The Complete Works of

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

(1899-1961)

Contents

The Novels

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING

THE SUN ALSO RISES

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

The Short Story Collections

INTRODUCTION TO HEMINGWAY’S SHORT STORIES

THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS

IN OUR TIME

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

WINNER TAKE NOTHING

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND THE FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND FOUR STORIES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

MISCELLANEOUS SHORT STORIES

The Short Stories

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Play

THE FIFTH COLUMN

The Poetry

HEMINGWAY’S POEMS

The Non-Fiction

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA

NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

The Autobiographies

HEMINGWAY, THE WILD YEARS

A MOVEABLE FEAST

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

© Delphi Classics 2016

Version 1

The Complete Works of

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

By Delphi Classics, 2016

COPYRIGHT

Complete Works of Ernest Hemingway

First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2016.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78656 036 0

Delphi Classics

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United Kingdom

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The Novels

Hemingway’s birthplace in Oak Park, Chicago, Illinois

Hemingway as a baby

Hemingway, 1916

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING

The Torrents of Spring was first published in America in May 1926 by Charlie Scribner’s Sons. Hemingway had a contract with the publisher Boni and Liveright, guaranteeing them rights to the author’s next three books, with the understanding that if they were to reject a work then Hemingway would be able to terminate the agreement. The novelist completed the text in less than two weeks and submitted it to his publisher in December 1925. It was rejected by Boni and Liveright, which allowed Hemingway to break his contract and the novella was subsequently released by Scribner’s five months later. It has been suggested that the author wrote the book in an attempt to escape his contract, though this was denied by him and in his letters he demonstrated a great attachment to the text. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald believed the novella to be excellent and outstanding, although it has largely been considered by critics to be a much lesser work than Hemingway’s other novel published that same year, The Sun Also Rises.

The book was composed as a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s novel, Dark Laughter, which Hemingway believed to be a prime example of pretentious writing he found so appalling. He argued he was motivated by a desire to encourage his contemporary to produce better work, but it can be argued it was an unnecessary and unpleasant attack on a fellow author that had greatly helped him at the start of his career. The writer Gertrude Stein is believed to have ended her friendship with Hemingway over the publication of The Torrents of Spring, considering it be a cruel and mean-spirited assault on Anderson.

The plot of the novel centres on Yogi Johnson and Scripps O’Neil, and their quest to find the ideal woman. It relates their travails as they attempt in different ways to attain the women of their desires, and the author sharply satirises and lambasts the overwrought lyrical romanticism he found so objectionable.

The first edition of the novel, 1926

Hemingway’s passport photograph, 1923

CONTENTS

PART ONE. RED AND BLACK LAUGHTER

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART TWO. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

PART THREE. MEN IN WAR AND THE DEATH OF SOCIETY

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

PART FOUR. THE PASSING OF A GREAT RACE AND THE MAKING AND MARRING OF AMERICANS

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works.

The first edition of ‘Dark Laughter’, 1925

PART ONE. RED AND BLACK LAUGHTER

The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation.

HENRY FIELDING

CHAPTER 1

Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, “If winter comes can spring be far behind?” would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered. Near Yogi at the next window but one stood Scripps O’Neil, a tall, lean man with a tall, lean face. Both stood and looked out at the empty yard of the pump-factory. Snow covered the crated pumps that would soon be shipped away. Once the spring should come and the snow melt, workmen from the factory would break out the pumps from piles where they were snowed in and haul them down to the G. R. & I. station, where they would be loaded on flat-cars and shipped away. Yogi Johnson looked out of the window at the snowed-in pumps, and his breath made little fairy tracings on the cold windowpane. Yogi Johnson thought of Paris. Perhaps it was the little fairy tracings that reminded him of the gay city where he had once spent two weeks. Two weeks that were to have been the happiest weeks of his life. That was all behind him now. That and everything else.

Scripps O’Neil had two wives. As he looked out of the window, standing tall and lean and resilient with his own tenuous hardness, he thought of both of them. One lived in Mancelona and the other lived in Petoskey. He had not seen the wife who lived in Mancelona since last spring. He looked out at the snow-covered pump-yards and thought what spring would mean. With his wife in Mancelona Scripps often got drunk. When he was drunk he and his wife were happy. They would go down together to the railway station and walk out along the tracks, and then sit together and drink and watch the trains go by. They would sit under a pine-tree on a little hill that overlooked the railway and drink. Sometimes they drank all night. Sometimes they drank for a week at a time. It did them good. It made Scripps strong.

Scripps had a daughter whom he playfully called Lousy O’Neil. Her real name was Lucy O’Neil. One night, after Scripps and his old woman had been out drinking on the railroad line for three or four days, he lost his wife. He didn’t know where she was. When he came to himself everything was dark. He walked along the railroad track toward town. The ties were stiff and hard under his feet. He tried walking on the rails. He couldn’t do it. He had the dope on that all right. He went back to walking along the ties. It was a long way into town. Finally he came to where he could see the lights of the switch-yard. He cut away from the tracks and passed the Mancelona High School. It was a yellow-brick building. There was nothing rococo about it, like the buildings he had seen in Paris. No, he had never been in Paris. That was not he. That was his friend Yogi Johnson.

Yogi Johnson looked out of the window. Soon it would be time to shut the pump-factory for the night. He opened the window carefully, just a crack. Just a crack, but that was enough. Outside in the yard the snow had begun to melt. A warm breeze was blowing. A chinook wind the pump fellows called it. The warm chinook wind came in through the window into the pump-factory. All the workmen laid down their tools. Many of them were Indians.

The foreman was a short, iron-jawed man. He had once made a trip as far as Duluth. Duluth was far across the blue waters of the lake in the hills of Minnesota. A wonderful thing had happened to him there.

The foreman put his finger in his mouth to moisten it and held it up in the air. He felt the warm breeze on his finger. He shook his head ruefully and smiled at the men, a little grimly perhaps.

“Well, it’s a regular chinook, boys,” he said.

Silently for the most part, the workmen hung up their tools. The half-completed pumps were put away in their racks. The workmen filed, some of them talking, others silent, a few muttering, to the washroom to wash up.

Outside through the window came the sound of an Indian war-whoop.

CHAPTER 2

Scripps O’Neil stood outside the Mancelona High School looking up at the lighted windows. It was dark and the snow was falling. It had been falling ever since Scripps could remember. A passer-by stopped and stared at Scripps. After all, what was this man to him? He went on.

Scripps stood in the snow and stared up at the lighted windows of the High School. Inside there people were learning things. Far into the night they worked, the boys vying with the girls in their search for knowledge, this urge for the learning of things that was sweeping America. His girl, little Lousy, a girl that had cost him a cool seventy-five dollars in doctors’ bills, was in there learning. Scripps was proud. It was too late for him to learn, but there, day after day and night after night, Lousy was learning. She had the stuff in her, that girl.

Scripps went on up to his house. It was not a big house, but it wasn’t size that mattered to Scripps’s old woman.

“Scripps,” she often said when they were drinking together, “I don’t want a palace. All I want is a place to keep the wind out.” Scripps had taken her at her word. Now, as he walked in the late evening through the snow and saw the lights of his own home, he felt glad that he had taken her at her word. It was better this way than if he were coming home to a palace. He, Scripps, was not the sort of chap that wanted a palace.

He opened the door of his house and went in. Something kept going through his head. He tried to get it out, but it was no good. What was it that poet chap his friend Harry Parker had met once in Detroit had written? Harry used to recite it: “Through pleasures and palaces though I may roam. When you something something something there’s no place like home.” He could not remember the words. Not all of them. He had written a simple tune to it and taught Lucy to sing it. That was when they first were married. Scripps might have been a composer, one of these chaps that write the stuff the Chicago Symphony Orchestra plays, if he had had a chance to go on. He would get Lucy to sing that song tonight. He would never drink again. Drinking robbed him of his ear for music. Times when he was drunk the sound of the whistles of the trains at night pulling up the Boyne Falls grade seemed more lovely than anything this chap Stravinsky had ever written. Drinking had done that. It was wrong. He would get away to Paris. Like this chap Albert Spalding that played the violin.

Scripps opened the door. He went in. “Lucy,” he called, “it is I, Scripps.” He would never drink again. No more nights out on the railroad. Perhaps Lucy needed a new fur coat. Perhaps, after all, she had wanted a palace instead of this place. You never knew how you were treating a woman. Perhaps, after all, this place was not keeping out the wind. Fantastic. He lit a match. “Lucy!” he called, and there was a note of dumb terror in his mouth. His friend Walt Simmons had heard just such a cry from a stallion that had once been run over by a passing autobus in the Place Vendôme in Paris. In Paris there were no geldings. All the horses were stallions. They did not breed mares. Not since the war. The war changed all that.

“Lucy!” he called, and again “Lucy!” There was no answer. The house was empty. Through the snow-filled air, as he stood there alone in his tall leanness, in his own deserted house, there came to Scripps’s ears the distant sound of an Indian war-whoop.

CHAPTER 3

Scripps left Mancelona. He was through with that place. What had a town like that to give him? There was nothing to it. You worked all your life and then a thing like that happened. The savings of years wiped out. Everything gone. He started to Chicago to get a job. Chicago was the place. Look at its geographical situation, right at the end of Lake Michigan. Chicago would do big things. Any fool could see that. He would buy land in what is now the Loop, the big shopping and manufacturing district. He would buy the land at a low price and then hang onto it. Let them try and get it away from him. He knew a thing or two now.

Alone, bareheaded, the snow blowing in his hair, he walked down the G. R. & I. railway tracks. It was the coldest night he had ever known. He picked up a dead bird that had frozen and fallen onto the railroad tracks and put it inside his shirt to warm it. The bird nestled close to his warm body and pecked at his chest gratefully.

“Poor little chap,” Scripps said. “You feel the cold too.”

Tears came into his eyes.

“Drat that wind,” Scripps said and once again faced into the blowing snow. The wind was blowing straight down from Lake Superior. The telegraph wires above Scripps’s head sang in the wind. Through the dark, Scripps saw a great yellow eye coming toward him. The giant locomotive came nearer through the snow-storm. Scripps stepped to one side of the track to let it go by. What is it that old writing fellow Shakespeare says: “Might makes right”? Scripps thought of that quotation as the train went past him in the snowing darkness. First the engine passed. He saw the fireman bending to fling great shovelfuls of coal into the open furnace door. The engineer wore goggles. His face was lit up by the light from the open door of the engine. He was the engineer. It was he who had his hand on the throttle. Scripps thought of the Chicago anarchists who, when they were hanged, said: “Though you throttle us today, still you cannot something something our souls.” There was a monument where they were buried in Waldheim Cemetery, right beside the Forest Park Amusement Park, in Chicago. His father used to take Scripps out there on Sundays. The monument was all black and there was a black angel. That was when Scripps had been a little boy. He used often to ask his father: “Father, why if we come to look at the anarchists on Sunday why can’t we ride on the shoot the chutes?” He had never been satisfied with his father’s answer. He had been a little boy in knee pants then. His father had been a great composer. His mother was an Italian woman from the north of Italy. They are strange people, these north Italians.

Scripps stood beside the track, and the long black segments of the train clicked by him in the snow. All the cars were Pullmans. The blinds were down. Light came in thin slits from the bottom of the dark windows as the cars went by. The train did not roar by as it might have if it had been going in the other direction, because it was climbing the Boyne Falls grade. It went slower than if it had been going down. Still it went too fast for Scripps to hitch on. He thought how he had been an expert at hitching on grocery wagons when he was a young boy in knee pants.

The long black train of Pullman cars passed Scripps as he stood beside the tracks. Who were in those cars? Were they Americans, piling up money while they slept? Were they mothers? Were they fathers? Were there lovers among them? Or were they Europeans, members of a worn-out civilization world-weary from the war? Scripps wondered.

The last car passed him and the train went on up the track. Scripps watched the red light at its stern disappearing into the blackness through which the snowflakes now came softly. The bird fluttered inside his shirt. Scripps started along the ties. He wanted to get to Chicago that night, if possible, to start work in the morning. The bird fluttered again. It was not so feeble now. Scripps put his hand on it to still its little bird flutterings. The bird was calmed. Scripps strode on up the track.

After all, he did not need to go as far as Chicago. There were other places. What if that critic fellow Henry Mencken had called Chicago the Literary Capital of America? There was Grand Rapids. Once in Grand Rapids, he could start in in the furniture business. Fortunes had been made that way. Grand Rapids furniture was famous wherever young couples walked in the evening to talk of home-making. He remembered a sign he had seen in Chicago as a little boy. His mother had pointed it out to him as together they walked barefoot through what now is probably the Loop, begging from door to door. His mother loved the bright flashing of the electric lights in the sign.

“They are like San Miniato in my native Florence,” she told Scripps. “Look at them, my son,” she said, “for some day your music will be played there by the Firenze Symphony Orchestra.”

Scripps had often watched the sign for hours while his mother slept wrapped in an old shawl on what is now probably the Blackstone Hotel. The sign had made a great impression on him.

LET HARTMAN FEATHER YOUR NEST

it had said. It flashed in many different colors. First a pure, dazzling white. That was what Scripps loved best. Then it flashed a lovely green. Then it flashed red. One night as he lay crouched against his mother’s body warmth and watched the sign flash, a policeman came up. “You’ll have to move along,” he said.

Ah, yes, there was big money to be made in the furniture business if you knew how to go about it. He, Scripps, knew all the wrinkles of that game. In his own mind it was settled. He would stop at Grand Rapids. The little bird fluttered, happily now.

“Ah, what a beautiful gilded cage I’ll build for you, my pretty one,” Scripps said exultantly. The little bird pecked him confidently. Scripps strode on in the storm. The snow was beginning to drift across the track. Borne on the wind, there came to Scripps’s ears the sound of a far-off Indian war-whoop.

CHAPTER 4

Where was Scripps now? Walking in the night in the storm, he had become confused. He had started for Chicago after that dreadful night when he had found that his home was a home no longer. Why had Lucy left? What had become of Lousy? He, Scripps, did not know. Not that he cared. That was all behind him. There was none of that now. He was standing knee-deep in snow in front of a railway station. On the railway station was written in big letters:

PETOSKEY

There were a pile of deer shipped down by hunters from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, lying piled the one on the other, dead and stiff and drifted half over with snow on the station platform. Scripps read the sign again. Could this be Petoskey?

A man was inside the station, tapping something back of a wicketed window. He looked out at Scripps. Could he be a telegrapher? Something told Scripps that he was.

He stepped out of the snow-drift and approached the window. Behind the window the man worked busily away at his telegrapher’s key.

“Are you a telegrapher?” asked Scripps.

“Yes, sir,” said the man. “I’m a telegrapher.”

“How wonderful!”

The telegrapher eyed him suspiciously. After all, what was this man to him?

“Is it hard to be a telegrapher?” Scripps asked. He wanted to ask the man outright if this was Petoskey. He did not know this great northern section of America, though, and he wished to be polite.

The telegrapher looked at him curiously.

“Say,” he asked, “are you a fairy?”

“No,” Scripps said. “I don’t know what being a fairy means.”

“Well,” said the telegrapher, “what do you carry a bird around for?”

“Bird?” asked Scripps. “What bird?”

“That bird that’s sticking out of your shirt.” Scripps was at a loss. What sort of chap was this telegrapher? What sort of men went in for telegraphy? Were they like composers? Were they like artists? Were they like writers? Were they like the advertising men who write the ads in our national weeklies? Or were they like Europeans, drawn and wasted by the war, their best years behind them? Could he tell this telegrapher the whole story? Would he understand?

“I started home,” he began. “I passed the Mancelona High School—”

“I knew a girl in Mancelona,” the telegrapher said. “Maybe you knew her. Ethel Enright.”

It was no good going on. He would cut the story short. He would give the bare essentials. Besides, it was beastly cold. It was cold standing there on the wind-swept station platform. Something told him it was useless to go on. He looked over at the deer lying there in a pile, stiff and cold. Perhaps they, too, had been lovers. Some were bucks and some were does. The bucks had horns. That was how you could tell. With cats it is more difficult. In France they geld the cats and do not geld the horses. France was a long way off.

“My wife left me,” Scripps said abruptly.

“I don’t wonder if you go around with a damn bird sticking out of your shirt,” the telegrapher said.

“What town is this?” Scripps asked. The single moment of spiritual communion they had had, had been dissipated. They had never really had it. But they might have. It was no use now. It was no use trying to capture what had gone. What had fled.

“Petoskey,” the telegrapher replied.

“Thank you,” Scripps said. He turned and walked into the silent, deserted Northern town. Luckily, he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He had sold a story to George Horace Lorimer just before he had started out with his old woman on that drinking trip. Why had he gone at all? What was it all about, anyway?

Coming toward him down the street came two Indians. They looked at him, but their faces did not change. Their faces remained the same. They went into McCarthy’s barber shop.

CHAPTER 5

Scripps O’Neil stood irresolutely before the barber shop. Inside there men were being shaved. Other men, no different, were having their hair cut. Other men sat against the wall in tall chairs and smoked, awaiting their turn in the barber chairs, admiring the paintings hung on the wall, or admiring their own reflections in the long mirror. Should he, Scripps, go in there? After all, he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He could go where he wanted. He looked, once again, irresolutely. It was an inviting prospect, the society of men, the warm room, the white jackets of the barbers skillfully snipping away with their scissors or drawing their blades diagonally through the lather that covered the face of some man who was getting a shave. They could use their tools, these barbers. Somehow, it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted something different. He wanted to eat. Besides, there was his bird to look after.

Scripps O’Neil turned his back on the barber shop and strode away up the street of the silently frozen Northern town. On his right, as he walked, the weeping birches, their branches bare of leaves, hung down to the ground, heavy with snow. To his ears came the sound of sleigh bells. Perhaps it was Christmas. In the South little children would be shooting off firecrackers and crying “Christmas Gift! Christmas Gift!” to one another. His father came from the South. He had been a soldier in the rebel army. ‘Way back in Civil War days. Sherman had burned their house down on his March to the Sea. “War is hell,” Sherman had said. “But you see how it is, Mrs. O’Neil. I’ve got to do it.” He had touched a match to the white-pillared old house.

“If General O’Neil were here, you dastard!” his mother had said, speaking in her broken English, “you’d never have touched a match to that house.”

Smoke curled up from the old house. The fire was mounting. The white pillars were obscured in the rising smoke-wreaths. Scripps had held close to his mother’s linsey-woolsey dress.

General Sherman climbed back onto his horse and made a low bow. “Mrs. O’Neil,” he said, and Scripps’s mother always said there were tears in his eyes, even if he was a damned Yank. The man had a heart, sir, even if he did not follow its dictates. “Mrs. O’Neil, if the general were here, we could have it out as man to man. As it is, ma’am, war being what it is, I must burn your house.”

He motioned to one of his soldiers, who ran forward and threw a bucket of kerosene on the flames. The flames rose and a great column of smoke went up in the still evening air.

“At least, General Sherman,” Scripps’s mother said triumphantly, “that column of smoke will warn the other loyal daughters of the Confederacy that you are coming.”

Sherman bowed. “That is the risk we must take, ma’am.” He clapped spurs to his horse and rode away, his long white hair floating on the wind. Neither Scripps nor his mother ever saw him again. Odd that he should think of that incident now. He looked up. Facing him was a sign:

BROWN’S BEANERY THE BEST BY TEST

He would go in and eat. This was what he wanted. He would go in and eat. That sign:

THE BEST BY TEST

Ah, these big beanery owners were wise fellows. They knew how to get the customers. No ads in The Saturday Evening Post for them. THE BEST BY TEST. That was the stuff. He went in.

Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?

“I wonder,” Scripps asked an elderly waitress who came in through the swinging door from the kitchen, “if you could tell me if this is Brown’s Beanery?”

“Yes, sir,” answered the waitress. “The best by test.”

“Thank you,” Scripps said. He sat down at the counter. “I would like to have some beans for myself and some for my bird here.”

He opened his shirt and placed the bird on the counter. The bird ruffled his feathers and shook himself. He pecked inquiringly at the catsup bottle. The elderly waitress put out a hand and stroked him. “Isn’t he a manly little fellow?” she remarked. “By the way,” she asked, a little shamefacedly, “what was it you ordered, sir?”

“Beans,” Scripps said, “for my bird and myself.”

The waitress shoved up a little wicket that led into the kitchen. Scripps had a glimpse of a warm, steam-filled room, with big pots and kettles, and many shining cans on the wall.

“A pig and the noisy ones,” the waitress called in a matter-of-fact voice into the open wicket. “One for a bird!”

“On the fire!” a voice answered from the kitchen.

“How old is your bird?” the elderly waitress asked.

“I don’t know,” Scripps said. “I never saw him before last night. I was walking on the railroad track from Mancelona. My wife left me.”

“Poor little chap,” the waitress said. She poured a little catsup on her finger and the bird pecked at it gratefully.

“My wife left me,” Scripps said. “We’d been out drinking on the railroad track. We used to go out evenings and watch the trains pass. I write stories. I had a story in The Post and two in The Dial. Mencken’s trying to get ahold of me. I’m too wise for that sort of thing. No politzei for mine. They give me the katzenjammers.”

What was he saying? He was talking wildly. This would never do. He must pull himself together.

“Scofield Thayer was my best man,” he said. “I’m a Harvard man. All I want is for them to give me and my bird a square deal. No more weltpolitik. Take Dr. Coolidge away.”

His mind was wandering. He knew what it was. He was faint with hunger. This Northern air was too sharp, too keen for him.

“I say,” he said. “Could you let me have just a few of those beans. I don’t like to rush things. I know when to let well enough alone.”

The wicket came up, and a large plate of beans and a small plate of beans, both steaming, appeared.

“Here they are,” the waitress said.

Scripps fell to on the large plate of beans. There was a little pork, too. The bird was eating happily, raising its head after each swallow to let the beans go down.

“He does that to thank God for those beans,” the elderly waitress explained.

“They’re mighty fine beans, too,” Scripps agreed. Under the influence of the beans his head was clearing. What was this rot he had been talking about that man Henry Mencken? Was Mencken really after him? It wasn’t a pretty prospect to face. He had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. When that was gone he could always put an end to things. If they pressed him too far they would get a big surprise. He wasn’t the man to be taken alive. Just let them try it.

After eating his beans the bird had fallen asleep. He was sleeping on one leg, the other leg tucked up into his feathers.

“When he gets tired of sleeping on that leg he will change legs and rest,” the waitress remarked. “We had an old osprey at home that was like that.”

“Where was your home?” Scripps asked.

“In England. In the Lake District.” The waitress smiled a bit wistfully. “Wordsworth’s country, you know.”

Ah, these English. They travelled all over the face of the globe. They were not content to remain in their little island. Strange Nordics, obsessed with their dream of empire.

“I was not always a waitress,” the elderly waitress remarked.

“I’m sure you weren’t.”

“Not half,” the waitress went on. “It’s rather a strange story. Perhaps it would bore you?”

“Not at all,” Scripps said. “You wouldn’t mind if I used the story sometime?”

“Not if you find it interesting,” the waitress smiled. “You wouldn’t use my name, of course.”

“Not if you’d rather not,” Scripps said. “By the way, could I have another order of beans?”

“Best by test,” the waitress smiled. Her face was lined and gray. She looks a little like that actress that died in Pittsburgh. What was her name? Lenore Ulric. In Peter Pan. That was it. They say she always went about veiled, Scripps thought. There was an interesting woman. Was it Lenore Ulric? Perhaps not. No matter.

“You really want some more beans?” asked the waitress.

“Yes,” Scripps answered simply.

“Once again on the loud ones,” the waitress called into the wicket. “Lay off the bird.”

“On the fire,” came the response.

“Please go on with your story,” Scripps said kindly.

“It was the year of the Paris Exposition,” she began. “I was a young girl at the time, a jeune fille, and I came over from England with my mother. We were going to be present at the opening of the exposition. On our way from the Gare du Nord to the hotel in the Place Vendôme where we lodged, we stopped at a coiffeur’s shop and made some trifling purchase. My mother, as I recall, purchased an additional bottle of ‘smelling salts,’ as you call them here in America.”

She smiled.

“Yes, go on. Smelling salts,” Scripps said.

“We registered, as is customary, in the hotel, and were given the adjoining rooms we had reserved. My mother felt a bit done in by the trip, and we dined in our rooms. I was full of excitement about seeing the exposition on the morrow. But I was tired after the journey — we had had a rather nasty crossing — and slept soundly. In the morning I awoke and called for my mother. There was no answer, and I went into the room to waken Mummy. Instead of Mummy there was a French general in the bed.”

“Mon Dieu!” Scripps said.

“I was terribly frightened,” the waitress went on, “and rang the bell for the management. The concierge came up, and I demanded to know where my mother was.

“‘But, mademoiselle,’ the concierge explained, ‘we know nothing about your mother. You came here with General So-and-so’ — I cannot remember the general’s name.”

“Call him General Joffre,” Scripps suggested.

“It was a name very like that,” the waitress said. “I was fearfully frightened and sent for the police, and demanded to see the guest-register. ‘You’ll find there that I am registered with my mother,’ I said. The police came and the concierge brought up the register. ‘See, madame,’ he said. ‘You are registered with the general with whom you came to our hotel last night.’

“I was desperate. Finally, I remembered where the coiffeur’s shop was. The police sent for the coiffeur. An agent of police brought him in.

“‘I stopped at your shop with my mother,’ I said to the coiffeur, ‘and my mother bought a bottle of aromatic salts.’

“‘I remember mademoiselle perfectly,’ the coiffeur said. ‘But you were not with your mother. You were with an elderly French general. He purchased, I believe, a pair of mustache tongs. My books, at any rate, will show the purchase.’

“I was in despair. In the meantime the police had brought in the cab driver who had brought us from the gare to the hotel. He swore that I had never been with my mother. Tell me, does this story bore you?”

“Go on,” said Scripps. “If you had ever been as hard up for plots as I have been!”

“Well,” the waitress said. “That’s all there is to the tale. I never saw my mother again. I communicated with the embassy, but they could do nothing. It was finally established by them that I had crossed the channel with my mother, but they could do nothing beyond that.” Tears came into the elderly waitress’s eyes. “I never saw Mummy again. Never again. Not even once.”

“What about the general?”

“He finally loaned me one hundred francs — not a great sum even in those days — and I came to America and became a waitress. That’s all there is to the story.”

“There’s more than that,” Scripps said. “I’d stake my life there’s more than that.”

“Sometimes, you know, I feel there is,” the waitress said. “I feel there must be more than that. Somewhere, somehow, there must be an explanation. I don’t know what brought the subject into my mind this morning.”

“It was a good thing to get it off your mind,” Scripps said.

“Yes,” the waitress smiled, the lines in her face not quite so deep now. “I feel better now.”

“Tell me,” Scripps asked the waitress. “Is there any work in this town for me and my bird?”

“Honest work?” asked the waitress. “I only know of honest work.”

“Yes, honest work,” Scripps said.

“They do say they’re hiring hands at the new pump-factory,” the waitress said. Why shouldn’t he work with his hands? Rodin had done it. Cézanne had been a butcher. Renoir a carpenter. Picasso had worked in a cigarette-factory in his boyhood. Gilbert Stuart, who painted those famous portraits of Washington that are reproduced all over this America of ours and hang in every schoolroom — Gilbert Stuart had been a blacksmith. Then there was Emerson. Emerson had been a hod-carrier. James Russell Lowell had been, he had heard, a telegraph operator in his youth. Like that chap down at the station. Perhaps even now that telegrapher at the station was working on his “Thanatopsis” or his “To a Waterfowl.” Why shouldn’t he, Scripps O’Neil, work in a pump-factory?

“You’ll come back again?” the waitress asked.

“If I may,” Scripps said.

“And bring your bird.”

“Yes,” Scripps said. “The little chap’s rather tired now. After all, it was a hard night for him.”

“I should say it was,” agreed the waitress.

Scripps went out again into the town. He felt clearheaded and ready to face life. A pump-factory would be interesting. Pumps were big things now. Fortunes were made and lost in pumps every day in New York in Wall Street. He knew of a chap who’d cleaned up a cool half-million on pumps in less than half an hour. They knew what they were about, these big Wall Street operators.

Outside on the street he looked up at the sign. BEST BY TEST, he read. They had the dope all right, he said. Was it true, though, that there had been a Negro cook? Just once, just for one moment, when the wicket went up, he thought he had caught a glimpse of something black. Perhaps the chap was only sooty from the stove.

PART TWO. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE

And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse any one; for though everything is copied from the book of nature, and scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations or experience; yet I have used the utmost care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and colors, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty; and if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where the failure characterized is so minute, that it is a foible only which the party himself may laugh at as well as any other.

HENRY FIELDING

CHAPTER 6

Scripps O’Neil was looking for employment. It would be good to work with his hands. He walked down the street away from the beanery and past McCarthy’s barber shop. He did not go into the barber shop. It looked as inviting as ever, but it was employment Scripps wanted. He turned sharply around the corner of the barber shop and onto the Main Street of Petoskey. It was a handsome, broad street, lined on either side with brick and pressed-stone buildings. Scripps walked along it toward the part of town where the pump-factory stood. At the door of the pump-factory he was embarrassed. Could this really be the pump-factory? True, a stream of pumps were being carried out and set up in the snow, and workmen were throwing pails of water over them to encase them in a coating of ice that would protect them from the winter winds as well as any paint would. But were they really pumps? It might all be a trick. These pump men were clever fellows.

“I say!” Scripps beckoned to one of the workmen who was sloshing water over a new, raw-looking pump that had just been carried out and stood protestingly in the snow. “Are they pumps?”

“They will be in time,” the workman said.

Scripps knew it was the factory. They weren’t going to fool him on that. He walked up to the door. There was a sign on it:

KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU

Can that mean me? Scripps wondered. He knocked on the door and went in.

“I’d like to speak to the manager,” he said, standing quietly in the half-light.

Workmen were passing him, carrying the new raw pumps on their shoulders. They hummed snatches of songs as they passed. The handles of the pumps flopped stiffly in dumb protest. Some pumps had no handles. They perhaps, after all, are the lucky ones, Scripps thought. A little man came up to him. He was well-built, short, with wide shoulders and a grim face.

“You were asking for the manager?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m the foreman here. What I say goes.”

“Can you hire and fire?” Scripps asked.

“I can do one as easily as the other,” the foreman said.

“I want a job.”

“Any experience?”

“Not in pumps.”

“All right,” the foreman said. “We’ll put you on piece-work. Here, Yogi,” he called to one of the men, who was standing looking out of the window of the factory, “show this new chum where to stow his swag and how to find his way around these diggings.” The foreman looked Scripps up and down. “I’m an Australian,” he said. “Hope you’ll like the lay here.” He walked off.

The man called Yogi Johnson came over from the window. “Glad to meet you,” he said. He was a chunky, well-built fellow. One of the sort you see around almost anywhere. He looked as though he had been through things.

“Your foreman’s the first Australian I’ve ever met,” Scripps said.

“Oh, he’s not an Australian,” Yogi said. “He was just with the Australians once during the war, and it made a big impression on him.”

“Were you in the war?” Scripps asked.

“Yes,” Yogi Johnson said. “I was the first man to go from Cadillac.”

“It must have been quite an experience.”

“It’s meant a lot to me,” Yogi answered. “Come on and I’ll show you around the works.”

Scripps followed this man, who showed him through the pump-factory. It was dark but warm inside the pump-factory. Men naked to the waist took the pumps in huge tongs as they came trundling by on an endless chain, culling out the misfits and placing the perfect pumps on another endless chain that carried them up into the cooling room. Other men, Indians for the most part, wearing only breech-clouts, broke up the misfit pumps with huge hammers and adzes and rapidly recast them into axe heads, wagon springs, trombone slides, bullet moulds, all the by-products of a big pump-factory. There was nothing wasted, Yogi pointed out. A group of Indian boys, humming to themselves one of the old tribal chantries, squatted in a corner of the big forging room shaping the little fragments that were chipped from the pumps in casting, into safety razor blades.

“They work naked,” Yogi said. “They’re searched as they go out. Sometimes they try and conceal the razor blades and take them out with them to bootleg.”

“There must be quite a loss that way,” Scripps said.

“Oh, no,” Yogi answered. “The inspectors get most of them.”

Upstairs, apart in a separate room, two old men were working. Yogi opened the door. One of the old men looked over his steel spectacles and frowned.

“You make a draft,” he said.

“Shut the door,” the other old man said, in the high, complaining voice of the very old.

“They’re our two hand-workers,” Yogi said. “They make all the pumps the manufactory sends out to the big international pump races. You remember our Peerless Pounder that won the pump race in Italy, where Franky Dawson was killed?”

“I read about it in the paper,” Scripps answered.

“Mr. Borrow, over there in the corner, made the Peerless Pounder all himself by hand,” Yogi said.

“I carved it direct from the steel with this knife.” Mr. Borrow held up a short-bladed, razorlike-looking knife. “Took me eighteen months to get it right.”

“The Peerless Pounder was quite a pump all right,” the high-voiced little old man said. “But we’re working on one now that will show its heels to any of them foreign pumps, aren’t we, Henry?”

“That’s Mr. Shaw,” Yogi said in an undertone. “He’s probably the greatest living pump-maker.”

“You boys get along and leave us alone,” Mr. Borrow said. He was carving away steadily, his infirm old hands shaking a little between strokes.

“Let the boys watch,” Mr. Shaw said. “Where you from, young feller?”

“I’ve just come from Mancelona,” Scripps answered. “My wife left me.”

“Well, you won’t have no difficulty finding another one,” Mr. Shaw said. “You’re a likely-looking young feller. But take my advice and take your time. A poor wife ain’t much better than no wife at all.”

“I wouldn’t say that, Henry,” Mr. Borrow remarked in his high voice. “Any wife at all’s a pretty good wife the way things are going now.”

“You take my advice, young feller, and go slow. Get yourself a good one this time.”

“Henry knows a thing or two,” Mr. Borrow said. “He knows what he’s talking about there.” He laughed a high, cackling laugh. Mr. Shaw, the old pump-maker, blushed.

“You boys get along and leave us get on with our pump-making,” he said. “Henry and me here, we got a sight of work to do.”

“I’m very glad to have met you,” Scripps said.

“Come on,” Yogi said. “I better get you started or the foreman will be on my tail.”

He put Scripps to work collaring pistons in the piston-collaring room. There Scripps worked for almost a year. In some ways it was the happiest year of his life. In other ways it was a nightmare. A hideous nightmare. In the end he grew to like it. In other ways he hated it. Before he knew it, a year had passed. He was still collaring pistons. But what strange things had happened in that year. Often he wondered about them. As he wondered, collaring a piston now almost automatically, he listened to the laughter that came up from below, where the little Indian lads were shaping what were to be razor blades. As he listened something rose in his throat and almost choked him.

CHAPTER 7

That night, after his first day in the pump-factory, the first day in what was or were to become an endless succession of days of dull piston-collaring, Scripps went again to the beanery to eat. All day he had kept his bird concealed. Something told him that the pump-factory was not the place to bring his bird out in. During the day the bird had several times made him uncomfortable, but he had adjusted his clothes to it and even cut a little slit the bird could poke his beak out through in search of fresh air. Now the day’s work was over. It was finished. Scripps on his way to the beanery. Scripps happy that he was working with his hands. Scripps thinking of the old pump-makers. Scripps going to the society of the friendly waitress. Who was that waitress, anyway? What was it had happened to her in Paris? He must find out more about this Paris. Yogi Johnson had been there. He would quiz Yogi. Get him to talk. Draw him out. Make him tell what he knew. He knew a trick or two about that.

Watching the sunset out over the Petoskey Harbor, the lake now frozen and great blocks of ice jutting up over the breakwater, Scripps strode down the streets of Petoskey to the beanery. He would have liked to ask Yogi Johnson to eat with him, but he didn’t dare. Not yet. That would come later. All in good time. No need to rush matters with a man like Yogi. Who was Yogi, anyway? Had he really been in the war? What had the war meant to him? Was he really the first man to enlist from Cadillac? Where was Cadillac, anyway? Time would tell.

Scripps O’Neil opened the door and went into the beanery. The elderly waitress got up from the chair where she had been reading the overseas edition of The Manchester Guardian, and put the paper and her steel-rimmed spectacles on top of the cash register.

“Good evening,” she said simply. “It’s good to have you back.”

Something stirred inside Scripps O’Neil. A feeling that he could not define came within him.

“I’ve been working all day long” — he looked at the elderly waitress— “for you,” he added.

“How lovely!” she said. And then smiled shyly. “And I have been working all day long — for you.”

Tears came into Scripps’s eyes. Something stirred inside him again. He reached forward to take the elderly waitress’s hand, and with quiet dignity she laid it within his own. “You are my woman,” he said. Tears came into her eyes, too.

“You are my man,” she said.

“Once again I say: you are my woman.” Scripps pronounced the words solemnly. Something had broken inside him again. He felt he could not keep from crying.

“Let this be our wedding ceremony,” the elderly waitress said. Scripps pressed her hand. “You are my woman,” he said simply.

“You are my man and more than my man.” She looked into his eyes. “You are all of America to me.”

“Let us go,” Scripps said.

“Have you your bird?” asked the waitress, laying aside her apron and folding the copy of The Manchester Guardian Weekly. “I’ll bring The Guardian, if you don’t mind,” she said, wrapping the paper in her apron. “It’s a new paper and I’ve not read it yet.”

“I’m very fond of The Guardian,” Scripps said. “My family have taken it ever since I can remember. My father was a great admirer of Gladstone.”

“My father went to Eton with Gladstone,” the elderly waitress said. “And now I am ready.”

She had donned a coat and stood ready, her apron, her steel-rimmed spectacles in their worn black morocco case, her copy of The Manchester Guardian held in her hand.

“Have you no hat?” asked Scripps.

“No.”

“Then I will buy you one,” Scripps said tenderly.

“It will be your wedding gift,” the elderly waitress said. Again there were tears shone in her eyes.

“And now let us go,” Scripps said.

The elderly waitress came out from behind the counter, and together, hand in hand, they strode out into the night.

Inside the beanery the black cook pushed up the wicket and looked through from the kitchen. “Dey’ve gone off,” he chuckled. “Gone off into de night. Well, well, well.” He closed the wicket softly. Even he was a little impressed.

CHAPTER 8

Half an hour later Scripps O’Neil and the elderly waitress returned to the beanery as man and wife. The beanery looked much the same. There was the long counter, the salt cellars, the sugar containers, the catsup bottle, the Worcestershire Sauce bottle. There was the wicket that led into the kitchen. Behind the counter was the relief waitress. She was a buxom, jolly-looking girl, and she wore a white apron. At the counter, reading a Detroit paper, sat a drummer. The drummer was eating a T-bone steak and hashed-brown potatoes. Something very beautiful had happened to Scripps and the elderly waitress. Now they were hungry. They wished to eat.

The elderly waitress looking at Scripps. Scripps looking at the elderly waitress. The drummer reading his paper and occasionally putting a little catsup on his hashed-brown potatoes. The other waitress, Mandy, back of the counter in her freshly starched white apron. The frost on the windows. The warmth inside. The cold outside. Scripps’s bird, rather rumpled now, sitting on the counter and preening his feathers.

“So you’ve come back,” Mandy the waitress said. “The cook said you had gone out into the night.”

The elderly waitress looked at Mandy, her eyes brightened, her voice calm and now of a deeper, richer timbre.

“We are man and wife now,” she said kindly. “We have just been married. What would you like to eat for supper, Scripps, dear?”

“I don’t know,” Scripps said. He felt vaguely uneasy. Something was stirring within him.

“Perhaps you have eaten enough of the beans, dear Scripps,” the elderly waitress, now his wife, said. The drummer looked up from his paper. Scripps noticed that it was the Detroit News. There was a fine paper.

“That’s a fine paper you’re reading,” Scripps said to the drummer.

“It’s a good paper, the News,” the drummer said. “You two on your honeymoon?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Scripps said; “we are man and wife now.”

“Well,” said the drummer, “that’s a mighty fine thing to be. I’m a married man myself.”

“Are you?” said Scripps. “My wife left me. It was in Mancelona.”

“Don’t let’s talk of that any more, Scripps, dear,” Mrs. Scripps said. “You’ve told that story so many times.”

“Yes, dear,” Scripps agreed. He felt vaguely mistrustful of himself. Something, somewhere was stirring inside of him. He looked at the waitress called Mandy, standing robust and vigorously lovely in her newly starched white apron. He watched her hands, healthy, calm, capable hands, doing the duties of her waitress-hood.

“Try one of these T-bones with hashed-brown potatoes,” the drummer suggested. “They got a nice T-bone here.”

“Would you like one, dear?” Scripps asked his wife.

“I’ll just take a bowl of milk and crackers,” the elderly Mrs. Scripps said. “You have whatever you want, dear.”

“Here’s your crackers and milk, Diana,” Mandy said, placing them on the counter. “Do you want a T-bone, sir?”

“Yes,” Scripps said. Something stirred again within him.

“Well done or rare?”

“Rare, please.”

The waitress turned and called into the wicket: “Tea for one. Let it go raw!”

“Thank you,” Scripps said. He eyed the waitress Mandy. She had a gift for the picturesque in speech, that girl. It had been that very picturesque quality in her speech that had first drawn him to his present wife. That and her strange background. England, the Lake Country. Scripps striding through the Lake Country with Wordsworth. A field of golden daffodils. The wind blowing at Windermere. Far off, perhaps, a stag at bay. Ah, that was farther north, in Scotland. They were a hardy race, those Scots, deep in their mountain fastnesses. Harry Lauder and his pipe. The Highlanders in the Great War. Why had not he, Scripps, been in the war? That was where that chap Yogi Johnson had it on him. The war would have meant much to him, Scripps. Why hadn’t he been in it? Why hadn’t he heard of it in time? Perhaps he was too old. Look at that old French General Joffre, though. Surely he was a younger man than that old general. General Foch praying for victory. The French troops kneeling along the Chemin des Dames, praying for victory. The Germans with their “Gott mit uns.” What a mockery. Surely he was no older than that French General Foch. He wondered.

Mandy, the waitress, placed his T-bone steak and hashed-brown potatoes on the counter before him. As she laid the plate down, just for an instant, her hand touched his. Scripps felt a strange thrill go through him. Life was before him. He was not an old man. Why were there no wars now? Perhaps there were. Men were fighting in China, Chinamen, Chinamen killing one another. What for? Scripps wondered. What was it all about, anyway?

Mandy, the buxom waitress, leaned forward. “Say,” she said, “did I ever tell you about the last words of Henry James?”

“Really, dear Mandy,” Mrs. Scripps said, “you’ve told that story rather often.”

“Let’s hear it,” Scripps said. “I’m very interested in Henry James.” Henry James, Henry James. That chap who had gone away from his own land to live in England among Englishmen. Why had he done it? For what had he left America? Weren’t his roots here? His brother William. Boston. Pragmatism. Harvard University. Old John Harvard with silver buckles on his shoes. Charley Brickley. Eddie Mahan. Where were they now?

“Well,” Mandy began, “Henry James became a British subject on his death-bed. At once, as soon as the king heard Henry James had become a British subject he sent around the highest decoration in his power to bestow — the Order of Merit.”

“The O. M.,” the elderly Mrs. Scripps explained.

“That was it,” the waitress said. “Professors Gosse and Saintsbury came with the man who brought the decoration. Henry James was lying on his death-bed, and his eyes were shut. There was a single candle on a table beside the bed. The nurse allowed them to come near the bed, and they put the ribbon of the decoration around James’s neck, and the decoration lay on the sheet over Henry James’s chest. Professors Gosse and Saintsbury leaned forward and smoothed the ribbon of the decoration. Henry James never opened his eyes. The nurse told them they all must go out of the room, and they all went out of the room. When they were all gone, Henry James spoke to the nurse. He never opened his eyes. ‘Nurse,’ Henry James said, ‘put out the candle, nurse, and spare my blushes.’ Those were the last words he ever spoke.”

“James was quite a writer,” Scripps O’Neil said. He was strangely moved by the story.

“You don’t always tell it the same way, dear,” Mrs. Scripps remarked to Mandy. There were tears in Mandy’s eyes. “I feel very strongly about Henry James,” she said.

“What was the matter with James?” asked the drummer. “Wasn’t America good enough for him?”

Scripps O’Neil was thinking about Mandy, the waitress. What a background she must have, that girl! What a fund of anecdotes! A chap could go far with a woman like that to help him! He stroked the little bird that sat on the lunch-counter before him. The bird pecked at his finger. Was the little bird a hawk? A falcon, perhaps, from one of the big Michigan falconries. Was it perhaps a robin? Pulling and tugging at the early worm on some green lawn somewhere? He wondered.

“What do you call your bird?” the drummer asked.

“I haven’t named him yet. What would you call him?”

“Why not call him Ariel?” Mandy asked.

“Or Puck,” Mrs. Scripps put in.

“What’s it mean?” asked the drummer.

“It’s a character out of Shakespeare,” Mandy explained.

“Oh, give the bird a chance.”

“What would you call him?” Scripps turned to the drummer.

“He ain’t a parrot, is he?” asked the drummer. “If he was a parrot you could call him Polly.”

“There’s a character in ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ called Polly,” Mandy explained.

Scripps wondered. Perhaps the bird was a parrot. A parrot strayed from some comfortable home with some old maid. The untilled soil of some New England spinster.

“Better wait till you see how he turns out,” the drummer advised. “You got plenty of time to name him.”

This drummer had sound ideas. He, Scripps, did not even know what sex the bird was. Whether he was a boy bird or a girl bird.

“Wait till you see if he lays eggs,” the drummer suggested. Scripps looked into the drummer’s eyes. The fellow had voiced his own unspoken thought.

“You know a thing or two, drummer,” he said.

“Well,” the drummer admitted modestly, “I ain’t drummed all these years for nothing.”

“You’re right there, pal,” Scripps said.

“That’s a nice bird you got there, brother,” the drummer said. “You want to hang onto that bird.”

Scripps knew it. Ah, these drummers know a thing or two. Going up and down over the face of this great America of ours. These drummers kept their eyes open. They were no fools.

“Listen,” the drummer said. He pushed his derby hat off his brow and, leaning forward, spat into the tall brass cuspidor that stood beside his stool. “I want to tell you about a pretty beautiful thing that happened to me once in Bay City.”

Mandy, the waitress, leaned forward. Mrs. Scripps leaned toward the drummer to hear better. The drummer looked apologetically at Scripps and stroked the bird with his forefinger.

“Tell you about it some other time, brother,” he said. Scripps understood. From out of the kitchen, through the wicket in the hall, came a high-pitched, haunting laugh. Scripps listened. Could that be the laughter of the Negro? He wondered.

CHAPTER 9

Scripps going slowly to work in the pump-factory in the mornings. Mrs. Scripps looking out of the window and watching him go up the street. Not much time for reading The Guardian now. Not much time for reading about English politics. Not much time for worrying about the cabinet crises over there in France. The French were a strange people. Joan of Arc. Eva le Gallienne. Clemenceau. Georges Carpentier. Sacha Guitry. Yvonne Printemps. Grock. Les Fratellinis. Gilbert Seldes. The Dial. The Dial Prize. Marianne Moore. E. E. Cummings. The Enormous Room. Vanity Fair. Frank Crowninshield. What was it all about? Where was it taking her?

She had a man now. A man of her own. For her own. Could she keep him? Could she hold him for her own? She wondered.

Mrs. Scripps, formerly an elderly waitress, now the wife of Scripps O’Neil, with a good job in the pump-factory. Diana Scripps. Diana was her own name. It had been her mother’s, too. Diana Scripps looking into the mirror and wondering could she hold him. It was getting to be a question. Why had he ever met Mandy? Would she have the courage to break off going to the restaurant with Scripps to eat? She couldn’t do that. He would go alone. She knew that. It was no use trying to pull wool over her own eyes. He would go alone and he would talk with Mandy. Diana looked into the mirror. Could she hold him? Could she hold him? That thought never left her now.

Every night at the restaurant, she couldn’t call it a beanery now — that made a lump come in her throat and made her throat feel hard and choky. Every night at the restaurant now Scripps and Mandy talked together. The girl was trying to take him away. Him, her Scripps. Trying to take him away. Take him away. Could she, Diana, hold him?

She was no better than a slut, that Mandy. Was that the way to do? Was that the thing to do? Go after another woman’s man? Come between man and wife? Break up a home? And all with these interminable literary reminiscences. These endless anecdotes. Scripps was fascinated by Mandy. Diana admitted that to herself. But she might hold him. That was all that mattered now. To hold him. To hold him. Not to let him go. Make him stay. She looked into the mirror.

Diana subscribing for The Forum. Diana reading The Mentor. Diana reading William Lyon Phelps in Scribner’s. Diana walking through the frozen streets of the silent Northern town to the Public Library, to read The Literary Digest “Book Review.” Diana waiting for the postman to come, bringing The Bookman. Diana, in the snow, waiting for the postman to bring The Saturday Review of Literature. Diana, bareheaded now, standing in the mounting snow-drifts, waiting for the postman to bring her the New York Times “Literary Section.” Was it doing any good? Was it holding him?

At first it seemed to be. Diana learned editorials by John Farrar by heart. Scripps brightened. A little of the old light shining in Scripps’s eyes now. Then it died. Some little mistake in the wording, some slip in her understanding of a phrase, some divergence in her attitude, made it all ring false. She would go on. She was not beaten. He was her man and she would hold him. She looked away from the window and slit open the covering of the magazine that lay on her table. It was Harper’s Magazine. Harper’s Magazine in a new format. Harper’s Magazine completely changed and revised. Perhaps that would do the trick. She wondered.

CHAPTER 10

Spring was coming. Spring was in the air. (Author’s Note — This is the same day on which the story starts, back on page three.) A chinook wind was blowing. Workmen were coming home from the factory. Scripps’s bird singing in its cage. Diana looking out of the open window. Diana watching for her Scripps to come up the street. Could she hold him? Could she hold him? If she couldn’t hold him, would he leave her his bird? She had felt lately that she couldn’t hold him. In the nights, now, when she touched Scripps he rolled away, not toward her. It was a little sign, but life was made up of little signs. She felt she couldn’t hold him. As she looked out of the window, a copy of The Century Magazine dropped from her nerveless hand. The Century had a new editor. There were more woodcuts. Glenn Frank had gone to head some great university somewhere. There were more Van Dorens on the magazine. Diana felt that might turn the trick. Happily she had opened The Century and read all morning. Then the wind, the warm chinook wind, had started to blow, and she knew Scripps would soon be home. Men were coming down the street in increasing numbers. Was Scripps among them? She did not like to put on her spectacles to look. She wanted Scripps’s first glimpse of her to be of her at her best. As she felt him drawing nearer, the confidence she had had in The Century grew fainter. She had so hoped that would give her the something which would hold him. She wasn’t sure now.

Scripps coming down the street with a crowd of excited workmen. Men stirred by the spring. Scripps swinging his lunch-bucket. Scripps waving good-by to the workmen, who trooped one by one into what had formerly been a saloon. Scripps not looking up at the window. Scripps coming up the stairs. Scripps coming nearer. Scripps coming nearer. Scripps here.

“Good afternoon, dear Scripps,” she said. “I’ve been reading a story by Ruth Suckow.”

“Hello, Diana,” Scripps answered. He set down his lunch-pail. She looked worn and old. He could afford to be polite.

“What was the story about, Diana?” he asked.

“It was about a little girl in Iowa,” Diana said. She moved toward him. “It was about people on the land. It reminded me a little of my own Lake Country.”

“That so?” asked Scripps. In some ways the pump-factory had hardened him. His speech had become more clipped. More like these hardy Northern workers’. But his mind was the same.

“Would you like me to read a little of it out loud?” Diana asked. “They’re some lovely woodcuts.”

“How about going down to the beanery?” Scripps said.

“As you wish, dear,” Diana said. Then her voice broke. “I wish — oh, I wish you’d never seen that place!” She wiped away her tears. Scripps had not even seen them. “I’ll bring the bird, dear,” Diana said. “He hasn’t been out all day.”

Together they went down the street to the beanery. They did not walk hand in hand now. They walked like what are called old married people. Mrs. Scripps carried the bird-cage. The bird was happy in the warm wind. Men lurching along, drunk with the spring, passed them. Many spoke to Scripps. He was well known and well liked in the town now. Some, as they lurched by, raised their hats to Mrs. Scripps. She responded vaguely. If I can only hold him, she was thinking. If I can only hold him. As they walked along the slushy snow of the narrow sidewalk of the Northern town, something began to beat in her head. Perhaps it was the rhythm of their walking together. I can’t hold him. I can’t hold him. I can’t hold him.

Scripps took her arm as they crossed the street. When his hand touched her arm Diana knew it was true. She would never hold him. A group of Indians passed them on the street. Were they laughing at her or was it some tribal jest? Diana didn’t know. All she knew was that rhythm that beat into her brain. I can’t hold him. I can’t hold him.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

For the reader, not the printer. What difference does it make to the printer? Who is the printer, anyway? Gutenberg. The Gutenberg Bible. Caxton. Twelve-point open-face Caslon. The linotype machine. The author as a little boy being sent to look for type lice. The author as a young man being sent for the key to the forms. Ah, they knew a trick or two, these printers.

(In case the reader is becoming confused, we are now up to where the story opened with Yogi Johnson and Scripps O’Neil in the pump-factory itself, with the chinook wind blowing. As you see, Scripps O’Neil has now come out of the pump-factory and is on his way to the beanery with his wife, who is afraid she cannot hold him. Personally, we don’t believe she can, but the reader will see for himself. We will now leave the couple on their way to the beanery and go back and take up Yogi Johnson. We want the reader to like Yogi Johnson. The story will move a little faster from now on, in case any of the readers are tiring. We will also try and work in a number of good anecdotes. Would it be any violation of confidence if we told the reader that we get the best of these anecdotes from Mr. Ford Madox Ford? We owe him our thanks, and we hope the reader does, too. At any rate, we will now go on with Yogi Johnson. Yogi Johnson, the reader may remember, is the chap who was in the war. As the story opens, he is just coming out of the pump-factory. (See page three.)

It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank. Now, if the reader is ready — and understand, I don’t want to rush the reader any — we will go back to Yogi Johnson. But please remember that, while we have gone back to Yogi Johnson, Scripps O’Neil and his wife are on their way to the beanery. What will happen to them there I don’t know. I only wish the reader could help me.)

PART THREE. MEN IN WAR AND THE DEATH OF SOCIETY

It may be likewise noted that affectation does not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected; and therefore, though, when it proceeds from hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for instance, the affectation of liberality in a vain man differs visibly from the same affectation in the avaricious, for though the vain man is not what he would appear, or hath not the virtue he affects, to the degree he would be thought to have it; yet it sits less awkwardly on him than on the avaricious man, who is the very reverse of what he would seem to be.

HENRY FIELDING

CHAPTER 11

Yogi Johnson walked out of the workmen’s entrance of the pump-factory and down the street. Spring was in the air. The snow was melting, and the gutters were running with snow-water. Yogi Johnson walked down the middle of the street, keeping on the as yet unmelted ice. He turned to the left and crossed the bridge over Bear River. The ice had already melted in the river and he watched the swirling brown current. Below, beside the stream, buds on the willow brush were coming out green.

It’s a real chinook wind, Yogi thought. The foreman did right to let the men go. It wouldn’t be safe keeping them in a day like this. Anything might happen. The owner of the factory knew a thing or two. When the chinook blew, the thing to do was to get the men out of the factory. Then, if any of them were injured, it was not on him. He didn’t get caught under the Employer’s Liability Act. They knew a thing or two, these big pump-manufacturers. They were smart, all right.

Yogi was worried. There was something on his mind. It was spring, there was no doubt of that now, and he did not want a woman. He had worried about it a lot lately. There was no question about it. He did not want a woman. He couldn’t explain it to himself. He had gone to the Public Library and asked for a book the night before. He looked at the librarian. He did not want her. Somehow, she meant nothing to him. At the restaurant where he had a meal ticket he looked hard at the waitress who brought him his meals. He did not want her, either. He passed a group of girls on their way home from high school. He looked carefully at all of them. He did not want a single one. Decidedly something was wrong. Was he going to pieces? Was this the end?

Well, Yogi thought, women are gone, perhaps, though I hope not; but I still have my love of horses. He was walking up the steep hill that leads up from the Bear River out onto the Charlevoix road. The road was not really so steep, but it felt steep to Yogi, his legs heavy with the spring. In front of him was a grain and feed store. A team of beautiful horses were hitched in front of the feed store. Yogi went up to them. He wanted to touch them. To reassure himself that there was something left. The nigh horse looked at him as he came near. Yogi put his hand in his pocket for a lump of sugar. He had no sugar. The horse put its ears back and showed its teeth. The other horse jerked its head away. Was this all that his love of horses had brought him? After all, perhaps there was something wrong with these horses. Perhaps they had glanders or spavin. Perhaps something had been caught in the tender frog of their hoof. Perhaps they were lovers.

Yogi walked on up the hill and turned to the left onto the Charlevoix road. He passed the last houses of the outskirts of Petoskey and came out onto the open country road. On his right was a field that stretched to Little Traverse Bay. The blue of the bay opening out into the big Lake Michigan. Across the bay the pine hills behind Harbor Springs. Beyond, where you could not see it, Cross Village, where the Indians lived. Even further beyond, the Straits of Mackinac with St. Ignace, where a strange and beautiful thing had once happened to Oscar Gardner, who worked beside Yogi in the pump-factory. Further beyond, the Soo, both Canadian and American. There the wilder spirits of Petoskey sometimes went to drink beer. They were happy then. ‘Way, ‘way beyond, and, in the other direction, at the foot of the lake was Chicago, where Scripps O’Neil had started for on that eventful night when his first marriage had become a marriage no longer. Near there Gary, Indiana, where were the great steel mills. Near there Hammond, Indiana. Near there Michigan City, Indiana. Further beyond, there would be Indianapolis, Indiana, where Booth Tarkington lived. He had the wrong dope, that fellow. Further down there would be Cincinnati, Ohio. Beyond that, Vicksburg, Mississippi. Beyond that, Waco, Texas. Ah! there was grand sweep to this America of ours.

Yogi walked across the road and sat down on a pile of logs, where he could look out over the lake. After all, the war was over and he was still alive.

There was a chap in that fellow Anderson’s book that the librarian had given him at the library last night. Why hadn’t he wanted the librarian, anyway? Could it be because he thought she might have false teeth? Could it be something else? Would a little child ever tell her? He didn’t know. What was the librarian to him, anyway?

This chap in the book by Anderson. He had been a soldier, too. He had been at the front two years, Anderson said. What was his name? Fred Something. This Fred had thoughts dancing in his brain — horror. One night, in the time of the fighting, he went out on parade — no, it was patrol — in No Man’s Land, and saw another man stumbling along in the darkness and shot him. The man pitched forward dead. It had been the only time Fred consciously killed a man. You don’t kill men in war much, the book said. The hell you don’t, Yogi thought, if you’re two years in the infantry at the front. They just die. Indeed they do, Yogi thought. Anderson said the act was rather hysterical on Fred’s part. He and the men with him might have made the fellow surrender. They had all got the jimjams. After it happened they all ran away together. Where the hell did they run to? Yogi wondered. Paris?

Afterward, killing this man haunted Fred. It’s got to be sweet and true. That was the way the soldiers thought, Anderson said. The hell it was. This Fred was supposed to have been two years in an infantry regiment at the front.

A couple of Indians were passing along the road, grunting to themselves and to each other. Yogi called to them. The Indians came over.

“Big white chief got chew of tobacco?” asked the first Indian.

“White chief carry liquor?” the second Indian asked.

Yogi handed them a package of Peerless and his pocket flask.

“White chief heap big medicine,” the Indians grunted.

“Listen,” Yogi Johnson said. “I am about to address to you a few remarks about the war. A subject on which I feel very deeply.” The Indians sat down on the logs. One of the Indians pointed at the sky. “Up there gitchy Manitou the Mighty,” he said.

The other Indian winked at Yogi. “White chief no believe every goddam thing he hear,” he grunted.

“Listen,” Yogi Johnson said. And he told them about the war.

War hadn’t been that way to Yogi, he told the Indians. War had been to him like football. American football. What they play at the colleges. Carlisle Indian School. Both the Indians nodded. They had been to Carlisle.

Yogi had played centre at football and war had been much the same thing, intensely unpleasant. When you played football and had the ball, you were down with your legs spread out and the ball held out in front of you on the ground; you had to listen for the signal, decode it, and make the proper pass. You had to think about it all the time. While your hands were on the ball the opposing centre stood in front of you, and when you passed the ball he brought his hand up smash into your face and grabbed you with the other hand under the chin or under your armpit, and tried to pull you forward or shove you back to make a hole he could go through and break up the play. You were supposed to charge forward so hard you banged him out of the play with your body and put you both on the ground. He had all the advantage. It was not what you would call fun. When you had the ball he had all the advantage. The only good thing was that when he had the ball you could rough-house him. In this way things evened up and sometimes even a certain tolerance was achieved. Football, like the war, was unpleasant; stimulating and exciting after you had attained a certain hardness, and the chief difficulty had been that of remembering the signals. Yogi was thinking about the war, not the army. He meant combat. The army was something different. You could take it and ride with it or you could buck the tiger and let it smash you. The army was a silly business, but the war was different.

Yogi was not haunted by men he had killed. He knew he had killed five men. Probably he had killed more. He didn’t believe men you killed haunted you. Not if you had been two years at the front. Most of the men he had known had been excited as hell when they had first killed. The trouble was to keep them from killing too much. It was hard to get prisoners back to the people that wanted them for identification. You sent a man back with two prisoners; maybe you sent two men back with four prisoners. What happened? The men came back and said the prisoners were knocked out by the barrage. They would give the prisoner a poke in the seat of the pants with a bayonet, and when the prisoner jumped they would say, “You would run, you son of a bitch,” and let their gun off in the back of his head. They wanted to be sure they had killed. Also they didn’t want to go back through any damn barrage. No, sir. They learned those kind of manners from the Australians. After all, what were those Jerries? A bunch of goddam Huns. “Huns” sounded like a funny word now. All this sweetness and truth. Not if you were in there two years. In the end they would have softened. Got sorry for excesses and begun to store up good deeds against getting killed themselves. But that was the fourth phase of soldiering, the gentling down.

In a good soldier in the war it went like this: First, you were brave because you didn’t think anything could hit you, because you yourself were something special, and you knew that you could never die. Then you found out different. You were really scared then, but if you were a good soldier you functioned the same as before. Then after you were wounded and not killed, with new men coming on, and going through your old processes, you hardened and became a good hard-boiled soldier. Then came the second crack, which is much worse than the first, and then you began doing good deeds, and being the boy Sir Philip Sidney, and storing up treasures in heaven. At the same time, of course, functioning always the same as before. As if it were a football game.

Nobody had any damn business to write about it, though, that didn’t at least know about it from hearsay. Literature has too strong an effect on people’s minds. Like this American writer Willa Cather, who wrote a book about the war where all the last part of it was taken from the action in the Birth of a Nation, and ex-servicemen wrote to her from all over America to tell her how much they liked it.

One of the Indians was asleep. He had been chewing tobacco, and his mouth was pursed up in sleep. He was leaning on the other Indian’s shoulder. The Indian who was awake pointed at the other Indian, who was asleep, and shook his head.

“Well, how did you like the speech?” Yogi asked the Indian who was awake.

“White chief have heap much sound ideas,” the Indian said. “White chief educated like hell.”

“Thank you,” Yogi said. He felt touched. Here among the simple aborigines, the only real Americans, he had found that true communion. The Indian looked at him, holding the sleeping Indian carefully that his head might not fall back upon the snow-covered logs.

“Was white chief in the war?” the Indian asked.

“I landed in France in May, 1917,” Yogi began.

“I thought maybe white chief was in the war from the way he talked,” the Indian said. “Him,” he raised the head of his sleeping companion up so the last rays of the sunset shone on the sleeping Indian’s face, “he got V.C. Me I got D.S.O. and M.C. with bar. I was major in the Fourth C.M.R.’s.”

“I’m glad to meet you,” Yogi said. He felt strangely humiliated. It was growing dark. There was a single line of sunset where the sky and the water met way out on Lake Michigan. Yogi watched the narrow line of the sunset grow darker red, thin to a mere slit, and then fade. The sun was down behind the lake. Yogi stood up from the pile of logs. The Indian stood up too. He awakened his companion, and the Indian who had been sleeping stood up and looked at Yogi Johnson.

“We go to Petoskey to join Salvation Army,” the larger and more wakeful Indian said.

“White chief come too,” said the smaller Indian, who had been asleep.

“I’ll walk in with you,” Yogi replied. Who were these Indians? What did they mean to him?

With the sun down, the slushy road was stiffening. It was freezing again. After all, maybe spring was not coming. Maybe it did not make a difference that he did not want a woman. Now that the spring was perhaps not coming there was a question about that. He would walk into town with the Indians and look for a beautiful woman and try and want her. He turned down the now frozen road. The two Indians walked by his side. They were all bound in the same direction.

CHAPTER 12

Through the night down the frozen road the three walked into Petoskey. They had been silent walking along the frozen road. Their shoes broke the new-formed crusts of ice. Sometimes Yogi Johnson stepped through a thin film of ice into a pool of water. The Indians avoided the pools of water.

They came down the hill past the feed store, crossed the bridge over the Bear River, their boots ringing hollowly on the frozen planks of the bridge, and climbed the hill that led past Dr. Rumsey’s house and the Home Tea-Room up to the pool-room. In front of the pool-room the two Indians stopped.

“White chief shoot pool?” the big Indian asked.

“No,” Yogi Johnson said. “My right arm was crippled in the war.”

“White chief have hard luck,” the small Indian said. “Shoot one game Kelly pool.”

“He got both arms and both legs shot off at Ypres,” the big Indian said in an aside to Yogi. “Him very sensitive.”

“All right,” Yogi Johnson said. “I’ll shoot one game.”

They went into the hot, smoke-filled warmth of the pool-room. They obtained a table and took down cues from the wall. As the little Indian reached up to take down his cue Yogi noticed that he had two artificial arms. They were brown leather and were both buckled on at the elbow. On the smooth green cloth, under the bright electric lights, they played pool. At the end of an hour and a half, Yogi Johnson found that he owed the little Indian four dollars and thirty cents.

“You shoot a pretty nice stick,” he remarked to the small Indian.

“Me not shoot so good since the war,” the small Indian replied.

“White chief like to drink a little?” asked the larger Indian.

“Where do you get it?” asked Yogi. “I have to go to Cheboygan for mine.”

“White chief come with red brothers,” the big Indian said.

They left the pool-table, placed their cues in the rack on the wall, paid at the counter, and went out into the night.

Along the dark streets men were sneaking home. The frost had come and frozen everything stiff and cold. The chinook had not been a real chinook, after all. Spring had not yet come, and the men who had commenced their orgies were halted by the chill in the air that told them the chinook wind had been a fake. That foreman, Yogi thought, he’ll catch hell to-morrow. Perhaps it had all been engineered by the pump-manufacturers to get the foreman out of his job. Such things were done. Through the dark of the night men were sneaking home in little groups.

The two Indians walked on either side of Yogi. They turned down a side street, and all three halted before a building that looked something like a stable. It was a stable. The two Indians opened the door and Yogi followed them inside. A ladder led upstairs to the floor above. It was dark inside the stable, but one of the Indians lit a match to show Yogi the ladder. The little Indian climbed up first, the metal hinges of his artificial limbs squeaking as he climbed. Yogi followed him, and the other Indian climbed last, lighting Yogi’s way with matches. The little Indian knocked on the roof where the ladder stopped against the wall. There was an answering knock. The little Indian knocked in answer, three sharp knocks on the roof above his head. A trap-door in the roof was raised, and they climbed up through into the lighted room.

In one corner of the room there was a bar with a brass rail and tall spittoons. Behind the bar was a mirror. Easy-chairs were all around the room. There was a pool-table. Magazines on sticks hung in a line on the wall. There was a framed autographed portrait of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on the wall draped in the American flag. Several Indians were sitting in the easy-chairs reading. A little group stood at the bar.

“Nice little club, eh?” An Indian came up and shook hands with Yogi. “I see you almost every day at the pump-factory.”

He was a man who worked at one of the machines near Yogi in the factory. Another Indian came up and shook hands with Yogi. He also worked in the pump-factory.

“Rotten luck about the chinook,” he said.

“Yes,” Yogi said. “Just a false alarm.”

“Come and have a drink,” the first Indian said.

“I’m with a party,” Yogi answered. Who were these Indians, anyway?

“Bring them along too,” the first Indian said. “Always room for one more.”

Yogi looked around him. The two Indians who had brought him were gone. Where were they? Then he saw them. They were over at the pool-table. The tall refined Indian to whom Yogi was talking followed his glance. He nodded his head in understanding.

“They’re woods Indians,” he explained apologetically. “We’re most of us town Indians here.”

“Yes, of course,” Yogi agreed.

“The little chap has a very good war record,” the tall refined Indian remarked. “The other chap was a major too, I believe.”

Yogi was guided over to the bar by the tall refined Indian. Behind the bar was the bartender. He was a Negro.

“How would some Dog’s Head ale go?” asked the Indian.

“Fine,” Yogi said.

“Two Dog’s Heads, Bruce,” the Indian remarked to the bartender. The bartender broke into a chuckle.

“What are you laughing at, Bruce?” the Indian asked.

The Negro broke into a shrill haunting laugh.

“I knowed it, Massa Red Dog,” he said. “I knowed you’d ordah dat Dog’s Head all the time.”

“He’s a merry fellow,” the Indian remarked to Yogi. “I must introduce myself. Red Dog’s the name.”

“Johnson’s the name,” Yogi said. “Yogi Johnson.”

“Oh, we are all quite familiar with your name, Mr. Johnson,” Red Dog smiled. “I would like you to meet my friends Mr. Sitting Bull, Mr. Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.”

“Sitting Bull’s a name I know,” Yogi remarked, shaking hands.

“Oh, I’m not one of those Sitting Bulls,” Mr. Sitting Bull said.

“Chief Running Skunk-Backwards’s great-grandfather once sold the entire Island of Manhattan for a few strings of wampum,” Red Dog explained.

“How very interesting,” Yogi said.

“That was a costly bit of wampum for our family,” Chief Running Skunk-Backwards smiled ruefully.

“Chief Running Skunk-Backwards has some of that wampum. Would you like to see it?” Red Dog asked.

“Indeed, I would.”

“It’s really no different from any other wampum,” Skunk-Backwards explained deprecatingly. He pulled a chain of wampum out of his pocket, and handed it to Yogi Johnson. Yogi looked at it curiously. What a part that string of wampum had played in this America of ours.

“Would you like to have one or two wampums for a keep-sake?” Skunk-Backwards asked.

“I wouldn’t like to take your wampum,” Yogi demurred.

“They have no intrinsic value really,” Skunk-Backwards explained, detaching one or two wampums from the string.

“Their value is really a sentimental one to Skunk-Backwards’s family,” Red Dog said.

“It’s damned decent of you, Mr. Skunk-Backwards,” Yogi said.

“It’s nothing,” Skunk-Backwards said. “You’d do the same for me in a moment.”

“It’s decent of you.”

Behind the bar, Bruce, the Negro bartender, had been leaning forward and watching the wampums pass from hand to hand. His dark face shone. Sharply, without explanation, he broke into high-pitched uncontrolled laughter. The dark laughter of the Negro.

Red Dog looked at him sharply. “I say, Bruce,” he spoke sharply; “your mirth is a little ill-timed.”

Bruce stopped laughing and wiped his face on a towel. He rolled his eyes apologetically.

“Ah can’t help it, Massa Red Dog. When I seen Mistah Skunk-Backhouse passin’ dem wampums around I jess couldn’t stand it no longa. Whad he wan sell a big town like New Yawk foh dem wampums for? Wampums! Take away yoah wampums!”

“Bruce is an eccentric,” Red Dog explained, “but he’s a corking bartender and a good-hearted chap.”

“Youah right theah, Massa Red Dog,” the bartender leaned forward. “I’se got a heart of puah gold.”

“He is an eccentric, though,” Red Dog apologized. “The house committee are always after me to get another bartender, but I like the chap, oddly enough.”

“I’m all right, boss,” Bruce said. “It’s just that when I see something funny I just have to laff. You know I don’ mean no harm, boss.”

“Right enough, Bruce,” Red Dog agreed. “You are an honest chap.”

Yogi Johnson looked about the room. The other Indians had gone away from the bar, and Skunk-Backwards was showing the wampum to a little group of Indians in dinner dress who had just come in. At the pool-table the two woods Indians were still playing. They had removed their coats, and the light above the pool-table glinted on the metal joints in the little woods Indian’s artificial arms. He had just run the table for the eleventh consecutive time.

“That little chap would have made a pool-player if he hadn’t had a bit of hard luck in the war,” Red Dog remarked. “Would you like to have a look about the club?” He took the check from Bruce, signed it, and Yogi followed him into the next room.

“Our committee room,” Red Dog said. On the walls were framed autographed photographs of Chief Bender, Francis Park-man, D. H. Lawrence, Chief Meyers, Stewart Edward White, Mary Austin, Jim Thorpe, General Custer, Glenn Warner, Mabel Dodge, and a full-length oil painting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Beyond the committee room was a locker room with a small plunge bath or swimming-pool. “It’s really ridiculously small for a club,” Red Dog said. “But it makes a comfortable little hole to pop into when the evenings are dull.” He smiled. “We call it the wigwam, you know. That’s a little conceit of my own.”

“It’s a damned nice club,” Yogi said enthusiastically.

“Put you up if you like,” Red Dog offered. “What’s your tribe?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your tribe. What are you — Sac and Fox? Jibway? Cree, I imagine.”

“Oh,” said Yogi. “My parents came from Sweden.”

Red Dog looked at him closely. His eyes narrowed.

“You’re not having me on?”

“No. They either came from Sweden or Norway,” Yogi said.

“I’d have sworn you looked a bit on the white side,” Red Dog said. “Damned good thing this came out in time. There’d have been no end of scandal.” He put his hand to his head and pursed his lips. “Here, you,” he turned suddenly and gripped Yogi by the vest. Yogi felt the barrel of an automatic pushed hard against his stomach.

“You’ll go quietly through the club-room, get your coat and hat and leave as though nothing had happened. Say polite good-by to anyone who happens to speak to you. And never come back. Get that, you Swede.”

“Yes,” said Yogi. “Put up your gun. I’m not afraid of your gun.”

“Do as I say,” Red Dog ordered. “As for those two pool-players that brought you here, I’ll soon have them out of this.”

Yogi went into the bright room, looked at the bar, where Bruce, the bartender, was regarding him, got his hat and coat, said good-night to Skunk-Backwards, who asked him why he was leaving so early, and the outside trap-door was swung up by Bruce. As Yogi started down the ladder the Negro burst out laughing. “I knowed it,” he laughed. “I knowed it all de time. No Swede gwine to fool ole Bruce.”

Yogi looked back and saw the laughing black face of the Negro framed in the oblong square of light that came through the raised trap-door. Once on the stable floor, Yogi looked around him. He was alone. The straw of the old stable was stiff and frozen under his feet. Where had he been? Had he been in an Indian club? What was it all about? Was this the end?

Above him a slit of light came in the roof. Then it was blocked by two black figures, there was the sound of a kick, a blow, a series of thuds, some dull, some sharp, and two human forms came crashing down the ladder. From above floated the dark, haunting sound of black Negro laughter.

The two woods Indians picked themselves up from the straw and limped toward the door. One of them, the little one, was crying. Yogi followed them out into the cold night. It was cold. The night was clear. The stars were out.

“Club no damn good,” the big Indian said. “Club heap no damn good.”

The little Indian was crying. Yogi, in the starlight, saw that he had lost one of his artificial arms.

“Me no play pool no more,” the little Indian sobbed. He shook his one arm at the window of the club, from which a thin slit of light came. “Club heap goddam hell no good.”

“Never mind,” Yogi said. “I’ll get you a job in the pump-factory.”

“Pump-factory, hell,” the big Indian said. “We all go join Salvation Army.”

“Don’t cry,” Yogi said to the little Indian. “I’ll buy you a new arm.”

The little Indian went on crying. He sat down in the snowy road. “No can play pool me no care about nothing,” he said.

From above them, out of the window of the club came the haunting sound of a Negro laughing.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE READER

In case it may have any historical value, I am glad to state that I wrote the foregoing chapter in two hours directly on the typewriter, and then went out to lunch with John Dos Passos, whom I consider a very forceful writer, and an exceedingly pleasant fellow besides. This is what is known in the provinces as log-rolling. We lunched on rollmops, Sole Meunière, Civet de Lièvre à la Chez Cocotte, marmelade de pommes, and washed it all down, as we used to say (eh, reader?) with a bottle of Montrachet 1919, with the sole, and a bottle of Hospice de Beaune 1919 apiece with the jugged hare. Mr. Dos Passos, I believe, shared a bottle of Chambertin with me over the marmelade de pommes (Eng., apple sauce). We drank two vieux marcs, and after deciding not to go to the Café du Dôme and talk about Art we both went to our respective homes and I wrote the following chapter. I would like the reader to particularly remark the way the complicated threads of the lives of the various characters in the book are gathered together, and then held there in that memorable scene in the beanery. It was when I read this chapter aloud to him that Mr. Dos Passos exclaimed, “Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece.”

P. S. — FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

It is at this point, reader, that I am going to try and get that sweep and movement into the book that shows that the book is really a great book. I know you hope just as much as I do, reader, that I will get this sweep and movement because think what it will mean to both of us. Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been visiting at our home (we’re getting along in the literary game, eh, reader?) asked us the other day if perhaps our reader, that’s you, reader — just think of it, H. G. Wells talking about you right in our home. Anyway, H. G. Wells asked us if perhaps our reader would not think too much of this story was autobiographical. Please, reader, just get that idea out of your head. We have lived in Petoskey, Mich., it is true, and naturally many of the characters are drawn from life as we lived it then. But they are other people, not the author. The author only comes into the story in these little notes. It is true that before starting this story we spent twelve years studying the various Indian dialects of the North, and there is still preserved in the museum at Cross Village our translation of the New Testament into Ojibway. But you would have done the same thing in our place, reader, and I think if you think it over you will agree with us on this. Now to get back to the story. It is meant in the best spirit of friendship when I say that you have no idea, reader, what a hard chapter this is going to be to write. As a matter of fact, and I try to be frank about these things, we will not even try and write it until tomorrow.

PART FOUR. THE PASSING OF A GREAT RACE AND THE MAKING AND MARRING OF AMERICANS

But perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules introduced vices, and of a very black kind, into this work. To which I shall answer: first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be found here are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind. Thirdly, that they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule, but detestation. Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure at that time on the scene: and lastly, they never produce the intended evil.

HENRY FIELDING

CHAPTER 13

Yogi Johnson walking down the silent street with his arm around the little Indian’s shoulder. The big Indian walking along beside them. The cold night. The shuttered houses of the town. The little Indian, who has lost his artificial arm. The big Indian, who was also in the war. Yogi Johnson, who was in the war too. The three of them walking, walking, walking. Where were they going? Where could they go? What was there left?

Suddenly under a street light that swung on its drooping wire above a street corner, casting its light down on the snow, the big Indian stopped. “Walking no get us nowhere,” he grunted. “Walking no good. Let white chief speak. Where we go, white chief?”

Yogi Johnson did not know. Obviously, walking was not the solution of their problem. Walking was all right in its way. Coxey’s Army. A horde of men, seeking work, pressing on toward Washington. Marching men, Yogi thought. Marching on and on and where were they getting? Nowhere. Yogi knew it only too well. Nowhere. No damn where at all.

“White chief speak up,” the big Indian said.

“I don’t know,” Yogi said. “I don’t know at all.” Was this what they had fought the war for? Was this what it was all about? It looked like it. Yogi standing under the street light. Yogi thinking and wondering. The two Indians in their mackinaw coats. One of the Indians with an empty sleeve. All of them wondering.

“White chief no speak?” the big Indian asked.

“No.” What could Yogi say? What was there to say?

“Red brother speak?” asked the Indian.

“Speak out,” Yogi said. He looked down at the snow. “One man’s as good as another now.”

“White chief ever go to Brown’s Beanery?” asked the big Indian, looking into Yogi’s face under the arc light.

“No.” Yogi felt all in. Was this the end? A beanery. Well, a beanery as well as any other place. But a beanery. Well, why not? These Indians knew the town. They were ex-service men. They both had splendid war records. He knew that himself. But a beanery.

“White chief come with red brothers.” The tall Indian put his arm under Yogi’s arm. The little Indian fell into step. “Forward to the beanery.” Yogi spoke quietly. He was a white man, but he knew when he had enough. After all, the white race might not always be supreme. This Moslem revolt. Unrest in the East. Trouble in the West. Things looked black in the South. Now this condition of things in the North. Where was it taking him? Where did it all lead? Would it help him to want a woman? Would spring ever come? Was it worth while after all? He wondered.

The three of them striding along the frozen streets of Petoskey. Going somewhere now. En route. Huysmans wrote that. It would be interesting to read French. He must try it sometime. There was a street in Paris named after Huysmans. Right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived. Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leading her? What was at the bottom of it? All that in Paris. Ah, Paris. How far it was to Paris now. Paris in the morning. Paris in the evening. Paris at night. Paris in the morning again. Paris at noon, perhaps. Why not? Yogi Johnson striding on. His mind never still.

All three of them striding on together. The arms of those that had arms linked through each other’s arms. Red men and white men walking together. Something had brought them together. Was it the war? Was it fate? Was it accident? Or was it just chance? These questions struggled with each other in Yogi Johnson’s brain. His brain was tired. He had been thinking too much lately. On still they strode. Then, abruptly, they stopped.

The little Indian looked up at the sign. It shone in the night outside the frosted windows of the beanery.

BEST BY TEST.

“Makeum heap big test,” the little Indian grunted.

“White man’s beanery got heap fine T-bone steak,” the tall Indian grunted. “Take it from red brother.” The Indians stood a little uncertainly outside the door. The tall Indian turned to Yogi. “White chief got dollars?”

“Yes, I’ve got money,” Yogi answered. He was prepared to go the route. It was no time to turn back now. “The feed’s on me, boys.”

“White chief nature’s nobleman,” the tall Indian grunted.

“White chief rough diamond,” the little Indian agreed.

“You’d do the same for me,” Yogi deprecated. After all, perhaps it was true. It was a chance he was taking. He had taken a chance in Paris once. Steve Brodie had taken a chance. Or so they said. Chances were taken all over the world every day. In China, Chinamen were taking chances. In Africa, Africans. In Egypt, Egyptians. In Poland, Poles. In Russia, Russians. In Ireland, Irish. In Armenia — –

“Armenians no take chances,” the tall Indian grunted quietly. He had voiced Yogi’s unspoken doubt. They were a canny folk these red men.

“Not even in the rug game?”

“Red brother think not,” the Indian said. His tones carried conviction to Yogi. Who were these Indians? There was something back of all this. They went into the beanery.

AUTHOR’S NOTE TO READER

It was at this point in the story, reader, that Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald came to our home one afternoon, and after remaining for quite a while suddenly sat down in the fireplace and would not (or was it could not, reader?) get up and let the fire burn something else so as to keep the room warm. I know, reader, that these things sometimes do not show in a story, but, just the same, they are happening, and think what they mean to chaps like you and me in the literary game. If you should think this part of the story is not as good as it might have been remember, reader, that day in and day out all over the world things like this are happening. Need I add, reader, that I have the utmost respect for Mr. Fitzgerald, and let anybody else attack him and I would be the first to spring to his defense! And that includes you too, reader, though I hate to speak out bluntly like this, and take the risk of breaking up a friendship of the sort that ours has gotten to be.

P. S. — TO THE READER

As I read that chapter over, reader, it doesn’t seem so bad. You may like it. I hope you will. And if you do like it, reader, and the rest of the book as well, will you tell your friends about it, and try and get them to buy the book just as you have done? I only get twenty cents on each book that is sold, and while twenty cents is not much nowadays still it will mount up to a lot if two or three hundred thousand copies of the book are sold. They will be, too, if every one likes the book as much as you and I do, reader. And listen, reader. I meant it when I said I would be glad to read anything you wrote. That wasn’t just talk. Bring it along and we will go over it together. If you like, I’ll re-write bits of it for you. I don’t mean that in any critical sort of way either. If there is anything you do not like in this book just write to Mr. Scribner’s Sons at the home office. They’ll change it for you. Or, if you would rather, I will change it myself. You know what I think of you, reader. And you’re not angry or upset about what I said about Scott Fitzgerald either, are you? I hope not. Now I am going to write the next chapter. Mr. Fitzgerald is gone and Mr. Dos Passos had gone to England, and I think I can promise you that it will be a bully chapter. At least, it will be just as good as I can write it. We both know how good that can be, if we read the blurbs, eh, reader?

CHAPTER 14

Inside the beanery. They are all inside the beanery. Some do not see the others. Each are intent on themselves. Red men are intent on red men. White men are intent on white men or on white women. There are no red women. Are there no squaws any more? What has become of the squaws? Have we lost our squaws in America? Silently, through the door which she had opened, a squaw came into the room. She was clad only in a pair of worn moccasins. On her back was a papoose. Beside her walked a husky dog.

“Don’t look!” the drummer shouted to the women at the counter.

“Here! Get her out of here!” the owner of the beanery shouted. The squaw was forcibly ejected by the Negro cook. They heard her thrashing around in the snow outside. Her husky dog was barking.

“My God! What that might have led to!” Scripps O’Neil mopped his forehead with a napkin.

The Indians had watched with impassive faces. Yogi Johnson had been unable to move. The waitresses had covered their faces with napkins or whatever was handy. Mrs. Scripps had covered her eyes with The American Mercury. Scripps O’Neil was feeling faint and shaken. Something had stirred inside him, some vague primordial feeling, as the squaw had come into the room.

“Wonder where that squaw came from?” the drummer asked.

“Her my squaw,” the little Indian said.

“Good God, man! Can’t you clothe her?” Scripps O’Neil said in a dumb voice. There was a note of terror in his words.

“Her no like clothes,” the little Indian explained. “Her woods Indian.”

Yogi Johnson was not listening. Something had broken inside of him. Something had snapped as the squaw came into the room. He had a new feeling. A feeling he thought had been lost for ever. Lost for always. Lost. Gone permanently. He knew now it was a mistake. He was all right now. By the merest chance he had found it out. What might he not have thought if that squaw had never come into the beanery? What black thoughts he had been thinking! He had been on the verge of suicide. Self-destruction. Killing himself. Here in this beanery. What a mistake that would have been. He knew now. What a botch he might have made of life. Killing himself. Let spring come now. Let it come. It couldn’t come fast enough. Let spring come. He was ready for it.

“Listen,” he said to the two Indians. “I want to tell you about something that happened to me in Paris.”

The two Indians leaned forward. “White chief got the floor,” the tall Indian remarked.

“What I thought was a very beautiful thing happened to me in Paris,” Yogi began. “You Indians know Paris? Good. Well, it turned out to be the ugliest thing that ever happened to me.”

The Indians grunted. They knew their Paris.

“It was the first day of my leave. I was walking along the Boulevard Malesherbes. A car passed me and a beautiful woman leaned out. She called to me and I came. She took me to a house, a mansion rather, in a distant part of Paris, and there a very beautiful thing happened to me. Afterward someone took me out a different door than I had come in by. The beautiful woman had told me that she would never, that she could never, see me again. I tried to get the number of the mansion but it was one of a block of mansions all looking the same.

“From then on all through my leave I tried to see that beautiful lady. Once I thought I saw her in the theatre. It wasn’t her. Another time I caught a glimpse of what I thought was her in a passing taxi and leaped into another taxi and followed. I lost the taxi. I was desperate. Finally on the next to the last night of my leave I was so desperate and dull that I went with one of those guides that guarantee to show you all of Paris. We started out and visited various places. ‘Is this all you’ve got?’ I asked the guide.

“‘There is a real place, but it’s very expensive,’ the guide said. We compromised on a price finally, and the guide took me. It was in an old mansion. You looked through a slit in the wall. All around the wall were people looking through slits. There, looking through slits could be seen the uniforms of men of all the Allied countries, and many handsome South Americans in evening dress. I looked through a slit myself. For a while nothing happened. Then a beautiful woman came into the room with a young British officer. She took off her long fur coat and her hat and threw them into a chair. The officer was taking off his Sam Browne belt. I recognized her. It was the lady whom I had been with when the beautiful thing happened to me.” Yogi Johnson looked at his empty plate of beans. “Since then,” he said, “I have never wanted a woman. How I have suffered I cannot tell. But I’ve suffered, boys, I’ve suffered. I blamed it on the war. I blamed it on France. I blamed it on the decay of morality in general. I blamed it on the younger generation. I blamed it here. I blamed it there. Now I am cured. Here’s five dollars for you, boys.” His eyes were shining. “Get some more to eat. Take a trip somewhere. This is the happiest day of my life.”

He stood up from his stool before the counter, shook the one Indian impulsively by the hand, rested his hand for a minute on the other Indian’s shoulder, opened the door of the beanery, and strode out into the night.

The two Indians looked at one another. “White chief heap nice fella,” observed the big Indian.

“Think him was in the war?” asked the little Indian.

“Me wonder,” the big Indian said.

“White chief said he buy me new artificial arm,” the little Indian grumbled.

“Maybe you get more than that,” the big Indian said.

“Me wonder,” the little Indian said. They went on eating.

At the other end of the counter of the beanery a marriage was coming to an end.

Scripps O’Neil and his wife sat side by side. Mrs. Scripps knew now. She couldn’t hold him. She had tried and failed. She had lost. She knew it was a losing game. There was no holding him now. Mandy was talking again. Talking. Talking. Always talking. That interminable stream of literary gossip that was bringing her, Diana’s, marriage to an end. She couldn’t hold him. He was going. Going. Going away from her. Diana sitting there in misery. Scripps listening to Mandy talking. Mandy talking. Talking. Talking. The drummer, an old friend now, the drummer, sitting reading his Detroit News. She couldn’t hold him. She couldn’t hold him. She couldn’t hold him.

The little Indian got up from his stool at the beanery counter, and went over to the window. The glass on the window was covered with thick rimy frost. The little Indian breathed on the frozen windowpane, rubbed the spot bare with the empty sleeve of his mackinaw coat and looked out into the night. Suddenly he turned from the window and rushed out into the night. The tall Indian watched him go, leisurely finished his meal, took a toothpick, placed it between his teeth, and then he too followed his friend out into the night.

CHAPTER 15

They were alone in the beanery now. Scripps and Mandy and Diana. Only the drummer was with them. He was an old friend now. But his nerves were on edge tonight. He folded his paper abruptly and started for the door.

“See you all later,” he said. He went out into the night. It seemed the only thing to do. He did it.

Only three of them in the beanery now. Scripps and Mandy and Diana. Only those three. Mandy was talking. Leaning on the counter and talking. Scripps with his eyes fixed on Mandy. Diana made no pretense of listening now. She knew it was over. It was all over now. But she would make one more attempt. One more last gallant try. Perhaps she still could hold him. Perhaps it had all been just a dream. She steadied her voice and then she spoke.

“Scripps, dear,” she said. Her voice shook a little. She steadied it.

“What’s on your mind?” Scripps asked abruptly. Ah, there it was. That horrid clipped speech again.

“Scripps, dear, wouldn’t you like to come home?” Diana’s voice quavered. “There’s a new Mercury.” She had changed from the London Mercury to The American Mercury just to please Scripps. “It just came. I wish you felt like coming home, normale’s a splendid thing in this Mercury. Do come home, Scripps, I’ve never asked anything of you before. Come home, Scripps! Oh, won’t you come home?”

Scripps looked up. Diana’s heart beat faster. Perhaps he was coming. Perhaps she was holding him. Holding him. Holding him.

“Do come, Scripps, dear,” Diana said softly. “There’s a wonderful editorial in it by Mencken about chiropractors.”

Scripps looked away.

“Won’t you come, Scripps?” Diana pleaded.

“No,” Scripps said. “I don’t give a damn about Mencken any more.”

Diana dropped her head. “Oh, Scripps,” she said. “Oh, Scripps.” This was the end. She had her answer now. She had lost him. Lost him. Lost him. It was over. Finished. Done for. She sat crying silently. Mandy was talking again.

Suddenly Diana straightened up. She had one last request to make. One thing she would ask him. Only one. He might refuse her. He might not grant it. But she would ask him.

“Scripps,” she said.

“What’s the trouble?” Scripps turned in irritation. Perhaps, after all, he was sorry for her. He wondered.

“Can I take the bird, Scripps?” Diana’s voice broke.

“Sure,” said Scripps. “Why not?”

Diana picked up the bird-cage. The bird was asleep. Perched on one leg as on that night when they had first met. What was it he was like? Ah, yes. Like an old osprey. An old, old osprey from her own Lake Country. She held the cage to her tightly.

“Thank you, Scripps,” she said. “Thank you for this bird.” Her voice broke. “And now I must be going.”

Quietly, silently, gathering her shawl around her, clutching the cage with the sleeping bird and the copy of The Mercury to her breast, with only a backward glance, a last glance at him who had been her Scripps, she opened the door of the beanery, and went out into the night. Scripps did not even see her go. He was intent on what Mandy was saying. Mandy was talking again.

“That bird she just took out,” Mandy was saying.

“Oh, did she take a bird out?” Scripps asked. “Go on with the story.”

“You used to wonder about what sort of bird that was,” Mandy went on.

“That’s right,” Scripps agreed.

“Well that reminds me of a story about Gosse and the Marquis of Buque,” Mandy went on.

“Tell it, Mandy. Tell it,” Scripps urged.

“It seems a great friend of mine, Ford, you’ve heard me speak of him before, was in the marquis’s castle during the war. His regiment was billeted there and the marquis, one of the richest if not the richest man in England, was serving in Ford’s regiment as a private. Ford was sitting in the library one evening. The library was a most extraordinary place. The walls were made of bricks of gold set into tiles or something. I forget exactly how it was.”

“Go on,” Scripps urged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Anyhow, in the middle of the wall of the library was a stuffed flamingo in a glass case.”

“They understand interior decorating, these English,” Scripps said.

“Your wife was English, wasn’t she?” asked Mandy.

“From the Lake Country,” Scripps answered. “Go on with the story.”

“Well, anyway,” Mandy went on, “Ford was sitting there in the library one evening after mess when the butler came in and said: ‘The Marquis of Buque’s compliments and might he show the library to a group of friends with whom he has been dining?’ They used to let him dine out and sometimes they let him sleep in the castle. Ford said, ‘Quite,’ and in came the marquis in his private’s uniform followed by Sir Edmund Gosse and Professor Whatsisname, I forget it for the moment, from Oxford. Gosse stopped in front of the stuffed flamingo in the glass case and said, ‘What have we here, Buque?’

“‘It’s a flamingo, Sir Edmund,’ the marquis answered.

“‘That’s not my idea of a flamingo,’ Gosse remarked.

“‘No, Gosse. That’s God’s idea of a flamingo,’ Professor Whatsisname said. I wish I could remember his name.”

“Don’t bother,” Scripps said. His eyes were bright. He leaned forward. Something was pounding inside of him. Something he could not control. “I love you, Mandy,” he said. “I love you. You are my woman.” The thing was pounding away inside of him. It would not stop.

“That’s all right,” Mandy answered. “I’ve known you were my man for a long time. Would you like to hear another story? Speaking of woman.”

“Go on,” Scripps said. “You must never stop, Mandy. You are my woman now.”

“Sure,” Mandy agreed. “This story is about when Knut Hamsun was a streetcar conductor in Chicago.”

“Go on,” Scripps said. “You are my woman now, Mandy.”

He repeated the phrase to himself. My woman. My woman. You are my woman. She is my woman. It is my woman. My woman. But, somehow, he was not satisfied. Somewhere, somehow, there must be something else. Something else. My woman. The words were a little hollow now. Into his mind, though he tried to thrust it out, there came again the monstrous picture of the squaw as she strode silently into the room. That squaw. She did not wear clothes, because she did not like them. Hardy, braving the winter nights. What might not the spring bring? Mandy was talking. Mandy talking on in the beanery. Mandy telling her stories. It grows late in the beanery. Mandy talks on. She is his woman now. He is her man. But is he her man? In Scripps’s brain that vision of the squaw. The squaw that strode unannounced into the beanery. The squaw who had been thrown out into the snow. Mandy talking on. Telling literary reminiscences. Authentic incidents. They had the ring of truth. But were they enough? Scripps wondered. She was his woman. But for how long? Scripps wondered. Mandy talking on in the beanery. Scripps listening. But his mind straying away. Straying away. Straying away. Where was it straying? Out into the night. Out into the night.

CHAPTER 16

Night in Petoskey. Long past midnight. Inside the beanery a light burning. The town asleep under the Northern moon. To the North the tracks of the G. R. & I. Railroad running far into the North. Cold tracks, stretching North toward Mackinaw City and St. Ignace. Cold tracks to be walking on at this time of night.

North of the frozen little Northern town a couple walking side by side on the tracks. It is Yogi Johnson walking with the squaw. As they walk Yogi Johnson silently strips off his garments. One by one he strips off his garments, and casts them beside the track. In the end he is clad only in a worn pair of pump-maker shoes. Yogi Johnson, naked in the moonlight, walking North beside the squaw. The squaw striding along beside him. She carries the papoose on her back in his bark cradle. Yogi attempts to take the papoose from her. He would carry the papoose. The husky dog whines and licks at Yogi Johnson’s ankles. No, the squaw would carry the papoose herself. On they stride. Into the North. Into the Northern night.

Behind them come two figures. Sharply etched in the moonlight. It is the two Indians. The two woods Indians. They stoop and gather up the garments Yogi Johnson has cast away. Occasionally, they grunt to one another. Striding softly along in the moonlight. Their keen eyes not missing a single cast-off garment. When the last garment has been cast off they look and see far ahead of them the two figures in the moonlight. The two Indians straighten up. They examine the garments.

“White chief snappy dresser,” the tall Indian remarks, holding up an initialled shirt.

“White chief going get pretty cold,” the small Indian remarks. He hands a vest to the tall Indian. The tall Indian rolls all the clothing, all the cast-off garments, into a bundle, and they start back along the tracks to the town.

“Better keep clothes for white chief or sellem Salvation Army?” asks the short Indian.

“Better sellem Salvation Army,” the tall Indian grunts.

“White chief maybe never come back.”

“White chief come back all right,” grunted the little Indian.

“Better sellem Salvation Army, anyway,” grunts the tall Indian. “White chief need new clothes, anyhow, when spring comes.”

As they walked down the tracks toward town, the air seemed to soften. The Indians walk uneasily now. Through the tamaracks and cedars beside the railway tracks a warm wind is blowing. The snow-drifts are melting now beside the tracks. Something stirs inside the two Indians. Some urge. Some strange pagan disturbance. The warm wind is blowing. The tall Indian stops, moistens his finger and holds it up in the air. The little Indian watches. “Chinook?” he asks.

“Heap chinook,” the tall Indian says. They hurry on toward town. The moon is blurred now by clouds carried by the warm chinook wind that is blowing.

“Want to get in town before rush,” the tall Indian grunts.

“Red brothers want be well up in line,” the little Indian grunts anxiously.

“Nobody work in factory now,” the tall Indian grunted.

“Better hurry.”

The warm wind blows. Inside the Indians strange longings were stirring. They knew what they wanted. Spring at last was coming to the frozen little Northern town. The two Indians hurried along the track.

THE END

AUTHOR’S FINAL NOTE TO THE READER

Well, reader, how did you like it? It took me ten days to write it. Has it been worth it? There is just one place I would like to clear up. You remember back in the story where the elderly waitress, Diana, tells about how she lost her mother in Paris, and woke up to find herself with a French general in the next room? I thought perhaps you might be interested to know the real explanation of that. What actually happened was that her mother was taken violently ill with the bubonic plague in the night, and the doctor who was called diagnosed the case and warned the authorities. It was the day the great exposition was to be opened, and think what a case of bubonic plague would have done for the exposition as publicity. So the French authorities simply had the woman disappear. She died toward morning. The general who was summoned and who then got into bed in the same room where the mother had been, always seemed to us like a pretty brave man. He was one of the big stockholders in the exposition, though, I believe. Anyway, reader, as a piece of secret history it always seemed to me like an awfully good story, and I know you would rather have me explain it here than drag an explanation into the novel, where really, after all, it has no place. It is interesting to observe, though, how the French police hushed the whole matter up, and how quickly they got ahold of the coiffeur and the cab-driver. Of course, what it shows is that when you’re travelling abroad alone, or even with your mother, you simply cannot be too careful. I hope it is all right about bringing this in here, but I just felt I owed it to you, reader, to give some explanation. I do not believe in these protracted good-bys any more than I do in long engagements, so I will just say a simple farewell and Godspeed, reader, and leave you now to your own devices.

THE SUN ALSO RISES

The Sun Also Rises was first published in America by Scribner’s on 22 October 1926 and in the following year Jonathan Cape released the novel in London under the title, Fiesta. The book proved to be popular and has remained in print ever since. Hemingway began writing it in the summer of 1925, shortly after returning from his trip to Pamplona and he quickly completed the first draft in the space of two months. He had originally titled the book Fiesta before changing it to The Lost Generation in September 1925. In December, Hemingway decided to revise and edit the text, and shortly afterwards he signed a contract with Scribner’s. The text was once again altered by the author in the spring of 1926, before he made proofs in August, two months before publication.

The novel was inspired by the author’s trips to the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, famous for the ‘running of the bulls’ that occurs every year between the 6th and 14th of July. Hemingway first attended the festival in 1923, before returning the following two years with friends, as he found the experience so intriguing and electrifying, as revealed in the narration of the text.

Hemingway had originally intended to write a non-fiction work about bullfighting, but decided that his time spent in Pamplona had provided a strong inspiration for a novel. He based his characters on the people he spent time with during the summer of 1925. The plot centres on Jake Barnes — an American journalist living in Paris — and his relationships with a group of friends and new acquaintances, including the charming and liberated divorcee, the wealthy Lady Brett Ashley. Barnes was injured during the First World War, resulting in his impotence, deeply impacting his ability to have a romantic relationship with Brett. She becomes involved with a young bullfighter, as well as other men, leading to violence and heartbreak. Hemingway’s novel explores the impact of the psychological and physical damage caused by the war, as the characters attempt to establish meaning and forge relationships with each other. The novel reveals a distaste for elements of the expatriate bohemian crowd and exhibits a scornful attitude towards those that have inherited their wealth and do not work. Lady Brett is a fascinating character, exhibiting a freedom, independence and sexual liberation, which traits are depicted as both alluring and dangerous — a restless and disruptive force in the lives of the men she encounters. Hemingway grants her an insouciance and sense of defiance for social mores, creating an attractive, but ultimately destructive presence.

The first edition, 1926

CONTENTS

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

BOOK II

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

BOOK III

CHAPTER 19

Hemingway with friends in Pamplona, July 1925

Town Hall of Pamplona, shortly after the initiation of the San Fermín festival

“You are all a lost generation.”

GERTRUDE STEIN in conversation

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever... The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose... The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.... All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”

Ecclesiastes

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although, being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym. He was Spider Kelly’s star pupil. Spider Kelly taught all his young gentlemen to box like featherweights, no matter whether they weighed one hundred and five or two hundred and five pounds. But it seemed to fit Cohn. He was really very fast. He was so good that Spider promptly overmatched him and got his nose permanently flattened. This increased Cohn’s distaste for boxing, but it gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion.

I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly. Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had become of him.

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest. At the military school where he prepped for Princeton, and played a very good end on the football team, no one had made him race-conscious. No one had ever made him feel he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else, until he went to Princeton. He was a nice boy, a friendly boy, and very shy, and it made him bitter. He took it out in boxing, and he came out of Princeton with painful self-consciousness and the flattened nose, and was married by the first girl who was nice to him. He was married five years, had three children, lost most of the fifty thousand dollars his father left him, the balance of the estate having gone to his mother, hardened into a rather unattractive mould under domestic unhappiness with a rich wife; and just when he had made up his mind to leave his wife she left him and went off with a miniature-painter. As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself, her departure was a very healthful shock.

The divorce was arranged and Robert Cohn went out to the Coast. In California he fell among literary people and, as he still had a little of the fifty thousand left, in a short time he was backing a review of the Arts. The review commenced publication in Carmel, California, and finished in Provincetown, Massachusetts. By that time Cohn, who had been regarded purely as an angel, and whose name had appeared on the editorial page merely as a member of the advisory board, had become the sole editor. It was his money and he discovered he liked the authority of editing. He was sorry when the magazine became too expensive and he had to give it up.

By that time, though, he had other things to worry about. He had been taken in hand by a lady who hoped to rise with the magazine. She was very forceful, and Cohn never had a chance of not being taken in hand. Also he was sure that he loved her. When this lady saw that the magazine was not going to rise, she became a little disgusted with Cohn and decided that she might as well get what there was to get while there was still something available, so she urged that they go to Europe, where Cohn could write. They came to Europe, where the lady had been educated, and stayed three years. During these three years, the first spent in travel, the last two in Paris, Robert Cohn had two friends, Braddocks and myself. Braddocks was his literary friend. I was his tennis friend.

The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possession and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her. During this time Robert’s mother had settled an allowance on him, about three hundred dollars a month. During two years and a half I do not believe that Robert Cohn looked at another woman. He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing. He wrote a novel, and it was not really such a bad novel as the critics later called it, although it was a very poor novel. He read many books, played bridge, played tennis, and boxed at a local gymnasium.

I first became aware of his lady’s attitude toward him one night after the three of us had dined together. We had dined at l’Avenue’s and afterward went to the Café de Versailles for coffee. We had several fines after the coffee, and I said I must be going. Cohn had been talking about the two of us going off somewhere on a weekend trip. He wanted to get out of town and get in a good walk. I suggested we fly to Strasbourg and walk up to Saint Odile, or somewhere or other in Alsace. “I know a girl in Strasbourg who can show us the town,” I said.

Somebody kicked me under the table. I thought it was accidental and went on: “She’s been there two years and knows everything there is to know about the town. She’s a swell girl.”

I was kicked again under the table and, looking, saw Frances, Robert’s lady, her chin lifting and her face hardening.

“Hell,” I said, “why go to Strasbourg? We could go up to Bruges, or to the Ardennes.”

Cohn looked relieved. I was not kicked again. I said good-night and went out. Cohn said he wanted to buy a paper and would walk to the corner with me. “For God’s sake,” he said, “why did you say that about that girl in Strasbourg for? Didn’t you see Frances?”

“No, why should I? If I know an American girl that lives in Strasbourg what the hell is it to Frances?”

“It doesn’t make any difference. Any girl. I couldn’t go, that would be all.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You don’t know Frances. Any girl at all. Didn’t you see the way she looked?”

“Oh, well,” I said, “let’s go to Senlis.”

“Don’t get sore.”

“I’m not sore. Senlis is a good place and we can stay at the Grand Cerf and take a hike in the woods and come home.”

“Good, that will be fine.”

“Well, I’ll see you to-morrow at the courts,” I said.

“Good-night, Jake,” he said, and started back to the café.

“You forgot to get your paper,” I said.

“That’s so.” He walked with me up to the kiosque at the corner. “You are not sore, are you, Jake?” He turned with the paper in his hand.

“No, why should I be?”

“See you at tennis,” he said. I watched him walk back to the café holding his paper. I rather liked him and evidently she led him quite a life.

CHAPTER 2

That winter Robert Cohn went over to America with his novel, and it was accepted by a fairly good publisher. His going made an awful row I heard, and I think that was where Frances lost him, because several women were nice to him in New York, and when he came back he was quite changed. He was more enthusiastic about America than ever, and he was not so simple, and he was not so nice. The publishers had praised his novel pretty highly and it rather went to his head. Then several women had put themselves out to be nice to him, and his horizons had all shifted. For four years his horizon had been absolutely limited to his wife. For three years, or almost three years, he had never seen beyond Frances. I am sure he had never been in love in his life.

He had married on the rebound from the rotten time he had in college, and Frances took him on the rebound from his discovery that he had not been everything to his first wife. He was not in love yet but he realized that he was an attractive quantity to women, and that the fact of a woman caring for him and wanting to live with him was not simply a divine miracle. This changed him so that he was not so pleasant to have around. Also, playing for higher stakes than he could afford in some rather steep bridge games with his New York connections, he had held cards and won several hundred dollars. It made him rather vain of his bridge game, and he talked several times of how a man could always make a living at bridge if he were ever forced to.

Then there was another thing. He had been reading W. H. Hudson. That sounds like an innocent occupation, but Cohn had read and reread “The Purple Land.” “The Purple Land” is a very sinister book if read too late in life. It recounts splendid imaginary amorous adventures of a perfect English gentleman in an intensely romantic land, the scenery of which is very well described. For a man to take it at thirty-four as a guide-book to what life holds is about as safe as it would be for a man of the same age to enter Wall Street direct from a French convent, equipped with a complete set of the more practical Alger books. Cohn, I believe, took every word of “The Purple Land” as literally as though it had been an R. G. Dun report. You understand me, he made some reservations, but on the whole the book to him was sound. It was all that was needed to set him off. I did not realize the extent to which it had set him off until one day he came into my office.

“Hello, Robert,” I said. “Did you come in to cheer me up?”

“Would you like to go to South America, Jake?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I never wanted to go. Too expensive. You can see all the South Americans you want in Paris anyway.”

“They’re not the real South Americans.”

“They look awfully real to me.”

I had a boat train to catch with a week’s mail stories, and only half of them written.

“Do you know any dirt?” I asked.

“No.”

“None of your exalted connections getting divorces?”

“No; listen, Jake. If I handled both our expenses, would you go to South America with me?”

“Why me?”

“You can talk Spanish. And it would be more fun with two of us.”

“No,” I said, “I like this town and I go to Spain in the summer-time.”

“All my life I’ve wanted to go on a trip like that,” Cohn said. He sat down. “I’ll be too old before I can ever do it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” I said. “You can go anywhere you want. You’ve got plenty of money.”

“I know. But I can’t get started.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “All countries look just like the moving pictures.”

But I felt sorry for him. He had it badly.

“I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it.”

“Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”

“I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life. I want to go back in the country in South America. We could have a great trip.”

“Did you ever think about going to British East Africa to shoot?”

“No, I wouldn’t like that.”

“I’d go there with you.”

“No; that doesn’t interest me.”

“That’s because you never read a book about it. Go on and read a book all full of love affairs with the beautiful shiny black princesses.”

“I want to go to South America.”

He had a hard, Jewish, stubborn streak.

“Come on down-stairs and have a drink.”

“Aren’t you working?”

“No,” I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: “Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables,” and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. “This is a good place,” he said.

“There’s a lot of liquor,” I agreed.

“Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Yes, every once in a while.”

“Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?”

“What the hell, Robert,” I said. “What the hell.”

“I’m serious.”

“It’s one thing I don’t worry about,” I said.

“You ought to.”

“I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying.”

“Well, I want to go to South America.”

“Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”

“But you’ve never been to South America.”

“South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same. This is a good town. Why don’t you start living your life in Paris?”

“I’m sick of Paris, and I’m sick of the Quarter.”

“Stay away from the Quarter. Cruise around by yourself and see what happens to you.”

“Nothing happens to me. I walked alone all one night and nothing happened except a bicycle cop stopped me and asked to see my papers.”

“Wasn’t the town nice at night?”

“I don’t care for Paris.”

So there you were. I was sorry for him, but it was not a thing you could do anything about, because right away you ran up against the two stubbornnesses: South America could fix it and he did not like Paris. He got the first idea out of a book, and I suppose the second came out of a book too.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve got to go up-stairs and get off some cables.”

“Do you really have to go?”

“Yes, I’ve got to get these cables off.”

“Do you mind if I come up and sit around the office?”

“No, come on up.”

He sat in the outer room and read the papers, and the Editor and Publisher and I worked hard for two hours. Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare. I went out into the other room and there was Robert Cohn asleep in the big chair. He was asleep with his head on his arms. I did not like to wake him up, but I wanted to lock the office and shove off. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shook his head. “I can’t do it,” he said, and put his head deeper into his arms. “I can’t do it. Nothing will make me do it.”

“Robert,” I said, and shook him by the shoulder. He looked up. He smiled and blinked.

“Did I talk out loud just then?”

“Something. But it wasn’t clear.”

“God, what a rotten dream!”

“Did the typewriter put you to sleep?”

“Guess so. I didn’t sleep all last night.”

“What was the matter?”

“Talking,” he said.

I could picture it. I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends. We went out to the Café Napolitain to have an apéritif and watch the evening crowd on the Boulevard.

CHAPTER 3

It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal. I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up.

“Well, what will you drink?” I asked.

“Pernod.”

“That’s not good for little girls.”

“Little girl yourself. Dites garçon, un pernod.”

“A pernod for me, too.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Going on a party?”

“Sure. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. You never know in this town.”

“Don’t you like Paris?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you go somewhere else?”

“Isn’t anywhere else.”

“You’re happy, all right.”

“Happy, hell!”

Pernod is greenish imitation absinthe. When you add water it turns milky. It tastes like licorice and it has a good uplift, but it drops you just as far. We sat and drank it, and the girl looked sullen.

“Well,” I said, “are you going to buy me a dinner?”

She grinned and I saw why she made a point of not laughing. With her mouth closed she was a rather pretty girl. I paid for the saucers and we walked out to the street. I hailed a horse-cab and the driver pulled up at the curb. Settled back in the slow, smoothly rolling fiacre we moved up the Avenue de l’Opéra, passed the locked doors of the shops, their windows lighted, the Avenue broad and shiny and almost deserted. The cab passed the New York Herald bureau with the window full of clocks.

“What are all the clocks for?” she asked.

“They show the hour all over America.”

“Don’t kid me.”

We turned off the Avenue up the Rue des Pyramides, through the traffic of the Rue de Rivoli, and through a dark gate into the Tuileries. She cuddled against me and I put my arm around her. She looked up to be kissed. She touched me with one hand and I put her hand away.

“Never mind.”

“What’s the matter? You sick?”

“Yes.”

“Everybody’s sick. I’m sick, too.”

We came out of the Tuileries into the light and crossed the Seine and then turned up the Rue des Saints Pères.

“You oughtn’t to drink pernod if you’re sick.”

“You neither.”

“It doesn’t make any difference with me. It doesn’t make any difference with a woman.”

“What are you called?”

“Georgette. How are you called?”

“Jacob.”

“That’s a Flemish name.”

“American too.”

“You’re not Flamand?”

“No, American.”

“Good, I detest Flamands.”

By this time we were at the restaurant. I called to the cocher to stop. We got out and Georgette did not like the looks of the place. “This is no great thing of a restaurant.”

“No,” I said. “Maybe you would rather go to Foyot’s. Why don’t you keep the cab and go on?”

I had picked her up because of a vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with some one. It was a long time since I had dined with a poule, and I had forgotten how dull it could be. We went into the restaurant, passed Madame Lavigne at the desk and into a little room. Georgette cheered up a little under the food.

“It isn’t bad here,” she said. “It isn’t chic, but the food is all right.”

“Better than you eat in Liège.”

“Brussels, you mean.”

We had another bottle of wine and Georgette made a joke. She smiled and showed all her bad teeth, and we touched glasses. “You’re not a bad type,” she said. “It’s a shame you’re sick. We get on well. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“I got hurt in the war,” I said.

“Oh, that dirty war.”

We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided. I was bored enough. Just then from the other room some one called: “Barnes! I say, Barnes! Jacob Barnes!”

“It’s a friend calling me,” I explained, and went out.

There was Braddocks at a big table with a party: Cohn, Frances Clyne, Mrs. Braddocks, several people I did not know.

“You’re coming to the dance, aren’t you?” Braddocks asked.

“What dance?”

“Why, the dancings. Don’t you know we’ve revived them?” Mrs. Braddocks put in.

“You must come, Jake. We’re all going,” Frances said from the end of the table. She was tall and had a smile.

“Of course, he’s coming,” Braddocks said. “Come in and have coffee with us, Barnes.”

“Right.”

“And bring your friend,” said Mrs. Braddocks laughing. She was a Canadian and had all their easy social graces.

“Thanks, we’ll be in,” I said. I went back to the small room.

“Who are your friends?” Georgette asked.

“Writers and artists.”

“There are lots of those on this side of the river.”

“Too many.”

“I think so. Still, some of them make money.”

“Oh, yes.”

We finished the meal and the wine. “Come on,” I said. “We’re going to have coffee with the others.”

Georgette opened her bag, made a few passes at her face as she looked in the little mirror, re-defined her lips with the lipstick, and straightened her hat.

“Good,” she said.

We went into the room full of people and Braddocks and the men at his table stood up.

“I wish to present my fiancée, Mademoiselle Georgette Leblanc,” I said. Georgette smiled that wonderful smile, and we shook hands all round.

“Are you related to Georgette Leblanc, the singer?” Mrs. Braddocks asked.

“Connais pas,” Georgette answered.

“But you have the same name,” Mrs. Braddocks insisted cordially.

“No,” said Georgette. “Not at all. My name is Hobin.”

“But Mr. Barnes introduced you as Mademoiselle Georgette Leblanc. Surely he did,” insisted Mrs. Braddocks, who in the excitement of talking French was liable to have no idea what she was saying.

“He’s a fool,” Georgette said.

“Oh, it was a joke, then,” Mrs. Braddocks said.

“Yes,” said Georgette. “To laugh at.”

“Did you hear that, Henry?” Mrs. Braddocks called down the table to Braddocks. “Mr. Barnes introduced his fiancée as Mademoiselle Leblanc, and her name is actually Hobin.”

“Of course, darling. Mademoiselle Hobin, I’ve known her for a very long time.”

“Oh, Mademoiselle Hobin,” Frances Clyne called, speaking French very rapidly and not seeming so proud and astonished as Mrs. Braddocks at its coming out really French. “Have you been in Paris long? Do you like it here? You love Paris, do you not?”

“Who’s she?” Georgette turned to me. “Do I have to talk to her?”

She turned to Frances, sitting smiling, her hands folded, her head poised on her long neck, her lips pursed ready to start talking again.

“No, I don’t like Paris. It’s expensive and dirty.”

“Really? I find it so extraordinarily clean. One of the cleanest cities in all Europe.”

“I find it dirty.”

“How strange! But perhaps you have not been here very long.”

“I’ve been here long enough.”

“But it does have nice people in it. One must grant that.”

Georgette turned to me. “You have nice friends.”

Frances was a little drunk and would have liked to have kept it up but the coffee came, and Lavigne with the liqueurs, and after that we all went out and started for Braddocks’s dancing-club.

The dancing-club was a bal musette in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. Five nights a week the working people of the Pantheon quarter danced there. One night a week it was the dancing-club. On Monday nights it was closed. When we arrived it was quite empty, except for a policeman sitting near the door, the wife of the proprietor back of the zinc bar, and the proprietor himself. The daughter of the house came downstairs as we went in. There were long benches, and tables ran across the room, and at the far end a dancing-floor.

“I wish people would come earlier,” Braddocks said. The daughter came up and wanted to know what we would drink. The proprietor got up on a high stool beside the dancing-floor and began to play the accordion. He had a string of bells around one of his ankles and beat time with his foot as he played. Every one danced. It was hot and we came off the floor perspiring.

“My God,” Georgette said. “What a box to sweat in!”

“It’s hot.”

“Hot, my God!”

“Take off your hat.”

“That’s a good idea.”

Some one asked Georgette to dance, and I went over to the bar. It was really very hot and the accordion music was pleasant in the hot night. I drank a beer, standing in the doorway and getting the cool breath of wind from the street. Two taxis were coming down the steep street. They both stopped in front of the Bal. A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them.

One of them saw Georgette and said: “I do declare. There is an actual harlot. I’m going to dance with her, Lett. You watch me.”

The tall dark one, called Lett, said: “Don’t you be rash.”

The wavy blond one answered: “Don’t you worry, dear.” And with them was Brett.

I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure. Instead, I walked down the street and had a beer at the bar at the next Bal. The beer was not good and I had a worse cognac to take the taste out of my mouth. When I came back to the Bal there was a crowd on the floor and Georgette was dancing with the tall blond youth, who danced big-hippily, carrying his head on one side, his eyes lifted as he danced. As soon as the music stopped another one of them asked her to dance. She had been taken up by them. I knew then that they would all dance with her. They are like that.

I sat down at a table. Cohn was sitting there. Frances was dancing. Mrs. Braddocks brought up somebody and introduced him as Robert Prentiss. He was from New York by way of Chicago, and was a rising new novelist. He had some sort of an English accent. I asked him to have a drink.

“Thanks so much,” he said, “I’ve just had one.”

“Have another.”

“Thanks, I will then.”

We got the daughter of the house over and each had a fine à l’eau.

“You’re from Kansas City, they tell me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do you find Paris amusing?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

I was a little drunk. Not drunk in any positive sense but just enough to be careless.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “yes. Don’t you?”

“Oh, how charmingly you get angry,” he said. “I wish I had that faculty.”

I got up and walked over toward the dancing-floor. Mrs. Braddocks followed me. “Don’t be cross with Robert,” she said. “He’s still only a child, you know.”

“I wasn’t cross,” I said. “I just thought perhaps I was going to throw up.”

“Your fiancée is having a great success,” Mrs. Braddocks looked out on the floor where Georgette was dancing in the arms of the tall, dark one, called Lett.

“Isn’t she?” I said.

“Rather,” said Mrs. Braddocks.

Cohn came up. “Come on, Jake,” he said, “have a drink.” We walked over to the bar. “What’s the matter with you? You seem all worked up over something?”

“Nothing. This whole show makes me sick is all.”

Brett came up to the bar.

“Hello, you chaps.”

“Hello, Brett,” I said. “Why aren’t you tight?”

“Never going to get tight any more. I say, give a chap a brandy and soda.”

She stood holding the glass and I saw Robert Cohn looking at her. He looked a great deal as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land. Cohn, of course, was much younger. But he had that look of eager, deserving expectation.

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

“It’s a fine crowd you’re with, Brett,” I said.

“Aren’t they lovely? And you, my dear. Where did you get it?”

“At the Napolitain.”

“And have you had a lovely evening?”

“Oh, priceless,” I said.

Brett laughed. “It’s wrong of you, Jake. It’s an insult to all of us. Look at Frances there, and Jo.”

This for Cohn’s benefit.

“It’s in restraint of trade,” Brett said. She laughed again.

“You’re wonderfully sober,” I said.

“Yes. Aren’t I? And when one’s with the crowd I’m with, one can drink in such safety, too.”

The music started and Robert Cohn said: “Will you dance this with me, Lady Brett?”

Brett smiled at him. “I’ve promised to dance this with Jacob,” she laughed. “You’ve a hell of a biblical name, Jake.”

“How about the next?” asked Cohn.

“We’re going,” Brett said. “We’ve a date up at Montmartre.” Dancing, I looked over Brett’s shoulder and saw Cohn, standing at the bar, still watching her.

“You’ve made a new one there,” I said to her.

“Don’t talk about it. Poor chap. I never knew it till just now.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “I suppose you like to add them up.”

“Don’t talk like a fool.”

“You do.”

“Oh, well. What if I do?”

“Nothing,” I said. We were dancing to the accordion and some one was playing the banjo. It was hot and I felt happy. We passed close to Georgette dancing with another one of them.

“What possessed you to bring her?”

“I don’t know, I just brought her.”

“You’re getting damned romantic.”

“No, bored.”

“Now?”

“No, not now.”

“Let’s get out of here. She’s well taken care of.”

“Do you want to?”

“Would I ask you if I didn’t want to?”

We left the floor and I took my coat off a hanger on the wall and put it on. Brett stood by the bar. Cohn was talking to her. I stopped at the bar and asked them for an envelope. The patronne found one. I took a fifty-franc note from my pocket, put it in the envelope, sealed it, and handed it to the patronne.

“If the girl I came with asks for me, will you give her this?” I said. “If she goes out with one of those gentlemen, will you save this for me?”

“C’est entendu, Monsieur,” the patronne said. “You go now? So early?”

“Yes,” I said.

We started out the door. Cohn was still talking to Brett. She said good night and took my arm. “Good night, Cohn,” I said. Outside in the street we looked for a taxi.

“You’re going to lose your fifty francs,” Brett said.

“Oh, yes.”

“No taxis.”

“We could walk up to the Pantheon and get one.”

“Come on and we’ll get a drink in the pub next door and send for one.”

“You wouldn’t walk across the street.”

“Not if I could help it.”

We went into the next bar and I sent a waiter for a taxi.

“Well,” I said, “we’re out away from them.”

We stood against the tall zinc bar and did not talk and looked at each other. The waiter came and said the taxi was outside. Brett pressed my hand hard. I gave the waiter a franc and we went out. “Where should I tell him?” I asked.

“Oh, tell him to drive around.”

I told the driver to go to the Parc Montsouris, and got in, and slammed the door. Brett was leaning back in the corner, her eyes closed. I got in and sat beside her. The cab started with a jerk.

“Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable,” Brett said.

CHAPTER 4

The taxi went up the hill, passed the lighted square, then on into the dark, still climbing, then levelled out onto a dark street behind St. Etienne du Mont, went smoothly down the asphalt, passed the trees and the standing bus at the Place de la Contrescarpe, then turned onto the cobbles of the Rue Mouffetard. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. We were sitting apart and we jolted close together going down the old street. Brett’s hat was off. Her head was back. I saw her face in the lights from the open shops, then it was dark, then I saw her face clearly as we came out on the Avenue des Gobelins. The street was torn up and men were working on the car-tracks by the light of acetylene flares. Brett’s face was white and the long line of her neck showed in the bright light of the flares. The street was dark again and I kissed her. Our lips were tight together and then she turned away and pressed against the corner of the seat, as far away as she could get. Her head was down.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “Please don’t touch me.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t stand it.”

“Oh, Brett.”

“You mustn’t. You must know. I can’t stand it, that’s all. Oh, darling, please understand!”

“Don’t you love me?”

“Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.”

“Isn’t there anything we can do about it?”

She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things.

“And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to go through that hell again.”

“We’d better keep away from each other.”

“But, darling, I have to see you. It isn’t all that you know.”

“No, but it always gets to be.”

“That’s my fault. Don’t we pay for all the things we do, though?”

She had been looking into my eyes all the time. Her eyes had different depths, sometimes they seemed perfectly flat. Now you could see all the way into them.

“When I think of the hell I’ve put chaps through. I’m paying for it all now.”

“Don’t talk like a fool,” I said. “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it.”

“Oh, no. I’ll lay you don’t.”

“Well, let’s shut up about it.”

“I laughed about it too, myself, once.” She wasn’t looking at me. “A friend of my brother’s came home that way from Mons. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?”

“No,” I said. “Nobody ever knows anything.”

I was pretty well through with the subject. At one time or another I had probably considered it from most of its various angles, including the one that certain injuries or imperfections are a subject of merriment while remaining quite serious for the person possessing them.

“It’s funny,” I said. “It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.”

“Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again.

“I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.”

“No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.”

“It’s good to see each other.”

“No. I don’t think it is.”

“Don’t you want to?”

“I have to.”

We were sitting now like two strangers. On the right was the Parc Montsouris. The restaurant where they have the pool of live trout and where you can sit and look out over the park was closed and dark. The driver leaned his head around.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked. Brett turned her head away.

“Oh, go to the Select.”

“Café Select,” I told the driver. “Boulevard Montparnasse.” We drove straight down, turning around the Lion de Belfort that guards the passing Montrouge trams. Brett looked straight ahead. On the Boulevard Raspail, with the lights of Montparnasse in sight, Brett said: “Would you mind very much if I asked you to do something?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Kiss me just once more before we get there.”

When the taxi stopped I got out and paid. Brett came out putting on her hat. She gave me her hand as she stepped down. Her hand was shaky. “I say, do I look too much of a mess?” She pulled her man’s felt hat down and started in for the bar. Inside, against the bar and at tables, were most of the crowd who had been at the dance.

“Hello, you chaps,” Brett said. “I’m going to have a drink.”

“Oh, Brett! Brett!” the little Greek portrait-painter, who called himself a duke, and whom everybody called Zizi, pushed up to her. “I got something fine to tell you.”

“Hello, Zizi,” Brett said.

“I want you to meet a friend,” Zizi said. A fat man came up.

“Count Mippipopolous, meet my friend Lady Ashley.”

“How do you do?” said Brett.

“Well, does your Ladyship have a good time here in Paris?” asked Count Mippipopolous, who wore an elk’s tooth on his watch-chain.

“Rather,” said Brett.

“Paris is a fine town all right,” said the count. “But I guess you have pretty big doings yourself over in London.”

“Oh, yes,” said Brett. “Enormous.”

Braddocks called to me from a table. “Barnes,” he said, “have a drink. That girl of yours got in a frightful row.”

“What about?”

“Something the patronne’s daughter said. A corking row. She was rather splendid, you know. Showed her yellow card and demanded the patronne’s daughter’s too. I say it was a row.”

“What finally happened?”

“Oh, some one took her home. Not a bad-looking girl. Wonderful command of the idiom. Do stay and have a drink.”

“No,” I said. “I must shove off. Seen Cohn?”

“He went home with Frances,” Mrs. Braddock put in.

“Poor chap, he looks awfully down,” Braddocks said.

“I dare say he is,” said Mrs. Braddocks.

“I have to shove off,” I said. “Good night.”

I said good night to Brett at the bar. The count was buying champagne. “Will you take a glass of wine with us, sir?” he asked.

“No. Thanks awfully. I have to go.”

“Really going?” Brett asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got a rotten headache.”

“I’ll see you to-morrow?”

“Come in at the office.”

“Hardly.”

“Well, where will I see you?”

“Anywhere around five o’clock.”

“Make it the other side of town then.”

“Good. I’ll be at the Crillon at five.”

“Try and be there,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Brett said. “I’ve never let you down, have I?”

“Heard from Mike?”

“Letter to-day.”

“Good night, sir,” said the count.

I went out onto the sidewalk and walked down toward the Boulevard St. Michel, passed the tables of the Rotonde, still crowded, looked across the street at the Dome, its tables running out to the edge of the pavement. Some one waved at me from a table, I did not see who it was and went on. I wanted to get home. The Boulevard Montparnasse was deserted. Lavigne’s was closed tight, and they were stacking the tables outside the Closerie des Lilas. I passed Ney’s statue standing among the new-leaved chestnut-trees in the arc-light. There was a faded purple wreath leaning against the base. I stopped and read the inscription: from the Bonapartist Groups, some date; I forget. He looked very fine, Marshal Ney in his top-boots, gesturing with his sword among the green new horse-chestnut leaves. My flat was just across the street, a little way down the Boulevard St. Michel.

There was a light in the concierge’s room and I knocked on the door and she gave me my mail. I wished her good night and went up-stairs. There were two letters and some papers. I looked at them under the gas-light in the dining-room. The letters were from the States. One was a bank statement. It showed a balance of $2432.60. I got out my check-book and deducted four checks drawn since the first of the month, and discovered I had a balance of $1832.60. I wrote this on the back of the statement. The other letter was a wedding announcement. Mr. and Mrs. Aloysius Kirby announce the marriage of their daughter Katherine — I knew neither the girl nor the man she was marrying. They must be circularizing the town. It was a funny name. I felt sure I could remember anybody with a name like Aloysius. It was a good Catholic name. There was a crest on the announcement. Like Zizi the Greek duke. And that count. The count was funny. Brett had a title, too. Lady Ashley. To hell with Brett. To hell with you, Lady Ashley.

I lit the lamp beside the bed, turned off the gas, and opened the wide windows. The bed was far back from the windows, and I sat with the windows open and undressed by the bed. Outside a night train, running on the street-car tracks, went by carrying vegetables to the markets. They were noisy at night when you could not sleep. Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror of the big armoire beside the bed. That was a typically French way to furnish a room. Practical, too, I suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny. I put on my pajamas and got into bed. I had the two bull-fight papers, and I took their wrappers off. One was orange. The other yellow. They would both have the same news, so whichever I read first would spoil the other. Le Toril was the better paper, so I started to read it. I read it all the way through, including the Petite Correspondance and the Cornigrams. I blew out the lamp. Perhaps I would be able to sleep.

My head started to work. The old grievance. Well, it was a rotten way to be wounded and flying on a joke front like the Italian. In the Italian hospital we were going to form a society. It had a funny name in Italian. I wonder what became of the others, the Italians. That was in the Ospedale Maggiore in Milano, Padiglione Ponte. The next building was the Padiglione Zonda. There was a statue of Ponte, or maybe it was Zonda. That was where the liaison colonel came to visit me. That was funny. That was about the first funny thing. I was all bandaged up. But they had told him about it. Then he made that wonderful speech: “You, a foreigner, an Englishman” (any foreigner was an Englishman) “have given more than your life.” What a speech! I would like to have it illuminated to hang in the office. He never laughed. He was putting himself in my place, I guess. “Che mala fortuna! Che mala fortuna!”

I never used to realize it, I guess. I try and play it along and just not make trouble for people. Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.

I lay awake thinking and my mind jumping around. Then I couldn’t keep away from it, and I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I was thinking about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.

I woke up. There was a row going on outside. I listened and I thought I recognized a voice. I put on a dressing-gown and went to the door. The concierge was talking down-stairs. She was very angry. I heard my name and called down the stairs.

“Is that you, Monsieur Barnes?” the concierge called.

“Yes. It’s me.”

“There’s a species of woman here who’s waked the whole street up. What kind of a dirty business at this time of night! She says she must see you. I’ve told her you’re asleep.”

Then I heard Brett’s voice. Half asleep I had been sure it was Georgette. I don’t know why. She could not have known my address.

“Will you send her up, please?”

Brett came up the stairs. I saw she was quite drunk. “Silly thing to do,” she said. “Make an awful row. I say, you weren’t asleep, were you?”

“What did you think I was doing?”

“Don’t know. What time is it?”

I looked at the clock. It was half-past four. “Had no idea what hour it was,” Brett said. “I say, can a chap sit down? Don’t be cross, darling. Just left the count. He brought me here.”

“What’s he like?” I was getting brandy and soda and glasses.

“Just a little,” said Brett. “Don’t try and make me drunk. The count? Oh, rather. He’s quite one of us.”

“Is he a count?”

“Here’s how. I rather think so, you know. Deserves to be, anyhow. Knows hell’s own amount about people. Don’t know where he got it all. Owns a chain of sweetshops in the States.”

She sipped at her glass.

“Think he called it a chain. Something like that. Linked them all up. Told me a little about it. Damned interesting. He’s one of us, though. Oh, quite. No doubt. One can always tell.”

She took another drink.

“How do I buck on about all this? You don’t mind, do you? He’s putting up for Zizi, you know.”

“Is Zizi really a duke, too?”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Greek, you know. Rotten painter. I rather liked the count.”

“Where did you go with him?”

“Oh, everywhere. He just brought me here now. Offered me ten thousand dollars to go to Biarritz with him. How much is that in pounds?”

“Around two thousand.”

“Lot of money. I told him I couldn’t do it. He was awfully nice about it. Told him I knew too many people in Biarritz.”

Brett laughed.

“I say, you are slow on the up-take,” she said. I had only sipped my brandy and soda. I took a long drink.

“That’s better. Very funny,” Brett said. “Then he wanted me to go to Cannes with him. Told him I knew too many people in Cannes. Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people in Monte Carlo. Told him I knew too many people everywhere. Quite true, too. So I asked him to bring me here.”

She looked at me, her hand on the table, her glass raised. “Don’t look like that,” she said. “Told him I was in love with you. True, too. Don’t look like that. He was damn nice about it. Wants to drive us out to dinner to-morrow night. Like to go?”

“Why not?”

“I’d better go now.”

“Why?”

“Just wanted to see you. Damned silly idea. Want to get dressed and come down? He’s got the car just up the street.”

“The count?”

“Himself. And a chauffeur in livery. Going to drive me around and have breakfast in the Bois. Hampers. Got it all at Zelli’s. Dozen bottles of Mumms. Tempt you?”

“I have to work in the morning,” I said. “I’m too far behind you now to catch up and be any fun.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Right. Send him a tender message?”

“Anything. Absolutely.”

“Good night, darling.”

“Don’t be sentimental.”

“You make me ill.”

We kissed good night and Brett shivered. “I’d better go,” she said. “Good night, darling.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“Yes.”

We kissed again on the stairs and as I called for the cordon the concierge muttered something behind her door. I went back up-stairs and from the open window watched Brett walking up the street to the big limousine drawn up to the curb under the arc-light. She got in and it started off. I turned around. On the table was an empty glass and a glass half-full of brandy and soda. I took them both out to the kitchen and poured the half-full glass down the sink. I turned off the gas in the dining-room, kicked off my slippers sitting on the bed, and got into bed. This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

CHAPTER 5

In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. I got on an S bus and rode down to the Madeleine, standing on the back platform. From the Madeleine I walked along the Boulevard des Capucines to the Opéra, and up to my office. I passed the man with the jumping frogs and the man with the boxer toys. I stepped aside to avoid walking into the thread with which his girl assistant manipulated the boxers. She was standing looking away, the thread in her folded hands. The man was urging two tourists to buy. Three more tourists had stopped and were watching. I walked on behind a man who was pushing a roller that printed the name CINZANO on the sidewalk in damp letters. All along people were going to work. It felt pleasant to be going to work. I walked across the avenue and turned in to my office.

Up-stairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s work. At eleven o’clock I went over to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents, while the foreign-office mouthpiece, a young Nouvelle Revue Française diplomat in horn-rimmed spectacles, talked and answered questions for half an hour. The President of the Council was in Lyons making a speech, or, rather he was on his way back. Several people asked questions to hear themselves talk and there were a couple of questions asked by news service men who wanted to know the answers. There was no news. I shared a taxi back from the Quai d’Orsay with Woolsey and Krum.

“What do you do nights, Jake?” asked Krum. “I never see you around.”

“Oh, I’m over in the Quarter.”

“I’m coming over some night. The Dingo. That’s the great place, isn’t it?”

“Yes. That, or this new dive, The Select.”

“I’ve meant to get over,” said Krum. “You know how it is, though, with a wife and kids.”

“Playing any tennis?” Woolsey asked.

“Well, no,” said Krum. “I can’t say I’ve played any this year. I’ve tried to get away, but Sundays it’s always rained, and the courts are so damned crowded.”

“The Englishmen all have Saturday off,” Woolsey said.

“Lucky beggars,” said Krum. “Well, I’ll tell you. Some day I’m not going to be working for an agency. Then I’ll have plenty of time to get out in the country.”

“That’s the thing to do. Live out in the country and have a little car.”

“I’ve been thinking some about getting a car next year.”

I banged on the glass. The chauffeur stopped. “Here’s my street,” I said. “Come in and have a drink.”

“Thanks, old man,” Krum said. Woolsey shook his head. “I’ve got to file that line he got off this morning.”

I put a two-franc piece in Krum’s hand.

“You’re crazy, Jake,” he said. “This is on me.”

“It’s all on the office, anyway.”

“Nope. I want to get it.”

I waved good-by. Krum put his head out. “See you at the lunch on Wednesday.”

“You bet.”

I went to the office in the elevator. Robert Cohn was waiting for me. “Hello, Jake,” he said. “Going out to lunch?”

“Yes. Let me see if there is anything new.”

“Where will we eat?”

“Anywhere.”

I was looking over my desk. “Where do you want to eat?”

“How about Wetzel’s? They’ve got good hors d’oeuvres.”

In the restaurant we ordered hors d’oeuvres and beer. The sommelier brought the beer, tall, beaded on the outside of the steins, and cold. There were a dozen different dishes of hors d’oeuvres.

“Have any fun last night?” I asked.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“How’s the writing going?”

“Rotten. I can’t get this second book going.”

“That happens to everybody.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that. It gets me worried, though.”

“Thought any more about going to South America?”

“I mean that.”

“Well, why don’t you start off?”

“Frances.”

“Well,” I said, “take her with you.”

“She wouldn’t like it. That isn’t the sort of thing she likes. She likes a lot of people around.”

“Tell her to go to hell.”

“I can’t. I’ve got certain obligations to her.”

He shoved the sliced cucumbers away and took a pickled herring.

“What do you know about Lady Brett Ashley, Jake?”

“Her name’s Lady Ashley. Brett’s her own name. She’s a nice girl,” I said. “She’s getting a divorce and she’s going to marry Mike Campbell. He’s over in Scotland now. Why?”

“She’s a remarkably attractive woman.”

“Isn’t she?”

“There’s a certain quality about her, a certain fineness. She seems to be absolutely fine and straight.”

“She’s very nice.”

“I don’t know how to describe the quality,” Cohn said. “I suppose it’s breeding.”

“You sound as though you liked her pretty well.”

“I do. I shouldn’t wonder if I were in love with her.”

“She’s a drunk,” I said. “She’s in love with Mike Campbell, and she’s going to marry him. He’s going to be rich as hell some day.”

“I don’t believe she’ll ever marry him.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t believe it. Have you known her a long time?”

“Yes,” I said. “She was a V. A. D. in a hospital I was in during the war.”

“She must have been just a kid then.”

“She’s thirty-four now.”

“When did she marry Ashley?”

“During the war. Her own true love had just kicked off with the dysentery.”

“You talk sort of bitter.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to give you the facts.”

“I don’t believe she would marry anybody she didn’t love.”

“Well,” I said. “She’s done it twice.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Well,” I said, “don’t ask me a lot of fool questions if you don’t like the answers.”

“I didn’t ask you that.”

“You asked me what I knew about Brett Ashley.”

“I didn’t ask you to insult her.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d’oeuvres.

“Sit down,” I said. “Don’t be a fool.”

“You’ve got to take that back.”

“Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff.”

“Take it back.”

“Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashley. How’s that?

“No. Not that. About me going to hell.”

“Oh, don’t go to hell,” I said. “Stick around. We’re just starting lunch.”

Cohn smiled again and sat down. He seemed glad to sit down. What the hell would he have done if he hadn’t sat down? “You say such damned insulting things, Jake.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a nasty tongue. I never mean it when I say nasty things.”

“I know it,” Cohn said. “You’re really about the best friend I have, Jake.”

God help you, I thought. “Forget what I said,” I said out loud. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s fine. I was just sore for a minute.”

“Good. Let’s get something else to eat.”

After we finished the lunch we walked up to the Café de la Paix and had coffee. I could feel Cohn wanted to bring up Brett again, but I held him off it. We talked about one thing and another, and I left him to come to the office.

CHAPTER 6

At five o’clock I was in the Hotel Crillon waiting for Brett. She was not there, so I sat down and wrote some letters. They were not very good letters but I hoped their being on Crillon stationery would help them. Brett did not turn up, so about quarter to six I went down to the bar and had a Jack Rose with George the barman. Brett had not been in the bar either, and so I looked for her up-stairs on my way out, and took a taxi to the Café Select. Crossing the Seine I saw a string of barges being towed empty down the current, riding high, the bargemen at the sweeps as they came toward the bridge. The river looked nice. It was always pleasant crossing bridges in Paris.

The taxi rounded the statue of the inventor of the semaphore engaged in doing same, and turned up the Boulevard Raspail, and I sat back to let that part of the ride pass. The Boulevard Raspail always made dull riding. It was like a certain stretch on the P. L. M. between Fontainebleau and Montereau that always made me feel bored and dead and dull until it was over. I suppose it is some association of ideas that makes those dead places in a journey. There are other streets in Paris as ugly as the Boulevard Raspail. It is a street I do not mind walking down at all. But I cannot stand to ride along it. Perhaps I had read something about it once. That was the way Robert Cohn was about all of Paris. I wondered where Cohn got that incapacity to enjoy Paris. Possibly from Mencken. Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dislikes from Mencken.

The taxi stopped in front of the Rotonde. No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde. Ten years from now it will probably be the Dome. It was near enough, anyway. I walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select. There were a few people inside at the bar, and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.

“Sit down,” said Harvey, “I’ve been looking for you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Just looking for you.”

“Been out to the races?”

“No. Not since Sunday.”

“What do you hear from the States?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I’m through with them. I’m absolutely through with them.”

He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

“Do you want to know something, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t had anything to eat for five days.”

I figured rapidly back in my mind. It was three days ago that Harvey had won two hundred francs from me shaking poker dice in the New York Bar.

“What’s the matter?”

“No money. Money hasn’t come,” he paused. “I tell you it’s strange, Jake. When I’m like this I just want to be alone. I want to stay in my own room. I’m like a cat.”

I felt in my pocket.

“Would a hundred help you any, Harvey?”

“Yes.”

“Come on. Let’s go and eat.”

“There’s no hurry. Have a drink.”

“Better eat.”

“No. When I get like this I don’t care whether I eat or not.”

We had a drink. Harvey added my saucer to his own pile.

“Do you know Mencken, Harvey?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s all right. He says some pretty funny things. Last time I had dinner with him we talked about Hoffenheimer. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘he’s a garter snapper.’ That’s not bad.”

“That’s not bad.”

“He’s through now,” Harvey went on. “He’s written about all the things he knows, and now he’s on all the things he doesn’t know.”

“I guess he’s all right,” I said. “I just can’t read him.”

“Oh, nobody reads him now,” Harvey said, “except the people that used to read the Alexander Hamilton Institute.”

“Well,” I said. “That was a good thing, too.”

“Sure,” said Harvey. So we sat and thought deeply for a while.

“Have another port?”

“All right,” said Harvey.

“There comes Cohn,” I said. Robert Cohn was crossing the street.

“That moron,” said Harvey. Cohn came up to our table.

“Hello, you bums,” he said.

“Hello, Robert,” Harvey said. “I was just telling Jake here that you’re a moron.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell us right off. Don’t think. What would you rather do if you could do anything you wanted?”

Cohn started to consider.

“Don’t think. Bring it right out.”

“I don’t know,” Cohn said. “What’s it all about, anyway?”

“I mean what would you rather do. What comes into your head first. No matter how silly it is.”

“I don’t know,” Cohn said. “I think I’d rather play football again with what I know about handling myself, now.”

“I misjudged you,” Harvey said. “You’re not a moron. You’re only a case of arrested development.”

“You’re awfully funny, Harvey,” Cohn said. “Some day somebody will push your face in.”

Harvey Stone laughed. “You think so. They won’t, though. Because it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I’m not a fighter.”

“It would make a difference to you if anybody did it.”

“No, it wouldn’t. That’s where you make your big mistake. Because you’re not intelligent.”

“Cut it out about me.”

“Sure,” said Harvey. “It doesn’t make any difference to me. You don’t mean anything to me.”

“Come on, Harvey,” I said. “Have another porto.”

“No,” he said. “I’m going up the street and eat. See you later, Jake.”

He walked out and up the street. I watched him crossing the street through the taxis, small, heavy, slowly sure of himself in the traffic.

“He always gets me sore,” Cohn said. “I can’t stand him.”

“I like him,” I said. “I’m fond of him. You don’t want to get sore at him.”

“I know it,” Cohn said. “He just gets on my nerves.”

“Write this afternoon?”

“No. I couldn’t get it going. It’s harder to do than my first book. I’m having a hard time handling it.”

The sort of healthy conceit that he had when he returned from America early in the spring was gone. Then he had been sure of his work, only with these personal longings for adventure. Now the sureness was gone. Somehow I feel I have not shown Robert Cohn clearly. The reason is that until he fell in love with Brett, I never heard him make one remark that would, in any way, detach him from other people. He was nice to watch on the tennis-court, he had a good body, and he kept it in shape; he handled his cards well at bridge, and he had a funny sort of undergraduate quality about him. If he were in a crowd nothing he said stood out. He wore what used to be called polo shirts at school, and may be called that still, but he was not professionally youthful. I do not believe he thought about his clothes much. Externally he had been formed at Princeton. Internally he had been moulded by the two women who had trained him. He had a nice, boyish sort of cheerfulness that had never been trained out of him, and I probably have not brought it out. He loved to win at tennis. He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance. On the other hand, he was not angry at being beaten. When he fell in love with Brett his tennis game went all to pieces. People beat him who had never had a chance with him. He was very nice about it.

Anyhow, we were sitting on the terrace of the Café Select, and Harvey Stone had just crossed the street.

“Come on up to the Lilas,” I said.

“I have a date.”

“What time?”

“Frances is coming here at seven-fifteen.”

“There she is.”

Frances Clyne was coming toward us from across the street. She was a very tall girl who walked with a great deal of movement. She waved and smiled. We watched her cross the street.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m so glad you’re here, Jake. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“Hello, Frances,” said Cohn. He smiled.

“Why, hello, Robert. Are you here?” She went on, talking rapidly. “I’ve had the darndest time. This one” — shaking her head at Cohn— “didn’t come home for lunch.”

“I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Oh, I know. But you didn’t say anything about it to the cook. Then I had a date myself, and Paula wasn’t at her office. I went to the Ritz and waited for her, and she never came, and of course I didn’t have enough money to lunch at the Ritz — —”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, went out, of course.” She spoke in a sort of imitation joyful manner. “I always keep my appointments. No one keeps theirs, nowadays. I ought to know better. How are you, Jake, anyway?”

“Fine.”

“That was a fine girl you had at the dance, and then went off with that Brett one.”

“Don’t you like her?” Cohn asked.

“I think she’s perfectly charming. Don’t you?”

Cohn said nothing.

“Look, Jake. I want to talk with you. Would you come over with me to the Dome? You’ll stay here, won’t you, Robert? Come on, Jake.”

We crossed the Boulevard Montparnasse and sat down at a table. A boy came up with the Paris Times, and I bought one and opened it.

“What’s the matter, Frances?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, “except that he wants to leave me.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, he told every one that we were going to be married, and I told my mother and every one, and now he doesn’t want to do it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“He’s decided he hasn’t lived enough. I knew it would happen when he went to New York.”

She looked up, very bright-eyed and trying to talk inconsequentially.

“I wouldn’t marry him if he doesn’t want to. Of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t marry him now for anything. But it does seem to me to be a little late now, after we’ve waited three years, and I’ve just gotten my divorce.”

I said nothing.

“We were going to celebrate so, and instead we’ve just had scenes. It’s so childish. We have dreadful scenes, and he cries and begs me to be reasonable, but he says he just can’t do it.”

“It’s rotten luck.”

“I should say it is rotten luck. I’ve wasted two years and a half on him now. And I don’t know now if any man will ever want to marry me. Two years ago I could have married anybody I wanted, down at Cannes. All the old ones that wanted to marry somebody chic and settle down were crazy about me. Now I don’t think I could get anybody.”

“Sure, you could marry anybody.”

“No, I don’t believe it. And I’m fond of him, too. And I’d like to have children. I always thought we’d have children.”

She looked at me very brightly. “I never liked children much, but I don’t want to think I’ll never have them. I always thought I’d have them and then like them.”

“He’s got children.”

“Oh, yes. He’s got children, and he’s got money, and he’s got a rich mother, and he’s written a book, and nobody will publish my stuff; nobody at all. It isn’t bad, either. And I haven’t got any money at all. I could have had alimony, but I got the divorce the quickest way.”

She looked at me again very brightly.

“It isn’t right. It’s my own fault and it’s not, too. I ought to have known better. And when I tell him he just cries and says he can’t marry. Why can’t he marry? I’d be a good wife. I’m easy to get along with. I leave him alone. It doesn’t do any good.”

“It’s a rotten shame.”

“Yes, it is a rotten shame. But there’s no use talking about it, is there? Come on, let’s go back to the café.”

“And of course there isn’t anything I can do.”

“No. Just don’t let him know I talked to you. I know what he wants.” Now for the first time she dropped her bright, terribly cheerful manner. “He wants to go back to New York alone, and be there when his book comes out so when a lot of little chickens like it. That’s what he wants.”

“Maybe they won’t like it. I don’t think he’s that way. Really.”

“You don’t know him like I do, Jake. That’s what he wants to do. I know it. I know it. That’s why he doesn’t want to marry. He wants to have a big triumph this fall all by himself.”

“Want to go back to the café?”

“Yes. Come on.”

We got up from the table — they had never brought us a drink — and started across the street toward the Select, where Cohn sat smiling at us from behind the marble-topped table.

“Well, what are you smiling at?” Frances asked him. “Feel pretty happy?”

“I was smiling at you and Jake with your secrets.”

“Oh, what I’ve told Jake isn’t any secret. Everybody will know it soon enough. I only wanted to give Jake a decent version.”

“What was it? About your going to England?”

“Yes, about my going to England. Oh, Jake! I forgot to tell you. I’m going to England.”

“Isn’t that fine!”

“Yes, that’s the way it’s done in the very best families. Robert’s sending me. He’s going to give me two hundred pounds and then I’m going to visit friends. Won’t it be lovely? The friends don’t know about it, yet.”

She turned to Cohn and smiled at him. He was not smiling now.

“You were only going to give me a hundred pounds, weren’t you, Robert? But I made him give me two hundred. He’s really very generous. Aren’t you, Robert?”

I do not know how people could say such terrible things to Robert Cohn. There are people to whom you could not say insulting things. They give you a feeling that the world would be destroyed, would actually be destroyed before your eyes, if you said certain things. But here was Cohn taking it all. Here it was, all going on right before me, and I did not even feel an impulse to try and stop it. And this was friendly joking to what went on later.

“How can you say such things, Frances?” Cohn interrupted.

“Listen to him. I’m going to England. I’m going to visit friends. Ever visit friends that didn’t want you? Oh, they’ll have to take me, all right. ‘How do you do, my dear? Such a long time since we’ve seen you. And how is your dear mother?’ Yes, how is my dear mother? She put all her money into French war bonds. Yes, she did. Probably the only person in the world that did. ‘And what about Robert?’ or else very careful talking around Robert. ‘You must be most careful not to mention him, my dear. Poor Frances has had a most unfortunate experience.’ Won’t it be fun, Robert? Don’t you think it will be fun, Jake?”

She turned to me with that terribly bright smile. It was very satisfactory to her to have an audience for this.

“And where are you going to be, Robert? It’s my own fault, all right. Perfectly my own fault. When I made you get rid of your little secretary on the magazine I ought to have known you’d get rid of me the same way. Jake doesn’t know about that. Should I tell him?”

“Shut up, Frances, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him. Robert had a little secretary on the magazine. Just the sweetest little thing in the world, and he thought she was wonderful, and then I came along and he thought I was pretty wonderful, too. So I made him get rid of her, and he had brought her to Provincetown from Carmel when he moved the magazine, and he didn’t even pay her fare back to the coast. All to please me. He thought I was pretty fine, then. Didn’t you, Robert?

“You mustn’t misunderstand, Jake, it was absolutely platonic with the secretary. Not even platonic. Nothing at all, really. It was just that she was so nice. And he did that just to please me. Well, I suppose that we that live by the sword shall perish by the sword. Isn’t that literary, though? You want to remember that for your next book, Robert.

“You know Robert is going to get material for a new book. Aren’t you, Robert? That’s why he’s leaving me. He’s decided I don’t film well. You see, he was so busy all the time that we were living together, writing on this book, that he doesn’t remember anything about us. So now he’s going out and get some new material. Well, I hope he gets something frightfully interesting.

“Listen, Robert, dear. Let me tell you something. You won’t mind, will you? Don’t have scenes with your young ladies. Try not to. Because you can’t have scenes without crying, and then you pity yourself so much you can’t remember what the other person’s said. You’ll never be able to remember any conversations that way. Just try and be calm. I know it’s awfully hard. But remember, it’s for literature. We all ought to make sacrifices for literature. Look at me. I’m going to England without a protest. All for literature. We must all help young writers. Don’t you think so, Jake? But you’re not a young writer. Are you, Robert? You’re thirty-four. Still, I suppose that is young for a great writer. Look at Hardy. Look at Anatole France. He just died a little while ago. Robert doesn’t think he’s any good, though. Some of his French friends told him. He doesn’t read French very well himself. He wasn’t a good writer like you are, was he, Robert? Do you think he ever had to go and look for material? What do you suppose he said to his mistresses when he wouldn’t marry them? I wonder if he cried, too? Oh, I’ve just thought of something.” She put her gloved hand up to her lips. “I know the real reason why Robert won’t marry me, Jake. It’s just come to me. They’ve sent it to me in a vision in the Café Select. Isn’t it mystic? Some day they’ll put a tablet up. Like at Lourdes. Do you want to hear, Robert? I’ll tell you. It’s so simple. I wonder why I never thought about it. Why, you see, Robert’s always wanted to have a mistress, and if he doesn’t marry me, why, then he’s had one. She was his mistress for over two years. See how it is? And if he marries me, like he’s always promised he would, that would be the end of all the romance. Don’t you think that’s bright of me to figure that out? It’s true, too. Look at him and see if it’s not. Where are you going, Jake?”

“I’ve got to go in and see Harvey Stone a minute.”

Cohn looked up as I went in. His face was white. Why did he sit there? Why did he keep on taking it like that?

As I stood against the bar looking out I could see them through the window. Frances was talking on to him, smiling brightly, looking into his face each time she asked: “Isn’t it so, Robert?” Or maybe she did not ask that now. Perhaps she said something else. I told the barman I did not want anything to drink and went out through the side door. As I went out the door I looked back through the two thicknesses of glass and saw them sitting there. She was still talking to him. I went down a side street to the Boulevard Raspail. A taxi came along and I got in and gave the driver the address of my flat.

CHAPTER 7

As I started up the stairs the concierge knocked on the glass of the door of her lodge, and as I stopped she came out. She had some letters and a telegram.

“Here is the post. And there was a lady here to see you.”

“Did she leave a card?”

“No. She was with a gentleman. It was the one who was here last night. In the end I find she is very nice.”

“Was she with a friend of mine?”

“I don’t know. He was never here before. He was very large. Very, very large. She was very nice. Very, very nice. Last night she was, perhaps, a little—” She put her head on one hand and rocked it up and down. “I’ll speak perfectly frankly, Monsieur Barnes. Last night I found her not so gentille. Last night I formed another idea of her. But listen to what I tell you. She is très, très gentille. She is of very good family. It is a thing you can see.”

“They did not leave any word?”

“Yes. They said they would be back in an hour.”

“Send them up when they come.”

“Yes, Monsieur Barnes. And that lady, that lady there is some one. An eccentric, perhaps, but quelqu’une, quelqu’une!”

The concierge, before she became a concierge, had owned a drink-selling concession at the Paris race-courses. Her life-work lay in the pelouse, but she kept an eye on the people of the pesage, and she took great pride in telling me which of my guests were well brought up, which were of good family, who were sportsmen, a French word pronounced with the accent on the men. The only trouble was that people who did not fall into any of those three categories were very liable to be told there was no one home, chez Barnes. One of my friends, an extremely underfed-looking painter, who was obviously to Madame Duzinell neither well brought up, of good family, nor a sportsman, wrote me a letter asking if I could get him a pass to get by the concierge so he could come up and see me occasionally in the evenings.

I went up to the flat wondering what Brett had done to the concierge. The wire was a cable from Bill Gorton, saying he was arriving on the France. I put the mail on the table, went back to the bedroom, undressed and had a shower. I was rubbing down when I heard the door-bell pull. I put on a bathrobe and slippers and went to the door. It was Brett. Back of her was the count. He was holding a great bunch of roses.

“Hello, darling,” said Brett. “Aren’t you going to let us in?”

“Come on. I was just bathing.”

“Aren’t you the fortunate man. Bathing.”

“Only a shower. Sit down, Count Mippipopolous. What will you drink?”

“I don’t know whether you like flowers, sir,” the count said, “but I took the liberty of just bringing these roses.”

“Here, give them to me.” Brett took them. “Get me some water in this, Jake.” I filled the big earthenware jug with water in the kitchen, and Brett put the roses in it, and placed them in the centre of the dining-room table.

“I say. We have had a day.”

“You don’t remember anything about a date with me at the Crillon?”

“No. Did we have one? I must have been blind.”

“You were quite drunk, my dear,” said the count.

“Wasn’t I, though? And the count’s been a brick, absolutely.”

“You’ve got hell’s own drag with the concierge now.”

“I ought to have. Gave her two hundred francs.”

“Don’t be a damned fool.”

“His,” she said, and nodded at the count.

“I thought we ought to give her a little something for last night. It was very late.”

“He’s wonderful,” Brett said. “He remembers everything that’s happened.”

“So do you, my dear.”

“Fancy,” said Brett. “Who’d want to? I say, Jake, do we get a drink?”

“You get it while I go in and dress. You know where it is.”

“Rather.”

While I dressed I heard Brett put down glasses and then a siphon, and then heard them talking. I dressed slowly, sitting on the bed. I felt tired and pretty rotten. Brett came in the room, a glass in her hand, and sat on the bed.

“What’s the matter, darling? Do you feel rocky?”

She kissed me coolly on the forehead.

“Oh, Brett, I love you so much.”

“Darling,” she said. Then: “Do you want me to send him away?”

“No. He’s nice.”

“I’ll send him away.”

“No, don’t.”

“Yes, I’ll send him away.”

“You can’t just like that.”

“Can’t I, though? You stay here. He’s mad about me, I tell you.”

She was gone out of the room. I lay face down on the bed. I was having a bad time. I heard them talking but I did not listen. Brett came in and sat on the bed.

“Poor old darling.” She stroked my head.

“What did you say to him?” I was lying with my face away from her. I did not want to see her.

“Sent him for champagne. He loves to go for champagne.”

Then later: “Do you feel better, darling? Is the head any better?”

“It’s better.”

“Lie quiet. He’s gone to the other side of town.”

“Couldn’t we live together, Brett? Couldn’t we just live together?”

“I don’t think so. I’d just tromper you with everybody. You couldn’t stand it.”

“I stand it now.”

“That would be different. It’s my fault, Jake. It’s the way I’m made.”

“Couldn’t we go off in the country for a while?”

“It wouldn’t be any good. I’ll go if you like. But I couldn’t live quietly in the country. Not with my own true love.”

“I know.”

“Isn’t it rotten? There isn’t any use my telling you I love you.”

“You know I love you.”

“Let’s not talk. Talking’s all bilge. I’m going away from you, and then Michael’s coming back.”

“Why are you going away?”

“Better for you. Better for me.”

“When are you going?”

“Soon as I can.”

“Where?”

“San Sebastian.”

“Can’t we go together?”

“No. That would be a hell of an idea after we’d just talked it out.”

“We never agreed.”

“Oh, you know as well as I do. Don’t be obstinate, darling.”

“Oh, sure,” I said. “I know you’re right. I’m just low, and when I’m low I talk like a fool.”

I sat up, leaned over, found my shoes beside the bed and put them on. I stood up.

“Don’t look like that, darling.”

“How do you want me to look?”

“Oh, don’t be a fool. I’m going away to-morrow.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes. Didn’t I say so? I am.”

“Let’s have a drink, then. The count will be back.”

“Yes. He should be back. You know he’s extraordinary about buying champagne. It means any amount to him.”

We went into the dining-room. I took up the brandy bottle and poured Brett a drink and one for myself. There was a ring at the bell-pull. I went to the door and there was the count. Behind him was the chauffeur carrying a basket of champagne.

“Where should I have him put it, sir?” asked the count.

“In the kitchen,” Brett said.

“Put it in there, Henry,” the count motioned. “Now go down and get the ice.” He stood looking after the basket inside the kitchen door. “I think you’ll find that’s very good wine,” he said. “I know we don’t get much of a chance to judge good wine in the States now, but I got this from a friend of mine that’s in the business.”

“Oh, you always have some one in the trade,” Brett said.

“This fellow raises the grapes. He’s got thousands of acres of them.”

“What’s his name?” asked Brett. “Veuve Cliquot?”

“No,” said the count. “Mumms. He’s a baron.”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” said Brett. “We all have titles. Why haven’t you a title, Jake?”

“I assure you, sir,” the count put his hand on my arm. “It never does a man any good. Most of the time it costs you money.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s damned useful sometimes,” Brett said.

“I’ve never known it to do me any good.”

“You haven’t used it properly. I’ve had hell’s own amount of credit on mine.”

“Do sit down, count,” I said. “Let me take that stick.”

The count was looking at Brett across the table under the gas-light. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes on the rug. She saw me notice it. “I say, Jake, I don’t want to ruin your rugs. Can’t you give a chap an ash-tray?”

I found some ash-trays and spread them around. The chauffeur came up with a bucket full of salted ice. “Put two bottles in it, Henry,” the count called.

“Anything else, sir?”

“No. Wait down in the car.” He turned to Brett and to me. “We’ll want to ride out to the Bois for dinner?”

“If you like,” Brett said. “I couldn’t eat a thing.”

“I always like a good meal,” said the count.

“Should I bring the wine in, sir?” asked the chauffeur.

“Yes. Bring it in, Henry,” said the count. He took out a heavy pigskin cigar-case and offered it to me. “Like to try a real American cigar?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll finish the cigarette.”

He cut off the end of his cigar with a gold cutter he wore on one end of his watch-chain.

“I like a cigar to really draw,” said the count “Half the cigars you smoke don’t draw.”

He lit the cigar, puffed at it, looking across the table at Brett. “And when you’re divorced, Lady Ashley, then you won’t have a title.”

“No. What a pity.”

“No,” said the count. “You don’t need a title. You got class all over you.”

“Thanks. Awfully decent of you.”

“I’m not joking you,” the count blew a cloud of smoke. “You got the most class of anybody I ever seen. You got it. That’s all.”

“Nice of you,” said Brett. “Mummy would be pleased. Couldn’t you write it out, and I’ll send it in a letter to her.”

“I’d tell her, too,” said the count. “I’m not joking you. I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies. That’s what I always say.”

“You’re right,” Brett said. “You’re terribly right. I always joke people and I haven’t a friend in the world. Except Jake here.”

“You don’t joke him.”

“That’s it.”

“Do you, now?” asked the count. “Do you joke him?”

Brett looked at me and wrinkled up the corners of her eyes.

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t joke him.”

“See,” said the count. “You don’t joke him.”

“This is a hell of a dull talk,” Brett said. “How about some of that champagne?”

The count reached down and twirled the bottles in the shiny bucket. “It isn’t cold, yet. You’re always drinking, my dear. Why don’t you just talk?”

“I’ve talked too ruddy much. I’ve talked myself all out to Jake.”

“I should like to hear you really talk, my dear. When you talk to me you never finish your sentences at all.”

“Leave ‘em for you to finish. Let any one finish them as they like.”

“It is a very interesting system,” the count reached down and gave the bottles a twirl. “Still I would like to hear you talk some time.”

“Isn’t he a fool?” Brett asked.

“Now,” the count brought up a bottle. “I think this is cool.”

I brought a towel and he wiped the bottle dry and held it up. “I like to drink champagne from magnums. The wine is better but it would have been too hard to cool.” He held the bottle, looking at it. I put out the glasses.

“I say. You might open it,” Brett suggested.

“Yes, my dear. Now I’ll open it.”

It was amazing champagne.

“I say that is wine,” Brett held up her glass. “We ought to toast something. ‘Here’s to royalty.’”

“This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don’t want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.”

Brett’s glass was empty.

“You ought to write a book on wines, count,” I said.

“Mr. Barnes,” answered the count, “all I want out of wines is to enjoy them.”

“Let’s enjoy a little more of this,” Brett pushed her glass forward. The count poured very carefully. “There, my dear. Now you enjoy that slowly, and then you can get drunk.”

“Drunk? Drunk?”

“My dear, you are charming when you are drunk.”

“Listen to the man.”

“Mr. Barnes,” the count poured my glass full. “She is the only lady I have ever known who was as charming when she was drunk as when she was sober.”

“You haven’t been around much, have you?”

“Yes, my dear. I have been around very much. I have been around a very great deal.”

“Drink your wine,” said Brett. “We’ve all been around. I dare say Jake here has seen as much as you have.”

“My dear, I am sure Mr. Barnes has seen a lot. Don’t think I don’t think so, sir. I have seen a lot, too.”

“Of course you have, my dear,” Brett said. “I was only ragging.”

“I have been in seven wars and four revolutions,” the count said.

“Soldiering?” Brett asked.

“Sometimes, my dear. And I have got arrow wounds. Have you ever seen arrow wounds?”

“Let’s have a look at them.”

The count stood up, unbuttoned his vest, and opened his shirt. He pulled up the undershirt onto his chest and stood, his chest black, and big stomach muscles bulging under the light.

“You see them?”

Below the line where his ribs stopped were two raised white welts. “See on the back where they come out.” Above the small of the back were the same two scars, raised as thick as a finger.

“I say. Those are something.”

“Clean through.”

The count was tucking in his shirt.

“Where did you get those?” I asked.

“In Abyssinia. When I was twenty-one years old.”

“What were you doing?” asked Brett. “Were you in the army?”

“I was on a business trip, my dear.”

“I told you he was one of us. Didn’t I?” Brett turned to me. “I love you, count. You’re a darling.”

“You make me very happy, my dear. But it isn’t true.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“You see, Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don’t you find it like that?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“I know,” said the count. “That is the secret. You must get to know the values.”

“Doesn’t anything ever happen to your values?” Brett asked.

“No. Not any more.”

“Never fall in love?”

“Always,” said the count. “I am always in love.”

“What does that do to your values?”

“That, too, has got a place in my values.”

“You haven’t any values. You’re dead, that’s all.”

“No, my dear. You’re not right. I’m not dead at all.”

We drank three bottles of the champagne and the count left the basket in my kitchen. We dined at a restaurant in the Bois. It was a good dinner. Food had an excellent place in the count’s values. So did wine. The count was in fine form during the meal. So was Brett. It was a good party.

“Where would you like to go?” asked the count after dinner. We were the only people left in the restaurant. The two waiters were standing over against the door. They wanted to go home.

“We might go up on the hill,” Brett said. “Haven’t we had a splendid party?”

The count was beaming. He was very happy.

“You are very nice people,” he said. He was smoking a cigar again. “Why don’t you get married, you two?”

“We want to lead our own lives,” I said.

“We have our careers,” Brett said. “Come on. Let’s get out of this.”

“Have another brandy,” the count said.

“Get it on the hill.”

“No. Have it here where it is quiet.”

“You and your quiet,” said Brett. “What is it men feel about quiet?”

“We like it,” said the count. “Like you like noise, my dear.”

“All right,” said Brett. “Let’s have one.”

“Sommelier!” the count called.

“Yes, sir.”

“What is the oldest brandy you have?”

“Eighteen eleven, sir.”

“Bring us a bottle.”

“I say. Don’t be ostentatious. Call him off, Jake.”

“Listen, my dear. I get more value for my money in old brandy than in any other antiquities.”

“Got many antiquities?”

“I got a houseful.”

Finally we went up to Montmartre. Inside Zelli’s it was crowded, smoky, and noisy. The music hit you as you went in. Brett and I danced. It was so crowded we could barely move. The nigger drummer waved at Brett. We were caught in the jam, dancing in one place in front of him.

“Hahre you?”

“Great.”

“Thaats good.”

He was all teeth and lips.

“He’s a great friend of mine,” Brett said. “Damn good drummer.”

The music stopped and we started toward the table where the count sat. Then the music started again and we danced. I looked at the count. He was sitting at the table smoking a cigar. The music stopped again.

“Let’s go over.”

Brett started toward the table. The music started and again we danced, tight in the crowd.

“You are a rotten dancer, Jake. Michael’s the best dancer I know.”

“He’s splendid.”

“He’s got his points.”

“I like him,” I said. “I’m damned fond of him.”

“I’m going to marry him,” Brett said. “Funny. I haven’t thought about him for a week.”

“Don’t you write him?”

“Not I. Never write letters.”

“I’ll bet he writes to you.”

“Rather. Damned good letters, too.”

“When are you going to get married?”

“How do I know? As soon as we can get the divorce. Michael’s trying to get his mother to put up for it.”

“Could I help you?”

“Don’t be an ass. Michael’s people have loads of money.”

The music stopped. We walked over to the table. The count stood up.

“Very nice,” he said. “You looked very, very nice.”

“Don’t you dance, count?” I asked.

“No. I’m too old.”

“Oh, come off it,” Brett said.

“My dear, I would do it if I would enjoy it. I enjoy to watch you dance.”

“Splendid,” Brett said. “I’ll dance again for you some time. I say. What about your little friend, Zizi?”

“Let me tell you. I support that boy, but I don’t want to have him around.”

“He is rather hard.”

“You know I think that boy’s got a future. But personally I don’t want him around.”

“Jake’s rather the same way.”

“He gives me the willys.”

“Well,” the count shrugged his shoulders. “About his future you can’t ever tell. Anyhow, his father was a great friend of my father.”

“Come on. Let’s dance,” Brett said.

We danced. It was crowded and close.

“Oh, darling,” Brett said, “I’m so miserable.”

I had that feeling of going through something that has all happened before. “You were happy a minute ago.”

The drummer shouted: “You can’t two time—”

“It’s all gone.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I just feel terribly.”

“......” the drummer chanted. Then turned to his sticks.

“Want to go?”

I had the feeling as in a nightmare of it all being something repeated, something I had been through and that now I must go through again.

“......” the drummer sang softly.

“Let’s go,” said Brett. “You don’t mind.”

“......” the drummer shouted and grinned at Brett.

“All right,” I said. We got out from the crowd. Brett went to the dressing-room.

“Brett wants to go,” I said to the count. He nodded. “Does she? That’s fine. You take the car. I’m going to stay here for a while, Mr. Barnes.”

We shook hands.

“It was a wonderful time,” I said. “I wish you would let me get this.” I took a note out of my pocket.

“Mr. Barnes, don’t be ridiculous,” the count said.

Brett came over with her wrap on. She kissed the count and put her hand on his shoulder to keep him from standing up. As we went out the door I looked back and there were three girls at his table. We got into the big car. Brett gave the chauffeur the address of her hotel.

“No, don’t come up,” she said at the hotel. She had rung and the door was unlatched.

“Really?”

“No. Please.”

“Good night, Brett,” I said. “I’m sorry you feel rotten.”

“Good night, Jake. Good night, darling. I won’t see you again.” We kissed standing at the door. She pushed me away. We kissed again. “Oh, don’t!” Brett said.

She turned quickly and went into the hotel. The chauffeur drove me around to my flat. I gave him twenty francs and he touched his cap and said: “Good night, sir,” and drove off. I rang the bell. The door opened and I went up-stairs and went to bed.

BOOK II

CHAPTER 8

I did not see Brett again until she came back from San Sebastian. One card came from her from there. It had a picture of the Concha, and said: “Darling. Very quiet and healthy. Love to all the chaps. BRETT.”

Nor did I see Robert Cohn again. I heard Frances had left for England and I had a note from Cohn saying he was going out in the country for a couple of weeks, he did not know where, but that he wanted to hold me to the fishing-trip in Spain we had talked about last winter. I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers.

Brett was gone, I was not bothered by Cohn’s troubles, I rather enjoyed not having to play tennis, there was plenty of work to do, I went often to the races, dined with friends, and put in some extra time at the office getting things ahead so I could leave it in charge of my secretary when Bill Gorton and I should shove off to Spain the end of June. Bill Gorton arrived, put up a couple of days at the flat and went off to Vienna. He was very cheerful and said the States were wonderful. New York was wonderful. There had been a grand theatrical season and a whole crop of great young light heavyweights. Any one of them was a good prospect to grow up, put on weight and trim Dempsey. Bill was very happy. He had made a lot of money on his last book, and was going to make a lot more. We had a good time while he was in Paris, and then he went off to Vienna. He was coming back in three weeks and we would leave for Spain to get in some fishing and go to the fiesta at Pamplona. He wrote that Vienna was wonderful. Then a card from Budapest: “Jake, Budapest is wonderful.” Then I got a wire: “Back on Monday.”

Monday evening he turned up at the flat. I heard his taxi stop and went to the window and called to him; he waved and started up-stairs carrying his bags. I met him on the stairs, and took one of the bags.

“Well,” I said, “I hear you had a wonderful trip.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Budapest is absolutely wonderful.”

“How about Vienna?”

“Not so good, Jake. Not so good. It seemed better than it was.”

“How do you mean?” I was getting glasses and a siphon.

“Tight, Jake. I was tight.”

“That’s strange. Better have a drink.”

Bill rubbed his forehead. “Remarkable thing,” he said. “Don’t know how it happened. Suddenly it happened.”

“Last long?”

“Four days, Jake. Lasted just four days.”

“Where did you go?”

“Don’t remember. Wrote you a post-card. Remember that perfectly.”

“Do anything else?”

“Not so sure. Possible.”

“Go on. Tell me about it.”

“Can’t remember. Tell you anything I could remember.”

“Go on. Take that drink and remember.”

“Might remember a little,” Bill said. “Remember something about a prize-fight. Enormous Vienna prize-fight. Had a nigger in it. Remember the nigger perfectly.”

“Go on.”

“Wonderful nigger. Looked like Tiger Flowers, only four times as big. All of a sudden everybody started to throw things. Not me. Nigger’d just knocked local boy down. Nigger put up his glove. Wanted to make a speech. Awful noble-looking nigger. Started to make a speech. Then local white boy hit him. Then he knocked white boy cold. Then everybody commenced to throw chairs. Nigger went home with us in our car. Couldn’t get his clothes. Wore my coat. Remember the whole thing now. Big sporting evening.”

“What happened?”

“Loaned the nigger some clothes and went around with him to try and get his money. Claimed nigger owed them money on account of wrecking hall. Wonder who translated? Was it me?”

“Probably it wasn’t you.”

“You’re right. Wasn’t me at all. Was another fellow. Think we called him the local Harvard man. Remember him now. Studying music.”

“How’d you come out?”

“Not so good, Jake. Injustice everywhere. Promoter claimed nigger promised let local boy stay. Claimed nigger violated contract. Can’t knock out Vienna boy in Vienna. ‘My God, Mister Gorton,’ said nigger, ‘I didn’t do nothing in there for forty minutes but try and let him stay. That white boy musta ruptured himself swinging at me. I never did hit him.’”

“Did you get any money?”

“No money, Jake. All we could get was nigger’s clothes. Somebody took his watch, too. Splendid nigger. Big mistake to have come to Vienna. Not so good, Jake. Not so good.”

“What became of the nigger?”

“Went back to Cologne. Lives there. Married. Got a family. Going to write me a letter and send me the money I loaned him. Wonderful nigger. Hope I gave him the right address.”

“You probably did.”

“Well, anyway, let’s eat,” said Bill. “Unless you want me to tell you some more travel stories.”

“Go on.”

“Let’s eat.”

We went down-stairs and out onto the Boulevard St. Michel in the warm June evening.

“Where will we go?”

“Want to eat on the island?”

“Sure.”

We walked down the Boulevard. At the juncture of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau with the Boulevard is a statue of two men in flowing robes.

“I know who they are.” Bill eyed the monument. “Gentlemen who invented pharmacy. Don’t try and fool me on Paris.”

We went on.

“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said. “Want to buy anything? Nice stuffed dog?”

“Come on,” I said. “You’re pie-eyed.”

“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said. “Certainly brighten up your flat.”

“Come on.”

“Just one stuffed dog. I can take ‘em or leave ‘em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog.”

“Come on.”

“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.”

“We’ll get one on the way back.”

“All right. Have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault.”

We went on.

“How’d you feel that way about dogs so sudden?”

“Always felt that way about dogs. Always been a great lover of stuffed animals.”

We stopped and had a drink.

“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said. “You ought to try it some times, Jake.”

“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”

“Ought not to daunt you. Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public.”

“Where were you drinking?”

“Stopped at the Crillon. George made me a couple of Jack Roses. George’s a great man. Know the secret of his success? Never been daunted.”

“You’ll be daunted after about three more pernods.”

“Not in public. If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself. I’m like a cat that way.”

“When did you see Harvey Stone?”

“At the Crillon. Harvey was just a little daunted. Hadn’t eaten for three days. Doesn’t eat any more. Just goes off like a cat. Pretty sad.”

“He’s all right.”

“Splendid. Wish he wouldn’t keep going off like a cat, though. Makes me nervous.”

“What’ll we do to-night?”

“Doesn’t make any difference. Only let’s not get daunted. Suppose they got any hard-boiled eggs here? If they had hard-boiled eggs here we wouldn’t have to go all the way down to the island to eat.”

“Nix,” I said. “We’re going to have a regular meal.”

“Just a suggestion,” said Bill. “Want to start now?”

“Come on.”

We started on again down the Boulevard. A horse-cab passed us. Bill looked at it.

“See that horse-cab? Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas. Going to give all my friends stuffed animals. I’m a nature-writer.”

A taxi passed, some one in it waved, then banged for the driver to stop. The taxi backed up to the curb. In it was Brett.

“Beautiful lady,” said Bill. “Going to kidnap us.”

“Hullo!” Brett said. “Hullo!”

“This is Bill Gorton. Lady Ashley.”

Brett smiled at Bill. “I say I’m just back. Haven’t bathed even. Michael comes in to-night.”

“Good. Come on and eat with us, and we’ll all go to meet him.”

“Must clean myself.”

“Oh, rot! Come on.”

“Must bathe. He doesn’t get in till nine.”

“Come and have a drink, then, before you bathe.”

“Might do that. Now you’re not talking rot.”

We got in the taxi. The driver looked around.

“Stop at the nearest bistro,” I said.

“We might as well go to the Closerie,” Brett said. “I can’t drink these rotten brandies.”

“Closerie des Lilas.”

Brett turned to Bill.

“Have you been in this pestilential city long?”

“Just got in to-day from Budapest.”

“How was Budapest?”

“Wonderful. Budapest was wonderful.”

“Ask him about Vienna.”

“Vienna,” said Bill, “is a strange city.”

“Very much like Paris,” Brett smiled at him, wrinkling the corners of her eyes.

“Exactly,” Bill said. “Very much like Paris at this moment.”

“You have a good start.”

Sitting out on the terraces of the Lilas Brett ordered a whiskey and soda, I took one, too, and Bill took another pernod.

“How are you, Jake?”

“Great,” I said. “I’ve had a good time.”

Brett looked at me. “I was a fool to go away,” she said. “One’s an ass to leave Paris.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Oh, all right. Interesting. Not frightfully amusing.”

“See anybody?”

“No, hardly anybody. I never went out.”

“Didn’t you swim?”

“No. Didn’t do a thing.”

“Sounds like Vienna,” Bill said.

Brett wrinkled up the corners of her eyes at him.

“So that’s the way it was in Vienna.”

“It was like everything in Vienna.”

Brett smiled at him again.

“You’ve a nice friend, Jake.”

“He’s all right,” I said. “He’s a taxidermist.”

“That was in another country,” Bill said. “And besides all the animals were dead.”

“One more,” Brett said, “and I must run. Do send the waiter for a taxi.”

“There’s a line of them. Right out in front.”

“Good.”

We had the drink and put Brett into her taxi.

“Mind you’re at the Select around ten. Make him come. Michael will be there.”

“We’ll be there,” Bill said. The taxi started and Brett waved.

“Quite a girl,” Bill said. “She’s damned nice. Who’s Michael?”

“The man she’s going to marry.”

“Well, well,” Bill said. “That’s always just the stage I meet anybody. What’ll I send them? Think they’d like a couple of stuffed race-horses?”

“We better eat.”

“Is she really Lady something or other?” Bill asked in the taxi on our way down to the Ile Saint Louis.

“Oh, yes. In the stud-book and everything.”

“Well, well.”

We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island. It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place. Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table. Bill had eaten at the restaurant in 1918, and right after the armistice, and Madame Lecomte made a great fuss over seeing him.

“Doesn’t get us a table, though,” Bill said. “Grand woman, though.”

We had a good meal, a roast chicken, new green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, and some apple-pie and cheese.

“You’ve got the world here all right,” Bill said to Madame Lecomte. She raised her hand. “Oh, my God!”

“You’ll be rich.”

“I hope so.”

After the coffee and a fine we got the bill, chalked up the same as ever on a slate, that was doubtless one of the “quaint” features, paid it, shook hands, and went out.

“You never come here any more, Monsieur Barnes,” Madame Lecomte said.

“Too many compatriots.”

“Come at lunch-time. It’s not crowded then.”

“Good. I’ll be down soon.”

We walked along under the trees that grew out over the river on the Quai d’Orléans side of the island. Across the river were the broken walls of old houses that were being torn down.

“They’re going to cut a street through.”

“They would,” Bill said.

We walked on and circled the island. The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge. Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky. We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame. Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.

“It’s pretty grand,” Bill said. “God, I love to get back.”

We leaned on the wooden rail of the bridge and looked up the river to the lights of the big bridges. Below the water was smooth and black. It made no sound against the piles of the bridge. A man and a girl passed us. They were walking with their arms around each other.

We crossed the bridge and walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. It was steep walking, and we went all the way up to the Place Contrescarpe. The arc-light shone through the leaves of the trees in the square, and underneath the trees was an S bus ready to start. Music came out of the door of the Negre Joyeux. Through the window of the Café Aux Amateurs I saw the long zinc bar. Outside on the terrace working people were drinking. In the open kitchen of the Amateurs a girl was cooking potato-chips in oil. There was an iron pot of stew. The girl ladled some onto a plate for an old man who stood holding a bottle of red wine in one hand.

“Want to have a drink?”

“No,” said Bill. “I don’t need it.”

We turned to the right off the Place Contrescarpe, walking along smooth narrow streets with high old houses on both sides. Some of the houses jutted out toward the street. Others were cut back. We came onto the Rue du Pot de Fer and followed it along until it brought us to the rigid north and south of the Rue Saint Jacques and then walked south, past Val de Grâce, set back behind the courtyard and the iron fence, to the Boulevard du Port Royal.

“What do you want to do?” I asked. “Go up to the café and see Brett and Mike?”

“Why not?”

We walked along Port Royal until it became Montparnasse, and then on past the Lilas, Lavigne’s, and all the little cafés, Damoy’s, crossed the street to the Rotonde, past its lights and tables to the Select.

Michael came toward us from the tables. He was tanned and healthy-looking.

“Hel-lo, Jake,” he said. “Hel-lo! Hel-lo! How are you, old lad?”

“You look very fit, Mike.”

“Oh, I am. I’m frightfully fit. I’ve done nothing but walk. Walk all day long. One drink a day with my mother at tea.”

Bill had gone into the bar. He was standing talking with Brett, who was sitting on a high stool, her legs crossed. She had no stockings on.

“It’s good to see you, Jake,” Michael said. “I’m a little tight you know. Amazing, isn’t it? Did you see my nose?”

There was a patch of dried blood on the bridge of his nose.

“An old lady’s bags did that,” Mike said. “I reached up to help her with them and they fell on me.”

Brett gestured at him from the bar with her cigarette-holder and wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

“An old lady,” said Mike. “Her bags fell on me. Let’s go in and see Brett. I say, she is a piece. You are a lovely lady, Brett. Where did you get that hat?”

“Chap bought it for me. Don’t you like it?”

“It’s a dreadful hat. Do get a good hat.”

“Oh, we’ve so much money now,” Brett said. “I say, haven’t you met Bill yet? You are a lovely host, Jake.”

She turned to Mike. “This is Bill Gorton. This drunkard is Mike Campbell. Mr. Campbell is an undischarged bankrupt.”

“Aren’t I, though? You know I met my ex-partner yesterday in London. Chap who did me in.”

“What did he say?”

“Bought me a drink. I thought I might as well take it. I say, Brett, you are a lovely piece. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“Beautiful. With this nose?”

“It’s a lovely nose. Go on, point it at me. Isn’t she a lovely piece?”

“Couldn’t we have kept the man in Scotland?”

“I say, Brett, let’s turn in early.”

“Don’t be indecent, Michael. Remember there are ladies at this bar.”

“Isn’t she a lovely piece? Don’t you think so, Jake?”

“There’s a fight to-night,” Bill said. “Like to go?”

“Fight,” said Mike. “Who’s fighting?”

“Ledoux and somebody.”

“He’s very good, Ledoux,” Mike said. “I’d like to see it, rather” — he was making an effort to pull himself together— “but I can’t go. I had a date with this thing here. I say, Brett, do get a new hat.”

Brett pulled the felt hat down far over one eye and smiled out from under it. “You two run along to the fight. I’ll have to be taking Mr. Campbell home directly.”

“I’m not tight,” Mike said. “Perhaps just a little. I say, Brett, you are a lovely piece.”

“Go on to the fight,” Brett said. “Mr. Campbell’s getting difficult. What are these outbursts of affection, Michael?”

“I say, you are a lovely piece.”

We said good night. “I’m sorry I can’t go,” Mike said. Brett laughed. I looked back from the door. Mike had one hand on the bar and was leaning toward Brett, talking. Brett was looking at him quite coolly, but the corners of her eyes were smiling.

Outside on the pavement I said: “Do you want to go to the fight?”

“Sure,” said Bill. “If we don’t have to walk.”

“Mike was pretty excited about his girl friend,” I said in the taxi.

“Well,” said Bill. “You can’t blame him such a hell of a lot.”

CHAPTER 9

The Ledoux-Kid Francis fight was the night of the 20th of June. It was a good fight. The morning after the fight I had a letter from Robert Cohn, written from Hendaye. He was having a very quiet time, he said, bathing, playing some golf and much bridge. Hendaye had a splendid beach, but he was anxious to start on the fishing-trip. When would I be down? If I would buy him a double-tapered line he would pay me when I came down.

That same morning I wrote Cohn from the office that Bill and I would leave Paris on the 25th unless I wired him otherwise, and would meet him at Bayonne, where we could get a bus over the mountains to Pamplona. The same evening about seven o’clock I stopped in at the Select to see Michael and Brett. They were not there, and I went over to the Dingo. They were inside sitting at the bar.

“Hello, darling.” Brett put out her hand.

“Hello, Jake,” Mike said. “I understand I was tight last night.”

“Weren’t you, though,” Brett said. “Disgraceful business.”

“Look,” said Mike, “when do you go down to Spain? Would you mind if we came down with you?”

“It would be grand.”

“You wouldn’t mind, really? I’ve been at Pamplona, you know. Brett’s mad to go. You’re sure we wouldn’t just be a bloody nuisance?”

“Don’t talk like a fool.”

“I’m a little tight, you know. I wouldn’t ask you like this if I weren’t. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“Oh, shut up, Michael,” Brett said. “How can the man say he’d mind now? I’ll ask him later.”

“But you don’t mind, do you?”

“Don’t ask that again unless you want to make me sore. Bill and I go down on the morning of the 25th.”

“By the way, where is Bill?” Brett asked.

“He’s out at Chantilly dining with some people.”

“He’s a good chap.”

“Splendid chap,” said Mike. “He is, you know.”

“You don’t remember him,” Brett said.

“I do. Remember him perfectly. Look, Jake, we’ll come down the night of the 25th. Brett can’t get up in the morning.”

“Indeed not!”

“If our money comes and you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“It will come, all right. I’ll see to that.”

“Tell me what tackle to send for.”

“Get two or three rods with reels, and lines, and some flies.”

“I won’t fish,” Brett put in.

“Get two rods, then, and Bill won’t have to buy one.”

“Right,” said Mike. “I’ll send a wire to the keeper.”

“Won’t it be splendid,” Brett said. “Spain! We will have fun.”

“The 25th. When is that?”

“Saturday.”

“We will have to get ready.”

“I say,” said Mike, “I’m going to the barber’s.”

“I must bathe,” said Brett. “Walk up to the hotel with me, Jake. Be a good chap.”

“We have got the loveliest hotel,” Mike said. “I think it’s a brothel!”

“We left our bags here at the Dingo when we got in, and they asked us at this hotel if we wanted a room for the afternoon only. Seemed frightfully pleased we were going to stay all night.”

“I believe it’s a brothel,” Mike said. “And I should know.”

“Oh, shut it and go and get your hair cut.”

Mike went out. Brett and I sat on at the bar.

“Have another?”

“Might.”

“I needed that,” Brett said.

We walked up the Rue Delambre.

“I haven’t seen you since I’ve been back,” Brett said.

“No.”

“How are you, Jake?”

“Fine.”

Brett looked at me. “I say,” she said, “is Robert Cohn going on this trip?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Don’t you think it will be a bit rough on him?”

“Why should it?”

“Who did you think I went down to San Sebastian with?”

“Congratulations,” I said.

We walked along.

“What did you say that for?”

“I don’t know. What would you like me to say?”

We walked along and turned a corner.

“He behaved rather well, too. He gets a little dull.”

“Does he?”

“I rather thought it would be good for him.”

“You might take up social service.”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“I won’t.”

“Didn’t you really know?”

“No,” I said. “I guess I didn’t think about it.”

“Do you think it will be too rough on him?”

“That’s up to him,” I said. “Tell him you’re coming. He can always not come.”

“I’ll write him and give him a chance to pull out of it.”

I did not see Brett again until the night of the 24th of June.

“Did you hear from Cohn?”

“Rather. He’s keen about it.”

“My God!”

“I thought it was rather odd myself.”

“Says he can’t wait to see me.”

“Does he think you’re coming alone?”

“No. I told him we were all coming down together. Michael and all.”

“He’s wonderful.”

“Isn’t he?”

They expected their money the next day. We arranged to meet at Pamplona. They would go directly to San Sebastian and take the train from there. We would all meet at the Montoya in Pamplona. If they did not turn up on Monday at the latest we would go on ahead up to Burguete in the mountains, to start fishing. There was a bus to Burguete. I wrote out an itinerary so they could follow us.

Bill and I took the morning train from the Gare d’Orsay. It was a lovely day, not too hot, and the country was beautiful from the start. We went back into the diner and had breakfast. Leaving the dining-car I asked the conductor for tickets for the first service.

“Nothing until the fifth.”

“What’s this?”

There were never more than two servings of lunch on that train, and always plenty of places for both of them.

“They’re all reserved,” the dining-car conductor said. “There will be a fifth service at three-thirty.”

“This is serious,” I said to Bill.

“Give him ten francs.”

“Here,” I said. “We want to eat in the first service.”

The conductor put the ten francs in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said. “I would advise you gentlemen to get some sandwiches. All the places for the first four services were reserved at the office of the company.”

“You’ll go a long way, brother,” Bill said to him in English. “I suppose if I’d given you five francs you would have advised us to jump off the train.”

“Comment?”

“Go to hell!” said Bill. “Get the sandwiches made and a bottle of wine. You tell him, Jake.”

“And send it up to the next car.” I described where we were.

In our compartment were a man and his wife and their young son.

“I suppose you’re Americans, aren’t you?” the man asked. “Having a good trip?”

“Wonderful,” said Bill.

“That’s what you want to do. Travel while you’re young. Mother and I always wanted to get over, but we had to wait a while.”

“You could have come over ten years ago, if you’d wanted to,” the wife said. “What you always said was: ‘See America first!’ I will say we’ve seen a good deal, take it one way and another.”

“Say, there’s plenty of Americans on this train,” the husband said. “They’ve got seven cars of them from Dayton, Ohio. They’ve been on a pilgrimage to Rome, and now they’re going down to Biarritz and Lourdes.”

“So, that’s what they are. Pilgrims. Goddam Puritans,” Bill said.

“What part of the States you boys from?”

“Kansas City,” I said. “He’s from Chicago.”

“You both going to Biarritz?”

“No. We’re going fishing in Spain.”

“Well, I never cared for it, myself. There’s plenty that do out where I come from, though. We got some of the best fishing in the State of Montana. I’ve been out with the boys, but I never cared for it any.”

“Mighty little fishing you did on them trips,” his wife said.

He winked at us.

“You know how the ladies are. If there’s a jug goes along, or a case of beer, they think it’s hell and damnation.”

“That’s the way men are,” his wife said to us. She smoothed her comfortable lap. “I voted against prohibition to please him, and because I like a little beer in the house, and then he talks that way. It’s a wonder they ever find any one to marry them.”

“Say,” said Bill, “do you know that gang of Pilgrim Fathers have cornered the dining-car until half past three this afternoon?”

“How do you mean? They can’t do a thing like that.”

“You try and get seats.”

“Well, mother, it looks as though we better go back and get another breakfast.”

She stood up and straightened her dress.

“Will you boys keep an eye on our things? Come on, Hubert.”

They all three went up to the wagon restaurant. A little while after they were gone a steward went through announcing the first service, and pilgrims, with their priests, commenced filing down the corridor. Our friend and his family did not come back. A waiter passed in the corridor with our sandwiches and the bottle of Chablis, and we called him in.

“You’re going to work to-day,” I said.

He nodded his head. “They start now, at ten-thirty.”

“When do we eat?”

“Huh! When do I eat?”

He left two glasses for the bottle, and we paid him for the sandwiches and tipped him.

“I’ll get the plates,” he said, “or bring them with you.”

We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis and watched the country out of the window. The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies. The pastureland was green, and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees.

At Tours we got off and bought another bottle of wine, and when we got back in the compartment the gentleman from Montana and his wife and his son, Hubert, were sitting comfortably.

“Is there good swimming in Biarritz?” asked Hubert.

“That boy’s just crazy till he can get in the water,” his mother said. “It’s pretty hard on youngsters travelling.”

“There’s good swimming,” I said. “But it’s dangerous when it’s rough.”

“Did you get a meal?” Bill asked.

“We sure did. We set right there when they started to come in, and they must have just thought we were in the party. One of the waiters said something to us in French, and then they just sent three of them back.”

“They thought we were snappers, all right,” the man said. “It certainly shows you the power of the Catholic Church. It’s a pity you boys ain’t Catholics. You could get a meal, then, all right.”

“I am,” I said. “That’s what makes me so sore.”

Finally at a quarter past four we had lunch. Bill had been rather difficult at the last. He buttonholed a priest who was coming back with one of the returning streams of pilgrims.

“When do us Protestants get a chance to eat, father?”

“I don’t know anything about it. Haven’t you got tickets?”

“It’s enough to make a man join the Klan,” Bill said. The priest looked back at him.

Inside the dining-car the waiters served the fifth successive table d’hôte meal. The waiter who served us was soaked through. His white jacket was purple under the arms.

“He must drink a lot of wine.”

“Or wear purple undershirts.”

“Let’s ask him.”

“No. He’s too tired.”

The train stopped for half an hour at Bordeaux and we went out through the station for a little walk. There was not time to get in to the town. Afterward we passed through the Landes and watched the sun set. There were wide fire-gaps cut through the pines, and you could look up them like avenues and see wooded hills way off. About seven-thirty we had dinner and watched the country through the open window in the diner. It was all sandy pine country full of heather. There were little clearings with houses in them, and once in a while we passed a sawmill. It got dark and we could feel the country hot and sandy and dark outside of the window, and about nine o’clock we got into Bayonne. The man and his wife and Hubert all shook hands with us. They were going on to LaNegresse to change for Biarritz.

“Well, I hope you have lots of luck,” he said.

“Be careful about those bull-fights.”

“Maybe we’ll see you at Biarritz,” Hubert said.

We got off with our bags and rod-cases and passed through the dark station and out to the lights and the line of cabs and hotel buses. There, standing with the hotel runners, was Robert Cohn. He did not see us at first. Then he started forward.

“Hello, Jake. Have a good trip?”

“Fine,” I said. “This is Bill Gorton.”

“How are you?”

“Come on,” said Robert. “I’ve got a cab.” He was a little near-sighted. I had never noticed it before. He was looking at Bill, trying to make him out. He was shy, too.

“We’ll go up to my hotel. It’s all right. It’s quite nice.”

We got into the cab, and the cabman put the bags up on the seat beside him and climbed up and cracked his whip, and we drove over the dark bridge and into the town.

“I’m awfully glad to meet you,” Robert said to Bill. “I’ve heard so much about you from Jake and I’ve read your books. Did you get my line, Jake?”

The cab stopped in front of the hotel and we all got out and went in. It was a nice hotel, and the people at the desk were very cheerful, and we each had a good small room.

CHAPTER 10

In the morning it was bright, and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café. Bayonne is a nice town. It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river. Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river. We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.

I was not at all sure Mike’s rods would come from Scotland in time, so we hunted a tackle store and finally bought a rod for Bill up-stairs over a drygoods store. The man who sold the tackle was out, and we had to wait for him to come back. Finally he came in, and we bought a pretty good rod cheap, and two landing-nets.

We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what. It seemed like a nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches. Then we went up past the old fort and out to the local Syndicat d’Initiative office, where the bus was supposed to start from. There they told us the bus service did not start until the 1st of July. We found out at the tourist office what we ought to pay for a motor-car to Pamplona and hired one at a big garage just around the corner from the Municipal Theatre for four hundred francs. The car was to pick us up at the hotel in forty minutes, and we stopped at the café on the square where we had eaten breakfast, and had a beer. It was hot, but the town had a cool, fresh, early-morning smell and it was pleasant sitting in the café. A breeze started to blow, and you could feel that the air came from the sea. There were pigeons out in the square, and the houses were a yellow, sun-baked color, and I did not want to leave the café. But we had to go to the hotel to get our bags packed and pay the bill. We paid for the beers, we matched and I think Cohn paid, and went up to the hotel. It was only sixteen francs apiece for Bill and me, with ten per cent added for the service, and we had the bags sent down and waited for Robert Cohn. While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed he must have just come in from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel.

Cohn came down, finally, and we all went out to the car. It was a big, closed car, with a driver in a white duster with blue collar and cuffs, and we had him put the back of the car down. He piled in the bags and we started off up the street and out of the town. We passed some lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun. There were signs on the walls of the churches saying it was forbidden to play pelota against them, and the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn’t see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was.

We crossed the Spanish frontier. There was a little stream and a bridge, and Spanish carabineers, with patent-leather Bonaparte hats, and short guns on their backs, on one side, and on the other fat Frenchmen in kepis and mustaches. They only opened one bag and took the passports in and looked at them. There was a general store and inn on each side of the line. The chauffeur had to go in and fill out some papers about the car and we got out and went over to the stream to see if there were any trout. Bill tried to talk some Spanish to one of the carabineers, but it did not go very well. Robert Cohn asked, pointing with his finger, if there were any trout in the stream, and the carabineer said yes, but not many.

I asked him if he ever fished, and he said no, that he didn’t care for it.

Just then an old man with long, sunburned hair and beard, and clothes that looked as though they were made of gunny-sacking, came striding up to the bridge. He was carrying a long staff, and he had a kid slung on his back, tied by the four legs, the head hanging down.

The carabineer waved him back with his sword. The man turned without saying anything, and started back up the white road into Spain.

“What’s the matter with the old one?” I asked.

“He hasn’t got any passport.”

I offered the guard a cigarette. He took it and thanked me.

“What will he do?” I asked.

The guard spat in the dust.

“Oh, he’ll just wade across the stream.”

“Do you have much smuggling?”

“Oh,” he said, “they go through.”

The chauffeur came out, folding up the papers and putting them in the inside pocket of his coat. We all got in the car and it started up the white dusty road into Spain. For a while the country was much as it had been; then, climbing all the time, we crossed the top of a Col, the road winding back and forth on itself, and then it was really Spain. There were long brown mountains and a few pines and far-off forests of beech-trees on some of the mountainsides. The road went along the summit of the Col and then dropped down, and the driver had to honk, and slow up, and turn out to avoid running into two donkeys that were sleeping in the road. We came down out of the mountains and through an oak forest, and there were white cattle grazing in the forest. Down below there were grassy plains and clear streams, and then we crossed a stream and went through a gloomy little village, and started to climb again. We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes.

After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind. I was up in front with the driver and I turned around. Robert Cohn was asleep, but Bill looked and nodded his head. Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.

We came into the town on the other side of the plateau, the road slanting up steeply and dustily with shade-trees on both sides, and then levelling out through the new part of town they are building up outside the old walls. We passed the bull-ring, high and white and concrete-looking in the sun, and then came into the big square by a side street and stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya.

The driver helped us down with the bags. There was a crowd of kids watching the car, and the square was hot, and the trees were green, and the flags hung on their staffs, and it was good to get out of the sun and under the shade of the arcade that runs all the way around the square. Montoya was glad to see us, and shook hands and gave us good rooms looking out on the square, and then we washed and cleaned up and went down-stairs in the dining-room for lunch. The driver stayed for lunch, too, and afterward we paid him and he started back to Bayonne.

There are two dining-rooms in the Montoya. One is up-stairs on the second floor and looks out on the square. The other is down one floor below the level of the square and has a door that opens on the back street that the bulls pass along when they run through the streets early in the morning on their way to the ring. It is always cool in the down-stairs dining-room and we had a very good lunch. The first meal in Spain was always a shock with the hors d’oeuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, and dessert and fruit. You have to drink plenty of wine to get it all down. Robert Cohn tried to say he did not want any of the second meat course, but we would not interpret for him, and so the waitress brought him something else as a replacement, a plate of cold meats, I think. Cohn had been rather nervous ever since we had met at Bayonne. He did not know whether we knew Brett had been with him at San Sebastian, and it made him rather awkward.

“Well,” I said, “Brett and Mike ought to get in to-night.”

“I’m not sure they’ll come,” Cohn said.

“Why not?” Bill said. “Of course they’ll come.”

“They’re always late,” I said.

“I rather think they’re not coming,” Robert Cohn said.

He said it with an air of superior knowledge that irritated both of us.

“I’ll bet you fifty pesetas they’re here to-night,” Bill said. He always bets when he is angered, and so he usually bets foolishly.

“I’ll take it,” Cohn said. “Good. You remember it, Jake. Fifty pesetas.”

“I’ll remember it myself,” Bill said. I saw he was angry and wanted to smooth him down.

“It’s a sure thing they’ll come,” I said. “But maybe not to-night.”

“Want to call it off?” Cohn asked.

“No. Why should I? Make it a hundred if you like.”

“All right. I’ll take that.”

“That’s enough,” I said. “Or you’ll have to make a book and give me some of it.”

“I’m satisfied,” Cohn said. He smiled. “You’ll probably win it back at bridge, anyway.”

“You haven’t got it yet,” Bill said.

We went out to walk around under the arcade to the Café Iruña for coffee. Cohn said he was going over and get a shave.

“Say,” Bill said to me, “have I got any chance on that bet?”

“You’ve got a rotten chance. They’ve never been on time anywhere. If their money doesn’t come it’s a cinch they won’t get in to-night.”

“I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth. But I had to call him. He’s all right, I guess, but where does he get this inside stuff? Mike and Brett fixed it up with us about coming down here.”

I saw Cohn coming over across the square.

“Here he comes.”

“Well, let him not get superior and Jewish.”

“The barber shop’s closed,” Cohn said. “It’s not open till four.”

We had coffee at the Iruña, sitting in comfortable wicker chairs looking out from the cool of the arcade at the big square. After a while Bill went to write some letters and Cohn went over to the barber-shop. It was still closed, so he decided to go up to the hotel and get a bath, and I sat out in front of the café and then went for a walk in the town. It was very hot, but I kept on the shady side of the streets and went through the market and had a good time seeing the town again. I went to the Ayuntamiento and found the old gentleman who subscribes for the bull-fight tickets for me every year, and he had gotten the money I sent him from Paris and renewed my subscriptions, so that was all set. He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story. Anyway, his office had a green baize door and a big wooden door, and when I went out I left him sitting among the archives that covered all the walls, and I shut both the doors, and as I went out of the building into the street the porter stopped me to brush off my coat.

“You must have been in a motor-car,” he said.

The back of the collar and the upper part of the shoulders were gray with dust.

“From Bayonne.”

“Well, well,” he said. “I knew you were in a motor-car from the way the dust was.” So I gave him two copper coins.

At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the façade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot and hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along side-streets to the hotel.

At dinner that night we found that Robert Cohn had taken a bath, had had a shave and a haircut and a shampoo, and something put on his hair afterward to make it stay down. He was nervous, and I did not try to help him any. The train was due in at nine o’clock from San Sebastian, and, if Brett and Mike were coming, they would be on it. At twenty minutes to nine we were not half through dinner. Robert Cohn got up from the table and said he would go to the station. I said I would go with him, just to devil him. Bill said he would be damned if he would leave his dinner. I said we would be right back.

We walked to the station. I was enjoying Cohn’s nervousness. I hoped Brett would be on the train. At the station the train was late, and we sat on a baggage-truck and waited outside in the dark. I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn — nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.

After a while we heard the train-whistle way off below on the other side of the plateau, and then we saw the headlight coming up the hill. We went inside the station and stood with a crowd of people just back of the gates, and the train came in and stopped, and everybody started coming out through the gates.

They were not in the crowd. We waited till everybody had gone through and out of the station and gotten into buses, or taken cabs, or were walking with their friends or relatives through the dark into the town.

“I knew they wouldn’t come,” Robert said. We were going back to the hotel.

“I thought they might,” I said.

Bill was eating fruit when we came in and finishing a bottle of wine.

“Didn’t come, eh?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I give you that hundred pesetas in the morning, Cohn?” Bill asked. “I haven’t changed any money here yet.”

“Oh, forget about it,” Robert Cohn said. “Let’s bet on something else. Can you bet on bull-fights?”

“You could,” Bill said, “but you don’t need to.”

“It would be like betting on the war,” I said. “You don’t need any economic interest.”

“I’m very curious to see them,” Robert said.

Montoya came up to our table. He had a telegram in his hand. “It’s for you.” He handed it to me.

It read: “Stopped night San Sebastian.”

“It’s from them,” I said. I put it in my pocket. Ordinarily I should have handed it over.

“They’ve stopped over in San Sebastian,” I said. “Send their regards to you.”

Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. I do not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch — that and when he went through all that barbering. So I put the telegram in my pocket. The telegram came to me, anyway.

“Well,” I said. “We ought to pull out on the noon bus for Burguete. They can follow us if they get in to-morrow night.”

There were only two trains up from San Sebastian, an early morning train and the one we had just met.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Cohn said.

“The sooner we get on the stream the better.”

“It’s all one to me when we start,” Bill said. “The sooner the better.”

We sat in the Iruña for a while and had coffee and then took a little walk out to the bull-ring and across the field and under the trees at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the river in the dark, and I turned in early. Bill and Cohn stayed out in the café quite late, I believe, because I was asleep when they came in.

In the morning I bought three tickets for the bus to Burguete. It was scheduled to leave at two o’clock. There was nothing earlier. I was sitting over at the Iruña reading the papers when I saw Robert Cohn coming across the square. He came up to the table and sat down in one of the wicker chairs.

“This is a comfortable café,” he said. “Did you have a good night, Jake?”

“I slept like a log.”

“I didn’t sleep very well. Bill and I were out late, too.”

“Where were you?”

“Here. And after it shut we went over to that other café. The old man there speaks German and English.”

“The Café Suizo.”

“That’s it. He seems like a nice old fellow. I think it’s a better café than this one.”

“It’s not so good in the daytime,” I said. “Too hot. By the way, I got the bus tickets.”

“I’m not going up to-day. You and Bill go on ahead.”

“I’ve got your ticket.”

“Give it to me. I’ll get the money back.”

“It’s five pesetas.”

Robert Cohn took out a silver five-peseta piece and gave it to me.

“I ought to stay,” he said. “You see I’m afraid there’s some sort of misunderstanding.”

“Why,” I said. “They may not come here for three or four days now if they start on parties at San Sebastian.”

“That’s just it,” said Robert. “I’m afraid they expected to meet me at San Sebastian, and that’s why they stopped over.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, I wrote suggesting it to Brett.”

“Why in hell didn’t you stay there and meet them then?” I started to say, but I stopped. I thought that idea would come to him by itself, but I do not believe it ever did.

He was being confidential now and it was giving him pleasure to be able to talk with the understanding that I knew there was something between him and Brett.

“Well, Bill and I will go up right after lunch,” I said.

“I wish I could go. We’ve been looking forward to this fishing all winter.” He was being sentimental about it. “But I ought to stay. I really ought. As soon as they come I’ll bring them right up.”

“Let’s find Bill.”

“I want to go over to the barber-shop.”

“See you at lunch.”

I found Bill up in his room. He was shaving.

“Oh, yes, he told me all about it last night,” Bill said. “He’s a great little confider. He said he had a date with Brett at San Sebastian.”

“The lying bastard!”

“Oh, no,” said Bill. “Don’t get sore. Don’t get sore at this stage of the trip. How did you ever happen to know this fellow, anyway?”

“Don’t rub it in.”

Bill looked around, half-shaved, and then went on talking into the mirror while he lathered his face.

“Didn’t you send him with a letter to me in New York last winter? Thank God, I’m a travelling man. Haven’t you got some more Jewish friends you could bring along?” He rubbed his chin with his thumb, looked at it, and then started scraping again.

“You’ve got some fine ones yourself.”

“Oh, yes. I’ve got some darbs. But not alongside of this Robert Cohn. The funny thing is he’s nice, too. I like him. But he’s just so awful.”

“He can be damn nice.”

“I know it. That’s the terrible part.”

I laughed.

“Yes. Go on and laugh,” said Bill. “You weren’t out with him last night until two o’clock.”

“Was he very bad?”

“Awful. What’s all this about him and Brett, anyway? Did she ever have anything to do with him?”

He raised his chin up and pulled it from side to side.

“Sure. She went down to San Sebastian with him.”

“What a damn-fool thing to do. Why did she do that?”

“She wanted to get out of town and she can’t go anywhere alone. She said she thought it would be good for him.”

“What bloody-fool things people do. Why didn’t she go off with some of her own people? Or you?” — he slurred that over— “or me? Why not me?” He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone. “It’s an honest face. It’s a face any woman would be safe with.”

“She’d never seen it.”

“She should have. All women should see it. It’s a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face. My son” — he pointed the razor at me— “go west with this face and grow up with the country.”

He ducked down to the bowl, rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked at himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.

“My God!” he said, “isn’t it an awful face?”

He looked in the glass.

“And as for this Robert Cohn,” Bill said, “he makes me sick, and he can go to hell, and I’m damn glad he’s staying here so we won’t have him fishing with us.”

“You’re damn right.”

“We’re going trout-fishing. We’re going trout-fishing in the Irati River, and we’re going to get tight now at lunch on the wine of the country, and then take a swell bus ride.”

“Come on. Let’s go over to the Iruña and start,” I said.

CHAPTER 11

It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and I fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top.

Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that I spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.

Finally, after a couple more false klaxons, the bus started, and Robert Cohn waved good-by to us, and all the Basques waved good-by to him. As soon as we started out on the road outside of town it was cool. It felt nice riding high up and close under the trees. The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from the bluff above the river. The Basque lying against my knees pointed out the view with the neck of the wine-bottle, and winked at us. He nodded his head.

“Pretty nice, eh?”

“These Basques are swell people,” Bill said.

The Basque lying against my legs was tanned the color of saddle-leather. He wore a black smock like all the rest. There were wrinkles in his tanned neck. He turned around and offered his wine-bag to Bill. Bill handed him one of our bottles. The Basque wagged a forefinger at him and handed the bottle back, slapping in the cork with the palm of his hand. He shoved the wine-bag up.

“Arriba! Arriba!” he said. “Lift it up.”

Bill raised the wine-skin and let the stream of wine spurt out and into his mouth, his head tipped back. When he stopped drinking and tipped the leather bottle down a few drops ran down his chin.

“No! No!” several Basques said. “Not like that.” One snatched the bottle away from the owner, who was himself about to give a demonstration. He was a young fellow and he held the wine-bottle at full arms’ length and raised it high up, squeezing the leather bag with his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth. He held the bag out there, the wine making a flat, hard trajectory into his mouth, and he kept on swallowing smoothly and regularly.

“Hey!” the owner of the bottle shouted. “Whose wine is that?”

The drinker waggled his little finger at him and smiled at us with his eyes. Then he bit the stream off sharp, made a quick lift with the wine-bag and lowered it down to the owner. He winked at us. The owner shook the wine-skin sadly.

We passed through a town and stopped in front of the posada, and the driver took on several packages. Then we started on again, and outside the town the road commenced to mount. We were going through farming country with rocky hills that sloped down into the fields. The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain. The road was white and dusty, and the dust rose under the wheels and hung in the air behind us. The road climbed up into the hills and left the rich grain-fields below. Now there were only patches of grain on the bare hillsides and on each side of the water-courses. We turned sharply out to the side of the road to give room to pass to a long string of six mules, following one after the other, hauling a high-hooded wagon loaded with freight. The wagon and the mules were covered with dust. Close behind was another string of mules and another wagon. This was loaded with lumber, and the arriero driving the mules leaned back and put on the thick wooden brakes as we passed. Up here the country was quite barren and the hills were rocky and hard-baked clay furrowed by the rain.

We came around a curve into a town, and on both sides opened out a sudden green valley. A stream went through the centre of the town and fields of grapes touched the houses.

The bus stopped in front of a posada and many of the passengers got down, and a lot of the baggage was unstrapped from the roof from under the big tarpaulins and lifted down. Bill and I got down and went into the posada. There was a low, dark room with saddles and harness, and hay-forks made of white wood, and clusters of canvas rope-soled shoes and hams and slabs of bacon and white garlics and long sausages hanging from the roof. It was cool and dusky, and we stood in front of a long wooden counter with two women behind it serving drinks. Behind them were shelves stacked with supplies and goods.

We each had an aguardiente and paid forty centimes for the two drinks. I gave the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the copper piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price.

Two of our Basques came in and insisted on buying a drink. So they bought a drink and then we bought a drink, and then they slapped us on the back and bought another drink. Then we bought, and then we all went out into the sunlight and the heat, and climbed back on top of the bus. There was plenty of room now for every one to sit on the seat, and the Basque who had been lying on the tin roof now sat between us. The woman who had been serving drinks came out wiping her hands on her apron and talked to somebody inside the bus. Then the driver came out swinging two flat leather mail-pouches and climbed up, and everybody waving we started off.

The road left the green valley at once, and we were up in the hills again. Bill and the wine-bottle Basque were having a conversation. A man leaned over from the other side of the seat and asked in English: “You’re Americans?”

“Sure.”

“I been there,” he said. “Forty years ago.”

He was an old man, as brown as the others, with the stubble of a white beard.

“How was it?”

“What you say?”

“How was America?”

“Oh, I was in California. It was fine.”

“Why did you leave?”

“What you say?”

“Why did you come back here?”

“Oh! I come back to get married. I was going to go back but my wife she don’t like to travel. Where you from?”

“Kansas City.”

“I been there,” he said. “I been in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City.”

He named them carefully.

“How long were you over?”

“Fifteen years. Then I come back and got married.”

“Have a drink?”

“All right,” he said. “You can’t get this in America, eh?”

“There’s plenty if you can pay for it.”

“What you come over here for?”

“We’re going to the fiesta at Pamplona.”

“You like the bull-fights?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I like them.”

Then after a little:

“Where you go now?”

“Up to Burguete to fish.”

“Well,” he said, “I hope you catch something.”

He shook hands and turned around to the back seat again. The other Basques had been impressed. He sat back comfortably and smiled at me when I turned around to look at the country. But the effort of talking American seemed to have tired him. He did not say anything after that.

The bus climbed steadily up the road. The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay. There was no grass beside the road. Looking back we could see the country spread out below. Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides. Making the horizon were the brown mountains. They were strangely shaped. As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing. As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains coming up in the south. Then the road came over the crest, flattened out, and went into a forest. It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees. We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it. These were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind. These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them. The green plain stretched off. It was cut by fences and the white of the road showed through the trunks of a double line of trees that crossed the plain toward the north. As we came to the edge of the rise we saw the red roofs and white houses of Burguete ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.

“There’s Roncevaux,” I said.

“Where?”

“Way off there where the mountain starts.”

“It’s cold up here,” Bill said.

“It’s high,” I said. “It must be twelve hundred metres.”

“It’s awful cold,” Bill said.

The bus levelled down onto the straight line of road that ran to Burguete. We passed a crossroads and crossed a bridge over a stream. The houses of Burguete were along both sides of the road. There were no side-streets. We passed the church and the school-yard, and the bus stopped. We got down and the driver handed down our bags and the rod-case. A carabineer in his cocked hat and yellow leather cross-straps came up.

“What’s in there?” he pointed to the rod-case.

I opened it and showed him. He asked to see our fishing permits and I got them out. He looked at the date and then waved us on.

“Is that all right?” I asked.

“Yes. Of course.”

We went up the street, past the whitewashed stone houses, families sitting in their doorways watching us, to the inn.

The fat woman who ran the inn came out from the kitchen and shook hands with us. She took off her spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again. It was cold in the inn and the wind was starting to blow outside. The woman sent a girl up-stairs with us to show the room. There were two beds, a washstand, a clothes-chest, and a big, framed steel-engraving of Nuestra Señora de Roncesvalles. The wind was blowing against the shutters. The room was on the north side of the inn. We washed, put on sweaters, and came down-stairs into the dining-room. It had a stone floor, low ceiling, and was oak-panelled. The shutters were up and it was so cold you could see your breath.

“My God!” said Bill. “It can’t be this cold to-morrow. I’m not going to wade a stream in this weather.”

There was an upright piano in the far corner of the room beyond the wooden tables and Bill went over and started to play.

“I got to keep warm,” he said.

I went out to find the woman and ask her how much the room and board was. She put her hands under her apron and looked away from me.

“Twelve pesetas.”

“Why, we only paid that in Pamplona.”

She did not say anything, just took off her glasses and wiped them on her apron.

“That’s too much,” I said. “We didn’t pay more than that at a big hotel.”

“We’ve put in a bathroom.”

“Haven’t you got anything cheaper?”

“Not in the summer. Now is the big season.”

We were the only people in the inn. Well, I thought, it’s only a few days.

“Is the wine included?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s all right.”

I went back to Bill. He blew his breath at me to show how cold it was, and went on playing. I sat at one of the tables and looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one panel of rabbits, dead, one of pheasants, also dead, and one panel of dead ducks. The panels were all dark and smoky-looking. There was a cupboard full of liqueur bottles. I looked at them all. Bill was still playing. “How about a hot rum punch?” he said. “This isn’t going to keep me warm permanently.”

I went out and told the woman what a rum punch was and how to make it. In a few minutes a girl brought a stone pitcher, steaming, into the room. Bill came over from the piano and we drank the hot punch and listened to the wind.

“There isn’t too much rum in that.”

I went over to the cupboard and brought the rum bottle and poured a half-tumblerful into the pitcher.

“Direct action,” said Bill. “It beats legislation.”

The girl came in and laid the table for supper.

“It blows like hell up here,” Bill said.

The girl brought in a big bowl of hot vegetable soup and the wine. We had fried trout afterward and some sort of a stew and a big bowl full of wild strawberries. We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles.

After supper we went up-stairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.

CHAPTER 12

When I woke in the morning I went to the window and looked out. It had cleared and there were no clouds on the mountains. Outside under the window were some carts and an old diligence, the wood of the roof cracked and split by the weather. It must have been left from the days before the motor-buses. A goat hopped up on one of the carts and then to the roof of the diligence. He jerked his head at the other goats below and when I waved at him he bounded down.

Bill was still sleeping, so I dressed, put on my shoes outside in the hall, and went down-stairs. No one was stirring down-stairs, so I unbolted the door and went out. It was cool outside in the early morning and the sun had not yet dried the dew that had come when the wind died down. I hunted around in the shed behind the inn and found a sort of mattock, and went down toward the stream to try and dig some worms for bait. The stream was clear and shallow but it did not look trouty. On the grassy bank where it was damp I drove the mattock into the earth and loosened a chunk of sod. There were worms underneath. They slid out of sight as I lifted the sod and I dug carefully and got a good many. Digging at the edge of the damp ground I filled two empty tobacco-tins with worms and sifted dirt onto them. The goats watched me dig.

When I went back into the inn the woman was down in the kitchen, and I asked her to get coffee for us, and that we wanted a lunch. Bill was awake and sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I saw you out of the window,” he said. “Didn’t want to interrupt you. What were you doing? Burying your money?”

“You lazy bum!”

“Been working for the common good? Splendid. I want you to do that every morning.”

“Come on,” I said. “Get up.”

“What? Get up? I never get up.”

He climbed into bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin.

“Try and argue me into getting up.”

I went on looking for the tackle and putting it all together in the tackle-bag.

“Aren’t you interested?” Bill asked.

“I’m going down and eat.”

“Eat? Why didn’t you say eat? I thought you just wanted me to get up for fun. Eat? Fine. Now you’re reasonable. You go out and dig some more worms and I’ll be right down.”

“Oh, go to hell!”

“Work for the good of all.” Bill stepped into his underclothes. “Show irony and pity.”

I started out of the room with the tackle-bag, the nets, and the rod-case.

“Hey! come back!”

I put my head in the door.

“Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?”

I thumbed my nose.

“That’s not irony.”

As I went down-stairs I heard Bill singing, “Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling ... Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. Oh, give them Irony. When they’re feeling ... Just a little irony. Just a little pity ...” He kept on singing until he came down-stairs. The tune was: “The Bells are Ringing for Me and my Gal.” I was reading a week-old Spanish paper.

“What’s all this irony and pity?”

“What? Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?”

“No. Who got it up?”

“Everybody. They’re mad about it in New York. It’s just like the Fratellinis used to be.”

The girl came in with the coffee and buttered toast. Or, rather, it was bread toasted and buttered.

“Ask her if she’s got any jam,” Bill said. “Be ironical with her.”

“Have you got any jam?”

“That’s not ironical. I wish I could talk Spanish.”

The coffee was good and we drank it out of big bowls. The girl brought in a glass dish of raspberry jam.

“Thank you.”

“Hey! that’s not the way,” Bill said. “Say something ironical. Make some crack about Primo de Rivera.”

“I could ask her what kind of a jam they think they’ve gotten into in the Riff.”

“Poor,” said Bill. “Very poor. You can’t do it. That’s all. You don’t understand irony. You have no pity. Say something pitiful.”

“Robert Cohn.”

“Not so bad. That’s better. Now why is Cohn pitiful? Be ironic.”

He took a big gulp of coffee.

“Aw, hell!” I said. “It’s too early in the morning.”

“There you go. And you claim you want to be a writer, too. You’re only a newspaper man. An expatriated newspaper man. You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.”

“Go on,” I said. “Who did you get this stuff from?”

“Everybody. Don’t you read? Don’t you ever see anybody? You know what you are? You’re an expatriate. Why don’t you live in New York? Then you’d know these things. What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you every year?”

“Take some more coffee,” I said.

“Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave. You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type. Haven’t you heard that? Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.”

He drank the coffee.

“You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

“It sounds like a swell life,” I said. “When do I work?”

“You don’t work. One group claims women support you. Another group claims you’re impotent.”

“No,” I said. “I just had an accident.”

“Never mention that,” Bill said. “That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.”

He had been going splendidly, but he stopped. I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted to start him again.

“It wasn’t a bicycle,” I said. “He was riding horseback.”

“I heard it was a tricycle.”

“Well,” I said. “A plane is sort of like a tricycle. The joystick works the same way.”

“But you don’t pedal it.”

“No,” I said, “I guess you don’t pedal it.”

“Let’s lay off that,” Bill said.

“All right. I was just standing up for the tricycle.”

“I think he’s a good writer, too,” Bill said. “And you’re a hell of a good guy. Anybody ever tell you you were a good guy?”

“I’m not a good guy.”

“Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin.”

He stopped.

“Want to hear some more?”

“Shoot,” I said.

“I don’t know any more. Tell you some more at lunch.”

“Old Bill,” I said.

“You bum!”

We packed the lunch and two bottles of wine in the rucksack, and Bill put it on. I carried the rod-case and the landing-nets slung over my back. We started up the road and then went across a meadow and found a path that crossed the fields and went toward the woods on the slope of the first hill. We walked across the fields on the sandy path. The fields were rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing. The cattle were up in the hills. We heard their bells in the woods.

The path crossed a stream on a foot-log. The log was surfaced off, and there was a sapling bent across for a rail. In the flat pool beside the stream tadpoles spotted the sand. We went up a steep bank and across the rolling fields. Looking back we saw Burguete, white houses and red roofs, and the white road with a truck going along it and the dust rising.

Beyond the fields we crossed another faster-flowing stream. A sandy road led down to the ford and beyond into the woods. The path crossed the stream on another foot-log below the ford, and joined the road, and we went into the woods.

It was a beech wood and the trees were very old. Their roots bulked above the ground and the branches were twisted. We walked on the road between the thick trunks of the old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches on the grass. The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park.

“This is country,” Bill said.

The road went up a hill and we got into thick woods, and the road kept on climbing. Sometimes it dipped down but rose again steeply. All the time we heard the cattle in the woods. Finally, the road came out on the top of the hills. We were on the top of the height of land that was the highest part of the range of wooded hills we had seen from Burguete. There were wild strawberries growing on the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing in the trees.

Ahead the road came out of the forest and went along the shoulder of the ridge of hills. The hills ahead were not wooded, and there were great fields of yellow gorse. Way off we saw the steep bluffs, dark with trees and jutting with gray stone, that marked the course of the Irati River.

“We have to follow this road along the ridge, cross these hills, go through the woods on the far hills, and come down to the Irati valley,” I pointed out to Bill.

“That’s a hell of a hike.”

“It’s too far to go and fish and come back the same day, comfortably.”

“Comfortably. That’s a nice word. We’ll have to go like hell to get there and back and have any fishing at all.”

It was a long walk and the country was very fine, but we were tired when we came down the steep road that led out of the wooded hills into the valley of the Rio de la Fabrica.

The road came out from the shadow of the woods into the hot sun. Ahead was a river-valley. Beyond the river was a steep hill. There was a field of buckwheat on the hill. We saw a white house under some trees on the hillside. It was very hot and we stopped under some trees beside a dam that crossed the river.

Bill put the pack against one of the trees and we jointed up the rods, put on the reels, tied on leaders, and got ready to fish.

“You’re sure this thing has trout in it?” Bill asked.

“It’s full of them.”

“I’m going to fish a fly. You got any McGintys?”

“There’s some in there.”

“You going to fish bait?”

“Yeah. I’m going to fish the dam here.”

“Well, I’ll take the fly-book, then.” He tied on a fly. “Where’d I better go? Up or down?”

“Down is the best. They’re plenty up above, too.”

Bill went down the bank.

“Take a worm can.”

“No, I don’t want one. If they won’t take a fly I’ll just flick it around.”

Bill was down below watching the stream.

“Say,” he called up against the noise of the dam. “How about putting the wine in that spring up the road?”

“All right,” I shouted. Bill waved his hand and started down the stream. I found the two wine-bottles in the pack, and carried them up the road to where the water of a spring flowed out of an iron pipe. There was a board over the spring and I lifted it and, knocking the corks firmly into the bottles, lowered them down into the water. It was so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed. I put back the slab of wood, and hoped nobody would find the wine.

I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam. It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs. The gate was up, and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls. In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep. As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down. Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down. I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.

I did not feel the first trout strike. When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam. He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.

While I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day, so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of fems, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.

It was very hot on the dam, so I put my worm-can in the shade with the bag, and got a book out of the pack and settled down under the tree to read until Bill should come up for lunch.

It was a little past noon and there was not much shade, but I sat against the trunk of two of the trees that grew together, and read. The book was something by A. E. W. Mason, and I was reading a wonderful story about a man who had been frozen in the Alps and then fallen into a glacier and disappeared, and his bride was going to wait twenty-four years exactly for his body to come out on the moraine, while her true love waited too, and they were still waiting when Bill came up.

“Get any?” he asked. He had his rod and his bag and his net all in one hand, and he was sweating. I hadn’t heard him come up, because of the noise from the dam.

“Six. What did you get?”

Bill sat down, opened up his bag, laid a big trout on the grass. He took out three more, each one a little bigger than the last, and laid them side by side in the shade from the tree. His face was sweaty and happy.

“How are yours?”

“Smaller.”

“Let’s see them.”

“They’re packed.”

“How big are they really?”

“They’re all about the size of your smallest.”

“You’re not holding out on me?”

“I wish I were.”

“Get them all on worms?”

“Yes.”

“You lazy bum!”

Bill put the trout in the bag and started for the river, swinging the open bag. He was wet from the waist down and I knew he must have been wading the stream.

I walked up the road and got out the two bottles of wine. They were cold. Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees. I spread the lunch on a newspaper, and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree. Bill came up drying his hands, his bag plump with ferns.

“Let’s see that bottle,” he said. He pulled the cork, and tipped up the bottle and drank. “Whew! That makes my eyes ache.”

“Let’s try it.”

The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.

“That’s not such filthy wine,” Bill said.

“The cold helps it,” I said.

We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.

“Chicken.”

“There’s hard-boiled eggs.”

“Find any salt?”

“First the egg,” said Bill. “Then the chicken. Even Bryan could see that.”

“He’s dead. I read it in the paper yesterday.”

“No. Not really?”

“Yes. Bryan’s dead.”

Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper. “I reverse the order. For Bryan’s sake. As a tribute to the Great Commoner. First the chicken; then the egg.”

“Wonder what day God created the chicken?”

“Oh,” said Bill, sucking the drumstick, “how should we know? We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.”

“Eat an egg.”

Bill gestured with the drumstick in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.

“Let us rejoice in our blessings. Let us utilize the fowls of the air. Let us utilize the product of the vine. Will you utilize a little, brother?”

“After you, brother.”

Bill took a long drink.

“Utilize a little, brother,” he handed me the bottle. “Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers. Let us accept on faith and simply say — I want you to join with me in saying — What shall we say, brother?” He pointed the drumstick at me and went on. “Let me tell you. We will say, and I for one am proud to say — and I want you to say with me, on your knees, brother. Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors. Remember the woods were God’s first temples. Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that, Lady — that’s Mencken.’”

“Here,” I said. “Utilize a little of this.”

We uncorked the other bottle.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Didn’t you like Bryan?”

“I loved Bryan,” said Bill. “We were like brothers.”

“Where did you know him?”

“He and Mencken and I all went to Holy Cross together.”

“And Frankie Fritsch.”

“It’s a lie. Frankie Fritsch went to Fordham.”

“Well,” I said, “I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning.”

“It’s a lie,” Bill said. “I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning myself.”

“You’re cock-eyed,” I said.

“On wine?”

“Why not?”

“It’s the humidity,” Bill said. “They ought to take this damn humidity away.”

“Have another shot.”

“Is this all we’ve got?”

“Only the two bottles.”

“Do you know what you are?” Bill looked at the bottle affectionately.

“No,” I said.

“You’re in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League.”

“I went to Notre Dame with Wayne B. Wheeler.”

“It’s a lie,” said Bill. “I went to Austin Business College with Wayne B. Wheeler. He was class president.”

“Well,” I said, “the saloon must go.”

“You’re right there, old classmate,” Bill said. “The saloon must go, and I will take it with me.”

“You’re cock-eyed.”

“On wine?”

“On wine.”

“Well, maybe I am.”

“Want to take a nap?”

“All right.”

We lay with our heads in the shade and looked up into the trees.

“You asleep?”

“No,” Bill said. “I was thinking.”

I shut my eyes. It felt good lying on the ground.

“Say,” Bill said, “what about this Brett business?”

“What about it?”

“Were you ever in love with her?”

“Sure.”

“For how long?”

“Off and on for a hell of a long time.”

“Oh, hell!” Bill said. “I’m sorry, fella.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I don’t give a damn any more.”

“Really?”

“Really. Only I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it.”

“You aren’t sore I asked you?”

“Why the hell should I be?”

“I’m going to sleep,” Bill said. He put a newspaper over his face.

“Listen, Jake,” he said, “are you really a Catholic?”

“Technically.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, I’ll go to sleep now,” he said. “Don’t keep me awake by talking so much.”

I went to sleep, too. When I woke up Bill was packing the rucksack. It was late in the afternoon and the shadow from the trees was long and went out over the dam. I was stiff from sleeping on the ground.

“What did you do? Wake up?” Bill asked. “Why didn’t you spend the night?” I stretched and rubbed my eyes.

“I had a lovely dream,” Bill said. “I don’t remember what it was about, but it was a lovely dream.”

“I don’t think I dreamt.”

“You ought to dream,” Bill said. “All our biggest business men have been dreamers. Look at Ford. Look at President Coolidge. Look at Rockefeller. Look at Jo Davidson.”

I disjointed my rod and Bill’s and packed them in the rod-case. I put the reels in the tackle-bag. Bill had packed the rucksack and we put one of the trout-bags in. I carried the other.

“Well,” said Bill, “have we got everything?”

“The worms.”

“Your worms. Put them in there.”

He had the pack on his back and I put the worm-cans in one of the outside flap pockets.

“You got everything now?”

I looked around on the grass at the foot of the elm-trees.

“Yes.”

We started up the road into the woods. It was a long walk home to Burguete, and it was dark when we came down across the fields to the road, and along the road between the houses of the town, their windows lighted, to the inn.

We stayed five days at Burguete and had good fishing. The nights were cold and the days were hot, and there was always a breeze even in the heat of the day. It was hot enough so that it felt good to wade in a cold stream, and the sun dried you when you came out and sat on the bank. We found a stream with a pool deep enough to swim in. In the evenings we played three-handed bridge with an Englishman named Harris, who had walked over from Saint Jean Pied de Port and was stopping at the inn for the fishing. He was very pleasant and went with us twice to the Irati River. There was no word from Robert Cohn nor from Brett and Mike.

CHAPTER 13

One morning I went down to breakfast and the Englishman, Harris, was already at the table. He was reading the paper through spectacles. He looked up and smiled.

“Good morning,” he said. “Letter for you. I stopped at the post and they gave it me with mine.”

The letter was at my place at the table, leaning against a coffee-cup. Harris was reading the paper again. I opened the letter. It had been forwarded from Pamplona. It was dated San Sebastian, Sunday:

DEAR JAKE,

We got here Friday, Brett passed out on the train, so brought her here for 3 days rest with old friends of ours. We go to Montoya Hotel Pamplona Tuesday, arriving at I don’t know what hour. Will you send a note by the bus to tell us what to do to rejoin you all on Wednesday. All our love and sorry to be late, but Brett was really done in and will be quite all right by Tues. and is practically so now. I know her so well and try to look after her but it’s not so easy. Love to all the chaps,

MICHAEL.

“What day of the week is it?” I asked Harris.

“Wednesday, I think. Yes, quite. Wednesday. Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.”

“Yes. We’ve been here nearly a week.”

“I hope you’re not thinking of leaving?”

“Yes. We’ll go in on the afternoon bus, I’m afraid.”

“What a rotten business. I had hoped we’d all have another go at the Irati together.”

“We have to go into Pamplona. We’re meeting people there.”

“What rotten luck for me. We’ve had a jolly time here at Burguete.”

“Come on in to Pamplona. We can play some bridge there, and there’s going to be a damned fine fiesta.”

“I’d like to. Awfully nice of you to ask me. I’d best stop on here, though. I’ve not much more time to fish.”

“You want those big ones in the Irati.”

“I say, I do, you know. They’re enormous trout there.”

“I’d like to try them once more.”

“Do. Stop over another day. Be a good chap.”

“We really have to get into town,” I said.

“What a pity.”

After breakfast Bill and I were sitting warming in the sun on a bench out in front of the inn and talking it over. I saw a girl coming up the road from the centre of the town. She stopped in front of us and took a telegram out of the leather wallet that hung against her skirt.

“Por ustedes?”

I looked at it. The address was: “Barnes, Burguete.”

“Yes. It’s for us.”

She brought out a book for me to sign, and I gave her a couple of coppers. The telegram was in Spanish: “Vengo Jueves Cohn.”

I handed it to Bill.

“What does the word Cohn mean?” he asked.

“What a lousy telegram!” I said. “He could send ten words for the same price. ‘I come Thursday.’ That gives you a lot of dope, doesn’t it?”

“It gives you all the dope that’s of interest to Cohn.”

“We’re going in, anyway,” I said. “There’s no use trying to move Brett and Mike out here and back before the fiesta. Should we answer it?”

“We might as well,” said Bill. “There’s no need for us to be snooty.”

We walked up to the post-office and asked for a telegraph blank.

“What will we say?” Bill asked.

“‘Arriving to-night.’ That’s enough.”

We paid for the message and walked back to the inn. Harris was there and the three of us walked up to Roncesvalles. We went through the monastery.

“It’s a remarkable place,” Harris said, when we came out. “But you know I’m not much on those sort of places.”

“Me either,” Bill said.

“It’s a remarkable place, though,” Harris said. “I wouldn’t not have seen it. I’d been intending coming up each day.”

“It isn’t the same as fishing, though, is it?” Bill asked. He liked Harris.

“I say not.”

We were standing in front of the old chapel of the monastery.

“Isn’t that a pub across the way?” Harris asked. “Or do my eyes deceive me?”

“It has the look of a pub,” Bill said.

“It looks to me like a pub,” I said.

“I say,” said Harris, “let’s utilize it.” He had taken up utilizing from Bill.

We had a bottle of wine apiece. Harris would not let us pay. He talked Spanish quite well, and the innkeeper would not take our money.

“I say. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to have you chaps up here.”

“We’ve had a grand time, Harris.”

Harris was a little tight.

“I say. Really you don’t know how much it means. I’ve not had much fun since the war.”

“We’ll fish together again, some time. Don’t you forget it, Harris.”

“We must. We have had such a jolly good time.”

“How about another bottle around?”

“Jolly good idea,” said Harris.

“This is mine,” said Bill. “Or we don’t drink it.”

“I wish you’d let me pay for it. It does give me pleasure, you know.”

“This is going to give me pleasure,” Bill said.

The innkeeper brought in the fourth bottle. We had kept the same glasses. Harris lifted his glass.

“I say. You know this does utilize well.”

Bill slapped him on the back.

“Good old Harris.”

“I say. You know my name isn’t really Harris. It’s Wilson-Harris. All one name. With a hyphen, you know.”

“Good old Wilson-Harris,” Bill said. “We call you Harris because we’re so fond of you.”

“I say, Barnes. You don’t know what this all means to me.”

“Come on and utilize another glass,” I said.

“Barnes. Really, Barnes, you can’t know. That’s all.”

“Drink up, Harris.”

We walked back down the road from Roncesvalles with Harris between us. We had lunch at the inn and Harris went with us to the bus. He gave us his card, with his address in London and his club and his business address, and as we got on the bus he handed us each an envelope. I opened mine and there were a dozen flies in it. Harris had tied them himself. He tied all his own flies.

“I say, Harris—” I began.

“No, no!” he said. He was climbing down from the bus. “They’re not first-rate flies at all. I only thought if you fished them some time it might remind you of what a good time we had.”

The bus started. Harris stood in front of the post-office. He waved. As we started along the road he turned and walked back toward the inn.

“Say, wasn’t that Harris nice?” Bill said.

“I think he really did have a good time.”

“Harris? You bet he did.”

“I wish he’d come into Pamplona.”

“He wanted to fish.”

“Yes. You couldn’t tell how English would mix with each other, anyway.”

“I suppose not.”

We got into Pamplona late in the afternoon and the bus stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya. Out in the plaza they were stringing electric-light wires to light the plaza for the fiesta. A few kids came up when the bus stopped, and a customs officer for the town made all the people getting down from the bus open their bundles on the sidewalk. We went into the hotel and on the stairs I met Montoya. He shook hands with us, smiling in his embarrassed way.

“Your friends are here,” he said.

“Mr. Campbell?”

“Yes. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Campbell and Lady Ashley.”

He smiled as though there were something I would hear about.

“When did they get in?”

“Yesterday. I’ve saved you the rooms you had.”

“That’s fine. Did you give Mr. Campbell the room on the plaza?”

“Yes. All the rooms we looked at.”

“Where are our friends now?”

“I think they went to the pelota.”

“And how about the bulls?”

Montoya smiled. “To-night,” he said. “To-night at seven o’clock they bring in the Villar bulls, and to-morrow come the Miuras. Do you all go down?”

“Oh, yes. They’ve never seen a desencajonada.”

Montoya put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll see you there.”

He smiled again. He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about. He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood. It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand.

“Your friend, is he aficionado, too?” Montoya smiled at Bill.

“Yes. He came all the way from New York to see the San Fermines.”

“Yes?” Montoya politely disbelieved. “But he’s not aficionado like you.”

He put his hand on my shoulder again embarrassedly.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s a real aficionado.”

“But he’s not aficionado like you are.”

Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister. The photographs of bull-fighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bull-fighters who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.

We often talked about bulls and bull-fighters. I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a “Buen hombre.” But nearly always there was the actual touching. It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.

Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me all my friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bull-fighting.

Bill had gone up-stairs as we came in, and I found him washing and changing in his room.

“Well,” he said, “talk a lot of Spanish?”

“He was telling me about the bulls coming in to-night.”

“Let’s find the gang and go down.”

“All right. They’ll probably be at the café.”

“Have you got tickets?”

“Yes. I got them for all the unloadings.”

“What’s it like?” He was pulling his cheek before the glass, looking to see if there were unshaved patches under the line of the jaw.

“It’s pretty good,” I said. “They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have steers in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in at the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down.”

“Do they ever gore the steers?”

“Sure. Sometimes they go right after them and kill them.”

“Can’t the steers do anything?”

“No. They’re trying to make friends.”

“What do they have them in for?”

“To quiet down the bulls and keep them from breaking horns against the stone walls, or goring each other.”

“Must be swell being a steer.”

We went down the stairs and out of the door and walked across the square toward the Café Iruña. There were two lonely looking ticket-houses standing in the square. Their windows, marked SOL, SOL Y SOMBRA, and SOMBRA, were shut. They would not open until the day before the fiesta.

Across the square the white wicker tables and chairs of the Iruña extended out beyond the Arcade to the edge of the street. I looked for Brett and Mike at the tables. There they were. Brett and Mike and Robert Cohn. Brett was wearing a Basque beret. So was Mike. Robert Cohn was bare-headed and wearing his spectacles. Brett saw us coming and waved. Her eyes crinkled up as we came up to the table.

“Hello, you chaps!” she called.

Brett was happy. Mike had a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands. Robert Cohn shook hands because we were back.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked.

“I brought them up here,” Cohn said.

“What rot,” Brett said. “We’d have gotten here earlier if you hadn’t come.”

“You’d never have gotten here.”

“What rot! You chaps are brown. Look at Bill.”

“Did you get good fishing?” Mike asked. “We wanted to join you.”

“It wasn’t bad. We missed you.”

“I wanted to come,” Cohn said, “but I thought I ought to bring them.”

“You bring us. What rot.”

“Was it really good?” Mike asked. “Did you take many?”

“Some days we took a dozen apiece. There was an Englishman up there.”

“Named Harris,” Bill said. “Ever know him, Mike? He was in the war, too.”

“Fortunate fellow,” Mike said. “What times we had. How I wish those dear days were back.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Were you in the war, Mike?” Cohn asked.

“Was I not.”

“He was a very distinguished soldier,” Brett said. “Tell them about the time your horse bolted down Piccadilly.”

“I’ll not. I’ve told that four times.”

“You never told me,” Robert Cohn said.

“I’ll not tell that story. It reflects discredit on me.”

“Tell them about your medals.”

“I’ll not. That story reflects great discredit on me.”

“What story’s that?”

“Brett will tell you. She tells all the stories that reflect discredit on me.”

“Go on. Tell it, Brett.”

“Should I?”

“I’ll tell it myself.”

“What medals have you got, Mike?”

“I haven’t got any medals.”

“You must have some.”

“I suppose I’ve the usual medals. But I never sent in for them. One time there was this wopping big dinner and the Prince of Wales was to be there, and the cards said medals will be worn. So naturally I had no medals, and I stopped at my tailor’s and he was impressed by the invitation, and I thought that’s a good piece of business, and I said to him: ‘You’ve got to fix me up with some medals.’ He said: ‘What medals, sir?’ And I said: ‘Oh, any medals. Just give me a few medals.’ So he said: ‘What medals have you, sir?’ And I said: ‘How should I know?’ Did he think I spent all my time reading the bloody gazette? ‘Just give me a good lot. Pick them out yourself.’ So he got me some medals, you know, miniature medals, and handed me the box, and I put it in my pocket and forgot it. Well, I went to the dinner, and it was the night they’d shot Henry Wilson, so the Prince didn’t come and the King didn’t come, and no one wore any medals, and all these coves were busy taking off their medals, and I had mine in my pocket.”

He stopped for us to laugh.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. Perhaps I didn’t tell it right.”

“You didn’t,” said Brett. “But no matter.”

We were all laughing.

“Ah, yes,” said Mike. “I know now. It was a damn dull dinner, and I couldn’t stick it, so I left. Later on in the evening I found the box in my pocket. What’s this? I said. Medals? Bloody military medals? So I cut them all off their backing — you know, they put them on a strip — and gave them all around. Gave one to each girl. Form of souvenir. They thought I was hell’s own shakes of a soldier. Give away medals in a night club. Dashing fellow.”

“Tell the rest,” Brett said.

“Don’t you think that was funny?” Mike asked. We were all laughing. “It was. I swear it was. Any rate, my tailor wrote me and wanted the medals back. Sent a man around. Kept on writing for months. Seems some chap had left them to be cleaned. Frightfully military cove. Set hell’s own store by them.” Mike paused. “Rotten luck for the tailor,” he said.

“You don’t mean it,” Bill said. “I should think it would have been grand for the tailor.”

“Frightfully good tailor. Never believe it to see me now,” Mike said. “I used to pay him a hundred pounds a year just to keep him quiet. So he wouldn’t send me any bills. Frightful blow to him when I went bankrupt. It was right after the medals. Gave his letters rather a bitter tone.”

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

“What brought it on?”

“Friends,” said Mike. “I had a lot of friends. False friends. Then I had creditors, too. Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

“Tell them about in the court,” Brett said.

“I don’t remember,” Mike said. “I was just a little tight.”

“Tight!” Brett exclaimed. “You were blind!”

“Extraordinary thing,” Mike said. “Met my former partner the other day. Offered to buy me a drink.”

“Tell them about your learned counsel,” Brett said.

“I will not,” Mike said. “My learned counsel was blind, too. I say this is a gloomy subject. Are we going down and see these bulls unloaded or not?”

“Let’s go down.”

We called the waiter, paid, and started to walk through the town. I started off walking with Brett, but Robert Cohn came up and joined her on the other side. The three of us walked along, past the Ayuntamiento with the banners hung from the balcony, down past the market and down past the steep street that led to the bridge across the Arga. There were many people walking to go and see the bulls, and carriages drove down the hill and across the bridge, the drivers, the horses, and the whips rising above the walking people in the street. Across the bridge we turned up a road to the corrals. We passed a wine-shop with a sign in the window: Good Wine 30 Centimes A Liter.

“That’s where we’ll go when funds get low,” Brett said.

The woman standing in the door of the wine-shop looked at us as we passed. She called to some one in the house and three girls came to the window and stared. They were staring at Brett.

At the gate of the corrals two men took tickets from the people that went in. We went in through the gate. There were trees inside and a low, stone house. At the far end was the stone wall of the corrals, with apertures in the stone that were like loopholes running all along the face of each corral. A ladder led up to the top of the wall, and people were climbing up the ladder and spreading down to stand on the walls that separated the two corrals. As we came up the ladder, walking across the grass under the trees, we passed the big, gray painted cages with the bulls in them. There was one bull in each travelling-box. They had come by train from a bull-breeding ranch in Castile, and had been unloaded off flat-cars at the station and brought up here to be let out of their cages into the corrals. Each cage was stencilled with the name and the brand of the bull-breeder.

We climbed up and found a place on the wall looking down into the corral. The stone walls were whitewashed, and there was straw on the ground and wooden feed-boxes and water-troughs set against the wall.

“Look up there,” I said.

Beyond the river rose the plateau of the town. All along the old walls and ramparts people were standing. The three lines of fortifications made three black lines of people. Above the walls there were heads in the windows of the houses. At the far end of the plateau boys had climbed into the trees.

“They must think something is going to happen,” Brett said.

“They want to see the bulls.”

Mike and Bill were on the other wall across the pit of the corral. They waved to us. People who had come late were standing behind us, pressing against us when other people crowded them.

“Why don’t they start?” Robert Cohn asked.

A single mule was hitched to one of the cages and dragged it up against the gate in the corral wall. The men shoved and lifted it with crowbars into position against the gate. Men were standing on the wall ready to pull up the gate of the corral and then the gate of the cage. At the other end of the corral a gate opened and two steers came in, swaying their heads and trotting, their lean flanks swinging. They stood together at the far end, their heads toward the gate where the bull would enter.

“They don’t look happy,” Brett said.

The men on top of the wall leaned back and pulled up the door of the corral. Then they pulled up the door of the cage.

I leaned way over the wall and tried to see into the cage. It was dark. Some one rapped on the cage with an iron bar. Inside something seemed to explode. The bull, striking into the wood from side to side with his horns, made a great noise. Then I saw a dark muzzle and the shadow of horns, and then, with a clattering on the wood in the hollow box, the bull charged and came out into the corral, skidding with his forefeet in the straw as he stopped, his head up, the great hump of muscle on his neck swollen tight, his body muscles quivering as he looked up at the crowd on the stone walls. The two steers backed away against the wall, their heads sunken, their eyes watching the bull.

The bull saw them and charged. A man shouted from behind one of the boxes and slapped his hat against the planks, and the bull, before he reached the steer, turned, gathered himself and charged where the man had been, trying to reach him behind the planks with a half-dozen quick, searching drives with the right horn.

“My God, isn’t he beautiful?” Brett said. We were looking right down on him.

“Look how he knows how to use his horns,” I said. “He’s got a left and a right just like a boxer.”

“Not really?”

“You watch.”

“It goes too fast.”

“Wait. There’ll be another one in a minute.”

They had backed up another cage into the entrance. In the far corner a man, from behind one of the plank shelters, attracted the bull, and while the bull was facing away the gate was pulled up and a second bull came out into the corral.

He charged straight for the steers and two men ran out from behind the planks and shouted, to turn him. He did not change his direction and the men shouted: “Hah! Hah! Toro!” and waved their arms; the two steers turned sideways to take the shock, and the bull drove into one of the steers.

“Don’t look,” I said to Brett. She was watching, fascinated.

“Fine,” I said. “If it doesn’t buck you.”

“I saw it,” she said. “I saw him shift from his left to his right horn.”

“Damn good!”

The steer was down now, his neck stretched out, his head twisted, he lay the way he had fallen. Suddenly the bull left off and made for the other steer which had been standing at the far end, his head swinging, watching it all. The steer ran awkwardly and the bull caught him, hooked him lightly in the flank, and then turned away and looked up at the crowd on the walls, his crest of muscle rising. The steer came up to him and made as though to nose at him and the bull hooked perfunctorily. The next time he nosed at the steer and then the two of them trotted over to the other bull.

When the next bull came out, all three, the two bulls and the steer, stood together, their heads side by side, their horns against the newcomer. In a few minutes the steer picked the new bull up, quieted him down, and made him one of the herd. When the last two bulls had been unloaded the herd were all together.

The steer who had been gored had gotten to his feet and stood against the stone wall. None of the bulls came near him, and he did not attempt to join the herd.

We climbed down from the wall with the crowd, and had a last look at the bulls through the loopholes in the wall of the corral. They were all quiet now, their heads down. We got a carriage outside and rode up to the café. Mike and Bill came in half an hour later. They had stopped on the way for several drinks.

We were sitting in the café.

“That’s an extraordinary business,” Brett said.

“Will those last ones fight as well as the first?” Robert Cohn asked. “They seemed to quiet down awfully fast.”

“They all know each other,” I said. “They’re only dangerous when they’re alone, or only two or three of them together.”

“What do you mean, dangerous?” Bill said. “They all looked dangerous to me.”

“They only want to kill when they’re alone. Of course, if you went in there you’d probably detach one of them from the herd, and he’d be dangerous.”

“That’s too complicated,” Bill said. “Don’t you ever detach me from the herd, Mike.”

“I say,” Mike said, “they were fine bulls, weren’t they? Did you see their horns?”

“Did I not,” said Brett. “I had no idea what they were like.”

“Did you see the one hit that steer?” Mike asked. “That was extraordinary.”

“It’s no life being a steer,” Robert Cohn said.

“Don’t you think so?” Mike said. “I would have thought you’d loved being a steer, Robert.”

“What do you mean, Mike?”

“They lead such a quiet life. They never say anything and they’re always hanging about so.”

We were embarrassed. Bill laughed. Robert Cohn was angry. Mike went on talking.

“I should think you’d love it. You’d never have to say a word. Come on, Robert. Do say something. Don’t just sit there.”

“I said something, Mike. Don’t you remember? About the steers.”

“Oh, say something more. Say something funny. Can’t you see we’re all having a good time here?”

“Come off it, Michael. You’re drunk,” Brett said.

“I’m not drunk. I’m quite serious. Is Robert Cohn going to follow Brett around like a steer all the time?”

“Shut up, Michael. Try and show a little breeding.”

“Breeding be damned. Who has any breeding, anyway, except the bulls? Aren’t the bulls lovely? Don’t you like them, Bill? Why don’t you say something, Robert? Don’t sit there looking like a bloody funeral. What if Brett did sleep with you? She’s slept with lots of better people than you.”

“Shut up,” Cohn said. He stood up. “Shut up, Mike.”

“Oh, don’t stand up and act as though you were going to hit me. That won’t make any difference to me. Tell me, Robert. Why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer? Don’t you know you’re not wanted? I know when I’m not wanted. Why don’t you know when you’re not wanted? You came down to San Sebastian where you weren’t wanted, and followed Brett around like a bloody steer. Do you think that’s right?”

“Shut up. You’re drunk.”

“Perhaps I am drunk. Why aren’t you drunk? Why don’t you ever get drunk, Robert? You know you didn’t have a good time at San Sebastian because none of our friends would invite you on any of the parties. You can’t blame them hardly. Can you? I asked them to. They wouldn’t do it. You can’t blame them, now. Can you? Now, answer me. Can you blame them?”

“Go to hell, Mike.”

“I can’t blame them. Can you blame them? Why do you follow Brett around? Haven’t you any manners? How do you think it makes me feel?”

“You’re a splendid one to talk about manners,” Brett said. “You’ve such lovely manners.”

“Come on, Robert,” Bill said.

“What do you follow her around for?”

Bill stood up and took hold of Cohn.

“Don’t go,” Mike said. “Robert Cohn’s going to buy a drink.”

Bill went off with Cohn. Cohn’s face was sallow. Mike went on talking. I sat and listened for a while. Brett looked disgusted.

“I say, Michael, you might not be such a bloody ass,” she interrupted. “I’m not saying he’s not right, you know.” She turned to me.

The emotion left Mike’s voice. We were all friends together.

“I’m not so damn drunk as I sounded,” he said.

“I know you’re not,” Brett said.

“We’re none of us sober,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean.”

“But you put it so badly,” Brett laughed.

“He was an ass, though. He came down to San Sebastian where he damn well wasn’t wanted. He hung around Brett and just looked at her. It made me damned well sick.”

“He did behave very badly,” Brett said.

“Mark you. Brett’s had affairs with men before. She tells me all about everything. She gave me this chap Cohn’s letters to read. I wouldn’t read them.”

“Damned noble of you.”

“No, listen, Jake. Brett’s gone off with men. But they weren’t ever Jews, and they didn’t come and hang about afterward.”

“Damned good chaps,” Brett said. “It’s all rot to talk about it. Michael and I understand each other.”

“She gave me Robert Cohn’s letters. I wouldn’t read them.”

“You wouldn’t read any letters, darling. You wouldn’t read mine.”

“I can’t read letters,” Mike said. “Funny, isn’t it?”

“You can’t read anything.”

“No. You’re wrong there. I read quite a bit. I read when I’m at home.”

“You’ll be writing next,” Brett said. “Come on, Michael. Do buck up. You’ve got to go through with this thing now. He’s here. Don’t spoil the fiesta.”

“Well, let him behave, then.”

“He’ll behave. I’ll tell him.”

“You tell him, Jake. Tell him either he must behave or get out.”

“Yes,” I said, “it would be nice for me to tell him.”

“Look, Brett. Tell Jake what Robert calls you. That is perfect, you know.”

“Oh, no. I can’t.”

“Go on. We’re all friends. Aren’t we all friends, Jake?”

“I can’t tell him. It’s too ridiculous.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You won’t, Michael. Don’t be an ass.”

“He calls her Circe,” Mike said. “He claims she turns men into swine. Damn good. I wish I were one of these literary chaps.”

“He’d be good, you know,” Brett said. “He writes a good letter.”

“I know,” I said. “He wrote me from San Sebastian.”

“That was nothing,” Brett said. “He can write a damned amusing letter.”

“She made me write that. She was supposed to be ill.”

“I damned well was, too.”

“Come on,” I said, “we must go in and eat.”

“How should I meet Cohn?” Mike said.

“Just act as though nothing had happened.”

“It’s quite all right with me,” Mike said. “I’m not embarrassed.”

“If he says anything, just say you were tight.”

“Quite. And the funny thing is I think I was tight.”

“Come on,” Brett said. “Are these poisonous things paid for? I must bathe before dinner.”

We walked across the square. It was dark and all around the square were the lights from the cafés under the arcades. We walked across the gravel under the trees to the hotel.

They went up-stairs and I stopped to speak with Montoya.

“Well, how did you like the bulls?” he asked.

“Good. They were nice bulls.”

“They’re all right” — Montoya shook his head— “but they’re not too good.”

“What didn’t you like about them?”

“I don’t know. They just didn’t give me the feeling that they were so good.”

“I know what you mean.”

“They’re all right.”

“Yes. They’re all right.”

“How did your friends like them?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” Montoya said.

I went up-stairs. Bill was in his room standing on the balcony looking out at the square. I stood beside him.

“Where’s Cohn?”

“Up-stairs in his room.”

“How does he feel?”

“Like hell, naturally. Mike was awful. He’s terrible when he’s tight.”

“He wasn’t so tight.”

“The hell he wasn’t. I know what we had before we came to the café.”

“He sobered up afterward.”

“Good. He was terrible. I don’t like Cohn, God knows, and I think it was a silly trick for him to go down to San Sebastian, but nobody has any business to talk like Mike.”

“How’d you like the bulls?”

“Grand. It’s grand the way they bring them out.”

“To-morrow come the Miuras.”

“When does the fiesta start?”

“Day after to-morrow.”

“We’ve got to keep Mike from getting so tight. That kind of stuff is terrible.”

“We’d better get cleaned up for supper.”

“Yes. That will be a pleasant meal.”

“Won’t it?”

As a matter of fact, supper was a pleasant meal. Brett wore a black, sleeveless evening dress. She looked quite beautiful. Mike acted as though nothing had happened. I had to go up and bring Robert Cohn down. He was reserved and formal, and his face was still taut and sallow, but he cheered up finally. He could not stop looking at Brett. It seemed to make him happy. It must have been pleasant for him to see her looking so lovely, and know he had been away with her and that every one knew it. They could not take that away from him. Bill was very funny. So was Michael. They were good together.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.

CHAPTER 14

I do not know what time I got to bed. I remember undressing, putting on a bathrobe, and standing out on the balcony. I knew I was quite drunk, and when I came in I put on the light over the head of the bed and started to read. I was reading a book by Turgenieff. Probably I read the same two pages over several times. It was one of the stories in “A Sportsman’s Sketches.” I had read it before, but it seemed quite new. The country became very clear and the feeling of pressure in my head seemed to loosen. I was very drunk and I did not want to shut my eyes because the room would go round and round. If I kept on reading that feeling would pass.

I heard Brett and Robert Cohn come up the stairs. Cohn said good night outside the door and went on up to his room. I heard Brett go into the room next door. Mike was already in bed. He had come in with me an hour before. He woke as she came in, and they talked together. I heard them laugh. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep. It was not necessary to read any more. I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t!

I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I’ve had.

Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

I wished Mike would not behave so terribly to Cohn, though. Mike was a bad drunk. Brett was a good drunk. Bill was a good drunk. Cohn was never drunk. Mike was unpleasant after he passed a certain point. I liked to see him hurt Cohn. I wished he would not do it, though, because afterward it made me disgusted at myself. That was morality; things that made you disgusted afterward. No, that must be immorality. That was a large statement. What a lot of bilge I could think up at night. What rot, I could hear Brett say it. What rot! When you were with English you got into the habit of using English expressions in your thinking. The English spoken language — the upper classes, anyway — must have fewer words than the Eskimo. Of course I didn’t know anything about the Eskimo. Maybe the Eskimo was a fine language. Say the Cherokee. I didn’t know anything about the Cherokee, either. The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything. I liked them, though. I liked the way they talked. Take Harris. Still Harris was not the upper classes.

I turned on the light again and read. I read the Turgenieff. I knew that now, reading it in the oversensitized state of my mind after much too much brandy, I would remember it somewhere, and afterward it would seem as though it had really happened to me. I would always have it. That was another good thing you paid for and then had. Some time along toward daylight I went to sleep.

* * * * *

The next two days in Pamplona were quiet, and there were no more rows. The town was getting ready for the fiesta. Workmen put up the gate-posts that were to shut off the side streets when the bulls were released from the corrals and came running through the streets in the morning on their way to the ring. The workmen dug holes and fitted in the timbers, each timber numbered for its regular place. Out on the plateau beyond the town employees of the bull-ring exercised picador horses, galloping them stiff-legged on the hard, sun-baked fields behind the bull-ring. The big gate of the bull-ring was open, and inside the amphitheatre was being swept. The ring was rolled and sprinkled, and carpenters replaced weakened or cracked planks in the barrera. Standing at the edge of the smooth rolled sand you could look up in the empty stands and see old women sweeping out the boxes.

Outside, the fence that led from the last street of the town to the entrance of the bull-ring was already in place and made a long pen; the crowd would come running down with the bulls behind them on the morning of the day of the first bull-fight. Out across the plain, where the horse and cattle fair would be, some gypsies had camped under the trees. The wine and aguardiente sellers were putting up their booths. One booth advertised ANIS DEL TORO. The cloth sign hung against the planks in the hot sun. In the big square that was the centre of the town there was no change yet. We sat in the white wicker chairs on the terrasse of the café and watched the motor-buses come in and unload peasants from the country coming in to the market, and we watched the buses fill up and start out with peasants sitting with their saddle-bags full of the things they had bought in the town. The tall gray motor-buses were the only life of the square except for the pigeons and the man with a hose who sprinkled the gravelled square and watered the streets.

In the evening was the paseo. For an hour after dinner every one, all the good-looking girls, the officers from the garrison, all the fashionable people of the town, walked in the street on one side of the square while the café tables filled with the regular after-dinner crowd.

During the morning I usually sat in the café and read the Madrid papers and then walked in the town or out into the country. Sometimes Bill went along. Sometimes he wrote in his room. Robert Cohn spent the mornings studying Spanish or trying to get a shave at the barber-shop. Brett and Mike never got up until noon. We all had a vermouth at the café. It was a quiet life and no one was drunk. I went to church a couple of times, once with Brett. She said she wanted to hear me go to confession, but I told her that not only was it impossible but it was not as interesting as it sounded, and, besides, it would be in a language she did not know. We met Cohn as we came out of church, and although it was obvious he had followed us, yet he was very pleasant and nice, and we all three went for a walk out to the gypsy camp, and Brett had her fortune told.

It was a good morning, there were high white clouds above the mountains. It had rained a little in the night and it was fresh and cool on the plateau, and there was a wonderful view. We all felt good and we felt healthy, and I felt quite friendly to Cohn. You could not be upset about anything on a day like that.

That was the last day before the fiesta.

CHAPTER 15

At noon of Sunday, the 6th of July, the fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it. People had been coming in all day from the country, but they were assimilated in the town and you did not notice them. The square was as quiet in the hot sun as on any other day. The peasants were in the outlying wine-shops. There they were drinking, getting ready for the fiesta. They had come in so recently from the plains and the hills that it was necessary that they make their shifting in values gradually. They could not start in paying café prices. They got their money’s worth in the wine-shops. Money still had a definite value in hours worked and bushels of grain sold. Late in the fiesta it would not matter what they paid, nor where they bought.

Now on the day of the starting of the fiesta of San Fermin they had been in the wine-shops of the narrow streets of the town since early morning. Going down the streets in the morning on the way to mass in the cathedral, I heard them singing through the open doors of the shops. They were warming up. There were many people at the eleven o’clock mass. San Fermin is also a religious festival.

I walked down the hill from the cathedral and up the street to the café on the square. It was a little before noon. Robert Cohn and Bill were sitting at one of the tables. The marble-topped tables and the white wicker chairs were gone. They were replaced by cast-iron tables and severe folding chairs. The café was like a battleship stripped for action. To-day the waiters did not leave you alone all morning to read without asking if you wanted to order something. A waiter came up as soon as I sat down.

“What are you drinking?” I asked Bill and Robert.

“Sherry,” Cohn said.

“Jerez,” I said to the waiter.

Before the waiter brought the sherry the rocket that announced the fiesta went up in the square. It burst and there was a gray ball of smoke high up above the Theatre Gayarre, across on the other side of the plaza. The ball of smoke hung in the sky like a shrapnel burst, and as I watched, another rocket came up to it, trickling smoke in the bright sunlight. I saw the bright flash as it burst and another little cloud of smoke appeared. By the time the second rocket had burst there were so many people in the arcade, that had been empty a minute before, that the waiter, holding the bottle high up over his head, could hardly get through the crowd to our table. People were coming into the square from all sides, and down the street we heard the pipes and the fifes and the drums coming. They were playing the riau-riau music, the pipes shrill and the drums pounding, and behind them came the men and boys dancing. When the fifers stopped they all crouched down in the street, and when the reed-pipes and the fifes shrilled, and the flat, dry, hollow drums tapped it out again, they all went up in the air dancing. In the crowd you saw only the heads and shoulders of the dancers going up and down.

In the square a man, bent over, was playing on a reed-pipe, and a crowd of children were following him shouting, and pulling at his clothes. He came out of the square, the children following him, and piped them past the café and down a side street. We saw his blank pockmarked face as he went by, piping, the children close behind him shouting and pulling at him.

“He must be the village idiot,” Bill said. “My God! look at that!”

Down the street came dancers. The street was solid with dancers, all men. They were all dancing in time behind their own fifers and drummers. They were a club of some sort, and all wore workmen’s blue smocks, and red handkerchiefs around their necks, and carried a great banner on two poles. The banner danced up and down with them as they came down surrounded by the crowd.

“Hurray for Wine! Hurray for the Foreigners!” was painted on the banner.

“Where are the foreigners?” Robert Cohn asked.

“We’re the foreigners,” Bill said.

All the time rockets were going up. The café tables were all full now. The square was emptying of people and the crowd was filling the cafés.

“Where’s Brett and Mike?” Bill asked.

“I’ll go and get them,” Cohn said.

“Bring them here.”

The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on. The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta. Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences. It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta. All during the fiesta you had the feeling, even when it was quiet, that you had to shout any remark to make it heard. It was the same feeling about any action. It was a fiesta and it went on for seven days.

That afternoon was the big religious procession. San Fermin was translated from one church to another. In the procession were all the dignitaries, civil and religious. We could not see them because the crowd was too great. Ahead of the formal procession and behind it danced the riau-riau dancers. There was one mass of yellow shirts dancing up and down in the crowd. All we could see of the procession through the closely pressed people that crowded all the side streets and curbs were the great giants, cigar-store Indians, thirty feet high, Moors, a King and Queen, whirling and waltzing solemnly to the riau-riau.

They were all standing outside the chapel where San Fermin and the dignitaries had passed in, leaving a guard of soldiers, the giants, with the men who danced in them standing beside their resting frames, and the dwarfs moving with their whacking bladders through the crowd. We started inside and there was a smell of incense and people filing back into the church, but Brett was stopped just inside the door because she had no hat, so we went out again and along the street that ran back from the chapel into town. The street was lined on both sides with people keeping their place at the curb for the return of the procession. Some dancers formed a circle around Brett and started to dance. They wore big wreaths of white garlics around their necks. They took Bill and me by the arms and put us in the circle. Bill started to dance, too. They were all chanting. Brett wanted to dance but they did not want her to. They wanted her as an image to dance around. When the song ended with the sharp riau-riau! they rushed us into a wine-shop.

We stood at the counter. They had Brett seated on a wine-cask. It was dark in the wine-shop and full of men singing, hard-voiced singing. Back of the counter they drew the wine from casks. I put down money for the wine, but one of the men picked it up and put it back in my pocket.

“I want a leather wine-bottle,” Bill said.

“There’s a place down the street,” I said. “I’ll go get a couple.”

The dancers did not want me to go out. Three of them were sitting on the high wine-cask beside Brett, teaching her to drink out of the wine-skins. They had hung a wreath of garlics around her neck. Some one insisted on giving her a glass. Somebody was teaching Bill a song. Singing it into his ear. Beating time on Bill’s back.

I explained to them that I would be back. Outside in the street I went down the street looking for the shop that made leather wine-bottles. The crowd was packed on the sidewalks and many of the shops were shuttered, and I could not find it. I walked as far as the church, looking on both sides of the street. Then I asked a man and he took me by the arm and led me to it. The shutters were up but the door was open.

Inside it smelled of fresh tanned leather and hot tar. A man was stencilling completed wine-skins. They hung from the roof in bunches. He took one down, blew it up, screwed the nozzle tight, and then jumped on it

“See! It doesn’t leak.”

“I want another one, too. A big one.”

He took down a big one that would hold a gallon or more, from the roof. He blew it up, his cheeks puffing ahead of the wine-skin, and stood on the bota holding on to a chair.

“What are you going to do? Sell them in Bayonne?”

“No. Drink out of them.”

He slapped me on the back.

“Good man. Eight pesetas for the two. The lowest price.”

The man who was stencilling the new ones and tossing them into a pile stopped.

“It’s true,” he said. “Eight pesetas is cheap.”

I paid and went out and along the street back to the wine-shop. It was darker than ever inside and very crowded. I did not see Brett and Bill, and some one said they were in the back room. At the counter the girl filled the two wine-skins for me. One held two litres. The other held five litres. Filling them both cost three pesetas sixty centimos. Some one at the counter, that I had never seen before, tried to pay for the wine, but I finally paid for it myself. The man who had wanted to pay then bought me a drink. He would not let me buy one in return, but said he would take a rinse of the mouth from the new wine-bag. He tipped the big five-litre bag up and squeezed it so the wine hissed against the back of his throat.

“All right,” he said, and handed back the bag.

In the back room Brett and Bill were sitting on barrels surrounded by the dancers. Everybody had his arms on everybody else’s shoulders, and they were all singing. Mike was sitting at a table with several men in their shirt-sleeves, eating from a bowl of tuna fish, chopped onions and vinegar. They were all drinking wine and mopping up the oil and vinegar with pieces of bread.

“Hello, Jake. Hello!” Mike called. “Come here. I want you to meet my friends. We’re all having an hors-d’oeuvre.”

I was introduced to the people at the table. They supplied their names to Mike and sent for a fork for me.

“Stop eating their dinner, Michael,” Brett shouted from the wine-barrels.

“I don’t want to eat up your meal,” I said when some one handed me a fork.

“Eat,” he said. “What do you think it’s here for?”

I unscrewed the nozzle of the big wine-bottle and handed it around. Every one took a drink, tipping the wine-skin at arm’s length.

Outside, above the singing, we could hear the music of the procession going by.

“Isn’t that the procession?” Mike asked.

“Nada,” some one said. “It’s nothing. Drink up. Lift the bottle.”

“Where did they find you?” I asked Mike.

“Some one brought me here,” Mike said. “They said you were here.”

“Where’s Cohn?”

“He’s passed out,” Brett called. “They’ve put him away somewhere.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“How should we know,” Bill said. “I think he’s dead.”

“He’s not dead,” Mike said. “I know he’s not dead. He’s just passed out on Anis del Mono.”

As he said Anis del Mono one of the men at the table looked up, brought out a bottle from inside his smock, and handed it to me.

“No,” I said. “No, thanks!”

“Yes. Yes. Arriba! Up with the bottle!”

I took a drink. It tasted of licorice and warmed all the way. I could feel it warming in my stomach.

“Where the hell is Cohn?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I’ll ask. Where is the drunken comrade?” he asked in Spanish.

“You want to see him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Not me,” said Mike. “This gent.”

The Anis del Mono man wiped his mouth and stood up.

“Come on.”

In a back room Robert Cohn was sleeping quietly on some wine-casks. It was almost too dark to see his face. They had covered him with a coat and another coat was folded under his head. Around his neck and on his chest was a big wreath of twisted garlics.

“Let him sleep,” the man whispered. “He’s all right.”

Two hours later Cohn appeared. He came into the front room still with the wreath of garlics around his neck. The Spaniards shouted when he came in. Cohn wiped his eyes and grinned.

“I must have been sleeping,” he said.

“Oh, not at all,” Brett said.

“You were only dead,” Bill said.

“Aren’t we going to go and have some supper?” Cohn asked.

“Do you want to eat?”

“Yes. Why not? I’m hungry.”

“Eat those garlics, Robert,” Mike said. “I say. Do eat those garlics.”

Cohn stood there. His sleep had made him quite all right.

“Do let’s go and eat,” Brett said. “I must get a bath.”

“Come on,” Bill said. “Let’s translate Brett to the hotel.”

We said good-bye to many people and shook hands with many people and went out. Outside it was dark.

“What time is it do you suppose?” Cohn asked.

“It’s to-morrow,” Mike said. “You’ve been asleep two days.”

“No,” said Cohn, “what time is it?”

“It’s ten o’clock.”

“What a lot we’ve drunk.”

“You mean what a lot we’ve drunk. You went to sleep.”

Going down the dark streets to the hotel we saw the sky-rockets going up in the square. Down the side streets that led to the square we saw the square solid with people, those in the centre all dancing.

It was a big meal at the hotel. It was the first meal of the prices being doubled for the fiesta, and there were several new courses. After the dinner we were out in the town. I remember resolving that I would stay up all night to watch the bulls go through the streets at six o’clock in the morning, and being so sleepy that I went to bed around four o’clock. The others stayed up.

My own room was locked and I could not find the key, so I went up-stairs and slept on one of the beds in Cohn’s room. The fiesta was going on outside in the night, but I was too sleepy for it to keep me awake. When I woke it was the sound of the rocket exploding that announced the release of the bulls from the corrals at the edge of town. They would race through the streets and out to the bull-ring. I had been sleeping heavily and I woke feeling I was too late. I put on a coat of Cohn’s and went out on the balcony. Down below the narrow street was empty. All the balconies were crowded with people. Suddenly a crowd came down the street. They were all running, packed close together. They passed along and up the street toward the bull-ring and behind them came more men running faster, and then some stragglers who were really running. Behind them was a little bare space, and then the bulls galloping, tossing their heads up and down. It all went out of sight around the corner. One man fell, rolled to the gutter, and lay quiet. But the bulls went right on and did not notice him. They were all running together.

After they went out of sight a great roar came from the bull-ring. It kept on. Then finally the pop of the rocket that meant the bulls had gotten through the people in the ring and into the corrals. I went back in the room and got into bed. I had been standing on the stone balcony in bare feet. I knew our crowd must have all been out at the bull-ring. Back in bed, I went to sleep.

Cohn woke me when he came in. He started to undress and went over and closed the window because the people on the balcony of the house just across the street were looking in.

“Did you see the show?” I asked.

“Yes. We were all there.”

“Anybody get hurt?”

“One of the bulls got into the crowd in the ring and tossed six or eight people.”

“How did Brett like it?”

“It was all so sudden there wasn’t any time for it to bother anybody.”

“I wish I’d been up.”

“We didn’t know where you were. We went to your room but it was locked.”

“Where did you stay up?”

“We danced at some club.”

“I got sleepy,” I said.

“My gosh! I’m sleepy now,” Cohn said. “Doesn’t this thing ever stop?”

“Not for a week.”

Bill opened the door and put his head in.

“Where were you, Jake?”

“I saw them go through from the balcony. How was it?”

“Grand.”

“Where you going?”

“To sleep.”

No one was up before noon. We ate at tables set out under the arcade. The town was full of people. We had to wait for a table. After lunch we went over to the Iruña. It had filled up, and as the time for the bull-fight came it got fuller, and the tables were crowded closer. There was a close, crowded hum that came every day before the bull-fight. The café did not make this same noise at any other time, no matter how crowded it was. This hum went on, and we were in it and a part of it.

I had taken six seats for all the fights. Three of them were barreras, the first row at the ring-side, and three were sobrepuertos, seats with wooden backs, half-way up the amphitheatre. Mike thought Brett had best sit high up for her first time, and Cohn wanted to sit with them. Bill and I were going to sit in the barreras, and I gave the extra ticket to a waiter to sell. Bill said something to Cohn about what to do and how to look so he would not mind the horses. Bill had seen one season of bull-fights.

“I’m not worried about how I’ll stand it. I’m only afraid I may be bored,” Cohn said.

“You think so?”

“Don’t look at the horses, after the bull hits them,” I said to Brett. “Watch the charge and see the picador try and keep the bull off, but then don’t look again until the horse is dead if it’s been hit.”

“I’m a little nervy about it,” Brett said. “I’m worried whether I’ll be able to go through with it all right.”

“You’ll be all right. There’s nothing but that horse part that will bother you, and they’re only in for a few minutes with each bull. Just don’t watch when it’s bad.”

“She’ll be all right,” Mike said. “I’ll look after her.”

“I don’t think you’ll be bored,” Bill said.

“I’m going over to the hotel to get the glasses and the wine-skin,” I said. “See you back here. Don’t get cock-eyed.”

“I’ll come along,” Bill said. Brett smiled at us.

We walked around through the arcade to avoid the heat of the square.

“That Cohn gets me,” Bill said. “He’s got this Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he’ll get out of the fight will be being bored.”

“We’ll watch him with the glasses,” I said.

“Oh, to hell with him!”

“He spends a lot of time there.”

“I want him to stay there.”

In the hotel on the stairs we met Montoya.

“Come on,” said Montoya. “Do you want to meet Pedro Romero?”

“Fine,” said Bill. “Let’s go see him.”

We followed Montoya up a flight and down the corridor.

“He’s in room number eight,” Montoya explained. “He’s getting dressed for the bull-fight.”

Montoya knocked on the door and opened it. It was a gloomy room with a little light coming in from the window on the narrow street. There were two beds separated by a monastic partition. The electric light was on. The boy stood very straight and unsmiling in his bull-fighting clothes. His jacket hung over the back of a chair. They were just finishing winding his sash. His black hair shone under the electric light. He wore a white linen shirt and the sword-handler finished his sash and stood up and stepped back. Pedro Romero nodded, seeming very far away and dignified when we shook hands. Montoya said something about what great aficionados we were, and that we wanted to wish him luck. Romero listened very seriously. Then he turned to me. He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen.

“You go to the bull-fight,” he said in English.

“You know English,” I said, feeling like an idiot.

“No,” he answered, and smiled.

One of three men who had been sitting on the beds came up and asked us if we spoke French. “Would you like me to interpret for you? Is there anything you would like to ask Pedro Romero?”

We thanked him. What was there that you would like to ask? The boy was nineteen years old, alone except for his sword-handler, and the three hangers-on, and the bull-fight was to commence in twenty minutes. We wished him “Mucha suerte,” shook hands, and went out. He was standing, straight and handsome and altogether by himself, alone in the room with the hangers-on as we shut the door.

“He’s a fine boy, don’t you think so?” Montoya asked.

“He’s a good-looking kid,” I said.

“He looks like a torero,” Montoya said. “He has the type.”

“He’s a fine boy.”

“We’ll see how he is in the ring,” Montoya said.

We found the big leather wine-bottle leaning against the wall in my room, took it and the field-glasses, locked the door, and went down-stairs.

It was a good bull-light. Bill and I were very excited about Pedro Romero. Montoya was sitting about ten places away. After Romero had killed his first bull Montoya caught my eye and nodded his head. This was a real one. There had not been a real one for a long time. Of the other two matadors, one was very fair and the other was passable. But there was no comparison with Romero, although neither of his bulls was much.

Several times during the bull-fight I looked up at Mike and Brett and Cohn, with the glasses. They seemed to be all right. Brett did not look upset. All three were leaning forward on the concrete railing in front of them.

“Let me take the glasses,” Bill said.

“Does Cohn look bored?” I asked.

“That kike!”

Outside the ring, after the bull-fight was over, you could not move in the crowd. We could not make our way through but had to be moved with the whole thing, slowly, as a glacier, back to town. We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bull-fight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bull-fight. The fiesta was going on. The drums pounded and the pipe music was shrill, and everywhere the flow of the crowd was broken by patches of dancers. The dancers were in a crowd, so you did not see the intricate play of the feet. All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down. Finally, we got out of the crowd and made for the café. The waiter saved chairs for the others, and we each ordered an absinthe and watched the crowd in the square and the dancers.

“What do you suppose that dance is?” Bill asked.

“It’s a sort of jota.”

“They’re not all the same,” Bill said. “They dance differently to all the different tunes.”

“It’s swell dancing.”

In front of us on a clear part of the street a company of boys were dancing. The steps were very intricate and their faces were intent and concentrated. They all looked down while they danced. Their rope-soled shoes tapped and spatted on the pavement. The toes touched. The heels touched. The balls of the feet touched. Then the music broke wildly and the step was finished and they were all dancing on up the street.

“Here come the gentry,” Bill said.

They were crossing the street

“Hello, men,” I said.

“Hello, gents!” said Brett. “You saved us seats? How nice.”

“I say,” Mike said, “that Romero what’shisname is somebody. Am I wrong?”

“Oh, isn’t he lovely,” Brett said. “And those green trousers.”

“Brett never took her eyes off them.”

“I say, I must borrow your glasses to-morrow.”

“How did it go?”

“Wonderfully! Simply perfect. I say, it is a spectacle!”

“How about the horses?”

“I couldn’t help looking at them.”

“She couldn’t take her eyes off them,” Mike said. “She’s an extraordinary wench.”

“They do have some rather awful things happen to them,” Brett said. “I couldn’t look away, though.”

“Did you feel all right?”

“I didn’t feel badly at all.”

“Robert Cohn did,” Mike put in. “You were quite green, Robert.”

“The first horse did bother me,” Cohn said.

“You weren’t bored, were you?” asked Bill.

Cohn laughed.

“No. I wasn’t bored. I wish you’d forgive me that.”

“It’s all right,” Bill said, “so long as you weren’t bored.”

“He didn’t look bored,” Mike said. “I thought he was going to be sick.”

“I never felt that bad. It was just for a minute.”

“I thought he was going to be sick. You weren’t bored, were you, Robert?”

“Let up on that, Mike. I said I was sorry I said it.”

“He was, you know. He was positively green.”

“Oh, shove it along, Michael.”

“You mustn’t ever get bored at your first bull-fight, Robert,” Mike said. “It might make such a mess.”

“Oh, shove it along, Michael,” Brett said.

“He said Brett was a sadist,” Mike said. “Brett’s not a sadist. She’s just a lovely, healthy wench.”

“Are you a sadist, Brett?” I asked.

“Hope not.”

“He said Brett was a sadist just because she has a good, healthy stomach.”

“Won’t be healthy long.”

Bill got Mike started on something else than Cohn. The waiter brought the absinthe glasses.

“Did you really like it?” Bill asked Cohn.

“No, I can’t say I liked it. I think it’s a wonderful show.”

“Gad, yes! What a spectacle!” Brett said.

“I wish they didn’t have the horse part,” Cohn said.

“They’re not important,” Bill said. “After a while you never notice anything disgusting.”

“It is a bit strong just at the start,” Brett said. “There’s a dreadful moment for me just when the bull starts for the horse.”

“The bulls were fine,” Cohn said.

“They were very good,” Mike said.

“I want to sit down below, next time.” Brett drank from her glass of absinthe.

“She wants to see the bull-fighters close by,” Mike said.

“They are something,” Brett said. “That Romero lad is just a child.”

“He’s a damned good-looking boy,” I said. “When we were up in his room I never saw a better-looking kid.”

“How old do you suppose he is?”

“Nineteen or twenty.”

“Just imagine it.”

The bull-fight on the second day was much better than on the first. Brett sat between Mike and me at the barrera, and Bill and Cohn went up above. Romero was the whole show. I do not think Brett saw any other bull-fighter. No one else did either, except the hard-shelled technicians. It was all Romero. There were two other matadors, but they did not count. I sat beside Brett and explained to Brett what it was all about. I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watching the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors. I had her watch how Romero took the bull away from a fallen horse with his cape, and how he held him with the cape and turned him, smoothly and suavely, never wasting the bull. She saw how Romero avoided every brusque movement and saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them, not winded and discomposed but smoothly worn down. She saw how close Romero always worked to the bull, and I pointed out to her the tricks the other bull-fighters used to make it look as though they were working closely. She saw why she liked Romero’s cape-work and why she did not like the others.

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing.

“I’ve never seen him do an awkward thing,” Brett said.

“You won’t until he gets frightened,” I said.

“He’ll never be frightened,” Mike said. “He knows too damned much.”

“He knew everything when he started. The others can’t ever learn what he was born with.”

“And God, what looks,” Brett said.

“I believe, you know, that she’s falling in love with this bull-fighter chap,” Mike said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Be a good chap, Jake. Don’t tell her anything more about him. Tell her how they beat their old mothers.”

“Tell me what drunks they are.”

“Oh, frightful,” Mike said. “Drunk all day and spend all their time beating their poor old mothers.”

“He looks that way,” Brett said.

“Doesn’t he?” I said.

They had hitched the mules to the dead bull and then the whips cracked, the men ran, and the mules, straining forward, their legs pushing, broke into a gallop, and the bull, one horn up, his head on its side, swept a swath smoothly across the sand and out the red gate.

“This next is the last one.”

“Not really,” Brett said. She leaned forward on the barrera. Romero waved his picadors to their places, then stood, his cape against his chest, looking across the ring to where the bull would come out.

After it was over we went out and were pressed tight in the crowd.

“These bull-fights are hell on one,” Brett said. “I’m limp as a rag.”

“Oh, you’ll get a drink,” Mike said.

The next day Pedro Romero did not fight. It was Miura bulls, and a very bad bull-fight. The next day there was no bull-fight scheduled. But all day and all night the fiesta kept on.

CHAPTER 16

In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the sea.

The flags in the square hung wet from the white poles and the banners were wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under the arcades and made pools of water in the square, and the streets wet and dark and deserted; yet the fiesta kept up without any pause. It was only driven under cover.

The covered seats of the bull-ring had been crowded with people sitting out of the rain watching the concourse of Basque and Navarrais dancers and singers, and afterward the Val Carlos dancers in their costumes danced down the street in the rain, the drums sounding hollow and damp, and the chiefs of the bands riding ahead on their big, heavy-footed horses, their costumes wet, the horses’ coats wet in the rain. The crowd was in the cafés and the dancers came in, too, and sat, their tight-wound white legs under the tables, shaking the water from their belled caps, and spreading their red and purple jackets over the chairs to dry. It was raining hard outside.

I left the crowd in the café and went over to the hotel to get shaved for dinner. I was shaving in my room when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I called.

Montoya walked in.

“How are you?” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

“No bulls to-day.”

“No,” I said, “nothing but rain.”

“Where are your friends?”

“Over at the Iruña.”

Montoya smiled his embarrassed smile.

“Look,” he said. “Do you know the American ambassador?”

“Yes,” I said. “Everybody knows the American ambassador.”

“He’s here in town, now.”

“Yes,” I said. “Everybody’s seen them.”

“I’ve seen them, too,” Montoya said. He didn’t say anything. I went on shaving.

“Sit down,” I said. “Let me send for a drink.”

“No, I have to go.”

I finished shaving and put my face down into the bowl and washed it with cold water. Montoya was standing there looking more embarrassed.

“Look,” he said. “I’ve just had a message from them at the Grand Hotel that they want Pedro Romero and Marcial Lalanda to come over for coffee to-night after dinner.”

“Well,” I said, “it can’t hurt Marcial any.”

“Marcial has been in San Sebastian all day. He drove over in a car this morning with Marquez. I don’t think they’ll be back to-night.”

Montoya stood embarrassed. He wanted me to say something.

“Don’t give Romero the message,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely.”

Montoya was very pleased.

“I wanted to ask you because you were an American,” he said.

“That’s what I’d do.”

“Look,” said Montoya. “People take a boy like that. They don’t know what he’s worth. They don’t know what he means. Any foreigner can flatter him. They start this Grand Hotel business, and in one year they’re through.”

“Like Algabeno,” I said.

“Yes, like Algabeno.”

“They’re a fine lot,” I said. “There’s one American woman down here now that collects bull-fighters.”

“I know. They only want the young ones.”

“Yes,” I said. “The old ones get fat.”

“Or crazy like Gallo.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s easy. All you have to do is not give him the message.”

“He’s such a fine boy,” said Montoya. “He ought to stay with his own people. He shouldn’t mix in that stuff.”

“Won’t you have a drink?” I asked.

“No,” said Montoya, “I have to go.” He went out.

I went down-stairs and out the door and took a walk around through the arcades around the square. It was still raining. I looked in at the Iruña for the gang and they were not there, so I walked on around the square and back to the hotel. They were eating dinner in the down-stairs dining-room.

They were well ahead of me and it was no use trying to catch them. Bill was buying shoe-shines for Mike. Bootblacks opened the street door and each one Bill called over and started to work on Mike.

“This is the eleventh time my boots have been polished,” Mike said. “I say, Bill is an ass.”

The bootblacks had evidently spread the report. Another came in.

“Limpia botas?” he said to Bill.

“No,” said Bill. “For this Señor.”

The bootblack knelt down beside the one at work and started on Mike’s free shoe that shone already in the electric light.

“Bill’s a yell of laughter,” Mike said.

I was drinking red wine, and so far behind them that I felt a little uncomfortable about all this shoe-shining. I looked around the room. At the next table was Pedro Romero. He stood up when I nodded, and asked me to come over and meet a friend. His table was beside ours, almost touching. I met the friend, a Madrid bull-fight critic, a little man with a drawn face. I told Romero how much I liked his work, and he was very pleased. We talked Spanish and the critic knew a little French. I reached to our table for my wine-bottle, but the critic took my arm. Romero laughed.

“Drink here,” he said in English.

He was very bashful about his English, but he was really very pleased with it, and as we went on talking he brought out words he was not sure of, and asked me about them. He was anxious to know the English for Corrida de toros, the exact translation. Bull-fight he was suspicious of. I explained that bull-fight in Spanish was the lidia of a toro. The Spanish word corrida means in English the running of bulls — the French translation is Course de taureaux. The critic put that in. There is no Spanish word for bull-fight.

Pedro Romero said he had learned a little English in Gibraltar. He was born in Ronda. That is not far above Gibraltar. He started bull-fighting in Malaga in the bull-fighting school there. He had only been at it three years. The bull-fight critic joked him about the number of Malagueño expressions he used. He was nineteen years old, he said. His older brother was with him as a banderillero, but he did not live in this hotel. He lived in a smaller hotel with the other people who worked for Romero. He asked me how many times I had seen him in the ring. I told him only three. It was really only two, but I did not want to explain after I had made the mistake.

“Where did you see me the other time? In Madrid?”

“Yes,” I lied. I had read the accounts of his two appearances in Madrid in the bull-fight papers, so I was all right.

“The first or the second time?”

“The first.”

“I was very bad,” he said. “The second time I was better. You remember?” He turned to the critic.

He was not at all embarrassed. He talked of his work as something altogether apart from himself. There was nothing conceited or braggartly about him.

“I like it very much that you like my work,” he said. “But you haven’t seen it yet. To-morrow, if I get a good bull, I will try and show it to you.”

When he said this he smiled, anxious that neither the bull-fight critic nor I would think he was boasting.

“I am anxious to see it,” the critic said. “I would like to be convinced.”

“He doesn’t like my work much.” Romero turned to me. He was serious.

The critic explained that he liked it very much, but that so far it had been incomplete.

“Wait till to-morrow, if a good one comes out.”

“Have you seen the bulls for to-morrow?” the critic asked me.

“Yes. I saw them unloaded.”

Pedro Romero leaned forward.

“What did you think of them?”

“Very nice,” I said. “About twenty-six arrobas. Very short horns. Haven’t you seen them?”

“Oh, yes,” said Romero.

“They won’t weigh twenty-six arrobas,” said the critic.

“No,” said Romero.

“They’ve got bananas for horns,” the critic said.

“You call them bananas?” asked Romero. He turned to me and smiled. “You wouldn’t call them bananas?”

“No,” I said. “They’re horns all right.”

“They’re very short,” said Pedro Romero. “Very, very short. Still, they aren’t bananas.”

“I say, Jake,” Brett called from the next table, “you have deserted us.”

“Just temporarily,” I said. “We’re talking bulls.”

“You are superior.”

“Tell him that bulls have no balls,” Mike shouted. He was drunk.

Romero looked at me inquiringly.

“Drunk,” I said. “Borracho! Muy borracho!”

“You might introduce your friends,” Brett said. She had not stopped looking at Pedro Romero. I asked them if they would like to have coffee with us. They both stood up. Romero’s face was very brown. He had very nice manners.

I introduced them all around and they started to sit down, but there was not enough room, so we all moved over to the big table by the wall to have coffee. Mike ordered a bottle of Fundador and glasses for everybody. There was a lot of drunken talking.

“Tell him I think writing is lousy,” Bill said. “Go on, tell him. Tell him I’m ashamed of being a writer.”

Pedro Romero was sitting beside Brett and listening to her.

“Go on. Tell him!” Bill said.

Romero looked up smiling.

“This gentleman,” I said, “is a writer.”

Romero was impressed. “This other one, too,” I said, pointing at Cohn.

“He looks like Villalta,” Romero said, looking at Bill. “Rafael, doesn’t he look like Villalta?”

“I can’t see it,” the critic said.

“Really,” Romero said in Spanish. “He looks a lot like Villalta. What does the drunken one do?”

“Nothing.”

“Is that why he drinks?”

“No. He’s waiting to marry this lady.”

“Tell him bulls have no balls!” Mike shouted, very drunk, from the other end of the table.

“What does he say?”

“He’s drunk.”

“Jake,” Mike called. “Tell him bulls have no balls!”

“You understand?” I said.

“Yes.”

I was sure he didn’t, so it was all right.

“Tell him Brett wants to see him put on those green pants.”

“Pipe down, Mike.”

“Tell him Brett is dying to know how he can get into those pants.”

“Pipe down.”

During this Romero was fingering his glass and talking with Brett. Brett was talking French and he was talking Spanish and a little English, and laughing.

Bill was filling the glasses.

“Tell him Brett wants to come into — —”

“Oh, pipe down, Mike, for Christ’s sake!”

Romero looked up smiling. “Pipe down! I know that,” he said.

Just then Montoya came into the room. He started to smile at me, then he saw Pedro Romero with a big glass of cognac in his hand, sitting laughing between me and a woman with bare shoulders, at a table full of drunks. He did not even nod.

Montoya went out of the room. Mike was on his feet proposing a toast. “Let’s all drink to—” he began. “Pedro Romero,” I said. Everybody stood up. Romero took it very seriously, and we touched glasses and drank it down, I rushing it a little because Mike was trying to make it clear that that was not at all what he was going to drink to. But it went off all right, and Pedro Romero shook hands with every one and he and the critic went out together.

“My God! he’s a lovely boy,” Brett said. “And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn.”

“I started to tell him,” Mike began. “And Jake kept interrupting me. Why do you interrupt me? Do you think you talk Spanish better than I do?”

“Oh, shut up, Mike! Nobody interrupted you.”

“No, I’d like to get this settled.” He turned away from me. “Do you think you amount to something, Cohn? Do you think you belong here among us? People who are out to have a good time? For God’s sake don’t be so noisy, Cohn!”

“Oh, cut it out, Mike,” Cohn said.

“Do you think Brett wants you here? Do you think you add to the party? Why don’t you say something?”

“I said all I had to say the other night, Mike.”

“I’m not one of you literary chaps.” Mike stood shakily and leaned against the table. “I’m not clever. But I do know when I’m not wanted. Why don’t you see when you’re not wanted, Cohn? Go away. Go away, for God’s sake. Take that sad Jewish face away. Don’t you think I’m right?”

He looked at us.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s all go over to the Iruña.”

“No. Don’t you think I’m right? I love that woman.”

“Oh, don’t start that again. Do shove it along, Michael,” Brett said.

“Don’t you think I’m right, Jake?”

Cohn still sat at the table. His face had the sallow, yellow look it got when he was insulted, but somehow he seemed to be enjoying it. The childish, drunken heroics of it. It was his affair with a lady of title.

“Jake,” Mike said. He was almost crying. “You know I’m right. Listen, you!” He turned to Cohn: “Go away! Go away now!”

“But I won’t go, Mike,” said Cohn.

“Then I’ll make you!” Mike started toward him around the table. Cohn stood up and took off his glasses. He stood waiting, his face sallow, his hands fairly low, proudly and firmly waiting for the assault, ready to do battle for his lady love.

I grabbed Mike. “Come on to the café,” I said. “You can’t hit him here in the hotel.”

“Good!” said Mike. “Good idea!”

We started off. I looked back as Mike stumbled up the stairs and saw Cohn putting his glasses on again. Bill was sitting at the table pouring another glass of Fundador. Brett was sitting looking straight ahead at nothing.

Outside on the square it had stopped raining and the moon was trying to get through the clouds. There was a wind blowing. The military band was playing and the crowd was massed on the far side of the square where the fireworks specialist and his son were trying to send up fire balloons. A balloon would start up jerkily, on a great bias, and be torn by the wind or blown against the houses of the square. Some fell into the crowd. The magnesium flared and the fireworks exploded and chased about in the crowd. There was no one dancing in the square. The gravel was too wet.

Brett came out with Bill and joined us. We stood in the crowd and watched Don Manuel Orquito, the fireworks king, standing on a little platform, carefully starting the balloons with sticks, standing above the heads of the crowd to launch the balloons off into the wind. The wind brought them all down, and Don Manuel Orquito’s face was sweaty in the light of his complicated fireworks that fell into the crowd and charged and chased, sputtering and cracking, between the legs of the people. The people shouted as each new luminous paper bubble careened, caught fire, and fell.

“They’re razzing Don Manuel,” Bill said.

“How do you know he’s Don Manuel?” Brett said.

“His name’s on the programme. Don Manuel Orquito, the pirotecnico of esta ciudad.”

“Globos illuminados,” Mike said. “A collection of globos illuminados. That’s what the paper said.”

The wind blew the band music away.

“I say, I wish one would go up,” Brett said. “That Don Manuel chap is furious.”

“He’s probably worked for weeks fixing them to go off, spelling out ‘Hail to San Fermin,’” Bill said.

“Globos illuminados,” Mike said. “A bunch of bloody globos illuminados.”

“Come on,” said Brett. “We can’t stand here.”

“Her ladyship wants a drink,” Mike said.

“How you know things,” Brett said.

Inside, the café was crowded and very noisy. No one noticed us come in. We could not find a table. There was a great noise going on.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Bill said.

Outside the paseo was going in under the arcade. There were some English and Americans from Biarritz in sport clothes scattered at the tables. Some of the women stared at the people going by with lorgnons. We had acquired, at some time, a friend of Bill’s from Biarritz. She was staying with another girl at the Grand Hotel. The other girl had a headache and had gone to bed.

“Here’s the pub,” Mike said. It was the Bar Milano, a small, tough bar where you could get food and where they danced in the back room. We all sat down at a table and ordered a bottle of Fundador. The bar was not full. There was nothing going on.

“This is a hell of a place,” Bill said.

“It’s too early.”

“Let’s take the bottle and come back later,” Bill said. “I don’t want to sit here on a night like this.”

“Let’s go and look at the English,” Mike said. “I love to look at the English.”

“They’re awful,” Bill said. “Where did they all come from?”

“They come from Biarritz,” Mike said, “They come to see the last day of the quaint little Spanish fiesta.”

“I’ll festa them,” Bill said.

“You’re an extraordinarily beautiful girl.” Mike turned to Bill’s friend. “When did you come here?”

“Come off it, Michael.”

“I say, she is a lovely girl. Where have I been? Where have I been looking all this while? You’re a lovely thing. Have we met? Come along with me and Bill. We’re going to festa the English.”

“I’ll festa them,” Bill said, “What the hell are they doing at this fiesta?”

“Come on,” Mike said. “Just us three. We’re going to festa the bloody English. I hope you’re not English? I’m Scotch. I hate the English. I’m going to festa them. Come on, Bill.”

Through the window we saw them, all three arm in arm, going toward the café. Rockets were going up in the square.

“I’m going to sit here,” Brett said.

“I’ll stay with you,” Cohn said.

“Oh, don’t!” Brett said. “For God’s sake, go off somewhere. Can’t you see Jake and I want to talk?”

“I didn’t,” Cohn said. “I thought I’d sit here because I felt a little tight.”

“What a hell of a reason for sitting with any one. If you’re tight, go to bed. Go on to bed.”

“Was I rude enough to him?” Brett asked. Cohn was gone. “My God! I’m so sick of him!”

“He doesn’t add much to the gayety.”

“He depresses me so.”

“He’s behaved very badly.”

“Damned badly. He had a chance to behave so well.”

“He’s probably waiting just outside the door now.”

“Yes. He would. You know I do know how he feels. He can’t believe it didn’t mean anything.”

“I know.”

“Nobody else would behave as badly. Oh, I’m so sick of the whole thing. And Michael. Michael’s been lovely, too.”

“It’s been damned hard on Mike.”

“Yes. But he didn’t need to be a swine.”

“Everybody behaves badly,” I said. “Give them the proper chance.”

“You wouldn’t behave badly.” Brett looked at me.

“I’d be as big an ass as Cohn,” I said.

“Darling, don’t let’s talk a lot of rot.”

“All right. Talk about anything you like.”

“Don’t be difficult. You’re the only person I’ve got, and I feel rather awful to-night.”

“You’ve got Mike.”

“Yes, Mike. Hasn’t he been pretty?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s been damned hard on Mike, having Cohn around and seeing him with you.”

“Don’t I know it, darling? Please don’t make me feel any worse than I do.”

Brett was nervous as I had never seen her before. She kept looking away from me and looking ahead at the wall.

“Want to go for a walk?”

“Yes. Come on.”

I corked up the Fundador bottle and gave it to the bartender.

“Let’s have one more drink of that,” Brett said. “My nerves are rotten.”

We each drank a glass of the smooth amontillado brandy.

“Come on,” said Brett.

As we came out the door I saw Cohn walk out from under the arcade.

“He was there,” Brett said.

“He can’t be away from you.”

“Poor devil!”

“I’m not sorry for him. I hate him, myself.”

“I hate him, too,” she shivered. “I hate his damned suffering.”

We walked arm in arm down the side street away from the crowd and the lights of the square. The street was dark and wet, and we walked along it to the fortifications at the edge of town. We passed wine-shops with light coming out from their doors onto the black, wet street, and sudden bursts of music.

“Want to go in?”

“No.”

We walked out across the wet grass and onto the stone wall of the fortifications. I spread a newspaper on the stone and Brett sat down. Across the plain it was dark, and we could see the mountains. The wind was high up and took the clouds across the moon. Below us were the dark pits of the fortifications. Behind were the trees and the shadow of the cathedral, and the town silhouetted against the moon.

“Don’t feel bad,” I said.

“I feel like hell,” Brett said. “Don’t let’s talk.”

We looked out at the plain. The long lines of trees were dark in the moonlight. There were the lights of a car on the road climbing the mountain. Up on the top of the mountain we saw the lights of the fort. Below to the left was the river. It was high from the rain, and black and smooth. Trees were dark along the banks. We sat and looked out. Brett stared straight ahead. Suddenly she shivered.

“It’s cold.”

“Want to walk back?”

“Through the park.”

We climbed down. It was clouding over again. In the park it was dark under the trees.

“Do you still love me, Jake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Because I’m a goner,” Brett said.

“How?”

“I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.”

“I wouldn’t be if I were you.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner. It’s tearing me all up inside.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”

“You ought to stop it.”

“How can I stop it? I can’t stop things. Feel that?”

Her hand was trembling.

“I’m like that all through.”

“You oughtn’t to do it.”

“I can’t help it. I’m a goner now, anyway. Don’t you see the difference?”

“No.”

“I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to do something I really want to do. I’ve lost my self-respect.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Oh, darling, don’t be difficult. What do you think it’s meant to have that damned Jew about, and Mike the way he’s acted?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t just stay tight all the time.”

“No.”

“Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t say it’s right. It is right though for me. God knows, I’ve never felt such a bitch.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come on,” Brett said. “Let’s go and find him.”

Together we walked down the gravel path in the park in the dark, under the trees and then out from under the trees and past the gate into the street that led into town.

Pedro Romero was in the café. He was at a table with other bull-fighters and bull-fight critics. They were smoking cigars. When we came in they looked up. Romero smiled and bowed. We sat down at a table half-way down the room.

“Ask him to come over and have a drink.”

“Not yet. He’ll come over.”

“I can’t look at him.”

“He’s nice to look at,” I said.

“I’ve always done just what I wanted.”

“I know.”

“I do feel such a bitch.”

“Well,” I said.

“My God!” said Brett, “the things a woman goes through.”

“Yes?”

“Oh, I do feel such a bitch.”

I looked across at the table. Pedro Romero smiled. He said something to the other people at his table, and stood up. He came over to our table. I stood up and we shook hands.

“Won’t you have a drink?”

“You must have a drink with me,” he said. He seated himself, asking Brett’s permission without saying anything. He had very nice manners. But he kept on smoking his cigar. It went well with his face.

“You like cigars?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I always smoke cigars.”

It was part of his system of authority. It made him seem older. I noticed his skin. It was clear and smooth and very brown. There was a triangular scar on his cheek-bone. I saw he was watching Brett. He felt there was something between them. He must have felt it when Brett gave him her hand. He was being very careful. I think he was sure, but he did not want to make any mistake.

“You fight to-morrow?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Algabeno was hurt to-day in Madrid. Did you hear?”

“No,” I said. “Badly?”

He shook his head.

“Nothing. Here,” he showed his hand. Brett reached out and spread the fingers apart.

“Oh!” he said in English, “you tell fortunes?”

“Sometimes. Do you mind?”

“No. I like it.” He spread his hand flat on the table. “Tell me I live for always, and be a millionaire.”

He was still very polite, but he was surer of himself. “Look,” he said, “do you see any bulls in my hand?”

He laughed. His hand was very fine and the wrist was small.

“There are thousands of bulls,” Brett said. She was not at all nervous now. She looked lovely.

“Good,” Romero laughed. “At a thousand duros apiece,” he said to me in Spanish. “Tell me some more.”

“It’s a good hand,” Brett said. “I think he’ll live a long time.”

“Say it to me. Not to your friend.”

“I said you’d live a long time.”

“I know it,” Romero said. “I’m never going to die.”

I tapped with my finger-tips on the table. Romero saw it. He shook his head.

“No. Don’t do that. The bulls are my best friends.”

I translated to Brett.

“You kill your friends?” she asked.

“Always,” he said in English, and laughed. “So they don’t kill me.” He looked at her across the table.

“You know English well.”

“Yes,” he said. “Pretty well, sometimes. But I must not let anybody know. It would be very bad, a torero who speaks English.”

“Why?” asked Brett.

“It would be bad. The people would not like it. Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“They would not like it. Bull-fighters are not like that.”

“What are bull-fighters like?”

He laughed and tipped his hat down over his eyes and changed the angle of his cigar and the expression of his face.

“Like at the table,” he said. I glanced over. He had mimicked exactly the expression of Nacional. He smiled, his face natural again. “No. I must forget English.”

“Don’t forget it, yet,” Brett said.

“No?”

“No.”

“All right.”

He laughed again.

“I would like a hat like that,” Brett said.

“Good. I’ll get you one.”

“Right. See that you do.”

“I will. I’ll get you one to-night.”

I stood up. Romero rose, too.

“Sit down,” I said. “I must go and find our friends and bring them here.”

He looked at me. It was a final look to ask if it were understood. It was understood all right.

“Sit down,” Brett said to him. “You must teach me Spanish.”

He sat down and looked at her across the table. I went out. The hard-eyed people at the bull-fighter table watched me go. It was not pleasant. When I came back and looked in the café, twenty minutes later, Brett and Pedro Romero were gone. The coffee-glasses and our three empty cognac-glasses were on the table. A waiter came with a cloth and picked up the glasses and mopped off the table.

CHAPTER 17

Outside the Bar Milano I found Bill and Mike and Edna. Edna was the girl’s name.

“We’ve been thrown out,” Edna said.

“By the police,” said Mike. “There’s some people in there that don’t like me.”

“I’ve kept them out of four fights,” Edna said. “You’ve got to help me.”

Bill’s face was red.

“Come back in, Edna,” he said. “Go on in there and dance with Mike.”

“It’s silly,” Edna said. “There’ll just be another row.”

“Damned Biarritz swine,” Bill said.

“Come on,” Mike said. “After all, it’s a pub. They can’t occupy a whole pub.”

“Good old Mike,” Bill said. “Damned English swine come here and insult Mike and try and spoil the fiesta.”

“They’re so bloody,” Mike said. “I hate the English.”

“They can’t insult Mike,” Bill said. “Mike is a swell fellow. They can’t insult Mike. I won’t stand it. Who cares if he is a damn bankrupt?” His voice broke.

“Who cares?” Mike said. “I don’t care. Jake doesn’t care. Do you care?”

“No,” Edna said. “Are you a bankrupt?”

“Of course I am. You don’t care, do you, Bill?”

Bill put his arm around Mike’s shoulder.

“I wish to hell I was a bankrupt. I’d show those bastards.”

“They’re just English,” Mike said. “It never makes any difference what the English say.”

“The dirty swine,” Bill said. “I’m going to clean them out.”

“Bill,” Edna looked at me. “Please don’t go in again, Bill. They’re so stupid.”

“That’s it,” said Mike. “They’re stupid. I knew that was what it was.”

“They can’t say things like that about Mike,” Bill said.

“Do you know them?” I asked Mike.

“No. I never saw them. They say they know me.”

“I won’t stand it,” Bill said.

“Come on. Let’s go over to the Suizo,” I said.

“They’re a bunch of Edna’s friends from Biarritz,” Bill said.

“They’re simply stupid,” Edna said.

“One of them’s Charley Blackman, from Chicago,” Bill said.

“I was never in Chicago,” Mike said.

Edna started to laugh and could not stop.

“Take me away from here,” she said, “you bankrupts.”

“What kind of a row was it?” I asked Edna. We were walking across the square to the Suizo. Bill was gone.

“I don’t know what happened, but some one had the police called to keep Mike out of the back room. There were some people that had known Mike at Cannes. What’s the matter with Mike?”

“Probably he owes them money” I said. “That’s what people usually get bitter about.”

In front of the ticket-booths out in the square there were two lines of people waiting. They were sitting on chairs or crouched on the ground with blankets and newspapers around them. They were waiting for the wickets to open in the morning to buy tickets for the bull-fight. The night was clearing and the moon was out. Some of the people in the line were sleeping.

At the Café Suizo we had just sat down and ordered Fundador when Robert Cohn came up.

“Where’s Brett?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“She was with you.”

“She must have gone to bed.”

“She’s not.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

His face was sallow under the light. He was standing up.

“Tell me where she is.”

“Sit down,” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”

“The hell you don’t!”

“You can shut your face.”

“Tell me where Brett is.”

“I’ll not tell you a damn thing.”

“You know where she is.”

“If I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

“Oh, go to hell, Cohn,” Mike called from the table. “Brett’s gone off with the bull-fighter chap. They’re on their honeymoon.”

“You shut up.”

“Oh, go to hell!” Mike said languidly.

“Is that where she is?” Cohn turned to me.

“Go to hell!”

“She was with you. Is that where she is?”

“Go to hell!”

“I’ll make you tell me” — he stepped forward— “you damned pimp.”

I swung at him and he ducked. I saw his face duck sideways in the light. He hit me and I sat down on the pavement. As I started to get on my feet he hit me twice. I went down backward under a table. I tried to get up and felt I did not have any legs. I felt I must get on my feet and try and hit him. Mike helped me up. Some one poured a carafe of water on my head. Mike had an arm around me, and I found I was sitting on a chair. Mike was pulling at my ears.

“I say, you were cold,” Mike said.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Oh, I was around.”

“You didn’t want to mix in it?”

“He knocked Mike down, too,” Edna said.

“He didn’t knock me out,” Mike said. “I just lay there.”

“Does this happen every night at your fiestas?” Edna asked. “Wasn’t that Mr. Cohn?”

“I’m all right,” I said. “My head’s a little wobbly.”

There were several waiters and a crowd of people standing around.

“Vaya!” said Mike. “Get away. Go on.”

The waiters moved the people away.

“It was quite a thing to watch,” Edna said. “He must be a boxer.”

“He is.”

“I wish Bill had been here,” Edna said. “I’d like to have seen Bill knocked down, too. I’ve always wanted to see Bill knocked down. He’s so big.”

“I was hoping he would knock down a waiter,” Mike said, “and get arrested. I’d like to see Mr. Robert Cohn in jail.”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Edna. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do, though,” Mike said. “I’m not one of these chaps likes being knocked about. I never play games, even.”

Mike took a drink.

“I never liked to hunt, you know. There was always the danger of having a horse fall on you. How do you feel, Jake?”

“All right.”

“You’re nice,” Edna said to Mike. “Are you really a bankrupt?”

“I’m a tremendous bankrupt,” Mike said. “I owe money to everybody. Don’t you owe any money?”

“Tons.”

“I owe everybody money,” Mike said. “I borrowed a hundred pesetas from Montoya to-night.”

“The hell you did,” I said.

“I’ll pay it back,” Mike said. “I always pay everything back.”

“That’s why you’re a bankrupt, isn’t it?” Edna said.

I stood up. I had heard them talking from a long way away. It all seemed like some bad play.

“I’m going over to the hotel,” I said. Then I heard them talking about me.

“Is he all right?” Edna asked.

“We’d better walk with him.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Don’t come. I’ll see you all later.”

I walked away from the café. They were sitting at the table. I looked back at them and at the empty tables. There was a waiter sitting at one of the tables with his head in his hands.

Walking across the square to the hotel everything looked new and changed. I had never seen the trees before. I had never seen the flagpoles before, nor the front of the theatre. It was all different. I felt as I felt once coming home from an out-of-town football game. I was carrying a suitcase with my football things in it, and I walked up the street from the station in the town I had lived in all my life and it was all new. They were raking the lawns and burning leaves in the road, and I stopped for a long time and watched. It was all strange. Then I went on, and my feet seemed to be a long way off, and everything seemed to come from a long way off, and I could hear my feet walking a great distance away. I had been kicked in the head early in the game. It was like that crossing the square. It was like that going up the stairs in the hotel. Going up the stairs took a long time, and I had the feeling that I was carrying my suitcase. There was a light in the room. Bill came out and met me in the hall.

“Say,” he said, “go up and see Cohn. He’s been in a jam, and he’s asking for you.”

“The hell with him.”

“Go on. Go on up and see him.”

I did not want to climb another flight of stairs.

“What are you looking at me that way for?”

“I’m not looking at you. Go on up and see Cohn. He’s in bad shape.”

“You were drunk a little while ago,” I said.

“I’m drunk now,” Bill said. “But you go up and see Cohn. He wants to see you.”

“All right,” I said. It was just a matter of climbing more stairs. I went on up the stairs carrying my phantom suitcase. I walked down the hall to Cohn’s room. The door was shut and I knocked.

“Who is it?”

“Barnes.”

“Come in, Jake.”

I opened the door and went in, and set down my suitcase. There was no light in the room. Cohn was lying, face down, on the bed in the dark.

“Hello, Jake.”

“Don’t call me Jake.”

I stood by the door. It was just like this that I had come home. Now it was a hot bath that I needed. A deep, hot bath, to lie back in.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I asked.

Cohn was crying. There he was, face down on the bed, crying. He had on a white polo shirt, the kind he’d worn at Princeton.

“I’m sorry, Jake. Please forgive me.”

“Forgive you, hell.”

“Please forgive me, Jake.”

I did not say anything. I stood there by the door.

“I was crazy. You must see how it was.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“I couldn’t stand it about Brett.”

“You called me a pimp.”

I did not care. I wanted a hot bath. I wanted a hot bath in deep water.

“I know. Please don’t remember it. I was crazy.”

“That’s all right.”

He was crying. His voice was funny. He lay there in his white shirt on the bed in the dark. His polo shirt.

“I’m going away in the morning.”

He was crying without making any noise.

“I just couldn’t stand it about Brett. I’ve been through hell, Jake. It’s been simply hell. When I met her down here Brett treated me as though I were a perfect stranger. I just couldn’t stand it. We lived together at San Sebastian. I suppose you know it. I can’t stand it any more.”

He lay there on the bed.

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to take a bath.”

“You were the only friend I had, and I loved Brett so.”

“Well,” I said, “so long.”

“I guess it isn’t any use,” he said. “I guess it isn’t any damn use.”

“What?”

“Everything. Please say you forgive me, Jake.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“I felt so terribly. I’ve been through such hell, Jake. Now everything’s gone. Everything.”

“Well,” I said, “so long. I’ve got to go.”

He rolled over, sat on the edge of the bed, and then stood up.

“So long, Jake,” he said. “You’ll shake hands, won’t you?”

“Sure. Why not?”

We shook hands. In the dark I could not see his face very well.

“Well,” I said, “see you in the morning.”

“I’m going away in the morning.”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

I went out. Cohn was standing in the door of the room.

“Are you all right, Jake?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m all right.”

I could not find the bathroom. After a while I found it. There was a deep stone tub. I turned on the taps and the water would not run. I sat down on the edge of the bath-tub. When I got up to go I found I had taken off my shoes. I hunted for them and found them and carried them down-stairs. I found my room and went inside and undressed and got into bed.

* * * * *

I woke with a headache and the noise of the bands going by in the street. I remembered I had promised to take Bill’s friend Edna to see the bulls go through the street and into the ring. I dressed and went down-stairs and out into the cold early morning. People were crossing the square, hurrying toward the bull-ring. Across the square were the two lines of men in front of the ticket-booths. They were still waiting for the tickets to go on sale at seven o’clock. I hurried across the street to the café. The waiter told me that my friends had been there and gone.

“How many were they?”

“Two gentlemen and a lady.”

That was all right. Bill and Mike were with Edna. She had been afraid last night they would pass out. That was why I was to be sure to take her. I drank the coffee and hurried with the other people toward the bull-ring. I was not groggy now. There was only a bad headache. Everything looked sharp and clear, and the town smelt of the early morning.

The stretch of ground from the edge of the town to the bull-ring was muddy. There was a crowd all along the fence that led to the ring, and the outside balconies and the top of the bull-ring were solid with people. I heard the rocket and I knew I could not get into the ring in time to see the bulls come in, so I shoved through the crowd to the fence. I was pushed close against the planks of the fence. Between the two fences of the runway the police were clearing the crowd along. They walked or trotted on into the bull-ring. Then people commenced to come running. A drunk slipped and fell. Two policemen grabbed him and rushed him over to the fence. The crowd were running fast now. There was a great shout from the crowd, and putting my head through between the boards I saw the bulls just coming out of the street into the long running pen. They were going fast and gaining on the crowd. Just then another drunk started out from the fence with a blouse in his hands. He wanted to do capework with the bulls. The two policemen tore out, collared him, one hit him with a club, and they dragged him against the fence and stood flattened out against the fence as the last of the crowd and the bulls went by. There were so many people running ahead of the bulls that the mass thickened and slowed up going through the gate into the ring, and as the bulls passed, galloping together, heavy, muddy-sided, horns swinging, one shot ahead, caught a man in the running crowd in the back and lifted him in the air. Both the man’s arms were by his sides, his head went back as the horn went in, and the bull lifted him and then dropped him. The bull picked another man running in front, but the man disappeared into the crowd, and the crowd was through the gate and into the ring with the bulls behind them. The red door of the ring went shut, the crowd on the outside balconies of the bull-ring were pressing through to the inside, there was a shout, then another shout.

The man who had been gored lay face down in the trampled mud. People climbed over the fence, and I could not see the man because the crowd was so thick around him. From inside the ring came the shouts. Each shout meant a charge by some bull into the crowd. You could tell by the degree of intensity in the shout how bad a thing it was that was happening. Then the rocket went up that meant the steers had gotten the bulls out of the ring and into the corrals. I left the fence and started back toward the town.

Back in the town I went to the café to have a second coffee and some buttered toast. The waiters were sweeping out the café and mopping off the tables. One came over and took my order.

“Anything happen at the encierro?”

“I didn’t see it all. One man was badly cogido.”

“Where?”

“Here.” I put one hand on the small of my back and the other on my chest, where it looked as though the horn must have come through. The waiter nodded his head and swept the crumbs from the table with his cloth.

“Badly cogido,” he said. “All for sport. All for pleasure.”

He went away and came back with the long-handled coffee and milk pots. He poured the milk and coffee. It came out of the long spouts in two streams into the big cup. The waiter nodded his head.

“Badly cogido through the back,” he said. He put the pots down on the table and sat down in the chair at the table. “A big horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s it. All for fun. Fun, you understand.”

“You’re not an aficionado?”

“Me? What are bulls? Animals. Brute animals.” He stood up and put his hand on the small of his back. “Right through the back. A cornada right through the back. For fun — you understand.”

He shook his head and walked away, carrying the coffee-pots. Two men were going by in the street. The waiter shouted to them. They were grave-looking. One shook his head. “Muerto!” he called.

The waiter nodded his head. The two men went on. They were on some errand. The waiter came over to my table.

“You hear? Muerto. Dead. He’s dead. With a horn through him. All for morning fun. Es muy flamenco.”

“It’s bad.”

“Not for me,” the waiter said. “No fun in that for me.”

Later in the day we learned that the man who was killed was named Vicente Girones, and came from near Tafalla. The next day in the paper we read that he was twenty-eight years old, and had a farm, a wife, and two children. He had continued to come to the fiesta each year after he was married. The next day his wife came in from Tafalla to be with the body, and the day after there was a service in the chapel of San Fermin, and the coffin was carried to the railway-station by members of the dancing and drinking society of Tafalla. The drums marched ahead, and there was music on the fifes, and behind the men who carried the coffin walked the wife and two children.... Behind them marched all the members of the dancing and drinking societies of Pamplona, Estella, Tafalla, and Sanguesa who could stay over for the funeral. The coffin was loaded into the baggage-car of the train, and the widow and the two children rode, sitting, all three together, in an open third-class railway-carriage. The train started with a jerk, and then ran smoothly, going down grade around the edge of the plateau and out into the fields of grain that blew in the wind on the plain on the way to Tafalla.

The bull who killed Vicente Girones was named Bocanegra, was Number 118 of the bull-breeding establishment of Sanchez Tabemo, and was killed by Pedro Romero as the third bull of that same afternoon. His ear was cut by popular acclamation and given to Pedro Romero, who, in turn, gave it to Brett, who wrapped it in a handkerchief belonging to myself, and left both ear and handkerchief, along with a number of Muratti cigarette-stubs, shoved far back in the drawer of the bed-table that stood beside her bed in the Hotel Montoya, in Pamplona.

* * * * *

Back in the hotel, the night watchman was sitting on a bench inside the door. He had been there all night and was very sleepy. He stood up as I came in. Three of the waitresses came in at the same time. They had been to the morning show at the bull-ring. They went up-stairs laughing. I followed them up-stairs and went into my room. I took off my shoes and lay down on the bed. The window was open onto the balcony and the sunlight was bright in the room. I did not feel sleepy. It must have been half past three o’clock when I had gone to bed and the bands had waked me at six. My jaw was sore on both sides. I felt it with my thumb and fingers. That damn Cohn. He should have hit somebody the first time he was insulted, and then gone away. He was so sure that Brett loved him. He was going to stay, and true love would conquer all. Some one knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

It was Bill and Mike. They sat down on the bed.

“Some encierro,” Bill said. “Some encierro.”

“I say, weren’t you there?” Mike asked. “Ring for some beer, Bill.”

“What a morning!” Bill said. He mopped off his face. “My God! what a morning! And here’s old Jake. Old Jake, the human punching-bag.”

“What happened inside?”

“Good God!” Bill said, “what happened, Mike?”

“There were these bulls coming in,” Mike said. “Just ahead of them was the crowd, and some chap tripped and brought the whole lot of them down.”

“And the bulls all came in right over them,” Bill said.

“I heard them yell.”

“That was Edna,” Bill said.

“Chaps kept coming out and waving their shirts.”

“One bull went along the barrera and hooked everybody over.”

“They took about twenty chaps to the infirmary,” Mike said.

“What a morning!” Bill said. “The damn police kept arresting chaps that wanted to go and commit suicide with the bulls.”

“The steers took them in, in the end,” Mike said.

“It took about an hour.”

“It was really about a quarter of an hour,” Mike objected.

“Oh, go to hell,” Bill said. “You’ve been in the war. It was two hours and a half for me.”

“Where’s that beer?” Mike asked.

“What did you do with the lovely Edna?”

“We took her home just now. She’s gone to bed.”

“How did she like it?”

“Fine. We told her it was just like that every morning.”

“She was impressed,” Mike said.

“She wanted us to go down in the ring, too,” Bill said. “She likes action.”

“I said it wouldn’t be fair to my creditors,” Mike said.

“What a morning,” Bill said. “And what a night!”

“How’s your jaw, Jake?” Mike asked.

“Sore,” I said.

Bill laughed.

“Why didn’t you hit him with a chair?”

“You can talk,” Mike said. “He’d have knocked you out, too. I never saw him hit me. I rather think I saw him just before, and then quite suddenly I was sitting down in the street, and Jake was lying under a table.”

“Where did he go afterward?” I asked.

“Here she is,” Mike said. “Here’s the beautiful lady with the beer.”

The chambermaid put the tray with the beer-bottles and glasses down on the table.

“Now bring up three more bottles,” Mike said.

“Where did Cohn go after he hit me?” I asked Bill.

“Don’t you know about that?” Mike was opening a beer-bottle. He poured the beer into one of the glasses, holding the glass close to the bottle.

“Really?” Bill asked.

“Why he went in and found Brett and the bull-fighter chap in the bull-fighter’s room, and then he massacred the poor, bloody bull-fighter.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“What a night!” Bill said.

“He nearly killed the poor, bloody bull-fighter. Then Cohn wanted to take Brett away. Wanted to make an honest woman of her, I imagine. Damned touching scene.”

He took a long drink of the beer.

“He is an ass.”

“What happened?”

“Brett gave him what for. She told him off. I think she was rather good.”

“I’ll bet she was,” Bill said.

“Then Cohn broke down and cried, and wanted to shake hands with the bull-fighter fellow. He wanted to shake hands with Brett, too.”

“I know. He shook hands with me.”

“Did he? Well, they weren’t having any of it. The bull-fighter fellow was rather good. He didn’t say much, but he kept getting up and getting knocked down again. Cohn couldn’t knock him out. It must have been damned funny.”

“Where did you hear all this?”

“Brett. I saw her this morning.”

“What happened finally?”

“It seems the bull-fighter fellow was sitting on the bed. He’d been knocked down about fifteen times, and he wanted to fight some more. Brett held him and wouldn’t let him get up. He was weak, but Brett couldn’t hold him, and he got up. Then Cohn said he wouldn’t hit him again. Said he couldn’t do it. Said it would be wicked. So the bull-fighter chap sort of rather staggered over to him. Cohn went back against the wall.

“‘So you won’t hit me?’

“‘No,’ said Cohn. ‘I’d be ashamed to.’

“So the bull-fighter fellow hit him just as hard as he could in the face, and then sat down on the floor. He couldn’t get up, Brett said. Cohn wanted to pick him up and carry him to the bed. He said if Cohn helped him he’d kill him, and he’d kill him anyway this morning if Cohn wasn’t out of town. Cohn was crying, and Brett had told him off, and he wanted to shake hands. I’ve told you that before.”

“Tell the rest,” Bill said.

“It seems the bull-fighter chap was sitting on the floor. He was waiting to get strength enough to get up and hit Cohn again. Brett wasn’t having any shaking hands, and Cohn was crying and telling her how much he loved her, and she was telling him not to be a ruddy ass. Then Cohn leaned down to shake hands with the bull-fighter fellow. No hard feelings, you know. All for forgiveness. And the bull-fighter chap hit him in the face again.”

“That’s quite a kid,” Bill said.

“He ruined Cohn,” Mike said. “You know I don’t think Cohn will ever want to knock people about again.”

“When did you see Brett?”

“This morning. She came in to get some things. She’s looking after this Romero lad.”

He poured out another bottle of beer.

“Brett’s rather cut up. But she loves looking after people. That’s how we came to go off together. She was looking after me.”

“I know,” I said.

“I’m rather drunk,” Mike said. “I think I’ll stay rather drunk. This is all awfully amusing, but it’s not too pleasant. It’s not too pleasant for me.”

He drank off the beer.

“I gave Brett what for, you know. I said if she would go about with Jews and bull-fighters and such people, she must expect trouble.” He leaned forward. “I say, Jake, do you mind if I drink that bottle of yours? She’ll bring you another one.”

“Please,” I said. “I wasn’t drinking it, anyway.”

Mike started to open the bottle. “Would you mind opening it?” I pressed up the wire fastener and poured it for him.

“You know,” Mike went on, “Brett was rather good. She’s always rather good. I gave her a fearful hiding about Jews and bull-fighters, and all those sort of people, and do you know what she said: ‘Yes. I’ve had such a hell of a happy life with the British aristocracy!’”

He took a drink.

“That was rather good. Ashley, chap she got the title from, was a sailor, you know. Ninth baronet. When he came home he wouldn’t sleep in a bed. Always made Brett sleep on the floor. Finally, when he got really bad, he used to tell her he’d kill her. Always slept with a loaded service revolver. Brett used to take the shells out when he’d gone to sleep. She hasn’t had an absolutely happy life. Brett. Damned shame, too. She enjoys things so.”

He stood up. His hand was shaky.

“I’m going in the room. Try and get a little sleep.”

He smiled.

“We go too long without sleep in these fiestas. I’m going to start now and get plenty of sleep. Damn bad thing not to get sleep. Makes you frightfully nervy.”

“We’ll see you at noon at the Iruña,” Bill said.

Mike went out the door. We heard him in the next room.

He rang the bell and the chambermaid came and knocked at the door.

“Bring up half a dozen bottles of beer and a bottle of Fundador,” Mike told her.

“Si, Señorito.”

“I’m going to bed,” Bill said. “Poor old Mike. I had a hell of a row about him last night.”

“Where? At that Milano place?”

“Yes. There was a fellow there that had helped pay Brett and Mike out of Cannes, once. He was damned nasty.”

“I know the story.”

“I didn’t. Nobody ought to have a right to say things about Mike.”

“That’s what makes it bad.”

“They oughtn’t to have any right. I wish to hell they didn’t have any right. I’m going to bed.”

“Was anybody killed in the ring?”

“I don’t think so. Just badly hurt.”

“A man was killed outside in the runway.”

“Was there?” said Bill.

CHAPTER 18

At noon we were all at the café. It was crowded. We were eating shrimps and drinking beer. The town was crowded. Every street was full. Big motor-cars from Biarritz and San Sebastian kept driving up and parking around the square. They brought people for the bull-fight. Sight-seeing cars came up, too. There was one with twenty-five Englishwomen in it. They sat in the big, white car and looked through their glasses at the fiesta. The dancers were all quite drunk. It was the last day of the fiesta.

The fiesta was solid and unbroken, but the motor-cars and tourist-cars made little islands of onlookers. When the cars emptied, the onlookers were absorbed into the crowd. You did not see them again except as sport clothes, odd-looking at a table among the closely packed peasants in black smocks. The fiesta absorbed even the Biarritz English so that you did not see them unless you passed close to a table. All the time there was music in the street. The drums kept on pounding and the pipes were going. Inside the cafés men with their hands gripping the table, or on each other’s shoulders, were singing the hard-voiced singing.

“Here comes Brett,” Bill said.

I looked and saw her coming through the crowd in the square, walking, her head up, as though the fiesta were being staged in her honor, and she found it pleasant and amusing.

“Hello, you chaps!” she said. “I say, I have a thirst.”

“Get another big beer,” Bill said to the waiter.

“Shrimps?”

“Is Cohn gone?” Brett asked.

“Yes,” Bill said. “He hired a car.”

The beer came. Brett started to lift the glass mug and her hand shook. She saw it and smiled, and leaned forward and took a long sip.

“Good beer.”

“Very good,” I said. I was nervous about Mike. I did not think he had slept. He must have been drinking all the time, but he seemed to be under control.

“I heard Cohn had hurt you, Jake,” Brett said.

“No. Knocked me out. That was all.”

“I say, he did hurt Pedro Romero,” Brett said. “He hurt him most badly.”

“How is he?”

“He’ll be all right. He won’t go out of the room.”

“Does he look badly?”

“Very. He was really hurt. I told him I wanted to pop out and see you chaps for a minute.”

“Is he going to fight?”

“Rather. I’m going with you, if you don’t mind.”

“How’s your boy friend?” Mike asked. He had not listened to anything that Brett had said.

“Brett’s got a bull-fighter,” he said. “She had a Jew named Cohn, but he turned out badly.”

Brett stood up.

“I am not going to listen to that sort of rot from you, Michael.”

“How’s your boy friend?”

“Damned well,” Brett said. “Watch him this afternoon.”

“Brett’s got a bull-fighter,” Mike said. “A beautiful, bloody bull-fighter.”

“Would you mind walking over with me? I want to talk to you, Jake.”

“Tell him all about your bull-fighter,” Mike said. “Oh, to hell with your bull-fighter!” He tipped the table so that all the beers and the dish of shrimps went over in a crash.

“Come on,” Brett said. “Let’s get out of this.”

In the crowd crossing the square I said: “How is it?”

“I’m not going to see him after lunch until the fight. His people come in and dress him. They’re very angry about me, he says.”

Brett was radiant. She was happy. The sun was out and the day was bright.

“I feel altogether changed,” Brett said. “You’ve no idea, Jake.”

“Anything you want me to do?”

“No, just go to the fight with me.”

“We’ll see you at lunch?”

“No. I’m eating with him.”

We were standing under the arcade at the door of the hotel. They were carrying tables out and setting them up under the arcade.

“Want to take a turn out to the park?” Brett asked. “I don’t want to go up yet. I fancy he’s sleeping.”

We walked along past the theatre and out of the square and along through the barracks of the fair, moving with the crowd between the lines of booths. We came out on a cross-street that led to the Paseo de Sarasate. We could see the crowd walking there, all the fashionably dressed people. They were making the turn at the upper end of the park.

“Don’t let’s go there,” Brett said. “I don’t want staring at just now.”

We stood in the sunlight. It was hot and good after the rain and the clouds from the sea.

“I hope the wind goes down,” Brett said. “It’s very bad for him.”

“So do I.”

“He says the bulls are all right.”

“They’re good.”

“Is that San Fermin’s?”

Brett looked at the yellow wall of the chapel.

“Yes. Where the show started on Sunday.”

“Let’s go in. Do you mind? I’d rather like to pray a little for him or something.”

We went in through the heavy leather door that moved very lightly. It was dark inside. Many people were praying. You saw them as your eyes adjusted themselves to the half-light. We knelt at one of the long wooden benches. After a little I felt Brett stiffen beside me, and saw she was looking straight ahead.

“Come on,” she whispered throatily. “Let’s get out of here. Makes me damned nervous.”

Outside in the hot brightness of the street Brett looked up at the tree-tops in the wind. The praying had not been much of a success.

“Don’t know why I get so nervy in church,” Brett said. “Never does me any good.”

We walked along.

“I’m damned bad for a religious atmosphere,” Brett said. “I’ve the wrong type of face.

“You know,” Brett said, “I’m not worried about him at all. I just feel happy about him.”

“Good.”

“I wish the wind would drop, though.”

“It’s liable to go down by five o’clock.”

“Let’s hope.”

“You might pray,” I laughed.

“Never does me any good. I’ve never gotten anything I prayed for. Have you?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, rot,” said Brett. “Maybe it works for some people, though. You don’t look very religious, Jake.”

“I’m pretty religious.”

“Oh, rot,” said Brett. “Don’t start proselyting to-day. To-day’s going to be bad enough as it is.”

It was the first time I had seen her in the old happy, careless way since before she went off with Cohn. We were back again in front of the hotel. All the tables were set now, and already several were filled with people eating.

“Do look after Mike,” Brett said. “Don’t let him get too bad.”

“Your frients haff gone up-stairs,” the German maître d’hôtel said in English. He was a continual eavesdropper. Brett turned to him:

“Thank you, so much. Have you anything else to say?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Good,” said Brett.

“Save us a table for three,” I said to the German. He smiled his dirty little pink-and-white smile.

“Iss madam eating here?”

“No,” Brett said.

“Den I think a tabul for two will be enuff.”

“Don’t talk to him,” Brett said. “Mike must have been in bad shape,” she said on the stairs. We passed Montoya on the stairs. He bowed and did not smile.

“I’ll see you at the café,” Brett said. “Thank you, so much, Jake.”

We had stopped at the floor our rooms were on. She went straight down the hall and into Romero’s room. She did not knock. She simply opened the door, went in, and closed it behind her.

I stood in front of the door of Mike’s room and knocked. There was no answer. I tried the knob and it opened. Inside the room was in great disorder. All the bags were opened and clothing was strewn around. There were empty bottles beside the bed. Mike lay on the bed looking like a death mask of himself. He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Hello, Jake,” he said very slowly. “I’m getting a lit tle sleep. I’ve want ed a lit tle sleep for a long time.”

“Let me cover you over.”

“No. I’m quite warm.”

“Don’t go. I have n’t got ten to sleep yet.”

“You’ll sleep, Mike. Don’t worry, boy.”

“Brett’s got a bull-fighter,” Mike said. “But her Jew has gone away.”

He turned his head and looked at me.

“Damned good thing, what?”

“Yes. Now go to sleep, Mike. You ought to get some sleep.”

“I’m just start ing. I’m go ing to get a lit tle sleep.”

He shut his eyes. I went out of the room and turned the door to quietly. Bill was in my room reading the paper.

“See Mike?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go and eat.”

“I won’t eat down-stairs with that German head waiter. He was damned snotty when I was getting Mike up-stairs.”

“He was snotty to us, too.”

“Let’s go out and eat in the town.”

We went down the stairs. On the stairs we passed a girl coming up with a covered tray.

“There goes Brett’s lunch,” Bill said.

“And the kid’s,” I said.

Outside on the terrace under the arcade the German head waiter came up. His red cheeks were shiny. He was being polite.

“I haff a tabul for two for you gentlemen,” he said.

“Go sit at it,” Bill said. We went on out across the street.

We ate at a restaurant in a side street off the square. They were all men eating in the restaurant. It was full of smoke and drinking and singing. The food was good and so was the wine. We did not talk much. Afterward we went to the café and watched the fiesta come to the boiling-point. Brett came over soon after lunch. She said she had looked in the room and that Mike was asleep.

When the fiesta boiled over and toward the bull-ring we went with the crowd. Brett sat at the ringside between Bill and me. Directly below us was the callejon, the passageway between the stands and the red fence of the barrera. Behind us the concrete stands filled solidly. Out in front, beyond the red fence, the sand of the ring was smooth-rolled and yellow. It looked a little heavy from the rain, but it was dry in the sun and firm and smooth. The sword-handlers and bull-ring servants came down the callejon carrying on their shoulders the wicker baskets of fighting capes and muletas. They were bloodstained and compactly folded and packed in the baskets. The sword-handlers opened the heavy leather sword-cases so the red wrapped hilts of the sheaf of swords showed as the leather case leaned against the fence. They unfolded the dark-stained red flannel of the muletas and fixed batons in them to spread the stuff and give the matador something to hold. Brett watched it all. She was absorbed in the professional details.

“He’s his name stencilled on all the capes and muletas,” she said. “Why do they call them muletas?”

“I don’t know.”

“I wonder if they ever launder them.”

“I don’t think so. It might spoil the color.”

“The blood must stiffen them,” Bill said.

“Funny,” Brett said. “How one doesn’t mind the blood.”

Below in the narrow passage of the callejon the sword-handlers arranged everything. All the seats were full. Above, all the boxes were full. There was not an empty seat except in the President’s box. When he came in the fight would start. Across the smooth sand, in the high doorway that led into the corrals, the bull-fighters were standing, their arms furled in their capes, talking, waiting for the signal to march in across the arena. Brett was watching them with the glasses.

“Here, would you like to look?”

I looked through the glasses and saw the three matadors. Romero was in the centre, Belmonte on his left, Marcial on his right. Back of them were their people, and behind the banderilleros, back in the passageway and in the open space of the corral, I saw the picadors. Romero was wearing a black suit. His tricornered hat was low down over his eyes. I could not see his face clearly under the hat, but it looked badly marked. He was looking straight ahead. Marcial was smoking a cigarette guardedly, holding it in his hand. Belmonte looked ahead, his face wan and yellow, his long wolf jaw out. He was looking at nothing. Neither he nor Romero seemed to have anything in common with the others. They were all alone. The President came in; there was handclapping above us in the grand stand, and I handed the glasses to Brett. There was applause. The music started. Brett looked through the glasses.

“Here, take them,” she said.

Through the glasses I saw Belmonte speak to Romero. Marcial straightened up and dropped his cigarette, and, looking straight ahead, their heads back, their free arms swinging, the three matadors walked out. Behind them came all the procession, opening out, all striding in step, all the capes furled, everybody with free arms swinging, and behind rode the picadors, their pics rising like lances. Behind all came the two trains of mules and the bull-ring servants. The matadors bowed, holding their hats on, before the President’s box, and then came over to the barrera below us. Pedro Romero took off his heavy gold-brocaded cape and handed it over the fence to his sword-handler. He said something to the sword-handler. Close below us we saw Romero’s lips were puffed, both eyes were discolored. His face was discolored and swollen. The sword-handler took the cape, looked up at Brett, and came over to us and handed up the cape.

“Spread it out in front of you,” I said.

Brett leaned forward. The cape was heavy and smoothly stiff with gold. The sword-handler looked back, shook his head, and said something. A man beside me leaned over toward Brett.

“He doesn’t want you to spread it,” he said. “You should fold it and keep it in your lap.”

Brett folded the heavy cape.

Romero did not look up at us. He was speaking to Belmonte. Belmonte had sent his formal cape over to some friends. He looked across at them and smiled, his wolf smile that was only with the mouth. Romero leaned over the barrera and asked for the water-jug. The sword-handler brought it and Romero poured water over the percale of his fighting-cape, and then scuffed the lower folds in the sand with his slippered foot.

“What’s that for?” Brett asked.

“To give it weight in the wind.”

“His face looks bad,” Bill said.

“He feels very badly,” Brett said. “He should be in bed.”

The first bull was Belmonte’s. Belmonte was very good. But because he got thirty thousand pesetas and people had stayed in line all night to buy tickets to see him, the crowd demanded that he should be more than very good. Belmonte’s great attraction is working close to the bull. In bull-fighting they speak of the terrain of the bull and the terrain of the bull-fighter. As long as a bull-fighter stays in his own terrain he is comparatively safe. Each time he enters into the terrain of the bull he is in great danger. Belmonte, in his best days, worked always in the terrain of the bull. This way he gave the sensation of coming tragedy. People went to the corrida to see Belmonte, to be given tragic sensations, and perhaps to see the death of Belmonte. Fifteen years ago they said if you wanted to see Belmonte you should go quickly, while he was still alive. Since then he has killed more than a thousand bulls. When he retired the legend grew up about how his bull-fighting had been, and when he came out of retirement the public were disappointed because no real man could work as close to the bulls as Belmonte was supposed to have done, not, of course, even Belmonte.

Also Belmonte imposed conditions and insisted that his bulls should not be too large, nor too dangerously armed with horns, and so the element that was necessary to give the sensation of tragedy was not there, and the public, who wanted three times as much from Belmonte, who was sick with a fistula, as Belmonte had ever been able to give, felt defrauded and cheated, and Belmonte’s jaw came further out in contempt, and his face turned yellower, and he moved with greater difficulty as his pain increased, and finally the crowd were actively against him, and he was utterly contemptuous and indifferent. He had meant to have a great afternoon, and instead it was an afternoon of sneers, shouted insults, and finally a volley of cushions and pieces of bread and vegetables, thrown down at him in the plaza where he had had his greatest triumphs. His jaw only went further out. Sometimes he turned to smile that toothed, long-jawed, lipless smile when he was called something particularly insulting, and always the pain that any movement produced grew stronger and stronger, until finally his yellow face was parchment color, and after his second bull was dead and the throwing of bread and cushions was over, after he had saluted the President with the same wolf-jawed smile and contemptuous eyes, and handed his sword over the barrera to be wiped, and put back in its case, he passed through into the callejon and leaned on the barrera below us, his head on his arms, not seeing, not hearing anything, only going through his pain. When he looked up, finally, he asked for a drink of water. He swallowed a little, rinsed his mouth, spat the water, took his cape, and went back into the ring.

Because they were against Belmonte the public were for Romero. From the moment he left the barrera and went toward the bull they applauded him. Belmonte watched Romero, too, watched him always without seeming to. He paid no attention to Marcial. Marcial was the sort of thing he knew all about. He had come out of retirement to compete with Marcial, knowing it was a competition gained in advance. He had expected to compete with Marcial and the other stars of the decadence of bull-fighting, and he knew that the sincerity of his own bull-fighting would be so set off by the false æsthetics of the bull-fighters of the decadent period that he would only have to be in the ring. His return from retirement had been spoiled by Romero. Romero did always, smoothly, calmly, and beautifully, what he, Belmonte, could only bring himself to do now sometimes. The crowd felt it, even the people from Biarritz, even the American ambassador saw it, finally. It was a competition that Belmonte would not enter because it would lead only to a bad horn wound or death. Belmonte was no longer well enough. He no longer had his greatest moments in the bull-ring. He was not sure that there were any great moments. Things were not the same and now life only came in flashes. He had flashes of the old greatness with his bulls, but they were not of value because he had discounted them in advance when he had picked the bulls out for their safety, getting out of a motor and leaning on a fence, looking over at the herd on the ranch of his friend the bull-breeder. So he had two small, manageable bulls without much horns, and when he felt the greatness again coming, just a little of it through the pain that was always with him, it had been discounted and sold in advance, and it did not give him a good feeling. It was the greatness, but it did not make bull-fighting wonderful to him any more.

Pedro Romero had the greatness. He loved bull-fighting, and I think he loved the bulls, and I think he loved Brett. Everything of which he could control the locality he did in front of her all that afternoon. Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon.

His first “quite” was directly below us. The three matadors take the bull in turn after each charge he makes at a picador. Belmonte was the first. Marcial was the second. Then came Romero. The three of them were standing at the left of the horse. The picador, his hat down over his eyes, the shaft of his pic angling sharply toward the bull, kicked in the spurs and held them and with the reins in his left hand walked the horse forward toward the bull. The bull was watching. Seemingly he watched the white horse, but really he watched the triangular steel point of the pic. Romero, watching, saw the bull start to turn his head. He did not want to charge. Romero flicked his cape so the color caught the bull’s eye. The bull charged with the reflex, charged, and found not the flash of color but a white horse, and a man leaned far over the horse, shot the steel point of the long hickory shaft into the hump of muscle on the bull’s shoulder, and pulled his horse sideways as he pivoted on the pic, making a wound, enforcing the iron into the bull’s shoulder, making him bleed for Belmonte.

The bull did not insist under the iron. He did not really want to get at the horse. He turned and the group broke apart and Romero was taking him out with his cape. He took him out softly and smoothly, and then stopped and, standing squarely in front of the bull, offered him the cape. The bull’s tail went up and he charged, and Romero moved his arms ahead of the bull, wheeling, his feet firmed. The dampened, mud-weighted cape swung open and full as a sail fills, and Romero pivoted with it just ahead of the bull. At the end of the pass they were facing each other again. Romero smiled. The bull wanted it again, and Romero’s cape filled again, this time on the other side. Each time he let the bull pass so close that the man and the bull and the cape that filled and pivoted ahead of the bull were all one sharply etched mass. It was all so slow and so controlled. It was as though he were rocking the bull to sleep. He made four veronicas like that, and finished with a half-veronica that turned his back on the bull and came away toward the applause, his hand on his hip, his cape on his arm, and the bull watching his back going away.

In his own bulls he was perfect. His first bull did not see well. After the first two passes with the cape Romero knew exactly how bad the vision was impaired. He worked accordingly. It was not brilliant bull-fighting. It was only perfect bull-fighting. The crowd wanted the bull changed. They made a great row. Nothing very fine could happen with a bull that could not see the lures, but the President would not order him replaced.

“Why don’t they change him?” Brett asked.

“They’ve paid for him. They don’t want to lose their money.”

“It’s hardly fair to Romero.”

“Watch how he handles a bull that can’t see the color.”

“It’s the sort of thing I don’t like to see.”

It was not nice to watch if you cared anything about the person who was doing it. With the bull who could not see the colors of the capes, or the scarlet flannel of the muleta, Romero had to make the bull consent with his body. He had to get so close that the bull saw his body, and would start for it, and then shift the bull’s charge to the flannel and finish out the pass in the classic manner. The Biarritz crowd did not like it They thought Romero was afraid, and that was why he gave that little sidestep each time as he transferred the bull’s charge from his own body to the flannel. They preferred Belmonte’s imitation of himself or Marcial’s imitation of Belmonte. There were three of them in the row behind us.

“What’s he afraid of the bull for? The bull’s so dumb he only goes after the cloth.”

“He’s just a young bull-fighter. He hasn’t learned it yet.”

“But I thought he was fine with the cape before.”

“Probably he’s nervous now.”

Out in the centre of the ring, all alone, Romero was going on with the same thing, getting so close that the bull could see him plainly, offering the body, offering it again a little closer, the bull watching dully, then so close that the bull thought he had him, offering again and finally drawing the charge and then, just before the horns came, giving the bull the red cloth to follow with at little, almost imperceptible, jerk that so offended the critical judgment of the Biarritz bull-fight experts.

“He’s going to kill now,” I said to Brett. “The bull’s still strong. He wouldn’t wear himself out.”

Out in the centre of the ring Romero profiled in front of the bull, drew the sword out from the folds of the muleta, rose on his toes, and sighted along the blade. The bull charged as Romero charged. Romero’s left hand dropped the muleta over the bull’s muzzle to blind him, his left shoulder went forward between the horns as the sword went in, and for just an instant he and the bull were one, Romero way out over the bull, the right arm extended high up to where the hilt of the sword had gone in between the bull’s shoulders. Then the figure was broken. There was a little jolt as Romero came clear, and then he was standing, one hand up, facing the bull, his shirt ripped out from under his sleeve, the white blowing in the wind, and the bull, the red sword hilt tight between his shoulders, his head going down and his legs settling.

“There he goes,” Bill said.

Romero was close enough so the bull could see him. His hand still up, he spoke to the bull. The bull gathered himself, then his head went forward and he went over slowly, then all over, suddenly, four feet in the air.

They handed the sword to Romero, and carrying it blade down, the muleta in his other hand, he walked over to in front of the President’s box, bowed, straightened, and came over to the barrera and handed over the sword and muleta.

“Bad one,” said the sword-handler.

“He made me sweat,” said Romero. He wiped off his face. The sword-handler handed him the water-jug. Romero wiped his lips. It hurt him to drink out of the jug. He did not look up at us.

Marcial had a big day. They were still applauding him when Romero’s last bull came in. It was the bull that had sprinted out and killed the man in the morning running.

During Romero’s first bull his hurt face had been very noticeable. Everything he did showed it. All the concentration of the awkwardly delicate working with the bull that could not see well brought it out. The fight with Cohn had not touched his spirit but his face had been smashed and his body hurt. He was wiping all that out now. Each thing that he did with this bull wiped that out a little cleaner. It was a good bull, a big bull, and with horns, and it turned and recharged easily and surely. He was what Romero wanted in bulls.

When he had finished his work with the muleta and was ready to kill, the crowd made him go on. They did not want the bull killed yet, they did not want it to be over. Romero went on. It was like a course in bull-fighting. All the passes he linked up, all completed, all slow, templed and smooth. There were no tricks and no mystifications. There was no brusqueness. And each pass as it reached the summit gave you a sudden ache inside. The crowd did not want it ever to be finished.

The bull was squared on all four feet to be killed, and Romero killed directly below us. He killed not as he had been forced to by the last bull, but as he wanted to. He profiled directly in front of the bull, drew the sword out of the folds of the muleta and sighted along the blade. The bull watched him. Romero spoke to the bull and tapped one of his feet. The bull charged and Romero waited for the charge, the muleta held low, sighting along the blade, his feet firm. Then without taking a step forward, he became one with the bull, the sword was in high between the shoulders, the bull had followed the low-swung flannel, that disappeared as Romero lurched clear to the left, and it was over. The bull tried to go forward, his legs commenced to settle, he swung from side to side, hesitated, then went down on his knees, and Romero’s older brother leaned forward behind him and drove a short knife into the bull’s neck at the base of the horns. The first time he missed. He drove the knife in again, and the bull went over, twitching and rigid. Romero’s brother, holding the bull’s horn in one hand, the knife in the other, looked up at the President’s box. Handkerchiefs were waving all over the bull-ring. The President looked down from the box and waved his handkerchief. The brother cut the notched black ear from the dead bull and trotted over with it to Romero. The bull lay heavy and black on the sand, his tongue out. Boys were running toward him from all parts of the arena, making a little circle around him. They were starting to dance around the bull.

Romero took the ear from his brother and held it up toward the President. The President bowed and Romero, running to get ahead of the crowd, came toward us. He leaned up against the barrera and gave the ear to Brett. He nodded his head and smiled. The crowd were all about him. Brett held down the cape.

“You liked it?” Romero called.

Brett did not say anything. They looked at each other and smiled. Brett had the ear in her hand.

“Don’t get bloody,” Romero said, and grinned. The crowd wanted him. Several boys shouted at Brett. The crowd was the boys, the dancers, and the drunks. Romero turned and tried to get through the crowd. They were all around him trying to lift him and put him on their shoulders. He fought and twisted away, and started running, in the midst of them, toward the exit. He did not want to be carried on people’s shoulders. But they held him and lifted him. It was uncomfortable and his legs were spraddled and his body was very sore. They were lifting him and all running toward the gate. He had his hand on somebody’s shoulder. He looked around at us apologetically. The crowd, running, went out the gate with him.

We all three went back to the hotel. Brett went up-stairs. Bill and I sat in the down-stairs dining-room and ate some hard-boiled eggs and drank several bottles of beer. Belmonte came down in his street clothes with his manager and two other men. They sat at the next table and ate. Belmonte ate very little. They were leaving on the seven o’clock train for Barcelona. Belmonte wore a blue-striped shirt and a dark suit, and ate soft-boiled eggs. The others ate a big meal. Belmonte did not talk. He only answered questions.

Bill was tired after the bull-fight. So was I. We both took a bull-fight very hard. We sat and ate the eggs and I watched Belmonte and the people at his table. The men with him were tough-looking and businesslike.

“Come on over to the café,” Bill said. “I want an absinthe.”

It was the last day of the fiesta. Outside it was beginning to be cloudy again. The square was full of people and the fireworks experts were making up their set pieces for the night and covering them over with beech branches. Boys were watching. We passed stands of rockets with long bamboo stems. Outside the café there was a great crowd. The music and the dancing were going on. The giants and the dwarfs were passing.

“Where’s Edna?” I asked Bill.

“I don’t know.”

We watched the beginning of the evening of the last night of the fiesta. The absinthe made everything seem better. I drank it without sugar in the dripping glass, and it was pleasantly bitter.

“I feel sorry about Cohn,” Bill said. “He had an awful time.”

“Oh, to hell with Cohn,” I said.

“Where do you suppose he went?”

“Up to Paris.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do?”

“Oh, to hell with him.”

“What do you suppose he’ll do?”

“Pick up with his old girl, probably.”

“Who was his old girl?”

“Somebody named Frances.”

We had another absinthe.

“When do you go back?” I asked.

“To-morrow.”

After a little while Bill said: “Well, it was a swell fiesta.”

“Yes,” I said; “something doing all the time.”

“You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’d believe anything. Including nightmares.”

“What’s the matter? Feel low?”

“Low as hell.”

“Have another absinthe. Here, waiter! Another absinthe for this señor.”

“I feel like hell,” I said.

“Drink that,” said Bill. “Drink it slow.”

It was beginning to get dark. The fiesta was going on. I began to feel drunk but I did not feel any better.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel like hell.”

“Have another?”

“It won’t do any good.”

“Try it. You can’t tell; maybe this is the one that gets it. Hey, waiter! Another absinthe for this señor!”

I poured the water directly into it and stirred it instead of letting it drip. Bill put in a lump of ice. I stirred the ice around with a spoon in the brownish, cloudy mixture.

“How is it?”

“Fine.”

“Don’t drink it fast that way. It will make you sick.”

I set down the glass. I had not meant to drink it fast.

“I feel tight.”

“You ought to.”

“That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Sure. Get tight. Get over your damn depression.”

“Well, I’m tight. Is that what you want?”

“Sit down.”

“I won’t sit down,” I said. “I’m going over to the hotel.”

I was very drunk. I was drunker than I ever remembered having been. At the hotel I went up-stairs. Brett’s door was open. I put my head in the room. Mike was sitting on the bed. He waved a bottle.

“Jake,” he said. “Come in, Jake.”

I went in and sat down. The room was unstable unless I looked at some fixed point.

“Brett, you know. She’s gone off with the bull-fighter chap.”

“No.”

“Yes. She looked for you to say good-bye. They went on the seven o’clock train.”

“Did they?”

“Bad thing to do,” Mike said. “She shouldn’t have done it.”

“No.”

“Have a drink? Wait while I ring for some beer.”

“I’m drunk,” I said. “I’m going in and lie down.”

“Are you blind? I was blind myself.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m blind.”

“Well, bung-o,” Mike said. “Get some sleep, old Jake.”

I went out the door and into my own room and lay on the bed. The bed went sailing off and I sat up in bed and looked at the wall to make it stop. Outside in the square the fiesta was going on. It did not mean anything. Later Bill and Mike came in to get me to go down and eat with them. I pretended to be asleep.

“He’s asleep. Better let him alone.”

“He’s blind as a tick,” Mike said. They went out.

I got up and went to the balcony and looked out at the dancing in the square. The world was not wheeling any more. It was just very clear and bright, and inclined to blur at the edges. I washed, brushed my hair. I looked strange to myself in the glass, and went down-stairs to the dining-room.

“Here he is!” said Bill. “Good old Jake! I knew you wouldn’t pass out.”

“Hello, you old drunk,” Mike said.

“I got hungry and woke up.”

“Eat some soup,” Bill said.

The three of us sat at the table, and it seemed as though about six people were missing.

BOOK III

CHAPTER 19

In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished. I woke about nine o’clock, had a bath, dressed, and went down-stairs. The square was empty and there were no people on the streets. A few children were picking up rocket-sticks in the square. The cafés were just opening and the waiters were carrying out the comfortable white wicker chairs and arranging them around the marble-topped tables in the shade of the arcade. They were sweeping the streets and sprinkling them with a hose.

I sat in one of the wicker chairs and leaned back comfortably. The waiter was in no hurry to come. The white-paper announcements of the unloading of the bulls and the big schedules of special trains were still up on the pillars of the arcade. A waiter wearing a blue apron came out with a bucket of water and a cloth, and commenced to tear down the notices, pulling the paper off in strips and washing and rubbing away the paper that stuck to the stone. The fiesta was over.

I drank a coffee and after a while Bill came over. I watched him come walking across the square. He sat down at the table and ordered a coffee.

“Well,” he said, “it’s all over.”

“Yes,” I said. “When do you go?”

“I don’t know. We better get a car, I think. Aren’t you going back to Paris?”

“No. I can stay away another week. I think I’ll go to San Sebastian.”

“I want to get back.”

“What’s Mike going to do?”

“He’s going to Saint Jean de Luz.”

“Let’s get a car and all go as far as Bayonne. You can get the train up from there to-night.”

“Good. Let’s go after lunch.”

“All right. I’ll get the car.”

We had lunch and paid the bill. Montoya did not come near us. One of the maids brought the bill. The car was outside. The chauffeur piled and strapped the bags on top of the car and put them in beside him in the front seat and we got in. The car went out of the square, along through the side streets, out under the trees and down the hill and away from Pamplona. It did not seem like a very long ride. Mike had a bottle of Fundador. I only took a couple of drinks. We came over the mountains and out of Spain and down the white roads and through the overfoliaged, wet, green, Basque country, and finally into Bayonne. We left Bill’s baggage at the station, and he bought a ticket to Paris. His train left at seven-ten. We came out of the station. The car was standing out in front.

“What shall we do about the car?” Bill asked.

“Oh, bother the car,” Mike said. “Let’s just keep the car with us.”

“All right,” Bill said. “Where shall we go?”

“Let’s go to Biarritz and have a drink.”

“Old Mike the spender,” Bill said.

We drove in to Biarritz and left the car outside a very Ritz place. We went into the bar and sat on high stools and drank a whiskey and soda.

“That drink’s mine,” Mike said.

“Let’s roll for it.”

So we rolled poker dice out of a deep leather dice-cup. Bill was out first roll. Mike lost to me and handed the bartender a hundred-franc note. The whiskeys were twelve francs apiece. We had another round and Mike lost again. Each time he gave the bartender a good tip. In a room off the bar there was a good jazz band playing. It was a pleasant bar. We had another round. I went out on the first roll with four kings. Bill and Mike rolled. Mike won the first roll with four jacks. Bill won the second. On the final roll Mike had three kings and let them stay. He handed the dice-cup to Bill. Bill rattled them and rolled, and there were three kings, an ace, and a queen.

“It’s yours, Mike,” Bill said. “Old Mike, the gambler.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mike said. “I can’t get it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve no money,” Mike said. “I’m stony. I’ve just twenty francs. Here, take twenty francs.”

Bill’s face sort of changed.

“I just had enough to pay Montoya. Damned lucky to have it, too.”

“I’ll cash you a check,” Bill said.

“That’s damned nice of you, but you see I can’t write checks.”

“What are you going to do for money?”

“Oh, some will come through. I’ve two weeks allowance should be here. I can live on tick at this pub in Saint Jean.”

“What do you want to do about the car?” Bill asked me. “Do you want to keep it on?”

“It doesn’t make any difference. Seems sort of idiotic.”

“Come on, let’s have another drink,” Mike said.

“Fine. This one is on me,” Bill said. “Has Brett any money?” He turned to Mike.

“I shouldn’t think so. She put up most of what I gave to old Montoya.”

“She hasn’t any money with her?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t think so. She never has any money. She gets five hundred quid a year and pays three hundred and fifty of it in interest to Jews.”

“I suppose they get it at the source,” said Bill.

“Quite. They’re not really Jews. We just call them Jews. They’re Scotsmen, I believe.”

“Hasn’t she any at all with her?” I asked.

“I hardly think so. She gave it all to me when she left.”

“Well,” Bill said, “we might as well have another drink.”

“Damned good idea,” Mike said. “One never gets anywhere by discussing finances.”

“No,” said Bill. Bill and I rolled for the next two rounds. Bill lost and paid. We went out to the car.

“Anywhere you’d like to go, Mike?” Bill asked.

“Let’s take a drive. It might do my credit good. Let’s drive about a little.”

“Fine. I’d like to see the coast. Let’s drive down toward Hendaye.”

“I haven’t any credit along the coast.”

“You can’t ever tell,” said Bill.

We drove out along the coast road. There was the green of the headlands, the white, red-roofed villas, patches of forest, and the ocean very blue with the tide out and the water curling far out along the beach. We drove through Saint Jean de Luz and passed through villages farther down the coast. Back of the rolling country we were going through we saw the mountains we had come over from Pamplona. The road went on ahead. Bill looked at his watch. It was time for us to go back. He knocked on the glass and told the driver to turn around. The driver backed the car out into the grass to turn it. In back of us were the woods, below a stretch of meadow, then the sea.

At the hotel where Mike was going to stay in Saint Jean we stopped the car and he got out. The chauffeur carried in his bags. Mike stood by the side of the car.

“Good-bye, you chaps,” Mike said. “It was a damned fine fiesta.”

“So long, Mike,” Bill said.

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

“Don’t worry about money,” Mike said. “You can pay for the car, Jake, and I’ll send you my share.”

“So long, Mike.”

“So long, you chaps. You’ve been damned nice.”

We all shook hands. We waved from the car to Mike. He stood in the road watching. We got to Bayonne just before the train left. A porter carried Bill’s bags in from the consigne. I went as far as the inner gate to the tracks.

“So long, fella,” Bill said.

“So long, kid!”

“It was swell. I’ve had a swell time.”

“Will you be in Paris?”

“No, I have to sail on the 17th. So long, fella!”

“So long, old kid!”

He went in through the gate to the train. The porter went ahead with the bags. I watched the train pull out. Bill was at one of the windows. The window passed, the rest of the train passed, and the tracks were empty. I went outside to the car.

“How much do we owe you?” I asked the driver. The price to Bayonne had been fixed at a hundred and fifty pesetas.

“Two hundred pesetas.”

“How much more will it be if you drive me to San Sebastian on your way back?”

“Fifty pesetas.”

“Don’t kid me.”

“Thirty-five pesetas.”

“It’s not worth it,” I said. “Drive me to the Hotel Panier Fleuri.”

At the hotel I paid the driver and gave him a tip. The car was powdered with dust. I rubbed the rod-case through the dust. It seemed the last thing that connected me with Spain and the fiesta. The driver put the car in gear and went down the street. I watched it turn off to take the road to Spain. I went into the hotel and they gave me a room. It was the same room I had slept in when Bill and Cohn and I were in Bayonne. That seemed a very long time ago. I washed, changed my shirt, and went out in the town.

At a newspaper kiosque I bought a copy of the New York Herald and sat in a café to read it. It felt strange to be in France again. There was a safe, suburban feeling. I wished I had gone up to Paris with Bill, except that Paris would have meant more fiesta-ing. I was through with fiestas for a while. It would be quiet in San Sebastian. The season does not open there until August. I could get a good hotel room and read and swim. There was a fine beach there. There were wonderful trees along the promenade above the beach, and there were many children sent down with their nurses before the season opened. In the evening there would be band concerts under the trees across from the Café Marinas. I could sit in the Marinas and listen.

“How does one eat inside?” I asked the waiter. Inside the café was a restaurant.

“Well. Very well. One eats very well.”

“Good.”

I went in and ate dinner. It was a big meal for France but it seemed very carefully apportioned after Spain. I drank a bottle of wine for company. It was a Château Margaux. It was pleasant to be drinking slowly and to be tasting the wine and to be drinking alone. A bottle of wine was good company. Afterward I had coffee. The waiter recommended a Basque liqueur called Izzarra. He brought in the bottle and poured a liqueur-glass full. He said Izzarra was made of the flowers of the Pyrenees. The veritable flowers of the Pyrenees. It looked like hair-oil and smelled like Italian strega. I told him to take the flowers of the Pyrenees away and bring me a vieux marc. The marc was good. I had a second marc after the coffee.

The waiter seemed a little offended about the flowers of the Pyrenees, so I overtipped him. That made him happy. It felt comfortable to be in a country where it is so simple to make people happy. You can never tell whether a Spanish waiter will thank you. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money. I spent a little money and the waiter liked me. He appreciated my valuable qualities. He would be glad to see me back. I would dine there again some time and he would be glad to see me, and would want me at his table. It would be a sincere liking because it would have a sound basis. I was back in France.

Next morning I tipped every one a little too much at the hotel to make more friends, and left on the morning train for San Sebastian. At the station I did not tip the porter more than I should because I did not think I would ever see him again. I only wanted a few good French friends in Bayonne to make me welcome in case I should come back there again. I knew that if they remembered me their friendship would be loyal.

At Irun we had to change trains and show passports. I hated to leave France. Life was so simple in France. I felt I was a fool to be going back into Spain. In Spain you could not tell about anything. I felt like a fool to be going back into it, but I stood in line with my passport, opened my bags for the customs, bought a ticket, went through a gate, climbed onto the train, and after forty minutes and eight tunnels I was at San Sebastian.

Even on a hot day San Sebastian has a certain early-morning quality. The trees seem as though their leaves were never quite dry. The streets feel as though they had just been sprinkled. It is always cool and shady on certain streets on the hottest day. I went to a hotel in the town where I had stopped before, and they gave me a room with a balcony that opened out above the roofs of the town. There was a green mountainside beyond the roofs.

I unpacked my bags and stacked my books on the table beside the head of the bed, put out my shaving things, hung up some clothes in the big armoire, and made up a bundle for the laundry. Then I took a shower in the bathroom and went down to lunch. Spain had not changed to summer-time, so I was early. I set my watch again. I had recovered an hour by coming to San Sebastian.

As I went into the dining-room the concierge brought me a police bulletin to fill out. I signed it and asked him for two telegraph forms, and wrote a message to the Hotel Montoya, telling them to forward all mail and telegrams for me to this address. I calculated how many days I would be in San Sebastian and then wrote out a wire to the office asking them to hold mail, but forward all wires for me to San Sebastian for six days. Then I went in and had lunch.

After lunch I went up to my room, read a while, and went to sleep. When I woke it was half past four. I found my swimming-suit, wrapped it with a comb in a towel, and went down-stairs and walked up the street to the Concha. The tide was about half-way out. The beach was smooth and firm, and the sand yellow. I went into a bathing-cabin, undressed, put on my suit, and walked across the smooth sand to the sea. The sand was warm under bare feet. There were quite a few people in the water and on the beach. Out beyond where the headlands of the Concha almost met to form the harbor there was a white line of breakers and the open sea. Although the tide was going out, there were a few slow rollers. They came in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water, and then broke smoothly on the warm sand. I waded out. The water was cold. As a roller came I dove, swam out under water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone. I swam out to the raft, pulled myself up, and lay on the hot planks. A boy and girl were at the other end. The girl had undone the top strap of her bathing-suit and was browning her back. The boy lay face downward on the raft and talked to her. She laughed at things he said, and turned her brown back in the sun. I lay on the raft in the sun until I was dry. Then I tried several dives. I dove deep once, swimming down to the bottom. I swam with my eyes open and it was green and dark. The raft made a dark shadow. I came out of water beside the raft, pulled up, dove once more, holding it for length, and then swam ashore. I lay on the beach until I was dry, then went into the bathing-cabin, took off my suit, sloshed myself with fresh water, and rubbed dry.

I walked around the harbor under the trees to the casino, and then up one of the cool streets to the Café Marinas. There was an orchestra playing inside the café and I sat out on the terrace and enjoyed the fresh coolness in the hot day, and had a glass of lemon-juice and shaved ice and then a long whiskey and soda. I sat in front of the Marinas for a long time and read and watched the people, and listened to the music.

Later when it began to get dark, I walked around the harbor and out along the promenade, and finally back to the hotel for supper. There was a bicycle-race on, the Tour du Pays Basque, and the riders were stopping that night in San Sebastian. In the dining-room, at one side, there was a long table of bicycle-riders, eating with their trainers and managers. They were all French and Belgians, and paid close attention to their meal, but they were having a good time. At the head of the table were two good-looking French girls, with much Rue du Faubourg Montmartre chic. I could not make out whom they belonged to. They all spoke in slang at the long table and there were many private jokes and some jokes at the far end that were not repeated when the girls asked to hear them. The next morning at five o’clock the race resumed with the last lap, San Sebastian-Bilbao. The bicycle-riders drank much wine, and were burned and browned by the sun. They did not take the race seriously except among themselves. They had raced among themselves so often that it did not make much difference who won. Especially in a foreign country. The money could be arranged.

The man who had a matter of two minutes lead in the race had an attack of boils, which were very painful. He sat on the small of his back. His neck was very red and the blond hairs were sunburned. The other riders joked him about his boils. He tapped on the table with his fork.

“Listen,” he said, “to-morrow my nose is so tight on the handle-bars that the only thing touches those boils is a lovely breeze.”

One of the girls looked at him down the table, and he grinned and turned red. The Spaniards, they said, did not know how to pedal.

I had coffee out on the terrasse with the team manager of one of the big bicycle manufacturers. He said it had been a very pleasant race, and would have been worth watching if Bottechia had not abandoned it at Pamplona. The dust had been bad, but in Spain the roads were better than in France. Bicycle road-racing was the only sport in the world, he said. Had I ever followed the Tour de France? Only in the papers. The Tour de France was the greatest sporting event in the world. Following and organizing the road races had made him know France. Few people know France. All spring and all summer and all fall he spent on the road with bicycle road-racers. Look at the number of motor-cars now that followed the riders from town to town in a road race. It was a rich country and more sportif every year. It would be the most sportif country in the world. It was bicycle road-racing did it. That and football. He knew France. La France Sportive. He knew road-racing. We had a cognac. After all, though, it wasn’t bad to get back to Paris. There is only one Paname. In all the world, that is. Paris is the town the most sportif in the world. Did I know the Chope de Negre? Did I not. I would see him there some time. I certainly would. We would drink another fine together. We certainly would. They started at six o’clock less a quarter in the morning. Would I be up for the depart? I would certainly try to. Would I like him to call me? It was very interesting. I would leave a call at the desk. He would not mind calling me. I could not let him take the trouble. I would leave a call at the desk. We said good-bye until the next morning.

In the morning when I awoke the bicycle-riders and their following cars had been on the road for three hours. I had coffee and the papers in bed and then dressed and took my bathing-suit down to the beach. Everything was fresh and cool and damp in the early morning. Nurses in uniform and in peasant costume walked under the trees with children. The Spanish children were beautiful. Some bootblacks sat together under a tree talking to a soldier. The soldier had only one arm. The tide was in and there was a good breeze and a surf on the beach.

I undressed in one of the bath-cabins, crossed the narrow line of beach and went into the water. I swam out, trying to swim through the rollers, but having to dive sometimes. Then in the quiet water I turned and floated. Floating I saw only the sky, and felt the drop and lift of the swells. I swam back to the surf and coasted in, face down, on a big roller, then turned and swam, trying to keep in the trough and not have a wave break over me. It made me tired, swimming in the trough, and I turned and swam out to the raft. The water was buoyant and cold. It felt as though you could never sink. I swam slowly, it seemed like a long swim with the high tide, and then pulled up on the raft and sat, dripping, on the boards that were becoming hot in the sun. I looked around at the bay, the old town, the casino, the line of trees along the promenade, and the big hotels with their white porches and gold-lettered names. Off on the right, almost closing the harbor, was a green hill with a castle. The raft rocked with the motion of the water. On the other side of the narrow gap that led into the open sea was another high headland. I thought I would like to swim across the bay but I was afraid of cramp.

I sat in the sun and watched the bathers on the beach. They looked very small. After a while I stood up, gripped with my toes on the edge of the raft as it tipped with my weight, and dove cleanly and deeply, to come up through the lightening water, blew the salt water out of my head, and swam slowly and steadily in to shore.

After I was dressed and had paid for the bath-cabin, I walked back to the hotel. The bicycle-racers had left several copies of L’Auto around, and I gathered them up in the reading-room and took them out and sat in an easy chair in the sun to read about and catch up on French sporting life. While I was sitting there the concierge came out with a blue envelope in his hand.

“A telegram for you, sir.”

I poked my finger along under the fold that was fastened down, spread it open, and read it. It had been forwarded from Paris:

COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID
AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT.

I tipped the concierge and read the message again. A postman was coming along the sidewalk. He turned in the hotel. He had a big moustache and looked very military. He came out of the hotel again. The concierge was just behind him.

“Here’s another telegram for you, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said.

I opened it. It was forwarded from Pamplona.

COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID
AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT.

The concierge stood there waiting for another tip, probably.

“What time is there a train for Madrid?”

“It left at nine this morning. There is a slow train at eleven, and the Sud Express at ten to-night.”

“Get me a berth on the Sud Express. Do you want the money now?”

“Just as you wish,” he said. “I will have it put on the bill.”

“Do that.”

Well, that meant San Sebastian all shot to hell. I suppose, vaguely, I had expected something of the sort. I saw the concierge standing in the doorway.

“Bring me a telegram form, please.”

He brought it and I took out my fountain-pen and printed:

LADY ASHLEY HOTEL MONTANA MADRID
ARRIVING SUD EXPRESS TOMORROW LOVE
JAKE.

That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.

I did not sleep much that night on the Sud Express. In the morning I had breakfast in the dining-car and watched the rock and pine country between Avila and Escorial. I saw the Escorial out of the window, gray and long and cold in the sun, and did not give a damn about it. I saw Madrid come up over the plain, a compact white sky-line on the top of a little cliff away off across the sun-hardened country.

The Norte station in Madrid is the end of the line. All trains finish there. They don’t go on anywhere. Outside were cabs and taxis and a line of hotel runners. It was like a country town. I took a taxi and we climbed up through the gardens, by the empty palace and the unfinished church on the edge of the cliff, and on up until we were in the high, hot, modern town. The taxi coasted down a smooth street to the Puerta del Sol, and then through the traffic and out into the Carrera San Jeronimo. All the shops had their awnings down against the heat. The windows on the sunny side of the street were shuttered. The taxi stopped at the curb. I saw the sign HOTEL MONTANA on the second floor. The taxi-driver carried the bags in and left them by the elevator. I could not make the elevator work, so I walked up. On the second floor up was a cut brass sign: HOTEL MONTANA. I rang and no one came to the door. I rang again and a maid with a sullen face opened the door.

“Is Lady Ashley here?” I asked.

She looked at me dully.

“Is an Englishwoman here?”

She turned and called some one inside. A very fat woman came to the door. Her hair was gray and stiffly oiled in scallops around her face. She was short and commanding.

“Muy buenos,” I said. “Is there an Englishwoman here? I would like to see this English lady.”

“Muy buenos. Yes, there is a female English. Certainly you can see her if she wishes to see you.”

“She wishes to see me.”

“The chica will ask her.”

“It is very hot.”

“It is very hot in the summer in Madrid.”

“And how cold in winter.”

“Yes, it is very cold in winter.”

Did I want to stay myself in person in the Hotel Montana?

Of that as yet I was undecided, but it would give me pleasure if my bags were brought up from the ground floor in order that they might not be stolen. Nothing was ever stolen in the Hotel Montana. In other fondas, yes. Not here. No. The personages of this establishment were rigidly selectioned. I was happy to hear it. Nevertheless I would welcome the upbringal of my bags.

The maid came in and said that the female English wanted to see the male English now, at once.

“Good,” I said. “You see. It is as I said.”

“Clearly.”

I followed the maid’s back down a long, dark corridor. At the end she knocked on a door.

“Hello,” said Brett. “Is it you, Jake?”

“It’s me.”

“Come in. Come in.”

I opened the door. The maid closed it after me. Brett was in bed. She had just been brushing her hair and held the brush in her hand. The room was in that disorder produced only by those who have always had servants.

“Darling!” Brett said.

I went over to the bed and put my arms around her. She kissed me, and while she kissed me I could feel she was thinking of something else. She was trembling in my arms. She felt very small.

“Darling! I’ve had such a hell of a time.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Nothing to tell. He only left yesterday. I made him go.”

“Why didn’t you keep him?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t the sort of thing one does. I don’t think I hurt him any.”

“You were probably damn good for him.”

“He shouldn’t be living with any one. I realized that right away.”

“No.”

“Oh, hell!” she said, “let’s not talk about it. Let’s never talk about it.”

“All right.”

“It was rather a knock his being ashamed of me. He was ashamed of me for a while, you know.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes. They ragged him about me at the café, I guess. He wanted me to grow my hair out. Me, with long hair. I’d look so like hell.”

“It’s funny.”

“He said it would make me more womanly. I’d look a fright.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, he got over that. He wasn’t ashamed of me long.”

“What was it about being in trouble?”

“I didn’t know whether I could make him go, and I didn’t have a sou to go away and leave him. He tried to give me a lot of money, you know. I told him I had scads of it. He knew that was a lie. I couldn’t take his money, you know.”

“No.”

“Oh, let’s not talk about it. There were some funny things, though. Do give me a cigarette.”

I lit the cigarette.

“He learned his English as a waiter in Gib.”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to marry me, finally.”

“Really?”

“Of course. I can’t even marry Mike.”

“Maybe he thought that would make him Lord Ashley.”

“No. It wasn’t that. He really wanted to marry me. So I couldn’t go away from him, he said. He wanted to make it sure I could never go away from him. After I’d gotten more womanly, of course.”

“You ought to feel set up.”

“I do. I’m all right again. He’s wiped out that damned Cohn.”

“Good.”

“You know I’d have lived with him if I hadn’t seen it was bad for him. We got along damned well.”

“Outside of your personal appearance.”

“Oh, he’d have gotten used to that.”

She put out the cigarette.

“I’m thirty-four, you know. I’m not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children.”

“No.”

“I’m not going to be that way. I feel rather good, you know. I feel rather set up.”

“Good.”

She looked away. I thought she was looking for another cigarette. Then I saw she was crying. I could feel her crying. Shaking and crying. She wouldn’t look up. I put my arms around her.

“Don’t let’s ever talk about it. Please don’t let’s ever talk about it.”

“Dear Brett.”

“I’m going back to Mike.” I could feel her crying as I held her close. “He’s so damned nice and he’s so awful. He’s my sort of thing.”

She would not look up. I stroked her hair. I could feel her shaking.

“I won’t be one of those bitches,” she said. “But, oh, Jake, please let’s never talk about it.”

We left the Hotel Montana. The woman who ran the hotel would not let me pay the bill. The bill had been paid.

“Oh, well. Let it go,” Brett said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

We rode in a taxi down to the Palace Hotel, left the bags, arranged for berths on the Sud Express for the night, and went into the bar of the hotel for a cocktail. We sat on high stools at the bar while the barman shook the Martinis in a large nickelled shaker.

“It’s funny what a wonderful gentility you get in the bar of a big hotel,” I said.

“Barmen and jockeys are the only people who are polite any more.”

“No matter how vulgar a hotel is, the bar is always nice.”

“It’s odd.”

“Bartenders have always been fine.”

“You know,” Brett said, “it’s quite true. He is only nineteen. Isn’t it amazing?”

We touched the two glasses as they stood side by side on the bar. They were coldly beaded. Outside the curtained window was the summer heat of Madrid.

“I like an olive in a Martini,” I said to the barman.

“Right you are, sir. There you are.”

“Thanks.”

“I should have asked, you know.”

The barman went far enough up the bar so that he would not hear our conversation. Brett had sipped from the Martini as it stood, on the wood. Then she picked it up. Her hand was steady enough to lift it after that first sip.

“It’s good. Isn’t it a nice bar?”

“They’re all nice bars.”

“You know I didn’t believe it at first. He was born in 1905. I was in school in Paris, then. Think of that.”

“Anything you want me to think about it?”

“Don’t be an ass. Would you buy a lady a drink?”

“We’ll have two more Martinis.”

“As they were before, sir?”

“They were very good.” Brett smiled at him.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Well, bung-o,” Brett said.

“Bung-o!”

“You know,” Brett said, “he’d only been with two women before. He never cared about anything but bull-fighting.”

“He’s got plenty of time.”

“I don’t know. He thinks it was me. Not the show in general.”

“Well, it was you.”

“Yes. It was me.”

“I thought you weren’t going to ever talk about it.”

“How can I help it?”

“You’ll lose it if you talk about it.”

“I just talk around it. You know I feel rather damned good, Jake.”

“You should.”

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.”

“Yes.”

“It’s sort of what we have instead of God.”

“Some people have God,” I said. “Quite a lot.”

“He never worked very well with me.”

“Should we have another Martini?”

The barman shook up two more Martinis and poured them out into fresh glasses.

“Where will we have lunch?” I asked Brett. The bar was cool. You could feel the heat outside through the window.

“Here?” asked Brett.

“It’s rotten here in the hotel. Do you know a place called Botin’s?” I asked the barman.

“Yes, sir. Would you like to have me write out the address?”

“Thank you.”

We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s. It is one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.

“How do you feel, Jake?” Brett asked. “My God! what a meal you’ve eaten.”

“I feel fine. Do you want a dessert?”

“Lord, no.”

Brett was smoking.

“You like to eat, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes.” I said. “I like to do a lot of things.”

“What do you like to do?”

“Oh,” I said, “I like to do a lot of things. Don’t you want a dessert?”

“You asked me that once,” Brett said.

“Yes,” I said. “So I did. Let’s have another bottle of rioja alta.”

“It’s very good.”

“You haven’t drunk much of it,” I said.

“I have. You haven’t seen.”

“Let’s get two bottles,” I said. The bottles came. I poured a little in my glass, then a glass for Brett, then filled my glass. We touched glasses.

“Bung-o!” Brett said. I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett put her hand on my arm.

“Don’t get drunk, Jake,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t,” she said. “You’ll be all right.”

“I’m not getting drunk,” I said. “I’m just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine.”

“Don’t get drunk,” she said. “Jake, don’t get drunk.”

“Want to go for a ride?” I said. “Want to ride through the town?”

“Right,” Brett said. “I haven’t seen Madrid. I should see Madrid.”

“I’ll finish this,” I said.

Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street. A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little square with trees and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned out onto the Gran Via.

“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time together.”

Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.

“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

THE END

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

A Farewell To Arms was first serialized in Scribner’s Magazine between May and October 1929, and was published as a book in September 1929. The commercial success of the novel secured financial security and independence for the author, and the work has remained one of Hemingway’s best known and most popular novels. It has been adapted for stage and film multiple times including, Laurence Stallings 1930 theatre production, and the 1957 movie directed by Charles Vidor.  The book was inspired by the author’s experiences in Italy during the First World War, and his relationship with the nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, which ended with her unexpectedly leaving him for an Italian officer. However, while the novel features autobiographical aspects it is largely fiction; Hemingway was not present at the battles he depicts in the text, and his relationship with Kurowsky differed significantly from the romance between Frederic and Catherine. The title is derived from a poem written by the 16th century poet and dramatist, George Peele, which was written for the retirement ceremony of the Queen’s Champion, Henry Lee. Peele’s plays include The Famous Chronicle of Edward the First and The Maid’s Metamorphosis, and it has been argued by some scholars that the playwright was also a collaborator on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

A Farewell To Arms centres on Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver working for the Italian Army. Early in the novel he encounters Catherine Barkley- an English nurse- and begins a romance with her. He is injured and sent to Milan where he recuperates under the care of Catherine. Their relationship begins to deepen and strengthen, and becomes the source of comfort and hope for them. However, Henry is soon sent back to the Italian Front where he finds his force in retreat and experiencing huge internal strife. The brutality and destruction of the war, and the devastating impact on the mental and moral health of those fighting, is a central component of the novel. The writer also highlights the suffering of non-combatants, who are shown to endure great loss and torment due the consequences of the conflict. Hemingway carefully and delicately examines the psychological trauma experienced by those affected by war, as he depicts Henry in states of physical and mental anguish. The author also criticizes and exposes the patriotic lie that war is glorious and honourable, and he demonstrates how hollow and meaningless those concepts are when faced with cruelty, brutality, and senseless violence.

The first edition, 1929

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

BOOK FIVE

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

Hemingway in uniform in Milan, 1918

Poster for the 1932 film adaptation

Hemingway fishing at Key West, 1929 — shortly after publication

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1

IN THE LATE SUMMER of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.

There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.

At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

CHAPTER 2

THE NEXT YEAR there were many victories. The mountain that was beyond the valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured and there were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south and we crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many thick shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of the house. Now the fighting was in the next mountains beyond and was not a mile away. The town was very nice and our house was very fine. The river ran behind us and the town had been captured very handsomely but the mountains beyond it could not be taken and I was very glad the Austrians seemed to want to come back to the town some time, if the war should end, because they did not bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way. People lived on in it and there were hospitals and cafés and artillery up side streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the mountains beyond the town, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square; these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat’s chin tuft; all these with the sudden interiors of houses that had lost a wall through shelling, with plaster and rubble in their gardens and sometimes in the street, and the whole thing going well on the Carso made the fall very different from the last fall when we had been in the country. The war was changed too.

The forest of oak trees on the mountain beyond the town was gone. The forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up, and one day at the end of the fall when I was out where the oak forest had been I saw a cloud coming over the mountain. It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow. The snow slanted across the wind, the bare ground was covered, the stumps of trees projected, there was snow on the guns and there were paths in the snow going back to the latrines behind trenches.

Later, below in the town, I watched the snow falling, looking out of the window of the bawdy house, the house for officers, where I sat with a friend and two glasses drinking a bottle of Asti, and, looking out at the snow falling slowly and heavily, we knew it was all over for that year. Up the river the mountains had not been taken; none of the mountains beyond the river had been taken. That was all left for next year. My friend saw the priest from our mess going by in the street, walking carefully in the slush, and pounded on the window to attract his attention. The priest looked up. He saw us and smiled. My friend motioned for him to come in. The priest shook his head and went on. That night in the mess after the spaghetti course, which every one ate very quickly and seriously, lifting the spaghetti on the fork until the loose strands hung clear then lowering it into the mouth, or else using a continuous lift and sucking into the mouth, helping ourselves to wine from the grass-covered gallon flask; it swung in a metal cradle and you pulled the neck of the flask down with the forefinger and the wine, clear red, tannic and lovely, poured out into the glass held with the same hand; after this course, the captain commenced picking on the priest.

The priest was young and blushed easily and wore a uniform like the rest of us but with a cross in dark red velvet above the left breast pocket of his gray tunic. The captain spoke pidgin Italian for my doubtful benefit, in order that I might understand perfectly, that nothing should be lost.

“Priest to-day with girls,” the captain said looking at the priest and at me. The priest smiled and blushed and shook his head. This captain baited him often.

“Not true?” asked the captain. “To-day I see priest with girls.”

“No,” said the priest. The other officers were amused at the baiting.

“Priest not with girls,” went on the captain. “Priest never with girls,” he explained to me. He took my glass and filled it, looking at my eyes all the time, but not losing sight of the priest.

“Priest every night five against one.” Every one at the table laughed. “You understand? Priest every night five against one.” He made a gesture and laughed loudly. The priest accepted it as a joke.

“The Pope wants the Austrians to win the war,” the major said. “He loves Franz Joseph. That’s where the money comes from. I am an atheist.”

“Did you ever read the ‘Black Pig’?” asked the lieutenant. “I will get you a copy. It was that which shook my faith.”

“It is a filthy and vile book,” said the priest. “You do not really like it.”

“It is very valuable,” said the lieutenant. “It tells you about those priests. You will like it,” he said to me. I smiled at the priest and he smiled back across the candle-light. “Don’t you read it,” he said.

“I will get it for you,” said the lieutenant.

“All thinking men are atheists,” the major said. “I do not believe in the Free Masons however.”

“I believe in the Free Masons,” the lieutenant said. “It is a noble organization.” Some one came in and as the door opened I could see the snow falling.

“There will be no more offensive now that the snow has come,” I said.

“Certainly not,” said the major. “You should go on leave. You should go to Rome, Naples, Sicily — —”

“He should visit Amalfi,” said the lieutenant. “I will write you cards to my family in Amalfi. They will love you like a son.”

“He should go to Palermo.”

“He ought to go to Capri.”

“I would like you to see Abruzzi and visit my family at Capracotta,” said the priest.

“Listen to him talk about the Abruzzi. There’s more snow there than here. He doesn’t want to see peasants. Let him go to centres of culture and civilization.”

“He should have fine girls. I will give you the addresses of places in Naples. Beautiful young girls — accompanied by their mothers. Ha! Ha! Ha!” The captain spread his hand open, the thumb up and fingers outspread as when you make shadow pictures. There was a shadow from his hand on the wall. He spoke again in pidgin Italian. “You go away like this,” he pointed to the thumb, “and come back like this,” he touched the little finger. Every one laughed.

“Look,” said the captain. He spread the hand again. Again the candle-light made its shadows on the wall. He started with the upright thumb and named in their order the thumb and four fingers, “soto-tenente (the thumb), tenente (first finger), capitano (next finger), maggiore (next to the little finger), and tenente-colonello (the little finger). You go away soto-tenente! You come back sotocolonello!” They all laughed. The captain was having a great success with finger games. He looked at the priest and shouted, “Every night priest five against one!” They all laughed again.

“You must go on leave at once,” the major said.

“I would like to go with you and show you things,” the lieutenant said.

“When you come back bring a phonograph.”

“Bring good opera disks.”

“Bring Caruso.”

“Don’t bring Caruso. He bellows.”

“Don’t you wish you could bellow like him?”

“He bellows. I say he bellows!”

“I would like you to go to Abruzzi,” the priest said. The others were shouting. “There is good hunting. You would like the people and though it is cold it is clear and dry. You could stay with my family. My father is a famous hunter.”

“Come on,” said the captain. “We go whorehouse before it shuts.”

“Good-night,” I said to the priest.

“Good-night,” he said.

CHAPTER 3

WHEN I CAME BACK to the front we still lived in that town. There were many more guns in the country around and the spring had come. The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. In the town there were more guns, there were some new hospitals, you met British men and sometimes women, on the street, and a few more houses had been hit by shell fire. It was warm and like the spring and I walked down the alleyway of trees, warmed from the sun on the wall, and found we still lived in the same house and that it all looked the same as when I had left it. The door was open, there was a soldier sitting on a bench outside in the sun, an ambulance was waiting by the side door and inside the door, as I went in, there was the smell of marble floors and hospital. It was all as I had left it except that now it was spring. I looked in the door of the big room and saw the major sitting at his desk, the window open and the sunlight coming into the room. He did not see me and I did not know whether to go in and report or go upstairs first and clean up. I decided to go on upstairs.

The room I shared with the lieutenant Rinaldi looked out on the courtyard. The window was open, my bed was made up with blankets and my things hung on the wall, the gas mask in an oblong tin can, the steel helmet on the same peg. At the foot of the bed was my flat trunk, and my winter boots, the leather shiny with oil, were on the trunk. My Austrian sniper’s rifle with its blued octagon barrel and the lovely dark walnut, cheek-fitted, schutzen stock, hung over the two beds. The telescope that fitted it was, I remembered, locked in the trunk. The lieutenant, Rinaldi, lay asleep on the other bed. He woke when he heard me in the room and sat up.

“Ciaou!” he said. “What kind of time did you have?”

“Magnificent.”

We shook hands and he put his arm around my neck and kissed me.

“Oughf,” I said.

“You’re dirty,” he said. “You ought to wash. Where did you go and what did you do? Tell me everything at once.”

“I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina — —”

“You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli — —”

“That’s enough. Tell me really what was the best.”

“In Milano.”

“That was because it was first. Where did you meet her? In the Cova? Where did you go? How did you feel? Tell me everything at once. Did you stay all night?”

“Yes.”

“That’s nothing. Here now we have beautiful girls. New girls never been to the front before.”

“Wonderful.”

“You don’t believe me? We will go now this afternoon and see. And in the town we have beautiful English girls. I am now in love with Miss Barkley. I will take you to call. I will probably marry Miss Barkley.”

“I have to get washed and report. Doesn’t anybody work now?”

“Since you are gone we have nothing but frostbites, chilblains, jaundice, gonorrhea, self-inflicted wounds, pneumonia and hard and soft chancres. Every week some one gets wounded by rock fragments. There are a few real wounded. Next week the war starts again. Perhaps it start again. They say so. Do you think I would do right to marry Miss Barkley — after the war of course?”

“Absolutely,” I said and poured the basin full of water.

“To-night you will tell me everything,” said Rinaldi. “Now I must go back to sleep to be fresh and beautiful for Miss Barkley.”

I took off my tunic and shirt and washed in the cold water in the basin. While I rubbed myself with a towel I looked around the room and out the window and at Rinaldi lying with his eyes closed on the bed. He was good-looking, was my age, and he came from Amalfi. He loved being a surgeon and we were great friends. While I was looking at him he opened his eyes.

“Have you any money?”

“Yes.”

“Loan me fifty lire.”

I dried my hands and took out my pocket-book from the inside of my tunic hanging on the wall. Rinaldi took the note, folded it without rising from the bed and slid it in his breeches pocket. He smiled, “I must make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth. You are my great and good friend and financial protector.”

“Go to hell,” I said.

That night at the mess I sat next to the priest and he was disappointed and suddenly hurt that I had not gone to the Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming and they had made preparations. I myself felt as badly as he did and could not understand why I had not gone. It was what I had wanted to do and I tried to explain how one thing had led to another and finally he saw it and understood that I had really wanted to go and it was almost all right. I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

We two were talking while the others argued. I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know. He had not had it but he understood that I had really wanted to go to the Abruzzi but had not gone and we were still friends, with many tastes alike, but with the difference between us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later. In the meantime we were all at the mess, the meal was finished, and the argument went on. We two stopped talking and the captain shouted, “Priest not happy. Priest not happy without girls.”

“I am happy,” said the priest.

“Priest not happy. Priest wants Austrians to win the war,” the captain said. The others listened. The priest shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“Priest wants us never to attack. Don’t you want us never to attack?”

“No. If there is a war I suppose we must attack.”

“Must attack. Shall attack!”

The priest nodded.

“Leave him alone,” the major said. “He’s all right.”

“He can’t do anything about it anyway,” the captain said. We all got up and left the table.

CHAPTER 4

THE BATTERY in the next garden woke me in the morning and I saw the sun coming through the window and got out of the bed. I went to the window and looked out. The gravel paths were moist and the grass was wet with dew. The battery fired twice and the air came each time like a blow and shook the window and made the front of my pajamas flap. I could not see the guns but they were evidently firing directly over us. It was a nuisance to have them there but it was a comfort that they were no bigger. As I looked out at the garden I heard a motor truck starting on the road. I dressed, went downstairs, had some coffee in the kitchen and went out to the garage.

Ten cars were lined up side by side under the long shed. They were top-heavy, blunt-nosed ambulances, painted gray and built like moving-vans. The mechanics were working on one out in the yard. Three others were up in the mountains at dressing stations.

“Do they ever shell that battery?” I asked one of the mechanics.

“No, Signor Tenente. It is protected by the little hill.”

“How’s everything?”

“Not so bad. This machine is no good but the others march.” He stopped working and smiled. “Were you on permission?”

“Yes.”

He wiped his hands on his jumper and grinned. “You have a good time?” The others all grinned too.

“Fine,” I said. “What’s the matter with this machine?”

“It’s no good. One thing after another.”

“What’s the matter now?”

“New rings.”

I left them working, the car looking disgraced and empty with the engine open and parts spread on the work bench, and went in under the shed and looked at each of the cars. They were moderately clean, a few freshly washed, the others dusty. I looked at the tires carefully, looking for cuts or stone bruises. Everything seemed in good condition. It evidently made no difference whether I was there to look after things or not. I had imagined that the condition of the cars, whether or not things were obtainable, the smooth functioning of the business of removing wounded and sick from the dressing stations, hauling them back from the mountains to the clearing station and then distributing them to the hospitals named on their papers, depended to a considerable extent on myself. Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not.

“Has there been any trouble getting parts?” I asked the sergeant mechanic.

“No, Signor Tenente.”

“Where is the gasoline park now?”

“At the same place.”

“Good,” I said and went back to the house and drank another bowl of coffee at the mess table. The coffee was a pale gray and sweet with condensed milk. Outside the window it was a lovely spring morning. There was that beginning of a feeling of dryness in the nose that meant the day would be hot later on. That day I visited the posts in the mountains and was back in town late in the afternoon.

The whole thing seemed to run better while I was away. The offensive was going to start again I heard. The division for which we worked were to attack at a place up the river and the major told me that I would see about the posts for during the attack. The attack would cross the river up above the narrow gorge and spread up the hillside. The posts for the cars would have to be as near the river as they could get and keep covered. They would, of course, be selected by the infantry but we were supposed to work it out. It was one of those things that gave you a false feeling of soldiering.

I was very dusty and dirty and went up to my room to wash. Rinaldi was sitting on the bed with a copy of Hugo’s English grammar. He was dressed, wore his black boots, and his hair shone.

“Splendid,” he said when he saw me. “You will come with me to see Miss Barkley.”

“No.”

“Yes. You will please come and make me a good impression on her.”

“All right. Wait till I get cleaned up.”

“Wash up and come as you are.”

I washed, brushed my hair and we started.

“Wait a minute,” Rinaldi said. “Perhaps we should have a drink.” He opened his trunk and took out a bottle.

“Not Strega,” I said.

“No. Grappa.”

“All right.”

He poured two glasses and we touched them, first fingers extended. The grappa was very strong.

“Another?”

“All right,” I said. We drank the second grappa, Rinaldi put away the bottle and we went down the stairs. It was hot walking through the town but the sun was starting to go down and it was very pleasant. The British hospital was a big villa built by Germans before the war. Miss Barkley was in the garden. Another nurse was with her. We saw their white uniforms through the trees and walked toward them. Rinaldi saluted. I saluted too but more moderately.

“How do you do?” Miss Barkley said. “You’re not an Italian, are you?”

“Oh, no.”

Rinaldi was talking with the other nurse. They were laughing. “What an odd thing — to be in the Italian army.”

“It’s not really the army. It’s only the ambulance.”

“It’s very odd though. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There isn’t always an explanation for everything.”

“Oh, isn’t there? I was brought up to think there was.”

“That’s awfully nice.”

“Do we have to go on and talk this way?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s a relief. Isn’t it?”

“What is the stick?” I asked. Miss Barkley was quite tall. She wore what seemed to me to be a nurse’s uniform, was blonde and had a tawny skin and gray eyes. I thought she was very beautiful. She was carrying a thin rattan stick like a toy riding-crop, bound in leather.

“It belonged to a boy who was killed last year.”

“I’m awfully sorry.”

“He was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the Somme.”

“It was a ghastly show.”

“Were you there?”

“No.”

“I’ve heard about it,” she said. “There’s not really any war of that sort down here. They sent me the little stick. His mother sent it to me. They returned it with his things.”

“Had you been engaged long?”

“Eight years. We grew up together.”

“And why didn’t you marry?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I was a fool not to. I could have given him that anyway. But I thought it would be bad for him.”

“I see.”

“Have you ever loved any one?”

“No,” I said.

We sat down on a bench and I looked at her.

“You have beautiful hair,” I said.

“Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

“I was going to cut it all off when he died.”

“No.”

“I wanted to do something for him. You see I didn’t care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn’t know.”

I did not say anything.

“I didn’t know about anything then. I thought it would be worse for him. I thought perhaps he couldn’t stand it and then of course he was killed and that was the end of it.”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That’s the end of it.”

We looked at Rinaldi talking with the other nurse.

“What is her name?”

“Ferguson. Helen Ferguson. Your friend is a doctor, isn’t he?”

“Yes. He’s very good.”

“That’s splendid. You rarely find any one any good this close to the front. This is close to the front, isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

“It’s a silly front,” she said. “But it’s very beautiful. Are they going to have an offensive?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll have to work. There’s no work now.”

“Have you done nursing long?”

“Since the end of ‘fifteen. I started when he did. I remember having a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was. With a sabre cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder. Something picturesque.”

“This is the picturesque front,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “People can’t realize what France is like. If they did, it couldn’t all go on. He didn’t have a sabre cut. They blew him all to bits.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Do you suppose it will always go on?”

“No.”

“What’s to stop it?”

“It will crack somewhere.”

“We’ll crack. We’ll crack in France. They can’t go on doing things like the Somme and not crack.”

“They won’t crack here,” I said.

“You think not?”

“No. They did very well last summer.”

“They may crack,” she said. “Anybody may crack.”

“The Germans too.”

“No,” she said. “I think not.”

We went over toward Rinaldi and Miss Ferguson.

“You love Italy?” Rinaldi asked Miss Ferguson in English.

“Quite well.”

“No understand,” Rinaldi shook his head.

“Abbastanza bene,” I translated. He shook his head.

“That is not good. You love England?”

“Not too well. I’m Scotch, you see.”

Rinaldi looked at me blankly.

“She’s Scotch, so she loves Scotland better than England,” I said in Italian.

“But Scotland is England.”

I translated this for Miss Ferguson.

“Pas encore,” said Miss Ferguson.

“Not really?”

“Never. We do not like the English.”

“Not like the English? Not like Miss Barkley?”

“Oh, that’s different. You mustn’t take everything so literally.”

After a while we said good-night and left. Walking home Rinaldi said, “Miss Barkley prefers you to me. That is very clear. But the little Scotch one is very nice.”

“Very,” I said. I had not noticed her. “You like her?”

“No,” said Rinaldi.

CHAPTER 5

THE NEXT AFTERNOON I went to call on Miss Barkley again. She was not in the garden and I went to the side door of the villa where the ambulances drove up. Inside I saw the head nurse, who said Miss Barkley was on duty— “there’s a war on, you know.”

I said I knew.

“You’re the American in the Italian army?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How did you happen to do that? Why didn’t you join up with us?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Could I join now?”

“I’m afraid not now. Tell me. Why did you join up with the Italians?”

“I was in Italy,” I said, “and I spoke Italian.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m learning it. It’s beautiful language.”

“Somebody said you should be able to learn it in two weeks.”

“Oh, I’ll not learn it in two weeks. I’ve studied it for months now. You may come and see her after seven o’clock if you wish. She’ll be off then. But don’t bring a lot of Italians.”

“Not even for the beautiful language?”

“No. Nor for the beautiful uniforms.”

“Good evening,” I said.

“A rivederci, Tenente.”

“A rivederla.” I saluted and went out. It was impossible to salute foreigners as an Italian, without embarrassment. The Italian salute never seemed made for export.

The day had been hot. I had been up the river to the bridgehead at Plava. It was there that the offensive was to begin. It had been impossible to advance on the far side the year before because there was only one road leading down from the pass to the pontoon bridge and it was under machine-gun and shell fire for nearly a mile. It was not wide enough either to carry all the transport for an offensive and the Austrians could make a shambles out of it. But the Italians had crossed and spread out a little way on the far side to hold about a mile and a half on the Austrian side of the river. It was a nasty place and the Austrians should not have let them hold it. I suppose it was mutual tolerance because the Austrians still kept a bridgehead further down the river. The Austrian trenches were above on the hillside only a few yards from the Italian lines. There had been a little town but it was all rubble. There was what was left of a railway station and a smashed permanent bridge that could not be repaired and used because it was in plain sight.

I went along the narrow road down toward the river, left the car at the dressing station under the hill, crossed the pontoon bridge, which was protected by a shoulder of the mountain, and went through the trenches in the smashed-down town and along the edge of the slope. Everybody was in the dugouts. There were racks of rockets standing to be touched off to call for help from the artillery or to signal with if the telephone wires were cut. It was quiet, hot and dirty. I looked across the wire at the Austrian lines. Nobody was in sight. I had a drink with a captain that I knew in one of the dugouts and went back across the bridge.

A new wide road was being finished that would go over the mountain and zig-zag down to the bridge. When this road was finished the offensive would start. It came down through the forest in sharp turns. The system was to bring everything down the new road and take the empty trucks, carts and loaded ambulances and all returning traffic up the old narrow road. The dressing station was on the Austrian side of the river under the edge of the hill and stretcher-bearers would bring the wounded back across the pontoon bridge. It would be the same when the offensive started. As far as I could make out the last mile or so of the new road where it started to level out would be able to be shelled steadily by the Austrians. It looked as though it might be a mess. But I found a place where the cars would be sheltered after they passed that last bad-looking bit and could wait for the wounded to be brought across the pontoon bridge. I would have liked to drive over the new road but it was not yet finished. It looked wide and well made with a good grade and the turns looked very impressive where you could see them through openings in the forest on the mountain side. The cars would be all right with their good metal-to-metal brakes and anyway, coming down, they would not be loaded. I drove back up the narrow road.

Two carabinieri held the car up. A shell had fallen and while we waited three others fell up the road. They were seventy-sevens and came with a whishing rush of air, a hard bright burst and flash and then gray smoke that blew across the road. The carabinieri waved us to go on. Passing where the shells had landed I avoided the small broken places and smelled the high explosive and the smell of blasted clay and stone and freshly shattered flint. I drove back to Gorizia and our villa and, as I said, went to call on Miss Barkley, who was on duty.

At dinner I ate very quickly and left for the villa where the British had their hospital. It was really very large and beautiful and there were fine trees in the grounds. Miss Barkley was sitting on a bench in the garden. Miss Ferguson was with her. They seemed glad to see me and in a little while Miss Ferguson excused herself and went away.

“I’ll leave you two,” she said. “You get along very well without me.”

“Don’t go, Helen,” Miss Barkley said.

“I’d really rather. I must write some letters.”

“Good-night,” I said.

“Good-night, Mr. Henry.”

“Don’t write anything that will bother the censor.”

“Don’t worry. I only write about what a beautiful place we live in and how brave the Italians are.”

“That way you’ll be decorated.”

“That will be nice. Good-night, Catherine.”

“I’ll see you in a little while,” Miss Barkley said. Miss Ferguson walked away in the dark.

“She’s nice,” I said.

“Oh, yes, she’s very nice. She’s a nurse.”

“Aren’t you a nurse?”

“Oh, no. I’m something called a V. A. D. We work very hard but no one trusts us.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t trust us when there’s nothing going on. When there is really work they trust us.”

“What is the difference?”

“A nurse is like a doctor. It takes a long time to be. A V. A. D. is a short cut.”

“I see.”

“The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”

“I can come here though.”

“Oh, yes. We’re not cloistered.”

“Let’s drop the war.”

“It’s very hard. There’s no place to drop it.”

“Let’s drop it anyway.”

“All right.”

We looked at each other in the dark. I thought she was very beautiful and I took her hand. She let me take it and I held it and put my arm around under her arm.

“No,” she said. I kept my arm where it was.

“Why not?”

“No.”

“Yes,” I said. “Please.” I leaned forward in the dark to kiss her and there was a sharp stinging flash. She had slapped my face hard. Her hand had hit my nose and eyes, and tears came in my eyes from the reflex.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. I felt I had a certain advantage.

“You were quite right.”

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she said. “I just couldn’t stand the nurse’s-evening-off aspect of it. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I did hurt you, didn’t I?”

She was looking at me in the dark. I was angry and yet certain, seeing it all ahead like the moves in a chess game.

“You did exactly right,” I said. “I don’t mind at all.”

“Poor man.”

“You see I’ve been leading a sort of a funny life. And I never even talk English. And then you are so very beautiful.” I looked at her.

“You don’t need to say a lot of nonsense. I said I was sorry. We do get along.”

“Yes,” I said. “And we have gotten away from the war.”

She laughed. It was the first time I had ever heard her laugh. I watched her face.

“You are sweet,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes. You are a dear. I’d be glad to kiss you if you don’t mind.”

I looked in her eyes and put my arm around her as I had before and kissed her. I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight. I was still angry and as I held her suddenly she shivered. I held her close against me and could feel her heart beating and her lips opened and her head went back against my hand and then she was crying on my shoulder.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “You will be good to me, won’t you?”

What the hell, I thought. I stroked her hair and patted her shoulder. She was crying.

“You will, won’t you?” She looked up at me. “Because we’re going to have a strange life.”

After a while I walked with her to the door of the villa and she went in and I walked home. Back at the villa I went upstairs to the room. Rinaldi was lying on his bed. He looked at me.

“So you make progress with Miss Barkley?”

“We are friends.”

“You have that pleasant air of a dog in heat.”

I did not understand the word.

“Of a what?”

He explained.

“You,” I said, “have that pleasant air of a dog who — —”

“Stop it,” he said. “In a little while we would say insulting things.” He laughed.

“Good-night,” I said.

“Good-night, little puppy.”

I knocked over his candle with the pillow and got into bed in the dark.

Rinaldi picked up the candle, lit it and went on reading.

CHAPTER 6

I WAS AWAY for two days at the posts. When I got home it was too late and I did not see Miss Barkley until the next evening. She was not in the garden and I had to wait in the office of the hospital until she came down. There were many marble busts on painted wooden pillars along the walls of the room they used for an office. The hall too, that the office opened on, was lined with them. They had the complete marble quality of all looking alike. Sculpture had always seemed a dull business — still, bronzes looked like something. But marble busts all looked like a cemetery. There was one fine cemetery though — the one at Pisa. Genoa was the place to see the bad marbles. This had been the villa of a very wealthy German and the busts must have cost him plenty. I wondered who had done them and how much he got. I tried to make out whether they were members of the family or what; but they were all uniformly classical. You could not tell anything about them.

I sat on a chair and held my cap. We were supposed to wear steel helmets even in Gorizia but they were uncomfortable and too bloody theatrical in a town where the civilian inhabitants had not been evacuated. I wore one when we went up to the posts and carried an English gas mask. We were just beginning to get some of them. They were a real mask. Also we were required to wear an automatic pistol; even doctors and sanitary officers. I felt it against the back of the chair. You were liable to arrest if you did not have one worn in plain sight. Rinaldi carried a holster stuffed with toilet paper. I wore a real one and felt like a gunman until I practiced firing it. It was an Astra 7.65 caliber with a short barrel and it jumped so sharply when you let it off that there was no question of hitting anything. I practiced with it, holding below the target and trying to master the jerk of the ridiculous short barrel until I could hit within a yard of where I aimed at twenty paces and then the ridiculousness of carrying a pistol at all came over me and I soon forgot it and carried it flopping against the small of my back with no feeling at all except a vague sort of shame when I met English-speaking people. I sat now in the chair and an orderly of some sort looked at me disapprovingly from behind a desk while I looked at the marble floor, the pillars with the marble busts, and the frescoes on the wall and waited for Miss Barkley. The frescoes were not bad. Any frescoes were good when they started to peel and flake off.

I saw Catherine Barkley coming down the hall, and stood up. She did not seem tall walking toward me but she looked very lovely.

“Good-evening, Mr. Henry,” she said.

“How do you do?” I said. The orderly was listening behind the desk.

“Shall we sit here or go out in the garden?”

“Let’s go out. It’s much cooler.”

I walked behind her out into the garden, the orderly looking after us. When we were out on the gravel drive she said, “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been out on post.”

“You couldn’t have sent me a note?”

“No,” I said. “Not very well. I thought I was coming back.”

“You ought to have let me know, darling.”

We were off the driveway, walking under the trees. I took her hands, then stopped and kissed her.

“Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”

“No,” she said. “We have to just walk here. You’ve been away a long time.”

“This is the third day. But I’m back now.”

She looked at me, “And you do love me?”

“Yes.”

“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.

“And you call me Catherine?”

“Catherine.” We walked on a way and were stopped under a tree.

“Say, ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.’”

“I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”

“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I love you so and it’s been awful. You won’t go away?”

“No. I’ll always come back.”

“Oh, I love you so. Please put your hand there again.”

“It’s not been away.” I turned her so I could see her face when I kissed her and I saw that her eyes were shut. I kissed both her shut eyes. I thought she was probably a little crazy. It was all right if she was. I did not care what I was getting into. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers where the girls climbed all over you and put your cap on backward as a sign of affection between their trips upstairs with brother officers. I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes. Nobody had mentioned what the stakes were. It was all right with me.

“I wish there was some place we could go,” I said. I was experiencing the masculine difficulty of making love very long standing up.

“There isn’t any place,” she said. She came back from wherever she had been.

“We might sit there just for a little while.”

We sat on the flat stone bench and I held Catherine Barkley’s hand. She would not let me put my arm around her.

“Are you very tired?” she asked.

“No.”

She looked down at the grass.

“This is a rotten game we play, isn’t it?”

“What game?”

“Don’t be dull.”

“I’m not, on purpose.”

“You’re a nice boy,” she said. “And you play it as well as you know how. But it’s a rotten game.”

“Do you always know what people think?”

“Not always. But I do with you. You don’t have to pretend you love me. That’s over for the evening. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

“But I do love you.”

“Please let’s not lie when we don’t have to. I had a very fine little show and I’m all right now. You see I’m not mad and I’m not gone off. It’s only a little sometimes.”

I pressed her hand, “Dear Catherine.”

“It sounds very funny now — Catherine. You don’t pronounce it very much alike. But you’re very nice. You’re a very good boy.”

“That’s what the priest said.”

“Yes, you’re very good. And you will come and see me?”

“Of course.”

“And you don’t have to say you love me. That’s all over for a while.” She stood up and put out her hand. “Good-night.”

I wanted to kiss her.

“No,” she said. “I’m awfully tired.”

“Kiss me, though,” I said.

“I’m awfully tired, darling.”

“Kiss me.”

“Do you want to very much?”

“Yes.”

We kissed and she broke away suddenly. “No. Good-night, please, darling.” We walked to the door and I saw her go in and down the hall. I liked to watch her move. She went on down the hall. I went on home. It was a hot night and there was a good deal going on up in the mountains. I watched the flashes on San Gabriele.

I stopped in front of the Villa Rossa. The shutters were up but it was still going on inside. Somebody was singing. I went on home. Rinaldi came in while I was undressing.

“Ah, ha!” he said. “It does not go so well. Baby is puzzled.”

“Where have you been?”

“At the Villa Rossa. It was very edifying, baby. We all sang. Where have you been?”

“Calling on the British.”

“Thank God I did not become involved with the British.”

CHAPTER 7

I CAME BACK the next afternoon from our first mountain post and stopped the car at the smistimento where the wounded and sick were sorted by their papers and the papers marked for the different hospitals. I had been driving and I sat in the car and the driver took the papers in. It was a hot day and the sky was very bright and blue and the road was white and dusty. I sat in the high seat of the Fiat and thought about nothing. A regiment went by in the road and I watched them pass. The men were hot and sweating. Some wore their steel helmets but most of them carried them slung from their packs. Most of the helmets were too big and came down almost over the ears of the men who wore them. The officers all wore helmets; better-fitting helmets. It was half of the brigata Basilicata. I identified them by their red and white striped collar mark. There were stragglers going by long after the regiment had passed — men who could not keep up with their platoons. They were sweaty, dusty and tired. Some looked pretty bad. A soldier came along after the last of the stragglers. He was walking with a limp. He stopped and sat down beside the road. I got down and went over.

“What’s the matter?”

He looked at me, then stood up.

“I’m going on.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“ — the war.”

“What’s wrong with your leg?”

“It’s not my leg. I got a rupture.”

“Why don’t you ride with the transport?” I asked. “Why don’t you go to the hospital?”

“They won’t let me. The lieutenant said I slipped the truss on purpose.”

“Let me feel it.”

“It’s way out.”

“Which side is it on?”

“Here.”

I felt it.

“Cough,” I said.

“I’m afraid it will make it bigger. It’s twice as big as it was this morning.”

“Sit down,” I said. “As soon as I get the papers on these wounded I’ll take you along the road and drop you with your medical officers.”

“He’ll say I did it on purpose.”

“They can’t do anything,” I said. “It’s not a wound. You’ve had it before, haven’t you?”

“But I lost the truss.”

“They’ll send you to a hospital.”

“Can’t I stay here, Tenente?”

“No, I haven’t any papers for you.”

The driver came out of the door with the papers for the wounded in the car.

“Four for 105. Two for 132,” he said. They were hospitals beyond the river.

“You drive,” I said. I helped the soldier with the rupture up on the seat with us.

“You speak English?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“How you like this goddam war?”

“Rotten.”

“I say it’s rotten. Jesus Christ, I say it’s rotten.”

“Were you in the States?”

“Sure. In Pittsburgh. I knew you was an American.”

“Don’t I talk Italian good enough?”

“I knew you was an American all right.”

“Another American,” said the driver in Italian looking at the hernia man.

“Listen, lootenant. Do you have to take me to that regiment?”

“Yes.”

“Because the captain doctor knew I had this rupture. I threw away the goddam truss so it would get bad and I wouldn’t have to go to the line again.”

“I see.”

“Couldn’t you take me no place else?”

“If it was closer to the front I could take you to a first medical post. But back here you’ve got to have papers.”

“If I go back they’ll make me get operated on and then they’ll put me in the line all the time.”

I thought it over.

“You wouldn’t want to go in the line all the time, would you?” he asked.

“No.”

“Jesus Christ, ain’t this a goddam war?”

“Listen,” I said. “You get out and fall down by the road and get a bump on your head and I’ll pick you up on our way back and take you to a hospital. We’ll stop by the road here, Aldo.” We stopped at the side of the road. I helped him down.

“I’ll be right here, lieutenant,” he said.

“So long,” I said. We went on and passed the regiment about a mile ahead, then crossed the river, cloudy with snow-water and running fast through the spiles of the bridge, to ride along the road across the plain and deliver the wounded at the two hospitals. I drove coming back and went fast with the empty car to find the man from Pittsburgh. First we passed the regiment, hotter and slower than ever: then the stragglers. Then we saw a horse ambulance stopped by the road. Two men were lifting the hernia man to put him in. They had come back for him. He shook his head at me. His helmet was off and his forehead was bleeding below the hair line. His nose was skinned and there was dust on the bloody patch and dust in his hair.

“Look at the bump, lieutenant!” he shouted. “Nothing to do. They come back for me.”

When I got back to the villa it was five o’clock and I went out where we washed the cars, to take a shower. Then I made out my report in my room, sitting in my trousers and an undershirt in front of the open window. In two days the offensive was to start and I would go with the cars to Plava. It was a long time since I had written to the States and I knew I should write but I had let it go so long that it was almost impossible to write now. There was nothing to write about. I sent a couple of army Zona di Guerra post-cards, crossing out everything except, I am well. That should handle them. Those post-cards would be very fine in America; strange and mysterious. This was a strange and mysterious war zone but I supposed it was quite well run and grim compared to other wars with the Austrians. The Austrian army was created to give Napoleon victories; any Napoleon. I wished we had a Napoleon, but instead we had Il Generale Cadorna, fat and prosperous and Vittorio Emmanuele, the tiny man with the long thin neck and the goat beard. Over on the right they had the Duke of Aosta. Maybe he was too good-looking to be a great general but he looked like a man. Lots of them would have liked him to be king. He looked like a king. He was the King’s uncle and commanded the third army. We were in the second army. There were some British batteries up with the third army. I had met two gunners from that lot, in Milan. They were very nice and we had a big evening. They were big and shy and embarrassed and very appreciative together of anything that happened. I wish that I was with the British. It would have been much simpler. Still I would probably have been killed. Not in this ambulance business. Yes, even in the ambulance business. British ambulance drivers were killed sometimes. Well, I knew I would not be killed. Not in this war. It did not have anything to do with me. It seemed no more dangerous to me myself than war in the movies. I wished to God it was over though. Maybe it would finish this summer. Maybe the Austrians would crack. They had always cracked in other wars. What was the matter with this war? Everybody said the French were through. Rinaldi said that the French had mutinied and troops marched on Paris. I asked him what happened and he said, “Oh, they stopped them.” I wanted to go to Austria without war. I wanted to go to the Black Forest. I wanted to go to the Hartz Mountains.

Where were the Hartz Mountains anyway? They were fighting in the Carpathians. I did not want to go there anyway. It might be good though. I could go to Spain if there was no war. The sun was going down and the day was cooling off. After supper I would go and see Catherine Barkley. I wish she were here now. I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like to eat at the Cova and then walk down the Via Manzoni in the hot evening and cross over and turn off along the canal and go to the hotel with Catherine Barkley. Maybe she would. Maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door and the porter would take off his cap and I would stop at the concierge’s desk and ask for the key and she would stand by the elevator and then we would get in the elevator and it would go up very slowly clicking at all the floors and then our floor and the boy would open the door and stand there and she would step out and I would step out and we would walk down the hall and I would put the key in the door and open it and go in and then take down the telephone and ask them to send a bottle of capri bianca in a silver bucket full of ice and you would hear the ice against the pail coming down the corridor and the boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please. Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open and the swallows flying over the roofs of the houses and when it was dark afterward and you went to the window very small bats hunting over the houses and close down over the trees and we would drink the capri and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be. I would eat quickly and go and see Catherine Barkley.

They talked too much at the mess and I drank wine because tonight we were not all brothers unless I drank a little and talked with the priest about Archbishop Ireland who was, it seemed, a noble man and with whose injustice, the injustices he had received and in which I participated as an American, and of which I had never heard, I feigned acquaintance. It would have been impolite not to have known something of them when I had listened to such a splendid explanation of their causes which were, after all, it seemed, misunderstandings. I thought he had a fine name and he came from Minnesota which made a lovely name: Ireland of Minnesota, Ireland of Wisconsin, Ireland of Michigan. What made it pretty was that it sounded like Island. No that wasn’t it. There was more to it than that. Yes, father. That is true, father. Perhaps, father. No, father. Well, maybe yes, father. You know more about it than I do, father. The priest was good but dull. The officers were not good but dull. The King was good but dull. The wine was bad but not dull. It took the enamel off your teeth and left it on the roof of your mouth.

“And the priest was locked up,” Rocca said, “because they found the three per cent bonds on his person. It was in France of course. Here they would never have arrested him. He denied all knowledge of the five per cent bonds. This took place at Béziers. I was there and reading of it in the paper, went to the jail and asked to see the priest. It was quite evident he had stolen the bonds.”

“I don’t believe a word of this,” Rinaldi said.

“Just as you like,” Rocca said. “But I am telling it for our priest here. It is very informative. He is a priest; he will appreciate it.”

The priest smiled. “Go on,” he said. “I am listening.”

“Of course some of the bonds were not accounted for but the priest had all of the three per cent bonds and several local obligations, I forget exactly what they were. So I went to the jail, now this is the point of the story, and I stood outside his cell and I said as though I were going to confession, ‘Bless me, father, for you have sinned.’”

There was great laughter from everybody.

“And what did he say?” asked the priest. Rocca ignored this and went on to explain the joke to me. “You see the point, don’t you?” It seemed it was a very funny joke if you understood it properly. They poured me more wine and I told the story about the English private soldier who was placed under the shower bath. Then the major told the story of the eleven Czecho-slovaks and the Hungarian corporal. After some more wine I told the story of the jockey who found the penny. The major said there was an Italian story something like that about the duchess who could not sleep at night. At this point the priest left and I told the story about the travelling salesman who arrived at five o’clock in the morning at Marseilles when the mistral was blowing. The major said he had heard a report that I could drink. I denied this. He said it was true and by the corpse of Bacchus we would test whether it was true or not. Not Bacchus, I said. Not Bacchus. Yes, Bacchus, he said. I should drink cup for cup and glass for glass with Bassi, Fillipo Vincenza. Bassi said no that was no test because he had already drunk twice as much as I. I said that was a foul lie and, Bacchus or no Bacchus, Fillipo Vincenza Bassi or Bassi Fillippo Vicenza had never touched a drop all evening and what was his name anyway? He said was my name Frederico Enrico or Enrico Federico? I said let the best man win, Bacchus barred, and the major started us with red wine in mugs. Half-way through the wine I did not want any more. I remembered where I was going.

“Bassi wins,” I said. “He’s a better man than I am. I have to go.”

“He does really,” said Rinaldi. “He has a rendezvous. I know all about it.”

“I have to go.”

“Another night,” said Bassi. “Another night when you feel stronger.” He slapped me on the shoulder. There were lighted candles on the table. All the officers were very happy. “Good-night, gentlemen,” I said.

Rinaldi went out with me. We stood outside the door on the patch and he said, “You better not go up there drunk.”

“I’m not drunk, Rinin. Really.”

“You’d better chew some coffee.”

“Nonsense.”

“I’ll get some, baby. You walk up and down.” He came back with a handful of roasted coffee beans. “Chew those, baby, and God be with you.”

“Bacchus,” I said.

“I’ll walk down with you.”

“I’m perfectly all right.”

We walked along together through the town and I chewed the coffee. At the gate of the driveway that led up to the British villa, Rinaldi said good-night.

“Good-night,” I said. “Why don’t you come in?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I like the simpler pleasures.”

“Thank you for the coffee beans.”

“Nothing, baby. Nothing.”

I started down the driveway. The outlines of the cypresses that lined it were sharp and clear. I looked back and saw Rinaldi standing watching me and waved to him.

I sat in the reception hall of the villa, waiting for Catherine Barkley to come down. Some one was coming down the hallway. I stood up, but it was not Catherine. It was Miss Ferguson.

“Hello,” she said. “Catherine asked me to tell you she was sorry she couldn’t see you this evening.”

“I’m so sorry. I hope she’s not ill.”

“She’s not awfully well.”

“Will you tell her how sorry I am?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Do you think it would be any good to try and see her tomorrow?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “Good-night.”

I went out the door and suddenly I felt lonely and empty. I had treated seeing Catherine very lightly, I had gotten somewhat drunk and had nearly forgotten to come but when I could not see her there I was feeling lonely and hollow.

CHAPTER 8

THE NEXT AFTERNOON we heard there was to be an attack up the river that night and that we were to take four cars there. Nobody knew anything about it although they all spoke with great positiveness and strategical knowledge. I was riding in the first car and as we passed the entry to the British hospital I told the driver to stop. The other cars pulled up. I got out and told the driver to go on and that if we had not caught up to them at the junction of the road to Cormons to wait there. I hurried up the driveway and inside the reception hall I asked for Miss Barkley.

“She’s on duty.”

“Could I see her just for a moment?”

They sent an orderly to see and she came back with him.

“I stopped to ask if you were better. They told me you were on duty, so I asked to see you.”

“I’m quite well,” she said, “I think the heat knocked me over yesterday.”

“I have to go.”

“I’ll just step out the door a minute.”

“And you’re all right?” I asked outside.

“Yes, darling. Are you coming to-night?”

“No. I’m leaving now for a show up above Plava.”

“A show?”

“I don’t think it’s anything.”

“And you’ll be back?”

“To-morrow.”

She was unclasping something from her neck. She put it in my hand. “It’s a Saint Anthony,” she said. “And come to-morrow night.”

“You’re not a Catholic, are you?”

“No. But they say a Saint Anthony’s very useful.”

“I’ll take care of him for you. Good-by.”

“No,” she said, “not good-by.”

“All right.”

“Be a good boy and be careful. No, you can’t kiss me here. You can’t.”

“All right.”

I looked back and saw her standing on the steps. She waved and I kissed my hand and held it out. She waved again and then I was out of the driveway and climbing up into the seat of the ambulance and we started. The Saint Anthony was in a little white metal capsule. I opened the capsule and spilled him out into my hand.

“Saint Anthony?” asked the driver.

“Yes.”

“I have one.” His right hand left the wheel and opened a button on his tunic and pulled it out from under his shirt.

“See?”

I put my Saint Anthony back in the capsule, spilled the thin gold chain together and put it all in my breast pocket.

“You don’t wear him?”

“No.”

“It’s better to wear him. That’s what it’s for.”

“All right,” I said. I undid the clasp of the gold chain and put it around my neck and clasped it. The saint hung down on the outside of my uniform and I undid the throat of my tunic, unbuttoned the shirt collar and dropped him in under the shirt. I felt him in his metal box against my chest while we drove. Then I forgot about him. After I was wounded I never found him. Some one probably got it at one of the dressing stations.

We drove fast when we were over the bridge and soon we saw the dust of the other cars ahead down the road. The road curved and we saw the three cars looking quite small, the dust rising from the wheels and going off through the trees. We caught them and passed them and turned off on a road that climbed up into the hills. Driving in convoy is not unpleasant if you are the first car and I settled back in the seat and watched the country. We were in the foothills on the near side of the river and as the road mounted there were the high mountains off to the north with snow still on the tops. I looked back and saw the three cars all climbing, spaced by the interval of their dust. We passed a long column of loaded mules, the drivers walking along beside the mules wearing red fezzes. They were bersaglieri.

Beyond the mule train the road was empty and we climbed through the hills and then went down over the shoulder of a long hill into a river-valley. There were trees along both sides of the road and through the right line of trees I saw the river, the water clear, fast and shallow. The river was low and there were stretches of sand and pebbles with a narrow channel of water and sometimes the water spread like a sheen over the pebbly bed. Close to the bank I saw deep pools, the water blue like the sky. I saw arched stone bridges over the river where tracks turned off from the road and we passed stone farmhouses with pear trees candelabraed against their south walls and low stone walls in the fields. The road went up the valley a long way and then we turned off and commenced to climb into the hills again. The road climbed steeply going up and back and forth through chestnut woods to level finally along a ridge. I could look down through the woods and see, far below, with the sun on it, the line of the river that separated the two armies. We went along the rough new military road that followed the crest of the ridge and I looked to the north at the two ranges of mountains, green and dark to the snow-line and then white and lovely in the sun. Then, as the road mounted along the ridge, I saw a third range of mountains, higher snow mountains, that looked chalky white and furrowed, with strange planes, and then there were mountains far off beyond all these that you could hardly tell if you really saw. Those were all the Austrians’ mountains and we had nothing like them. Ahead there was a rounded turn-off in the road to the right and looking down I could see the road dropping through the trees. There were troops on this road and motor trucks and mules with mountain guns and as we went down, keeping to the side, I could see the river far down below, the line of ties and rails running along it, the old bridge where the railway crossed to the other side and across, under a hill beyond the river, the broken houses of the little town that was to be taken.

It was nearly dark when we came down and turned onto the main road that ran beside the river.

CHAPTER 9

THE ROAD WAS crowded and there were screens of corn-stalk and straw matting on both sides and matting over the top so that it was like the entrance at a circus or a native village. We drove slowly in this matting-covered tunnel and came out onto a bare cleared space where the railway station had been. The road here was below the level of the river bank and all along the side of the sunken road there were holes dug in the bank with infantry in them. The sun was going down and looking up along the bank as we drove I saw the Austrian observation balloons above the hills on the other side dark against the sunset. We parked the cars beyond a brickyard. The ovens and some deep holes had been equipped as dressing stations. There were three doctors that I knew. I talked with the major and learned that when it should start and our cars should be loaded we would drive them back along the screened road and up to the main road along the ridge where there would be a post and other cars to clear them. He hoped the road would not jam. It was a one-road show. The road was screened because it was in sight of the Austrians across the river. Here at the brickyard we were sheltered from rifle or machine-gun fire by the river bank. There was one smashed bridge across the river. They were going to put over another bridge when the bombardment started and some troops were to cross at the shallows up above at the bend of the river. The major was a little man with upturned mustaches. He had been in the war in Libya and wore two wound-stripes. He said that if the thing went well he would see that I was decorated. I said I hoped it would go well but that he was too kind. I asked him if there was a big dugout where the drivers could stay and he sent a soldier to show me. I went with him and found the dugout, which was very good. The drivers were pleased with it and I left them there. The major asked me to have a drink with him and two other officers. We drank rum and it was very friendly. Outside it was getting dark. I asked what time the attack was to be and they said as soon as it was dark. I went back to the drivers. They were sitting in the dugout talking and when I came in they stopped. I gave them each a package of cigarettes, Macedonias, loosely packed cigarettes that spilled tobacco and needed to have the ends twisted before you smoked them. Manera lit his lighter and passed it around. The lighter was shaped like a Fiat radiator. I told them what I had heard.

“Why didn’t we see the post when we came down?” Passini asked.

“It was just beyond where we turned off.”

“That road will be a dirty mess,” Manera said.

“They’ll shell the — out of us.”

“Probably.”

“What about eating, lieutenant? We won’t get a chance to eat after this thing starts.”

“I’ll go and see now,” I said.

“You want us to stay here or can we look around?”

“Better stay here.”

I went back to the major’s dugout and he said the field kitchen would be along and the drivers could come and get their stew. He would loan them mess tins if they did not have them. I said I thought they had them. I went back and told the drivers I would get them as soon as the food came. Manera said he hoped it would come before the bombardment started. They were silent until I went out. They were all mechanics and hated the war.

I went out to look at the cars and see what was going on and then came back and sat down in the dugout with the four drivers. We sat on the ground with our backs against the wall and smoked. Outside it was nearly dark. The earth of the dugout was warm and dry and I let my shoulders back against the wall, sitting on the small of my back, and relaxed.

“Who goes to the attack?” asked Gavuzzi.

“Bersaglieri.”

“All bersaglieri?”

“I think so.”

“There aren’t enough troops here for a real attack.”

“It is probably to draw attention from where the real attack will be.”

“Do the men know that who attack?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Of course they don’t,” Manera said. “They wouldn’t attack if they did.”

“Yes, they would,” Passini said. “Bersaglieri are fools.”

“They are brave and have good discipline,” I said.

“They are big through the chest by measurement, and healthy. But they are still fools.”

“The granatieri are tall,” Manera said. This was a joke. They all laughed.

“Were you there, Tenente, when they wouldn’t attack and they shot every tenth man?”

“No.”

“It is true. They lined them up afterward and took every tenth man. Carabinieri shot them.”

“Carabinieri,” said Passini and spat on the floor. “But those grenadiers; all over six feet. They wouldn’t attack.”

“If everybody would not attack the war would be over,” Manera said.

“It wasn’t that way with the granatieri. They were afraid. The officers all came from such good families.”

“Some of the officers went alone.”

“A sergeant shot two officers who would not get out.”

“Some troops went out.”

“Those that went out were not lined up when they took the tenth men.”

“One of those shot by the carabinieri is from my town,” Passini said. “He was a big smart tall boy to be in the granatieri. Always in Rome. Always with the girls. Always with the carabinieri.” He laughed. “Now they have a guard outside his house with a bayonet and nobody can come to see his mother and father and sisters and his father loses his civil rights and cannot even vote. They are all without law to protect them. Anybody can take their property.”

“If it wasn’t that that happens to their families nobody would go to the attack.”

“Yes. Alpini would. These V. E. soldiers would. Some bersaglieri.”

“Bersaglieri have run too. Now they try to forget it.”

“You should not let us talk this way, Tenente. Evviva l’esercito,” Passini said sarcastically.

“I know how you talk,” I said. “But as long as you drive the cars and behave—”

“ — and don’t talk so other officers can hear,” Manera finished.

“I believe we should get the war over,” I said. “It would not finish it if one side stopped fighting. It would only be worse if we stopped fighting.”

“It could not be worse,” Passini said respectfully. “There is nothing worse than war.”

“Defeat is worse.”

“I do not believe it,” Passini said still respectfully. “What is defeat? You go home.”

“They come after you. They take your home. They take your sisters.”

“I don’t believe it,” Passini said. “They can’t do that to everybody. Let everybody defend his home. Let them keep their sisters in the house.”

“They hang you. They come and make you be a soldier again. Not in the auto-ambulance, in the infantry.”

“They can’t hang every one.”

“An outside nation can’t make you be a soldier,” Manera said. “At the first battle you all run.”

“Like the Tchecos.”

“I think you do not know anything about being conquered and so you think it is not bad.”

“Tenente,” Passini said. “We understand you let us talk. Listen. There is nothing as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize at all how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made.”

“I know it is bad but we must finish it.”

“It doesn’t finish. There is no finish to a war.”

“Yes there is.”

Passini shook his head.

“War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele?”

“What if we take the Carso and Monfalcone and Trieste? Where are we then? Did you see all the far mountains to-day? Do you think we could take all them too? Only if the Austrians stop fighting. One side must stop fighting. Why don’t we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is a war.”

“You’re an orator.”

“We think. We read. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates this war.”

“There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war.”

“Also they make money out of it.”

“Most of them don’t,” said Passini. “They are too stupid. They do it for nothing. For stupidity.”

“We must shut up,” said Manera. “We talk too much even for the Tenente.”

“He likes it,” said Passini. “We will convert him.”

“But now we will shut up,” Manera said.

“Do we eat yet, Tenente?” Gavuzzi asked.

“I will go and see,” I said. Gordini stood up and went outside with me.

“Is there anything I can do, Tenente? Can I help in any way?” He was the quietest one of the four. “Come with me if you want,” I said, “and we’ll see.”

It was dark outside and the long light from the search-lights was moving over the mountains. There were big search-lights on that front mounted on camions that you passed sometimes on the roads at night, close behind the lines, the camion stopped a little off the road, an officer directing the light and the crew scared. We crossed the brickyard, and stopped at the main dressing station. There was a little shelter of green branches outside over the entrance and in the dark the night wind rustled the leaves dried by the sun. Inside there was a light. The major was at the telephone sitting on a box. One of the medical captains said the attack had been put forward an hour. He offered me a glass of cognac. I looked at the board tables, the instruments shining in the light, the basins and the stoppered bottles. Gordini stood behind me. The major got up from the telephone.

“It starts now,” he said. “It has been put back again.”

I looked outside, it was dark and the Austrian search-lights were moving on the mountains behind us. It was quiet for a moment still, then from all the guns behind us the bombardment started.

“Savoia,” said the major.

“About the soup, major,” I said. He did not hear me. I repeated it.

“It hasn’t come up.”

A big shell came in and burst outside in the brickyard. Another burst and in the noise you could hear the smaller noise of the brick and dirt raining down.

“What is there to eat?”

“We have a little pasta asciutta,” the major said.

“I’ll take what you can give me.”

The major spoke to an orderly who went out of sight in the back and came back with a metal basin of cold cooked macaroni. I handed it to Gordini.

“Have you any cheese?”

The major spoke grudgingly to the orderly who ducked back into the hole again and came out with a quarter of a white cheese.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“You’d better not go out.”

Outside something was set down beside the entrance. One of the two men who had carried it looked in.

“Bring him in,” said the major. “What’s the matter with you? Do you want us to come outside and get him?”

The two stretcher-bearers picked up the man under the arms and by the legs and brought him in.

“Slit the tunic,” the major said.

He held a forceps with some gauze in the end. The two captains took off their coats. “Get out of here,” the major said to the two stretcher-bearers.

“Come on,” I said to Gordini.

“You better wait until the shelling is over,” the major said over his shoulder.

“They want to eat,” I said.

“As you wish.”

Outside we ran across the brickyard. A shell burst short near the river bank. Then there was one that we did not hear coming until the sudden rush. We both went flat and with the flash and bump of the burst and the smell heard the singing off of the fragments and the rattle of falling brick. Gordini got up and ran for the dugout. I was after him, holding the cheese, its smooth surface covered with brick dust. Inside the dugout were the three drivers sitting against the wall, smoking.

“Here, you patriots,” I said.

“How are the cars?” Manera asked.

“All right.”

“Did they scare you, Tenente?”

“You’re damned right,” I said.

I took out my knife, opened it, wiped off the blade and pared off the dirty outside surface of the cheese. Gavuzzi handed me the basin of macaroni.

“Start in to eat, Tenente.”

“No,” I said. “Put it on the floor. We’ll all eat.”

“There are no forks.”

“What the hell,” I said in English.

I cut the cheese into pieces and laid them on the macaroni.

“Sit down to it,” I said. They sat down and waited. I put thumb and fingers into the macaroni and lifted. A mass loosened.

“Lift it high, Tenente.”

I lifted it to arm’s length and the strands cleared. I lowered it into the mouth, sucked and snapped in the ends, and chewed, then took a bite of cheese, chewed, and then a drink of the wine. It tasted of rusty metal. I handed the canteen back to Passini.

“It’s rotten,” he said. “It’s been in there too long. I had it in the car.”

They were all eating, holding their chins close over the basin, tipping their heads back, sucking in the ends. I took another mouthful and some cheese and a rinse of wine. Something landed outside that shook the earth.

“Four hundred twenty or minnenwerfer,” Gavuzzi said.

“There aren’t any four hundred twenties in the mountains,” I said.

“They have big Skoda guns. I’ve seen the holes.”

“Three hundred fives.”

We went on eating. There was a cough, a noise like a railway engine starting and then an explosion that shook the earth again.

“This isn’t a deep dugout,” Passini said.

“That was a big trench mortar.”

“Yes, sir.”

I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh — then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying “Mama Mia! Oh, mama Mia!” I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed. His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected. He bit his arm and moaned, “Oh mama mia, mama Mia,” then, “Dio te salve, Maria. Dio te salve, Maria. Oh Jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia mama Mia oh purest lovely Mary shoot me. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Oh Jesus lovely Mary stop it. Oh oh oh oh,” then choking, “Mama mama mia.” Then he was quiet, biting his arm, the stump of his leg twitching.

“Porta feriti!” I shouted holding my hands cupped. “Porta feriti!” I tried to get closer to Passini to try to put a tourniquet on the legs but I could not move. I tried again and my legs moved a little. I could pull backward along with my arms and elbows. Passini was quiet now. I sat beside him, undid my tunic and tried to rip the tail of my shirt. It would not rip and I bit the edge of the cloth to start it. Then I thought of his puttees. I had on wool stockings but Passini wore puttees. All the drivers wore puttees but Passini had only one leg. I unwound the puttee and while I was doing it I saw there was no need to try and make a tourniquet because he was dead already. I made sure he was dead. There were three others to locate. I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll’s eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn’t there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Oh, God, I said, get me out of here. I knew, however, that there had been three others. There were four drivers. Passini was dead. That left three. Some one took hold of me under the arms and somebody else lifted my legs.

“There are three others,” I said. “One is dead.”

“It’s Manera. We went for a stretcher but there wasn’t any. How are you, Tenente?”

“Where is Gordini and Gavuzzi?”

“Gordini’s at the post getting bandaged. Gavuzzi has your legs. Hold on to my neck, Tenente. Are you badly hit?”

“In the leg. How is Gordini?”

“He’s all right. It was a big trench mortar shell.”

“Passini’s dead.”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

A shell fell close and they both dropped to the ground and dropped me. “I’m sorry, Tenente,” said Manera. “Hang onto my neck.”

“If you drop me again.”

“It was because we were scared.”

“Are you unwounded?”

“We are both wounded a little.”

“Can Gordini drive?”

“I don’t think so.”

They dropped me once more before we reached the post.

“You sons of bitches,” I said.

“I am sorry, Tenente,” Manera said. “We won’t drop you again.”

Outside the post a great many of us lay on the ground in the dark. They carried wounded in and brought them out. I could see the light come out from the dressing station when the curtain opened and they brought some one in or out. The dead were off to one side. The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers. There were not enough stretchers. Some of the wounded were noisy but most were quiet. The wind blew the leaves in the bower over the door of the dressing station and the night was getting cold. Stretcher-bearers came in all the time, put their stretchers down, unloaded them and went away. As soon as I got to the dressing station Manera brought a medical sergeant out and he put bandages on both my legs. He said there was so much dirt blown into the wound that there had not been much hemorrhage. They would take me as soon as possible. He went back inside. Gordini could not drive, Manera said. His shoulder was smashed and his head was hurt. He had not felt bad but now the shoulder had stiffened. He was sitting up beside one of the brick walls. Manera and Gavuzzi each went off with a load of wounded. They could drive all right. The British had come with three ambulances and they had two men on each ambulance. One of their drivers came over to me, brought by Gordini who looked very white and sick. The Britisher leaned over.

“Are you hit badly?” he asked. He was a tall man and wore steel-rimmed spectacles.

“In the legs.”

“It’s not serious I hope. Will you have a cigarette?”

“Thanks.”

“They tell me you’ve lost two drivers.”

“Yes. One killed and the fellow that brought you.”

“What rotten luck. Would you like us to take the cars?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”

“We’d take quite good care of them and return them to the villa. 206 aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a charming place. I’ve seen you about. They tell me you’re an American.”

“Yes.”

“I’m English.”

“No!”

“Yes, English. Did you think I was Italian? There were some Italians with one of our units.”

“It would be fine if you would take the cars,” I said.

“We’ll be most careful of them,” he straightened up. “This chap of yours was very anxious for me to see you.” He patted Gordini on the shoulder. Gordini winced and smiled. The Englishman broke into voluble and perfect Italian. “Now everything is arranged. I’ve seen your Tenente. We will take over the two cars. You won’t worry now.” He broke off, “I must do something about getting you out of here. I’ll see the medical wallahs. We’ll take you back with us.”

He walked across to the dressing station, stepping carefully among the wounded. I saw the blanket open, the light came out and he went in.

“He will look after you, Tenente,” Gordini said.

“How are you, Franco?”

“I am all right.” He sat down beside me. In a moment the blanket in front of the dressing station opened and two stretcher-bearers came out followed by the tall Englishman. He brought them over to me.

“Here is the American Tenente,” he said in Italian.

“I’d rather wait,” I said. “There are much worse wounded than me. I’m all right.”

“Come, come,” he said. “Don’t be a bloody hero.” Then in Italian: “Lift him very carefully about the legs. His legs are very painful. He is the legitimate son of President Wilson.” They picked me up and took me into the dressing room. Inside they were operating on all the tables. The little major looked at us furious. He recognized me and waved a forceps.

“Ça va bien?”

“Ça va.”

“I have brought him in,” the tall Englishman said in Italian. “The only son of the American Ambassador. He can be here until you are ready to take him. Then I will take him with my first load.” He bent over me. “I’ll look up their adjutant to do your papers and it will all go much faster.” He stooped to go under the doorway and went out. The major was unhooking the forceps now, dropping them in a basin. I followed his hands with my eyes. Now he was bandaging. Then the stretcher-bearers took the man off the table.

“I’ll take the American Tenente,” one of the captains said. They lifted me onto the table. It was hard and slippery. There were many strong smells, chemical smells and the sweet smell of blood. They took off my trousers and the medical captain commenced dictating to the sergeant-adjutant while he worked, “Multiple superficial wounds of the left and right thigh and left and right knee and right foot. Profound wounds of right knee and foot. Lacerations of the scalp (he probed — Does that hurt? — Christ, yes!) with possible fracture of the skull. Incurred in the line of duty. That’s what keeps you from being court-martialled for self-inflicted wounds,” he said. “Would you like a drink of brandy? How did you run into this thing anyway? What were you trying to do? Commit suicide? Antitetanus please, and mark a cross on both legs. Thank you. I’ll clean this up a little, wash it out, and put on a dressing. Your blood coagulates beautifully.”

The adjutant, looking up from the paper, “What inflicted the wounds?”

The medical captain, “What hit you?”

Me, with the eyes shut, “A trench mortar shell.”

The captain, doing things that hurt sharply and severing tissue— “Are you sure?”

Me — trying to lie still and feeling my stomach flutter when the flesh was cut, “I think so.”

Captain doctor — (interested in something he was finding), “Fragments of enemy trench-mortar shell. Now I’ll probe for some of this if you like but it’s not necessary. I’ll paint all this and — Does that sting? Good, that’s nothing to how it will feel later. The pain hasn’t started yet. Bring him a glass of brandy. The shock dulls the pain; but this is all right, you have nothing to worry about if it doesn’t infect and it rarely does now. How is your head?”

“Good Christ!” I said.

“Better not drink too much brandy then. If you’ve got a fracture you don’t want inflammation. How does that feel?”

Sweat ran all over me.

“Good Christ!” I said.

“I guess you’ve got a fracture all right. I’ll wrap you up and don’t bounce your head around.” He bandaged, his hands moving very fast and the bandage coming taut and sure. “All right, good luck and Vive la France.”

“He’s an American,” one of the other captains said.

“I thought you said he was a Frenchman. He talks French,” the captain said. “I’ve known him before. I always thought he was French.” He drank a half tumbler of cognac. “Bring on something serious. Get some more of that Antitetanus.” The captain waved to me. They lifted me and the blanket-flap went across my face as we went out. Outside the sergeant-adjutant knelt down beside me where I lay, “Name?” he asked softly. “Middle name? First name? Rank? Where born? What class? What corps?” and so on. “I’m sorry for your head, Tenente. I hope you feel better. I’m sending you now with the English ambulance.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “Thank you very much.” The pain that the major had spoken about had started and all that was happening was without interest or relation. After a while the English ambulance came up and they put me onto a stretcher and lifted the stretcher up to the ambulance level and shoved it in. There was another stretcher by the side with a man on it whose nose I could see, waxy-looking, out of the bandages. He breathed very heavily. There were stretchers lifted and slid into the slings above. The tall English driver came around and looked in, “I’ll take it very easily,” he said. “I hope you’ll be comfy.” I felt the engine start, felt him climb up into the front seat, felt the brake come off and the clutch go in, then we started. I lay still and let the pain ride.

As the ambulance climbed along the road, it was slow in the traffic, sometimes it stopped, sometimes it backed on a turn, then finally it climbed quite fast. I felt something dripping. At first it dropped slowly and regularly, then it pattered into a stream. I shouted to the driver. He stopped the car and looked in through the hole behind his seat.

“What is it?”

“The man on the stretcher over me has a hemorrhage.”

“We’re not far from the top. I wouldn’t be able to get the stretcher out alone.” He started the car. The stream kept on. In the dark I could not see where it came from the canvas overhead. I tried to move sideways so that it did not fall on me. Where it had run down under my shirt it was warm and sticky. I was cold and my leg hurt so that it made me sick. After a while the stream from the stretcher above lessened and started to drip again and I heard and felt the canvas above move as the man on the stretcher settled more comfortably.

“How is he?” the Englishman called back. “We’re almost up.”

“He’s dead I think,” I said.

The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone. It was cold in the car in the night as the road climbed. At the post on the top they took the stretcher out and put another in and we went on.

CHAPTER 10

IN THE WARD at the field hospital they told me a visitor was coming to see me in the afternoon. It was a hot day and there were many flies in the room. My orderly had cut paper into strips and tied the strips to a stick to make a brush that swished the flies away. I watched them settle on the ceiling. When he stopped swishing and fell asleep they came down and I blew them away and finally covered my face with my hands and slept too. It was very hot and when I woke my legs itched. I waked the orderly and he poured mineral water on the dressings. That made the bed damp and cool. Those of us that were awake talked across the ward. The afternoon was a quiet time. In the morning they came to each bed in turn, three men nurses and a doctor and picked you up out of bed and carried you into the dressing room so that the beds could be made while we were having our wounds dressed. It was not a pleasant trip to the dressing room and I did not know until later that beds could be made with men in them. My orderly had finished pouring water and the bed felt cool and lovely and I was telling him where to scratch on the soles of my feet against the itching when one of the doctors brought in Rinaldi. He came in very fast and bent down over the bed and kissed me. I saw he wore gloves.

“How are you, baby? How do you feel? I bring you this—” It was a bottle of cognac. The orderly brought a chair and he sat down, “and good news. You will be decorated. They want to get you the medaglia d’argento but perhaps they can get only the bronze.”

“What for?”

“Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what happened. Did you do any heroic act?”

“No,” I said. “I was blown up while we were eating cheese.”

“Be serious. You must have done something heroic either before or after. Remember carefully.”

“I did not.”

“Didn’t you carry anybody on your back? Gordini says you carried several people on your back but the medical major at the first post declares it is impossible. He had to sign the proposition for the citation.”

“I didn’t carry anybody. I couldn’t move.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Rinaldi.

He took off his gloves.

“I think we can get you the silver. Didn’t you refuse to be medically aided before the others?”

“Not very firmly.”

“That doesn’t matter. Look how you are wounded. Look at your valorous conduct in asking to go always to the first line. Besides, the operation was successful.”

“Did they cross the river all right?”

“Enormously. They take nearly a thousand prisoners. It’s in the bulletin. Didn’t you see it?”

“No.”

“I’ll bring it to you. It is a successful coup de main.”

“How is everything?”

“Splendid. We are all splendid. Everybody is proud of you. Tell me just exactly how it happened. I am positive you will get the silver. Go on tell me. Tell me all about it.” He paused and thought. “Maybe you will get an English medal too. There was an English there. I’ll go and see him and ask if he will recommend you. He ought to be able to do something. Do you suffer much? Have a drink. Orderly, go get a corkscrew. Oh you should see what I did in the removal of three metres of small intestine and better now than ever. It is one for The Lancet. You do me a translation and I will send it to The Lancet. Every day I am better. Poor dear baby, how do you feel? Where is that damn corkscrew? You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.” He slapped his gloves on the edge of the bed.

“Here is the corkscrew, Signor Tenente,” the orderly said.

“Open the bottle. Bring a glass. Drink that, baby. How is your poor head? I looked at your papers. You haven’t any fracture. That major at the first post was a hog-butcher. I would take you and never hurt you. I never hurt anybody. I learn how to do it. Every day I learn to do things smoother and better. You must forgive me for talking so much, baby. I am very moved to see you badly wounded. There, drink that. It’s good. It cost fifteen lire. It ought to be good. Five stars. After I leave here I’ll go see that English and he’ll get you an English medal.”

“They don’t give them like that.”

“You are so modest. I will send the liaison officer. He can handle the English.”

“Have you seen Miss Barkley?”

“I will bring her here. I will go now and bring her here.”

“Don’t go,” I said. “Tell me about Gorizia. How are the girls?”

“There are no girls. For two weeks now they haven’t changed them. I don’t go there any more. It is disgraceful. They aren’t girls; they are old war comrades.”

“You don’t go at all?”

“I just go to see if there is anything new. I stop by. They all ask for you. It is a disgrace that they should stay so long that they become friends.”

“Maybe girls don’t want to go to the front any more.”

“Of course they do. They have plenty of girls. It is just bad administration. They are keeping them for the pleasure of dugout hiders in the rear.”

“Poor Rinaldi,” I said. “All alone at the war with no new girls.”

Rinaldi poured himself another glass of the cognac.

“I don’t think it will hurt you, baby. You take it.”

I drank the cognac and felt it warm all the way down. Rinaldi poured another glass. He was quieter now. He held up the glass. “To your valorous wounds. To the silver medal. Tell me, baby, when you lie here all the time in the hot weather don’t you get excited?”

“Sometimes.”

“I can’t imagine lying like that. I would go crazy.”

“You are crazy.”

“I wish you were back. No one to come in at night from adventures. No one to make fun of. No one to lend me money. No blood brother and roommate. Why do you get yourself wounded?”

“You can make fun of the priest.”

“That priest. It isn’t me that makes fun of him. It is the captain. I like him. If you must have a priest have that priest. He’s coming to see you. He makes big preparations.”

“I like him.”

“Oh, I knew it. Sometimes I think you and he are a little that way. You know.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do sometimes. A little that way like the number of the first regiment of the Brigata Ancona.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

He stood up and put on his gloves.

“Oh I love to tease you, baby. With your priest and your English girl, and really you are just like me underneath.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, we are. You are really an Italian. All fire and smoke and nothing inside. You only pretend to be American. We are brothers and we love each other.”

“Be good while I’m gone,” I said.

“I will send Miss Barkley. You are better with her without me. You are purer and sweeter.”

“Oh, go to hell.”

“I will send her. Your lovely cool goddess. English goddess. My God what would a man do with a woman like that except worship her? What else is an Englishwoman good for?”

“You are an ignorant foul-mouthed dago.”

“A what?”

“An ignorant wop.”

“Wop. You are a frozen-faced . . . wop.”

“You are ignorant. Stupid.” I saw that word pricked him and kept on. “Uninformed. Inexperienced, stupid from inexperience.”

“Truly? I tell you something about your good women. Your goddesses. There is only one difference between taking a girl who has always been good and a woman. With a girl it is painful. That’s all I know.” He slapped the bed with his glove. “And you never know if the girl will really like it.”

“Don’t get angry.”

“I’m not angry. I just tell you, baby, for your own good. To save you trouble.”

“That’s the only difference?”

“Yes. But millions of fools like you don’t know it.”

“You were sweet to tell me.”

“We won’t quarrel, baby. I love you too much. But don’t be a fool.”

“No. I’ll be wise like you.”

“Don’t be angry, baby. Laugh. Take a drink. I must go, really.”

“You’re a good old boy.”

“Now you see. Underneath we are the same. We are war brothers. Kiss me good-by.”

“You’re sloppy.”

“No. I am just more affectionate.”

I felt his breath come toward me. “Good-by. I come to see you again soon.” His breath went away. “I won’t kiss you if you don’t want. I’ll send your English girl. Good-by, baby. The cognac is under the bed. Get well soon.”

He was gone.

CHAPTER 11

IT WAS DUSK when the priest came. They had brought the soup and afterward taken away the bowls and I was lying looking at the rows of beds and out the window at the tree-top that moved a little in the evening breeze. The breeze came in through the window and it was cooler with the evening. The flies were on the ceiling now and on the electric light bulbs that hung on wires. The lights were only turned on when some one was brought in at night or when something was being done. It made me feel very young to have the dark come after the dusk and then remain. It was like being put to bed after early supper. The orderly came down between the beds and stopped. Some one was with him. It was the priest. He stood there small, brown-faced, and embarrassed.

“How do you do?” he asked. He put some packages down by the bed, on the floor.

“All right, father.”

He sat down in the chair that had been brought for Rinaldi and looked out of the window embarrassedly. I noticed his face looked very tired.

“I can only stay a minute,” he said. “It is late.”

“It’s not late. How is the mess?”

He smiled. “I am still a great joke,” he sounded tired too. “Thank God they are all well.

“I am so glad you are all right,” he said. “I hope you don’t suffer.” He seemed very tired and I was not used to seeing him tired.

“Not any more.”

“I miss you at the mess.”

“I wish I were there. I always enjoyed our talking.”

“I brought you a few little things,” he said. He picked up the packages. “This is mosquito netting. This is a bottle of vermouth. You like vermouth? These are English papers.”

“Please open them.”

He was pleased and undid them. I held the mosquito netting in my hands. The vermouth he held up for me to see and then put it on the floor beside the bed. I held up one of the sheaf of English papers. I could read the headlines by turning it so the half-light from the window was on it. It was The News of the World.

“The others are illustrated,” he said.

“It will be a great happiness to read them. Where did you get them?”

“I sent for them to Mestre. I will have more.”

“You were very good to come, father. Will you drink a glass of vermouth?”

“Thank you. You keep it. It’s for you.”

“No, drink a glass.”

“All right. I will bring you more then.”

The orderly brought the glasses and opened the bottle. He broke off the cork and the end had to be shoved down into the bottle. I could see the priest was disappointed but he said, “That’s all right. It’s no matter.”

“Here’s to your health, father.”

“To your better health.”

Afterward he held the glass in his hand and we looked at one another. Sometimes we talked and were good friends but to-night it was difficult.

“What’s the matter, father? You seem very tired.”

“I am tired but I have no right to be.”

“It’s the heat.”

“No. This is only the spring. I feel very low.”

“You have the war disgust.”

“No. But I hate the war.”

“I don’t enjoy it,” I said. He shook his head and looked out of the window.

“You do not mind it. You do not see it. You must forgive me. I know you are wounded.”

“That is an accident.”

“Still even wounded you do not see it. I can tell. I do not see it myself but I feel it a little.”

“When I was wounded we were talking about it. Passini was talking.”

The priest put down the glass. He was thinking about something else.

“I know them because I am like they are,” he said.

“You are different though.”

“But really I am like they are.”

“The officers don’t see anything.”

“Some of them do. Some are very delicate and feel worse than any of us.”

“They are mostly different.”

“It is not education or money. It is something else. Even if they had education or money men like Passini would not wish to be officers. I would not be an officer.”

“You rank as an officer. I am an officer.”

“I am not really. You are not even an Italian. You are a foreigner. But you are nearer the officers than you are to the men.”

“What is the difference?”

“I cannot say it easily. There are people who would make war. In this country there are many like that. There are other people who would not make war.”

“But the first ones make them do it.”

“Yes.”

“And I help them.”

“You are a foreigner. You are a patriot.”

“And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it?”

“I do not know.”

He looked out of the window again. I watched his face.

“Have they ever been able to stop it?”

“They are not organized to stop things and when they get organized their leaders sell them out.”

“Then it’s hopeless?”

“It is never hopeless. But sometimes I cannot hope. I try always to hope but sometimes I cannot.”

“Maybe the war will be over.”

“I hope so.”

“What will you do then?”

“If it is possible I will return to the Abruzzi.”

His brown face was suddenly very happy.

“You love the Abruzzi?”

“Yes, I love it very much.”

“You ought to go there then.”

“I would be too happy. If I could live there and love God and serve Him.”

“And be respected,” I said.

“Yes and be respected. Why not?”

“No reason not. You should be respected.”

“It does not matter. But there in my country it is understood that a man may love God. It is not a dirty joke.”

“I understand.”

He looked at me and smiled.

“You understand but you do not love God.”

“No.”

“You do not love Him at all?” he asked.

“I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes.”

“You should love Him.”

“I don’t love much.”

“Yes,” he said. “You do. What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

“I don’t love.”

“You will. I know you will. Then you will be happy.”

“I’m happy. I’ve always been happy.”

“It is another thing. You cannot know about it unless you have it.”

“Well,” I said. “If I ever get it I will tell you.”

“I stay too long and talk too much.” He was worried that he really did.

“No. Don’t go. How about loving women? If I really loved some woman would it be like that?”

“I don’t know about that. I never loved any woman.”

“What about your mother?”

“Yes, I must have loved my mother.”

“Did you always love God?”

“Ever since I was a little boy.”

“Well,” I said. I did not know what to say. “You are a fine boy,” I said.

“I am a boy,” he said. “But you call me father.”

“That’s politeness.”

He smiled.

“I must go, really,” he said. “You do not want me for anything?” he asked hopefully.

“No. Just to talk.”

“I will take your greetings to the mess.”

“Thank you for the many fine presents.”

“Nothing.”

“Come and see me again.”

“Yes. Good-by,” he patted my hand.

“So long,” I said in dialect.

“Ciaou,” he repeated.

It was dark in the room and the orderly, who had sat by the foot of the bed, got up and went out with him. I liked him very much and I hoped he would get back to the Abruzzi some time. He had a rotten life in the mess and he was fine about it but I thought how he would be in his own country. At Capracotta, he had told me, there were trout in the stream below the town. It was forbidden to play the flute at night. When the young men serenaded only the flute was forbidden. Why, I had asked. Because it was bad for the girls to hear the flute at night. The peasants all called you “Don” and when you met them they took off their hats. His father hunted every day and stopped to eat at the houses of peasants. They were always honored. For a foreigner to hunt he must present a certificate that he had never been arrested. There were bears on the Gran Sasso D’Italia but it was a long way. Aquila was a fine town. It was cool in the summer at night and the spring in Abruzzi was the most beautiful in Italy. But what was lovely was the fall to go hunting through the chestnut woods. The birds were all good because they fed on grapes and you never took a lunch because the peasants were always honored if you would eat with them at their houses. After a while I went to sleep.

CHAPTER 12

THE ROOM was long with windows on the right-hand side and a door at the far end that went into the dressing room. The row of beds that mine was in faced the windows and another row, under the windows, faced the wall. If you lay on your left side you could see the dressing-room door. There was another door at the far end that people sometimes came in by. If any one were going to die they put a screen around the bed so you could not see them die, but only the shoes and puttees of doctors and men nurses showed under the bottom of the screen and sometimes at the end there would be whispering. Then the priest would come out from behind the screen and afterward the men nurses would go back behind the screen to come out again carrying the one who was dead with a blanket over him down the corridor between the beds and some one folded the screen and took it away.

That morning the major in charge of the ward asked me if I felt that I could travel the next day. I said I could. He said then they would ship me out early in the morning. He said I would be better off making the trip now before it got too hot.

When they lifted you up out of bed to carry you into the dressing room you could look out of the window and see the new graves in the garden. A soldier sat outside the door that opened onto the garden making crosses and painting on them the names, rank, and regiment of the men who were buried in the garden. He also ran errands for the ward and in his spare time made me a cigarette lighter out of an empty Austrian rifle cartridge. The doctors were very nice and seemed very capable. They were anxious to ship me to Milan where there were better X-ray facilities and where, after the operation, I could take mechanotherapy. I wanted to go to Milan too. They wanted to get us all out and back as far as possible because all the beds were needed for the offensive, when it should start.

The night before I left the field hospital Rinaldi came in to see me with the major from our mess. They said that I would go to an American hospital in Milan that had just been installed. Some American ambulance units were to be sent down and this hospital would look after them and any other Americans on service in Italy. There were many in the Red Cross. The States had declared war on Germany but not on Austria.

The Italians were sure America would declare war on Austria too and they were very excited about any Americans coming down, even the Red Cross. They asked me if I thought President Wilson would declare war on Austria and I said it was only a matter of days. I did not know what we had against Austria but it seemed logical that they should declare war on her if they did on Germany. They asked me if we would declare war on Turkey. I said that was doubtful. Turkey, I said, was our national bird but the joke translated so badly and they were so puzzled and suspicious that I said yes, we would probably declare war on Turkey. And on Bulgaria? We had drunk several glasses of brandy and I said yes by God on Bulgaria too and on Japan. But, they said, Japan is an ally of England. You can’t trust the bloody English. The Japanese want Hawaii, I said. Where is Hawaii? It is in the Pacific Ocean. Why do the Japanese want it? They don’t really want it, I said. That is all talk. The Japanese are a wonderful little people fond of dancing and light wines. Like the French, said the major. We will get Nice and Savoia from the French. We will get Corsica and all the Adriatic coast-line, Rinaldi said. Italy will return to the splendors of Rome, said the major. I don’t like Rome, I said. It is hot and full of fleas. You don’t like Rome? Yes, I love Rome. Rome is the mother of nations. I will never forget Romulus suckling the Tiber. What? Nothing. Let’s all go to Rome.

Let’s go to Rome to-night and never come back. Rome is a beautiful city, said the major. The mother and father of nations, I said. Roma is feminine, said Rinaldi. It cannot be the father. Who is the father, then, the Holy Ghost? Don’t blaspheme. I wasn’t blaspheming, I was asking for information. You are drunk, baby. Who made me drunk? I made you drunk, said the major. I made you drunk because I love you and because America is in the war. Up to the hilt, I said. You go away in the morning, baby, Rinaldi said. To Rome, I said. No, to Milan. To Milan, said the major, to the Crystal Palace, to the Cova, to Campari’s, to Biffi’s, to the galleria. You lucky boy. To the Gran Italia, I said, where I will borrow money from George. To the Scala, said Rinaldi. You will go to the Scala. Every night, I said. You won’t be able to afford it every night, said the major.

The tickets are very expensive. I will draw a sight draft on my grandfather, I said. A what? A sight draft. He has to pay or I go to jail. Mr. Cunningham at the bank does it. I live by sight drafts. Can a grandfather jail a patriotic grandson who is dying that Italy may live? Live the American Garibaldi, said Rinaldi. Viva the sight drafts, I said. We must be quiet, said the major. Already we have been asked many times to be quiet. Do you go to-morrow really, Federico? He goes to the American hospital I tell you, Rinaldi said. To the beautiful nurses. Not the nurses with beards of the field hospital. Yes, yes, said the major, I know he goes to the American hospital. I don’t mind their beards, I said. If any man wants to raise a beard let him. Why don’t you raise a beard, Signor Maggiore? It could not go in a gas mask. Yes it could. Anything can go in a gas mask. I’ve vomited into a gas mask. Don’t be so loud, baby, Rinaldi said. We all know you have been at the front. Oh, you fine baby, what will I do while you are gone? We must go, said the major. This becomes sentimental. Listen, I have a surprise for you. Your English. You know? The English you go to see every night at their hospital? She is going to Milan too. She goes with another to be at the American hospital. They had not got nurses yet from America. I talked to-day with the head of their riparto. They have too many women here at the front. They send some back. How do you like that, baby? All right. Yes? You go to live in a big city and have your English there to cuddle you. Why don’t I get wounded? Maybe you will, I said. We must go, said the major. We drink and make noise and disturb Federico. Don’t go. Yes, we must go. Good-by. Good luck. Many things. Ciaou. Ciaou. Ciaou. Come back quickly, baby. Rinaldi kissed me. You smell of lysol. Good-by, baby. Goodby. Many things. The major patted my shoulder. They tiptoed out. I found I was quite drunk but went to sleep.

The next day in the morning we left for Milan and arrived forty-eight hours later. It was a bad trip. We were sidetracked for a long time this side of Mestre and children came and peeked in. I got a little boy to go for a bottle of cognac but he came back and said he could only get grappa. I told him to get it and when it came I gave him the change and the man beside me and I got drunk and slept until past Vicenza where I woke up and was very sick on the floor. It did not matter because the man on that side had been very sick on the floor several times before. Afterward I thought I could not stand the thirst and in the yards outside of Verona I called to a soldier who was walking up and down beside the train and he got me a drink of water. I woke Georgetti, the other boy who was drunk, and offered him some water. He said to pour it on his shoulder and went back to sleep. The soldier would not take the penny I offered him and brought me a pulpy orange. I sucked on that and spit out the pith and watched the soldier pass up and down past a freight-car outside and after a while the train gave a jerk and started.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER 13

WE GOT INTO Milan early in the morning and they unloaded us in the freight yard. An ambulance took me to the American hospital. Riding in the ambulance on a stretcher I could not tell what part of town we were passing through but when they unloaded the stretcher I saw a market-place and an open wine shop with a girl sweeping out. They were watering the street and it smelled of the early morning. They put the stretcher down and went in. The porter came out with them. He had gray mustaches, wore a doorman’s cap and was in his shirt sleeves. The stretcher would not go into the elevator and they discussed whether it was better to lift me off the stretcher and go up in the elevator or carry the stretcher up the stairs. I listened to them discussing it. They decided on the elevator. They lifted me from the stretcher. “Go easy,” I said. “Take it softly.”

In the elevator we were crowded and as my legs bent the pain was very bad. “Straighten out the legs,” I said.

“We can’t, Signor Tenente. There isn’t room.” The man who said this had his arm around me and my arm was around his neck. His breath came in my face metallic with garlic and red wine.

“Be gentle,” the other man said.

“Son of a bitch who isn’t gentle!”

“Be gentle I say,” the man with my feet repeated.

I saw the doors of the elevator closed, and the grill shut and the fourth-floor button pushed by the porter. The porter looked worried. The elevator rose slowly.

“Heavy?” I asked the man with the garlic.

“Nothing,” he said. His face was sweating and he grunted. The elevator rose steadily and stopped. The man holding the feet opened the door and stepped out. We were on a balcony. There were several doors with brass knobs. The man carrying the feet pushed a button that rang a bell. We heard it inside the doors. No one came. Then the porter came up the stairs.

“Where are they?” the stretcher-bearers asked.

“I don’t know,” said the porter. “They sleep down stairs.”

“Get somebody.”

The porter rang the bell, then knocked on the door, then he opened the door and went in. When he came back there was an elderly woman wearing glasses with him. Her hair was loose and half-falling and she wore a nurse’s dress.

“I can’t understand,” she said. “I can’t understand Italian.”

“I can speak English,” I said. “They want to put me somewhere.”

“None of the rooms are ready. There isn’t any patient expected.” She tucked at her hair and looked at me near-sightedly.

“Show them any room where they can put me.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “There’s no patient expected. I couldn’t put you in just any room.”

“Any room will do,” I said. Then to the porter in Italian, “Find an empty room.”

“They are all empty,” said the porter. “You are the first patient.” He held his cap in his hand and looked at the elderly nurse.

“For Christ’s sweet sake take me to some room.” The pain had gone on and on with the legs bent and I could feel it going in and out of the bone. The porter went in the door, followed by the gray-haired woman, then came hurrying back. “Follow me,” he said. They carried me down a long hallway and into a room with drawn blinds. It smelled of new furniture. There was a bed and a big wardrobe with a mirror. They laid me down on the bed.

“I can’t put on sheets,” the woman said. “The sheets are locked up.”

I did not speak to her. “There is money in my pocket,” I said to the porter. “In the buttoned-down pocket.” The porter took out the money. The two stretcher-bearers stood beside the bed holding their caps. “Give them five lire apiece and five lire for yourself. My papers are in the other pocket. You may give them to the nurse.”

The stretcher-bearers saluted and said thank you. “Good-by,” I said. “And many thanks.” They saluted again and went out.

“Those papers,” I said to the nurse, “describe my case and the treatment already given.”

The woman picked them up and looked at them through her glasses. There were three papers and they were folded. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I can’t read Italian. I can’t do anything without the doctor’s orders.” She commenced to cry and put the papers in her apron pocket. “Are you an American?” she asked crying.

“Yes. Please put the papers on the table by the bed.”

It was dim and cool in the room. As I lay on the bed I could see the big mirror on the other side of the room but could not see what it reflected. The porter stood by the bed. He had a nice face and was very kind.

“You can go,” I said to him. “You can go too,” I said to the nurse. “What is your name?”

“Mrs. Walker.”

“You can go, Mrs. Walker. I think I will go to sleep.”

I was alone in the room. It was cool and did not smell like a hospital. The mattress was firm and comfortable and I lay without moving, hardly breathing, happy in feeling the pain lessen. After a while I wanted a drink of water and found the bell on a cord by the bed and rang it but nobody came. I went to sleep.

When I woke I looked around. There was sunlight coming in through the shutters. I saw the big armoire, the bare walls, and two chairs. My legs in the dirty bandages, stuck straight out in the bed. I was careful not to move them. I was thirsty and I reached for the bell and pushed the button. I heard the door open and looked and it was a nurse. She looked young and pretty.

“Good-morning,” I said.

“Good-morning,” she said and came over to the bed. “We haven’t been able to get the doctor. He’s gone to Lake Como. No one knew there was a patient coming. What’s wrong with you anyway?”

“I’m wounded. In the legs and feet and my head is hurt.”

“What’s your name?”

“Henry. Frederic Henry.”

“I’ll wash you up. But we can’t do anything to the dressings until the doctor comes.”

“Is Miss Barkley here?”

“No. There’s no one by that name here.”

“Who was the woman who cried when I came in?”

The nurse laughed. “That’s Mrs. Walker. She was on night duty and she’d been asleep. She wasn’t expecting any one.”

While we were talking she was undressing me, and when I was undressed, except for the bandages, she washed me, very gently and smoothly. The washing felt very good. There was a bandage on my head but she washed all around the edge.

“Where were you wounded?”

“On the Isonze north of Plava.”

“Where is that?”

“North of Gorizia.”

I could see that none of the places meant anything to her.

“Do you have a lot of pain?”

“No. Not much now.”

She put a thermometer in my mouth.

“The Italians put it under the arm,” I said.

“Don’t talk.”

When she took the thermometer out she read it and then shook it.

“What’s the temperature?”

“You’re not supposed to know that.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“It’s almost normal.”

“I never have any fever. My legs are full of old iron too.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re full of trench-mortar fragments, old screws and bedsprings and things.”

She shook her head and smiled.

“If you had any foreign bodies in your legs they would set up an inflammation and you’d have fever.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll see what comes out.”

She went out of the room and came back with the old nurse of the early morning. Together they made the bed with me in it. That was new to me and an admirable proceeding.

“Who is in charge here?”

“Miss Van Campen.”

“How many nurses are there?”

“Just us two.”

“Won’t there be more?”

“Some more are coming.”

“When will they get here?”

“I don’t know. You ask a great many questions for a sick boy.”

“I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m wounded.”

They had finished making the bed and I lay with a clean smooth sheet under me and another sheet over me. Mrs. Walker went out and came back with a pajama jacket. They put that on me and I felt very clean and dressed.

“You’re awfully nice to me,” I said. The nurse called Miss Gage giggled. “Could I have a drink of water?” I asked.

“Certainly. Then you can have breakfast.”

“I don’t want breakfast. Can I have the shutters opened please?”

The light had been dim in the room and when the shutters were opened it was bright sunlight and I looked out on a balcony and beyond were the tile roofs of houses and chimneys. I looked out over the tiled roofs and saw white clouds and the sky very blue.

“Don’t you know when the other nurses are coming?”

“Why? Don’t we take good care of you?”

“You’re very nice.”

“Would you like to use the bedpan?”

“I might try.”

They helped me and held me up but it was not any use. Afterward I lay and looked out the open doors onto the balcony.

“When does the doctor come?”

“When he gets back. We’ve tried to telephone to Lake Como for him.”

“Aren’t there any other doctors?”

“He’s the doctor for the hospital.”

Miss Gage brought a pitcher of water and a glass. I drank three glasses and then they left me and I looked out the window a while and went back to sleep. I ate some lunch and in the afternoon Miss Van Campen, the superintendent, came up to see me. She did not like me and I did not like her. She was small and neatly suspicious and too good for her position. She asked many questions and seemed to think it was somewhat disgraceful that I was with the Italians.

“Can I have wine with the meals?” I asked her.

“Only if the doctor prescribes it.”

“I can’t have it until he comes?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You plan on having him come eventually?”

“We’ve telephoned him at Lake Como.”

She went out and Miss Gage came back.

“Why were you rude to Miss Van Campen?” she asked after she had done something for me very skilfully.

“I didn’t mean to be. But she was snooty.”

“She said you were domineering and rude.”

“I wasn’t. But what’s the idea of a hospital without a doctor?”

“He’s coming. They’ve telephoned for him to Lake Como.”

“What does he do there? Swim?”

“No. He has a clinic there.”

“Why don’t they get another doctor?”

“Hush. Hush. Be a good boy and he’ll come.”

I sent for the porter and when he came I told him in Italian to get me a bottle of Cinzano at the wine shop, a fiasco of chianti and the evening papers. He went away and brought them wrapped in newspaper, unwrapped them and, when I asked him to, drew the corks and put the wine and vermouth under the bed. They left me alone and I lay in bed and read the papers awhile, the news from the front, and the list of dead officers with their decorations and then reached down and brought up the bottle of Cinzano and held it straight up on my stomach, the cool glass against my stomach, and took little drinks making rings on my stomach from holding the bottle there between drinks, and watched it get dark outside over the roofs of the town. The swallows circled around and I watched them and the night-hawks flying above the roofs and drank the Cinzano. Miss Gage brought up a glass with some eggnog in it. I lowered the vermouth bottle to the other side of the bed when she came in.

“Miss Van Campen had some sherry put in this,” she said. “You shouldn’t be rude to her. She’s not young and this hospital is a big responsibility for her. Mrs. Walker’s too old and she’s no use to her.”

“She’s a splendid woman,” I said. “Thank her very much.”

“I’m going to bring your supper right away.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”

When she brought the tray and put it on the bed table I thanked her and ate a little of the supper. Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the search-lights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went back to sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to be light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.

CHAPTER 14

IT WAS BRIGHT sunlight in the room when I woke. I thought I was back at the front and stretched out in bed. My legs hurt me and I looked down at them still in the dirty bandages, and seeing them knew where I was. I reached up for the bell-cord and pushed the button. I heard it buzz down the hall and then some one coming on rubber soles along the hall. It was Miss Gage and she looked a little older in the bright sunlight and not so pretty.

“Good-morning,” she said. “Did you have a good night?”

“Yes. Thanks very much,” I said. “Can I have a barber?”

“I came in to see you and you were asleep with this in the bed with you.”

She opened the armoire door and held up the vermouth bottle. It was nearly empty. “I put the other bottle from under the bed in there too,” she said. “Why didn’t you ask me for a glass?”

“I thought maybe you wouldn’t let me have it.”

“I’d have had some with you.”

“You’re a fine girl.”

“It isn’t good for you to drink alone,” she said. “You mustn’t do it.”

“All right.”

“Your friend Miss Barkley’s come,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes. I don’t like her.”

“You will like her. She’s awfully nice.”

She shook her head. “I’m sure she’s fine. Can you move just a little to this side? That’s fine. I’ll clean you up for breakfast.” She washed me with a cloth and soap and warm water. “Hold your shoulder up,” she said. “That’s fine.”

“Can I have the barber before breakfast?”

“I’ll send the porter for him.” She went out and came back. “He’s gone for him,” she said and dipped the cloth she held in the basin of water.

The barber came with the porter. He was a man of about fifty with an upturned mustache. Miss Gage was finished with me and went out and the barber lathered my face and shaved. He was very solemn and refrained from talking.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you know any news?” I asked.

“What news?”

“Any news. What’s happened in the town?”

“It is time of war,” he said. “The enemy’s ears are everywhere.”

I looked up at him. “Please hold your face still,” he said and went on shaving. “I will tell nothing.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“I am an Italian. I will not communicate with the enemy.”

I let it go at that. If he was crazy, the sooner I could get out from under the razor the better. Once I tried to get a good look at him. “Beware,” he said. “The razor is sharp.”

I paid him when it was over and tipped him half a lira. He returned the coins.

“I will not. I am not at the front. But I am an Italian.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“With your permission,” he said and wrapped his razors in newspaper. He went out leaving the five copper coins on the table beside the bed. I rang the bell. Miss Gage came in. “Would you ask the porter to come please?”

“All right.”

The porter came in. He was trying to keep from laughing.

“Is that barber crazy?”

“No, signorino. He made a mistake. He doesn’t understand very well and he thought I said you were an Austrian officer.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Ho ho ho,” the porter laughed. “He was funny. One move from you he said and he would have—” he drew his forefinger across his throat.

“Ho ho ho,” he tried to keep from laughing. “When I tell him you were not an Austrian. Ho ho ho.”

“Ho ho ho,” I said bitterly. “How funny if he would cut my throat. Ho ho ho.”

“No, signorino. No, no. He was so frightened of an Austrian. Ho ho ho.”

“Ho ho ho,” I said. “Get out of here.”

He went out and I heard him laughing in the hall. I heard some one coming down the hallway. I looked toward the door. It was Catherine Barkley.

She came in the room and over to the bed.

“Hello, darling,” she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful.

“Hello,” I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me. I pulled her down and kissed her and felt her heart beating.

“You sweet,” I said. “Weren’t you wonderful to come here?”

“It wasn’t very hard. It may be hard to stay.”

“You’ve got to stay,” I said. “Oh, you’re wonderful.” I was crazy about her. I could not believe she was really there and held her tight to me.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “You’re not well enough.”

“Yes, I am. Come on.”

“No. You’re not strong enough.”

“Yes. I am. Yes. Please.”

“You do love me?”

“I really love you. I’m crazy about you. Come on please.”

“Feel our hearts beating.”

“I don’t care about our hearts. I want you. I’m just mad about you.”

“You really love me?”

“Don’t keep on saying that. Come on. Please. Please, Catherine.”

“All right but only for a minute.”

“All right,” I said. “Shut the door.”

“You can’t. You shouldn’t.”

“Come on. Don’t talk. Please come on.”

Catherine sat in a chair by the bed. The door was open into the hall. The wildness was gone and I felt finer than I had ever felt.

She asked, “Now do you believe I love you?”

“Oh, you’re lovely,” I said. “You’ve got to stay. They can’t send you away. I’m crazy in love with you.”

“We’ll have to be awfully careful. That was just madness. We can’t do that.”

“We can at night.”

“We’ll have to be awfully careful. You’ll have to be careful in front of other people.”

“I will.”

“You’ll have to be. You’re sweet. You do love me, don’t you?”

“Don’t say that again. You don’t know what that does to me.”

“I’ll be careful then. I don’t want to do anything more to you. I have to go now, darling, really.”

“Come back right away.”

“I’ll come when I can.”

“Good-by.”

“Good-by, sweet.”

She went out. God knows I had not wanted to fall in love with her. I had not wanted to fall in love with any one. But God knows I had and I lay on the bed in the room of the hospital in Milan and all sorts of things went through my head but I felt wonderful and finally Miss Gage came in.

“The doctor’s coming,” she said. “He telephoned from Lake Como.”

“When does he get here?”

“He’ll be here this afternoon.”

CHAPTER 15

NOTHING HAPPENED until afternoon. The doctor was a thin quiet little man who seemed disturbed by the war. He took out a number of small steel splinters from my thighs with delicate and refined distaste. He used a local anæsthetic called something or other “snow,” which froze the tissue and avoided pain until the probe, the scalpel or the forceps got below the frozen portion. The anæsthetized area was clearly defined by the patient and after a time the doctor’s fragile delicacy was exhausted and he said it would be better to have an X-ray. Probing was unsatisfactory, he said.

The X-ray was taken at the Ospedale Maggiore and the doctor who did it was excitable, efficient and cheerful. It was arranged by holding up the shoulders, that the patient should see personally some of the larger foreign bodies through the machine. The plates were to be sent over. The doctor requested me to write in his pocket notebook, my name, and regiment and some sentiment. He declared that the foreign bodies were ugly, nasty, brutal. The Austrians were sons of bitches. How many had I killed? I had not killed any but I was anxious to please — and I said I had killed plenty. Miss Gage was with me and the doctor put his arm around her and said she was more beautiful than Cleopatra. Did she understand that? Cleopatra the former queen of Egypt. Yes, by God she was. We returned to the little hospital in the ambulance and after a while and much lifting I was upstairs and in bed again. The plates came that afternoon, the doctor had said by God he would have them that afternoon and he did. Catherine Barkley showed them to me. They were in red envelopes and she took them out of the envelopes and held them up to the light and we both looked.

“That’s your right leg,” she said, then put the plate back in the envelope. “This is your left.”

“Put them away,” I said, “and come over to the bed.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I just brought them in for a second to show you.”

She went out and I lay there. It was a hot afternoon and I was sick of lying in bed. I sent the porter for the papers, all the papers he could get.

Before he came back three doctors came into the room. I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another’s company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend to you a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success. These were three such doctors.

“This is the young man,” said the house doctor with the delicate hands.

“How do you do?” said the tall gaunt doctor with the beard. The third doctor, who carried the X-ray plates in their red envelopes, said nothing.

“Remove the dressings?” questioned the bearded doctor.

“Certainly. Remove the dressings, please, nurse,” the house doctor said to Miss Gage. Miss Gage removed the dressings. I looked down at the legs. At the field hospital they had the look of not too freshly ground hamburger steak. Now they were crusted and the knee was swollen and discolored and the calf sunken but there was no pus.

“Very clean,” said the house doctor. “Very clean and nice.”

“Um,” said the doctor with the beard. The third doctor looked over the house doctor’s shoulder.

“Please move the knee,” said the bearded doctor.

“I can’t.”

“Test the articulation?” the bearded doctor questioned. He had a stripe beside the three stars on his sleeve. That meant he was a first captain.

“Certainly,” the house doctor said. Two of them took hold of my right leg very gingerly and bent it.

“That hurts,” I said.

“Yes. Yes. A little further, doctor.”

“That’s enough. That’s as far as it goes,” I said.

“Partial articulation,” said the first captain. He straightened up. “May I see the plates again, please, doctor?” The third doctor handed him one of the plates. “No. The left leg, please.”

“That is the left leg, doctor.”

“You are right. I was looking from a different angle.” He returned the plate. The other plate he examined for some time. “You see, doctor?” he pointed to one of the foreign bodies which showed spherical and clear against the light. They examined the plate for some time.

“Only one thing I can say,” the first captain with the beard said. “It is a question of time. Three months, six months probably.”

“Certainly the synovial fluid must re-form.”

“Certainly. It is a question of time. I could not conscientiously open a knee like that before the projectile was encysted.”

“I agree with you, doctor.”

“Six months for what?” I asked.

“Six months for the projectile to encyst before the knee can be opened safely.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Do you want to keep your knee, young man?”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“I want it cut off,” I said, “so I can wear a hook on it.”

“What do you mean? A hook?”

“He is joking,” said the house doctor. He patted my shoulder very delicately. “He wants to keep his knee. This is a very brave young man. He has been proposed for the silver medal of valor.”

“All my felicitations,” said the first captain. He shook my hand. “I can only say that to be on the safe side you should wait at least six months before opening such a knee. You are welcome of course to another opinion.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “I value your opinion.”

The first captain looked at his watch.

“We must go,” he said. “All my best wishes.”

“All my best wishes and many thanks,” I said. I shook hands with the third doctor. “Capitano Varini — Tenente Enry,” and they all three went out of the room.

“Miss Gage,” I called. She came in. “Please ask the house doctor to come back a minute.”

He came in holding his cap and stood by the bed. “Did you wish to see me?”

“Yes. I can’t wait six months to be operated on. My God, doctor, did you ever stay in bed six months?”

“You won’t be in bed all the time. You must first have the wounds exposed to the sun. Then afterward you can be on crutches.”

“For six months and then have an operation?”

“That is the safe way. The foreign bodies must be allowed to encyst and the synovial fluid will re-form. Then it will be safe to open up the knee.”

“Do you really think yourself I will have to wait that long?”

“That is the safe way.”

“Who is that first captain?”

“He is a very excellent surgeon of Milan.”

“He’s a first captain, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but he is an excellent surgeon.”

“I don’t want my leg fooled with by a first captain. If he was any good he would be made a major. I know what a first captain is, doctor.”

“He is an excellent surgeon and I would rather have his judgment than any surgeon I know.”

“Could another surgeon see it?”

“Certainly if you wish. But I would take Dr. Varella’s opinion myself.”

“Could you ask another surgeon to come and see it?”

“I will ask Valentini to come.”

“Who is he?”

“He is a surgeon of the Ospedale Maggiore.”

“Good. I appreciate it very much. You understand, doctor, I couldn’t stay in bed six months.”

“You would not be in bed. You would first take a sun cure. Then you could have light exercise. Then when it was encysted we would operate.”

“But I can’t wait six months.”

The doctor spread his delicate fingers on the cap he held and smiled. “You are in such a hurry to get back to the front?”

“Why not?”

“It is very beautiful,” he said. “You are a noble young man.” He stooped over and kissed me very delicately on the forehead. “I will send for Valentini. Do not worry and excite yourself. Be a good boy.”

“Will you have a drink?” I asked.

“No thank you. I never drink alcohol.”

“Just have one.” I rang for the porter to bring glasses.

“No. No thank you. They are waiting for me.”

“Good-by,” I said.

“Good-by.”

Two hours later Dr. Valentini came into the room. He was in a great hurry and the points of his mustache stood straight up. He was a major, his face was tanned and he laughed all the time.

“How did you do it, this rotten thing?” he asked. “Let me see the plates. Yes. Yes. That’s it. You look healthy as a goat. Who’s the pretty girl? Is she your girl? I thought so. Isn’t this a bloody war? How does that feel? You are a fine boy. I’ll make you better than new. Does that hurt? You bet it hurts. How they love to hurt you, these doctors. What have they done for you so far? Can’t that girl talk Italian? She should learn. What a lovely girl. I could teach her. I will be a patient here myself. No, but I will do all your maternity work free. Does she understand that? She will make you a fine boy. A fine blonde like she is. That’s fine. That’s all right. What a lovely girl. Ask her if she eats supper with me. No I won’t take her away from you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Miss. That’s all.”

“That’s all I want to know.” He patted me on the shoulder. “Leave the dressings off.”

“Will you have a drink, Dr. Valentini?”

“A drink? Certainly. I will have ten drinks. Where are they?”

“In the armoire. Miss Barkley will get the bottle.”

“Cheery oh. Cheery oh to you, Miss. What a lovely girl. I will bring you better cognac than that.” He wiped his mustache.

“When do you think it can be operated on?”

“To-morrow morning. Not before. Your stomach must be emptied. You must be washed out. I will see the old lady downstairs and leave instructions. Good-by. I see you to-morrow. I’ll bring you better cognac than that. You are very comfortable here. Good-by. Until to-morrow. Get a good sleep. I’ll see you early.” He waved from the doorway, his mustaches went straight up, his brown face was smiling. There was a star in a box on his sleeve because he was a major.

CHAPTER 16

THAT NIGHT a bat flew into the room through the open door that led onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over the roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small light of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but hunted in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and watched him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still. After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam move across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A breeze came in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft gun on the next roof talking. It was cool and they were putting on their capes. I worried in the night about some one coming up but Catherine said they were all asleep. Once in the night we went to sleep and when I woke she was not there but I heard her coming along the hall and the door opened and she came back to the bed and said it was all right she had been downstairs and they were all asleep. She had been outside Miss Van Campen’s door and heard her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers and we ate them and drank some vermouth. We were very hungry but she said that would all have to be gotten out of me in the morning. I went to sleep again in the morning when it was light and when I was awake I found she was gone again. She came in looking fresh and lovely and sat on the bed and the sun rose while I had the thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs and then the coffee of the men at the gun on the next roof.

“I wish we could go for a walk,” Catherine said. “I’d wheel you if we had a chair.”

“How would I get into the chair?”

“We’d do it.”

“We could go out to the park and have breakfast outdoors.” I looked out the open doorway.

“What we’ll really do,” she said, “is get you ready for your friend Dr. Valentini.”

“I thought he was grand.”

“I didn’t like him as much as you did. But I imagine he’s very good.”

“Come back to bed, Catherine. Please,” I said.

“I can’t. Didn’t we have a lovely night?”

“And can you be on night duty to-night?”

“I probably will. But you won’t want me.”

“Yes, I will.”

“No, you won’t. You’ve never been operated on. You don’t know how you’ll be.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“You’ll be sick and I won’t be anything to you.”

“Come back then now.”

“No,” she said. “I have to do the chart, darling, and fix you up.”

“You don’t really love me or you’d come back again.”

“You’re such a silly boy.” She kissed me. “That’s all right for the chart. Your temperature’s always normal. You’ve such a lovely temperature.”

“You’ve got a lovely everything.”

“Oh no. You have the lovely temperature. I’m awfully proud of your temperature.”

“Maybe all our children will have fine temperatures.”

“Our children will probably have beastly temperatures.”

“What do you have to do to get me ready for Valentini?”

“Not much. But quite unpleasant.”

“I wish you didn’t have to do it.”

“I don’t. I don’t want any one else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.”

“Even Ferguson?”

“Especially Ferguson and Gage and the other, what’s her name?”

“Walker?”

“That’s it. They’ve too many nurses here now. There must be some more patients or they’ll send us away. They have four nurses now.”

“Perhaps there’ll be some. They need that many nurses. It’s quite a big hospital.”

“I hope some will come. What would I do if they sent me away? They will unless there are more patients.”

“I’d go too.”

“Don’t be silly. You can’t go yet. But get well quickly, darling, and we will go somewhere.”

“And then what?”

“Maybe the war will be over. It can’t always go on.”

“I’ll get well,” I said. “Valentini will fix me.”

“He should with those mustaches. And, darling, when you’re going under the ether just think about something else — not us. Because people get very blabby under an anæsthetic.”

“What should I think about?”

“Anything. Anything but us. Think about your people. Or even any other girl.”

“No.”

“Say your prayers then. That ought to create a splendid impression.”

“Maybe I won’t talk.”

“That’s true. Often people don’t talk.”

“I won’t talk.”

“Don’t brag, darling. Please don’t brag. You’re so sweet and you don’t have to brag.”

“I won’t talk a word.”

“Now you’re bragging, darling. You know you don’t need to brag. Just start your prayers or poetry or something when they tell you to breathe deeply. You’ll be lovely that way and I’ll be so proud of you. I’m very proud of you anyway. You have such a lovely temperature and you sleep like a little boy with your arm around the pillow and think it’s me. Or is it some other girl? Some fine Italian girl?”

“It’s you.”

“Of course it’s me. Oh I do love you and Valentini will make you a fine leg. I’m glad I don’t have to watch it.”

“And you’ll be on night duty to-night.”

“Yes. But you won’t care.”

“You wait and see.”

“There, darling. Now you’re all clean inside and out. Tell me. How many people have you ever loved?”

“Nobody.”

“Not me even?”

“Yes, you.”

“How many others really?”

“None.”

“How many have you — how do you say it? — stayed with?”

“None.”

“You’re lying to me.”

“Yes.”

“It’s all right. Keep right on lying to me. That’s what I want you to do. Were they pretty?”

“I never stayed with any one.”

“That’s right. Were they very attractive?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“You’re just mine. That’s true and you’ve never belonged to any one else. But I don’t care if you have. I’m not afraid of them. But don’t tell me about them. When a man stays with a girl when does she say how much it costs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not. Does she say she loves him? Tell me that. I want to know that.”

“Yes. If he wants her to.”

“Does he say he loves her? Tell me please. It’s important.”

“He does if he wants to.”

“But you never did? Really?”

“No.”

“Not really. Tell me the truth.”

“No,” I lied.

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t. Oh, I love you, darling.”

Outside the sun was up over the roofs and I could see the points of the cathedral with the sunlight on them. I was clean inside and outside and waiting for the doctor.

“And that’s it?” Catherine said. “She says just what he wants her to?”

“Not always.”

“But I will. I’ll say just what you wish and I’ll do what you wish and then you will never want any other girls, will you?” She looked at me very happily. “I’ll do what you want and say what you want and then I’ll be a great success, won’t I?”

“Yes.”

“What would you like me to do now that you’re all ready?”

“Come to the bed again.”

“All right. I’ll come.”

“Oh, darling, darling, darling,” I said.

“You see,” she said. “I do anything you want.”

“You’re so lovely.”

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at it yet.”

“You’re lovely.”

“I want what you want. There isn’t any me any more. Just what you want.”

“You sweet.”

“I’m good. Aren’t I good? You don’t want any other girls, do you?”

“No.”

“You see? I’m good. I do what you want.”

CHAPTER 17

WHEN I WAS awake after the operation I had not been away. You do not go away. They only choke you. It is not like dying it is just a chemical choking so you do not feel, and afterward you might as well have been drunk except that when you throw up nothing comes but bile and you do not feel better afterward. I saw sandbags at the end of the bed. They were on pipes that came out of the cast. After a while I saw Miss Gage and she said, “How is it now?”

“Better,” I said.

“He did a wonderful job on your knee.”

“How long did it take?”

“Two hours and a half.”

“Did I say anything silly?”

“Not a thing. Don’t talk. Just be quiet.”

I was sick and Catherine was right. It did not make any difference who was on night duty.

There were three other patients in the hospital now, a thin boy in the Red Cross from Georgia with malaria, a nice boy, also thin, from New York, with malaria and jaundice, and a fine boy who had tried to unscrew the fuse-cap from a combination shrapnel and high explosive shell for a souvenir. This was a shrapnel shell used by the Austrians in the mountains with a nose-cap which went on after the burst and exploded on contact.

Catherine Barkley was greatly liked by the nurses because she would do night duty indefinitely. She had quite a little work with the malaria people, the boy who had unscrewed the nose-cap was a friend of ours and never rang at night, unless it was necessary but between the times of working we were together. I loved her very much and she loved me. I slept in the daytime and we wrote notes during the day when we were awake and sent them by Ferguson. Ferguson was a fine girl. I never learned anything about her except that she had a brother in the Fifty-Second Division and a brother in Mesopotamia and she was very good to Catherine Barkley.

“Will you come to our wedding, Fergy?” I said to her once.

“You’ll never get married.”

“We will.”

“No you won’t.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll fight before you’ll marry.”

“We never fight.”

“You’ve time yet.”

“We don’t fight.”

“You’ll die then. Fight or die. That’s what people do. They don’t marry.”

I reached for her hand. “Don’t take hold of me,” she said. “I’m not crying. Maybe you’ll be all right you two. But watch out you don’t get her in trouble. You get her in trouble and I’ll kill you.”

“I won’t get her in trouble.”

“Well watch out then. I hope you’ll be all right. You have a good time.”

“We have a fine time.”

“Don’t fight then and don’t get her into trouble.”

“I won’t.”

“Mind you watch out. I don’t want her with any of these war babies.”

“You’re a fine girl, Fergy.”

“I’m not. Don’t try to flatter me. How does your leg feel?”

“Fine.”

“How is your head?” She touched the top of it with her fingers. It was sensitive like a foot that had gone to sleep. “It’s never bothered me.”

“A bump like that could make you crazy. It never bothers you?”

“No.”

“You’re a lucky young man. Have you the letter done? I’m going down.”

“It’s here,” I said.

“You ought to ask her not to do night duty for a while. She’s getting very tired.”

“All right. I will.”

“I want to do it but she won’t let me. The others are glad to let her have it. You might give her just a little rest.”

“All right.”

“Miss Van Campen spoke about you sleeping all the forenoons.”

“She would.”

“It would be better if you let her stay off nights a little while.”

“I want her to.”

“You do not. But if you would make her I’d respect you for it.”

“I’ll make her.”

“I don’t believe it.” She took the note and went out. I rang the bell and in a little while Miss Gage came in.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just wanted to talk to you. Don’t you think Miss Barkley ought to go off night duty for a while? She looks awfully tired. Why does she stay on so long?”

Miss Gage looked at me.

“I’m a friend of yours,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be silly. Was that all you wanted?”

“Do you want a vermouth?”

“All right. Then I have to go.” She got out the bottle from the armoire and brought a glass.

“You take the glass,” I said. “I’ll drink out of the bottle.”

“Here’s to you,” said Miss Gage.

“What did Van Campen say about me sleeping late in the mornings?”

“She just jawed about it. She calls you our privileged patient.”

“To hell with her.”

“She isn’t mean,” Miss Gage said. “She’s just old and cranky. She never liked you.”

“No.”

“Well, I do. And I’m your friend. Don’t forget that.”

“You’re awfully damned nice.”

“No. I know who you think is nice. But I’m your friend. How does your leg feel?”

“Fine.”

“I’ll bring some cold mineral water to pour over it. It must itch under the cast. It’s hot outside.”

“You’re awful nice.”

“Does it itch much?”

“No. It’s fine.”

“I’ll fix those sandbags better.” She leaned over. “I’m your friend.”

“I know you are.”

“No you don’t. But you will some day.”

Catherine Barkley took three nights off night duty and then she came back on again. It was as though we met again after each of us had been away on a long journey.

CHAPTER 18

WE HAD a lovely time that summer. When I could go out we rode in a carriage in the park. I remember the carriage, the horse going slowly, and up ahead the back of the driver with his varnished high hat, and Catherine Barkley sitting beside me. If we let our hands touch, just the side of my hand touching hers, we were excited. Afterward when I could get around on crutches we went to dinner at Biffi’s or the Gran Italia and sat at the tables outside on the floor of the galleria. The waiters came in and out and there were people going by and candles with shades on the tablecloths and after we decided that we liked the Gran Italia best, George, the headwaiter, saved us a table. He was a fine waiter and we let him order the meal while we looked at the people, and the great galleria in the dusk, and each other. We drank dry white capri iced in a bucket; although we tried many of the other wines, fresa, barbera and the sweet white wines. They had no wine waiter because of the war and George would smile ashamedly when I asked about wines like fresa.

“If you imagine a country that makes a wine because it tastes like strawberries,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t it?” Catherine asked. “It sounds splendid.”

“You try it, lady,” said George, “if you want to. But let me bring a little bottle of margaux for the Tenente.”

“I’ll try it too, George.”

“Sir, I can’t recommend you to. It doesn’t even taste like strawberries.”

“It might,” said Catherine. “It would be wonderful if it did.”

“I’ll bring it,” said George, “and when the lady is satisfied I’ll take it away.”

It was not much of a wine. As he said, it did not even taste like strawberries. We went back to capri. One evening I was short of money and George loaned me a hundred lire. “That’s all right, Tenente,” he said. “I know how it is. I know how a man gets short. If you or the lady need money I’ve always got money.”

After dinner we walked through the galleria, past the other restaurants and the shops with their steel shutters down, and stopped at the little place where they sold sandwiches; ham and lettuce sandwiches and anchovy sandwiches made of very tiny brown glazed rolls and only about as long as your finger. They were to eat in the night when we were hungry. Then we got into an open carriage outside the galleria in front of the cathedral and rode to the hospital. At the door of the hospital the porter came out to help with the crutches. I paid the driver, and then we rode upstairs in the elevator. Catherine got off at the lower floor where the nurses lived and I went on up and went down the hall on crutches to my room; sometimes I undressed and got into bed and sometimes I sat out on the balcony with my leg up on another chair and watched the swallows over the roofs and waited for Catherine. When she came upstairs it was as though she had been away on a long trip and I went along the hall with her on the crutches and carried the basins and waited outside the doors, or went in with her; it depending on whether they were friends of ours or not, and when she had done all there was to be done we sat out on the balcony outside my room. Afterward I went to bed and when they were all asleep and she was sure they would not call she came in. I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it, and I would take out the pins and lay them on the sheet and it would be loose and I would watch her while she kept very still and then take out the last two pins and it would all come down and she would drop her head and we would both be inside of it, and it was the feeling of inside a tent or behind a falls.

She had wonderfully beautiful hair and I would lie sometimes and watch her twisting it up in the light that came in the open door and it shone even in the night as water shines sometimes just before it is really daylight. She had a lovely face and body and lovely smooth skin too. We would be lying together and I would touch her cheeks and her forehead and under her eyes and her chin and throat with the tips of my fingers and say, “Smooth as piano keys,” and she would stroke my chin with her finger and say, “Smooth as emery paper and very hard on piano keys.”

“Is it rough?”

“No, darling. I was just making fun of you.”

It was lovely in the nights and if we could only touch each other we were happy. Besides all the big times we had many small ways of making love and we tried putting thoughts in the other one’s head while we were in different rooms. It seemed to work sometimes but that was probably because we were thinking the same thing anyway.

We said to each other that we were married the first day she had come to the hospital and we counted months from our wedding day. I wanted to be really married but Catherine said that if we were they would send her away and if we merely started on the formalities they would watch her and would break us up. We would have to be married under Italian law and the formalities were terrific. I wanted us to be married really because I worried about having a child if I thought about it, but we pretended to ourselves we were married and did not worry much and I suppose I enjoyed not being married, really. I know one night we talked about it and Catherine said, “But, darling, they’d send me away.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t.”

“They would. They’d send me home and then we would be apart until after the war.”

“I’d come on leave.”

“You couldn’t get to Scotland and back on a leave. Besides, I won’t leave you. What good would it do to marry now? We’re really married. I couldn’t be any more married.”

“I only wanted to for you.”

“There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.”

“I thought girls always wanted to be married.”

“They do. But, darling, I am married. I’m married to you. Don’t I make you a good wife?”

“You’re a lovely wife.”

“You see, darling, I had one experience of waiting to be married.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“You know I don’t love any one but you. You shouldn’t mind because some one else loved me.”

“I do.”

“You shouldn’t be jealous of some one who’s dead when you have everything.”

“No, but I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Poor darling. And I know you’ve been with all kinds of girls and it doesn’t matter to me.”

“Couldn’t we be married privately some way? Then if anything happened to me or if you had a child.”

“There’s no way to be married except by church or state. We are married privately. You see, darling, it would mean everything to me if I had any religion. But I haven’t any religion.”

“You gave me the Saint Anthony.”

“That was for luck. Some one gave it to me.”

“Then nothing worries you?”

“Only being sent away from you. You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.”

“All right. But I’ll marry you the day you say.”

“Don’t talk as though you had to make an honest woman of me, darling. I’m a very honest woman. You can’t be ashamed of something if you’re only happy and proud of it. Aren’t you happy?”

“But you won’t ever leave me for some one else.”

“No, darling. I won’t ever leave you for some one else. I suppose all sorts of dreadful things will happen to us. But you don’t have to worry about that.”

“I don’t. But I love you so much and you did love some one else before.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He died.”

“Yes and if he hadn’t I wouldn’t have met you. I’m not unfaithful, darling. I’ve plenty of faults but I’m very faithful. You’ll be sick of me I’ll be so faithful.”

“I’ll have to go back to the front pretty soon.”

“We won’t think about that until you go. You see I’m happy, darling, and we have a lovely time. I haven’t been happy for a long time and when I met you perhaps I was nearly crazy. Perhaps I was crazy. But now we’re happy and we love each other. Do let’s please just be happy. You are happy, aren’t you? Is there anything I do you don’t like? Can I do anything to please you? Would you like me to take down my hair? Do you want to play?”

“Yes and come to bed.”

“All right. I’ll go and see the patients first.”

CHAPTER 19

THE SUMMER went that way. I do not remember much about the days, except that they were hot and that there were many victories in the papers. I was very healthy and my legs healed quickly so that it was not very long after I was first on crutches before I was through with them and walking with a cane. Then I started treatments at the Ospedale Maggiore for bending the knees, mechanical treatments, baking in a box of mirrors with violet rays, massage, and baths. I went over there afternoons and afterward stopped at the café and had a drink and read the papers. I did not roam around the town; but wanted to get home to the hospital from the café. All I wanted was to see Catherine. The rest of the time I was glad to kill. Mostly I slept in the mornings, and in the afternoons, sometimes, I went to the races, and late to the mechanotherapy treatments. Sometimes I stopped in at the Anglo-American Club and sat in a deep leather-cushioned chair in front of the window and read the magazines. They would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance, so we were not together much in the afternoons. Although sometimes we could go out to dinner if Ferguson went along. Miss Van Campen had accepted the status that we were great friends because she got a great amount of work out of Catherine. She thought Catherine came from very good people and that prejudiced her in her favor finally. Miss Van Campen admired family very much and came from an excellent family herself. The hospital was quite busy, too, and that kept her occupied. It was a hot summer and I knew many people in Milan but always was anxious to get back home to the hospital as soon as the afternoon was over. At the front they were advancing on the Carso, they had taken Kuk across from Plava and were taking the Bainsizza plateau. The West front did not sound so good. It looked as though the war were going on for a long time. We were in the war now but I thought it would take a year to get any great amount of troops over and train them for combat. Next year would be a bad year, or a good year maybe. The Italians were using up an awful amount of men. I did not see how it could go on. Even if they took all the Bainsizza and Monte San Gabriele there were plenty of mountains beyond for the Austrians. I had seen them. All the highest mountains were beyond. On the Carso they were going forward but there were marshes and swamps down by the sea. Napoleon would have whipped the Austrians on the plains. He never would have fought them in the mountains. He would have let them come down and whipped them around Verona. Still nobody was whipping any one on the Western front. Perhaps wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War. I put the paper back on the rack and left the club. I went down the steps carefully and walked up the Via Manzoni. Outside the Gran Hotel I met old Meyers and his wife getting out of a carriage. They were coming back from the races. She was a big-busted woman in black satin. He was short and old, with a white mustache and walked flat-footed with a cane.

“How do you do? How do you do?” She shook hands. “Hello,” said Meyers.

“How were the races?”

“Fine. They were just lovely. I had three winners.”

“How did you do?” I asked Meyers.

“All right. I had a winner.”

“I never know how he does,” Mrs. Meyers said. “He never tells me.”

“I do all right,” Meyers said. He was being cordial. “You ought to come out.” While he talked you had the impression that he was not looking at you or that he mistook you for some one else.

“I will,” I said.

“I’m coming up to the hospital to see you,” Mrs. Meyers said. “I have some things for my boys. You’re all my boys. You certainly are my dear boys.”

“They’ll be glad to see you.”

“Those dear boys. You too. You’re one of my boys.”

“I have to get back,” I said.

“You give my love to all those dear boys. I’ve got lots of things to bring. I’ve some fine marsala and cakes.”

“Good-by,” I said. “They’ll be awfully glad to see you.”

“Good-by,” said Meyers. “You come around to the galleria. You know where my table is. We’re all there every afternoon.” I went on up the street. I wanted to buy something at the Cova to take to Catherine. Inside, at the Cova, I bought a box of chocolate and while the girl wrapped it up I walked over to the bar. There were a couple of British and some aviators. I had a martini alone, paid for it, picked up the box of chocolate at the outside counter and walked on home toward the hospital. Outside the little bar up the street from the Scala there were some people I knew, a vice-consul, two fellows who studied singing, and Ettore Moretti, an Italian from San Francisco who was in the Italian army. I had a drink with them. One of the singers was named Ralph Simmons, and he was singing under the name of Enrico DelCredo. I never knew how well he could sing but he was always on the point of something very big happening. He was fat and looked shopworn around the nose and mouth as though he had hayfever. He had come back from singing in Piacenza. He had sung Tosca and it had been wonderful.

“Of course you’ve never heard me sing,” he said.

“When will you sing here?”

“I’ll be at the Scala in the fall.”

“I’ll bet they throw the benches at you,” Ettore said. “Did you hear how they threw the benches at him in Modena?”

“It’s a damned lie.”

“They threw the benches at him,” Ettore said. “I was there. I threw six benches myself.”

“You’re just a wop from Frisco.”

“He can’t pronounce Italian,” Ettore said. “Everywhere he goes they throw the benches at him.”

“Piacenza’s the toughest house to sing in the north of Italy,” the other tenor said. “Believe me that’s a tough little house to sing.” This tenor’s name was Edgar Saunders, and he sang under the name of Edouardo Giovanni.

“I’d like to be there to see them throw the benches at you,” Ettore said. “You can’t sing Italian.”

“He’s a nut,” said Edgar Saunders. “All he knows how to say is throw benches.”

“That’s all they know how to do when you two sing,” Ettore said. “Then when you go to America you’ll tell about your triumphs at the Scala. They wouldn’t let you get by the first note at the Scala.”

“I’ll sing at the Scala,” Simmons said. “I’m going to sing Tosca in October.”

“We’ll go, won’t we, Mac?” Ettore said to the vice-consul. “They’ll need somebody to protect them.”

“Maybe the American army will be there to protect them,” the vice-consul said. “Do you want another drink, Simmons? You want a drink, Saunders?”

“All right,” said Saunders.

“I hear you’re going to get the silver medal,” Ettore said to me. “What kind of citation you going to get?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know I’m going to get it.”

“You’re going to get it. Oh boy, the girls at the Cova will think you’re fine then. They’ll all think you killed two hundred Austrians or captured a whole trench by yourself. Believe me, I got to work for my decorations.”

“How many have you got, Ettore?” asked the vice-consul.

“He’s got everything,” Simmons said. “He’s the boy they’re running the war for.”

“I’ve got the bronze twice and three silver medals,” said Ettore. “But the papers on only one have come through.”

“What’s the matter with the others?” asked Simmons.

“The action wasn’t successful,” said Ettore. “When the action isn’t successful they hold up all the medals.”

“How many times have you been wounded, Ettore?”

“Three times bad. I got three wound stripes. See?” He pulled his sleeve around. The stripes were parallel silver lines on a black background sewed to the cloth of the sleeve about eight inches below the shoulder.

“You got one too,” Ettore said to me. “Believe me they’re fine to have. I’d rather have them than medals. Believe me, boy, when you get three you’ve got something. You only get one for a wound that puts you three months in the hospital.”

“Where were you wounded, Ettore?” asked the vice-consul.

Ettore pulled up his sleeve. “Here,” he showed the deep smooth red scar. “Here on my leg. I can’t show you that because I got puttees on; and in the foot. There’s dead bone in my foot that stinks right now. Every morning I take new little pieces out and it stinks all the time.”

“What hit you?” asked Simmons.

“A hand-grenade. One of those potato mashers. It just blew the whole side of my foot off. You know those potato mashers?” He turned to me.

“Sure.”

“I saw the son of a bitch throw it,” Ettore said. “It knocked me down and I thought I was dead all right but those damn potato mashers haven’t got anything in them. I shot the son of a bitch with my rifle. I always carry a rifle so they can’t tell I’m an officer.”

“How did he look?” asked Simmons.

“That was the only one he had,” Ettore said. “I don’t know why he threw it. I guess he always wanted to throw one. He never saw any real fighting probably. I shot the son of a bitch all right.”

“How did he look when you shot him?” Simmons asked.

“Hell, how should I know?” said Ettore. “I shot him in the belly. I was afraid I’d miss him if I shot him in the head.”

“How long have you been an officer, Ettore?” I asked.

“Two years. I’m going to be a captain. How long have you been a lieutenant?”

“Going on three years.”

“You can’t be a captain because you don’t know the Italian language well enough,” Ettore said. “You can talk but you can’t read and write well enough. You got to have an education to be a captain. Why don’t you go in the American army?”

“Maybe I will.”

“I wish to God I could. Oh, boy, how much does a captain get, Mac?”

“I don’t know exactly. Around two hundred and fifty dollars, I think.”

“Jesus Christ what I could do with two hundred and fifty dollars. You better get in the American army quick, Fred. See if you can’t get me in.”

“All right.”

“I can command a company in Italian. I could learn it in English easy.”

“You’d be a general,” said Simmons.

“No, I don’t know enough to be a general. A general’s got to know a hell of a lot. You guys think there ain’t anything to war. You ain’t got brains enough to be a second-class corporal.”

“Thank God I don’t have to be,” Simmons said.

“Maybe you will if they round up all you slackers. Oh, boy, I’d like to have you two in my platoon. Mac too. I’d make you my orderly, Mac.”

“You’re a great boy, Ettore,” Mac said. “But I’m afraid you’re a militarist.”

“I’ll be a colonel before the war’s over,” Ettore said.

“If they don’t kill you.”

“They won’t kill me.” He touched the stars at his collar with his thumb and forefinger. “See me do that? We always touch our stars if anybody mentions getting killed.”

“Let’s go, Sim,” said Saunders standing up.

“All right.”

“So long,” I said. “I have to go too.” It was a quarter to six by the clock inside the bar. “Ciaou, Ettore.”

“Ciaou, Fred,” said Ettore. “That’s pretty fine you’re going to get the silver medal.”

“I don’t know I’ll get it.”

“You’ll get it all right, Fred. I heard you were going to get it all right.”

“Well, so long,” I said. “Keep out of trouble, Ettore.”

“Don’t worry about me. I don’t drink and I don’t run around. I’m no boozer and whorehound. I know what’s good for me.”

“So long,” I said. “I’m glad you’re going to be promoted captain.”

“I don’t have to wait to be promoted. I’m going to be a captain for merit of war. You know. Three stars with the crossed swords and crown above. That’s me.”

“Good luck.”

“Good luck. When you going back to the front?”

“Pretty soon.”

“Well, I’ll see you around.”

“So long.”

“So long. Don’t take any bad nickels.”

I walked on down a back street that led to a cross-cut to the hospital. Ettore was twenty-three. He had been brought up by an uncle in San Francisco and was visiting his father and mother in Torino when war was declared. He had a sister, who had been sent to America with him at the same time to live with the uncle, who would graduate from normal school this year. He was a legitimate hero who bored every one he met. Catherine could not stand him.

“We have heroes too,” she said. “But usually, darling, they’re much quieter.”

“I don’t mind him.”

“I wouldn’t mind him if he wasn’t so conceited and didn’t bore me, and bore me, and bore me.”

“He bores me.”

“You’re sweet to say so, darling. But you don’t need to. You can picture him at the front and you know he’s useful but he’s so much the type of boy I don’t care for.”

“I know.”

“You’re awfully sweet to know, and I try and like him but he’s a dreadful, dreadful boy really.”

“He said this afternoon he was going to be a captain.”

“I’m glad,” said Catherine. “That should please him.”

“Wouldn’t you like me to have some more exalted rank?”

“No, darling. I only want you to have enough rank so that we’re admitted to the better restaurants.”

“That’s just the rank I have.”

“You have a splendid rank. I don’t want you to have any more rank. It might go to your head. Oh, darling, I’m awfully glad you’re not conceited. I’d have married you even if you were conceited but it’s very restful to have a husband who’s not conceited.”

We were talking softly out on the balcony. The moon was supposed to rise but there was a mist over the town and it did not come up and in a little while it started to drizzle and we came in. Outside the mist turned to rain and in a little while it was raining hard and we heard it drumming on the roof. I got up and stood at the door to see if it was raining in but it wasn’t, so I left the door open.

“Who else did you see?” Catherine asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. Meyers.”

“They’re a strange lot.”

“He’s supposed to have been in the penitentiary at home. They let him out to die.”

“And he lived happily in Milan forever after.”

“I don’t know how happily.”

“Happily enough after jail I should think.”

“She’s bringing some things here.”

“She brings splendid things. Were you her dear boy?”

“One of them.”

“You are all her dear boys,” Catherine said. “She prefers the dear boys. Listen to it rain.”

“It’s raining hard.”

“And you’ll always love me, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And the rain won’t make any difference?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Because I’m afraid of the rain.”

“Why?” I was sleepy. Outside the rain was falling steadily.

“I don’t know, darling. I’ve always been afraid of the rain.”

“I like it.”

“I like to walk in it. But it’s very hard on loving.”

“I’ll love you always.”

“I’ll love you in the rain and in the snow and in the hail and — what else is there?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m sleepy.”

“Go to sleep, darling, and I’ll love you no matter how it is.”

“You’re not really afraid of the rain are you?”

“Not when I’m with you.”

“Why are you afraid of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“Don’t make me.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Tell me.”

“All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.”

“No.”

“And sometimes I see you dead in it.”

“That’s more likely.”

“No, it’s not, darling. Because I can keep you safe. I know I can. But nobody can help themselves.”

“Please stop it. I don’t want you to get Scotch and crazy tonight. We won’t be together much longer.”

“No, but I am Scotch and crazy. But I’ll stop it. It’s all nonsense.”

“Yes it’s all nonsense.”

“It’s all nonsense. It’s only nonsense. I’m not afraid of the rain. I’m not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn’t.” She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.

CHAPTER 20

ONE DAY in the afternoon we went to the races. Ferguson went too and Crowell Rodgers, the boy who had been wounded in the eyes by the explosion of the shell nose-cap. The girls dressed to go after lunch while Crowell and I sat on the bed in his room and read the past performances of the horses and the predictions in the racing paper. Crowell’s head was bandaged and he did not care much about these races but read the racing paper constantly and kept track of all the horses for something to do. He said the horses were a terrible lot but they were all the horses we had. Old Meyers liked him and gave him tips. Meyers won on nearly every race but disliked to give tips because it brought down the prices. The racing was very crooked. Men who had been ruled off the turf everywhere else were racing in Italy. Meyers’ information was good but I hated to ask him because sometimes he did not answer, and always you could see it hurt him to tell you, but he felt obligated to tell us for some reason and he hated less to tell Crowell. Crowell’s eyes had been hurt, one was hurt badly, and Meyers had trouble with his eyes and so he liked Crowell. Meyers never told his wife what horses he was playing and she won or lost, mostly lost, and talked all the time.

We four drove out to San Siro in an open carriage. It was a lovely day and we drove out through the park and out along the tramway and out of town where the road was dusty. There were villas with iron fences and big overgrown gardens and ditches with water flowing and green vegetable gardens with dust on the leaves. We could look across the plain and see farmhouses and the rich green farms with their irrigation ditches and the mountains to the north. There were many carriages going into the race track and the men at the gate let us in without cards because we were in uniform. We left the carriage, bought programmes, and walked across the infield and then across the smooth thick turf of the course to the paddock. The grand-stands were old and made of wood and the betting booths were under the stands and in a row out near the stables. There was a crowd of soldiers along the fence in the infield. The paddock was fairly well filled with people and they were walking the horses around in a ring under the trees behind the grandstand. We saw people we knew and got chairs for Ferguson and Catherine and watched the horses.

They went around, one after the other, their heads down, the grooms leading them. One horse, a purplish black, Crowell swore was dyed that color. We watched him and it seemed possible. He had only come out just before the bell rang to saddle. We looked him up in the programme from the number on the groom’s arm and it was listed a black gelding named Japalac. The race was for horses that had never won a race worth one thousand lire or more. Catherine was sure his color had been changed. Ferguson said she could not tell. I thought he looked suspicious. We all agreed we ought to back him and pooled one hundred lire. The odds sheets showed he would pay thirty-five to one. Crowell went over and bought the tickets while we watched the jockeys ride around once more and then go out under the trees to the track and gallop slowly up to the turn where the start was to be.

We went up in the grand-stand to watch the race. They had no elastic barrier at San Siro then and the starter lined up all the horses, they looked very small way up the track, and then sent them off with a crack of his long whip. They came past us with the black horse well in front and on the turn he was running away from the others. I watched them on the far side with the glasses and saw the jockey fighting to hold him in but he could not hold him and when they came around the turn and into the stretch the black horse was fifteen lengths ahead of the others. He went way on up and around the turn after the finish.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” Catherine said. “We’ll have over three thousand lire. He must be a splendid horse.”

“I hope his color doesn’t run,” Crowell said, “before they pay off.”

“He was really a lovely horse,” Catherine said. “I wonder if Mr. Meyers backed him.”

“Did you have the winner?” I called to Meyers. He nodded.

“I didn’t,” Mrs. Meyers said. “Who did you children bet on?”

“Japalac.”

“Really? He’s thirty-five to one!”

“We liked his color.”

“I didn’t. I thought he looked seedy. They told me not to back him.”

“He won’t pay much,” Meyers said.

“He’s marked thirty-five to one in the quotes,” I said.

“He won’t pay much. At the last minute,” Meyers said, “they put a lot of money on him.”

“Who?”

“Kempton and the boys. You’ll see. He won’t pay two to one.”

“Then we won’t get three thousand lire,” Catherine said. “I don’t like this crooked racing!”

“We’ll get two hundred lire.”

“That’s nothing. That doesn’t do us any good. I thought we were going to get three thousand.”

“It’s crooked and disgusting,” Ferguson said.

“Of course,” said Catherine, “if it hadn’t been crooked we’d never have backed him at all. But I would have liked the three thousand lire.”

“Let’s go down and get a drink and see what they pay,” Crowell said. We went out to where they posted the numbers and the bell rang to pay off and they put up 18.50 after Japalac to win. That meant he paid less than even money on a ten-lira bet.

We went to the bar under the grand-stand and had a whiskey and soda apiece. We ran into a couple of Italians we knew and McAdams, the vice-consul, and they came up with us when we joined the girls. The Italians were full of manners and McAdams talked to Catherine while we went down to bet again. Mr. Meyers was standing near the pari-mutuel.

“Ask him what he played,” I said to Crowell.

“What are you on, Mr. Meyers?” Crowell asked. Meyers took out his programme and pointed to the number five with his pencil.

“Do you mind if we play him too?” Crowell asked.

“Go ahead. Go ahead. But don’t tell my wife I gave it to you.”

“Will you have a drink?” I asked.

“No thanks. I never drink.”

We put a hundred lire on number five to win and a hundred to place and then had another whiskey and soda apiece. I was feeling very good and we picked up a couple more Italians, who each had a drink with us, and went back to the girls. These Italians were also very mannered and matched manners with the two we had collected before. In a little while no one could sit down. I gave the tickets to Catherine.

“What horse is it?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Meyers’ choice.”

“Don’t you even know the name?”

“No. You can find it on the programme. Number five I think.”

“You have touching faith,” she said. The number five won but did not pay anything. Mr. Meyers was angry.

“You have to put up two hundred lire to make twenty,” he said. “Twelve lire for ten. It’s not worth it. My wife lost twenty lire.”

“I’ll go down with you,” Catherine said to me. The Italians all stood up. We went downstairs and out to the paddock.

“Do you like this?” Catherine asked.

“Yes. I guess I do.”

“It’s all right, I suppose,” she said. “But, darling, I can’t stand to see so many people.”

“We don’t see many.”

“No. But those Meyers and the man from the bank with his wife and daughters — —”

“He cashes my sight drafts,” I said.

“Yes but some one else would if he didn’t. Those last four boys were awful.”

“We can stay out here and watch the race from the fence.”

“That will be lovely. And, darling, let’s back a horse we’ve never heard of and that Mr. Meyers won’t be backing.”

“All right.”

We backed a horse named Light For Me that finished fourth in a field of five. We leaned on the fence and watched the horses go by, their hoofs thudding as they went past, and saw the mountains off in the distance and Milan beyond the trees and the fields.

“I feel so much cleaner,” Catherine said. The horses were coming back, through the gate, wet and sweating, the jockeys quieting them and riding up to dismount under the trees.

“Wouldn’t you like a drink? We could have one out here and see the horses.”

“I’ll get them,” I said.

“The boy will bring them,” Catherine said. She put her hand up and the boy came out from the Pagoda bar beside the stables. We sat down at a round iron table.

“Don’t you like it better when we’re alone?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I felt very lonely when they were all there.”

“It’s grand here,” I said.

“Yes. It’s really a pretty course.”

“It’s nice.”

“Don’t let me spoil your fun, darling. I’ll go back whenever you want.”

“No,” I said. “We’ll stay here and have our drink. Then we’ll go down and stand at the water jump for the steeplechase.”

“You’re awfully good to me,” she said.

After we had been alone awhile we were glad to see the others again. We had a good time.

CHAPTER 21

IN SEPTEMBER the first cool nights came, then the days were cool and the leaves on the trees in the park began to turn color and we knew the summer was gone. The fighting at the front went very badly and they could not take San Gabriele. The fighting on the Bainsizza plateau was over and by the middle of the month the fighting for San Gabriele was about over too. They could not take it. Ettore was gone back to the front. The horses were gone to Rome and there was no more racing. Crowell had gone to Rome too, to be sent back to America. There were riots twice in the town against the war and bad rioting in Turin. A British major at the club told me the Italians had lost one hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriele. He said they had lost forty thousand on the Carso besides. We had a drink and he talked. He said the fighting was over for the year down here and that the Italians had bitten off more than they could chew. He said the offensive in Flanders was going to the bad. If they killed men as they did this fall the Allies would be cooked in another year. He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink. Was I on somebody’s staff? No. He was. It was all balls. We were alone in the club sitting back in one of the big leather sofas. His boots were smoothly polished dull leather. They were beautiful boots. He said it was all balls. They thought only in divisions and man-power. They all squabbled about divisions and only killed them when they got them. They were all cooked. The Germans won the victories. By God they were soldiers. The old Hun was a soldier. But they were cooked too. We were all cooked. I asked about Russia. He said they were cooked already. I’d soon see they were cooked. Then the Austrians were cooked too. If they got some Hun divisions they could do it. Did he think they would attack this fall? Of course they would. The Italians were cooked. Everybody knew they were cooked. The old Hun would come down through the Trentino and cut the railway at Vicenza and then where would the Italians be? They tried that in ‘sixteen, I said. Not with Germans. Yes, I said. But they probably wouldn’t do that, he said. It was too simple. They’d try something complicated and get royally cooked. I had to go, I said. I had to get back to the hospital. “Good-by,” he said. Then cheerily, “Every sort of luck!” There was a great contrast between his world pessimism and personal cheeriness.

I stopped at a barber shop and was shaved and went home to the hospital. My leg was as well as it would get for a long time. I had been up for examination three days before. There were still some treatments to take before my course at the Ospedale.

Maggiore was finished and I walked along the side street practicing not limping. An old man was cutting silhouettes under an arcade. I stopped to watch him. Two girls were posing and he cut their silhouettes together, snipping very fast and looking at them, his head on one side. The girls were giggling. He showed me the silhouettes before he pasted them on white paper and handed them to the girls.

“They’re beautiful,” he said. “How about you, Tenente?”

The girls went away looking at their silhouettes and laughing. They were nice-looking girls. One of them worked in the wine shop across from the hospital.

“All right,” I said.

“Take your cap off.”

“No. With it on.”

“It will not be so beautiful,” the old man said. “But,” he brightened, “it will be more military.”

He snipped away at the black paper, then separated the two thicknesses and pasted the profiles on a card and handed them to me.

“How much?”

“That’s all right.” He waved his hand. “I just made them for you.”

“Please.” I brought out some coppers. “For pleasure.”

“No. I did them for a pleasure. Give them to your girl.”

“Many thanks until we meet.”

“Until I see thee.”

I went on to the hospital. There were some letters, an official one, and some others. I was to have three weeks’ convalescent leave and then return to the front. I read it over carefully. Well, that was that. The convalescent leave started October fourth when my course was finished. Three weeks was twenty-one days. That made October twenty-fifth. I told them I would not be in and went to the restaurant a little way up the street from the hospital for supper and read my letters and the Corriere Della Sera at the table. There was a letter from my grandfather, containing family news, patriotic encouragement, a draft for two hundred dollars, and a few clippings; a dull letter from the priest at our mess, a letter from a man I knew who was flying with the French and had gotten in with a wild gang and was telling about it, and a note from Rinaldi asking me how long I was going to skulk in Milano and what was all the news? He wanted me to bring him phonograph records and enclosed a list. I drank a small bottle of chianti with the meal, had a coffee afterward with a glass of cognac, finished the paper, put my letters in my pocket, left the paper on the table with the tip and went out. In my room at the hospital I undressed, put on pajamas and a dressing-gown, pulled down the curtains on the door that opened onto the balcony and sitting up in bed read Boston papers from a pile Mrs. Meyers had left for her boys at the hospital. The Chicago White Sox were winning the American League pennant and the New York Giants were leading the National League. Babe Ruth was a pitcher then playing for Boston. The papers were dull, the news was local and stale, and the war news was all old. The American news was all training camps. I was glad I wasn’t in a training camp. The baseball news was all I could read and I did not have the slightest interest in it. A number of papers together made it impossible to read with interest. It was not very timely but I read at it for a while. I wondered if America really got into the war, if they would close down the major leagues. They probably wouldn’t. There was still racing in Milan and the war could not be much worse. They had stopped racing in France. That was where our horse Japalac came from. Catherine was not due on duty until nine o’clock. I heard her passing along the floor when she first came on duty and once saw her pass in the hall. She went to several other rooms and finally came into mine.

“I’m late, darling,” she said. “There was a lot to do. How are you?”

I told her about my papers and the leave.

“That’s lovely,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”

“Nowhere. I want to stay here.”

“That’s silly. You pick a place to go and I’ll come too.”

“How will you work it?”

“I don’t know. But I will.”

“You’re pretty wonderful.”

“No I’m not. But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”

“How do you mean?”

“Nothing. I was only thinking how small obstacles seemed that once were so big.”

“I should think it might be hard to manage.”

“No it won’t, darling. If necessary I’ll simply leave. But it won’t come to that.”

“Where should we go?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere we don’t know people.”

“Don’t you care where we go?”

“No. I’ll like any place.”

She seemed upset and taut.

“What’s the matter, Catherine?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.”

“Yes there is.”

“No nothing. Really nothing.”

“I know there is. Tell me, darling. You can tell me.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want to. I’m afraid I’ll make you unhappy or worry you.”

“No it won’t.”

“You’re sure? It doesn’t worry me but I’m afraid to worry you.”

“It won’t if it doesn’t worry you.”

“I don’t want to tell.”

“Tell it.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to have a baby, darling. It’s almost three months along. You’re not worried, are you? Please please don’t. You mustn’t worry.”

“All right.”

“Is it all right?”

“Of course.”

“I did everything. I took everything but it didn’t make any difference.”

“I’m not worried.”

“I couldn’t help it, darling, and I haven’t worried about it. You mustn’t worry or feel badly.”

“I only worry about you.”

“That’s it. That’s what you mustn’t do. People have babies all the time. Everybody has babies. It’s a natural thing.”

“You’re pretty wonderful.”

“No I’m not. But you mustn’t mind, darling. I’ll try and not make trouble for you. I know I’ve made trouble now. But haven’t I been a good girl until now? You never knew it, did you?”

“No.”

“It will all be like that. You simply mustn’t worry. I can see you’re worrying. Stop it. Stop it right away. Wouldn’t you like a drink, darling? I know a drink always makes you feel cheerful.”

“No. I feel cheerful. And you’re pretty wonderful.”

“No I’m not. But I’ll fix everything to be together if you pick out a place for us to go. It ought to be lovely in October. We’ll have a lovely time, darling, and I’ll write you every day while you’re at the front.”

“Where will you be?”

“I don’t know yet. But somewhere splendid. I’ll look after all that.”

We were quiet awhile and did not talk. Catherine was sitting on the bed and I was looking at her but we did not touch each other. We were apart as when some one comes into a room and people are self-conscious. She put out her hand and took mine.

“You aren’t angry are you, darling?”

“No.”

“And you don’t feel trapped?”

“Maybe a little. But not by you.”

“I didn’t mean by me. You mustn’t be stupid. I meant trapped at all.”

“You always feel trapped biologically.”

She went away a long way without stirring or removing her hand.

“‘Always’ isn’t a pretty word.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. But you see I’ve never had a baby and I’ve never even loved any one. And I’ve tried to be the way you wanted and then you talk about ‘always.’”

“I could cut off my tongue,” I offered.

“Oh, darling!” she came back from wherever she had been. “You mustn’t mind me.” We were both together again and the self-consciousness was gone. “We really are the same one and we mustn’t misunderstand on purpose.”

“We won’t.”

“But people do. They love each other and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and then suddenly they aren’t the same one.”

“We won’t fight.”

“We mustn’t. Because there’s only us two and in the world there’s all the rest of them. If anything comes between us we’re gone and then they have us.”

“They won’t get us,” I said. “Because you’re too brave. Nothing ever happens to the brave.”

“They die of course.”

“But only once.”

“I don’t know. Who said that?”

“The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?”

“Of course. Who said it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He was probably a coward,” she said. “He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to see inside the head of the brave.”

“Yes. That’s how they keep that way.”

“You’re an authority.”

“You’re right, darling. That was deserved.”

“You’re brave.”

“No,” she said. “But I would like to be.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I stand. I’ve been out long enough to know. I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better.”

“What is a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty? It’s awfully impressive.”

“It’s not. It means a mediocre hitter in baseball.”

“But still a hitter,” she prodded me.

“I guess we’re both conceited,” I said. “But you are brave.”

“No. But I hope to be.”

“We’re both brave,” I said. “And I’m very brave when I’ve had a drink.”

“We’re splendid people,” Catherine said. She went over to the armoire and brought me the cognac and a glass. “Have a drink, darling,” she said. “You’ve been awfully good.”

“I don’t really want one.”

“Take one.”

“All right.” I poured the water glass a third full of cognac and drank it off.

“That was very big,” she said. “I know brandy is for heroes. But you shouldn’t exaggerate.”

“Where will we live after the war?”

“In an old people’s home probably,” she said. “For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas. But now I look forward till when our son will be a lieutenant commander.”

“Maybe he’ll be a general.”

“If it’s an hundred years’ war he’ll have time to try both of the services.”

“Don’t you want a drink?”

“No. It always makes you happy, darling, and it only makes me dizzy.”

“Didn’t you ever drink brandy?”

“No, darling. I’m a very old-fashioned wife.”

I reached down to the floor for the bottle and poured another drink.

“I’d better go to have a look at your compatriots,” Catherine said. “Perhaps you’ll read the papers until I come back.”

“Do you have to go?”

“Now or later.”

“All right. Now.”

“I’ll come back later.”

“I’ll have finished the papers,” I said.

CHAPTER 22

IT TURNED cold that night and the next day it was raining. Coming home from the Ospedale Maggiore it rained very hard and I was wet when I came in. Up in my room the rain was coming down heavily outside on the balcony, and the wind blew it against the glass doors. I changed my clothing and drank some brandy but the brandy did not taste good. I felt sick in the night and in the morning after breakfast I was nauseated.

“There is no doubt about it,” the house surgeon said. “Look at the whites of his eyes, Miss.”

Miss Gage looked. They had me look in a glass. The whites of the eyes were yellow and it was the jaundice. I was sick for two weeks with it. For that reason we did not spend a convalescent leave together. We had planned to go to Pallanza on Lago Maggiore. It is nice there in the fall when the leaves turn. There are walks you can take and you can troll for trout in the lake. It would have been better than Stresa because there are fewer people at Pallanza. Stresa is so easy to get to from Milan that there are always people you know. There is a nice village at Pallanza and you can row out to the islands where the fishermen live and there is a restaurant on the biggest island. But we did not go.

One day while I was in bed with jaundice Miss Van Campen came in the room, opened the door into the armoire and saw the empty bottles there. I had sent a load of them down by the porter and I believe she must have seen them going out and come up to find some more. They were mostly vermouth bottles, marsala bottles, capri bottles, empty chianti flasks and a few cognac bottles. The porter had carried out the large bottles, those that had held vermouth, and the straw-covered chianti flasks, and left the brandy bottles for the last. It was the brandy bottles and a bottle shaped like a bear, which had held kümmel, that Miss Van Campen found. The bear-shaped bottle enraged her particularly. She held it up, the bear was sitting up on his haunches with his paws up, there was a cork in his glass head and a few sticky crystals at the bottom. I laughed.

“It is kümmel,” I said. “The best kümmel comes in those bear-shaped bottles. It comes from Russia.”

“Those are all brandy bottles, aren’t they?” Miss Van Campen asked.

“I can’t see them all,” I said. “But they probably are.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I bought them and brought them in myself,” I said. “I have had Italian officers visit me frequently and I have kept brandy to offer them.”

“You haven’t been drinking it yourself?” she said.

“I have also drunk it myself.”

“Brandy,” she said. “Eleven empty bottles of brandy and that bear liquid.”

“Kümmel.”

“I will send for some one to take them away. Those are all the empty bottles you have?”

“For the moment.”

“And I was pitying you having jaundice. Pity is something that is wasted on you.”

“Thank you.”

“I suppose you can’t be blamed for not wanting to go back to the front. But I should think you would try something more intelligent than producing jaundice with alcoholism.”

“With what?”

“With alcoholism. You heard me say it.” I did not say anything. “Unless you find something else I’m afraid you will have to go back to the front when you are through with your jaundice. I don’t believe self-inflicted jaundice entitles you to a convalescent leave.”

“You don’t?”

“I do not.”

“Have you ever had jaundice, Miss Van Campen?”

“No, but I have seen a great deal of it.”

“You noticed how the patients enjoyed it?”

“I suppose it is better than the front.”

“Miss Van Campen,” I said, “did you ever know a man who tried to disable himself by kicking himself in the scrotum?”

Miss Van Campen ignored the actual question. She had to ignore it or leave the room. She was not ready to leave because she had disliked me for a long time and she was now cashing in.

“I have known many men to escape the front through self-inflicted wounds.”

“That wasn’t the question. I have seen self-inflicted wounds also. I asked you if you had ever known a man who had tried to disable himself by kicking himself in the scrotum. Because that is the nearest sensation to jaundice and it is a sensation that I believe few women have ever experienced. That was why I asked you if you had ever had the jaundice, Miss Van Campen, because—” Miss Van Campen left the room. Later Miss Gage came in.

“What did you say to Van Campen? She was furious.”

“We were comparing sensations. I was going to suggest that she had never experienced childbirth — —”

“You’re a fool,” Gage said. “She’s after your scalp.”

“She has my scalp,” I said. “She’s lost me my leave and she might try and get me court-martialled. She’s mean enough.”

“She never liked you,” Gage said. “What’s it about?”

“She says I’ve drunk myself into jaundice so as not to go back to the front.”

“Pooh,” said Gage. “I’ll swear you’ve never taken a drink. Everybody will swear you’ve never taken a drink.”

“She found the bottles.”

“I’ve told you a hundred times to clear out those bottles. Where are they now?”

“In the armoire.”

“Have you a suitcase?”

“No. Put them in that rucksack.”

Miss Gage packed the bottles in the rucksack. “I’ll give them to the porter,” she said. She started for the door.

“Just a minute,” Miss Van Campen said. “I’ll take those bottles.” She had the porter with her. “Carry them, please,” she said. “I want to show them to the doctor when I make my report.”

She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it.

Nothing happened except that I lost my leave.

CHAPTER 23

THE NIGHT I was to return to the front I sent the porter down to hold a seat for me on the train when it came from Turin. The train was to leave at midnight. It was made up at Turin and reached Milan about half-past ten at night and lay in the station until time to leave. You had to be there when it came in, to get a seat. The porter took a friend with him, a machine-gunner on leave who worked in a tailor shop, and was sure that between them they could hold a place. I gave them money for platform tickets and had them take my baggage. There was a big rucksack and two musettes.

I said good-by at the hospital at about five o’clock and went out. The porter had my baggage in his lodge and I told him I would be at the station a little before midnight. His wife called me “Signorino” and cried. She wiped her eyes and shook hands and then cried again. I patted her on the back and she cried once more. She had done my mending and was a very short dumpy, happy-faced woman with white hair. When she cried her whole face went to pieces. I went down to the corner where there was a wine shop and waited inside looking out the window. It was dark outside and cold and misty. I paid for my coffee and grappa and I watched the people going by in the light from the window. I saw Catherine and knocked on the window. She looked, saw me and smiled, and I went out to meet her. She was wearing a dark blue cape and a soft felt hat. We walked along together, along the sidewalk past the wine shops, then across the market square and up the street and through the archway to the cathedral square. There were streetcar tracks and beyond them was the cathedral. It was white and wet in the mist. We crossed the tram tracks. On our left were the shops, their windows lighted, and the entrance to the galleria. There was a fog in the square and when we came close to the front of the cathedral it was very big and the stone was wet.

“Would you like to go in?”

“No,” Catherine said. We walked along. There was a soldier standing with his girl in the shadow of one of the stone buttresses ahead of us and we passed them. They were standing tight up against the stone and he had put his cape around her.

“They’re like us,” I said.

“Nobody is like us,” Catherine said. She did not mean it happily.

“I wish they had some place to go.”

“It mightn’t do them any good.”

“I don’t know. Everybody ought to have some place to go.”

“They have the cathedral,” Catherine said. We were past it now. We crossed the far end of the square and looked back at the cathedral. It was fine in the mist. We were standing in front of the leather goods shop. There were riding boots, a rucksack and ski boots in the window. Each article was set apart as an exhibit; the rucksack in the centre, the riding boots on one side and the ski boots on the other. The leather was dark and oiled smooth as a used saddle. The electric light made high lights on the dull oiled leather.

“We’ll ski some time.”

“In two months there will be ski-ing at Mürren,” Catherine said.

“Let’s go there.”

“All right,” she said. We went on past other windows and turned down a side street.

“I’ve never been this way.”

“This is the way I go to the hospital,” I said. It was a narrow street and we kept on the right-hand side. There were many people passing in the fog. There were shops and all the windows were lighted. We looked in a window at a pile of cheeses. I stopped in front of an armorer’s shop.

“Come in a minute. I have to buy a gun.”

“What sort of gun?”

“A pistol.” We went in and I unbuttoned my belt and laid it with the empty holster on the counter. Two women were behind the counter. The women brought out several pistols.

“It must fit this,” I said, opening the holster. It was a gray leather holster and I had bought it second-hand to wear in the town.

“Have they good pistols?” Catherine asked.

“They’re all about the same. Can I try this one?” I asked the woman.

“I have no place now to shoot,” she said. “But it is very good. You will not make a mistake with it.”

I snapped it and pulled back the action. The spring was rather strong but it worked smoothly. I sighted it and snapped it again.

“It is used,” the woman said. “It belonged to an officer who was an excellent shot.”

“Did you sell it to him?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get it back?”

“From his orderly.”

“Maybe you have mine,” I said. “How much is this?”

“Fifty lire. It is very cheap.”

“All right. I want two extra clips and a box of cartridges.”

She brought them from under the counter.

“Have you any need for a sword?” she asked. “I have some used swords very cheap.”

“I’m going to the front,” I said.

“Oh yes, then you won’t need a sword,” she said.

I paid for the cartridges and the pistol, filled the magazine and put it in place, put the pistol in my empty holster, filled the extra clips with cartridges and put them in the leather slots on the holster and then buckled on my belt. The pistol felt heavy on the belt. Still, I thought, it was better to have a regulation pistol. You could always get shells.

“Now we’re fully armed,” I said. “That was the one thing I had to remember to do. Some one got my other one going to the hospital.”

“I hope it’s a good pistol,” Catherine said.

“Was there anything else?” the woman asked.

“I don’t believe so.”

“The pistol has a lanyard,” she said.

“So I noticed.” The woman wanted to sell something else.

“You don’t need a whistle?”

“I don’t believe so.”

The woman said good-by and we went out onto the sidewalk. Catherine looked in the window. The woman looked out and bowed to us.

“What are those little mirrors set in wood for?”

“They’re for attracting birds. They twirl them out in the field and larks see them and come out and the Italians shoot them.”

“They are an ingenious people,” Catherine said. “You don’t shoot larks do you, darling, in America?”

“Not especially.”

We crossed the street and started to walk up the other side.

“I feel better now,” Catherine said. “I felt terrible when we started.”

“We always feel good when we’re together.”

“We always will be together.”

“Yes, except that I’m going away at midnight.”

“Don’t think about it, darling.”

We walked on up the street. The fog made the lights yellow.

“Aren’t you tired?” Catherine asked.

“How about you?”

“I’m all right. It’s fun to walk.”

“But let’s not do it too long.”

“No.”

We turned down a side street where there were no lights and walked in the street. I stopped and kissed Catherine. While I kissed her I felt her hand on my shoulder. She had pulled my cape around her so it covered both of us. We were standing in the street against a high wall.

“Let’s go some place,” I said.

“Good,” said Catherine. We walked on along the street until it came out onto a wider street that was beside a canal. On the other side was a brick wall and buildings. Ahead, down the street, I saw a streetcar cross a bridge.

“We can get a cab up at the bridge,” I said. We stood on the bridge in the fog waiting for a carriage. Several streetcars passed, full of people going home. Then a carriage came along but there was some one in it. The fog was turning to rain.

“We could walk or take a tram,” Catherine said.

“One will be along,” I said. “They go by here.”

“Here one comes,” she said.

The driver stopped his horse and lowered the metal sign on his meter. The top of the carriage was up and there were drops of water on the driver’s coat. His varnished hat was shining in the wet. We sat back in the seat together and the top of the carriage made it dark.

“Where did you tell him to go?”

“To the station. There’s a hotel across from the station where we can go.”

“We can go the way we are? Without luggage?”

“Yes,” I said.

It was a long ride to the station up side streets in the rain.

“Won’t we have dinner?” Catherine asked. “I’m afraid I’ll be hungry.”

“We’ll have it in our room.”

“I haven’t anything to wear. I haven’t even a night-gown.”

“We’ll get one,” I said and called to the driver.

“Go to the Via Manzoni and up that.” He nodded and turned off to the left at the next corner. On the big street Catherine watched for a shop.

“Here’s a place,” she said. I stopped the driver and Catherine got out, walked across the sidewalk and went inside. I sat back in the carriage and waited for her. It was raining and I could smell the wet street and the horse steaming in the rain. She came back with a package and got in and we drove on.

“I was very extravagant, darling,” she said, “but it’s a fine nightgown.”

At the hotel I asked Catherine to wait in the carriage while I went in and spoke to the manager. There were plenty of rooms. Then I went out to the carriage, paid the driver, and Catherine and I walked in together. The small boy in buttons carried the package. The manager bowed us toward the elevator. There was much red plush and brass. The manager went up in the elevator with us.

“Monsieur and Madame wish dinner in their rooms?”

“Yes. Will you have the menu brought up?” I said.

“You wish something special for dinner. Some game or a soufflé?”

The elevator passed three floors with a click each time, then clicked and stopped.

“What have you as game?”

“I could get a pheasant, or a woodcock.”

“A woodcock,” I said. We walked down the corridor. The carpet was worn. There were many doors. The manager stopped and unlocked a door and opened it.

“Here you are. A lovely room.”

The small boy in buttons put the package on the table in the centre of the room. The manager opened the curtains.

“It is foggy outside,” he said. The room was furnished in red plush. There were many mirrors, two chairs and a large bed with a satin coverlet. A door led to the bathroom.

“I will send up the menu,” the manager said. He bowed and went out.

I went to the window and looked out, then pulled a cord that shut the thick plush curtains. Catherine was sitting on the bed, looking at the cut glass chandelier. She had taken her hat off and her hair shone under the light. She saw herself in one of the mirrors and put her hands to her hair. I saw her in three other mirrors. She did not look happy. She let her cape fall on the bed.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“I never felt like a whore before,” she said. I went over to the window and pulled the curtain aside and looked out. I had not thought it would be like this.

“You’re not a whore.”

“I know it, darling. But it isn’t nice to feel like one.” Her voice was dry and flat.

“This was the best hotel we could get in,” I said. I looked out the window. Across the square were the lights of the station. There were carriages going by on the street and I saw the trees in the park. The lights from the hotel shone on the wet pavement. Oh, hell, I thought, do we have to argue now?

“Come over here please,” Catherine said. The flatness was all gone out of her voice. “Come over, please. I’m a good girl again.” I looked over at the bed. She was smiling.

I went over and sat on the bed beside her and kissed her.

“You’re my good girl.”

“I’m certainly yours,” she said.

After we had eaten we felt fine, and then after, we felt very happy and in a little time the room felt like our own home. My room at the hospital had been our own home and this room was our home too in the same way.

Catherine wore my tunic over her shoulders while we ate. We were very hungry and the meal was good and we drank a bottle of Capri and a bottle of St. Estephe. I drank most of it but Catherine drank some and it made her feel splendid. For dinner we had a woodcock with soufflé potatoes and purée de marron, a salad, and zabaione for dessert.

“It’s a fine room,” Catherine said. “It’s a lovely room. We should have stayed here all the time we’ve been in Milan.”

“It’s a funny room. But it’s nice.”

“Vice is a wonderful thing,” Catherine said. “The people who go in for it seem to have good taste about it. The red plush is really fine. It’s just the thing. And the mirrors are very attractive.”

“You’re a lovely girl.”

“I don’t know how a room like this would be for waking up in the morning. But it’s really a splendid room.” I poured another glass of St. Estephe.

“I wish we could do something really sinful,” Catherine said. “Everything we do seems so innocent and simple. I can’t believe we do anything wrong.”

“You’re a grand girl.”

“I only feel hungry. I get terribly hungry.”

“You’re a fine simple girl,” I said.

“I am a simple girl. No one ever understood it except you.”

“Once when I first met you I spent an afternoon thinking how we would go to the Hotel Cavour together and how it would be.”

“That was awfully cheeky of you. This isn’t the Cavour is it?”

“No. They wouldn’t have taken us in there.”

“They’ll take us in some time. But that’s how we differ, darling. I never thought about anything.”

“Didn’t you ever at all?”

“A little,” she said.

“Oh you’re a lovely girl.”

I poured another glass of wine.

“I’m a very simple girl,” Catherine said.

“I didn’t think so at first. I thought you were a crazy girl.”

“I was a little crazy. But I wasn’t crazy in any complicated manner. I didn’t confuse you did I, darling?”

“Wine is a grand thing,” I said. “It makes you forget all the bad.”

“It’s lovely,” said Catherine. “But it’s given my father gout very badly.”

“Have you a father?”

“Yes,” said Catherine. “He has gout. You won’t ever have to meet him. Haven’t you a father?”

“No,” I said. “A step-father.”

“Will I like him?”

“You won’t have to meet him.”

“We have such a fine time,” Catherine said. “I don’t take any interest in anything else any more. I’m so very happy married to you.”

The waiter came and took away the things. After a while we were very still and we could hear the rain. Down below on the street a motor car honked.

“‘But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,’” I said.

“I know that poem,” Catherine said. “It’s by Marvell. But it’s about a girl who wouldn’t live with a man.”

My head felt very clear and cold and I wanted to talk facts.

“Where will you have the baby?”

“I don’t know. The best place I can find.”

“How will you arrange it?”

“The best way I can. Don’t worry, darling. We may have several babies before the war is over.”

“It’s nearly time to go.”

“I know. You can make it time if you want.”

“No.”

“Then don’t worry, darling. You were fine until now and now you’re worrying.”

“I won’t. How often will you write?”

“Every day. Do they read your letters?”

“They can’t read English enough to hurt any.”

“I’ll make them very confusing,” Catherine said.

“But not too confusing.”

“I’ll just make them a little confusing.”

“I’m afraid we have to start to go.”

“All right, darling.”

“I hate to leave our fine house.”

“So do I.”

“But we have to go.”

“All right. But we’re never settled in our home very long.”

“We will be.”

“I’ll have a fine home for you when you come back.”

“Maybe I’ll be back right away.”

“Perhaps you’ll be hurt just a little in the foot.”

“Or the lobe of the ear.”

“No I want your ears the way they are.”

“And not my feet?”

“Your feet have been hit already.”

“We have to go, darling. Really.”

“All right. You go first.”

CHAPTER 24

WE WALKED down the stairs instead of taking the elevator. The carpet on the stairs was worn. I had paid for the dinner when it came up and the waiter, who had brought it, was sitting on a chair near the door. He jumped up and bowed and I went with him into the side room and paid the bill for the room. The manager had remembered me as a friend and refused payment in advance but when he retired he had remembered to have the waiter stationed at the door so that I should not get out without paying. I suppose that had happened; even with his friends. One had so many friends in a war.

I asked the waiter to get us a carriage and he took Catherine’s package that I was carrying and went out with an umbrella. Outside through the window we saw him crossing the street in the rain. We stood in the side room and looked out the window.

“How do you feel, Cat?”

“Sleepy.”

“I feel hollow and hungry.”

“Have you anything to eat?”

“Yes, in my musette.”

I saw the carriage coming. It stopped, the horse’s head hanging in the rain, and the waiter stepped out, opened his umbrella, and came toward the hotel. We met him at the door and walked out under the umbrella down the wet walk to the carriage at the curb. Water was running in the gutter.

“There is your package on the seat,” the waiter said. He stood with the umbrella until we were in and I had tipped him.

“Many thanks. Pleasant journey,” he said. The coachman lifted the reins and the horse started. The waiter turned away under the umbrella and went toward the hotel. We drove down the street and turned to the left, then came around to the right in front of the station. There were two carabinieri standing under the light just out of the rain. The light shone on their hats. The rain was clear and transparent against the light from the station. A porter came out from under the shelter of the station, his shoulders up against the rain.

“No,” I said. “Thanks. I don’t need thee.”

He went back under the shelter of the archway. I turned to Catherine. Her face was in the shadow from the hood of the carriage.

“We might as well say good-by.”

“I can’t go in?”

“No.”

“Good-by, Cat.”

“Will you tell him the hospital?”

“Yes.”

I told the driver the address to drive to. He nodded.

“Good-by,” I said. “Take good care of yourself and young Catherine.”

“Good-by, darling.”

“Good-by,” I said. I stepped out into the rain and the carriage started. Catherine leaned out and I saw her face in the light. She smiled and waved. The carriage went up the street, Catherine pointed in toward the archway. I looked, there were only the two carabinieri and the archway. I realized she meant for me to get in out of the rain. I went in and stood and watched the carriage turn the corner. Then I started through the station and down the runway to the train.

The porter was on the platform looking for me. I followed him into the train, crowding past people and along the aisle and in through a door to where the machine-gunner sat in the corner of a full compartment. My rucksack and musettes were above his head on the luggage rack. There were many men standing in the corridor and the men in the compartment all looked at us when we came in. There were not enough places in the train and every one was hostile. The machine-gunner stood up for me to sit down. Some one tapped me on the shoulder. I looked around. It was a very tall gaunt captain of artillery with a red scar along his jaw. He had looked through the glass on the corridor and then come in.

“What do you say?” I asked. I had turned and faced him. He was taller than I and his face was very thin under the shadow of his cap-visor and the scar was new and shiny. Every one in the compartment was looking at me.

“You can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t have a soldier save you a place.”

“I have done it.”

He swallowed and I saw his Adam’s apple go up and then down. The machine-gunner stood in front of the place. Other men looked in through the glass. No one in the compartment said anything.

“You have no right to do that. I was here two hours before you came.”

“What do you want?”

“The seat.”

“So do I.”

I watched his face and could feel the whole compartment against me. I did not blame them. He was in the right. But I wanted the seat. Still no one said anything.

“Oh, hell,” I thought.

“Sit down, Signor Capitano,” I said. The machine-gunner moved out of the way and the tall captain sat down. He looked at me. His face seemed hurt. But he had the seat. “Get my things,” I said to the machine-gunner. We went out in the corridor. The train was full and I knew there was no chance of a place. I gave the porter and the machine-gunner ten lire apiece. They went down the corridor and outside on the platform looking in the windows but there were no places.

“Maybe some will get off at Brescia,” the porter said.

“More will get on at Brescia,” said the machine-gunner. I said good-by to them and we shook hands and they left. They both felt badly. Inside the train we were all standing in the corridor when the train started. I watched the lights of the station and the yards as we went out. It was still raining and soon the windows were wet and you could not see out. Later I slept on the floor of the corridor; first putting my pocket-book with my money and papers in it inside my shirt and trousers so that it was inside the leg of my breeches. I slept all night, waking at Brescia and Verona when more men got on the train, but going back to sleep at once. I had my head on one of the musettes and my arms around the other and I could feel the pack and they could all walk over me if they wouldn’t step on me. Men were sleeping on the floor all down the corridor. Others stood holding on to the window rods or leaning against the doors. That train was always crowded.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER 25

NOW IN THE FALL the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy. I rode to Gorizia from Udine on a camion. We passed other camions on the road and I looked at the country. The mulberry trees were bare and the fields were brown. There were wet dead leaves on the road from the rows of bare trees and men were working on the road, tamping stone in the ruts from piles of crushed stone along the side of the road between the trees. We saw the town with a mist over it that cut off the mountains. We crossed the river and I saw that it was running high. It had been raining in the mountains. We came into the town past the factories and then the houses and villas and I saw that many more houses had been hit. On a narrow street we passed a British Red Cross ambulance. The driver wore a cap and his face was thin and very tanned. I did not know him. I got down from the camion in the big square in front of the Town Major’s house, the driver handed down my rucksack and I put it on and swung on the two musettes and walked to our villa. It did not feel like a homecoming.

I walked down the damp gravel driveway looking at the villa through the trees. The windows were all shut but the door was open. I went in and found the major sitting at a table in the bare room with maps and typed sheets of paper on the wall.

“Hello,” he said. “How are you?” He looked older and drier.

“I’m good,” I said. “How is everything?”

“It’s all over,” he said. “Take off your kit and sit down.” I put my pack and the two musettes on the floor and my cap on the pack. I brought the other chair over from the wall and sat down by the desk.

“It’s been a bad summer,” the major said. “Are you strong now?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever get the decorations?”

“Yes. I got them fine. Thank you very much.”

“Let’s see them.”

I opened my cape so he could see the two ribbons.

“Did you get the boxes with the medals?”

“No. Just the papers.”

“The boxes will come later. That takes more time.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“The cars are all away. There are six up north at Caporetto. You know Caporetto?”

“Yes,” I said. I remembered it as a little white town with a campanile in a valley. It was a clean little town and there was a fine fountain in the square.

“They are working from there. There are many sick now. The fighting is over.”

“Where are the others?”

“There are two up in the mountains and four still on the Bainsizza. The other two ambulance sections are in the Carso with the third army.”

“What do you wish me to do?”

“You can go and take over the four cars on the Bainsizza if you like. Gino has been up there a long time. You haven’t seen it up there, have you?”

“No.”

“It was very bad. We lost three cars.”

“I heard about it.”

“Yes, Rinaldi wrote you.”

“Where is Rinaldi?”

“He is here at the hospital. He has had a summer and fall of it.”

“I believe it.”

“It has been bad,” the major said. “You couldn’t believe how bad it’s been. I’ve often thought you were lucky to be hit when you were.”

“I know I was.”

“Next year will be worse,” the major said. “Perhaps they will attack now. They say they are to attack but I can’t believe it. It is too late. You saw the river?”

“Yes. It’s high already.”

“I don’t believe they will attack now that the rains have started. We will have the snow soon. What about your countrymen? Will there be other Americans besides yourself?”

“They are training an army of ten million.”

“I hope we get some of them. But the French will hog them all. We’ll never get any down here. All right. You stay here to-night and go out to-morrow with the little car and send Gino back. I’ll send somebody with you that knows the road. Gino will tell you everything. They are shelling quite a little still but it is all over. You will want to see the Bainsizza.”

“I’m glad to see it. I am glad to be back with you again, Signor Maggiore.”

He smiled. “You are very good to say so. I am very tired of this war. If I was away I do not believe I would come back.”

“Is it so bad?”

“Yes. It is so bad and worse. Go get cleaned up and find your friend Rinaldi.”

I went out and carried my bags up the stairs. Rinaldi was not in the room but his things were there and I sat down on the bed and unwrapped my puttees and took the shoe off my right foot. Then I lay back on the bed. I was tired and my right foot hurt. It seemed silly to lie on the bed with one shoe off, so I sat up and unlaced the other shoe and dropped it on the floor, then lay back on the blanket again. The room was stuffy with the window closed but I was too tired to get up and open it. I saw my things were all in one corner of the room. Outside it was getting dark. I lay on the bed and thought about Catherine and waited for Rinaldi. I was going to try not to think about Catherine except at night before I went to sleep. But now I was tired and there was nothing to do, so I lay and thought about her. I was thinking about her when Rinaldi came in. He looked just the same. Perhaps he was a little thinner.

“Well, baby,” he said. I sat up on the bed. He came over, sat down and put his arm around me. “Good old baby.” He whacked me on the back and I held both his arms.

“Old baby,” he said. “Let me see your knee.”

“I’ll have to take off my pants.”

“Take off your pants, baby. We’re all friends here. I want to see what kind of a job they did.” I stood up, took off the breeches and pulled off the knee-brace. Rinaldi sat on the floor and bent the knee gently back and forth. He ran his finger along the scar; put his thumbs together over the kneecap and rocked the knee gently with his fingers.

“Is that all the articulation you have?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a crime to send you back. They ought to get complete articulation.”

“It’s a lot better than it was. It was stiff as a board.”

Rinaldi bent it more. I watched his hands. He had fine surgeon’s hands. I looked at the top of his head, his hair shiny and parted smoothly. He bent the knee too far.

“Ouch!” I said.

“You ought to have more treatment on it with the machines,” Rinaldi said.

“It’s better than it was.”

“I see that, baby. This is something I know more about than you.” He stood up and sat down on the bed. “The knee itself is a good job.” He was through with the knee. “Tell me all about everything.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said. “I’ve led a quiet life.”

“You act like a married man,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“This war is killing me,” Rinaldi said, “I am very depressed by it.” He folded his hands over his knee.

“Oh,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Can’t I even have human impulses?”

“No. I can see you’ve been having a fine time. Tell me.”

“All summer and all fall I’ve operated. I work all the time. I do everybody’s work. All the hard ones they leave to me. By God, baby, I am becoming a lovely surgeon.”

“That sounds better.”

“I never think. No, by God, I don’t think; I operate.”

“That’s right.”

“But now, baby, it’s all over. I don’t operate now and I feel like hell. This is a terrible war, baby. You believe me when I say it. Now you cheer me up. Did you bring the phonograph records?”

“Yes.”

They were wrapped in paper in a cardboard box in my rucksack. I was too tired to get them out.

“Don’t you feel good yourself, baby?”

“I feel like hell.”

“This war is terrible,” Rinaldi said. “Come on. We’ll both get drunk and be cheerful. Then we’ll go get the ashes dragged. Then we’ll feel fine.”

“I’ve had the jaundice,” I said, “and I can’t get drunk.”

“Oh, baby, how you’ve come back to me. You come back serious and with a liver. I tell you this war is a bad thing. Why did we make it anyway.”

“We’ll have a drink. I don’t want to get drunk but we’ll have a drink.”

Rinaldi went across the room to the washstand and brought back two glasses and a bottle of cognac.

“It’s Austrian cognac,” he said. “Seven stars. It’s all they captured on San Gabriele.”

“Were you up there?”

“No. I haven’t been anywhere. I’ve been here all the time operating. Look, baby, this is your old tooth-brushing glass. I kept it all the time to remind me of you.”

“To remind you to brush your teeth.”

“No. I have my own too. I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush away the Villa Rossa from your teeth in the morning, swearing and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.” He came over to the bed. “Kiss me once and tell me you’re not serious.”

“I never kiss you. You’re an ape.”

“I know, you are the fine good Anglo-Saxon boy. I know. You are the remorse boy, I know. I will wait till I see the Anglo-Saxon brushing away harlotry with a toothbrush.”

“Put some cognac in the glass.”

We touched glasses and drank. Rinaldi laughed at me.

“I will get you drunk and take out your liver and put you in a good Italian liver and make you a man again.”

I held the glass for some more cognac. It was dark outside now. Holding the glass of cognac, I went over and opened the window. The rain had stopped falling. It was colder outside and there was a mist in the trees.

“Don’t throw the cognac out the window,” Rinaldi said. “If you can’t drink it give it to me.”

“Go something yourself,” I said. I was glad to see Rinaldi again. He had spent two years teasing me and I had always liked it. We understood each other very well.

“Are you married?” he asked from the bed. I was standing against the wall by the window.

“Not yet.”

“Are you in love?”

“Yes.”

“With that English girl?”

“Yes.”

“Poor baby. Is she good to you?”

“Of course.”

“I mean is she good to you practically speaking?”

“Shut up.”

“I will. You will see I am a man of extreme delicacy. Does she —— ?”

“Rinin,” I said. “Please shut up. If you want to be my friend, shut up.”

“I don’t want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

“Then shut up.”

“All right.”

I went over to the bed and sat down beside Rinaldi. He was holding his glass and looking at the floor.

“You see how it is, Rinin?”

“Oh, yes. All my life I encounter sacred subjects. But very few with you. I suppose you must have them too.” He looked at the floor.

“You haven’t any?”

“No.”

“Not any?”

“No.”

“I can say this about your mother and that about your sister?”

“And that about your sister,” Rinaldi said swiftly. We both laughed.

“The old superman,” I said.

“I am jealous maybe,” Rinaldi said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I don’t mean like that. I mean something else. Have you any married friends?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I haven’t,” Rinaldi said. “Not if they love each other.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t like me.”

“Why not?”

“I am the snake. I am the snake of reason.”

“You’re getting it mixed. The apple was reason.”

“No, it was the snake.” He was more cheerful.

“You are better when you don’t think so deeply,” I said.

“I love you, baby,” he said. “You puncture me when I become a great Italian thinker. But I know many things I can’t say. I know more than you.”

“Yes. You do.”

“But you will have a better time. Even with remorse you will have a better time.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yes. That is true. Already I am only happy when I am working.” He looked at the floor again.

“You’ll get over that.”

“No. I only like two other things; one is bad for my work and the other is over in half an hour or fifteen minutes. Sometimes less.”

“Sometimes a good deal less.”

“Perhaps I have improved, baby. You do not know. But there are only the two things and my work.”

“You’ll get other things.”

“No. We never get anything. We are born with all we have and we never learn. We never get anything new. We all start complete. You should be glad not to be a Latin.”

“There’s no such thing as a Latin. That is ‘Latin’ thinking. You are so proud of your defects.” Rinaldi looked up and laughed.

“We’ll stop, baby. I am tired from thinking so much.” He had looked tired when he came in. “It’s nearly time to eat. I’m glad you’re back. You are my best friend and my war brother.”

“When do the war brothers eat?” I asked.

“Right away. We’ll drink once more for your liver’s sake.”

“Like Saint Paul.”

“You are inaccurate. That was wine and the stomach. Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake.”

“Whatever you have in the bottle,” I said. “For any sake you mention.”

“To your girl,” Rinaldi said. He held out his glass.

“All right.”

“I’ll never say a dirty thing about her.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

He drank off the cognac. “I am pure,” he said. “I am like you, baby. I will get an English girl too. As a matter of fact I knew your girl first but she was a little tall for me. A tall girl for a sister,” he quoted.

“You have a lovely pure mind,” I said.

“Haven’t I? That’s why they call me Rinaldo Purissimo.”

“Rinaldo Sporchissimo.”

“Come on, baby, we’ll go down to eat while my mind is still pure.”

I washed, combed my hair and we went down the stairs. Rinaldi was a little drunk. In the room where we ate, the meal was not quite ready.

“I’ll go get the bottle,” Rinaldi said. He went off up the stairs. I sat at the table and he came back with the bottle and poured us each a half tumbler of cognac.

“Too much,” I said and held up the glass and sighted at the lamp on the table.

“Not for an empty stomach. It is a wonderful thing. It burns out the stomach completely. Nothing is worse for you.”

“All right.”

“Self-destruction day by day,” Rinaldi said. “It ruins the stomach and makes the hand shake. Just the thing for a surgeon.”

“You recommend it?”

“Heartily. I use no other. Drink it down, baby, and look forward to being sick.”

I drank half the glass. In the hall I could hear the orderly calling. “Soup! Soup is ready!”

The major came in, nodded to us and sat down. He seemed very small at table.

“Is this all we are?” he asked. The orderly put the soup bowl down and he ladled out a plate full.

“We are all,” Rinaldi said. “Unless the priest comes. If he knew Federico was here he would be here.”

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s at 307,” the major said. He was busy with his soup. He wiped his mouth, wiping his upturned gray mustache carefully. “He will come I think. I called them and left word to tell him you were here.”

“I miss the noise of the mess,” I said.

“Yes, it’s quiet,” the major said.

“I will be noisy,” said Rinaldi.

“Drink some wine, Enrico,” said the major. He filled my glass. The spaghetti came in and we were all busy. We were finishing the spaghetti when the priest came in. He was the same as ever, small and brown and compact looking. I stood up and we shook hands. He put his hand on my shoulder.

“I came as soon as I heard,” he said.

“Sit down,” the major said. “You’re late.”

“Good-evening, priest,” Rinaldi said, using the English word. They had taken that up from the priest-baiting captain, who spoke a little English. “Good-evening, Rinaldo,” the priest said. The orderly brought him soup but he said he would start with the spaghetti.

“How are you?” he asked me.

“Fine,” I said. “How have things been?”

“Drink some wine, priest,” Rinaldi said. “Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake. That’s Saint Paul, you know.”

“Yes I know,” said the priest politely. Rinaldi filled his glass.

“That Saint Paul,” said Rinaldi. “He’s the one who makes all the trouble.” The priest looked at me and smiled. I could see that the baiting did not touch him now.

“That Saint Paul,” Rinaldi said. “He was a rounder and a chaser and then when he was no longer hot he said it was no good. When he was finished he made the rules for us who are still hot. Isn’t it true, Federico?”

The major smiled. We were eating meat stew now.

“I never discuss a Saint after dark,” I said. The priest looked up from the stew and smiled at me.

“There he is, gone over with the priest,” Rinaldi said. “Where are all the good old priest-baiters? Where is Cavalcanti? Where is Brundi? Where is Cesare? Do I have to bait this priest alone without support?”

“He is a good priest,” said the major.

“He is a good priest,” said Rinaldi. “But still a priest. I try to make the mess like the old days. I want to make Federico happy. To hell with you, priest!”

I saw the major look at him and notice that he was drunk. His thin face was white. The line of his hair was very black against the white of his forehead.

“It’s all right, Rinaldo,” said the priest. “It’s all right.”

“To hell with you,” said Rinaldi. “To hell with the whole damn business.” He sat back in his chair.

“He’s been under a strain and he’s tired,” the major said to me. He finished his meat and wiped up the gravy with a piece of bread.

“I don’t give a damn,” Rinaldi said to the table. “To hell with the whole business.” He looked defiantly around the table, his eyes flat, his face pale.

“All right,” I said. “To hell with the whole damn business.”

“No, no,” said Rinaldi. “You can’t do it. You can’t do it. I say you can’t do it. You’re dry and you’re empty and there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else I tell you. Not a damned thing. I know, when I stop working.”

The priest shook his head. The orderly took away the stew dish.

“What are you eating meat for?” Rinaldi turned to the priest. “Don’t you know it’s Friday?”

“It’s Thursday,” the priest said.

“It’s a lie. It’s Friday. You’re eating the body of our Lord. It’s God-meat. I know. It’s dead Austrian. That’s what you’re eating.”

“The white meat is from officers,” I said, completing the old joke.

Rinaldi laughed. He filled his glass.

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m just a little crazy.”

“You ought to have a leave,” the priest said.

The major shook his head at him. Rinaldi looked at the priest.

“You think I ought to have a leave?”

The major shook his head at the priest. Rinaldi was looking at the priest.

“Just as you like,” the priest said. “Not if you don’t want.”

“To hell with you,” Rinaldi said. “They try to get rid of me. Every night they try to get rid of me. I fight them off. What if I have it. Everybody has it. The whole world’s got it. First,” he went on, assuming the manner of a lecturer, “it’s a little pimple. Then we notice a rash between the shoulders. Then we notice nothing at all. We put our faith in mercury.”

“Or salvarsan,” the major interrupted quietly.

“A mercurial product,” Rinaldi said. He acted very elated now. “I know something worth two of that. Good old priest,” he said. “You’ll never get it. Baby will get it. It’s an industrial accident. It’s a simple industrial accident.”

The orderly brought in the sweet and coffee. The dessert was a sort of black bread pudding with hard sauce. The lamp was smoking; the black smoke going close up inside the chimney.

“Bring two candles and take away the lamp,” the major said. The orderly brought two lighted candles each in a saucer, and took out the lamp blowing it out. Rinaldi was quiet now. He seemed all right. We talked and after the coffee we all went out into the hall.

“You want to talk to the priest. I have to go in the town,” Rinaldi said. “Good-night, priest.”

“Good-night, Rinaldo,” the priest said.

“I’ll see you, Fredi,” Rinaldi said.

“Yes,” I said. “Come in early.” He made a face and went out the door. The major was standing with us. “He’s very tired and overworked,” he said. “He thinks too he has syphilis. I don’t believe it but he may have. He is treating himself for it. Good-night. You will leave before daylight, Enrico?”

“Yes.”

“Good-by then,” he said. “Good luck. Peduzzi will wake you and go with you.”

“Good-by, Signor Maggiore.”

“Good-by. They talk about an Austrian offensive but I don’t believe it. I hope not. But anyway it won’t be here. Gino will tell you everything. The telephone works well now.”

“I’ll call regularly.”

“Please do. Good-night. Don’t let Rinaldi drink so much brandy.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“Good-night, priest.”

“Good-night, Signor Maggiore.”

He went off into his office.

CHAPTER 26

I WENT TO THE DOOR and looked out. It had stopped raining but there was a mist.

“Should we go upstairs?” I asked the priest.

“I can only stay a little while.”

“Come on up.”

We climbed the stairs and went into my room. I lay down on Rinaldi’s bed. The priest sat on my cot that the orderly had set up. It was dark in the room.

“Well,” he said, “how are you really?”

“I’m all right. I’m tired to-night.”

“I’m tired too, but from no cause.”

“What about the war?”

“I think it will be over soon. I don’t know why, but I feel it.”

“How do you feel it?”

“You know how your major is? Gentle? Many people are like that now.”

“I feel that way myself,” I said.

“It has been a terrible summer,” said the priest. He was surer of himself now than when I had gone away. “You cannot believe how it has been. Except that you have been there and you know how it can be. Many people have realized the war this summer. Officers whom I thought could never realize it realize it now.”

“What will happen?” I stroked the blanket with my hand.

“I do not know but I do not think it can go on much longer.”

“What will happen?”

“They will stop fighting.”

“Who?”

“Both sides.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“You don’t believe it?”

“I don’t believe both sides will stop fighting at once.”

“I suppose not. It is too much to expect. But when I see the changes in men I do not think it can go on.”

“Who won the fighting this summer?”

“No one.”

“The Austrians won,” I said. “They kept them from taking San Gabriele. They’ve won. They won’t stop fighting.”

“If they feel as we feel they may stop. They have gone through the same thing.”

“No one ever stopped when they were winning.”

“You discourage me.”

“I can only say what I think.”

“Then you think it will go on and on? Nothing will ever happen?”

“I don’t know. I only think the Austrians will not stop when they have won a victory. It is in defeat that we become Christian.”

“The Austrians are Christians — except for the Bosnians.”

“I don’t mean technically Christian. I mean like Our Lord.”

He said nothing.

“We are all gentler now because we are beaten. How would Our Lord have been if Peter had rescued him in the Garden?”

“He would have been just the same.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You discourage me,” he said. “I believe and I pray that something will happen. I have felt it very close.”

“Something may happen,” I said. “But it will happen only to us. If they felt the way we do, it would be all right. But they have beaten us. They feel another way.”

“Many of the soldiers have always felt this way. It is not because they were beaten.”

“They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.”

He did not say anything. He was thinking.

“Now I am depressed myself,” I said. “That’s why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”

“I had hoped for something.”

“Defeat?”

“No. Something more.”

“There isn’t anything more. Except victory. It may be worse.”

“I hoped for a long time for victory.”

“Me too.”

“Now I don’t know.”

“It has to be one or the other.”

“I don’t believe in victory any more.”

“I don’t. But I don’t believe in defeat. Though it may be better.”

“What do you believe in?”

“In sleep,” I said. He stood up.

“I am very sorry to have stayed so long. But I like so to talk with you.”

“It is very nice to talk again. I said that about sleeping, meaning nothing.”

We stood up and shook hands in the dark.

“I sleep at 307 now,” he said.

“I go out on post early to-morrow.”

“I’ll see you when you come back.”

“We’ll have a walk and talk together.” I walked with him to the door.

“Don’t go down,” he said. “It is very nice that you are back. Though not so nice for you.” He put his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s all right for me,” I said. “Good-night.”

“Good-night. Ciaou!”

“Ciaou!” I said. I was deadly sleepy.

CHAPTER 27

I WOKE WHEN Rinaldi came in but he did not talk and I went back to sleep again. In the morning I was dressed and gone before it was light. Rinaldi did not wake when I left.

I had not seen the Bainsizza before and it was strange to go up the slope where the Austrians had been, beyond the place on the river where I had been wounded. There was a steep new road and many trucks. Beyond, the road flattened out and I saw woods and steep hills in the mist. There were woods that had been taken quickly and not smashed. Then beyond where the road was not protected by the hills it was screened by matting on the sides and over the top. The road ended in a wrecked village. The lines were up beyond. There was much artillery around. The houses were badly smashed but things were very well organized and there were signboards everywhere. We found Gino and he got us some coffee and later I went with him and met various people and saw the posts. Gino said the British cars were working further down the Bainsizza at Ravne. He had great admiration for the British. There was still a certain amount of shelling, he said, but not many wounded. There would be many sick now the rains had started. The Austrians were supposed to attack but he did not believe it. We were supposed to attack too, but they had not brought up any new troops so he thought that was off too. Food was scarce and he would be glad to get a full meal in Gorizia. What kind of supper had I had? I told him and he said that would be wonderful. He was especially impressed by the dolce. I did not describe it in detail, only said it was a dolce, and I think he believed it was something more elaborate than bread pudding.

Did I know where he was going to go? I said I didn’t but that some of the other cars were at Caporetto. He hoped he would go up that way. It was a nice little place and he liked the high mountain hauling up beyond. He was a nice boy and every one seemed to like him. He said where it really had been hell was at San Gabriele and the attack beyond Lom that had gone bad. He said the Austrians had a great amount of artillery in the woods along Ternova ridge beyond and above us, and shelled the roads badly at night. There was a battery of naval guns that had gotten on his nerves. I would recognize them because of their flat trajectory. You heard the report and then the shriek commenced almost instantly. They usually fired two guns at once, one right after the other, and the fragments from the burst were enormous. He showed me one, a smoothly jagged piece of metal over a foot long. It looked like babbitting metal.

“I don’t suppose they are so effective,” Gino said. “But they scare me. They all sound as though they came directly for you. There is the boom, then instantly the shriek and burst. What’s the use of not being wounded if they scare you to death?”

He said there were Croats in the lines opposite us now and some Magyars. Our troops were still in the attacking positions. There was no wire to speak of and no place to fall back to if there should be an Austrian attack. There were fine positions for defense along the low mountains that came up out of the plateau but nothing had been done about organizing them for defense. What did I think about the Bainsizza anyway?

I had expected it to be flatter, more like a plateau. I had not realized it was so broken up.

“Alto piano,” Gino said, “but no piano.”

We went back to the cellar of the house where he lived. I said I thought a ridge that flattened out on top and had a little depth would be easier and more practical to hold than a succession of small mountains. It was no harder to attack up a mountain than on the level, I argued. “That depends on the mountains,” he said. “Look at San Gabriele.”

“Yes,” I said, “but where they had trouble was at the top where it was flat. They got up to the top easy enough.”

“Not so easy,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “but that was a special case because it was a fortress rather than a mountain, anyway. The Austrians had been fortifying it for years.” I meant tactically speaking in a war where there was some movement a succession of mountains were nothing to hold as a line because it was too easy to turn them. You should have possible mobility and a mountain is not very mobile. Also, people always over-shoot downhill. If the flank were turned, the best men would be left on the highest mountains. I did not believe in a war in mountains. I had thought about it a lot, I said. You pinched off one mountain and they pinched off another but when something really started every one had to get down off the mountains.

What were you going to do if you had a mountain frontier? he asked.

I had not worked that out yet, I said, and we both laughed. “But,” I said, “in the old days the Austrians were always whipped in the quadrilateral around Verona. They let them come down onto the plain and whipped them there.”

“Yes,” said Gino. “But those were Frenchmen and you can work out military problems clearly when you are fighting in somebody else’s country.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “when it is your own country you cannot use it so scientifically.”

“The Russians did, to trap Napoleon.”

“Yes, but they had plenty of country. If you tried to retreat to trap Napoleon in Italy you would find yourself in Brindisi.”

“A terrible place,” said Gino. “Have you ever been there?”

“Not to stay.”

“I am a patriot,” Gino said. “But I cannot love Brindisi or Taranto.”

“Do you love the Bainsizza?” I asked.

“The soil is sacred,” he said. “But I wish it grew more potatoes. You know when we came here we found fields of potatoes the Austrians had planted.”

“Has the food really been short?”

“I myself have never had enough to eat but I am a big eater and I have not starved. The mess is average. The regiments in the line get pretty good food but those in support don’t get so much. Something is wrong somewhere. There should be plenty of food.”

“The dogfish are selling it somewhere else.”

“Yes, they give the battalions in the front line as much as they can but the ones in back are very short. They have eaten all the Austrians’ potatoes and chestnuts from the woods. They ought to feed them better. We are big eaters. I am sure there is plenty of food. It is very bad for the soldiers to be short of food. Have you ever noticed the difference it makes in the way you think?”

“Yes,” I said. “It can’t win a war but it can lose one.”

“We won’t talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain.”

I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.

It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of the broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from out number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping. The sun came out once before it went down and shone on the bare woods beyond the ridge. There were many Austrian guns in the woods on that ridge but only a few fired. I watched the sudden round puffs of shrapnel smoke in the sky above a broken farmhouse near where the line was; soft puffs with a yellow white flash in the centre. You saw the flash, then heard the crack, then saw the smoke ball distort and thin in the wind. There were many iron shrapnel balls in the rubble of the houses and on the road beside the broken house where the post was, but they did not shell near the post that afternoon. We loaded two cars and drove down the road that was screened with wet mats and the last of the sun came through in the breaks between the strips of mattings. Before we were out on the clear road behind the hill the sun was down. We went on down the clear road and as it turned a corner into the open and went into the square arched tunnel of matting the rain started again.

The wind rose in the night and at three o’clock in the morning with the rain coming in sheets there was a bombardment and the Croatians came over across the mountain meadows and through patches of woods and into the front line. They fought in the dark in the rain and a counter-attack of scared men from the second line drove them back. There was much shelling and many rockets in the rain and machine-gun and rifle fire all along the line. They did not come again and it was quieter and between the gusts of wind and rain we could hear the sound of a great bombardment far to the north.

The wounded were coming into the post, some were carried on stretchers, some walking and some were brought on the backs of men that came across the field. They were wet to the skin and all were scared. We filled two cars with stretcher cases as they came up from the cellar of the post and as I shut the door of the second car and fastened it I felt the rain on my face turn to snow. The flakes were coming heavy and fast in the rain.

When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. It was getting dark. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.

We heard that the attack to the south had been unsuccessful. They did not attack that night but we heard that they had broken through to the north. In the night word came that we were to prepare to retreat. The captain at the post told me this. He had it from the Brigade. A little while later he came from the telephone and said it was a lie. The Brigade had received orders that the line of the Bainsizza should be held no matter what happened. I asked about the break through and he said that he had heard at the Brigade that the Austrians had broken through the twenty-seventh army corps up toward Caporetto. There had been a great battle in the north all day.

“If those bastards let them through we are cooked,” he said.

“It’s Germans that are attacking,” one of the medical officers said. The word Germans was something to be frightened of. We did not want to have anything to do with the Germans.

“There are fifteen divisions of Germans,” the medical officer said. “They have broken through and we will be cut off.”

“At the Brigade, they say this line is to be held. They say they have not broken through badly and that we will hold a line across the mountains from Monte Maggiore.”

“Where do they hear this?”

“From the Division.”

“The word that we were to retreat came from the Division.”

“We work under the Army Corps,” I said. “But here I work under you. Naturally when you tell me to go I will go. But get the orders straight.”

“The orders are that we stay here. You clear the wounded from here to the clearing station.”

“Sometimes we clear from the clearing station to the field hospitals too,” I said. “Tell me, I have never seen a retreat — if there is a retreat how are all the wounded evacuated?”

“They are not. They take as many as they can and leave the rest.”

“What will I take in the cars?”

“Hospital equipment.”

“All right,” I said.

The next night the retreat started. We heard that Germans and Austrians had broken through in the north and were coming down the mountain valleys toward Cividale and Udine. The retreat was orderly, wet and sullen. In the night, going slowly along the crowded roads we passed troops marching under the rain, guns, horses pulling wagons, mules, motor trucks, all moving away from the front. There was no more disorder than in an advance.

That night we helped empty the field hospitals that had been set up in the least ruined villages of the plateau, taking the wounded down to Plava on the river-bed: and the next day hauled all day in the rain to evacuate the hospitals and clearing station at Plava. It rained steadily and the army of the Bainsizza moved down off the plateau in the October rain and across the river where the great victories had commenced in the spring of that year. We came into Gorizia in the middle of the next day. The rain had stopped and the town was nearly empty. As we came up the street they were loading the girls from the soldiers’ whorehouse into a truck. There were seven girls and they had on their hats and coats and carried small suitcases. Two of them were crying. Of the others one smiled at us and put out her tongue and fluttered it up and down. She had thick full lips and black eyes.

I stopped the car and went over and spoke to the matron. The girls from the officers’ house had left early that morning, she said. Where were they going? To Conegliano, she said. The truck started. The girl with thick lips put out her tongue again at us. The matron waved. The two girls kept on crying. The others looked interestedly out at the town. I got back in the car.

“We ought to go with them,” Bonello said. “That would be a good trip.”

“We’ll have a good trip,” I said.

“We’ll have a hell of a trip.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. We came up the drive to the villa.

“I’d like to be there when some of those tough babies climb in and try and hop them.”

“You think they will?”

“Sure. Everybody in the Second Army knows that matron.”

We were outside the villa.

“They call her the Mother Superior,” Bonello said. “The girls are new but everybody knows her. They must have brought them up just before the retreat.”

“They’ll have a time.”

“I’ll say they’ll have a time. I’d like to have a crack at them for nothing. They charge too much at that house anyway. The government gyps us.”

“Take the car out and have the mechanics go over it,” I said. “Change the oil and check the differential. Fill it up and then get some sleep.”

“Yes, Signor Tenente.”

The villa was empty. Rinaldi was gone with the hospital. The major was gone taking hospital personnel in the staff car. There was a note on the window for me to fill the cars with the material piled in the hall and to proceed to Pordenone. The mechanics were gone already. I went out back to the garage. The other two cars came in while I was there and their drivers got down. It was starting to rain again.

“I’m so — sleepy I went to sleep three times coming here from Plava,” Piani said. “What are we going to do, Tenente?”

“We’ll change the oil, grease them, fill them up, then take them around in front and load up the junk they’ve left.”

“Then do we start?”

“No, we’ll sleep for three hours.”

“Christ I’m glad to sleep,” Bonello said. “I couldn’t keep awake driving.”

“How’s your car, Aymo?” I asked.

“It’s all right.”

“Get me a monkey suit and I’ll help you with the oil.”

“Don’t you do that, Tenente,” Aymo said. “It’s nothing to do. You go and pack your things.”

“My things are all packed,” I said. “I’ll go and carry out the stuff that they left for us. Bring the cars around as soon as they’re ready.”

They brought the cars around to the front of the villa and we loaded them with the hospital equipment which was piled in the hallway. When it was all in, the three cars stood in line down the driveway under the trees in the rain. We went inside.

“Make a fire in the kitchen and dry your things,” I said.

“I don’t care about dry clothes,” Piani said. “I want to sleep.”

“I’m going to sleep on the major’s bed,” Bonello said. “I’m going to sleep where the old man corks off.”

“I don’t care where I sleep,” Piani said.

“There are two beds in here.” I opened the door.

“I never knew what was in that room,” Bonello said.

“That was old fish-face’s room,” Piani said.

“You two sleep in there,” I said. “I’ll wake you.”

“The Austrians will wake us if you sleep too long, Tenente,” Bonello said.

“I won’t oversleep,” I said. “Where’s Aymo?”

“He went out in the kitchen.”

“Get to sleep,” I said.

“I’ll sleep,” Piani said. “I’ve been asleep sitting up all day. The whole top of my head kept coming down over my eyes.”

“Take your boots off,” Bonello said. “That’s old fish-face’s bed.”

“Fish-face is nothing to me.” Piani lay on the bed, his muddy boots straight out, his head on his arm. I went out to the kitchen. Aymo had a fire in the stove and a kettle of water on.

“I thought I’d start some pasta asciutta,” he said. “We’ll be hungry when we wake up.”

“Aren’t you sleepy, Bartolomeo?”

“Not so sleepy. When the water boils I’ll leave it. The fire will go down.”

“You’d better get some sleep,” I said. “We can eat cheese and monkey meat.”

“This is better,” he said. “Something hot will be good for those two anarchists. You go to sleep, Tenente.”

“There’s a bed in the major’s room.”

“You sleep there.”

“No, I’m going up to my old room. Do you want a drink, Bartolomeo?”

“When we go, Tenente. Now it wouldn’t do me any good.”

“If you wake in three hours and I haven’t called you, wake me, will you?”

“I haven’t any watch, Tenente.”

“There’s a clock on the wall in the major’s room.”

“All right.”

I went out then through the dining-room and the hall and up the marble stairs to the room where I had lived with Rinaldi. It was raining outside. I went to the window and looked out. It was getting dark and I saw the three cars standing in line under the trees. The trees were dripping in the rain. It was cold and the drops hung to the branches. I went back to Rinaldi’s bed and lay down and let sleep take me.

We ate in the kitchen before we started. Aymo had a basin of spaghetti with onions and tinned meat chopped up in it. We sat around the table and drank two bottles of the wine that had been left in the cellar of the villa. It was dark outside and still raining. Piani sat at the table very sleepy.

“I like a retreat better than an advance,” Bonello said. “On a retreat we drink barbera.”

“We drink it now. To-morrow maybe we drink rainwater,” Aymo said.

“To-morrow we’ll be in Udine. We’ll drink champagne. That’s where the slackers live. Wake up, Piani! We’ll drink champagne tomorrow in Udine!”

“I’m awake,” Piani said. He filled his plate with the spaghetti and meat. “Couldn’t you find tomato sauce, Barto?”

“There wasn’t any,” Aymo said.

“We’ll drink champagne in Udine,” Bonello said. He filled his glass with the clear red barbera.

“We may drink —— before Udine,” Piani said.

“Have you eaten enough, Tenente?” Aymo asked.

“I’ve got plenty. Give me the bottle, Bartolomeo.”

“I have a bottle apiece to take in the cars,” Aymo said.

“Did you sleep at all?”

“I don’t need much sleep. I slept a little.”

“To-morrow we’ll sleep in the king’s bed,” Bonello said. He was feeling very good.

“To-morrow maybe we’ll sleep in —— ,” Piani said.

“I’ll sleep with the queen,” Bonello said. He looked to see how I took the joke.

“You’ll sleep with —— ,” Piani said sleepily.

“That’s treason, Tenente,” Bonello said. “Isn’t that treason?”

“Shut up,” I said. “You get too funny with a little wine.” Outside it was raining hard. I looked at my watch. It was half-past nine.

“It’s time to roll,” I said and stood up.

“Who are you going to ride with, Tenente?” Bonello asked.

“With Aymo. Then you come. Then Piani. We’ll start out on the road for Cormons.”

“I’m afraid I’ll go to sleep,” Piani said.

“All right. I’ll ride with you. Then Bonello. Then Aymo.”

“That’s the best way,” Piani said. “Because I’m so sleepy.”

“I’ll drive and you sleep awhile.”

“No. I can drive just so long as I know somebody will wake me up if I go to sleep.”

“I’ll wake you up. Put out the lights, Barto.”

“You might as well leave them,” Bonello said. “We’ve got no more use for this place.”

“I have a small locker trunk in my room,” I said. “Will you help take it down, Piani?”

“We’ll take it,” Piani said. “Come on, Aldo.” He went off into the hall with Bonello. I heard them going upstairs.

“This was a fine place,” Bartolomeo Aymo said. He put two bottles of wine and half a cheese into his haversack. “There won’t be a place like this again. Where will they retreat to, Tenente?”

“Beyond the Tagliamento, they say. The hospital and the sector are to be at Pordenone.”

“This is a better town than Pordenone.”

“I don’t know Pordenone,” I said. “I’ve just been through there.”

“It’s not much of a place,” Aymo said.

CHAPTER 28

AS WE MOVED out through the town it was empty in the rain and the dark except for columns of troops and guns that were going through the main street. There were many trucks too and some carts going through on other streets and converging on the main road. When we were out past the tanneries onto the main road the troops, the motor trucks, the horse-drawn carts and the guns were in one wide slow-moving column. We moved slowly but steadily in the rain, the radiator cap of our car almost against the tailboard of a truck that was loaded high, the load covered with wet canvas. Then the truck stopped. The whole column was stopped. It started again and we went a little farther, then stopped. I got out and walked ahead, going between the trucks and carts and under the wet necks of the horses. The block was farther ahead. I left the road, crossed the ditch on a footboard and walked along the field beyond the ditch. I could see the stalled column between the trees in the rain as I went forward across from it in the field. I went about a mile. The column did not move, although, on the other side beyond the stalled vehicles I could see the troops moving. I went back to the cars. This block might extend as far as Udine. Piani was asleep over the wheel. I climbed up beside him and went to sleep too. Several hours later I heard the truck ahead of us grinding into gear. I woke Piani and we started, moving a few yards, then stopping, then going on again. It was still raining.

The column stalled again in the night and did not start. I got down and went back to see Aymo and Bonello. Bonello had two sergeants of engineers on the seat of his car with him. They stiffened when I came up.

“They were left to do something to a bridge,” Bonello said. “They can’t find their unit so I gave them a ride.”

“With the Sir Lieutenant’s permission.”

“With permission,” I said.

“The lieutenant is an American,” Bonello said. “He’ll give anybody a ride.”

One of the sergeants smiled. The other asked Bonello if I was an Italian from North or South America.

“He’s not an Italian. He’s North American English.”

The sergeants were polite but did not believe it. I left them and went back to Aymo. He had two girls on the seat with him and was sitting back in the corner and smoking.

“Barto, Barto,” I said. He laughed.

“Talk to them, Tenente,” he said. “I can’t understand them. Hey!” He put his hand on the girl’s thigh and squeezed it in a friendly way. The girl drew her shawl tight around her and pushed his hand away. “Hey!” he said. “Tell the Tenente your name and what you’re doing here.”

The girl looked at me fiercely. The other girl kept her eyes down. The girl who looked at me said something in a dialect I could not understand a word of. She was plump and dark and looked about sixteen.

“Sorella?” I asked and pointed at the other girl.

She nodded her head and smiled.

“All right,” I said and patted her knee. I felt her stiffen away when I touched her. The sister never looked up. She looked perhaps a year younger. Aymo put his hand on the elder girl’s thigh and she pushed it away. He laughed at her.

“Good man,” he pointed at himself. “Good man,” he pointed at me. “Don’t you worry.” The girl looked at him fiercely. The pair of them were like two wild birds.

“What does she ride with me for if she doesn’t like me?” Aymo asked. “They got right up in the car the minute I motioned to them.” He turned to the girl. “Don’t worry,” he said. “No danger of —— ,” using the vulgar word. “No place for —— .” I could see she understood the word and that was all. Her eyes looked at him very scared. She pulled the shawl tight. “Car all full,” Aymo said. “No danger of —— . No place for —— .” Every time he said the word the girl stiffened a little. Then sitting stiffly and looking at him she began to cry. I saw her lips working and then tears came down her plump cheeks. Her sister, not looking up, took her hand and they sat there together. The older one, who had been so fierce, began to sob.

“I guess I scared her,” Aymo said. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

Bartolomeo brought out his knapsack and cut off two pieces of cheese. “Here,” he said. “Stop crying.”

The older girl shook her head and still cried, but the younger girl took the cheese and commenced to eat. After a while the younger girl gave her sister the second piece of cheese and they both ate. The older sister still sobbed a little.

“She’ll be all right after a while,” Aymo said.

An idea came to him. “Virgin?” he asked the girl next to him. She nodded her head vigorously. “Virgin too?” he pointed to the sister. Both the girls nodded their heads and the elder said something in dialect.

“That’s all right,” Bartolomeo said. “That’s all right.”

Both the girls seemed cheered.

I left them sitting together with Aymo sitting back in the corner and went back to Piani’s car. The column of vehicles did not move but the troops kept passing alongside. It was still raining hard and I thought some of the stops in the movement of the column might be from cars with wet wiring. More likely they were from horses or men going to sleep. Still, traffic could tie up in cities when every one was awake. It was the combination of horse and motor vehicles. They did not help each other any. The peasants’ carts did not help much either. Those were a couple of fine girls with Barto. A retreat was no place for two virgins. Real virgins. Probably very religious. If there were no war we would probably all be in bed. In bed I lay me down my head. Bed and board. Stiff as a board in bed. Catherine was in bed now between two sheets, over her and under her. Which side did she sleep on? Maybe she wasn’t asleep. Maybe she was lying thinking about me. Blow, blow, ye western wind. Well, it blew and it wasn’t the small rain but the big rain down that rained. It rained all night. You knew it rained down that rained. Look at it. Christ, that my love were in my arms and I in my bed again. That my love Catherine. That my sweet love Catherine down might rain. Blow her again to me. Well, we were in it. Every one was caught in it and the small rain would not quiet it. “Good-night, Catherine,” I said out loud. “I hope you sleep well. If it’s too uncomfortable, darling, lie on the other side,” I said. “I’ll get you some cold water. In a little while it will be morning and then it won’t be so bad. I’m sorry he makes you so uncomfortable. Try and go to sleep, sweet.”

I was asleep all the time, she said. You’ve been talking in your sleep. Are you all right?

Are you really there?

Of course I’m here. I wouldn’t go away. This doesn’t make any difference between us.

You’re so lovely and sweet. You wouldn’t go away in the night, would you?

Of course I wouldn’t go away. I’m always here. I come whenever you want me.

“ —— ,” Piani said. “They’ve started again.”

“I was dopey,” I said. I looked at my watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. I reached back behind the seat for a bottle of the barbera.

“You talked out loud,” Piani said.

“I was having a dream in English,” I said.

The rain was slacking and we were moving along. Before daylight we were stalled again and when it was light we were at a little rise in the ground and I saw the road of the retreat stretched out far ahead, everything stationary except for the infantry filtering through. We started to move again but seeing the rate of progress in the daylight, I knew we were going to have to get off that main road some way and go across country if we ever hoped to reach Udine.

In the night many peasants had joined the column from the roads of the country and in the column there were carts loaded with household goods; there were mirrors projecting up between mattresses, and chickens and ducks tied to carts. There was a sewing machine on the cart ahead of us in the rain. They had saved the most valuable things. On some carts the women sat huddled from the rain and others walked beside the carts keeping as close to them as they could. There were dogs now in the column, keeping under the wagons as they moved along. The road was muddy, the ditches at the side were high with water and beyond the trees that lined the road the fields looked too wet and too soggy to try to cross. I got down from the car and worked up the road a way, looking for a place where I could see ahead to find a side-road we could take across country. I knew there were many side-roads but did not want one that would lead to nothing. I could not remember them because we had always passed them bowling along in the car on the main road and they all looked much alike. Now I knew we must find one if we hoped to get through. No one knew where the Austrians were nor how things were going but I was certain that if the rain should stop and planes come over and get to work on that column that it would be all over. All that was needed was for a few men to leave their trucks or a few horses be killed to tie up completely the movement on the road.

The rain was not falling so heavily now and I thought it might clear. I went ahead along the edge of the road and when there was a small road that led off to the north between two fields with a hedge of trees on both sides, I thought that we had better take it and hurried back to the cars. I told Piani to turn off and went back to tell Bonello and Aymo.

“If it leads nowhere we can turn around and cut back in,” I said.

“What about these?” Bonello asked. His two sergeants were beside him on the seat. They were unshaven but still military looking in the early morning.

“They’ll be good to push,” I said. I went back to Aymo and told him we were going to try it across country.

“What about my virgin family?” Aymo asked. The two girls were asleep.

“They won’t be very useful,” I said. “You ought to have some one that could push.”

“They could go back in the car,” Aymo said. “There’s room in the car.”

“All right if you want them,” I said. “Pick up somebody with a wide back to push.”

“Bersaglieri,” Aymo smiled. “They have the widest backs. They measure them. How do you feel, Tenente?”

“Fine. How are you?”

“Fine. But very hungry.”

“There ought to be something up that road and we will stop and eat.”

“How’s your leg, Tenente?”

“Fine,” I said. Standing on the step and looking up ahead I could see Piani’s car pulling out onto the little side-road and starting up it, his car showing through the hedge of bare branches. Bonello turned off and followed him and then Piani worked his way out and we followed the two ambulances ahead along the narrow road between hedges. It led to a farmhouse. We found Piani and Bonello stopped in the farmyard. The house was low and long with a trellis with a grape-vine over the door. There was a well in the yard and Piani was getting up water to fill his radiator. So much going in low gear had boiled it out. The farmhouse was deserted. I looked back down the road, the farmhouse was on a slight elevation above the plain, and we could see over the country, and saw the road, the hedges, the fields and the line of trees along the main road where the retreat was passing. The two sergeants were looking through the house. The girls were awake and looking at the courtyard, the well and the two big ambulances in front of the farmhouse, with three drivers at the well. One of the sergeants came out with a clock in his hand.

“Put it back,” I said. He looked at me, went in the house and came back without the clock.

“Where’s your partner?” I asked.

“He’s gone to the latrine.” He got up on the seat of the ambulance. He was afraid we would leave him.

“What about breakfast, Tenente?” Bonello asked. “We could eat something. It wouldn’t take very long.”

“Do you think this road going down on the other side will lead to anything?”

“Sure.”

“All right. Let’s eat.” Piani and Bonello went in the house.

“Come on,” Aymo said to the girls. He held his hand to help them down. The older sister shook her head. They were not going into any deserted house. They looked after us.

“They are difficult,” Aymo said. We went into the farmhouse together. It was large and dark, an abandoned feeling. Bonello and Piani were in the kitchen.

“There’s not much to eat,” Piani said. “They’ve cleaned it out.” Bonello sliced a big cheese on the heavy kitchen table.

“Where was the cheese?”

“In the cellar. Piani found wine too and apples.”

“That’s a good breakfast.”

Piani was taking the wooden cork out of a big wicker-covered wine jug. He tipped it and poured a copper pan full.

“It smells all right,” he said. “Find some beakers, Barto.”

The two sergeants came in.

“Have some cheese, sergeants,” Bonello said.

“We should go,” one of the sergeants said, eating his cheese and drinking a cup of wine.

“We’ll go. Don’t worry,” Bonello said.

“An army travels on its stomach,” I said.

“What?” asked the sergeant.

“It’s better to eat.”

“Yes. But time is precious.”

“I believe the bastards have eaten already,” Piani said. The sergeants looked at him. They hated the lot of us.

“You know the road?” one of them asked me.

“No,” I said. They looked at each other.

“We would do best to start,” the first one said.

“We are starting,” I said. I drank another cup of the red wine. It tasted very good after the cheese and apple.

“Bring the cheese,” I said and went out. Bonello came out carrying the great jug of wine.

“That’s too big,” I said. He looked at it regretfully.

“I guess it is,” he said. “Give me the canteens to fill.” He filled the canteens and some of the wine ran out on the stone paving of the courtyard. Then he picked up the wine jug and put it just inside the door.

“The Austrians can find it without breaking the door down,” he said.

“We’ll roll,” I said. “Piani and I will go ahead.” The two engineers were already on the seat beside Bonello. The girls were eating cheese and apples. Aymo was smoking. We started off down the narrow road. I looked back at the two cars coming and the farmhouse. It was a fine, low, solid stone house and the ironwork of the well was very good. Ahead of us the road was narrow and muddy and there was a high hedge on either side. Behind, the cars were following closely.

CHAPTER 29

AT NOON we were stuck in a muddy road about, as nearly as we could figure, ten kilometres from Udine. The rain had stopped during the forenoon and three times we had heard planes coming, seen them pass overhead, watched them go far to the left and heard them bombing on the main highroad. We had worked through a network of secondary roads and had taken many roads that were blind, but had always, by backing up and finding another road, gotten closer to Udine. Now, Aymo’s car, in backing so that we might get out of a blind road, had gotten into the soft earth at the side and the wheels, spinning, had dug deeper and deeper until the car rested on its differential. The thing to do now was to dig out in front of the wheels, put in brush so that the chains could grip, and then push until the car was on the road. We were all down on the road around the car. The two sergeants looked at the car and examined the wheels. Then they started off down the road without a word. I went after them.

“Come on,” I said. “Cut some brush.”

“We have to go,” one said.

“Get busy,” I said, “and cut brush.”

“We have to go,” one said. The other said nothing. They were in a hurry to start. They would not look at me.

“I order you to come back to the car and cut brush,” I said. The one sergeant turned. “We have to go on. In a little while you will be cut off. You can’t order us. You’re not our officer.”

“I order you to cut brush,” I said. They turned and started down the road.

“Halt,” I said. They kept on down the muddy road, the hedge on either side. “I order you to halt,” I called. They went a little faster. I opened up my holster, took the pistol, aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both started to run. I shot three times and dropped one. The other went through the hedge and was out of sight. I fired at him through the hedge as he ran across the field. The pistol clicked empty and I put in another clip. I saw it was too far to shoot at the second sergeant. He was far across the field, running, his head held low. I commenced to reload the empty clip. Bonello came up.

“Let me go finish him,” he said. I handed him the pistol and he walked down to where the sergeant of engineers lay face down across the road. Bonello leaned over, put the pistol against the man’s head and pulled the trigger. The pistol did not fire.

“You have to cock it,” I said. He cocked it and fired twice. He took hold of the sergeant’s legs and pulled him to the side of the road so he lay beside the hedge. He came back and handed me the pistol.

“The son of a bitch,” he said. He looked toward the sergeant. “You see me shoot him, Tenente?”

“We’ve got to get the brush quickly,” I said. “Did I hit the other one at all?”

“I don’t think so,” Aymo said. “He was too far away to hit with a pistol.”

“The dirty scum,” Piani said. We were all cutting twigs and branches. Everything had been taken out of the car. Bonello was digging out in front of the wheels. When we were ready Aymo started the car and put it into gear. The wheels spun round throwing brush and mud. Bonello and I pushed until we could feel our joints crack. The car would not move.

“Rock her back and forth, Barto,” I said.

He drove the engine in reverse, then forward. The wheels only dug in deeper. Then the car was resting on the differential again, and the wheels spun freely in the holes they had dug. I straightened up.

“We’ll try her with a rope,” I said.

“I don’t think it’s any use, Tenente. You can’t get a straight pull.”

“We have to try it,” I said. “She won’t come out any other way.”

Piani’s and Bonello’s cars could only move straight ahead down the narrow road. We roped both cars together and pulled. The wheels only pulled sideways against the ruts.

“It’s no good,” I shouted. “Stop it.”

Piani and Bonello got down from their cars and came back. Aymo got down. The girls were up the road about forty yards sitting on a stone wall.

“What do you say, Tenente?” Bonello asked.

“We’ll dig out and try once more with the brush,” I said. I looked down the road. It was my fault. I had led them up here. The sun was almost out from behind the clouds and the body of the sergeant lay beside the hedge.

“We’ll put his coat and cape under,” I said. Bonello went to get them. I cut brush and Aymo and Piani dug out in front and between the wheels. I cut the cape, then ripped it in two, and laid it under the wheel in the mud, then piled brush for the wheels to catch. We were ready to start and Aymo got up on the seat and started the car. The wheels spun and we pushed and pushed. But it wasn’t any use.

“It’s — ed,” I said. “Is there anything you want in the car, Barto?”

Aymo climbed up with Bonello, carrying the cheese and two bottles of wine and his cape. Bonello, sitting behind the wheel, was looking through the pockets of the sergeant’s coat.

“Better throw the coat away,” I said. “What about Barto’s virgins?”

“They can get in the back,” Piani said. “I don’t think we are going far.”

I opened the back door of the ambulance.

“Come on,” I said. “Get in.” The two girls climbed in and sat in the corner. They seemed to have taken no notice of the shooting. I looked back up the road. The sergeant lay in his dirty long-sleeved underwear. I got up with Piani and we started. We were going to try to cross the field. When the road entered the field I got down and walked ahead. If we could get across, there was a road on the other side. We could not get across. It was too soft and muddy for the cars. When they were finally and completely stalled, the wheels dug in to the hubs, we left them in the field and started on foot for Udine.

When we came to the road which led back toward the main highway I pointed down it to the two girls.

“Go down there,” I said. “You’ll meet people.” They looked at me. I took out my pocket-book and gave them each a ten-lira note. “Go down there,” I said, pointing. “Friends! Family!”

They did not understand but they held the money tightly and started down the road. They looked back as though they were afraid I might take the money back. I watched them go down the road, their shawls close around them, looking back apprehensively at us. The three drivers were laughing.

“How much will you give me to go in that direction, Tenente?” Bonello asked.

“They’re better off in a bunch of people than alone if they catch them,” I said.

“Give me two hundred lire and I’ll walk straight back toward Austria,” Bonello said.

“They’d take it away from you,” Piani said.

“Maybe the war will be over,” Aymo said. We were going up the road as fast as we could. The sun was trying to come through. Beside the road were mulberry trees. Through the trees I could see our two big moving-vans of cars stuck in the field. Piani looked back too.

“They’ll have to build a road to get them out,” he said.

“I wish to Christ we had bicycles,” Bonello said.

“Do they ride bicycles in America?” Aymo asked.

“They used to.”

“Here it is a great thing,” Aymo said. “A bicycle is a splendid thing.”

“I wish to Christ we had bicycles,” Bonello said. “I’m no walker.”

“Is that firing?” I asked. I thought I could hear firing a long way away.

“I don’t know,” Aymo said. He listened.

“I think so,” I said.

“The first thing we will see will be the cavalry,” Piani said.

“I don’t think they’ve got any cavalry.”

“I hope to Christ not,” Bonello said. “I don’t want to be stuck on a lance by any —— cavalry.”

“You certainly shot that sergeant, Tenente,” Piani said. We were walking fast.

“I killed him,” Bonello said. “I never killed anybody in this war, and all my life I’ve wanted to kill a sergeant.”

“You killed him on the sit all right,” Piani said. “He wasn’t flying very fast when you killed him.”

“Never mind. That’s one thing I can always remember. I killed that —— of a sergeant.”

“What will you say in confession?” Aymo asked.

“I’ll say, ‘Bless me, father, I killed a sergeant.’” They all laughed.

“He’s an anarchist,” Piani said. “He doesn’t go to church.”

“Piani’s an anarchist too,” Bonello said.

“Are you really anarchists?” I asked.

“No, Tenente. We’re socialists. We come from Imola.”

“Haven’t you ever been there?”

“No.”

“By Christ it’s a fine place, Tenente. You come there after the war and we’ll show you something.”

“Are you all socialists?”

“Everybody.”

“Is it a fine town?”

“Wonderful. You never saw a town like that.”

“How did you get to be socialists?”

“We’re all socialists. Everybody is a socialist. We’ve always been socialists.”

“You come, Tenente. We’ll make you a socialist too.”

Ahead the road turned off to the left and there was a little hill and, beyond a stone wall, an apple orchard. As the road went uphill they ceased talking. We walked along together all going fast against time.

CHAPTER 30

LATER WE WERE on a road that led to a river. There was a long line of abandoned trucks and carts on the road leading up to the bridge. No one was in sight. The river was high and the bridge had been blown up in the centre; the stone arch was fallen into the river and the brown water was going over it. We went on up the bank looking for a place to cross. Up ahead I knew there was a railway bridge and I thought we might be able to get across there. The path was wet and muddy. We did not see any troops; only abandoned trucks and stores. Along the river bank there was nothing and no one but the wet brush and muddy ground. We went up to the bank and finally we saw the railway bridge.

“What a beautiful bridge,” Aymo said. It was a long plain iron bridge across what was usually a dry river-bed.

“We’d better hurry and get across before they blow it up,” I said.

“There’s nobody to blow it up,” Piani said. “They’re all gone.”

“It’s probably mined,” Bonello said. “You cross first, Tenente.”

“Listen to the anarchist,” Aymo said. “Make him go first.”

“I’ll go,” I said. “It won’t be mined to blow up with one man.”

“You see,” Piani said. “That is brains. Why haven’t you brains, anarchist?”

“If I had brains I wouldn’t be here,” Bonello said.

“That’s pretty good, Tenente,” Aymo said.

“That’s pretty good,” I said. We were close to the bridge now. The sky had clouded over again and it was raining a little. The bridge looked long and solid. We climbed up the embankment.

“Come one at a time,” I said and started across the bridge. I watched the ties and the rails for any trip-wires or signs of explosive but I saw nothing. Down below the gaps in the ties the river ran muddy and fast. Ahead across the wet countryside I could see Udine in the rain. Across the bridge I looked back. Just up the river was another bridge. As I watched, a yellow mud-colored motor car crossed it. The sides of the bridge were high and the body of the car, once on, was out of sight. But I saw the heads of the driver, the man on the seat with him, and the two men on the rear seat. They all wore German helmets. Then the car was over the bridge and out of sight behind the trees and the abandoned vehicles on the road. I waved to Aymo who was crossing and to the others to come on. I climbed down and crouched beside the railway embankment. Aymo came down with me.

“Did you see the car?” I asked.

“No. We were watching you.”

“A German staff car crossed on the upper bridge.”

“A staff car?”

“Yes.”

“Holy Mary.”

The others came and we all crouched in the mud behind the embankment, looking across the rails at the bridge, the line of trees, the ditch and the road.

“Do you think we’re cut off then, Tenente?”

“I don’t know. All I know is a German staff car went along that road.”

“You don’t feel funny, Tenente? You haven’t got strange feelings in the head?”

“Don’t be funny, Bonello.”

“What about a drink?” Piani asked. “If we’re cut off we might as well have a drink.” He unhooked his canteen and uncorked it.

“Look! Look!” Aymo said and pointed toward the road. Along the top of the stone bridge we could see German helmets moving. They were bent forward and moved smoothly, almost supernaturally, along. As they came off the bridge we saw them. They were bicycle troops. I saw the faces of the first two. They were ruddy and healthy-looking. Their helmets came low down over their foreheads and the side of their faces. Their carbines were clipped to the frame of the bicycles. Stick bombs hung handle down from their belts. Their helmets and their gray uniforms were wet and they rode easily, looking ahead and to both sides. There were two — then four in line, then two, then almost a dozen; then another dozen — then one alone. They did not talk but we could not have heard them because of the noise from the river. They were gone out of sight up the road.

“Holy Mary,” Aymo said.

“They were Germans,” Piani said. “Those weren’t Austrians.”

“Why isn’t there somebody here to stop them?” I said. “Why haven’t they blown the bridge up? Why aren’t there machine-guns along this embankment?”

“You tell us, Tenente,” Bonello said.

I was very angry.

“The whole bloody thing is crazy. Down below they blow up a little bridge. Here they leave a bridge on the main road. Where is everybody? Don’t they try and stop them at all?”

“You tell us, Tenente,” Bonello said. I shut up. It was none of my business; all I had to do was to get to Pordenone with three ambulances. I had failed at that. All I had to do now was get to Pordenone. I probably could not even get to Udine. The hell I couldn’t. The thing to do was to be calm and not get shot or captured.

“Didn’t you have a canteen open?” I asked Piani. He handed it to me. I took a long drink. “We might as well start,” I said. “There’s no hurry though. Do you want to eat something?”

“This is no place to stay,” Bonello said.

“All right. We’ll start.”

“Should we keep on this side — out of sight?”

“We’d be better off on top. They may come along this bridge too. We don’t want them on top of us before we see them.”

We walked along the railroad track. On both sides of us stretched the wet plain. Ahead across the plain was the hill of Udine. The roofs fell away from the castle on the hill. We could see the campanile and the clock-tower. There were many mulberry trees in the fields. Ahead I saw a place where the rails were torn up. The ties had been dug out too and thrown down the embankment.

“Down! down!” Aymo said. We dropped down beside the embankment. There was another group of bicyclists passing along the road. I looked over the edge and saw them go on.

“They saw us but they went on,” Aymo said.

“We’ll get killed up there, Tenente,” Bonello said.

“They don’t want us,” I said. “They’re after something else. We’re in more danger if they should come on us suddenly.”

“I’d rather walk here out of sight,” Bonello said.

“All right. We’ll walk along the tracks.”

“Do you think we can get through?” Aymo asked.

“Sure. There aren’t very many of them yet. We’ll go through in the dark.”

“What was that staff car doing?”

“Christ knows,” I said. We kept on up the tracks. Bonello tired of walking in the mud of the embankment and came up with the rest of us. The railway moved south away from the highway now and we could not see what passed along the road. A short bridge over a canal was blown up but we climbed across on what was left of the span. We heard firing ahead of us.

We came up on the railway beyond the canal. It went on straight toward the town across the low fields. We could see the line of the other railway ahead of us. To the north was the main road where we had seen the cyclists; to the south there was a small branch-road across the fields with thick trees on each side. I thought we had better cut to the south and work around the town that way and across country toward Campoformio and the main road to the Tagliamento. We could avoid the main line of the retreat by keeping to the secondary roads beyond Udine. I knew there were plenty of side-roads across the plain. I started down the embankment.

“Come on,” I said. We would make for the side-road and work to the south of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.

“Go on back,” I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the mud. The drivers were ahead of me. I went up the embankment as fast as I could go. Two more shots came from the thick brush and Aymo, as he was crossing the tracks, lurched, tripped and fell face down. We pulled him down on the other side and turned him over. “His head ought to be uphill,” I said. Piani moved him around. He lay in the mud on the side of the embankment, his feet pointing downhill, breathing blood irregularly. The three of us squatted over him in the rain. He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping up the two holes. Piani laid his head down, wiped at his face, with a piece of the emergency dressing, then let it alone.

“The —— ,” he said.

“They weren’t Germans,” I said. “There can’t be any Germans over there.”

“Italians,” Piani said, using the word as an epithet, “Italiani!” Bonello said nothing. He was sitting beside Aymo, not looking at him. Piani picked up Aymo’s cap where it had rolled down the embankment and put it over his face. He took out his canteen.

“Do you want a drink?” Piani handed Bonello the canteen.

“No,” Bonello said. He turned to me. “That might have happened to us any time on the railway tracks.”

“No,” I said. “It was because we started across the field.”

Bonello shook his head. “Aymo’s dead,” he said. “Who’s dead next, Tenente? Where do we go now?”

“Those were Italians that shot,” I said. “They weren’t Germans.”

“I suppose if they were Germans they’d have killed all of us,” Bonello said.

“We are in more danger from Italians than Germans,” I said. “The rear guard are afraid of everything. The Germans know what they’re after.”

“You reason it out, Tenente,” Bonello said.

“Where do we go now?” Piani asked.

“We better lie up some place till it’s dark. If we could get south we’d be all right.”

“They’d have to shoot us all to prove they were right the first time,” Bonello said. “I’m not going to try them.”

“We’ll find a place to lie up as near to Udine as we can get and then go through when it’s dark.”

“Let’s go then,” Bonello said. We went down the north side of the embankment. I looked back. Aymo lay in the mud with the angle of the embankment. He was quite small and his arms were by his side, his puttee-wrapped legs and muddy boots together, his cap over his face. He looked very dead. It was raining. I had liked him as well as any one I ever knew. I had his papers in my pocket and would write to his family. Ahead across the fields was a farmhouse. There were trees around it and the farm buildings were built against the house. There was a balcony along the second floor held up by columns.

“We better keep a little way apart,” I said. “I’ll go ahead.” I started toward the farmhouse. There was a path across the field.

Crossing the field, I did not know but that some one would fire on us from the trees near the farmhouse or from the farmhouse itself. I walked toward it, seeing it very clearly. The balcony of the second floor merged into the barn and there was hay coming out between the columns. The courtyard was of stone blocks and all the trees were dripping with the rain. There was a big empty two-wheeled cart, the shafts tipped high up in the rain. I came to the courtyard, crossed it, and stood under the shelter of the balcony. The door of the house was open and I went in. Bonello and Piani came in after me. It was dark inside. I went back to the kitchen. There were ashes of a fire on the big open hearth. The pots hung over the ashes, but they were empty. I looked around but I could not find anything to eat.

“We ought to lie up in the barn,” I said. “Do you think you could find anything to eat, Piani, and bring it up there?”

“I’ll look,” Piani said.

“I’ll look too,” Bonello said.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go up and look at the barn.” I found a stone stairway that went up from the stable underneath. The stable smelt dry and pleasant in the rain. The cattle were all gone, probably driven off when they left. The barn was half full of hay. There were two windows in the roof, one was blocked with boards, the other was a narrow dormer window on the north side. There was a chute so that hay might be pitched down to the cattle. Beams crossed the opening down into the main floor where the hay-carts drove in when the hay was hauled in to be pitched up. I heard the rain on the roof and smelled the hay and, when I went down, the clean smell of dried dung in the stable. We could pry a board loose and see out of the south window down into the courtyard. The other window looked out on the field toward the north. We could get out of either window onto the roof and down, or go down the hay chute if the stairs were impractical. It was a big barn and we could hide in the hay if we heard any one. It seemed like a good place. I was sure we could have gotten through to the south if they had not fired on us. It was impossible that there were Germans there. They were coming from the north and down the road from Cividale. They could not have come through from the south. The Italians were even more dangerous. They were frightened and firing on anything they saw. Last night on the retreat we had heard that there had been many Germans in Italian uniforms mixing with the retreat in the north. I did not believe it. That was one of those things you always heard in the war. It was one of the things the enemy always did to you. You did not know any one who went over in German uniform to confuse them. Maybe they did but it sounded difficult. I did not believe the Germans did it.

I did not believe they had to. There was no need to confuse our retreat. The size of the army and the fewness of the roads did that. Nobody gave any orders, let alone Germans. Still, they would shoot us for Germans. They shot Aymo. The hay smelled good and lying in a barn in the hay took away all the years in between. We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air-rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn. The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been. You could not go back. If you did not go forward what happened? You never got back to Milan. And if you got back to Milan what happened? I listened to the firing to the north toward Udine. I could hear machine-gun firing. There was no shelling. That was something. They must have gotten some troops along the road. I looked down in the half-light of the hay-barn and saw Piani standing on the hauling floor. He had a long sausage, a jar of something and two bottles of wine under his arm.

“Come up,” I said. “There is the ladder.” Then I realized that I should help him with the things and went down. I was vague in the head from lying in the hay. I had been nearly asleep.

“Where’s Bonello?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” Piani said. We went up the ladder. Up on the hay we set the things down. Piani took out his knife with the corkscrew and drew the cork on a wine bottle.

“They have sealing-wax on it,” he said. “It must be good.” He smiled.

“Where’s Bonello?” I asked.

Piani looked at me.

“He went away, Tenente,” he said. “He wanted to be a prisoner.”

I did not say anything.

“He was afraid we would get killed.”

I held the bottle of wine and did not say anything.

“You see we don’t believe in the war anyway, Tenente.”

“Why didn’t you go?” I asked.

“I did not want to leave you.”

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, Tenente. He went away.”

“All right,” I said. “Will you cut the sausage?”

Piani looked at me in the half-light.

“I cut it while we were talking,” he said. We sat in the hay and ate the sausage and drank the wine. It must have been wine they had saved for a wedding. It was so old that it was losing its color.

“You look out of this window, Luigi,” I said. “I’ll go look out the other window.”

We had each been drinking out of one of the bottles and I took my bottle with me and went over and lay flat on the hay and looked out the narrow window at the wet country. I do not know what I expected to see but I did not see anything except the fields and the bare mulberry trees and the rain falling. I drank the wine and it did not make me feel good. They had kept it too long and it had gone to pieces and lost its quality and color. I watched it get dark outside; the darkness came very quickly. It would be a black night with the rain. When it was dark there was no use watching any more, so I went over to Piani. He was lying asleep and I did not wake him but sat down beside him for a while. He was a big man and he slept heavily. After a while I woke him and we started.

That was a very strange night. I do not know what I had expected, death perhaps and shooting in the dark and running, but nothing happened. We waited, lying flat beyond the ditch along the main road while a German battalion passed, then when they were gone we crossed the road and went on to the north. We were very close to Germans twice in the rain but they did not see us. We got past the town to the north without seeing any Italians, then after a while came on the main channels of the retreat and walked all night toward the Tagliamento. I had not realized how gigantic the retreat was. The whole country was moving, as well as the army. We walked all night, making better time than the vehicles. My leg ached and I was tired but we made good time. It seemed so silly for Bonello to have decided to be taken prisoner. There was no danger. We had walked through two armies without incident. If Aymo had not been killed there would never have seemed to be any danger. No one had bothered us when we were in plain sight along the railway. The killing came suddenly and unreasonably. I wondered where Bonello was.

“How do you feel, Tenente?” Piani asked. We were going along the side of a road crowded with vehicles and troops.

“Fine.”

“I’m tired of this walking.”

“Well, all we have to do is walk now. We don’t have to worry.”

“Bonello was a fool.”

“He was a fool all right.”

“What will you do about him, Tenente?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you just put him down as taken prisoner?”

“I don’t know.”

“You see if the war went on they would make bad trouble for his family.”

“The war won’t go on,” a soldier said. “We’re going home. The war is over.”

“Everybody’s going home.”

“We’re all going home.”

“Come on, Tenente,” Piani said. He wanted to get past them.

“Tenente? Who’s a Tenente? A basso gli ufficiali! Down with the officers!”

Piani took me by the arm. “I better call you by your name,” he said. “They might try and make trouble. They’ve shot some officers.” We worked up past them.

“I won’t make a report that will make trouble for his family.” I went on with our conversation.

“If the war is over it makes no difference,” Piani said. “But I don’t believe it’s over. It’s too good that it should be over.”

“We’ll know pretty soon,” I said.

“I don’t believe it’s over. They all think it’s over but I don’t believe it.”

“Viva la Pace!” a soldier shouted out. “We’re going home!”

“It would be fine if we all went home,” Piani said. “Wouldn’t you like to go home?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll never go. I don’t think it’s over.”

“Andiamo a casa!” a soldier shouted.

“They throw away their rifles,” Piani said. “They take them off and drop them down while they’re marching. Then they shout.”

“They ought to keep their rifles.”

“They think if they throw away their rifles they can’t make them fight.”

In the dark and the rain, making our way along the side of the road I could see that many of the troops still had their rifles. They stuck up above the capes.

“What brigade are you?” an officer called out.

“Brigata di Pace,” some one shouted. “Peace Brigade!” The officer said nothing.

“What does he say? What does the officer say?”

“Down with the officer. Viva la Pace!”

“Come on,” Piani said. We passed two British ambulances, abandoned in the block of vehicles.

“They’re from Gorizia,” Piani said. “I know the cars.”

“They got further than we did.”

“They started earlier.”

“I wonder where the drivers are?”

“Up ahead probably.”

“The Germans have stopped outside Udine,” I said. “These people will all get across the river.”

“Yes,” Piani said. “That’s why I think the war will go on.”

“The Germans could come on,” I said. “I wonder why they don’t come on.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about this kind of war.”

“They have to wait for their transport I suppose.”

“I don’t know,” Piani said. Alone he was much gentler. When he was with the others he was a very rough talker.

“Are you married, Luigi?”

“You know I am married.”

“Is that why you did not want to be a prisoner?”

“That is one reason. Are you married, Tenente?”

“No.”

“Neither is Bonello.”

“You can’t tell anything by a man’s being married. But I should think a married man would want to get back to his wife,” I said. I would be glad to talk about wives.

“Yes.”

“How are your feet?”

“They’re sore enough.”

Before daylight we reached the bank of the Tagliamento and followed down along the flooded river to the bridge where all the traffic was crossing.

“They ought to be able to hold at this river,” Piani said. In the dark the flood looked high. The water swirled and it was wide. The wooden bridge was nearly three-quarters of a mile across, and the river, that usually ran in narrow channels in the wide stony bed far below the bridge, was close under the wooden planking. We went along the bank and then worked our way into the crowd that were crossing the bridge. Crossing slowly in the rain a few feet above the flood, pressed tight in the crowd, the box of an artillery caisson just ahead, I looked over the side and watched the river. Now that we could not go our own pace I felt very tired. There was no exhilaration in crossing the bridge. I wondered what it would be like if a plane bombed it in the daytime.

“Piani,” I said.

“Here I am, Tenente.” He was a little ahead in the jam. No one was talking. They were all trying to get across as soon as they could: thinking only of that. We were almost across. At the far end of the bridge there were officers and carabinieri standing on both sides flashing lights. I saw them silhouetted against the sky-line. As we came close to them I saw one of the officers point to a man in the column. A carabiniere went in after him and came out holding the man by the arm. He took him away from the road. We came almost opposite them. The officers were scrutinizing every one in the column, sometimes speaking to each other, going forward to flash a light in some one’s face. They took some one else out just before we came opposite. I saw the man. He was a lieutenant-colonel. I saw the stars in the box on his sleeve as they flashed a light on him. His hair was gray and he was short and fat. The carabiniere pulled him in behind the line of officers. As we came opposite I saw one or two of them look at me. Then one pointed at me and spoke to a carabiniere. I saw the carabiniere start for me, come through the edge of the column toward me, then felt him take me by the collar.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said and hit him in the face. I saw his face under the hat, upturned mustaches and blood coming down his cheek. Another one dove in toward us.

“What’s the matter with you?” I said. He did not answer. He was watching a chance to grab me. I put my arm behind me to loosen my pistol.

“Don’t you know you can’t touch an officer?”

The other one grabbed me from behind and pulled my arm up so that it twisted in the socket. I turned with him and the other one grabbed me around the neck. I kicked his shins and got my left knee into his groin.

“Shoot him if he resists,” I heard some one say.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I tried to shout but my voice was not very loud. They had me at the side of the road now.

“Shoot him if he resists,” an officer said. “Take him over back.”

“Who are you?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Who are you?”

“Battle police,” another officer said.

“Why don’t you ask me to step over instead of having one of these airplanes grab me?”

They did not answer. They did not have to answer. They were battle police.

“Take him back there with the others,” the first officer said. “You see. He speaks Italian with an accent.”

“So do you, you —— ,” I said.

“Take him back with the others,” the first officer said. They took me down behind the line of officers below the road toward a group of people in a field by the river bank. As we walked toward them shots were fired. I saw flashes of the rifles and heard the reports. We came up to the group. There were four officers standing together, with a man in front of them with a carabiniere on each side of him. A group of men were standing guarded by carabinieri. Four other carabinieri stood near the questioning officers, leaning on their carbines. They were wide-hatted carabinieri. The two who had me shoved me in with the group waiting to be questioned. I looked at the man the officers were questioning. He was the fat gray-haired little lieutenant-colonel they had taken out of the column. The questioners had all the efficiency, coldness and command of themselves of Italians who are firing and are not being fired on.

“Your brigade?”

He told them.

“Regiment?”

He told them.

“Why are you not with your regiment?”

He told them.

“Do you not know that an officer should be with his troops?” He did.

That was all. Another officer spoke.

“It is you and such as you that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the lieutenant-colonel.

“It is because of treachery such as yours that we have lost the fruits of victory.”

“Have you ever been in a retreat?” the lieutenant-colonel asked.

“Italy should never retreat.”

We stood there in the rain and listened to this. We were facing the officers and the prisoner stood in front and a little to one side of us.

“If you are going to shoot me,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid.” He made the sign of the cross. The officers spoke together. One wrote something on a pad of paper.

“Abandoned his troops, ordered to be shot,” he said.

Two carabinieri took the lieutenant-colonel to the river bank. He walked in the rain, an old man with his hat off, a carabinieri on either side. I did not watch them shoot him but I heard the shots. They were questioning some one else. This officer too was separated from his troops. He was not allowed to make an explanation. He cried when they read the sentence from the pad of paper, and they were questioning another when they shot him. They made a point of being intent on questioning the next man while the man who had been questioned before was being shot. In this way there was obviously nothing they could do about it. I did not know whether I should wait to be questioned or make a break now. I was obviously a German in Italian uniform. I saw how their minds worked; if they had minds and if they worked. They were all young men and they were saving their country. The second army was being re-formed beyond the Tagliamento. They were executing officers of the rank of major and above who were separated from their troops. They were also dealing summarily with German agitators in Italian uniform. They wore steel helmets. Only two of us had steel helmets. Some of the carabinieri had them. The other carabinieri wore the wide hat. Airplanes we called them. We stood in the rain and were taken out one at a time to be questioned and shot. So far they had shot every one they had questioned. The questioners had that beautiful detachment and devotion to stern justice of men dealing in death without being in any danger of it. They were questioning a full colonel of a line regiment. Three more officers had just been put in with us.

“Where was his regiment?”

I looked at the carabinieri. They were looking at the newcomers. The others were looking at the colonel. I ducked down, pushed between two men, and ran for the river, my head down. I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash. The water was very cold and I stayed under as long as I could. I could feel the current swirl me and I stayed under until I thought I could never come up. The minute I came up I took a breath and went down again. It was easy to stay under with so much clothing and my boots. When I came up the second time I saw a piece of timber ahead of me and reached it and held on with one hand. I kept my head behind it and did not even look over it. I did not want to see the bank. There were shots when I ran and shots when I came up the first time. I heard them when I was almost above water. There were no shots now. The piece of timber swung in the current and I held it with one hand. I looked at the bank. It seemed to be going by very fast. There was much wood in the stream. The water was very cold. We passed the brush of an island above the water. I held onto the timber with both hands and let it take me along. The shore was out of sight now.

CHAPTER 31

YOU DO NOT know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly. It seems a long time and it may be very short. The water was cold and in flood and many things passed that had been floated off the banks when the river rose. I was lucky to have a heavy timber to hold on to, and I lay in the icy water with my chin on the wood, holding as easily as I could with both hands. I was afraid of cramps and I hoped we would move toward the shore. We went down the river in a long curve. It was beginning to be light enough so I could see the bushes along the shore-line. There was a brush island ahead and the current moved toward the shore. I wondered if I should take off my boots and clothes and try to swim ashore, but decided not to. I had never thought of anything but that I would reach the shore some way, and I would be in a bad position if I landed barefoot. I had to get to Mestre some way.

I watched the shore come close, then swing away, then come closer again. We were floating more slowly. The shore was very close now. I could see twigs on the willow bush. The timber swung slowly so that the bank was behind me and I knew we were in an eddy. We went slowly around. As I saw the bank again, very close now, I tried holding with one arm and kicking and swimming the timber toward the bank with the other, but I did not bring it any closer. I was afraid we would move out of the eddy and, holding with one hand, I drew up my feet so they were against the side of the timber and shoved hard toward the bank. I could see the brush, but even with my momentum and swimming as hard as I could, the current was taking me away. I thought then I would drown because of my boots, but I thrashed and fought through the water, and when I looked up the bank was coming toward me, and I kept thrashing and swimming in a heavy-footed panic until I reached it. I hung to the willow branch and did not have strength to pull myself up but I knew I would not drown now. It had never occurred to me on the timber that I might drown. I felt hollow and sick in my stomach and chest from the effort, and I held to the branches and waited. When the sick feeling was gone I pulled into the willow bushes and rested again, my arms around some brush, holding tight with my hands to the branches. Then I crawled out, pushed on through the willows and onto the bank. It was half-daylight and I saw no one. I lay flat on the bank and heard the river and the rain.

After a while I got up and started along the bank. I knew there was no bridge across the river until Latisana. I thought I might be opposite San Vito. I began to think out what I should do. Ahead there was a ditch running into the river. I went toward it. So far I had seen no one and I sat down by some bushes along the bank of the ditch and took off my shoes and emptied them of water. I took off my coat, took my wallet with my papers and my money all wet in it out of the inside pocket and then wrung the coat out. I took off my trousers and wrung them too, then my shirt and under clothing. I slapped and rubbed myself and then dressed again. I had lost my cap.

Before I put on my coat I cut the cloth stars off my sleeves and put them in the inside pocket with my money. My money was wet but was all right. I counted it. There were three thousand and some lire. My clothes felt wet and clammy and I slapped my arms to keep the circulation going. I had woven underwear and I did not think I would catch cold if I kept moving. They had taken my pistol at the road and I put the holster under my coat. I had no cape and it was cold in the rain. I started up the bank of the canal. It was daylight and the country was wet, low and dismal looking. The fields were bare and wet; a long way away I could see a campanile rising out of the plain. I came up onto a road. Ahead I saw some troops coming down the road. I limped along the side of the road and they passed me and paid no attention to me. They were a machine-gun detachment going up toward the river. I went on down the road.

That day I crossed the Venetian plain. It is a low level country and under the rain it is even flatter. Toward the sea there are salt marshes and very few roads. The roads all go along the river mouths to the sea and to cross the country you must go along the paths beside the canals. I was working across the country from the north to the south and had crossed two railway lines and many roads and finally I came out at the end of a path onto a railway line where it ran beside a marsh. It was the main line from Venice to Trieste, with a high solid embankment, a solid roadbed and double track. Down the tracks a way was a flag-station and I could see soldiers on guard. Up the line there was a bridge over a stream that flowed into the marsh. I could see a guard too at the bridge. Crossing the fields to the north I had seen a train pass on this railroad, visible a long way across the flat plain, and I thought a train might come from Portogruaro. I watched the guards and lay down on the embankment so that I could see both ways along the track. The guard at the bridge walked a way up the line toward where I lay, then turned and went back toward the bridge. I lay, and was hungry, and waited for the train. The one I had seen was so long that the engine moved it very slowly and I was sure I could get aboard it. After I had almost given up hoping for one I saw a train coming. The engine, coming straight on, grew larger slowly. I looked at the guard at the bridge. He was walking on the near side of the bridge but on the other side of the tracks. That would put him out of sight when the train passed. I watched the engine come nearer. It was working hard. I could see there were many cars. I knew there would be guards on the train, and I tried to see where they were, but, keeping out of sight, I could not. The engine was almost to where I was lying. When it came opposite, working and puffing even on the level, and I saw the engineer pass, I stood up and stepped up close to the passing cars. If the guards were watching I was a less suspicious object standing beside the track. Several closed freight-cars passed. Then I saw a low open car of the sort they call gondolas coming, covered with canvas. I stood until it had almost passed, then jumped and caught the rear hand-rods and pulled up. I crawled down between the gondola and the shelter of the high freight-car behind. I did not think any one had seen me. I was holding to the hand-rods and crouching low, my feet on the coupling. We were almost opposite the bridge. I remembered the guard. As we passed him he looked at me. He was a boy and his helmet was too big for him. I stared at him contemptuously and he looked away. He thought I had something to do with the train.

We were past. I saw him still looking uncomfortable, watching the other cars pass and I stooped to see how the canvas was fastened. It had grummets and was laced down at the edge with cord. I took out my knife, cut the cord and put my arm under. There were hard bulges under the canvas that tightened in the rain. I looked up and ahead. There was a guard on the freight-car ahead but he was looking forward. I let go of the hand-rails and ducked under the canvas. My forehead hit something that gave me a violent bump and I felt blood on my face but I crawled on in and lay flat. Then I turned around and fastened down the canvas.

I was in under the canvas with guns. They smelled cleanly of oil and grease. I lay and listened to the rain on the canvas and the clicking of the car over the rails. There was a little light came through and I lay and looked at the guns. They had their canvas jackets on. I thought they must have been sent ahead from the third army. The bump on my forehead was swollen and I stopped the bleeding by lying still and letting it coagulate, then picked away the dried blood except over the cut. It was nothing. I had no handkerchief, but feeling with my fingers I washed away where the dried blood had been, with rainwater that dripped from the canvas, and wiped it clean with the sleeve of my coat. I did not want to look conspicuous. I knew I would have to get out before they got to Mestre because they would be taking care of these guns. They had no guns to lose or forget about. I was terrifically hungry.

CHAPTER 32

LYING ON the floor of the flat-car with the guns beside me under the canvas I was wet, cold and very hungry. Finally I rolled over and lay flat on my stomach with my head on my arms. My knee was stiff, but it had been very satisfactory. Valentini had done a fine job. I had done half the retreat on foot and swum part of the Tagliamento with his knee. It was his knee all right. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and then it was not your body any more. The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much remember.

I could remember Catherine but I knew I would get crazy if I thought about her when I was not sure yet I would see her, so I would not think about her, only about her a little, only about her with the car going slowly and clickingly, and some light through the canvas and my lying with Catherine on the floor of the car. Hard as the floor of the car to lie not thinking only feeling, having been away too long, the clothes wet and the floor moving only a little each time and lonesome inside and alone with wet clothing and hard floor for a wife.

You did not love the floor of a flat-car nor guns with canvas jackets and the smell of vaselined metal or a canvas that rain leaked through, although it is very fine under a canvas and pleasant with guns; but you loved some one else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended there; you seeing now very clearly and coldly — not so coldly as clearly and emptily. You saw emptily, lying on your stomach, having been present when one army moved back and another came forward. You had lost your cars and your men as a floorwalker loses the stock of his department in a fire. There was, however, no insurance. You were out of it now. You had no more obligation. If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an accent they had always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be expected to return when the store opened again for business. They might seek other employment; if there was any other employment and the police did not get them.

Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation. Although that ceased when the carabiniere put his hands on my collar. I would like to have had the uniform off although I did not care much about the outward forms. I had taken off the stars, but that was for convenience. It was no point of honor. I was not against them. I was through. I wished them all the luck. There were the good ones, and the brave ones, and the calm ones and the sensible ones, and they deserved it. But it was not my show any more and I wished this bloody train would get to Mestre and I would eat and stop thinking. I would have to stop.

Piani would tell them they had shot me. They went through the pockets and took the papers of the people they shot. They would not have my papers. They might call me drowned. I wondered what they would hear in the States. Dead from wounds and other causes. Good Christ I was hungry. I wondered what had become of the priest at the mess. And Rinaldi. He was probably at Pordenone. If they had not gone further back. Well, I would never see him now. I would never see any of them now. That life was over. I did not think he had syphilis. It was not a serious disease anyway if you took it in time, they said. But he would worry. I would worry too if I had it. Any one would worry.

I was not made to think. I was made to eat. My God, yes. Eat and drink and sleep with Catherine. To-night maybe. No that was impossible. But to-morrow night, and a good meal and sheets and never going away again except together. Probably have to go damned quickly. She would go. I knew she would go. When would we go? That was something to think about. It was getting dark. I lay and thought where we would go. There were many places.

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER 33

I DROPPED OFF the train in Milan as it slowed to come into the station early in the morning before it was light. I crossed the track and came out between some buildings and down onto the street. A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine-glasses. The proprietor was behind the bar. Two soldiers sat at a table. I stood at the bar and drank a glass of coffee and ate a piece of bread. The coffee was gray with milk, and I skimmed the milk scum off the top with a piece of bread. The proprietor looked at me.

“You want a glass of grappa?”

“No thanks.”

“On me,” he said and poured a small glass and pushed it toward me. “What’s happening at the front?”

“I would not know.”

“They are drunk,” he said, moving his hand toward the two soldiers. I could believe him. They looked drunk.

“Tell me,” he said, “what is happening at the front?”

“I would not know about the front.”

“I saw you come down the wall. You came off the train.”

“There is a big retreat.”

“I read the papers. What happens? Is it over?”

“I don’t think so.”

He filled the glass with grappa from a short bottle. “If you are in trouble,” he said, “I can keep you.”

“I am not in trouble.”

“If you are in trouble stay here with me.”

“Where does one stay?”

“In the building. Many stay here. Any who are in trouble stay here.”

“Are many in trouble?”

“It depends on the trouble. You are a South American?”

“No.”

“Speak Spanish?”

“A little.”

He wiped off the bar.

“It is hard now to leave the country but in no way impossible.”

“I have no wish to leave.”

“You can stay here as long as you want. You will see what sort of man I am.”

“I have to go this morning but I will remember the address to return.”

He shook his head. “You won’t come back if you talk like that. I thought you were in real trouble.”

“I am in no trouble. But I value the address of a friend.”

I put a ten-lira note on the bar to pay for the coffee.

“Have a grappa with me,” I said.

“It is not necessary.”

“Have one.”

He poured the two glasses.

“Remember,” he said. “Come here. Do not let other people take you in. Here you are all right.”

“I am sure.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

He was serious. “Then let me tell you one thing. Do not go about with that coat.”

“Why?”

“On the sleeves it shows very plainly where the stars have been cut away. The cloth is a different color.”

I did not say anything.

“If you have no papers I can give you papers.”

“What papers?”

“Leave-papers.”

“I have no need for papers. I have papers.”

“All right,” he said. “But if you need papers I can get what you wish.”

“How much are such papers?”

“It depends on what they are. The price is reasonable.”

“I don’t need any now.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m all right,” I said.

When I went out he said, “Don’t forget that I am your friend.”

“No.”

“I will see you again,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

Outside I kept away from the station, where there were military police, and picked up a cab at the edge of the little park. I gave the driver the address of the hospital. At the hospital I went to the porter’s lodge. His wife embraced me. He shook my hand.

“You are back. You are safe.”

“Yes.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“How are you, Tenente? How are you?” the wife asked.

“Fine.”

“Won’t you have breakfast with us?”

“No, thank you. Tell me is Miss Barkley here at the hospital now?”

“Miss Barkley?”

“The English lady nurse.”

“His girl,” the wife said. She patted my arm and smiled.

“No,” the porter said. “She is away.”

My heart went down. “You are sure? I mean the tall blonde English young lady.”

“I am sure. She is gone to Stresa.”

“When did she go?”

“She went two days ago with the other lady English.”

“Good,” I said. “I wish you to do something for me. Do not tell any one you have seen me. It is very important.”

“I won’t tell any one,” the porter said. I gave him a ten-lira note. He pushed it away.

“I promise you I will tell no one,” he said. “I don’t want any money.”

“What can we do for you, Signor Tenente?” his wife asked.

“Only that,” I said.

“We are dumb,” the porter said. “You will let me know anything I can do?”

“Yes,” I said. “Good-by. I will see you again.”

They stood in the door, looking after me.

I got into the cab and gave the driver the address of Simmons, one of the men I knew who was studying singing.

Simmons lived a long way out in the town toward the Porta Magenta. He was still in bed and sleepy when I went to see him.

“You get up awfully early, Henry,” he said.

“I came in on the early train.”

“What’s all this retreat? Were you at the front? Will you have a cigarette? They’re in that box on the table.” It was a big room with a bed beside the wall, a piano over on the far side and a dresser and table. I sat on a chair by the bed. Simmons sat propped up by the pillows and smoked.

“I’m in a jam, Sim,” I said.

“So am I,” he said. “I’m always in a jam. Won’t you smoke?”

“No,” I said. “What’s the procedure in going to Switzerland?”

“For you? The Italians wouldn’t let you out of the country.”

“Yes. I know that. But the Swiss. What will they do?”

“They intern you.”

“I know. But what’s the mechanics of it?”

“Nothing. It’s very simple. You can go anywhere. I think you just have to report or something. Why? Are you fleeing the police?”

“Nothing definite yet.”

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want. But it would be interesting to hear. Nothing happens here. I was a great flop at Piacenza.”

“I’m awfully sorry.”

“Oh yes — I went very badly. I sung well too. I’m going to try it again at the Lyrico here.”

“I’d like to be there.”

“You’re awfully polite. You aren’t in a bad mess, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want. How do you happen to be away from the bloody front?”

“I think I’m through with it.”

“Good boy. I always knew you had sense. Can I help you any way?”

“You’re awfully busy.”

“Not a bit of it, my dear Henry. Not a bit of it. I’d be happy to do anything.”

“You’re about my size. Would you go out and buy me an outfit of civilian clothes? I’ve clothes but they’re all at Rome.”

“You did live there, didn’t you? It’s a filthy place. How did you ever live there?”

“I wanted to be an architect.”

“That’s no place for that. Don’t buy clothes. I’ll give you all the clothes you want. I’ll fit you out so you’ll be a great success. Go in that dressing room. There’s a closet. Take anything you want. My dear fellow, you don’t want to buy clothes.”

“I’d rather buy them, Sim.”

“My dear fellow, it’s easier for me to let you have them than go out and buy them. Have you got a passport? You won’t get far without a passport.”

“Yes. I’ve still got my passport.”

“Then get dressed, my dear fellow, and off to old Helvetia.”

“It’s not that simple. I have to go up to Stresa first.”

“Ideal, my dear fellow. You just row a boat across. If I wasn’t trying to sing, I’d go with you. I’ll go yet.”

“You could take up yodelling.”

“My dear fellow, I’ll take up yodelling yet. I really can sing though. That’s the strange part.”

“I’ll bet you can sing.”

He lay back in bed smoking a cigarette.

“Don’t bet too much. But I can sing though. It’s damned funny, but I can. I like to sing. Listen.” He roared into “Africana,” his neck swelling, the veins standing out. “I can sing,” he said. “Whether they like it or not.” I looked out of the window. “I’ll go down and let my cab go.”

“Come back up, my dear fellow, and we’ll have breakfast.” He stepped out of bed, stood straight, took a deep breath and commenced doing bending exercises. I went downstairs and paid off the cab.

CHAPTER 34

IN CIVILIAN CLOTHES I felt a masquerader. I had been in uniform a long time and I missed the feeling of being held by your clothes. The trousers felt very floppy. I had bought a ticket at Milan for Stresa. I had also bought a new hat. I could not wear Sim’s hat but his clothes were fine. They smelled of tobacco and as I sat in the compartment and looked out the window the new hat felt very new and the clothes very old. I myself felt as sad as the wet Lombard country that was outside through the window. There were some aviators in the compartment who did not think much of me. They avoided looking at me and were very scornful of a civilian my age. I did not feel insulted. In the old days I would have insulted them and picked a fight. They got off at Gallarate and I was glad to be alone. I had the paper but I did not read it because I did not want to read about the war. I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace. I felt damned lonely and was glad when the train got to Stresa.

At the station I had expected to see the porters from the hotels but there was no one. The season had been over a long time and no one met the train. I got down from the train with my bag, it was Sim’s bag, and very light to carry, being empty except for two shirts, and stood under the roof of the station in the rain while the train went on. I found a man in the station and asked him if he knew what hotels were open. The Grand-Hôtel & des Isles Borromées was open and several small hotels that stayed open all the year. I started in the rain for the Isles Borromées carrying my bag. I saw a carriage coming down the street and signalled to the driver. It was better to arrive in a carriage. We drove up to the carriage entrance of the big hotel and the concierge came out with an umbrella and was very polite.

I took a good room. It was very big and light and looked out on the lake. The clouds were down over the lake but it would be beautiful with the sunlight. I was expecting my wife, I said. There was a big double bed, a letto matrimoniale with a satin coverlet. The hotel was very luxurious. I went down the long halls, down the wide stairs, through the rooms to the bar. I knew the barman and sat on a high stool and ate salted almonds and potato chips. The martini felt cool and clean.

“What are you doing here in borghese?” the barman asked after he had mixed a second martini.

“I am on leave. Convalescing-leave.”

“There is no one here. I don’t know why they keep the hotel open.”

“Have you been fishing?”

“I’ve caught some beautiful pieces. Trolling this time of year you catch some beautiful pieces.”

“Did you ever get the tobacco I sent?”

“Yes. Didn’t you get my card?”

I laughed. I had not been able to get the tobacco. It was American pipe-tobacco that he wanted, but my relatives had stopped sending it or it was being held up. Anyway it never came.

“I’ll get some somewhere,” I said. “Tell me have you seen two English girls in the town? They came here day before yesterday.”

“They are not at the hotel.”

“They are nurses.”

“I have seen two nurses. Wait a minute, I will find out where they are.”

“One of them is my wife,” I said. “I have come here to meet her.”

“The other is my wife.”

“I am not joking.”

“Pardon my stupid joke,” he said. “I did not understand.” He went away and was gone quite a little while. I ate olives, salted almonds and potato chips and looked at myself in civilian clothes in the mirror behind the bar. The bartender came back. “They are at the little hotel near the station,” he said.

“How about some sandwiches?”

“I’ll ring for some. You understand there is nothing here, now there are no people.”

“Isn’t there really any one at all?”

“Yes. There are a few people.”

The sandwiches came and I ate three and drank a couple more martinis. I had never tasted anything so cool and clean. They made me feel civilized. I had had too much red wine, bread, cheese, bad coffee and grappa. I sat on the high stool before the pleasant mahogany, the brass and the mirrors and did not think at all. The barman asked me some question.

“Don’t talk about the war,” I said. The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn’t any war. There was no war here. Then I realized it was over for me. But I did not have the feeling that it was really over. I had the feeling of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.

Catherine and Helen Ferguson were at supper when I came to their hotel. Standing in the hallway I saw them at table. Catherine’s face was away from me and I saw the line of her hair and her cheek and her lovely neck and shoulders. Ferguson was talking. She stopped when I came in.

“My God,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“Why it’s you!” Catherine said. Her face lighted up. She looked too happy to believe it. I kissed her. Catherine blushed and I sat down at the table.

“You’re a fine mess,” Ferguson said. “What are you doing here? Have you eaten?”

“No.” The girl who was serving the meal came in and I told her to bring a plate for me. Catherine looked at me all the time, her eyes happy.

“What are you doing in mufti?” Ferguson asked.

“I’m in the Cabinet.”

“You’re in some mess.”

“Cheer up, Fergy. Cheer up just a little.”

“I’m not cheered by seeing you. I know the mess you’ve gotten this girl into. You’re no cheerful sight to me.”

Catherine smiled at me and touched me with her foot under the table.

“No one got me in a mess, Fergy. I get in my own messes.”

“I can’t stand him,” Ferguson said. “He’s done nothing but ruin you with his sneaking Italian tricks. Americans are worse than Italians.”

“The Scotch are such a moral people,” Catherine said.

“I don’t mean that. I mean his Italian sneakiness.”

“Am I sneaky, Fergy?”

“You are. You’re worse than sneaky. You’re like a snake. A snake with an Italian uniform: with a cape around your neck.”

“I haven’t got an Italian uniform now.”

“That’s just another example of your sneakiness. You had a love affair all summer and got this girl with child and now I suppose you’ll sneak off.”

I smiled at Catherine and she smiled at me.

“We’ll both sneak off,” she said.

“You’re two of the same thing,” Ferguson said. “I’m ashamed of you, Catherine Barkley. You have no shame and no honor and you’re as sneaky as he is.”

“Don’t, Fergy,” Catherine said and patted her hand. “Don’t denounce me. You know we like each other.”

“Take your hand away,” Ferguson said. Her face was red. “If you had any shame it would be different. But you’re God knows how many months gone with child and you think it’s a joke and are all smiles because your seducer’s come back. You’ve no shame and no feelings.” She began to cry. Catherine went over and put her arm around her. As she stood comforting Ferguson, I could see no change in her figure.

“I don’t care,” Ferguson sobbed. “I think it’s dreadful.”

“There, there, Fergy,” Catherine comforted her. “I’ll be ashamed. Don’t cry, Fergy. Don’t cry, old Fergy.”

“I’m not crying,” Ferguson sobbed. “I’m not crying. Except for the awful thing you’ve gotten into.” She looked at me. “I hate you,” she said. “She can’t make me not hate you. You dirty sneaking American Italian.” Her eyes and nose were red with crying.

Catherine smiled at me.

“Don’t you smile at him with your arm around me.”

“You’re unreasonable, Fergy.”

“I know it,” Ferguson sobbed. “You mustn’t mind me, either of you. I’m so upset. I’m not reasonable. I know it. I want you both to be happy.”

“We’re happy,” Catherine said. “You’re a sweet Fergy.”

Ferguson cried again. “I don’t want you happy the way you are. Why don’t you get married? You haven’t got another wife have you?”

“No,” I said. Catherine laughed.

“It’s nothing to laugh about,” Ferguson said. “Plenty of them have other wives.”

“We’ll be married, Fergy,” Catherine said, “if it will please you.”

“Not to please me. You should want to be married.”

“We’ve been very busy.”

“Yes. I know. Busy making babies.” I thought she was going to cry again but she went into bitterness instead. “I suppose you’ll go off with him now to-night?”

“Yes,” said Catherine. “If he wants me.”

“What about me?”

“Are you afraid to stay here alone?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then I’ll stay with you.”

“No, go on with him. Go with him right away. I’m sick of seeing both of you.”

“We’d better finish dinner.”

“No. Go right away.”

“Fergy, be reasonable.”

“I say get out right away. Go away both of you.”

“Let’s go then,” I said. I was sick of Fergy.

“You do want to go. You see you want to leave me even to eat dinner alone. I’ve always wanted to go to the Italian lakes and this is how it is. Oh, Oh,” she sobbed, then looked at Catherine and choked.

“We’ll stay till after dinner,” Catherine said. “And I’ll not leave you alone if you want me to stay. I won’t leave you alone, Fergy.”

“No. No. I want you to go. I want you to go.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m so unreasonable. Please don’t mind me.”

The girl who served the meal had been upset by all the crying. Now as she brought in the next course she seemed relieved that things were better.

That night at the hotel, in our room with the long empty hall outside and our shoes outside the door, a thick carpet on the floor of the room, outside the windows the rain falling and in the room light and pleasant and cheerful, then the light out and it exciting with smooth sheets and the bed comfortable, feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I remember waking in the morning. Catherine was asleep and the sunlight was coming in through the window. The rain had stopped and I stepped out of bed and across the floor to the window. Down below were the gardens, bare now but beautifully regular, the gravel paths, the trees, the stone wall by the lake and the lake in the sunlight with the mountains beyond. I stood at the window looking out and when I turned away I saw Catherine was awake and watching me.

“How are you, darling?” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day?”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel very well. We had a lovely night.”

“Do you want breakfast?”

She wanted breakfast. So did I and we had it in bed, the November sunlight coming in the window, and the breakfast tray across my lap.

“Don’t you want the paper? You always wanted the paper in the hospital.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want the paper now.”

“Was it so bad you don’t want even to read about it?”

“I don’t want to read about it.”

“I wish I had been with you so I would know about it too.”

“I’ll tell you about it if I ever get it straight in my head.”

“But won’t they arrest you if they catch you out of uniform?”

“They’ll probably shoot me.”

“Then we’ll not stay here. We’ll get out of the country.”

“I’d thought something of that.”

“We’ll get out. Darling, you shouldn’t take silly chances. Tell me how did you come from Mestre to Milan?”

“I came on the train. I was in uniform then.”

“Weren’t you in danger then?”

“Not much. I had an old order of movement. I fixed the dates on it in Mestre.”

“Darling, you’re liable to be arrested here any time. I won’t have it. It’s silly to do something like that. Where would we be if they took you off?”

“Let’s not think about it. I’m tired of thinking about it.”

“What would you do if they came to arrest you?”

“Shoot them.”

“You see how silly you are, I won’t let you go out of the hotel until we leave here.”

“Where are we going to go?”

“Please don’t be that way, darling. We’ll go wherever you say. But please find some place to go right away.”

“Switzerland is down the lake, we can go there.”

“That will be lovely.”

It was clouding over outside and the lake was darkening.

“I wish we did not always have to live like criminals,” I said.

“Darling, don’t be that way. You haven’t lived like a criminal very long. And we never live like criminals. We’re going to have a fine time.”

“I feel like a criminal. I’ve deserted from the army.”

“Darling, please be sensible. It’s not deserting from the army. It’s only the Italian army.”

I laughed. “You’re a fine girl. Let’s get back into bed. I feel fine in bed.”

A little while later Catherine said, “You don’t feel like a criminal do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not when I’m with you.”

“You’re such a silly boy,” she said. “But I’ll look after you. Isn’t it splendid, darling, that I don’t have any morning-sickness?”

“It’s grand.”

“You don’t appreciate what a fine wife you have. But I don’t care. I’ll get you some place where they can’t arrest you and then we’ll have a lovely time.”

“Let’s go there right away.”

“We will, darling. I’ll go any place any time you wish.”

“Let’s not think about anything.”

“All right.”

CHAPTER 35

CATHERINE went along the lake to the little hotel to see Ferguson and I sat in the bar and read the papers. There were comfortable leather chairs in the bar and I sat in one of them and read until the barman came in. The army had not stood at the Tagliamento. They were falling back to the Piave. I remembered the Piave. The railroad crossed it near San Dona going up to the front. It was deep and slow there and quite narrow. Down below there were mosquito marshes and canals. There were some lovely villas. Once, before the war, going up to Cortina D’Ampezzo I had gone along it for several hours in the hills. Up there it looked like a trout stream, flowing swiftly with shallow stretches and pools under the shadow of the rocks. The road turned off from it at Cadore. I wondered how the army that was up there would come down. The barman came in.

“Count Greffi was asking for you,” he said.

“Who?”

“Count Greffi. You remember the old man who was here when you were here before.”

“Is he here?”

“Yes, he’s here with his niece. I told him you were here. He wants you to play billiards.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s taking a walk.”

“How is he?”

“He’s younger than ever. He drank three champagne cocktails last night before dinner.”

“How’s his billiard game?”

“Good. He beat me. When I told him you were here he was very pleased. There’s nobody here for him to play with.”

Count Greffi was ninety-four years old. He had been a contemporary of Metternich and was an old man with white hair and mustache and beautiful manners. He had been in the diplomatic service of both Austria and Italy and his birthday parties were the great social event of Milan. He was living to be one hundred years old and played a smoothly fluent game of billiards that contrasted with his own ninety-four-year-old brittleness. I had met him when I had been at Stresa once before out of season and while we played billiards we drank champagne. I thought it was a splendid custom and he gave me fifteen points in a hundred and beat me.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was here?”

“I forgot it.”

“Who else is here?”

“No one you know. There are only six people altogether.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on out fishing.”

“I could come for an hour.”

“Come on. Bring the trolling line.”

The barman put on a coat and we went out. We went down and got a boat and I rowed while the barman sat in the stern and let out the line with a spinner and a heavy sinker on the end to troll for lake trout. We rowed along the shore, the barman holding the line in his hand and giving it occasional jerks forward. Stresa looked very deserted from the lake. There were the long rows of bare trees, the big hotels and the closed villas. I rowed across to Isola Bella and went close to the walls, where the water deepened sharply, and you saw the rock wall slanting down in the clear water, and then up and along to the fisherman’s island. The sun was under a cloud and the water was dark and smooth and very cold. We did not have a strike though we saw some circles on the water from rising fish.

I rowed up opposite the fisherman’s island where there were boats drawn up and men were mending nets.

“Should we get a drink?”

“All right.”

I brought the boat up to the stone pier and the barman pulled in the line, coiling it on the bottom of the boat and hooking the spinner on the edge of the gunwale. I stepped out and tied the boat. We went into a little café, sat at a bare wooden table and ordered vermouth.

“Are you tired from rowing?”

“I’ll row back,” he said.

“I like to row.”

“Maybe if you hold the line it will change the luck.”

“All right.”

“Tell me how goes the war.”

“Rotten.”

“I don’t have to go. I’m too old, like Count Greffi.”

“Maybe you’ll have to go yet.”

“Next year they’ll call my class. But I won’t go.”

“What will you do?”

“Get out of the country. I wouldn’t go to war. I was at the war once in Abyssinia. Nix. Why do you go?”

“I don’t know. I was a fool.”

“Have another vermouth?”

“All right.”

The barman rowed back. We trolled up the lake beyond Stresa and then down not far from shore. I held the taut line and felt the faint pulsing of the spinner revolving while I looked at the dark November water of the lake and the deserted shore. The barman rowed with long strokes and on the forward thrust of the boat the line throbbed. Once I had a strike: the line hardened suddenly and jerked back. I pulled and felt the live weight of the trout and then the line throbbed again. I had missed him.

“Did he feel big?”

“Pretty big.”

“Once when I was out trolling alone I had the line in my teeth and one struck and nearly took my mouth out.”

“The best way is to have it over your leg,” I said. “Then you feel it and don’t lose your teeth.”

I put my hand in the water. It was very cold. We were almost opposite the hotel now.

“I have to go in,” the barman said, “to be there for eleven o’clock. L’heure du cocktail.”

“All right.”

I pulled in the line and wrapped it on a stick notched at each end. The barman put the boat in a little slip in the stone wall and locked it with a chain and padlock.

“Any time you want it,” he said, “I’ll give you the key.”

“Thanks.”

We went up to the hotel and into the bar. I did not want another drink so early in the morning so I went up to our room. The maid had just finished doing the room and Catherine was not back yet. I lay down on the bed and tried to keep from thinking.

When Catherine came back it was all right again. Ferguson was downstairs, she said. She was coming to lunch.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind,” Catherine said.

“No,” I said.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know. You haven’t anything to do. All you have is me and I go away.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m sorry, darling. I know it must be a dreadful feeling to have nothing at all suddenly.”

“My life used to be full of everything,” I said. “Now if you aren’t with me I haven’t a thing in the world.”

“But I’ll be with you. I was only gone for two hours. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“I went fishing with the barman.”

“Wasn’t it fun?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think about me when I’m not here.”

“That’s the way I worked it at the front. But there was something to do then.”

“Othello with his occupation gone,” she teased.

“Othello was a nigger,” I said. “Besides, I’m not jealous. I’m just so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.”

“Will you be a good boy and be nice to Ferguson?”

“I’m always nice to Ferguson unless she curses me.”

“Be nice to her. Think how much we have and she hasn’t anything.”

“I don’t think she wants what we have.”

“You don’t know much, darling, for such a wise boy.”

“I’ll be nice to her.”

“I know you will. You’re so sweet.”

“She won’t stay afterward, will she?”

“No. I’ll get rid of her.”

“And then we’ll come up here.”

“Of course. What do you think I want to do?”

We went downstairs to have lunch with Ferguson. She was very impressed by the hotel and the splendor of the dining-room. We had a good lunch with a couple of bottles of white capri. Count Greffi came into the dining-room and bowed to us. His niece, who looked a little like my grandmother, was with him. I told Catherine and Ferguson about him and Ferguson was very impressed. The hotel was very big and grand and empty but the food was good, the wine was very pleasant and finally the wine made us all feel very well. Catherine had no need to feel any better. She was very happy. Ferguson became quite cheerful. I felt very well myself. After lunch Ferguson went back to her hotel. She was going to lie down for a while after lunch she said.

Along late in the afternoon some one knocked on our door.

“Who is it?”

“The Count Greffi wishes to know if you will play billiards with him.”

I looked at my watch; I had taken it off and it was under the pillow.

“Do you have to go, darling?” Catherine whispered.

“I think I’d better.” The watch was a quarter-past four o’clock. Out loud I said, “Tell the Count Greffi I will be in the billiard-room at five o’clock.”

At a quarter to five I kissed Catherine good-by and went into the bathroom to dress. Knotting my tie and looking in the glass I looked strange to myself in the civilian clothes. I must remember to buy some more shirts and socks.

“Will you be away a long time?” Catherine asked. She looked lovely in the bed. “Would you hand me the brush?”

I watched her brushing her hair, holding her head so the weight of her hair all came on one side. It was dark outside and the light over the head of the bed shone on her hair and on her neck and shoulders. I went over and kissed her and held her hand with the brush and her head sunk back on the pillow. I kissed her neck and shoulders. I felt faint with loving her so much.

“I don’t want to go away.”

“I don’t want you to go away.”

“I won’t go then.”

“Yes. Go. It’s only for a little while and then you’ll come back.”

“We’ll have dinner up here.”

“Hurry and come back.”

I found the Count Greffi in the billiard-room. He was practicing strokes, looking very fragile under the light that came down above the billiard table. On a card table a little way beyond the light was a silver icing-bucket with the necks and corks of two champagne bottles showing above the ice. The Count Greffi straightened up when I came toward the table and walked toward me. He put out his hand, “It is such a great pleasure that you are here. You were very kind to come to play with me.”

“It was very nice of you to ask me.”

“Are you quite well? They told me you were wounded on the Isonzo. I hope you are well again.”

“I’m very well. Have you been well?”

“Oh, I am always well. But I am getting old. I detect signs of age now.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Yes. Do you want to know one? It is easier for me to talk Italian. I discipline myself but I find when I am tired that it is so much easier to talk Italian. So I know I must be getting old.”

“We could talk Italian. I am a little tired, too.”

“Oh, but when you are tired it will be easier for you to talk English.”

“American.”

“Yes. American. You will please talk American. It is a delightful language.”

“I hardly ever see Americans.”

“You must miss them. One misses one’s countrymen and especially one’s countrywomen. I know that experience. Should we play or are you too tired?”

“I’m not really tired. I said that for a joke. What handicap will you give me?”

“Have you been playing very much?”

“None at all.”

“You play very well. Ten points in a hundred?”

“You flatter me.”

“Fifteen?”

“That would be fine but you will beat me.”

“Should we play for a stake? You always wished to play for a stake.”

“I think we’d better.”

“All right. I will give you eighteen points and we will play for a franc a point.”

He played a lovely game of billiards and with the handicap I was only four ahead at fifty. Count Greffi pushed a button on the wall to ring for the barman.

“Open one bottle please,” he said. Then to me, “We will take a little stimulant.” The wine was icy cold and very dry and good.

“Should we talk Italian? Would you mind very much? It is my weakness now.”

We went on playing, sipping the wine between shots, speaking in Italian, but talking little, concentrated on the game. Count Greffi made his one hundredth point and with the handicap I was only at ninety-four. He smiled and patted me on the shoulder.

“Now we will drink the other bottle and you will tell me about the war.” He waited for me to sit down.

“About anything else,” I said.

“You don’t want to talk about it? Good. What have you been reading?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m afraid I am very dull.”

“No. But you should read.”

“What is there written in war-time?”

“There is ‘Le Feu’ by a Frenchman, Barbusse. There is ‘Mr. Britling Sees Through It.’”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t see through it. Those books were at the hospital.”

“Then you have been reading?”

“Yes, but nothing any good.”

“I thought ‘Mr. Britling’ a very good study of the English middle-class soul.”

“I don’t know about the soul.”

“Poor boy. We none of us know about the soul. Are you Croyant?”

“At night.”

Count Greffi smiled and turned the glass with his fingers. “I had expected to become more devout as I grow older but somehow I haven’t,” he said. “It is a great pity.”

“Would you like to live after death?” I asked and instantly felt a fool to mention death. But he did not mind the word.

“It would depend on the life. This life is very pleasant. I would like to live forever,” he smiled. “I very nearly have.”

We were sitting in the deep leather chairs, the champagne in the ice-bucket and our glasses on the table between us.

“If you ever live to be as old as I am you will find many things strange.”

“You never seem old.”

“It is the body that is old. Sometimes I am afraid I will break off a finger as one breaks a stick of chalk. And the spirit is no older and not much wiser.”

“You are wise.”

“No, that is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.”

“Perhaps that is wisdom.”

“It is a very unattractive wisdom. What do you value most?”

“Some one I love.”

“With me it is the same. That is not wisdom. Do you value life?”

“Yes.”

“So do I. Because it is all I have. And to give birthday parties,” he laughed. “You are probably wiser than I am. You do not give birthday parties.”

We both drank the wine.

“What do you think of the war really?” I asked.

“I think it is stupid.”

“Who will win it?”

“Italy.”

“Why?”

“They are a younger nation.”

“Do younger nations always win wars?”

“They are apt to for a time.”

“Then what happens?”

“They become older nations.”

“You said you were not wise.”

“Dear boy, that is not wisdom. That is cynicism.”

“It sounds very wise to me.”

“It’s not particularly. I could quote you the examples on the other side. But it is not bad. Have we finished the champagne?”

“Almost.”

“Should we drink some more? Then I must dress.”

“Perhaps we’d better not now.”

“You are sure you don’t want more?”

“Yes.” He stood up.

“I hope you will be very fortunate and very happy and very, very healthy.”

“Thank you. And I hope you will live forever.”

“Thank you. I have. And if you ever become devout pray for me if I am dead. I am asking several of my friends to do that. I had expected to become devout myself but it has not come.” I thought he smiled sadly but I could not tell. He was so old and his face was very wrinkled, so that a smile used so many lines that all gradations were lost.

“I might become very devout,” I said. “Anyway, I will pray for you.”

“I had always expected to become devout. All my family died very devout. But somehow it does not come.”

“It’s too early.”

“Maybe it is too late. Perhaps I have outlived my religious feeling.”

“My own comes only at night.”

“Then too you are in love. Do not forget that is a religious feeling.”

“You believe so?”

“Of course.” He took a step toward the table. “You were very kind to play.”

“It was a great pleasure.”

“We will walk up stairs together.”

CHAPTER 36

THAT NIGHT THERE was a storm and I woke to hear the rain lashing the window-panes. It was coming in the open window. Some one had knocked on the door. I went to the door very softly, not to disturb Catherine, and opened it. The barman stood there. He wore his overcoat and carried his wet hat.

“Can I speak to you, Tenente?”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s a very serious matter.”

I looked around. The room was dark. I saw the water on the floor from the window. “Come in,” I said. I took him by the arm into the bathroom; locked the door and put on the light. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub.

“What’s the matter, Emilio? Are you in trouble?”

“No. You are, Tenente.”

“Yes?”

“They are going to arrest you in the morning.”

“Yes?”

“I came to tell you. I was out in the town and I heard them talking in a café.”

“I see.”

He stood there, his coat wet, holding his wet hat and said nothing.

“Why are they going to arrest me?”

“For something about the war.”

“Do you know what?”

“No. But I know that they know you were here before as an officer and now you are here out of uniform. After this retreat they arrest everybody.”

I thought a minute.

“What time do they come to arrest me?”

“In the morning. I don’t know the time.”

“What do you say to do?”

He put his hat in the washbowl. It was very wet and had been dripping on the floor.

“If you have nothing to fear an arrest is nothing. But it is always bad to be arrested — especially now.”

“I don’t want to be arrested.”

“Then go to Switzerland.”

“How?”

“In my boat.”

“There is a storm,” I said.

“The storm is over. It is rough but you will be all right.”

“When should we go?”

“Right away. They might come to arrest you early in the morning.”

“What about our bags?”

“Get them packed. Get your lady dressed. I will take care of them.”

“Where will you be?”

“I will wait here. I don’t want any one to see me outside in the hall.”

I opened the door, closed it, and went into the bedroom. Catherine was awake.

“What is it, darling?”

“It’s all right, Cat,” I said. “Would you like to get dressed right away and go in a boat to Switzerland?”

“Would you?”

“No,” I said. “I’d like to go back to bed.”

“What is it about?”

“The barman says they are going to arrest me in the morning.”

“Is the barman crazy?”

“No.”

“Then please hurry, darling, and get dressed so we can start.” She sat up on the side of the bed. She was still sleepy. “Is that the barman in the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

“Then I won’t wash. Please look the other way, darling, and I’ll be dressed in just a minute.”

I saw her white back as she took off her night-gown and then I looked away because she wanted me to. She was beginning to be a little big with the child and she did not want me to see her. I dressed hearing the rain on the windows. I did not have much to put in my bag.

“There’s plenty of room in my bag, Cat, if you need any.”

“I’m almost packed,” she said. “Darling, I’m awfully stupid, but why is the barman in the bathroom?”

“Sh — he’s waiting to take our bags down.”

“He’s awfully nice.”

“He’s an old friend,” I said. “I nearly sent him some pipe-tobacco once.”

I looked out the open window at the dark night. I could not see the lake, only the dark and the rain but the wind was quieter.

“I’m ready, darling,” Catherine said.

“All right.” I went to the bathroom door. “Here are the bags, Emilio,” I said. The barman took the two bags.

“You’re very good to help us,” Catherine said.

“That’s nothing, lady,” the barman said. “I’m glad to help you just so I don’t get in trouble myself. Listen,” he said to me. “I’ll take these out the servants’ stairs and to the boat. You just go out as though you were going for a walk.”

“It’s a lovely night for a walk,” Catherine said.

“It’s a bad night all right.”

“I’m glad I’ve an umbrella,” Catherine said.

We walked down the hall and down the wide thickly carpeted stairs. At the foot of the stairs by the door the porter sat behind his desk.

He looked surprised at seeing us.

“You’re not going out, sir?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “We’re going to see the storm along the lake.”

“Haven’t you got an umbrella, sir?”

“No,” I said. “This coat sheds water.”

He looked at it doubtfully. “I’ll get you an umbrella, sir,” he said. He went away and came back with a big umbrella. “It is a little big, sir,” he said. I gave him a ten-lira note. “Oh you are too good, sir. Thank you very much,” he said. He held the door open and we went out into the rain. He smiled at Catherine and she smiled at him. “Don’t stay out in the storm,” he said. “You will get wet, sir and lady.” He was only the second porter, and his English was still literally translated.

“We’ll be back,” I said. We walked down the path under the giant umbrella and out through the dark wet gardens to the road and across the road to the trellised pathway along the lake. The wind was blowing offshore now. It was a cold, wet November wind and I knew it was snowing in the mountains. We came along past the chained boats in the slips along the quay to where the barman’s boat should be. The water was dark against the stone. The barman stepped out from beside the row of trees.

“The bags are in the boat,” he said.

“I want to pay you for the boat,” I said.

“How much money have you?”

“Not so much.”

“You send me the money later. That will be all right.”

“How much?”

“What you want.”

“Tell me how much.”

“If you get through send me five hundred francs. You won’t mind that if you get through.”

“All right.”

“Here are sandwiches.” He handed me a package. “Everything there was in the bar. It’s all here. This is a bottle of brandy and a bottle of wine.” I put them in my bag. “Let me pay you for those.”

“All right, give me fifty lire.”

I gave it to him. “The brandy is good,” he said. “You don’t need to be afraid to give it to your lady. She better get in the boat.” He held the boat, it rising and falling against the stone wall and I helped Catherine in. She sat in the stern and pulled her cape around her.

“You know where to go?”

“Up the lake.”

“You know how far?”

“Past Luino.”

“Past Luino, Cannero, Cannobio, Tranzano. You aren’t in Switzerland until you come to Brissago. You have to pass Monte Tamara.”

“What time is it?” Catherine asked.

“It’s only eleven o’clock,” I said.

“If you row all the time you ought to be there by seven o’clock in the morning.”

“Is it that far?”

“It’s thirty-five kilometres.”

“How should we go? In this rain we need a compass.”

“No. Row to Isola Bella. Then on the other side of Isola Madre go with the wind. The wind will take you to Pallanza. You will see the lights. Then go up the shore.”

“Maybe the wind will change.”

“No,” he said. “This wind will blow like this for three days. It comes straight down from the Mattarone. There is a can to bail with.”

“Let me pay you something for the boat now.”

“No, I’d rather take a chance. If you get through you pay me all you can.”

“All right.”

“I don’t think you’ll get drowned.”

“That’s good.”

“Go with the wind up the lake.”

“All right.” I stepped in the boat.

“Did you leave the money for the hotel?”

“Yes. In an envelope in the room.”

“All right. Good luck, Tenente.”

“Good luck. We thank you many times.”

“You won’t thank me if you get drowned.”

“What does he say?” Catherine asked.

“He says good luck.”

“Good luck,” Catherine said. “Thank you very much.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

He bent down and shoved us off. I dug at the water with the oars, then waved one hand. The barman waved back deprecatingly. I saw the lights of the hotel and rowed out, rowing straight out until they were out of sight. There was quite a sea running but we were going with the wind.

CHAPTER 37

I ROWED in the dark keeping the wind in my face. The rain had stopped and only came occasionally in gusts. It was very dark, and the wind was cold. I could see Catherine in the stern but I could not see the water where the blades of the oars dipped. The oars were long and there were no leathers to keep them from slipping out. I pulled, raised, leaned forward, found the water, dipped and pulled, rowing as easily as I could. I did not feather the oars because the wind was with us. I knew my hands would blister and I wanted to delay it as long as I could. The boat was light and rowed easily. I pulled it along in the dark water. I could not see, and hoped we would soon come opposite Pallanza.

We never saw Pallanza. The wind was blowing up the lake and we passed the point that hides Pallanza in the dark and never saw the lights. When we finally saw some lights much further up the lake and close to the shore it was Intra. But for a long time we did not see any lights, nor did we see the shore but rowed steadily in the dark riding with the waves. Sometimes I missed the water with the oars in the dark as a wave lifted the boat. It was quite rough; but I kept on rowing, until suddenly we were close ashore against a point of rock that rose beside us; the waves striking against it, rushing high up, then falling back. I pulled hard on the right oar and backed water with the other and we went out into the lake again; the point was out of sight and we were going on up the lake.

“We’re across the lake,” I said to Catherine.

“Weren’t we going to see Pallanza?”

“We’ve missed it.”

“How are you, darling?”

“I’m fine.”

“I could take the oars awhile.”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Poor Ferguson,” Catherine said. “In the morning she’ll come to the hotel and find we’re gone.”

“I’m not worrying so much about that,” I said, “as about getting into the Swiss part of the lake before it’s daylight and the custom guards see us.”

“Is it a long way?”

“It’s some thirty kilometres from here.”

I rowed all night. Finally my hands were so sore I could hardly close them over the oars. We were nearly smashed up on the shore several times. I kept fairly close to the shore because I was afraid of getting lost on the lake and losing time. Sometimes we were so close we could see a row of trees and the road along the shore with the mountains behind. The rain stopped and the wind drove the clouds so that the moon shone through and looking back I could see the long dark point of Castagnola and the lake with white-caps and beyond, the moon on the high snow mountains. Then the clouds came over the moon again and the mountains and the lake were gone, but it was much lighter than it had been before and we could see the shore. I could see it too clearly and pulled out where they would not see the boat if there were custom guards along the Pallanza road. When the moon came out again we could see white villas on the shore on the slopes of the mountain and the white road where it showed through the trees. All the time I was rowing.

The lake widened and across it on the shore at the foot of the mountains on the other side we saw a few lights that should be Luino. I saw a wedgelike gap between the mountains on the other shore and I thought that must be Luino. If it was we were making good time. I pulled in the oars and lay back on the seat. I was very, very tired of rowing. My arms and shoulders and back ached and my hands were sore.

“I could hold the umbrella,” Catherine said. “We could sail with that with the wind.”

“Can you steer?”

“I think so.”

“You take this oar and hold it under your arm close to the side of the boat and steer and I’ll hold the umbrella.” I went back to the stern and showed her how to hold the oar. I took the big umbrella the porter had given me and sat facing the bow and opened it. It opened with a clap. I held it on both sides, sitting astride the handle hooked over the seat. The wind was full in it and I felt the boat suck forward while I held as hard as I could to the two edges. It pulled hard. The boat was moving fast.

“We’re going beautifully,” Catherine said. All I could see was umbrella ribs. The umbrella strained and pulled and I felt us driving along with it. I braced my feet and held back on it, then suddenly, it buckled; I felt a rib snap on my forehead, I tried to grab the top that was bending with the wind and the whole thing buckled and went inside out and I was astride the handle of an inside-out, ripped umbrella, where I had been holding a wind-filled pulling sail. I unhooked the handle from the seat, laid the umbrella in the bow and went back to Catherine for the oar. She was laughing. She took my hand and kept on laughing.

“What’s the matter?” I took the oar.

“You looked so funny holding that thing.”

“I suppose so.”

“Don’t be cross, darling. It was awfully funny. You looked about twenty feet broad and very affectionate holding the umbrella by the edges—” she choked.

“I’ll row.”

“Take a rest and a drink. It’s a grand night and we’ve come a long way.”

“I have to keep the boat out of the trough of the waves.”

“I’ll get you a drink. Then rest a little while, darling.”

I held the oars up and we sailed with them. Catherine was opening the bag. She handed me the brandy bottle. I pulled the cork with my pocket-knife and took a long drink. It was smooth and hot and the heat went all through me and I felt warmed and cheerful. “It’s lovely brandy,” I said. The moon was under again but I could see the shore. There seemed to be another point going out a long way ahead into the lake.

“Are you warm enough, Cat?”

“I’m splendid. I’m a little stiff.”

“Bail out that water and you can put your feet down.”

Then I rowed and listened to the oarlocks and the dip and scrape of the bailing tin under the stern seat.

“Would you give me the bailer?” I said. “I want a drink.”

“It’s awful dirty.”

“That’s all right. I’ll rinse it.”

I heard Catherine rinsing it over the side. Then she handed it to me dipped full of water. I was thirsty after the brandy and the water was icy cold, so cold it made my teeth ache. I looked toward the shore. We were closer to the long point. There were lights in the bay ahead.

“Thanks,” I said and handed back the tin pail.

“You’re ever so welcome,” Catherine said. “There’s much more if you want it.”

“Don’t you want to eat something?”

“No. I’ll be hungry in a little while. We’ll save it till then.”

“All right.”

What looked like a point ahead was a long high headland. I went further out in the lake to pass it. The lake was much narrower now. The moon was out again and the guardia di finanza could have seen our boat black on the water if they had been watching.

“How are you, Cat?” I asked.

“I’m all right. Where are we?”

“I don’t think we have more than about eight miles more.”

“That’s a long way to row, you poor sweet. Aren’t you dead?”

“No. I’m all right. My hands are sore is all.”

We went on up the lake. There was a break in the mountains on the right bank, a flattening-out with a low shore line that I thought must be Cannobio. I stayed a long way out because it was from now on that we ran the most danger of meeting guardia. There was a high dome-capped mountain on the other shore a way ahead. I was tired. It was no great distance to row but when you were out of condition it had been a long way. I knew I had to pass that mountain and go up the lake at least five miles further before we would be in Swiss water. The moon was almost down now but before it went down the sky clouded over again and it was very dark. I stayed well out in the lake, rowing awhile, then resting and holding the oars so that the wind struck the blades.

“Let me row awhile,” Catherine said.

“I don’t think you ought to.”

“Nonsense. It would be good for me. It would keep me from being too stiff.”

“I don’t think you should, Cat.”

“Nonsense. Rowing in moderation is very good for the pregnant lady.”

“All right, you row a little moderately. I’ll go back, then you come up. Hold on to both gunwales when you come up.”

I sat in the stern with my coat on and the collar turned up and watched Catherine row. She rowed very well but the oars were too long and bothered her. I opened the bag and ate a couple of sandwiches and took a drink of the brandy. It made everything much better and I took another drink.

“Tell me when you’re tired,” I said. Then a little later, “Watch out the oar doesn’t pop you in the tummy.”

“If it did” — Catherine said between strokes— “life might be much simpler.”

I took another drink of the brandy.

“How are you going?”

“All right.”

“Tell me when you want to stop.”

“All right.”

I took another drink of the brandy, then took hold of the two gunwales of the boat and moved forward.

“No. I’m going beautifully.”

“Go on back to the stern. I’ve had a grand rest.”

For a while, with the brandy, I rowed easily and steadily. Then I began to catch crabs and soon I was just chopping along again with a thin brown taste of bile from having rowed too hard after the brandy.

“Give me a drink of water, will you?” I said.

“That’s easy,” Catherine said.

Before daylight it started to drizzle. The wind was down or we were protected by mountains that bounded the curve the lake had made. When I knew daylight was coming I settled down and rowed hard. I did not know where we were and I wanted to get into the Swiss part of the lake. When it was beginning to be daylight we were quite close to the shore. I could see the rocky shore and the trees.

“What’s that?” Catherine said. I rested on the oars and listened. It was a motor boat chugging out on the lake. I pulled close up to the shore and lay quiet. The chugging came closer; then we saw the motor boat in the rain a little astern of us. There were four guardia di finanza in the stern, their alpini hats pulled down, their cape collars turned up and their carbines slung across their backs. They all looked sleepy so early in the morning. I could see the yellow on their hats and the yellow marks on their cape collars. The motor boat chugged on and out of sight in the rain.

I pulled out into the lake. If we were that close to the border I did not want to be hailed by a sentry along the road. I stayed out where I could just see the shore and rowed on for three quarters of an hour in the rain. We heard a motor boat once more but I kept quiet until the noise of the engine went away across the lake.

“I think we’re in Switzerland, Cat,” I said.

“Really?”

“There’s no way to know until we see Swiss troops.”

“Or the Swiss navy.”

“The Swiss navy’s no joke for us. That last motor boat we heard was probably the Swiss navy.”

“If we’re in Switzerland let’s have a big breakfast. They have wonderful rolls and butter and jam in Switzerland.”

It was clear daylight now and a fine rain was falling. The wind was still blowing outside up the lake and we could see the tops of the white-caps going away from us and up the lake. I was sure we were in Switzerland now. There were many houses back in the trees from the shore and up the shore a way was a village with stone houses, some villas on the hills and a church. I had been looking at the road that skirted the shore for guards but did not see any. The road came quite close to the lake now and I saw a soldier coming out of a café on the road. He wore a gray-green uniform and a helmet like the Germans. He had a healthy-looking face and a little toothbrush mustache. He looked at us.

“Wave to him,” I said to Catherine. She waved and the soldier smiled embarrassedly and gave a wave of his hand. I eased up rowing. We were passing the waterfront of the village.

“We must be well inside the border,” I said.

“We want to be sure, darling. We don’t want them to turn us back at the frontier.”

“The frontier is a long way back. I think this is the customs town. I’m pretty sure it’s Brissago.”

“Won’t there be Italians there? There are always both sides at a customs town.”

“Not in war-time. I don’t think they let the Italians cross the frontier.”

It was a nice-looking little town. There were many fishing boats along the quay and nets were spread on racks. There was a fine November rain falling but it looked cheerful and clean even with the rain.

“Should we land then and have breakfast?”

“All right.”

I pulled hard on the left oar and came in close, then straightened out when we were close to the quay and brought the boat alongside. I pulled in the oars, took hold of an iron ring, stepped up on the wet stone and was in Switzerland. I tied the boat and held my hand down to Catherine.

“Come on up, Cat. It’s a grand feeling.”

“What about the bags?”

“Leave them in the boat.”

Catherine stepped up and we were in Switzerland together.

“What a lovely country,” she said.

“Isn’t it grand?”

“Let’s go and have breakfast!”

“Isn’t it a grand country? I love the way it feels under my shoes.”

“I’m so stiff I can’t feel it very well. But it feels like a splendid country. Darling, do you realize we’re here and out of that bloody place?”

“I do. I really do. I’ve never realized anything before.”

“Look at the houses. Isn’t this a fine square? There’s a place we can get breakfast.”

“Isn’t the rain fine? They never had rain like this in Italy. It’s cheerful rain.”

“And we’re here, darling! Do you realize we’re here?”

We went inside the café and sat down at a clean wooden table. We were cockeyed excited. A splendid clean-looking woman with an apron came and asked us what we wanted.

“Rolls and jam and coffee,” Catherine said.

“I’m sorry, we haven’t any rolls in war-time.”

“Bread then.”

“I can make you some toast.”

“All right.”

“I want some eggs fried too.”

“How many eggs for the gentleman?”

“Three.”

“Take four, darling.”

“Four eggs.”

The woman went away. I kissed Catherine and held her hand very tight. We looked at each other and at the café.

“Darling, darling, isn’t it lovely?”

“It’s grand,” I said.

“I don’t mind there not being rolls,” Catherine said. “I thought about them all night. But I don’t mind it. I don’t mind it at all.”

“I suppose pretty soon they will arrest us.”

“Never mind, darling. We’ll have breakfast first. You won’t mind being arrested after breakfast. And then there’s nothing they can do to us. We’re British and American citizens in good standing.”

“You have a passport, haven’t you?”

“Of course. Oh let’s not talk about it. Let’s be happy.”

“I couldn’t be any happier,” I said. A fat gray cat with a tail that lifted like a plume crossed the floor to our table and curved against my leg to purr each time she rubbed. I reached down and stroked her. Catherine smiled at me very happily. “Here comes the coffee,” she said.

They arrested us after breakfast. We took a little walk through the village then went down to the quay to get our bags. A soldier was standing guard over the boat.

“Is this your boat?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Up the lake.”

“Then I have to ask you to come with me.”

“How about the bags?”

“You can carry the bags.”

I carried the bags and Catherine walked beside me and the soldier walked along behind us to the old custom house. In the custom house a lieutenant, very thin and military, questioned us.

“What nationality are you?”

“American and British.”

“Let me see your passports.”

I gave him mine and Catherine got hers out of her handbag.

He examined them for a long time.

“Why do you enter Switzerland this way in a boat?”

“I am a sportsman,” I said. “Rowing is my great sport. I always row when I get a chance.”

“Why do you come here?”

“For the winter sport. We are tourists and we want to do the winter sport.”

“This is no place for winter sport.”

“We know it. We want to go where they have the winter sport.”

“What have you been doing in Italy?”

“I have been studying architecture. My cousin has been studying art.”

“Why do you leave there?”

“We want to do the winter sport. With the war going on you cannot study architecture.”

“You will please stay where you are,” the lieutenant said. He went back into the building with our passports.

“You’re splendid, darling,” Catherine said. “Keep on the same track. You want to do the winter sport.”

“Do you know anything about art?”

“Rubens,” said Catherine.

“Large and fat,” I said.

“Titian,” Catherine said.

“Titian-haired,” I said. “How about Mantegna?”

“Don’t ask hard ones,” Catherine said. “I know him though — very bitter.”

“Very bitter,” I said. “Lots of nail holes.”

“You see I’ll make you a fine wife,” Catherine said. “I’ll be able to talk art with your customers.”

“Here he comes,” I said. The thin lieutenant came down the length of the custom house, holding our passports.

“I will have to send you into Locarno,” he said. “You can get a carriage and a soldier will go in with you.”

“All right,” I said. “What about the boat?”

“The boat is confiscated. What have you in those bags?”

He went all through the two bags and held up the quarter-bottle of brandy. “Would you join me in a drink?” I asked.

“No thank you.” He straightened up. “How much money have you?”

“Twenty-five hundred lire.”

He was favorably impressed. “How much has your cousin?”

Catherine had a little over twelve hundred lire. The lieutenant was pleased. His attitude toward us became less haughty.

“If you are going for winter sports,” he said, “Wengen is the place. My father has a very fine hotel at Wengen. It is open all the time.”

“That’s splendid,” I said. “Could you give me the name?”

“I will write it on a card.” He handed me the card very politely.

“The soldier will take you into Locarno. He will keep your passports. I regret this but it is necessary. I have good hopes they will give you a visa or a police permit at Locarno.”

He handed the two passports to the soldier and carrying the bags we started into the village to order a carriage. “Hi,” the lieutenant called to the soldier. He said something in a German dialect to him. The soldier slung his rifle on his back and picked up the bags.

“It’s a great country,” I said to Catherine.

“It’s so practical.”

“Thank you very much,” I said to the lieutenant. He waved his hand.

“Service!” he said. We followed our guard into the village.

We drove to Locarno in a carriage with the soldier sitting on the front seat with the driver. At Locarno we did not have a bad time. They questioned us but they were polite because we had passports and money. I do not think they believed a word of the story and I thought it was silly but it was like a law-court. You did not want something reasonable, you wanted something technical and then stuck to it without explanations. But we had passports and we would spend the money. So they gave us provisional visas.

At any time this visa might be withdrawn. We were to report to the police wherever we went.

Could we go wherever we wanted? Yes. Where did we want to go?

“Where do you want to go, Cat?”

“Montreux.”

“It is a very nice place,” the official said. “I think you will like that place.”

“Here at Lacarno is a very nice place,” another official said. “I am sure you would like it here very much at Locarno. Locarno is a very attractive place.”

“We would like some place where there is winter sport.”

“There is no winter sport at Montreux.”

“I beg your pardon,” the other official said. “I come from Montreux. There is very certainly winter sport on the Montreux Oberland Bernois railway. It would be false for you to deny that.”

“I do not deny it. I simply said there is no winter sport at Montreux.”

“I question that,” the other official said. “I question that statement.”

“I hold to that statement.”

“I question that statement. I myself have luge-ed into the streets of Montreux. I have done it not once but several times. Luge-ing is certainly winter sport.”

The other official turned to me.

“Is luge-ing your idea of winter sport, sir? I tell you you would be very comfortable here in Locarno. You would find the climate healthy, you would find the environs attractive. You would like it very much.”

“The gentleman has expressed a wish to go to Montreux.”

“What is luge-ing?” I asked.

“You see he has never even heard of luge-ing!”

That meant a great deal to the second official. He was pleased by that.

“Luge-ing,” said the first official, “is tobogganing.”

“I beg to differ,” the other official shook his head. “I must differ again. The toboggan is very different from the luge. The toboggan is constructed in Canada of flat laths. The luge is a common sled with runners. Accuracy means something.”

“Couldn’t we toboggan?” I asked.

“Of course you could toboggan,” the first official said. “You could toboggan very well. Excellent Canadian toboggans are sold in Montreux. Ochs Brothers sell toboggans. They import their own toboggans.”

The second official turned away. “Tobogganing,” he said, “requires a special piste. You could not toboggan into the streets of Montreux. Where are you stopping here?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “We just drove in from Brissago. The carriage is outside.”

“You make no mistake in going to Montreux,” the first official said. “You will find the climate delightful and beautiful. You will have no distance to go for winter sport.”

“If you really want winter sport,” the second official said, “you will go to the Engadine or to Mürren. I must protest against your being advised to go to Montreux for the winter sport.”

“At Les Avants above Montreux there is excellent winter sport of every sort.” The champion of Montreux glared at his colleague.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I am afraid we must go. My cousin is very tired. We will go tentatively to Montreux.”

“I congratulate you,” the first official shook my hand.

“I believe that you will regret leaving Locarno,” the second official said. “At any rate you will report to the police at Montreux.”

“There will be no unpleasantness with the police,” the first official assured me. “You will find all the inhabitants extremely courteous and friendly.”

“Thank you both very much,” I said. “We appreciate your advice very much.”

“Good-by,” Catherine said. “Thank you both very much.”

They bowed us to the door, the champion of Locarno a little coldly. We went down the steps and into the carriage.

“My God, darling,” Catherine said. “Couldn’t we have gotten away any sooner?” I gave the name of a hotel one of the officials had recommended to the driver. He picked up the reins.

“You’ve forgotten the army,” Catherine said. The soldier was standing by the carriage. I gave him a ten-lira note. “I have no Swiss money yet,” I said. He thanked me, saluted and went off. The carriage started and we drove to the hotel.

“How did you happen to pick out Montreux?” I asked Catherine. “Do you really want to go there?”

“It was the first place I could think of,” she said. “It’s not a bad place. We can find some place up in the mountains.”

“Are you sleepy?”

“I’m asleep right now.”

“We’ll get a good sleep. Poor Cat, you had a long bad night.”

“I had a lovely time,” Catherine said. “Especially when you sailed with the umbrella.”

“Can you realize we’re in Switzerland?”

“No, I’m afraid I’ll wake up and it won’t be true.”

“I am too.”

“It is true, isn’t it, darling? I’m not just driving down to the stazione in Milan to see you off.”

“I hope not.”

“Don’t say that. It frightens me. Maybe that’s where we’re going.”

“I’m so groggy I don’t know,” I said.

“Let me see your hands.”

I put them out. They were both blistered raw.

“There’s no hole in my side,” I said.

“Don’t be sacrilegious.”

I felt very tired and vague in the head. The exhilaration was all gone. The carriage was going along the street.

“Poor hands,” Catherine said.

“Don’t touch them,” I said. “By God I don’t know where we are. Where are we going, driver?” The driver stopped his horse.

“To the Hotel Metropole. Don’t you want to go there?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s all right, Cat.”

“It’s all right, darling. Don’t be upset. We’ll get a good sleep and you won’t feel groggy to-morrow.”

“I get pretty groggy,” I said. “It’s like a comic opera to-day. Maybe I’m hungry.”

“You’re just tired, darling. You’ll be fine.” The carriage pulled up before the hotel. Some one came out to take our bags.

“I feel all right,” I said. We were down on the pavement going into the hotel.

“I know you’ll be all right. You’re just tired. You’ve been up a long time.”

“Anyhow we’re here.”

“Yes, we’re really here.”

We followed the boy with the bags into the hotel.

BOOK FIVE

CHAPTER 38

THAT FALL the snow came very late. We lived in a brown wooden house in the pine trees on the side of the mountain and at night there was frost so that there was thin ice over the water in the two pitchers on the dresser in the morning. Mrs. Guttingen came into the room early in the morning to shut the windows and started a fire in the tall porcelain stove. The pine wood crackled and sparked and then the fire roared in the stove and the second time Mrs. Guttingen came into the room she brought big chunks of wood for the fire and a pitcher of hot water. When the room was warm she brought in breakfast. Sitting up in bed eating breakfast we could see the lake and the mountains across the lake on the French side. There was snow on the tops of the mountains and the lake was a gray steel-blue.

Outside, in front of the chalet a road went up the mountain. The wheel ruts and ridges were iron hard with the frost, and the road climbed steadily through the forest and up and around the mountain to where there were meadows, and barns and cabins in the meadows at the edge of the woods looking across the valley. The valley was deep and there was a stream at the bottom that flowed down into the lake and when the wind blew across the valley you could hear the stream in the rocks.

Sometimes we went off the road and on a path through the pine forest. The floor of the forest was soft to walk on; the frost did not harden it as it did the road. But we did not mind the hardness of the road because we had nails in the soles and heels of our boots and the heel nails bit on the frozen ruts and with nailed boots it was good walking on the road and invigorating. But it was lovely walking in the woods.

In front of the house where we lived the mountain went down steeply to the little plain along the lake and we sat on the porch of the house in the sun and saw the winding of the road down the mountain-side and the terraced vineyards on the side of the lower mountain, the vines all dead now for the winter and the fields divided by stone walls, and below the vineyards the houses of the town on the narrow plain along the lake shore. There was an island with two trees on the lake and the trees looked like the double sails of a fishing-boat. The mountains were sharp and steep on the other side of the lake and down at the end of the lake was the plain of the Rhone Valley flat between the two ranges of mountains; and up the valley where the mountains cut it off was the Dent du Midi. It was a high snowy mountain and it dominated the valley but it was so far away that it did not make a shadow.

When the sun was bright we ate lunch on the porch but the rest of the time we ate upstairs in a small room with plain wooden walls and a big stove in the corner. We bought books and magazines in the town and a copy of “Hoyle” and learned many two-handed card games. The small room with the stove was our living-room. There were two comfortable chairs and a table for books and magazines and we played cards on the dining-table when it was cleared away. Mr. and Mrs. Guttingen lived downstairs and we would hear them talking sometimes in the evening and they were very happy together too. He had been a headwaiter and she had worked as maid in the same hotel and they had saved their money to buy this place. They had a son who was studying to be a headwaiter. He was at a hotel in Zurich. Downstairs there was a parlor where they sold wine and beer, and sometimes in the evening we would hear carts stop outside on the road and men come up the steps to go in the parlor to drink wine.

There was a box of wood in the hall outside the living-room and I kept up the fire from it. But we did not stay up very late. We went to bed in the dark in the big bedroom and when I was undressed I opened the windows and saw the night and the cold stars and the pine trees below the window and then got into bed as fast as I could. It was lovely in bed with the air so cold and clear and the night outside the window. We slept well and if I woke in the night I knew it was from only one cause and I would shift the feather bed over, very softly so that Catherine would not be wakened and then go back to sleep again, warm and with the new lightness of thin covers. The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college. But I knew from the papers that they were still fighting in the mountains because the snow would not come.

Sometimes we walked down the mountain into Montreux. There was a path went down the mountain but it was steep and so usually we took the road and walked down on the wide hard road between fields and then below between the stone walls of the vineyards and on down between the houses of the villages along the way. There were three villages; Chernex, Fontanivent, and the other I forget. Then along the road we passed an old square-built stone château on a ledge on the side of the mountain-side with the terraced fields of vines, each vine tied to a stick to hold it up, the vines dry and brown and the earth ready for the snow and the lake down below flat and gray as steel. The road went down a long grade below the château and then turned to the right and went down very steeply and paved with cobbles, into Montreux.

We did not know any one in Montreux. We walked along beside the lake and saw the swans and the many gulls and terns that flew up when you came close and screamed while they looked down at the water. Out on the lake there were flocks of grebes, small and dark, and leaving trails in the water when they swam.

In the town we walked along the main street and looked in the windows of the shops. There were many big hotels that were closed but most of the shops were open and the people were very glad to see us. There was a fine coiffeur’s place where Catherine went to have her hair done. The woman who ran it was very cheerful and the only person we knew in Montreux. While Catherine was there I went up to a beer place and drank dark Munich beer and read the papers. I read the Corriere della Sera and the English and American papers from Paris. All the advertisements were blacked out, supposedly to prevent communication in that way with the enemy. The papers were bad reading. Everything was going very badly every-where. I sat back in the corner with a heavy mug of dark beer and an opened glazed-paper package of pretzels and ate the pretzels for the salty flavor and the good way they made the beer taste and read about disaster. I thought Catherine would come by but she did not come, so I hung the papers back on the rack, paid for my beer and went up the street to look for her. The day was cold and dark and wintry and the stone of the houses looked cold. Catherine was still in the hairdresser’s shop. The woman was waving her hair. I sat in the little booth and watched. It was exciting to watch and Catherine smiled and talked to me and my voice was a little thick from being excited. The tongs made a pleasant clicking sound and I could see Catherine in three mirrors and it was pleasant and warm in the booth. Then the woman put up Catherine’s hair, and Catherine looked in the mirror and changed it a little, taking out and putting in pins; then stood up. “I’m sorry to have taken such a long time.”

“Monsieur was very interested. Were you not, monsieur?” the woman smiled.

“Yes,” I said.

We went out and up the street. It was cold and wintry and the wind was blowing. “Oh, darling, I love you so,” I said.

“Don’t we have a fine time?” Catherine said. “Look. Let’s go some place and have beer instead of tea. It’s very good for young Catherine. It keeps her small.”

“Young Catherine,” I said. “That loafer.”

“She’s been very good,” Catherine said. “She makes very little trouble. The doctor says beer will be good for me and keep her small.”

“If you keep her small enough and she’s a boy, maybe he will be a jockey.”

“I suppose if we really have this child we ought to get married,” Catherine said. We were in the beer place at the corner table. It was getting dark outside. It was still early but the day was dark and the dusk was coming early.

“Let’s get married now,” I said.

“No,” Catherine said. “It’s too embarrassing now. I show too plainly. I won’t go before any one and be married in this state.”

“I wish we’d gotten married.”

“I suppose it would have been better. But when could we, darling?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know one thing. I’m not going to be married in this splendid matronly state.”

“You’re not matronly.”

“Oh yes, I am, darling. The hairdresser asked me if this was our first. I lied and said no, we had two boys and two girls.”

“When will we be married?”

“Any time after I’m thin again. We want to have a splendid wedding with every one thinking what a handsome young couple.”

“And you’re not worried?”

“Darling, why should I be worried? The only time I ever felt badly was when I felt like a whore in Milan and that only lasted seven minutes and besides it was the room furnishings. Don’t I make you a good wife?”

“You’re a lovely wife.”

“Then don’t be too technical, darling. I’ll marry you as soon as I’m thin again.”

“All right.”

“Do you think I ought to drink another beer? The doctor said I was rather narrow in the hips and it’s all for the best if we keep young Catherine small.”

“What else did he say?” I was worried.

“Nothing. I have a wonderful blood-pressure, darling. He admired my blood-pressure greatly.”

“What did he say about you being too narrow in the hips?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. He said I shouldn’t ski.”

“Quite right.”

“He said it was too late to start if I’d never done it before. He said I could ski if I wouldn’t fall down.”

“He’s just a big-hearted joker.”

“Really he was very nice. We’ll have him when the baby comes.”

“Did you ask him if you ought to get married?”

“No. I told him we’d been married four years. You see, darling, if I marry you I’ll be an American and any time we’re married under American law the child is legitimate.”

“Where did you find that out?”

“In the New York World Almanac in the library.”

“You’re a grand girl.”

“I’ll be very glad to be an American and we’ll go to America won’t we, darling? I want to see Niagara Falls.”

“You’re a fine girl.”

“There’s something else I want to see but I can’t remember it.”

“The stockyards?”

“No. I can’t remember it.”

“The Woolworth building?”

“No.”

“The Grand Canyon?”

“No. But I’d like to see that.”

“What was it?”

“The Golden Gate! That’s what I want to see. Where is the Golden Gate?”

“San Francisco.”

“Then let’s go there. I want to see San Francisco anyway.”

“All right. We’ll go there.”

“Now let’s go up the mountain. Should we? Can we get the M.O.B.?”

“There’s a train a little after five.”

“Let’s get that.”

“All right. I’ll drink one more beer first.”

When we went out to go up the street and climb the stairs to the station it was very cold. A cold wind was coming down the Rhone Valley. There were lights in the shop windows and we climbed the steep stone stairway to the upper street, then up another stairs to the station. The electric train was there waiting, all the lights on. There was a dial that showed when it left. The clock hands pointed to ten minutes after five. I looked at the station clock. It was five minutes after. As we got on board I saw the motorman and conductor coming out of the station wine-shop. We sat down and opened the window. The train was electrically heated and stuffy but fresh cold air came in through the window.

“Are you tired, Cat?” I asked.

“No. I feel splendid.”

“It isn’t a long ride.”

“I like the ride,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, darling. I feel fine.”

Snow did not come until three days before Christmas. We woke one morning and it was snowing. We stayed in bed with the fire roaring in the stove and watched the snow fall. Mrs. Guttingen took away the breakfast trays and put more wood in the stove. It was a big snow storm. She said it had started about midnight. I went to the window and looked out but could not see across the road. It was blowing and snowing wildly. I went back to bed and we lay and talked.

“I wish I could ski,” Catherine said. “It’s rotten not to be able to ski.”

“We’ll get a bobsled and come down the road. That’s no worse for you than riding in a car.”

“Won’t it be rough?”

“We can see.”

“I hope it won’t be too rough.”

“After a while we’ll take a walk in the snow.”

“Before lunch,” Catherine said, “so we’ll have a good appetite.”

“I’m always hungry.”

“So am I.”

We went out in the snow but it was drifted so that we could not walk far. I went ahead and made a trail down to the station but when we reached there we had gone far enough. The snow was blowing so we could hardly see and we went into the little inn by the station and swept each other off with a broom and sat on a bench and had vermouths.

“It is a big storm,” the barmaid said.

“Yes.”

“The snow is very late this year.”

“Yes.”

“Could I eat a chocolate bar?” Catherine asked. “Or is it too close to lunch? I’m always hungry.”

“Go on and eat one,” I said.

“I’ll take one with filberts,” Catherine said.

“They are very good,” the girl said, “I like them the best.”

“I’ll have another vermouth,” I said.

When we came out to start back up the road our track was filled in by the snow. There were only faint indentations where the holes had been. The snow blew in our faces so we could hardly see. We brushed off and went in to have lunch. Mr. Guttingen served the lunch.

“To-morrow there will be ski-ing,” he said. “Do you ski, Mr. Henry?”

“No. But I want to learn.”

“You will learn very easily. My boy will be here for Christmas and he will teach you.”

“That’s fine. When does he come?”

“To-morrow night.”

When we were sitting by the stove in the little room after lunch looking out the window at the snow coming down Catherine said, “Wouldn’t you like to go on a trip somewhere by yourself, darling, and be with men and ski?”

“No. Why should I?”

“I should think sometimes you would want to see other people besides me.”

“Do you want to see other people?”

“No.”

“Neither do I.”

“I know. But you’re different. I’m having a child and that makes me contented not to do anything. I know I’m awfully stupid now and I talk too much and I think you ought to get away so you won’t be tired of me.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“No. I want you to stay.”

“That’s what I’m going to do.”

“Come over here,” she said. “I want to feel the bump on your head. It’s a big bump.” She ran her finger over it. “Darling, would you like to grow a beard?”

“Would you like me to?”

“It might be fun. I’d like to see you with a beard.”

“All right. I’ll grow one. I’ll start now this minute. It’s a good idea. It will give me something to do.”

“Are you worried because you haven’t anything to do?”

“No. I like it. I have a fine life. Don’t you?”

“I have a lovely life. But I was afraid because I’m big now that maybe I was a bore to you.”

“Oh, Cat. You don’t know how crazy I am about you.”

“This way?”

“Just the way you are. I have a fine time. Don’t we have a good life?”

“I do, but I thought maybe you were restless.”

“No. Sometimes I wonder about the front and about people I know but I don’t worry. I don’t think about anything much.”

“Who do you wonder about?”

“About Rinaldi and the priest and lots of people I know. But I don’t think about them much. I don’t want to think about the war. I’m through with it.”

“What are you thinking about now?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes you were. Tell me.”

“I was wondering whether Rinaldi had the syphilis.”

“Was that all?”

“Yes.”

“Has he the syphilis?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m glad you haven’t. Did you ever have anything like that?”

“I had gonorrhea.”

“I don’t want to hear about it. Was it very painful, darling?”

“Very.”

“I wish I’d had it.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do. I wish I’d had it to be like you. I wish I’d stayed with all your girls so I could make fun of them to you.”

“That’s a pretty picture.”

“It’s not a pretty picture you having gonorrhea.”

“I know it. Look at it snow now.”

“I’d rather look at you. Darling, why don’t you let your hair grow?”

“How grow?”

“Just grow a little longer.”

“It’s long enough now.”

“No, let it grow a little longer and I could cut mine and we’d be just alike only one of us blonde and one of us dark.”

“I wouldn’t let you cut yours.”

“It would be fun. I’m tired of it. It’s an awful nuisance in the bed at night.”

“I like it.”

“Wouldn’t you like it short?”

“I might. I like it the way it is.”

“It might be nice short. Then we’d both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much I want to be you too.”

“You are. We’re the same one.”

“I know it. At night we are.”

“The nights are grand.”

“I want us to be all mixed up. I don’t want you to go away. I just said that. You go if you want to. But hurry right back. Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.”

“I won’t ever go away,” I said. “I’m no good when you’re not there. I haven’t any life at all any more.”

“I want you to have a life. I want you to have a fine life. But we’ll have it together, won’t we?”

“And now do you want me to stop growing my beard or let it go on?”

“Go on. Grow it. It will be exciting. Maybe it will be done for New Year’s.”

“Now do you want to play chess?”

“I’d rather play with you.”

“No. Let’s play chess.”

“And afterward we’ll play?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

I got out the chess-board and arranged the pieces. It was still snowing hard outside.

One time in the night I woke up and knew that Catherine was awake too. The moon was shining in the window and made shadows on the bed from the bars on the window-panes.

“Are you awake, sweetheart?”

“Yes. Can’t you sleep?”

“I just woke up thinking about how I was nearly crazy when I first met you. Do you remember?”

“You were just a little crazy.”

“I’m never that way any more. I’m grand now. You say grand so sweetly. Say grand.”

“Grand.”

“Oh, you’re sweet. And I’m not crazy now. I’m just very, very, very happy.”

“Go on to sleep,” I said.

“All right. Let’s go to sleep at exactly the same moment.”

“All right.”

But we did not. I was awake for quite a long time thinking about things and watching Catherine sleeping, the moonlight on her face. Then I went to sleep, too.

CHAPTER 39

BY THE MIDDLE of January I had a beard and the winter had settled into bright cold days and hard cold nights. We could walk on the roads again. The snow was packed hard and smooth by the hay-sleds and wood-sledges and the logs that were hauled down the mountain. The snow lay over all the country, down almost to Montreux. The mountains on the other side of the lake were all white and the plain of the Rhone Valley was covered. We took long walks on the other side of the mountain to the Bains de l’Alliaz. Catherine wore hobnailed boots and a cape and carried a stick with a sharp steel point. She did not look big with the cape and we would not walk too fast but stopped and sat on logs by the roadside to rest when she was tired.

There was an inn in the trees at the Bains de l’Alliaz where the woodcutters stopped to drink, and we sat inside warmed by the stove and drank hot red wine with spices and lemon in it. They called it glühwein and it was a good thing to warm you and to celebrate with. The inn was dark and smoky inside and afterward when you went out the cold air came sharply into your lungs and numbed the edge of your nose as you inhaled. We looked back at the inn with light coming from the windows and the woodcutters’ horses stamping and jerking their heads outside to keep warm. There was frost on the hairs of their muzzles and their breathing made plumes of frost in the air. Going up the road toward home the road was smooth and slippery for a while and the ice orange from the horses until the wood-hauling track turned off. Then the road was clean-packed snow and led through the woods, and twice coming home in the evening, we saw foxes.

It was a fine country and every time that we went out it was fun.

“You have a splendid beard now,” Catherine said. “It looks just like the woodcutters’. Did you see the man with the tiny gold earrings?”

“He’s a chamois hunter,” I said. “They wear them because they say it makes them hear better.”

“Really? I don’t believe it. I think they wear them to show they are chamois hunters. Are there chamois near here?”

“Yes, beyond the Dent de Jaman.”

“It was fun seeing the fox.”

“When he sleeps he wraps that tail around him to keep warm.”

“It must be a lovely feeling.”

“I always wanted to have a tail like that. Wouldn’t it be fun if we had brushes like a fox?”

“It might be very difficult dressing.”

“We’d have clothes made, or live in a country where it wouldn’t make any difference.”

“We live in a country where nothing makes any difference. Isn’t it grand how we never see any one? You don’t want to see people do you, darling?”

“No.”

“Should we sit here just a minute? I’m a little bit tired.”

We sat close together on the logs. Ahead the road went down through the forest.

“She won’t come between us, will she? The little brat.”

“No. We won’t let her.”

“How are we for money?”

“We have plenty. They honored the last sight draft.”

“Won’t your family try and get hold of you now they know you’re in Switzerland?”

“Probably. I’ll write them something.”

“Haven’t you written them?”

“No. Only the sight draft.”

“Thank God I’m not your family.”

“I’ll send them a cable.”

“Don’t you care anything about them?”

“I did, but we quarrelled so much it wore itself out.”

“I think I’d like them. I’d probably like them very much.”

“Let’s not talk about them or I’ll start to worry about them.” After a while I said, “Let’s go on if you’re rested.”

“I’m rested.”

We went on down the road. It was dark now and the snow squeaked under our boots. The night was dry and cold and very clear.

“I love your beard,” Catherine said. “It’s a great success. It looks so stiff and fierce and it’s very soft and a great pleasure.”

“Do you like it better than without?”

“I think so. You know, darling, I’m not going to cut my hair now until after young Catherine’s born. I look too big and matronly now. But after she’s born and I’m thin again I’m going to cut it and then I’ll be a fine new and different girl for you. We’ll go together and get it cut, or I’ll go alone and come and surprise you.”

I did not say anything.

“You won’t say I can’t, will you?”

“No. I think it would be exciting.”

“Oh, you’re so sweet. And maybe I’d look lovely, darling, and be so thin and exciting to you and you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”

“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”

“Yes. I want to ruin you.”

“Good,” I said, “that’s what I want too.”

CHAPTER 40

WE HAD a fine life. We lived through the months of January and February and the winter was very fine and we were very happy. There had been short thaws when the wind blew warm and the snow softened and the air felt like spring, but always the clear hard cold had come again and the winter had returned. In March came the first break in the winter. In the night it started raining. It rained on all morning and turned the snow to slush and made the mountain-side dismal. There were clouds over the lake and over the valley. It was raining high up the mountain. Catherine wore heavy overshoes and I wore Mr. Guttingen’s rubber-boots and we walked to the station under an umbrella, through the slush and the running water that was washing the ice of the roads bare, to stop at the pub before lunch for a vermouth. Outside we could hear the rain.

“Do you think we ought to move into town?”

“What do you think?” Catherine asked.

“If the winter is over and the rain keeps up it won’t be fun up here. How long is it before young Catherine?”

“About a month. Perhaps a little more.”

“We might go down and stay in Montreux.”

“Why don’t we go to Lausanne? That’s where the hospital is.”

“All right. But I thought maybe that was too big a town.”

“We can be as much alone in a bigger town and Lausanne might be nice.”

“When should we go?”

“I don’t care. Whenever you want, darling. I don’t want to leave here if you don’t want.”

“Let’s see how the weather turns out.”

It rained for three days. The snow was all gone now on the mountain-side below the station. The road was a torrent of muddy snow-water. It was too wet and slushy to go out. On the morning of the third day of rain we decided to go down into town.

“That is all right, Mr. Henry,” Guttingen said. “You do not have to give me any notice. I did not think you would want to stay now the bad weather is come.”

“We have to be near the hospital anyway on account of Madame,” I said.

“I understand,” he said. “Will you come back some time and stay, with the little one?”

“Yes, if you would have room.”

“In the spring when it is nice you could come and enjoy it. We could put the little one and the nurse in the big room that is closed now and you and Madame could have your same room looking out over the lake.”

“I’ll write about coming,” I said. We packed and left on the train that went down after lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Guttingen came down to the station with us and he hauled our baggage down on a sled through the slush. They stood beside the station in the rain waving good-by.

“They were very sweet,” Catherine said.

“They were fine to us.”

We took the train to Lausanne from Montreux. Looking out the window toward where we had lived you could not see the mountains for the clouds. The train stopped in Vevey, then went on, passing the lake on one side and on the other the wet brown fields and the bare woods and the wet houses. We came into Lausanne and went into a medium-sized hotel to stay. It was still raining as we drove through the streets and into the carriage entrance of the hotel. The concierge with brass keys on his lapels, the elevator, the carpets on the floors, and the white washbowls with shining fixtures, the brass bed and the big comfortable bedroom all seemed very great luxury after the Guttingens. The windows of the room looked out on a wet garden with a wall topped by an iron fence. Across the street, which sloped steeply, was another hotel with a similar wall and garden. I looked out at the rain falling in the fountain of the garden.

Catherine turned on all the lights and commenced unpacking. I ordered a whiskey and soda and lay on the bed and read the papers I had bought at the station. It was March, 1918, and the German offensive had started in France. I drank the whiskey and soda and read while Catherine unpacked and moved around the room.

“You know what I have to get, darling,” she said.

“What?”

“Baby clothes. There aren’t many people reach my time without baby things.”

“You can buy them.”

“I know. That’s what I’ll do to-morrow. I’ll find out what is necessary.”

“You ought to know. You were a nurse.”

“But so few of the soldiers had babies in the hospitals.”

“I did.”

She hit me with the pillow and spilled the whiskey and soda.

“I’ll order you another,” she said. “I’m sorry I spilled it.”

“There wasn’t much left. Come on over to the bed.”

“No. I have to try and make this room look like something.”

“Like what?”

“Like our home.”

“Hang out the Allied flags.”

“Oh shut up.”

“Say it again.”

“Shut up.”

“You say it so cautiously,” I said. “As though you didn’t want to offend any one.”

“I don’t.”

“Then come over to the bed.”

“All right.” She came and sat on the bed. “I know I’m no fun for you, darling. I’m like a big flour-barrel.”

“No you’re not. You’re beautiful and you’re sweet.”

“I’m just something very ungainly that you’ve married.”

“No you’re not. You’re more beautiful all the time.”

“But I will be thin again, darling.”

“You’re thin now.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Just whiskey and soda.”

“There’s another one coming,” she said. “And then should we order dinner up here?”

“That will be good.”

“Then we won’t go out, will we? We’ll just stay in to-night.”

“And play,” I said.

“I’ll drink some wine,” Catherine said. “It won’t hurt me. Maybe we can get some of our old white capri.”

“I know we can,” I said. “They’ll have Italian wines at a hotel this size.”

The waiter knocked at the door. He brought the whiskey in a glass with ice and beside the glass on a tray a small bottle of soda.

“Thank you,” I said. “Put it down there. Will you please have dinner for two brought up here and two bottles of dry white capri in ice.”

“Do you wish to commence your dinner with soup?”

“Do you want soup, Cat?”

“Please.”

“Bring soup for one.”

“Thank you, sir.” He went out and shut the door. I went back to the papers and the war in the papers and poured the soda slowly over the ice into the whiskey. I would have to tell them not to put ice in the whiskey. Let them bring the ice separately. That way you could tell how much whiskey there was and it would not suddenly be too thin from the soda. I would get a bottle of whiskey and have them bring ice and soda. That was the sensible way. Good whiskey was very pleasant. It was one of the pleasant parts of life.

“What are you thinking, darling?”

“About whiskey.”

“What about whiskey?”

“About how nice it is.”

Catherine made a face. “All right,” she said.

We stayed at that hotel three weeks. It was not bad; the dining-room was usually empty and very often we ate in our room at night. We walked in the town and took the cogwheel railway down to Ouchy and walked beside the lake. The weather became quite warm and it was like spring. We wished we were back in the mountains but the spring weather lasted only a few days and then the cold rawness of the breaking-up of winter came again.

Catherine bought the things she needed for the baby, up in the town. I went to a gymnasium in the arcade to box for exercise. I usually went up there in the morning while Catherine stayed late in bed. On the days of false spring it was very nice, after boxing and taking a shower, to walk along the streets smelling the spring in the air and stop at a café to sit and watch the people and read the paper and drink a vermouth; then go down to the hotel and have lunch with Catherine. The professor at the boxing gymnasium wore mustaches and was very precise and jerky and went all to pieces if you started after him. But it was pleasant in the gym. There was good air and light and I worked quite hard, skipping rope, shadow-boxing, doing abdominal exercises lying on the floor in a patch of sunlight that came through the open window, and occasionally scaring the professor when we boxed. I could not shadow-box in front of the narrow long mirror at first because it looked so strange to see a man with a beard boxing. But finally I just thought it was funny. I wanted to take off the beard as soon as I started boxing but Catherine did not want me to.

Sometimes Catherine and I went for rides out in the country in a carriage. It was nice to ride when the days were pleasant and we found two good places where we could ride out to eat. Catherine could not walk very far now and I loved to ride out along the country roads with her. When there was a good day we had a splendid time and we never had a bad time. We knew the baby was very close now and it gave us both a feeling as though something were hurrying us and we could not lose any time together.

CHAPTER 41

ONE MORNING I awoke about three o’clock hearing Catherine stirring in the bed.

“Are you all right, Cat?”

“I’ve been having some pains, darling.”

“Regularly?” —

“No, not very.”

“If you have them at all regularly we’ll go to the hospital.”

I was very sleepy and went back to sleep. A little while later I woke again.

“Maybe you’d better call up the doctor,” Catherine said. “I think maybe this is it.”

I went to the phone and called the doctor. “How often are the pains coming?” he asked.

“How often are they coming, Cat?”

“I should think every quarter of an hour.”

“You should go to the hospital, then,” the doctor said. “I will dress and go there right away myself.”

I hung up and called the garage near the station to send up a taxi. No one answered the phone for a long time. Then I finally got a man who promised to send up a taxi at once. Catherine was dressing. Her bag was all packed with the things she would need at the hospital and the baby things. Outside in the hall I rang for the elevator. There was no answer. I went downstairs. There was no one downstairs except the night-watchman. I brought the elevator up myself, put Catherine’s bag in it, she stepped in and we went down. The night-watchman opened the door for us and we sat outside on the stone slabs beside the stairs down to the driveway and waited for the taxi. The night was clear and the stars were out. Catherine was very excited.

“I’m so glad it’s started,” she said. “Now in a little while it will be all over.”

“You’re a good brave girl.”

“I’m not afraid. I wish the taxi would come, though.”

We heard it coming up the street and saw its headlights. It turned into the driveway and I helped Catherine in and the driver put the bag up in front.

“Drive to the hospital,” I said.

We went out of the driveway and started up the hill.

At the hospital we went in and I carried the bag. There was a woman at the desk who wrote down Catherine’s name, age, address, relatives and religion, in a book. She said she had no religion and the woman drew a line in the space after that word. She gave her name as Catherine Henry.

“I will take you up to your room,” she said. We went up in an elevator. The woman stopped it and we stepped out and followed her down a hall. Catherine held tight to my arm.

“This is the room,” the woman said. “Will you please undress and get into bed? Here is a night-gown for you to wear.”

“I have a night-gown,” Catherine said.

“It is better for you to wear this night-gown,” the woman said.

I went outside and sat on a chair in the hallway.

“You can come in now,” the woman said from the doorway. Catherine was lying in the narrow bed wearing a plain, square-cut night-gown that looked as though it were made of rough sheeting. She smiled at me.

“I’m having fine pains now,” she said. The woman was holding her wrist and timing the pains with a watch.

“That was a big one,” Catherine said. I saw it on her face.

“Where’s the doctor?” I asked the woman.

“He’s lying down sleeping. He will be here when he is needed.”

“I must do something for Madame, now,” the nurse said. “Would you please step out again?”

I went out into the hall. It was a bare hall with two windows and closed doors all down the corridor. It smelled of hospital. I sat on the chair and looked at the floor and prayed for Catherine.

“You can come in,” the nurse said. I went in.

“Hello, darling,” Catherine said.

“How is it?”

“They are coming quite often now.” Her face drew up. Then she smiled.

“That was a real one. Do you want to put your hand on my back again, nurse?”

“If it helps you,” the nurse said.

“You go away, darling,” Catherine said. “Go out and get something to eat. I may do this for a long time the nurse says.”

“The first labor is usually protracted,” the nurse said.

“Please go out and get something to eat,” Catherine said. “I’m fine, really.”

“I’ll stay awhile,” I said.

The pains came quite regularly, then slackened off. Catherine was very excited. When the pains were bad she called them good ones. When they started to fall off she was disappointed and ashamed.

“You go out, darling,” she said. “I think you are just making me self-conscious.” Her face tied up. “There. That was better. I so want to be a good wife and have this child without any foolishness. Please go and get some breakfast, darling, and then come back. I won’t miss you. Nurse is splendid to me.”

“You have plenty of time for breakfast,” the nurse said.

“I’ll go then. Good-by, sweet.”

“Good-by,” Catherine said, “and have a fine breakfast for me too.”

“Where can I get breakfast?” I asked the nurse.

“There’s a café down the street at the square,” she said. “It should be open now.”

Outside it was getting light. I walked down the empty street to the café. There was a light in the window. I went in and stood at the zinc bar and an old man served me a glass of white wine and a brioche. The brioche was yesterday’s. I dipped it in the wine and then drank a glass of coffee.

“What do you do at this hour?” the old man asked.

“My wife is in labor at the hospital.”

“So. I wish you good luck.”

“Give me another glass of wine.”

He poured it from the bottle slopping it over a little so some ran down on the zinc. I drank this glass, paid and went out. Outside along the street were the refuse cans from the houses waiting for the collector. A dog was nosing at one of the cans.

“What do you want?” I asked and looked in the can to see if there was anything I could pull out for him; there was nothing on top but coffee-grounds, dust and some dead flowers.

“There isn’t anything, dog,” I said. The dog crossed the street. I went up the stairs in the hospital to the floor Catherine was on and down the hall to her room. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I opened the door; the room was empty, except for Catherine’s bag on a chair and her dressing-gown hanging on a hook on the wall. I went out and down the hall, looking for somebody. I found a nurse.

“Where is Madame Henry?”

“A lady has just gone to the delivery room.”

“Where is it?”

“I will show you.”

She took me down to the end of the hall. The door of the room was partly open. I could see Catherine lying on a table, covered by a sheet. The nurse was on one side and the doctor stood on the other side of the table beside some cylinders. The doctor held a rubber mask attached to a tube in one hand.

“I will give you a gown and you can go in,” the nurse said. “Come in here, please.”

She put a white gown on me and pinned it at the neck in back with a safety pin.

“Now you can go in,” she said. I went into the room.

“Hello, darling,” Catherine said in a strained voice. “I’m not doing much.”

“You are Mr. Henry?” the doctor asked.

“Yes. How is everything going, doctor?”

“Things are going very well,” the doctor said. “We came in here where it is easy to give gas for the pains.”

“I want it now,” Catherine said. The doctor placed the rubber mask over her face and turned a dial and I watched Catherine breathing deeply and rapidly. Then she pushed the mask away. The doctor shut off the petcock.

“That wasn’t a very big one. I had a very big one a while ago. The doctor made me go clear out, didn’t you, doctor?” Her voice was strange. It rose on the word doctor.

The doctor smiled.

“I want it again,” Catherine said. She held the rubber tight to her face and breathed fast. I heard her moaning a little. Then she pulled the mask away and smiled.

“That was a big one,” she said. “That was a very big one. Don’t you worry, darling. You go away. Go have another breakfast.”

“I’ll stay,” I said.

We had gone to the hospital about three o’clock in the morning. At noon Catherine was still in the delivery room. The pains had slackened again. She looked very tired and worn now but she was still cheerful.

“I’m not any good, darling,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I thought I would do it very easily. Now — there’s one—” she reached out her hand for the mask and held it over her face. The doctor moved the dial and watched her. In a little while it was over.

“It wasn’t much,” Catherine said. She smiled. “I’m a fool about the gas. It’s wonderful.”

“We’ll get some for the home,” I said.

“There one comes,” Catherine said quickly. The doctor turned the dial and looked at his watch.

“What is the interval now?” I asked.

“About a minute.”

“Don’t you want lunch?”

“I will have something pretty soon,” he said.

“You must have something to eat, doctor,” Catherine said. “I’m so sorry I go on so long. Couldn’t my husband give me the gas?”

“If you wish,” the doctor said. “You turn it to the numeral two.”

“I see,” I said. There was a marker on a dial that turned with a handle.

“I want it now,” Catherine said. She held the mask tight to her face. I turned the dial to number two and when Catherine put down the mask I turned it off. It was very good of the doctor to let me do something.

“Did you do it, darling?” Catherine asked. She stroked my wrist.

“Sure.”

“You’re so lovely.” She was a little drunk from the gas.

“I will eat from a tray in the next room,” the doctor said. “You can call me any moment.” While the time passed I watched him eat, then, after a while, I saw that he was lying down and smoking a cigarette. Catherine was getting very tired.

“Do you think I’ll ever have this baby?” she asked.

“Yes, of course you will.”

“I try as hard as I can. I push down but it goes away. There it comes. Give it to me.”

At two o’clock I went out and had lunch. There were a few men in the café sitting with coffee and glasses of kirsch or marc on the tables. I sat down at a table. “Can I eat?” I asked the waiter.

“It is past time for lunch.”

“Isn’t there anything for all hours?”

“You can have choucroute.”

“Give me choucroute and beer.”

“A demi or a bock?”

“A light demi.”

The waiter brought a dish of sauerkraut with a slice of ham over the top and a sausage buried in the hot wine-soaked cabbage. I ate it and drank the beer. I was very hungry. I watched the people at the tables in the café. At one table they were playing cards. Two men at the table next me were talking and smoking. The café was full of smoke. The zinc bar, where I had breakfasted, had three people behind it now; the old man, a plump woman in a black dress who sat behind a counter and kept track of everything served to the tables, and a boy in an apron. I wondered how many children the woman had and what it had been like.

When I was through with the choucroute I went back to the hospital. The street was all clean now. There were no refuse cans out. The day was cloudy but the sun was trying to come through.

I rode upstairs in the elevator, stepped out and went down the hall to Catherine’s room, where I had left my white gown. I put it on and pinned it in back at the neck. I looked in the glass and saw myself looking like a fake doctor with a beard. I went down the hall to the delivery room. The door was closed and I knocked. No one answered so I turned the handle and went in. The doctor sat by Catherine. The nurse was doing something at the other end of the room.

“Here is your husband,” the doctor said.

“Oh, darling, I have the most wonderful doctor,” Catherine said in a very strange voice. “He’s been telling me the most wonderful story and when the pain came too badly he put me all the way out. He’s wonderful. You’re wonderful, doctor.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“I know it,” Catherine said. “But you shouldn’t say it.” Then “Give it to me. Give it to me.” She clutched hold of the mask and breathed short and deep, pantingly, making the respirator click. Then she gave a long sigh and the doctor reached with his left hand and lifted away the mask.

“That was a very big one,” Catherine said. Her voice was very strange. “I’m not going to die now, darling. I’m past where I was going to die. Aren’t you glad?”

“Don’t you get in that place again.”

“I won’t. I’m not afraid of it though. I won’t die, darling.”

“You will not do any such foolishness,” the doctor said. “You would not die and leave your husband.”

“Oh, no. I won’t die. I wouldn’t die. It’s silly to die. There it comes. Give it to me.”

After a while the doctor said, “You will go out, Mr. Henry, for a few moments and I will make an examination.”

“He wants to see how I am doing,” Catherine said. “You can come back afterward, darling, can’t he, doctor?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. “I will send word when he can come back.”

I went out the door and down the hall to the room where Catherine was to be after the baby came. I sat in a chair there and looked at the room. I had the paper in my coat that I had bought when I went out for lunch and I read it. It was beginning to be dark outside and I turned the light on to read. After a while I stopped reading and turned off the light and watched it get dark outside. I wondered why the doctor did not send for me. Maybe it was better I was away. He probably wanted me away for a while. I looked at my watch. If he did not send for me in ten minutes I would go down anyway.

Poor, poor dear Cat. And this was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other. Thank God for gas, anyway. What must it have been like before there were anæsthetics? Once it started, they were in the mill-race. Catherine had a good time in the time of pregnancy. It wasn’t bad. She was hardly ever sick. She was not awfully uncomfortable until toward the last. So now they got her in the end. You never got away with anything. Get away hell! It would have been the same if we had been married fifty times. And what if she should die? She won’t die. People don’t die in childbirth nowadays. That was what all husbands thought. Yes, but what if she should die? She won’t die. She’s just having a bad time. The initial labor is usually protracted. She’s only having a bad time. Afterward we’d say what a bad time and Catherine would say it wasn’t really so bad. But what if she should die? She can’t die. Yes, but what if she should die? She can’t, I tell you. Don’t be a fool. It’s just a bad time. It’s just nature giving her hell. It’s only the first labor, which is almost always protracted. Yes, but what if she should die? She can’t die. Why would she die? What reason is there for her to die? There’s just a child that has to be born, the by-product of good nights in Milan. It makes trouble and is born and then you look after it and get fond of it maybe. But what if she should die? She won’t die. But what if she should die? She won’t. She’s all right. But what if she should die? She can’t die. But what if she should die? Hey, what about that? What if she should die?

The doctor came into the room.

“How does it go, doctor?”

“It doesn’t go,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. I made an examination—” He detailed the result of the examination. “Since then I’ve waited to see. But it doesn’t go.”

“What do you advise?”

“There are two things. Either a high forceps delivery which can tear and be quite dangerous besides being possibly bad for the child, and a Cæsarean.”

“What is the danger of a Cæsarean?” What if she should die!

“It should be no greater than the danger of an ordinary delivery.”

“Would you do it yourself?”

“Yes. I would need possibly an hour to get things ready and to get the people I would need. Perhaps a little less.”

“What do you think?”

“I would advise a Cæsarean operation. If it were my wife I would do a Cæsarean.”

“What are the after effects?”

“There are none. There is only the scar.”

“What about infection?”

“The danger is not so great as in a high forceps delivery.”

“What if you just went on and did nothing?”

“You would have to do something eventually. Mrs. Henry is already losing much of her strength. The sooner we operate now the safer.”

“Operate as soon as you can,” I said.

“I will go and give the instructions.”

I went into the delivery room. The nurse was with Catherine who lay on the table, big under the sheet, looking very pale and tired.

“Did you tell him he could do it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Isn’t that grand. Now it will be all over in an hour. I’m almost done, darling. I’m going all to pieces. Please give me that. It doesn’t work. Oh, it doesn’t work!”

“Breathe deeply.”

“I am. Oh, it doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t work!”

“Get another cylinder,” I said to the nurse.

“That is a new cylinder.”

“I’m just a fool, darling,” Catherine said. “But it doesn’t work any more.” She began to cry. “Oh, I wanted so to have this baby and not make trouble, and now I’m all done and all gone to pieces and it doesn’t work. Oh, darling, it doesn’t work at all. I don’t care if I die if it will only stop. Oh, please, darling, please make it stop. There it comes. Oh Oh Oh!” She breathed sobbingly in the mask. “It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Don’t mind me, darling. Please don’t cry. Don’t mind me. I’m just gone all to pieces. You poor sweet. I love you so and I’ll be good again. I’ll be good this time. Can’t they give me something? If they could only give me something.”

“I’ll make it work. I’ll turn it all the way.”

“Give it to me now.”

I turned the dial all the way and as she breathed hard and deep her hand relaxed on the mask. I shut off the gas and lifted the mask. She came back from a long way away.

“That was lovely, darling. Oh, you’re so good to me.”

“You be brave, because I can’t do that all the time. It might kill you.”

“I’m not brave any more, darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me. I know it now.”

“Everybody is that way.”

“But it’s awful. They just keep it up till they break you.”

“In an hour it will be over.”

“Isn’t that lovely? Darling, I won’t die, will I?”

“No. I promise you won’t.”

“Because I don’t want to die and leave you, but I get so tired of it and I feel I’m going to die.”

“Nonsense. Everybody feels that.”

“Sometimes I know I’m going to die.”

“You won’t. You can’t.”

“But what if I should?”

“I won’t let you.”

“Give it to me quick. Give it to me!”

Then afterward, “I won’t die. I won’t let myself die.”

“Of course you won’t.”

“You’ll stay with me?”

“Not to watch it.”

“No, just to be there.”

“Sure. I’ll be there all the time.”

“You’re so good to me. There, give it to me. Give me some more. It’s not working!”

I turned the dial to three and then four. I wished the doctor would come back. I was afraid of the numbers above two.

Finally a new doctor came in with two nurses and they lifted Catherine onto a wheeled stretcher and we started down the hall. The stretcher went rapidly down the hall and into the elevator where every one had to crowd against the wall to make room; then up, then an open door and out of the elevator and down the hall on rubber wheels to the operating room. I did not recognize the doctor with his cap and mask on. There was another doctor and more nurses.

“They’ve got to give me something,” Catherine said. “They’ve got to give me something. Oh please, doctor, give me enough to do some good!”

One of the doctors put a mask over her face and I looked through the door and saw the bright small amphitheatre of the operating room.

“You can go in the other door and sit up there,” a nurse said to me. There were benches behind a rail that looked down on the white table and the lights. I looked at Catherine. The mask was over her face and she was quiet now. They wheeled the stretcher forward. I turned away and walked down the hall. Two nurses were hurrying toward the entrance to the gallery.

“It’s a Cæsarean,” one said. “They’re going to do a Cæsarean.”

The other one laughed, “We’re just in time. Aren’t we lucky?” They went in the door that led to the gallery.

Another nurse came along. She was hurrying too.

“You go right in there. Go right in,” she said.

“I’m staying outside.”

She hurried in. I walked up and down the hall. I was afraid to go in. I looked out the window. It was dark but in the light from the window I could see it was raining. I went into a room at the far end of the hall and looked at the labels on bottles in a glass case. Then I came out and stood in the empty hall and watched the door of the operating room.

A doctor came out followed by a nurse. He held something in his two hands that looked like a freshly skinned rabbit and hurried across the corridor with it and in through another door. I went down to the door he had gone into and found them in the room doing things to a new-born child. The doctor held him up for me to see. He held him by the heels and slapped him.

“Is he all right?”

“He’s magnificent. He’ll weigh five kilos.”

I had no feeling for him. He did not seem to have anything to do with me. I felt no feeling of fatherhood.

“Aren’t you proud of your son?” the nurse asked. They were washing him and wrapping him in something. I saw the little dark face and dark hand, but I did not see him move or hear him cry. The doctor was doing something to him again. He looked upset.

“No,” I said. “He nearly killed his mother.”

“It isn’t the little darling’s fault. Didn’t you want a boy?”

“No,” I said. The doctor was busy with him. He held him up by the feet and slapped him. I did not wait to see it. I went out in the hall. I could go in now and see. I went in the door and a little way down the gallery. The nurses who were sitting at the rail motioned for me to come down where they were. I shook my head. I could see enough where I was.

I thought Catherine was dead. She looked dead. Her face was gray, the part of it that I could see. Down below, under the light, the doctor was sewing up the great long, forcep-spread, thick-edged wound. Another doctor in a mask gave the anæsthetic. Two nurses in masks handed things. It looked like a drawing of the Inquisition. I knew as I watched I could have watched it all, but I was glad I hadn’t. I do not think I could have watched them cut, but I watched the wound closed into a high welted ridge with quick skilful-looking stitches like a cobbler’s, and was glad. When the wound was closed I went out into the hall and walked up and down again. After a while the doctor came out.

“How is she?”

“She is all right. Did you watch?”

He looked tired.

“I saw you sew up. The incision looked very long.”

“You thought so?”

“Yes. Will that scar flatten out?”

“Oh, yes.”

After a while they brought out the wheeled stretcher and took it very rapidly down the hallway to the elevator. I went along beside it. Catherine was moaning. Downstairs they put her in the bed in her room. I sat in a chair at the foot of the bed. There was a nurse in the room. I got up and stood by the bed. It was dark in the room. Catherine put out her hand. “Hello, darling,” she said. Her voice was very weak and tired.

“Hello, you sweet.”

“What sort of baby was it?”

“Sh — don’t talk,” the nurse said.

“A boy. He’s long and wide and dark.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s fine.”

I saw the nurse look at me strangely.

“I’m awfully tired,” Catherine said. “And I hurt like hell. Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine. Don’t talk.”

“You were lovely to me. Oh, darling, I hurt dreadfully. What does he look like?”

“He looks like a skinned rabbit with a puckered-up old-man’s face.”

“You must go out,” the nurse said. “Madame Henry must not talk.”

“I’ll be outside.”

“Go and get something to eat.”

“No. I’ll be outside.” I kissed Catherine. She was very gray and weak and tired.

“May I speak to you?” I said to the nurse. She came out in the hall with me. I walked a little way down the hall.

“What’s the matter with the baby?” I asked.

“Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t alive.”

“He was dead?”

“They couldn’t start him breathing. The cord was caught around his neck or something.”

“So he’s dead.”

“Yes. It’s such a shame. He was such a fine big boy. I thought you knew.”

“No,” I said. “You better go back in with Madame.”

I sat down on the chair in front of a table where there were nurses’ reports hung on clips at the side and looked out of the window. I could see nothing but the dark and the rain falling across the light from the window. So that was it. The baby was dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized. But what if he never breathed at all. He hadn’t. He had never been alive. Except in Catherine. I’d felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn’t for a week. Maybe he was choked all the time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I’d been choked like that. No I didn’t. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

Once in camp I put a log on top of the fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the centre where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.

So now I sat out in the hall and waited to hear how Catherine was. The nurse did not come out, so after a while I went to the door and opened it very softly and looked in. I could not see at first because there was a bright light in the hall and it was dark in the room. Then I saw the nurse sitting by the bed and Catherine’s head on a pillow, and she was all flat under the sheet. The nurse put her finger to her lips, then stood up and came to the door.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She’s all right,” the nurse said. “You should go and have your supper and then come back if you wish.”

I went down the hall and then down the stairs and out the door of the hospital and down the dark street in the rain to the café. It was brightly lighted inside and there were many people at the tables. I did not see a place to sit, and a waiter came up to me and took my wet coat and hat and showed me a place at a table across from an elderly man who was drinking beer and reading the evening paper. I sat down and asked the waiter what the plat du jour was.

“Veal stew — but it is finished.”

“What can I have to eat?”

“Ham and eggs, eggs with cheese, or choucroute.”

“I had choucroute this noon,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said. “That’s true. You ate choucroute this noon.” He was a middle-aged man with a bald top to his head and his hair slicked over it. He had a kind face.

“What do you want? Ham and eggs or eggs with cheese?”

“Ham and eggs,” I said, “and beer.”

“A demi-blonde?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I remembered,” he said. “You took a demi-blonde this noon.”

I ate the ham and eggs and drank the beer. The ham and eggs were in a round dish — the ham underneath and the eggs on top. It was very hot and at the first mouthful I had to take a drink of beer to cool my mouth. I was hungry and I asked the waiter for another order. I drank several glasses of beer. I was not thinking at all but read the paper of the man opposite me. It was about the break through on the British front. When he realized I was reading the back of his paper he folded it over. I thought of asking the waiter for a paper, but I could not concentrate. It was hot in the café and the air was bad. Many of the people at the tables knew one another. There were several card games going on. The waiters were busy bringing drinks from the bar to the tables. Two men came in and could find no place to sit. They stood opposite the table where I was. I ordered another beer. I was not ready to leave yet. It was too soon to go back to the hospital. I tried not to think and to be perfectly calm. The men stood around but no one was leaving, so they went out. I drank another beer. There was quite a pile of saucers now on the table in front of me. The man opposite me had taken off his spectacles, put them away in a case, folded his paper and put it in his pocket and now sat holding his liqueur glass and looking out at the room. Suddenly I knew I had to get back. I called the waiter, paid the reckoning, got into my coat, put on my hat and started out the door. I walked through the rain up to the hospital.

Upstairs I met the nurse coming down the hall.

“I just called you at the hotel,” she said. Something dropped inside me.

“What is wrong?”

“Mrs. Henry has had a hemorrhage.”

“Can I go in?”

“No, not yet. The doctor is with her.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It is very dangerous.” The nurse went into the room and shut the door. I sat outside in the hall. Everything was gone inside of me. I did not think. I could not think. I knew she was going to die and I prayed that she would not. Don’t let her die. Oh, God, please don’t let her die. I’ll do anything for you if you won’t let her die. Please, please, please, dear God, don’t let her die. Dear God, don’t let her die. Please, please, please don’t let her die. God please make her not die. I’ll do anything you say if you don’t let her die. You took the baby but don’t let her die. That was all right but don’t let her die. Please, please, dear God, don’t let her die.

The nurse opened the door and motioned with her finger for me to come. I followed her into the room. Catherine did not look up when I came in. I went over to the side of the bed. The doctor was standing by the bed on the opposite side. Catherine looked at me and smiled. I bent down over the bed and started to cry.

“Poor darling,” Catherine said very softly. She looked gray.

“You’re all right, Cat,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

“I’m going to die,” she said; then waited and said, “I hate it.”

I took her hand.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. I let go of her hand. She smiled. “Poor darling. You touch me all you want.”

“You’ll be all right, Cat. I know you’ll be all right.”

“I meant to write you a letter to have if anything happened, but I didn’t do it.”

“Do you want me to get a priest or any one to come and see you?”

“Just you,” she said. Then a little later, “I’m not afraid. I just hate it.”

“You must not talk so much,” the doctor said.

“All right,” Catherine said.

“Do you want me to do anything, Cat? Can I get you anything?”

Catherine smiled, “No.” Then a little later, “You won’t do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?”

“Never.”

“I want you to have girls, though.”

“I don’t want them.”

“You are talking too much,” the doctor said. “Mr. Henry must go out. He can come back again later. You are not going to die. You must not be silly.”

“All right,” Catherine said. “I’ll come and stay with you nights,” she said. It was very hard for her to talk.

“Please go out of the room,” the doctor said. “You cannot talk.” Catherine winked at me, her face gray. “I’ll be right outside,” I said.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Catherine said. “I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.”

“You dear, brave sweet.”

I waited outside in the hall. I waited a long time. The nurse came to the door and came over to me. “I’m afraid Mrs. Henry is very ill,” she said. “I’m afraid for her.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, but she is unconscious.”

It seems she had one hemorrhage after another. They couldn’t stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die.

Outside the room, in the hall, I spoke to the doctor, “Is there anything I can do to-night?”

“No. There is nothing to do. Can I take you to your hotel?”

“No, thank you. I am going to stay here a while.”

“I know there is nothing to say. I cannot tell you — —”

“No,” I said. “There’s nothing to say.”

“Good-night,” he said. “I cannot take you to your hotel?”

“No, thank you.”

“It was the only thing to do,” he said. “The operation proved — —”

“I do not want to talk about it,” I said.

“I would like to take you to your hotel.”

“No, thank you.”

He went down the hall. I went to the door of the room.

“You can’t come in now,” one of the nurses said.

“Yes I can,” I said.

“You can’t come in yet.”

“You get out,” I said. “The other one too.”

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

THE END

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

First published by Scribner’s on 15 October 1937, the first edition of To Have and Have Not had a print run of ten thousand copies. The opening sections of the novel had been written as two short stories: the first titled ‘One Trip Across’ was published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1934 and ‘The Tradesman’s Return’ featured in the February 1936 edition of Esquire magazine. Hemingway decided to write a novel from these stories, which he completed by the autumn of 1937. The text was heavily revised after the author’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, as he was influenced by the struggle of the Republicans fighting against Franco’s fascist forces.

The narrative centres on Harry Morgan, who is struggling to earn a living in Depression era Florida. He owns a boat and runs the waters between Key West and Cuba, trying to make money in order to support his wife and children. Initially, he resists illegal offers to transport Cuban revolutionaries between the two countries, but after being cheated out of money by a wealthy customer, he feels he no longer has any choice but to participate in illegal activities. Morgan’s situation becomes increasingly dangerous and desperate and he emerges deeper into the criminal underworld in an effort to provide for his family. The title of the novel refers to the great economic troubles of the Depression, as Hemingway juxtaposes the lives of the ‘have nots’ to those of the wealthy tourists in Florida. The author employs an unusual narrative technique, attempting to show different perspectives on the characters. The split Cuban and American setting is an interesting feature of the text, as Hemingway manages to capture the sense of political and social turbulence that engulfed both countries during the 1930’s.

The novel is not considered to be one of Hemingway’s greatest works and it has been criticised for its lack of cohesion, which is likely to have been an effect of the disjointed writing process. However, despite it not being one of his more popular books, it still has been adapted for film multiple times. The first production was released in 1944, and starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; it was directed by Howard Hawks and he chose to alter the location and make significant changes to the narrative, which resulted in the emphasis being firmly placed on the romantic aspects of the novel rather than the political content. There was an interesting 1987 film adaptation by the Iranian director Nasser Taghvai, called Captain Khorshid, where the setting was moved from Cuba and Florida to the Persian Gulf.

The first edition, 1937

CONTENTS

PART ONE. HARRY MORGAN

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

PART TWO. HARRY MORGAN

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

PART THREE. HARRY MORGAN

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

Poster for the 1944 film adaptation

PART ONE. HARRY MORGAN

Spring

CHAPTER 1

You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? Well, we came across the square from the dock to the Pearl of San Francisco Café to get coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of the fountain. But when we got inside the café and sat down, there were the three of them waiting for us.

We sat down and one of them came over.

“Well,” he said.

“I can’t do it,” I told him. “I’d like to do it as a favor. But I told you last night I couldn’t.”

“You can name your own price.”

“It isn’t that. I can’t do it. That’s all.”

The two others had come over and they stood there looking sad. They were nice-looking fellows all right and I would have liked to have done them the favor.

“A thousand apiece,” said the one who spoke good English.

“Don’t make me feel bad,” I told him. “I tell you true I can’t do it.”

“Afterwards, when things are changed, it would mean a good deal to you.”

“I know it. I’m all for you. But I can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I make my living with the boat. If I lose her I lose my living.”

“With the money you buy another boat.”

“Not in jail.”

They must have thought I just needed to be argued into it because the one kept on.

“You would have three thousand dollars and it could mean a great deal to you later. All this will not last, you know.”

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t care who is president here. But I don’t carry anything to the states that can talk.”

“You mean we would talk?” one of them who hadn’t spoke said. He was angry.

“I said anything that can talk.”

“Do you think we are lenguas largas?”

“No.”

“Do you know what a lengua larga is?”

“Yes. One with a long tongue.”

“Do you know what we do with them?”

“Don’t be tough with me,” I said. “You propositioned me. I didn’t offer you anything.”

“Shut up, Pancho,” the one who had done the talking before said to the angry one.

“He said we would talk,” Pancho said.

“Listen,” I said. “I told you I didn’t carry anything that can talk. Sacked liquor can’t talk. Demijohns can’t talk. There’s other things that can’t talk. Men can talk.”

“Can Chinamen talk?” Pancho said, pretty nasty.

“They can talk but I can’t understand them,” I told him.

“So you won’t?”

“It’s just like I told you last night. I can’t.”

“But you won’t talk?” Pancho said.

The one thing that he hadn’t understood right had made him nasty. I guess it was disappointment, too. I didn’t even answer him.

“You’re not a lengua larga, are you?” he asked, still nasty.

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s that? A threat?”

“Listen,” I told him. “Don’t be so tough so early in the morning. I’m sure you’ve cut plenty people’s throats. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

“So you’re sure I’ve cut people’s throats?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t give a damn. Can’t you do business without getting angry?”

“I am angry now,” he said. “I would like to kill you.”

“Oh, hell,” I told him. “Don’t talk so much.”

“Come on, Pancho,” the first one said. Then, to me, “I am very sorry. I wish you would take us.”

“I’m sorry, too. But I can’t.”

The three of them started for the door, and I watched them go. They were good-looking young fellows, wore good clothes; none of them wore hats, and they looked like they had plenty of money. They talked plenty of money, anyway, and they spoke the kind of English Cubans with money speak.

Two of them looked like brothers and the other one, Pancho, was a little taller but the same sort of looking kid. You know, slim, good clothes, and shiny hair. I didn’t figure he was as mean as he talked. I figured he was plenty nervous.

As they turned out of the door to the right, I saw a closed car come across the square toward them. The first thing a pane of glass went and the bullet smashed into the row of bottles on the showcase wall to the right. I heard the gun going and, bop, bop, bop, there were bottles smashing all along the wall.

I jumped behind the bar on the left side and could see looking over the edge. The car was stopped and there were two fellows crouched down by it. One had a Thompson gun and the other had a sawed-off automatic shotgun. The one with the Thompson gun was a nigger. The other had a chauffeur’s white duster on.

One of the boys was spread out on the sidewalk, face down, just outside the big window that was smashed. The other two were behind one of the Tropical beer ice wagons that was stopped in front of the Cunard bar next door. One of the ice-wagon horses was down in the harness, kicking, and the other was plunging his head off.

One of the boys shot from the rear corner of the wagon and it ricocheted off the sidewalk. The nigger with the Tommy gun got his face almost into the street and gave the back of the wagon a burst from underneath and sure enough one came down, falling toward the sidewalk with his head above the curb. He flopped there, putting his hands over his head, and the chauffeur shot at him with the shotgun while the nigger put in a fresh pan; but it was a long shot. You could see the buckshot marks all over the sidewalk like silver splatters.

The other fellow pulled the one who was hit back by the legs to behind the wagon, and I saw the nigger getting his face down on the paving to give them another burst. Then I saw old Pancho come around the corner of the wagon and step into the lee of the horse that was still up. He stepped clear of the horse, his face white as a dirty sheet, and got the chauffeur with the big Luger he had; holding it in both hands to keep it steady. He shot twice over the nigger’s head, coming on, and once low.

He hit a tire on the car because I saw dust blowing in a spurt on the street as the air came out, and at ten feet the nigger shot him in the belly with the Tommy gun, with what must have been the last shot in it because I saw him throw it down, and old Pancho sat down hard and went over forwards. He was trying to come up, still holding onto the Luger, only he couldn’t get his head up, when the nigger took the shotgun that was lying against the wheel of the car by the chauffeur and blew the side of his head off. Some nigger.

I took a quick one out of the first bottle I saw open and I couldn’t tell you yet what it was. The whole thing made me feel pretty bad. I slipped along behind the bar and out through the kitchen in back and all the way out. I went clean around the outside of the square and never even looked over toward the crowd there was coming fast in front of the café and went in through the gate and out onto the dock and got on board.

The fellow who had her chartered was on board waiting. I told him what had happened.

“Where’s Eddy?” this fellow Johnson that had us chartered asked me.

“I never saw him after the shooting started.”

“Do you suppose he was hit?”

“Hell, no. I tell you the only shots that came in the café were into the showcase. That was when the car was coming behind them. That was when they shot the first fellow right in front of the window. They came at an angle like this — —”

“You seem awfully sure about it,” he said.

“I was watching,” I told him.

Then, as I looked up, I saw Eddy coming along the dock looking taller and sloppier than ever. He walked with his joints all slung wrong.

“There he is.”

Eddy looked pretty bad. He never looked too good early in the morning; but he looked pretty bad now.

“Where were you?” I asked him.

“On the floor.”

“Did you see it?” Johnson asked him.

“Don’t talk about it, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said to him. “It makes me sick to even think about it.”

“You better have a drink,” Johnson told him. Then he said to me, “Well, are we going out?”

“That’s up to you.”

“What sort of a day will it be?”

“Just about like yesterday. Maybe better.”

“Let’s get out, then.”

“All right, as soon as the bait comes.”

We’d had this bird out three weeks fishing the stream and I hadn’t seen any of his money yet except one hundred dollars he gave me to pay the consul, and clear, and get some grub, and put gas in her before we came across. I was furnishing all the tackle and he had her chartered at thirty-five dollars a day. He slept at a hotel and came aboard every morning. Eddy got me the charter so I had to carry him. I was giving him four dollars a day.

“I’ve got to put gas in her,” I told Johnson.

“All right.”

“I’ll need some money for that.”

“How much?”

“It’s twenty-eight cents a gallon. I ought to put in forty gallons anyway. That’s eleven-twenty.”

He got out fifteen dollars.

“Do you want to put the rest on the beer and the ice?” I asked him.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Just put it down against what I owe you.”

I was thinking three weeks was a long time to let him go, but if he was good for it what difference was there? He should have paid every week anyway. But I’ve let them run a month and got the money. It was my fault but I was glad to see it run at first. It was only the last few days he made me nervous but I didn’t want to say anything for fear of getting him plugged at me. If he was good for it, the longer he went the better.

“Have a bottle of beer?” he asked me, opening the box.

“No, thanks.”

Just then this nigger we had getting bait comes down the dock and I told Eddy to get ready to cast her off.

The nigger came on board with the bait and we cast off and started out of the harbor, the nigger fixing on a couple of mackerel; passing the hook through their mouth, out the gills, slitting the side and then putting the hook through the other side and out, tying the mouth shut on the wire leader and tying the hook good so it couldn’t slip and so the bait would troll smooth without spinning.

He’s a real black nigger, smart and gloomy, with blue voodoo beads around his neck under his shirt, and an old straw hat. What he liked to do on board was sleep and read the papers. But he put on a nice bait and he was fast.

“Can’t you put on a bait like that, captain?” Johnson asked me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you carry a nigger to do it?”

“When the big fish run you’ll see,” I told him.

“What’s the idea?”

“The nigger can do it faster than I can.”

“Can’t Eddy do it?”

“No, sir.”

“It seems an unnecessary expense to me.” He’d been giving the nigger a dollar a day and the nigger had been on a rumba every night. I could see him getting sleepy already.

“He’s necessary,” I said.

By then we had passed the smacks with their fish cars anchored in front of Cabañas and the skiffs anchored fishing for mutton fish on the rock bottom by the Morro, and I headed her out where the Gulf made a dark line. Eddy put the two big teasers out and the nigger had baits on three rods.

The stream was in almost to soundings and as we came toward the edge you could see her running nearly purple with regular whirlpools. There was a light east breeze coming up and we put up plenty of flying fish, those big ones with the black wings that look like the picture of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic when they sail off.

Those big flying fish are the best sign there is. As far as you could see, there was that faded yellow gulfweed in small patches that means the main stream is well in and there were birds ahead working over a school of little tuna. You could see them jumping; just little ones weighing a couple of pounds apiece.

“Put out any time you want,” I told Johnson.

He put on his belt and his harness and put out the big rod with the Hardy reel with six hundred yards of thirty-six thread. I looked back and his bait was trolling nice, just bouncing along on the swell, and the two teasers were diving and jumping. We were going just about the right speed and I headed her into the Stream.

“Keep the rod butt in the socket on the chair,” I told him. “Then the rod won’t be as heavy. Keep the drag off so you can slack to him when he hits. If one ever hits with the drag on he’ll jerk you overboard.”

Every day I’d have to tell him the same thing but I didn’t mind that. One out of fifty parties you get know how to fish. Then when they do know, half the time they’re goofy and want to use line that isn’t strong enough to hold anything big.

“How does the day look?” he asked me.

“It couldn’t be better,” I told him. It was a pretty day all right.

I gave the nigger the wheel and told him to work along the edge of the Stream to the eastward and went back to where Johnson was sitting watching his bait bouncing along.

“Want me to put out another rod?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I want to hook, fight, and land my fish myself.”

“Good,” I said. “Do you want Eddy to put it out and hand it to you if one strikes so you can hook him?”

“No,” he said. “I prefer to have only one rod out.”

“All right.”

The nigger was still taking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead and up the stream a little. Looking back, I could see Havana looking fine in the sun and a ship just coming out of the harbor past the Morro.

“I think you’re going to have a chance to fight one today, Mr. Johnson,” I told him.

“It’s about time,” he said. “How long have we been out?”

“Three weeks today.”

“That’s a long time to fish.”

“They’re a funny fish,” I told him. “They aren’t here until they come. But when they come there’s plenty of them. And they’ve always come. If they don’t come now they’re never coming. The moon is right. There’s a good stream and we’re going to have a good breeze.”

“There were some small ones when we first came.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like I told you. The small ones thin out and stop before the big ones come.”

“You party-boat captains always have the same line. Either it’s too early or too late or the wind isn’t right or the moon is wrong. But you take the money just the same.”

“Well,” I told him, “the hell of it is that it usually is too early or too late and plenty of time the wind is wrong. Then when you get a day that’s perfect you’re ashore without a party.”

“But you think today’s a good day?”

“Well,” I told him, “I’ve had action enough for me already today. But I’d like to bet you’re going to have plenty.”

“I hope so,” he said.

We settled down to troll. Eddy went forward and laid down. I was standing up watching for a tail to show. Every once in a while the nigger would doze off and I was watching him, too. I bet he had some nights.

“Would you mind getting me a bottle of beer, captain?” Johnson asked me.

“No, sir,” I said, and I dug down in the ice to get him a cold one.

“Won’t you have one?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said. “I’ll wait till tonight.”

I opened the bottle and was reaching it toward him when I saw this big brown buggar with a spear on him longer than your arm burst head and shoulders out of the water and smash at that mackerel. He looked as big around as a saw log.

“Slack it to him!” I yelled.

“He hasn’t got it,” Johnson said.

“Hold it, then.”

He’d come up from deep down and missed it. I knew he’d turn and come for it again.

“Get ready to turn it loose to him the minute he grabs it.”

Then I saw him coming from behind under water. You could see his fins out wide like purple wings and the purple stripes across the brown. He came on like a submarine and his top fin came out and you could see it slice the water. Then he came right behind the bait and his spear came out too, sort of wagging, clean out of water.

“Let it go into his mouth,” I said. Johnson took his hand off the reel spool and it started to whiz and the old marlin turned and went down and I could see the whole length of him shine bright silver as he turned broadside and headed off fast toward shore.

“Put on a little drag,” I said. “Not much.”

He screwed down on the drag.

“Not too much,” I said. I could see the line slant up. “Shut her down hard and sock him,” I said. “You’ve got to sock him. He’s going to jump anyway.”

Johnson screwed the drag down and came back on the rod.

“Sock him!” I told him. “Stick it into him. Hit him half a dozen times.”

He hit him pretty hard a couple of times more, and then the rod bent double and the reel commenced to screech and out he came, boom, in a long straight jump, shining silver in the sun and making a splash like throwing a horse off a cliff.

“Ease up on the drag,” I told him.

“He’s gone,” said Johnson.

“The hell he is,” I told him. “Ease up on the drag quick.”

I could see the curve in the line and the next time he jumped he was astern and headed out to sea. Then he came out again and smashed the water white and I could see he was hooked in the side of the mouth. The stripes showed clear on him. He was a fine fish bright silver now, barred with purple, and as big around as a log.

“He’s gone,” Johnson said. The line was slack.

“Reel on him,” I said. “He’s hooked good. Put her ahead with all the machine!” I yelled to the nigger.

Then once, twice, he came out stiff as a post, the whole length of him jumping straight toward us, throwing the water high each time he landed. The line came taut and I saw he was headed inshore again and I could see he was turning.

“Now he’ll make his run,” I said. “If he hooks up I’ll chase him. Keep your drag light. There’s plenty of line.”

The old marlin headed out to the nor’west like all the big ones go, and brother, did he hook up. He started jumping in those long lopes and every splash would be like a speed boat in a sea. We went after him, keeping him on the quarter once I’d made the turn. I had the wheel and I kept yelling to Johnson to keep his drag light and reel fast. All of a sudden I see his rod jerk and the line go slack. It wouldn’t look slack unless you knew about it because of the pull of the belly of the line in the water. But I knew.

“He’s gone,” I told him. The fish was still jumping and he went on jumping until he was out of sight. He was a fine fish all right.

“I can still feel him pull,” Johnson said.

“That’s the weight of the line.”

“I can hardly reel it. Maybe he’s dead.”

“Look at him,” I said. “He’s still jumping.” You could see him out a half a mile, still throwing spouts of water.

I felt his drag. He had it screwed down tight. You couldn’t pull out any line. It had to break.

“Didn’t I tell you to keep your drag light?”

“But he kept taking out line.”

“So what?”

“So I tightened it.”

“Listen,” I told him. “If you don’t give them line when they hook up like that they break it. There isn’t any line will hold them. When they want it you’ve got to give it to them. You have to keep a light drag. The market fishermen can’t hold them tight when they do that even with a harpoon line. What we have to do is use the boat to chase them so they don’t take it all when they make their run. After they make their run they’ll sound and you can tighten up the drag and get it back.”

“Then if it hadn’t broken I would have caught him?”

“You’d have had a chance.”

“He couldn’t have kept that up, could he?”

“He can do plenty of other things. It isn’t until after he’s made his run that the fight starts.”

“Well, let’s catch one,” he said.

“You have to reel that line in first,” I told him.

We’d hooked that fish and lost him without waking Eddy up. Now old Eddy came back astern.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

Eddy was a good man on a boat once, before he got to be a rummy, but he isn’t any good now. I looked at him standing there tall and hollow-cheeked with his mouth loose and that white stuff in the corners of his eyes and his hair all faded in the sun. I knew he woke up dead for a drink.

“You’d better drink a bottle of beer,” I told him. He took one out of the box and drank it.

“Well, Mr. Johnson,” he said, “I guess I better finish my nap. Much obliged for the beer, sir.” Some Eddy. The fish didn’t make any difference to him.

Well, we hooked another one around noon and he jumped off. You could see the hook go thirty feet in the air when he threw it.

“What did I do wrong then?” Johnson asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “He just threw it.”

“Mr. Johnson,” said Eddy, who’d waked up to have another bottle of beer— “Mr. Johnson, you’re just unlucky. Now maybe you’re lucky with women. Mr. Johnson, what do you say we go out tonight?” Then he went back and laid down again.

About four o’clock when we’re coming back close in to shore against the Stream; it going like a mill race, us with the sun at our backs; the biggest black marlin I ever saw in my life hit Johnson’s bait. We’d put out a feather squid and caught four of those little tuna and the nigger put one on his hook for bait. It trolled pretty heavy but it made a big splash in the wake.

Johnson took the harness off the reel so he could put the rod across his knees because his arms got tired holding it in position all the time. Because his hands got tired holding the spool of the reel against the drag of the big bait, he screwed the drag down when I wasn’t looking. I never knew he had it down. I didn’t like to see him hold the rod that way but I hated to be crabbing at him all the time. Besides, with the drag off, line would go out so there wasn’t any danger. But it was a sloppy way to fish.

I was at the wheel and was working the edge of the stream opposite that old cement factory where it makes deep so close in to shore and where it makes a sort of eddy where there is always lots of bait. Then I saw a splash like a depth bomb, and the sword, and eye, and open lower-jaw and huge purple-black head of a black marlin. The whole top fin was up out of water looking as high as a full-rigged ship, and the whole scythe tail was out as he smashed at that tuna. The bill was as big around as a baseball bat and slanted up, and as he grabbed the bait he sliced the ocean wide open. He was solid purple-black and he had an eye as big as a soup bowl. He was huge. I bet he’d go a thousand pounds.

I yelled to Johnson to let him have line but before I could say a word, I saw Johnson rise up in the air off the chair as though he was being derricked, and him holding just for a second onto that rod and the rod bending like a bow, and then the butt caught him in the belly and the whole works went overboard.

He’d screwed the drag tight, and when the fish struck, it lifted Johnson right out of the chair and he couldn’t hold it. He’d had the butt under one leg and the rod across his lap. If he’d had the harness on it would have taken him along, too.

I cut out the engine and went back to the stern. He was sitting there holding onto his belly where the rod butt had hit him.

“I guess that’s enough for today,” I said.

“What was it?” he said to me.

“Black marlin,” I said.

“How did it happen?”

“You figure it out,” I said. “The reel cost two hundred and fifty dollars. It costs more now. The rod cost me forty-five. There was a little under six hundred yards of thirty-six thread.”

Just then Eddy slaps him on the back. “Mr. Johnson,” he says, “you’re just unlucky. You know I never saw that happen before in my life.”

“Shut up, you rummy,” I said to him.

“I tell you, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said, “that’s the rarest occurrence I ever saw in my life.”

“What would I do if I was hooked to a fish like that?” Johnson said.

“That’s what you wanted to fight all by yourself,” I told him. I was plenty sore.

“They’re too big,” Johnson said. “Why, it would just be punishment.”

“Listen,” I said. “A fish like that would kill you.”

“They catch them.”

“People who know how to fish catch them. But don’t think they don’t take punishment.”

“I saw a picture of a girl who caught one.”

“Sure,” I said. “Still fishing. He swallowed the bait and they pulled his stomach out and he came to the top and died. I’m talking about trolling for them when they’re hooked in the mouth.”

“Well,” said Johnson, “they’re too big. If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it?”

“That’s right, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it? Listen, Mr. Johnson. You hit the nail on the head there. If it isn’t enjoyable — why do it?”

I was still shaky from seeing that fish and feeling plenty sick about the tackle and I couldn’t listen to them. I told the nigger to head her for the Morro. I didn’t say anything to them and there they sat, Eddy in one of the chairs with a bottle of beer and Johnson with another.

“Captain,” he said to me after a while, “could you make me a highball?”

I made him one without saying anything, and then I made myself a real one. I was thinking to myself that this Johnson had fished fifteen days, finally he hooks into a fish a fisherman would give a year to tie into, he loses him, he loses my heavy tackle, he makes a fool of himself and he sits there perfectly content, drinking with a rummy.

When we got in to the dock and the nigger was standing there waiting, I said, “What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so,” Johnson said. “I’m about fed up with this kind of fishing.”

“You want to pay off the nigger?”

“How much do I owe him?”

“A dollar. You can give him a tip if you want.”

So Johnson gave the nigger a dollar and two Cuban twenty-cent pieces.

“What’s this for?” the nigger asks me, showing the coins.

“A tip,” I told him in Spanish. “You’re through. He gives you that.”

“Don’t come tomorrow?”

“No.”

The nigger gets his ball of twine he used for tying baits and his dark glasses, puts on his straw hat and goes without saying good-by. He was a nigger that never thought much of any of us.

“When do you want to settle up, Mr. Johnson?” I asked him.

“I’ll go to the bank in the morning,” Johnson said. “We can settle up in the afternoon.”

“Do you know how many days there are?”

“Fifteen.”

“No. There’s sixteen with today and a day each way makes eighteen. Then there’s the rod and reel and the line from today.”

“The tackle’s your risk.”

“No, sir. Not when you lose it that way.”

“I’ve paid every day for the rent of it. It’s your risk.”

“No, sir,” I said. “If a fish broke it and it wasn’t your fault, that would be something else. You lost that whole outfit by carelessness.”

“The fish pulled it out of my hands.”

“Because you had the drag on and didn’t have the rod in the socket.”

“You have no business to charge for that.”

“If you hired a car and ran it off a cliff, don’t you think you’d have to pay for it?”

“Not if I was in it,” Johnson said.

“That’s pretty good, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “You see it, don’t you, cap? If he was in it he’d be killed. So he wouldn’t have to pay. That’s a good one.”

I didn’t pay any attention to the rummy. “You owe two hundred and ninety-five dollars for that rod and reel and line,” I told Johnson.

“Well, it’s not right,” he said. “But if that’s the way you feel about it why not split the difference?”

“I can’t replace it for under three hundred and sixty. I’m not charging you for the line. A fish like that could get all your line and it not be your fault. If there was any one here but a rummy they’d tell you how square I’m being with you. I know it seems like a lot of money but it was a lot of money when I bought the tackle, too. You can’t fish fish like that without the best tackle you can buy.”

“Mr. Johnson, he says I’m a rummy. Maybe I am. But I tell you he’s right. He’s right and he’s reasonable,” Eddy told him.

“I don’t want to make any difficulties,” Johnson said finally. “I’ll pay for it, even though I don’t see it. That’s eighteen days at thirty-five dollars and two ninety-five extra.”

“You gave me a hundred,” I told him. “I’ll give you a list of what I spent and I’ll deduct what grub there is left. What you bought for provisions going over and back.”

“That’s reasonable,” Johnson said.

“Listen, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “If you knew the way they usually charge a stranger you’d know it was more than reasonable. Do you know what it is? It’s exceptional. The Cap is treating you like you were his own mother.”

“I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and come down in the afternoon. Then I’ll get the boat day after tomorrow.”

“You can go back with us and save the boat fare.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll save time with the boat.”

“Well,” I said. “What about a drink?”

“Fine,” said Johnson. “No hard feelings now, are there?”

“No, sir,” I told him. So the three of us sat there in the stern and drank a highball together.

The next day I worked around her all morning, changing the oil in her base and one thing and another. At noon I went uptown and ate at a Chink place where you get a good meal for forty cents, and then I bought some things to take home to my wife and our three girls. You know, perfume, a couple of fans and three of those high combs. When I finished I stopped in at Donovan’s and had a beer and talked with the old man and then walked back to the San Francisco docks, stopping in at three or four places for a beer on the way. I bought Frankie a couple at the Cunard bar and I came on board feeling pretty good. When I came on board I had just forty cents left. Frankie came on board with me, and while we sat and waited for Johnson I drank a couple of cold ones out of the ice box with Frankie.

Eddy hadn’t shown up all night or all day but I knew he would be around sooner or later, as soon as his credit ran out. Donovan told me he’d been in there the night before a little while with Johnson, and Eddy had been setting them up on credit. We waited and I began to wonder about Johnson not showing up. I’d left word at the dock for them to tell him to go on board and wait for me but they said he hadn’t come. Still, I figured he had been out late and probably didn’t get up till around noon. The banks were open until three-thirty. We saw the plane go out, and about five-thirty I was all over feeling good and was getting plenty worried.

At six o’clock I sent Frankie up to the hotel to see if Johnson was there. I still thought he might be out on a time or he might be there at the hotel feeling too bad to get up. I kept waiting and waiting until it was late. But I was getting plenty worried because he owed me eight hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Frankie was gone about a little over half an hour. When I saw him coming he was walking fast and shaking his head.

“He went on the plane,” he said.

All right. There it was. The consulate was closed. I had forty cents, and, anyhow, the plane was in Miami by now. I couldn’t even send a wire. Some Mr. Johnson, all right. It was my fault. I should have known better.

“Well,” I said to Frankie, “we might as well have a cold one. Mr. Johnson bought them.” There were three bottles of Tropical left.

Frankie felt as bad as I did. I don’t know how he could but he seemed to. He just kept slapping me on the back and shaking his head.

So there it was. I was broke. I’d lost five hundred and thirty dollars of the charter, and tackle I couldn’t replace for three hundred and fifty more. How some of that gang that hangs around the dock would be pleased at that, I thought. It certainly would make some Conchs happy. And the day before I turned down three thousand dollars to land three aliens on the Keys. Anywhere, just to get them out of the country.

All right, what was I going to do now? I couldn’t bring in a load because you have to have money to buy the booze and besides there’s no money in it any more. The town is flooded with it and there’s nobody to buy it. But I was damned if I was going home broke and starve a summer in that town. Besides I’ve got a family. The clearance was paid when we came in. You usually pay the broker in advance and he enters you and clears you. Hell, I didn’t even have enough money to put in gas. It was a hell of a note, all right. Some Mr. Johnson.

“I’ve got to carry something, Frankie,” I said. “I’ve got to make some money.”

“I’ll see,” said Frankie. He hangs around the water front and does odd jobs and is pretty deaf and drinks too much every night. But you never saw a fellow more loyal nor with a better heart. I’ve known him since I first started to run over there. He used to help me load plenty of times. Then when I quit handling stuff and went party-boating and broke out this swordfishing in Cuba I used to see him a lot around the dock and around the café. He seems dumb and he usually smiles instead of talking, but that’s because he’s deaf.

“You carry anything?” Frankie asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I can’t choose now.”

“Anything?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll see,” Frankie said. “Where will you be?”

“I’ll be at the Perla,” I told him. “I have to eat.”

You can get a good meal at the Perla for twenty-five cents. Everything on the menu is a dime except soup, and that is a nickel. I walked as far as there with Frankie, and I went in and he went on. Before he went he shook me by the hand and clapped me on the back again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Me Frankie; much politics. Much business. Much drinking. No money. But big friend. Don’t worry.”

“So long, Frankie,” I said. “Don’t you worry either, boy.”

CHAPTER 2

I went in the Perla and sat down at a table. They had a new pane of glass in the window that had been shot up and the showcase was all fixed up. There were a lot of gallegos drinking at the bar, and some eating. One table was playing dominoes already. I had black bean soup and a beef stew with boiled potatoes for fifteen cents. A bottle of Hatuey beer brought it up to a quarter. When I spoke to the waiter about the shooting he wouldn’t say anything. They were all plenty scared.

I finished the meal and sat back and smoked a cigarette and worried my head off. Then I saw Frankie coming in the door with some one behind him. Yellow stuff, I thought to myself. So it’s yellow stuff.

“This is Mr. Sing,” Frankie said, and smiled. He’d been pretty fast all right and he knew it.

“How do you do?” said Mr. Sing.

Mr. Sing was about the smoothest-looking thing I’d ever seen. He was a Chink all right, but he talked like an Englishman and he was dressed in a white suit with a silk shirt and black tie and one of those hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar Panama hats.

“You will have some coffee?” he asked me.

“If you do.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Sing. “We are quite alone here?”

“Except for everybody in the café,” I told him.

“That is all right,” Mr. Sing said. “You have a boat?”

“Thirty-eight feet,” I said. “Hundred horse Kermath.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Sing. “I had imagined it was something bigger.”

“It can carry two hundred and sixty-five cases without being loaded.”

“Would you care to charter it to me?”

“On what terms?”

“You need not go. I will provide a captain and a crew.”

“No,” I said. “I go on her wherever she goes.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “Would you mind leaving us?” he said to Frankie. Frankie looked as interested as ever and smiled at him.

“He’s deaf,” I said. “He doesn’t understand much English.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “You speak Spanish. Tell him to rejoin us later.”

I motioned to Frankie with my thumb. He got up and went over to the bar.

“You don’t speak Spanish?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Sing. “Now what are the circumstances that would — that have made you consider…”

“I’m broke.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “Does the boat owe any money? Can she be libeled?”

“No.”

“Quite so,” Mr. Sing said. “How many of my unfortunate compatriots could your boat accommodate?”

“You mean carry?”

“That’s it.”

“How far?”

“A day’s voyage.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She can take a dozen if they didn’t have any baggage.”

“They would not have baggage.”

“Where do you want to carry them?”

“I’d leave that to you,” Mr. Sing said.

“You mean where to land them?”

“You would embark them for the Tortugas where a schooner would pick them up.”

“Listen,” I said. “There’s a lighthouse at the Tortugas on Loggerhead Key with a radio that works both ways.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Sing. “It would certainly be very silly to land them there.”

“Then what?”

“I said you would embark them for there. That is what their passage calls for.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You would land them wherever your best judgment dictated.”

“Will the schooner come to Tortugas to get them?”

“Of course not,” said Mr. Sing. “How silly.”

“How much are they worth a head?”

“Fifty dollars,” said Mr. Sing.

“No.”

“How would seventy-five do?”

“What do you get a head?”

“Oh, that’s quite beside the point. You see, there are a great many facets, or you would say angles, to my issuing the tickets. It doesn’t stop there.”

“Yes,” I said. “And what I’m supposed to do doesn’t have to be paid for, either. Eh?”

“I see your point absolutely,” said Mr. Sing. “Should we say a hundred dollars apiece?”

“Listen,” I said. “Do you know how long I would go to jail if they pick me up on this?”

“Ten years,” said Mr. Sing. “Ten years at least. But there is no reason to go to jail, my dear captain. You run only one risk — when you load your passengers. Everything else is left to your discretion.”

“And if they come back on your hands?”

“That’s quite simple. I would accuse you to them of having betrayed me. I will make a partial refund and ship them out again. They realize, of course, that it is a difficult voyage.”

“What about me?”

“I suppose I should send some word to the consulate.”

“I see.”

“Twelve hundred dollars, Captain, is not to be despised at present.”

“When would I get the money?”

“Two hundred when you agree and a thousand when you load.”

“Suppose I went off with the two hundred?”

“I could do nothing, of course,” he smiled. “But I know you wouldn’t do such a thing, Captain.”

“Have you got the two hundred with you?”

“Of course.”

“Put it under the plate.” He did.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll clear in the morning and pull out at dark. Now, where do we load?”

“How would Bacuranao be?”

“All right. Have you got it fixed?”

“Of course.”

“Now, about the loading,” I said. “You show two lights, one above the other, at the point. I’ll come in when I see them. You come out in a boat and load from the boat. You come yourself and you bring the money. I won’t take one on board until I have it.”

“No,” he said, “one-half when you start to load and the other when you are finished.”

“All right,” I said. “That’s reasonable.”

“So everything is understood?”

“I guess so,” I said. “There’s no baggage and no arms. No guns, knives, or razors; nothing. I have to know about that.”

“Captain,” said Mr. Sing, “have you no trust in me? Don’t you see our interests are identical?”

“You’ll make sure?”

“Please do not embarrass me,” he said. “Do you not see how our interests coincide?”

“All right,” I told him. “What time will you be there?”

“Before midnight.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess that’s all.”

“How do you want the money?”

“In hundreds is all right.”

He stood up and I watched him go out. Frankie smiled at him as he went. Mr. Sing didn’t look at him. He was a smooth-looking Chink all right. Some Chink.

Frankie came over to the table. “Well?” he said.

“Where did you know Mr. Sing?”

“He ships Chinamen,” Frankie said. “Big business.”

“How long you know him?”

“He’s here about two years,” Frankie said. “Another one ship them before him. Somebody kill him.”

“Somebody will kill Mr. Sing, too.”

“Sure,” said Frankie. “Why not? Plenty big business.”

“Some business,” I said.

“Big business,” said Frankie. “Ship Chinamen never come back. Other Chinamen write letters say everything fine.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“This kind of Chinamen no understand write. Chinamen can write all rich. Eat nothing. Live on rice. Hundred thousand Chinamen here. Only three Chinese women.”

“Why?”

“Government no let.”

“Hell of a situation,” I said.

“You do business him?”

“Maybe.”

“Good business,” said Frankie. “Better than politics. Much money. Plenty big business.”

“Have a bottle of beer,” I told him.

“You not worry any more?”

“Hell no,” I said. “Plenty big business. Much obliged.”

“Good,” said Frankie and patted me on the back. “Make me happier than nothing. All I want is you happy. Chinamen good business, eh?”

“Wonderful.”

“Make me happy,” said Frankie. I saw he was about ready to cry because he was so pleased everything was all right, so I patted him on the back. Some Frankie.

First thing in the morning I got hold of the broker and told him to clear us. He wanted the crew list and I told him nobody.

“You’re going to cross alone, Captain?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s become of your mate?”

“He’s on a drunk,” I told him.

“It’s very dangerous to go alone.”

“It’s only ninety miles,” I said. “Do you think having a rummy on board makes any difference?”

I ran her over to the Standard Oil dock across the harbor and filled up both the tanks. She held nearly two hundred gallons when I had her full. I hated to buy it at twenty-eight cents a gallon but I didn’t know where we might go.

Ever since I’d seen the Chink and taken the money I’d been worrying about the business. I don’t think I slept all night. I brought her back to the San Francisco dock, and there was Eddy waiting on the dock for me.

“Hello, Harry,” he said to me and waved. I threw him the stern line and he made her fast and then came aboard; longer, blearier, drunker than ever. I didn’t say anything to him.

“What do you think about that fellow Johnson going off like that, Harry?” he asked me. “What do you know about that?”

“Get out of here,” I told him. “You’re poison to me.”

“Brother, don’t I feel as bad about it as you do?”

“Get off of her,” I told him.

He just settled back in the chair and stretched his legs out. “I hear we’re going across today,” he said. “Well, I guess there isn’t any use to stay around.”

“You’re not going.”

“What’s the matter, Harry? There’s no sense to get plugged with me.”

“No? Get off her.”

“Oh, take it easy.”

I hit him in the face and he stood up and then climbed up onto the dock.

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, Harry,” he said.

“You’re goddamn right you wouldn’t,” I told him. “I’m not going to carry you. That’s all.”

“Well, what did you have to hit me for?”

“So you’d believe it.”

“What do you want me to do? Stay here and starve?”

“Starve, hell,” I said. “You can get back on the ferry. You can work your way back.”

“You aren’t treating me square,” he said.

“Who did you ever treat square, you rummy?” I told him. “You’d double-cross your own mother.”

That was true, too. But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. But I wouldn’t carry him the way things were now; not even if I wanted to.

He started to walk off down the dock looking longer than a day without breakfast. Then he turned and came back.

“How’s to let me take a couple of dollars, Harry?”

I gave him a five-dollar bill of the Chink’s.

“I always knew you were my pal. Harry, why don’t you carry me?”

“You’re bad luck.”

“You’re just plugged,” he said. “Never mind, old pal. You’ll be glad to see me yet.”

Now he had money he went off a good deal faster but I tell you it was poison to see him walk, even. He walked just like his joints were backwards.

I went up to the Perla and met the broker and he gave me the papers and I bought him a drink. Then I had lunch and Frankie came in.

“Fellow gave me this for you,” he said and handed me a rolled-up sort of tube wrapped in paper and tied with a piece of red string. It looked like a photograph when I unwrapped it and I unrolled it thinking it was maybe a picture some one around the dock had taken of the boat.

All right. It was a close-up picture of the head and chest of a dead nigger with his throat cut clear across from ear to ear and then stitched up neat and a card on his chest saying in Spanish: “This is what we do to lenguas largas.”

“Who gave it to you?” I asked Frankie.

He pointed out a Spanish boy that works around the docks who is just about gone with the con. This kid was standing at the lunch counter.

“Ask him to come over.”

The kid came over. He said two young fellows gave it to him about eleven o’clock. They asked him if he knew me and he said, Yes. Then he gave it to Frankie for me. They gave him a dollar to see that I got it. They were well dressed, he said.

“Politics,” Frankie said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“They think you told the police you were meeting those boys here that morning.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Good thing you go.”

“Did they leave any message?” I asked the Spanish boy.

“No,” he said. “Just to give you that.”

“I’m going to leave now,” I said to Frankie.

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Very bad politics.”

I had all the papers in a bunch that the broker had given me and I paid the bill and walked out of that café and across the square and through the gate and I was plenty glad to come through the warehouse and get out on the dock. Those kids had me spooked all right. They were just dumb enough to think I’d tipped somebody off about that other lot. Those kids were like Pancho. When they were scared they got excited, and when they got excited they wanted to kill somebody.

I got on board and warmed up the engine. Frankie stood on the dock watching. He was smiling that funny deaf smile. I went back to him.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t you get in any trouble about this.”

He couldn’t hear me. I had to yell it at him.

“Me good politics,” Frankie said. He cast her off.

CHAPTER 3

I waved to Frankie, who’d thrown the bowline on board, and I headed her out of the slip and dropped down the channel with her. A British freighter was going out and I ran along beside her and passed her. She was loaded deep with sugar and her plates were rusty. A limey in an old blue sweater looked down at me from her stern as I went by her. I went out the harbor and past the Morro and put her on the course for Key West; due north. I left the wheel and went forward and coiled up the bowline and then came back and held her on her course, spreading Havana out astern, and then dropping it off behind us as we brought the mountains up.

I dropped the Morro out of sight after a while and then the National Hotel and finally I could just see the dome of the Capitol. There wasn’t much current compared to the last day we had fished and there was only a light breeze. I saw a couple of smacks headed in toward Havana and they were coming from the westward, so I knew the current was light.

I cut the switch and killed the motor. There wasn’t any sense in wasting gas. I’d let her drift. When it got dark I could always pick up the light of the Morro or, if she drifted up too far, the lights of Cojimar, and steer in and run along to Bacuranao. I figured the way the current looked she would drift the twelve miles up to Bacuranao by dark and I’d see the lights of Baracoa.

Well, I killed the engine and climbed up forward to have a look around. All there was to see was the two smacks off to the westward headed in, and way back the dome of the Capitol standing up white out of the edge of the sea. There was some gulfweed on the Stream and a few birds working, but not many. I sat up there awhile on top of the house and watched, but the only fish I saw were those little brown ones that use around the gulfweed. Brother, don’t let anybody tell you there isn’t plenty of water between Havana and Key West. I was just on the edge of it.

After a while I went down into the cockpit again, and there was Eddy.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter with the engine?”

“She broke down.”

“Why haven’t you got the hatch up?”

“Oh, hell!” I said.

Do you know what he’d done? He’d come back again and slipped the forward hatch and gone down into the cabin and gone to sleep. He had two quarts with him. He’d gone into the first bodega he’d seen and bought it and come aboard. When I started out he woke up and went back to sleep again. When I stopped her out in the gulf and she began to roll a little with the swell it woke him up.

“I knew you’d carry me, Harry,” he said.

“Carry you to hell,” I said. “You aren’t even on the crew list. I’ve got a good mind to make you jump overboard now.”

“You’re an old joker, Harry,” he said. “Us Conchs ought to stick together when we’re in trouble.”

“You,” I said, “with your mouth. Who’s going to trust your mouth when you’re hot?”

“I’m a good man, Harry. You put me to the test and see what a good man I am.”

“Get me the two quarts,” I told him. I was thinking of something else.

He brought them out and I took a drink from the open one and put them forward by the wheel. He stood there and I looked at him. I was sorry for him and for what I knew I’d have to do. Hell, I knew him when he was a good man.

“What’s the matter with her, Harry?”

“She’s all right.”

“What’s the matter, then? What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Brother,” I told him, and I was sorry for him, “you’re in plenty of trouble.”

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t got it all figured out yet.”

We sat there awhile and I didn’t feel like talking to him any more. Once I knew it, it was hard to talk to him. Then I went below and got out the pump-gun and the Winchester .30–30 that I always had below in the cabin and hung them up in their cases from the top of the house where we hung the rods usually, right over the wheel where I could reach them. I keep them in those full-length, clipped sheep’s wool cases with the wool inside soaked in oil. That’s the only way you can keep them from rusting on a boat.

I loosened up the pump and worked her a few times, and then filled her up and pumped one into the barrel. I put a shell in the chamber of the Winchester and filled up the magazine. I got out the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami from under the mattress and cleaned and oiled it and filled it up and put it on my belt.

“What’s the matter?” Eddy said. “What the hell’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I told him.

“What’s all the damn guns for?”

“I always carry them on board,” I said. “To shoot birds that bother the baits or to shoot sharks, or for cruising along the keys.”

“What’s the matter, damn it?” said Eddy. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I told him. I sat there with the old thirty-eight flopping against my leg when she rolled, and I looked at him. I thought, there’s no sense to do it now. I’m going to need him now.

“We’re going to do a little job,” I said. “In at Bacuranao. I’ll tell you what to do when it’s time.”

I didn’t want to tell him too far ahead because he would get to worrying and get so spooked he wouldn’t be any use.

“You couldn’t have anybody better than me, Harry,” he said. “I’m the man for you. I’m with you on anything.”

I looked at him, tall and bleary and shaky, and I didn’t say anything.

“Listen, Harry. Would you give me just one?” he asked me. “I don’t want to get the shakes.”

I gave him one and we sat and waited for it to get dark. It was a fine sunset and there was a nice light breeze, and when the sun got pretty well down I started the engine and headed her in slow toward land.

CHAPTER 4

We lay offshore about a mile in the dark. The current had freshened up, with the sun down, and I noticed it running in. I could see the Morro light way down to the westward and the glow of Havana, and the lights opposite us were Rincõn and Baracoa. I headed her up against the current until I was past Bacuranao and nearly to Cojimar. Then I let her drift down. It was plenty dark but I could tell good where we were. I had all the lights out.

“What’s it going to be, Harry?” Eddy asked me. He was beginning to be spooked again.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got me worried.” He was pretty close to the shakes and when he came near me he had a breath like a buzzard.

“What time is it?”

“I’ll go down and see,” he said. He came back up and said it was half past nine.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “You know I couldn’t eat, Harry.”

“All right,” I told him. “You can have one.”

After he had it I asked him how he felt. He said he felt fine.

“I’m going to give you a couple more in a little while,” I told him. “I know you haven’t got any cojones unless you’ve got rum and there isn’t much on board. So you’d better go easy.”

“Tell me what’s up,” said Eddy.

“Listen,” I said, talking to him in the dark. “We’re going to Bacuranao and pick up twelve Chinks. You take the wheel when I tell you to and do what I tell you to. We’ll take the twelve Chinks on board and we’ll lock them below forward. Go on forward now and fasten the hatch from the outside.”

He went up and I saw him shadowed against the dark. He came back and he said, “Harry, can I have one of those now?”

“No,” I said. “I want you rum-brave. I don’t want you useless.”

“I’m a good man, Harry. You’ll see.”

“You’re a rummy,” I said. “Listen. One Chink is going to bring those twelve out. He’s going to give me some money at the start. When they’re all on board he’s going to give me some more money. When you see him start to hand me money the second time you put her ahead and hook her up and head her out to sea. Don’t you pay any attention to what happens. You keep her going out no matter what happens. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If any Chink starts bursting out of the cabin or coming through the hatch, once we’re out and under way, you take that pump-gun and blow them back as fast as they come out. Do you know how to use the pump-gun?”

“No. But you can show me.”

“You’d never remember. Do you know how to use the Winchester?”

“Just pump the lever and shoot it.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Only don’t shoot any holes in the hull.”

“You’d better give me that other drink,” Eddy said.

“All right. I’ll give you a little one.”

I gave him a real one. I knew they wouldn’t make him drunk now; not pouring them into all that fear. But each one would work for a little while. After he drank this Eddy said, just as though he was happy, “So we’re going to run Chinks. Well, by God, I always said I’d run Chinamen if I was ever broke.”

“But you never got broke before, eh?” I said to him. He was funny all right.

I gave him three more drinks to keep him brave before it was half past ten. It was funny watching him and it kept me from thinking about it myself. I hadn’t figured on all this wait. I’d planned to leave after dark, run out, just out of the glare, and coast along to Cojimar.

At a little before eleven I saw the two lights show on the point. I waited a little while and then I took her in slow. Bacuranao is a cove where there used to be a big dock for loading sand. There is a little river that comes in when the rains open the bar across the mouth. The northers, in the winter, pile the sand up and close it. They used to go in with schooners and load guavas from the river and there used to be a town. But the hurricane took it and it is all gone now except one house that some Gallegos built out of the shacks the hurricane blew down and that they use for a clubhouse on Sundays when they come out to swim and picnic from Havana. There is one other house where the delegate lives but it is back from the beach.

Each little place like that all down the coast has a government delegate, but I figured the Chink must use his own boat and have him fixed. As we came in I could smell the sea grape and that sweet smell from the brush you get off the land.

“Get up forward,” I said to Eddy.

“You can’t hit anything on that side,” he said. “The reef’s on the other side as you go in.” You see, he’d been a good man once.

“Watch her,” I said, and I took her in to where I know they could see us. With no surf they could hear the engine. I didn’t want to wait around, not knowing whether they saw us or not, so I flashed the running lights on once, just the green and red, and turned them off. Then I turned her and headed her out and let her lay there, just outside, with the engine just ticking. There was quite a little swell that close in.

“Come on back here,” I said to Eddy and I gave him a real drink.

“Do you cock it first with your thumb?” he whispered to me. He was sitting at the wheel now, and I had reached up and had both the cases open and the butts pulled out about six inches.

“That’s right.”

“Oh, boy,” he said.

It certainly was wonderful what a drink would do to him and how quick.

We lay there and I could see a light from the delegate’s house back through the brush. I saw the two lights on the point go down, and one of them moving off around the point. They must have blown the other one out.

Then, in a little while, coming out of the cove, I see a boat come toward us with a man sculling. I could tell by the way he swung back and forth. I knew he had a big oar. I was pretty pleased. If they were sculling that meant one man.

They came alongside.

“Good evening, captain,” said Mr. Sing.

“Come astern and put her broadside,” I said to him.

He said something to the kid who was sculling but he couldn’t scull her backwards, so I took hold of the gunwale and passed her astern. There were eight men in the boat. The six Chinks, Mr. Sing, and the kid sculling. While I was pulling her astern I was waiting for something to hit me on top of the head but nothing did. I straightened up and let Mr. Sing hold onto the stern.

“Let’s see what it looks like,” I said.

He handed it to me and I took the roll of it up to where Eddy was at the wheel and put on the binnacle light. I looked at it carefully. It looked all right to me and I turned off the light. Eddy was trembling.

“Pour yourself one,” I said. I saw him reach for the bottle and tip it up.

I went back to the stern.

“All right,” I said. “Let six come on board.”

Mr. Sing and the Cuban that sculled were having a job holding their boat from knocking in what little swell there was. I heard Mr. Sing say something in Chink and all the Chinks in the boat started to climb onto the stern.

“One at a time,” I said.

He said something again, and then one after another six Chinks came over the stern. They were all lengths and sizes.

“Show them forward,” I said to Eddy.

“Right this way, gentlemen,” said Eddy. By God, I knew he had taken a big one.

“Lock the cabin,” I said, when they were all in.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

“I will return with the others,” said Mr. Sing.

“O.K.,” I told him.

I pushed them clear and the boy with him started sculling off.

“Listen,” I said to Eddy. “You lay off that bottle. You’re brave enough now.”

“O.K., chief,” said Eddy.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“This is what I like to do,” said Eddy. “You say you just pull it backward with your thumb?”

“You lousy rummy,” I told him. “Give me a drink out of that.”

“All gone,” said Eddy. “Sorry, chief.”

“Listen. What you have to do now is watch when he hands me the money and put her ahead.”

“O.K., chief,” said Eddy.

I reached up and took the other bottle and got the corkscrew and drew the cork. I took a good drink and went back to the stern, putting the cork in tight and laying the bottle behind two wicker jugs full of water.

“Here comes Mr. Sing,” I said to Eddy.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

The boat came out sculling toward us.

He brought her astern and I let them do the holding on. Mr. Sing had hold of the roller we had across the stern to slide a big fish aboard.

“Let them come aboard,” I said, “one at a time.”

Six more assorted Chinks came on board over the stern.

“Open up and show them forward,” I told Eddy.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

“Lock the cabin.”

“Yes, sir.”

I saw he was at the wheel.

“All right, Mr. Sing,” I said. “Let’s see the rest of it.”

He put his hand in his pocket and reached the money out toward me. I reached for it and grabbed his wrist with the money in his hand, and as he came forward on the stern I grabbed his throat with the other hand. I felt her start and then churn ahead as she hooked up and I was plenty busy with Mr. Sing but I could see the Cuban standing in the stern of the boat holding the sculling oar as we pulled away from her through all the flopping and bouncing Mr. Sing was doing. He was flopping and bouncing worse than any dolphin on a gaff.

I got his arm around behind him and came up on it but I brought it too far because I felt it go. When it went he made a funny little noise and came forward, me holding him throat and all, and bit me in the shoulder. But when I felt the arm go I dropped it. It wasn’t any good to him any more and I took him by the throat with both hands, and brother, that Mr. Sing would flop just like a fish, true, his loose arm flailing. But I got him forward onto his knees and had both thumbs well in behind his talk-box, and I bent the whole thing back until she cracked. Don’t think you can’t hear it crack, either.

I held him quiet just a second, and then I laid him down across the stern. He lay there, face up, quiet, in his good clothes, with his feet in the cockpit; and I left him.

I picked up the money off the cockpit floor and took it up and put on the binnacle light and counted it. Then I took the wheel and told Eddy to look under the stern for some pieces of iron that I used for anchoring whenever we fished bottom-fishing on patches or rocky bottom where you wouldn’t want to risk an anchor.

“I can’t find anything,” he said. He was scared being down there by Mr. Sing.

“Take the wheel,” I said. “Keep her out.”

There was a certain amount of moving around going on below but I wasn’t spooked about them.

I found a couple of pieces of what I wanted, iron from the old coaling dock at Tortugas, and I took some snapper line and made a couple of good big pieces fast to Mr. Sing’s ankles. Then when we were about two miles offshore I slid him over. He slid over smooth off the roller. I never even looked in his pockets. I didn’t feel like fooling with him.

He’d bled a little on the stern from his nose and his mouth, and I dipped a bucket of water that nearly pulled me overboard the way we were going, and cleaned her off good with a scrub brush from under the stern.

“Slow her down,” I said to Eddy.

“What if he floats up?” Eddy said.

“I dropped him in about seven hundred fathoms,” I said. “He’s going down all that way. That’s a long way, brother. He won’t float till the gas brings him up and all the time he’s going with the current and baiting up fish. Hell,” I said, “you don’t have to worry about Mr. Sing.”

“What did you have against him?” Eddy asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “He was the easiest man to do business with I ever met. I thought there must be something wrong all the time.”

“What did you kill him for?”

“To keep from killing twelve other Chinks,” I told him.

“Harry,” he said, “you’ve got to give me one because I can feel them coming on. It made me sick to see his head all loose like that.”

So I gave him one.

“What about the Chinks?” Eddy said.

“I want to get them out as quick as I can,” I told him. “Before they smell up the cabin.”

“Where are you going to put them?”

“We’ll run them right in to the long beach,” I told him.

“Take her in now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Take her in slow.”

We came in slow over the reef and to where I could see the beach shine. There is plenty of water over the reef and inside it’s all sandy bottom and slopes right into shore.

“Get up forward and give me the depth.”

He kept sounding with a grains pole, motioning me on with the pole. He came back and motioned me to stop. I came astern on her.

“You’ve got about five feet.”

“We’ve got to anchor,” I said. “If anything happens so we haven’t time to get her up, we can cut loose or break her off.”

Eddy paid out rope and when finally she didn’t drag he made her fast. She swung stern in.

“It’s sandy bottom, you know,” he said.

“How much water have we got at the stern?”

“Not over five feet.”

“You take the rifle,” I said. “And be careful.”

“Let me have one,” he said. He was plenty nervous.

I gave him one and took down the pump-gun. I unlocked the cabin door, opened it, and said: “Come on out.”

Nothing happened.

Then one Chink put his head out and saw Eddy standing there with a rifle and ducked back.

“Come on out. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said.

Nothing doing. Only lots of talk in Chink.

“Come on out, you!” Eddy said. My God, I knew he’d had the bottle.

“Put that bottle away,” I said to him, “or I’ll blow you out of the boat.”

“Come on out,” I said to them, “or I’ll shoot in at you.”

I saw one of them looking at the corner of the door and he saw the beach evidently because he begins to chatter.

“Come on,” I said, “or I’ll shoot.”

Out they came.

Now I tell you it would take a hell of a mean man to butcher a bunch of Chinks like that and I’ll bet there would be plenty of trouble, too, let alone mess.

They came out and they were scared and they didn’t have any guns but there were twelve of them. I walked backwards down to the stern holding the pump-gun. “Get overboard,” I said. “It’s not over your heads.”

Nobody moved.

“Over you go.”

Nobody moved.

“You yellow rat-eating aliens,” Eddy said, “get overboard.”

“Shut your drunken mouth,” I told him.

“No swim,” one Chink said.

“No need swim,” I said. “No deep.”

“Come on, get overboard,” Eddy said.

“Come astern here,” I said. “Take your gun in one hand and your grain pole in the other and show them how deep it is.”

He showed them, holding up the wet pole.

“No need swim?” the one asked me.

“No.”

“True?”

“Yes.”

“Where we?”

“Cuba.”

“You damn crook,” he said and went over the side, hanging on and then letting go. His head went under but he came up and his chin was out of water. “Damn crook,” he said. “Goddamn crook.”

He was mad and plenty brave. He said something in Chink and the others started going into the water off the stern.

“All right,” I said to Eddy. “Get the anchor up.”

As we headed her out, the moon started to come up, and you could see the Chinks with just their heads out of water, walking ashore, and the shine of the beach and the brush behind.

We got out past the reef and I looked back once and saw the beach and the mountains starting to show up; then I put her on her course for Key West.

“Now you can take a sleep,” I said to Eddy. “No, wait, go below and open all the ports to get the stink out and bring me the iodine.”

“What’s the matter?” he said when he brought it.

“I cut my finger.”

“Do you want me to steer?”

“Get a sleep,” I said. “I’ll wake you up.”

He lay down on the built-in bunk in the cockpit, over the gas tank, and in a little while he was asleep.

CHAPTER 5

I held the wheel with my knee and opened up my shirt and saw where Mr. Sing bit me. It was quite a bite and I put iodine on it, and then I sat there steering and wondering whether a bite from a Chinaman was poisonous, and listened to her running nice and smooth and the water washing along her and I figured, Hell, no, that bite wasn’t poisonous. A man like that Mr. Sing probably scrubbed his teeth two or three times a day. Some Mr. Sing. He certainly wasn’t much of a business man. Maybe he was. Maybe he just trusted me. I tell you I couldn’t figure him.

Well, now it was all simple except for Eddy. Because he’s a rummy he’ll talk when he gets hot. I sat there steering and I looked at him and I thought, hell, he’s as well off dead as the way he is, and then I’m all clear. When I found he was on board I decided I’d have to do away with him but then when everything had come out so nice I didn’t have the heart. But looking at him lying there it certainly was a temptation. But then I thought there’s no sense spoiling it by doing something you’d be sorry for afterwards. Then I started to think he wasn’t even on the crew list and I’d have to pay a fine for bringing him in and I didn’t know how to consider him.

Well, I had plenty of time to think about it and I held her on her course and every once in a while I’d take a drink out of the bottle he’d brought on board. There wasn’t much in it, and when I’d finished it, I opened up the only one I had left, and I tell you I felt pretty good steering, and it was a pretty night to cross. It had turned out a good trip all right, finally, even though it had looked plenty bad plenty of times.

When it got daylight Eddy woke up. He said he felt terrible.

“Take the wheel a minute,” I told him. “I want to look around.”

I went back to the stern and threw a little water on her. But she was perfectly clean. I scrubbed the brush over the side. I unloaded the guns and stowed them below. But I still kept the gun on my belt. It was fresh and nice as you want it below, no smell at all. A little water had come in through the starboard port onto one of the bunks was all; so I shut the ports. There wasn’t a customhouse officer in the world could smell Chink in her now.

I saw the clearance papers in the net bag hanging up under her framed license where I’d shoved them when I came on board and I took them out to look them over. Then I went up to the cockpit.

“Listen,” I said. “How did you get on the crew list?”

“I met the broker when he was leaving for the consulate and told him I was going.”

“God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below.

I made some coffee down below and then I came up and took the wheel.

“There’s coffee below,” I told him.

“Brother, coffee wouldn’t do me any good.” You know you had to be sorry for him. He certainly looked bad.

About nine o’clock we saw the Sand Key light just about dead ahead. We’d seen tankers going up the Gulf for quite a while.

“We’ll be in in a couple of hours now,” I said to him. “I’m going to give you the same four dollars a day just as if Johnson had paid.”

“How much did you get out of last night?” he asked me.

“Only six hundred,” I told him.

I don’t know whether he believed me or not.

“Don’t I share in it?”

“That’s your share,” I told him. “What I just told you, and if you ever open your mouth about last night I’ll hear of it and I’ll do away with you.”

“You know I’m no squealer, Harry.”

“You’re a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.”

“I’m a good man,” he said. “You oughtn’t to talk to me like that.”

“They can’t make it fast enough to keep you a good man,” I told him. But I didn’t worry about him any more because who was going to believe him? Mr. Sing wouldn’t make any complaints. The Chinks weren’t going to. You know the boy that sculled them out wasn’t. He wouldn’t want to get himself in trouble. Eddy would mouth about it sooner or later, maybe, but who believes a rummy?

Why, who could prove anything? Naturally it would have made plenty more talk when they saw his name on the crew list. That was luck for me, all right. I could have said he fell overboard, but it makes plenty talk. Plenty of luck for Eddy, too. Plenty of luck, all right.

Then we came to the edge of the stream and the water quit being blue and was light and greenish and inside I could see the stakes on the Eastern and the Western Dry Rocks and the wireless masts at Key West and the La Concha hotel up high out of all the low houses and plenty smoke from out where they’re burning garbage. Sand Key light was plenty close now and you could see the boathouse and the little dock alongside the light and I knew we were only forty minutes away now and I felt good to be getting back and I had a good stake now for the summertime.

“What do you say about a drink, Eddy?” I said to him.

“Ah, Harry,” he said, “I always knew you were my pal.”

That night I was sitting in the living room smoking a cigar and drinking a whiskey and water and listening to Gracie Allen on the radio. The girls had gone to the show and sitting there I felt sleepy and I felt good. There was somebody at the front door and Marie, my wife, got up from where she was sitting and went to it. She came back and said, “It’s that rummy, Eddy Marshall. He says he’s got to see you.”

“Tell him to get out before I run him out,” I told her.

She came back in and sat down and looking out the window where I was sitting with my feet up I could see Eddy going along the road under the arc light with another rummy he’d picked up, the two of them swaying, and their shadows from the arc light swaying worse.

“Poor goddamned rummies,” Marie said. “I pity a rummy.”

“He’s a lucky rummy.”

“There ain’t any lucky rummies,” Marie said. “You know that, Harry.”

“No,” I said. “I guess there aren’t.”

PART TWO. HARRY MORGAN

Fall

CHAPTER 6

They came on across in the night and it blew a big breeze from the northwest. When the sun was up he sighted a tanker coming down the Gulf and she stood up so high and white with the sun on her in that cold air it looked like tall buildings rising out of the sea and he said to the nigger, “Where the hell are we?”

The nigger raised himself up to look.

“Ain’t nothing like that this side of Miami.”

“You know damn well we ain’t been carried up to no Miami,” he told the nigger.

“All I say ain’t no buildings like that on no Florida Keys.”

“We’ve been steering for Sand Key.”

“We got to see it then. It or American shoals.”

Then in a little while he saw it was a tanker and not buildings and then in less than an hour he saw Sand Key light, straight, thin and brown rising out of the sea right where it ought to be.

“You got to have confidence steering,” he told the nigger.

“I got confidence,” the nigger said. “But the way this trip gone I ain’t got confidence no more.”

“How’s your leg?”

“It hurts me all the time.”

“It ain’t nothing,” the man said. “You keep it clean and wrapped up and it’ll heal by its-self.”

He was steering to the westward now to go in to lay up for the day in the mangroves by Woman Key where he would not see anybody and where the boat was to come out to meet them.

“You’re going to be all right,” he told the nigger.

“I don’t know,” the nigger said. “I hurt bad.”

“I’m going to fix you up good when we get in to the place,” he told him. “You aren’t shot bad. Quit worrying.”

“I’m shot,” he said. “I ain’t never been shot before. Any way I’m shot is bad.”

“You’re just scared.”

“No, sir. I’m shot. And I’m hurting bad. I’ve been throbbing all night.”

The nigger went on grumbling like that and he could not keep from taking the bandage off to look at it.

“Leave it alone,” the man who was steering told him. The nigger lay on the floor of the cockpit and there were sacks of liquor, shaped like hams, piled everywhere. He had made himself a place in them to lay down in. Every time he moved there was the noise of broken glass in the sacks and there was the odor of spilled liquor. The liquor had run all over everything. The man was steering in for Woman Key now. He could see it now plainly.

“I hurt,” the nigger said. “I hurt worse all the time.”

“I’m sorry, Wesley,” the man said. “But I got to steer.”

“You treat a man no better than a dog,” the nigger said. He was getting ugly now. But the man was still sorry for him.

“I’m going to make you comfortable, Wesley,” he said. “You lay quiet now.”

“You don’t care what happens to a man,” the nigger said. “You ain’t hardly human.”

“I’m going to fix you up good,” the man said. “You just lay quiet.”

“You ain’t going to fix me up,” the nigger said. The man, whose name was Harry Morgan, said nothing then because he liked the nigger and there was nothing to do now but hit him, and he couldn’t hit him. The nigger kept on talking.

“Why didn’t we stop when they started shooting?”

The man did not answer.

“Ain’t a man’s life worth more than a load of liquor?”

The man was intent on his steering.

“All we have to do is stop and let them take the liquor.”

“No,” the man said. “They take the liquor and the boat and you go to jail.”

“I don’t mind jail,” the nigger said. “But I never wanted to get shot.”

He was getting on the man’s nerves now and the man was becoming tired of hearing him talk.

“Who the hell’s shot worse?” he asked him. “You or me?”

“You’re shot worse,” the nigger said. “But I ain’t never been shot. I didn’t figure to get shot. I ain’t paid to get shot. I don’t want to be shot.”

“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him. “It don’t do you any good to talk like that.”

They were coming up on the Key now. They were inside the shoals and as he headed her into the channel it was hard to see with the sun on the water. The nigger was going out of his head, or becoming religious because he was hurt; anyway he was talking all the time.

“Why they run liquor now?” he said. “Prohibition’s over. Why they keep up a traffic like that? Whyn’t they bring the liquor in on the ferry?”

The man steering was watching the channel closely.

“Why don’t people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?”

The man saw where the water was rippling smooth off the bank even when he could not see the bank in the sun and he turned her off. He swung her around, spinning the wheel with one arm, and then the channel opened out and he took her slowly right up to the edge of the mangroves. He came astern on the engines and threw out the two clutches.

“I can put an anchor down,” he said. “But I can’t get no anchor up.”

“I can’t even move,” the nigger said.

“You’re certainly in a hell of a shape,” the man told him.

He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting, and dropping the small anchor but he got it over and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.

All night after he had dressed the nigger’s wound and the nigger had bandaged his arm he had been watching the compass, steering, and when it came daylight he had seen the nigger laying there in the sacks in the middle of the cockpit, but then he was watching the seas and the compass and looking for the Sand Key light and he had never observed carefully how things were. Things were bad.

The nigger was lying in the middle of the load of sacked liquor with his leg up. There were eight bullet holes through the cockpit splintered wide. The glass was broken in the windshield. He did not know how much stuff was smashed and wherever the nigger had not bled, he, himself, had bled. But the worst thing, the way he felt at the moment, was the smell of booze. Everything was soaked in it. Now the boat was lying quietly against the mangroves but he could not stop feeling the motion of the big sea they had been in all night in the Gulf.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” he told the nigger. “Then I’ll fix you up again.”

“I don’t want no coffee.”

“I do,” the man told him. But down below he began to feel dizzy so he came out on deck again.

“I guess we won’t have coffee,” he said.

“I want some water.”

“All right.”

He gave the negro a cup of water out of a demijohn.

“Why you want to keep on running for when they started to shoot?”

“Why they want to shoot?” the man answered.

“I want a doctor,” the nigger told him.

“What’s a doctor going to do that I ain’t done for you?”

“Doctor going to cure me.”

“You’ll have a doctor tonight when the boat comes out.”

“I don’t want to wait for no boat.”

“All right,” the man said. “We’re going to dump this liquor now.”

He started to dump it and it was hard work one handed. A sack of liquor only weighs forty pounds but he had not dumped very many of them before he became dizzy again. He sat down in the cockpit and then he lay down.

“You going to kill youself,” the nigger said.

The man lay quietly in the cockpit with his head against one of the sacks. The branches of the mangroves had come into the cockpit and they made a shadow over him where he lay. He could hear the wind above the mangroves and looking out at the high, cold sky, see the thin-blown clouds of the norther.

“Nobody going to come out with this breeze,” he thought. “They won’t look for us to have started with this blowing.”

“You think they’ll come out?” the nigger asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Why not?”

“It’s blowing too hard.”

“They’re looking for us.”

“Not with it like this. What you want to lie to me for?” The nigger was talking with his mouth almost against a sack.

“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him.

“Take it easy, the man says,” the nigger went on. “Take it easy. Take what easy? Take dyin’ like a dog easy? You got me here. Get me out.”

“Take it easy,” the man said, kindly.

“They ain’t coming,” the nigger said. “I know they ain’t coming. I’m cold, I tell you. I can’t stand this pain and cold, I tell you.”

The man sat up feeling hollow and unsteady. The nigger’s eyes watched him as he rose on one knee, his right arm dangling, took the hand of his right arm in his left hand and placed it between his knees and then pulled himself up by the plank nailed above the gunwale until he stood, looking down, down at the nigger, his right hand still held between his thighs. He was thinking that he had never really felt pain before.

“If I keep it out straight, pulled out straight, it don’t hurt so bad,” he said.

“Let me tie it up in a sling,” the nigger said.

“I can’t make a bend in the elbow,” the man said. “It stiffened that way.”

“What we going to do?”

“Dump this liquor,” the man told him. “Can’t you put over what you can reach, Wesley?”

The nigger tried to move to reach a sack, then groaned and lay back.

“Do you hurt that bad, Wesley?”

“Oh, God,” the nigger said.

“You don’t think once you moved it, it wouldn’t hurt so bad?”

“I’m shot,” the nigger said. “I ain’t going to move. The man wants me to go to dumpin’ liquor when I’m shot.”

“Take it easy.”

“You say that once more I go crazy.”

“Take it easy,” the man said quietly.

The nigger made a howling noise and, shuffling with his hands on the deck, picked up the whetstone from under the coaming.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll cut your heart out.”

“Not with no whetstone,” the man said. “Take it easy, Wesley.”

The nigger blubbered with his face against a sack. The man went on slowly lifting the sacked packages of liquor and dropping them over the side.

CHAPTER 7

While he was dumping the liquor he heard the sound of a motor and looking saw a boat headed toward them, coming down the channel around the end of the key. It was a white boat with a buff painted house and a windshield.

“Boat coming,” he said. “Come on, Wesley.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m remembering from now on,” the man said. “Before was different.”

“Go ahead and remember,” the nigger told him. “I ain’t forgot nothing either.”

Working fast now, the sweat running down his face, not stopping to watch the boat coming slowly down the channel, the man picked up the sacked packages of liquor with his good arm and dropped them over the side.

“Roll over,” he reached for the package under the nigger’s head and swung it over the side. The nigger sat up.

“Here they are,” he said. The boat was almost abeam of them.

“It’s Captain Willie,” the nigger said. “With a party.”

In the stern of the white boat two men in flannels and white cloth hats sat in fishing chairs trolling and an old man in a felt hat and a windbreaker held the tiller and steered the boat close past the mangroves where the booze boat lay.

“What do you say, Harry?” the old man called as he passed. The man called Harry waved his good arm in reply. The boat went on past, the two men who were fishing looking towards the booze boat and talking to the old man. Harry could not hear what they were saying.

“He’ll make a turn at the mouth and come back,” Harry said to the negro. He went below and came up with a blanket. “Let me cover you up.”

“‘Bout time you cover me up. They couldn’t help but see that liquor. What we goin’ to do?”

“Willie’s a good skate,” the man said. “He’ll tell them in town we’re out here. Those fellows fishing ain’t going to bother us. What they care about us?”

He felt very shaky now and he sat down on the steering seat and held his right arm tight between his thighs. His knees were shaking and with the shaking he could feel the ends of the bone in his upper arm grate. He opened his knees, lifted his arm out, and let it hang by his side. He was sitting there, his arm hanging, when the boat passed them coming back up the channel. The two men in the fishing chairs were talking. They had put up their rods and one of them was looking at him through a pair of glasses. They were too far out for him to hear what they were saying. It would not have helped him if he had.

On board the charter boat South Florida, trolling down the Woman Key channel, because it was too rough to go out to the reef, Captain Willie Adams was thinking, so Harry crossed last night. That boy’s got cojones. He must have got that whole blow. She’s a sea boat all right. How you suppose he smashed his windshield? Damned if I’d cross a night like last night. Damned if I’d ever run liquor from Cuba. They bring it all from Mariel now. It’s supposed to be wide open. “What’s that you say, Cap?”

“What boat is that?” asked one of the men in the fishing chairs.

“That boat?”

“Yes, that boat.”

“Oh, that’s a Key West boat.”

“What I said was, whose boat is it?”

“I wouldn’t know that, Cap.”

“Is the owner a fisherman?”

“Well, some say he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“He does a little of everything.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No, sir.”

“You called him Harry.”

“Not me.”

“I heard you call him Harry.”

Captain Willie Adams took a good look at the man who was speaking to him. He saw a high-cheekboned, thin-lipped, very ruddy face with deep set gray eyes and a contemptuous mouth looking at him from under a white canvas hat.

“I must have called him that by mistake,” Captain Willie said.

“You can see that the man is wounded, Doctor,” the other man said, handing the glasses to his companion.

“I can see that without glasses,” the man addressed as Doctor said. “Who is that man?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Captain Willie.

“Well, you will know,” the man with the contemptuous mouth said. “Write down the numbers on the bow.”

“I have them, Doctor.”

“We’ll go over and have a look,” the Doctor said.

“Are you a doctor?” Captain Willie asked.

“Not of medicine,” the gray-eyed man told him.

“If you’re not a medical doctor I wouldn’t go over there.”

“Why not?”

“If he wanted us he would have signalled us. If he don’t want us it’s none of our business. Down here everybody aims to mind their own business.”

“All right. Suppose you mind yours then. Take us over to that boat.”

Captain Willie continued on his way up the channel, the two-cylinder Palmer coughing steadily.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why don’t you obey my order?”

“Who the hell you think you are?” asked Captain Willie.

“That’s not the question. Do as I tell you.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“All right. For your information, I’m one of the three most important men in the United States today.”

“What the hell you doing in Key West, then?”

The other man leaned forward. “He’s Frederick Harrison,” he said impressively.

“I never heard of him,” said Captain Willie.

“Well, you will,” said Frederick Harrison. “And so will every one in this stinking jerkwater little town if I have to grub it out by the roots.”

“You’re a nice fellow,” said Captain Willie. “How did you get so important?”

“He’s one of the biggest men in the administration,” said the other man.

“Nuts,” said Captain Willie. “If he’s all that what’s he doing in Key West?”

“He’s just here for a rest,” the secretary explained. “He’s going to be governor-general of—”

“That’s enough, Willis,” Frederick Harrison said. “Now will you take us over to that boat,” he said smiling. He had a smile which was reserved for such occasions.

“No, sir.”

“Listen, you half-witted fisherman. I’ll make life so miserable for you — —”

“Yes,” said Captain Willie.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“None of it don’t mean anything to me,” said Captain Willie.

“That man is a bootlegger, isn’t he?”

“What do you think?”

“There’s probably a reward for him.”

“I doubt that.”

“He’s a lawbreaker.”

“He’s got a family and he’s got to eat and feed them. Who the hell do you eat off of with people working here in Key West for the government for six dollars and a half a week?”

“He’s wounded. That means he’s been in trouble.”

“Unless he shot hisself for fun.”

“You can save that sarcasm. You’re going over to that boat and we’re going to take that man and that boat into custody.”

“Into where?”

“Into Key West.”

“Are you an officer?”

“I’ve told you who he is,” the secretary said.

“All right,” said Captain Willie. He pushed the tiller hard over and turned the boat, coming so close to the edge of the channel that the propeller threw up a circling cloud of marl. He chugged down the channel toward where the other boat lay against the mangroves.

“Have you a gun aboard?” Frederick Harrison asked Captain Willie.

“No, sir.”

The two men in flannels were standing up now watching the booze boat.

“This is better fun than fishing, eh, Doctor?” the secretary said.

“Fishing is nonsense,” said Frederick Harrison. “If you catch a sailfish what do you do with it? You can’t eat it. This is really interesting. I’m glad to see this at first hand. Wounded as he is that man cannot escape. It’s too rough at sea. We know his boat.”

“You’re really capturing him single-handed,” said the secretary admiringly.

“And unarmed, too,” said Frederick Harrison.

“With no G men nonsense,” said the secretary.

“Edgar Hoover exaggerates his publicity,” said Frederick Harrison. “I feel we’ve given him about enough rope. Pull alongside,” he said to Captain Willie. Captain Willie threw out his clutch and the boat drifted.

“Hey,” Captain Willie called to the other boat. “Keep your heads down.”

“What’s that?” Harrison said angrily.

“Shut up,” said Captain Willie. “Hey,” he called over to the other boat. “Listen. Get on into town and take it easy. Never mind the boat. They’ll take the boat. Dump your load and get into town. I got a guy here on board some kind of a stool from Washington. More important than the president, he says. He wants to pinch you. He thinks you’re a bootlegger. He’s got the numbers of the boat. I ain’t never seen you so I don’t know who you are. I couldn’t identify you—”

The boats had drifted apart. Captain Willie went on shouting, “I don’t know where this place is where I seen you. I wouldn’t know how to get back here.”

“O.K.,” came a shout from the booze boat.

“I’m taking this big alphabet man fishing until dark,” Captain Willie shouted.

“O.K.”

“He loves to fish,” Captain Willie yelled, his voice almost breaking. “But the son of a bitch claims you can’t eat ‘em.”

“Thanks, brother,” came the voice of Harry.

“That chap your brother?” asked Frederick Harrison, his face very red but his love for information still unappeased.

“No, sir,” said Captain Willie. “Most everybody goes in boats calls each other brother.”

“We’ll go into Key West,” Frederick Harrison said; but he said it without great conviction.

“No, sir,” said Captain Willie. “You gentlemen chartered me for a day. I’m going to see you get your money’s worth. You called me a halfwit but I’ll see you get a full day’s charter.”

“Take us to Key West,” Harrison said.

“Yes, sir,” said Captain Willie. “Later on. But listen, sailfish is just as good eating as kingfish. When we used to sell them to Rios for the Havana market we got ten cents a pound same as kings.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Frederick Harrison.

“I thought you’d be interested in these things as a government man. Ain’t you mixed up in the prices of things that we eat or something? Ain’t that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits cost more and the grunts less?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Harrison.

CHAPTER 8

On the booze boat Harry had the last sack over.

“Get me the fish knife,” he said to the nigger.

“It’s gone.”

Harry pressed the self starters and started the two engines. He’d put a second engine in her when he went back to running liquor when the depression had put charter boat fishing on the bum. He got the hatchet and with his left hand chopped the anchor rope through against the bitt. It’ll sink and they’ll grapple it when they pick up the load, he thought. I’ll run her up into the Garrison Bight and if they’re going to take her they’ll take her. I got to get to a doctor. I don’t want to lose my arm and the boat both. The load is worth as much as the boat. There wasn’t much of it smashed. A little smashed can smell plenty.

He shoved the port clutch in and swung out away from the mangroves with the tide. The engines ran smoothly. Captain Willie’s boat was two miles away now headed for Boca Grande. I guess the tide’s high enough to go through the lakes now, Harry thought.

He shoved in his starboard clutch and the engines roared as he pushed up the throttle. He could feel her bow rise and the green mangroves coasted swiftly alongside as the boat sucked the water away from their roots. I hope they don’t take her, he thought. I hope they can fix my arm. How was I to know they’d shoot at us in Mariel after we could go and come there open for six months. That’s Cubans for you. Somebody didn’t pay somebody so we got the shooting. That’s Cubans all right.

“Hey, Wesley,” he said, looking back into the cockpit where the nigger lay with the blanket over him. “How you feeling?”

“God,” said Wesley. “I couldn’t feel no worse.”

“You’ll feel worse when the old doctor probes for it,” Harry told him.

“You ain’t human,” the nigger said. “You ain’t got human feelings.”

That old Willie is a good skate, Harry was thinking. There’s a good skate that old Willie. We did better to come in than to wait. It was foolish to wait. I felt so dizzy and sicklike I lost my judgment.

Ahead now he could see the white of the La Concha hotel, the wireless masts, and the houses of town. He could see the car ferries lying at the Trumbo dock where he would go around to head up for the Garrison Bight. That old Willie, he thought. He was giving them hell. Wonder who those buzzards were. Damn if I don’t feel plenty bad right now. I feel plenty dizzy. We did right to come in. We did right not to wait.

“Mr. Harry,” said the nigger, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help dump that stuff.”

“Hell,” said Harry, “ain’t no nigger any good when he’s shot. You’re a all right nigger, Wesley.”

Above the roar of the motors and the high, slapping rush of the boat through the water he felt a strange, hollow singing in his heart. He always felt this way coming home at the end of a trip. I hope they can fix that arm, he thought. I got a lot of use for that arm.

PART THREE. HARRY MORGAN

Winter

CHAPTER 9

Albert Speaking

We were all in there at Freddie’s place and this tall thin lawyer comes in and says, “Where’s Juan?”

“He ain’t back yet,” somebody said.

“I know he’s back and I’ve got to see him.”

“Sure, you tipped them off to him and you got him indicted and now you’re going to defend him,” Harry said. “Don’t you come around here asking where he is. You probably got him in your pocket.”

“Balls to you,” said the lawyer. “I’ve got a job for him.”

“Well, go look for him some place else,” Harry said. “He ain’t here.”

“I’ve got a job for him, I tell you,” the lawyer said.

“You ain’t got a job for anybody. All you are is poison.”

Just then the old man with the long gray hair over the back of his collar who sells the rubber goods specialties comes in for a quarter of a pint and Freddy pours it out for him and he corks it up and scuttles back across the street with it.

“What happened to your arm?” the lawyer asked Harry. Harry has the sleeve pinned up to the shoulder.

“I didn’t like the look of it so I cut it off,” Harry told him.

“You and who else cut it off?”

“Me and a doctor cut it off,” Harry said. He had been drinking and he was getting a little along with it. “I held still and he cut it off. If they cut them off for being in other people’s pockets you wouldn’t have no hands nor no feet.”

“What happened to it that they had to cut it off?” the lawyer asked him.

“Take it easy,” Harry told him.

“No, I’m asking you. What happened to it and where were you?”

“Go bother somebody else,” Harry told him. “You know where I was and you know what happened. Keep your mouth shut and don’t bother me.”

“I want to talk to you,” the lawyer told him.

“Then talk to me.”

“No, in back.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. No good ever comes of you. You’re poison.”

“I’ve got something for you. Something good.”

“All right. I’ll listen to you once,” Harry told him. “What’s it about? Juan?”

“No. Not about Juan.”

They went back behind the bend of the bar into where the booths are and they were gone quite a while. During the time they were gone Big Lucie’s daughter came in with that girl from their place that she’s always around with, and they sat at the bar and had a coca-cola.

“They tell me they ain’t going to let no girls out on the streets after six o’clock at night and no girls in any of the places,” Freddy says to Big Lucie’s daughter.

“That’s what they say.”

“It’s getting to be a hell of a town,” Freddy says.

“Hell of a town is right. You just walk outside to get a sandwich and a coca-cola and they arrest you and fine you fifteen dollars.”

“That’s all they pick on now,” says Big Lucie’s daughter. “Any kind of sporting people. Anybody with any sort of a cheerful outlook.”

“If something don’t happen to this town pretty quick things are going to be bad.”

Just then Harry and the lawyer came back out and the lawyer said, “You’ll be out there then?”

“Why not bring them here?”

“No. They don’t want to come in. Out there.”

“All right,” Harry said and stepped up to the bar and the lawyer went on out.

“What will you have, Al?” he asked me.

“Bacardi.”

“Give us two bacardis, Freddy.” Then he turned to me and said, “What are you doing now, Al?”

“Working on the relief.”

“What doing?”

“Digging the sewer. Taking the old streetcar rails up.”

“What do you get?”

“Seven and a half.”

“A week?”

“What did you think?”

“How do you drink in here?”

“I wasn’t till you asked me,” I told him. He edged over a little towards me. “You want to make a trip?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“We’ll talk about that.”

“All right.”

“Come on out in the car,” he said. “So long, Freddy.” He breathed a little fast the way he did when he’s been drinking and I walked up along where the street had been tore up, where we’d been working all day, to the corner where his car was. “Get in,” he said.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m going to find out.”

We drove up Whitehead Street and he didn’t say anything and at the head of the street he turned to the left and we drove across the head of town to White Street and out on it to the beach. All the time Harry didn’t say anything and we turned onto the sand road and drove along it to the boulevard. Out on the boulevard he pulled the car over to the edge of the sidewalk and stopped.

“Some strangers want to charter my boat to make a trip,” he said.

“The customs got your boat tied up.”

“The strangers don’t know that.”

“What kind of a trip?”

“They say they want to carry somebody over that has to go to Cuba to do some business and can’t come in by the plane or boat. Bee-lips was telling me.”

“Do they do that?”

“Sure. All the time since the revolution. It sounds all right. Plenty of people go that way.”

“What about the boat.”

“We’ll have to steal the boat. You know they ain’t got her fixed so I can’t start her.”

“How you going to get her out of the sub-base?”

“I’ll get her out.”

“How’re we coming back?”

“I’ll have to figure that. If you don’t want to go, say so.”

“I’d just as soon go if there’s any money in it.”

“Listen,” he said. “You’re making seven dollars and a half a week. You got three kids in school that are hungry at noon. You got a family that their bellies hurt and I give you a chance to make a little money.”

“You ain’t said how much money. You got to have money for taking chances.”

“There ain’t much money in any kind of chances now, Al,” he said. “Look at me. I used to make thirty-five dollars a day right through the season taking people out fishing. Now I get shot and lose an arm, and my boat, running a lousy load of liquor that’s worth hardly as much as my boat. But let me tell you, my kids ain’t going to have their bellies hurt and I ain’t going to dig sewers for the government for less money than will feed them. I can’t dig now anyway. I don’t know who made the laws but I know there ain’t no law that you got to go hungry.”

“I went out on strike against those wages,” I told him.

“And you come back to work,” he said. “They said you were striking against charity. You always worked, didn’t you? You never asked anybody for charity.”

“There ain’t any work,” I said. “There ain’t any work at living wages anywhere.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “But my family is going to eat as long as anybody eats. What they’re trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That’s what I hear. I hear they’re buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they’re going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists.”

“You talk like a radical,” I said.

“I ain’t no radical,” he said. “I’m sore. I been sore a long time.”

“Losing your arm don’t make you feel better.”

“The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There’s worse things than lose an arm. You’ve got two arms and you’ve got two of something else. And a man’s still a man with one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Then after a minute he says, “I got those other two still.” Then he started the car and said, “Come on, we’ll go see these fellows.”

We rode along the boulevard with the breeze blowing and a few cars going past and the smell of dead sea grass on the cement where the waves had gone over the seawall at high tide, Harry driving with his left arm. I always liked him all right and I’d gone in a boat with him plenty of times in the old days, but he was changed now since he lost his arm and that fellow down visiting from Washington made an affidavit that he saw the boat unloading liquor that time, and the customs seized her. When he was in a boat he always felt good and without his boat he felt plenty bad. I think he was glad of an excuse to steal her. He knew he couldn’t keep her but maybe he could make a piece of money with her while he had her. I needed money bad enough but I didn’t want to get in any trouble. I said to him, “You know I don’t want to get in any real trouble, Harry.”

“What worse trouble you going to get in than you’re in now?” he said. “What the hell worse trouble is there than starving?”

“I’m not starving,” I said. “What the hell you always talking about starving for?”

“Maybe you’re not, but your kids are.”

“Cut it out,” I said. “I’ll work with you but you can’t talk that way to me.”

“All right,” he said. “But be sure you want the job. I can get plenty of men in this town.”

“I want it,” I said. “I told you I want it.”

“Then cheer up.”

“You cheer up,” I said. “You’re the only one that’s talking like a radical.”

“Aw, cheer up,” he said. “None of you Conchs has any guts.”

“Since when ain’t you a Conch?”

“Since the first good meal I ever ate.” He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody. But he never had no pity for himself either.

“All right,” I said to him.

“Take it easy,” he said. Ahead of us I could see the lights of this place.

“We’re going to meet them here,” Harry said. “Keep your mouth buttoned up.”

“The hell with you.”

“Aw, take it easy,” Harry said as we turned into the runway and drove around to the back of the place. He was a bully and he was bad spoken but I always liked him all right.

We stopped the car in back of this place and went into the kitchen where the man’s wife was cooking at a stove. “Hello, Freda,” Harry said to her. “Where’s Bee-lips?”

“He’s right in there, Harry. Hello, Albert.”

“Hello, Miss Richards,” I said. I knew her ever since she used to be in jungle town, but two or three of the hardest working married women in town used to be sporting women and this was a hard working woman, I tell you that. “Your folks all well?” she asked me.

“They’re all fine.”

We went on through the kitchen and into this back room. There was Bee-lips, the lawyer, and four Cubans with him, sitting at a table.

“Sit down,” said one of them in English. He was a tough looking fellow, heavy, with a big face and a voice deep in his throat, and he had been drinking plenty you could see. “What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” said Harry.

“All right,” said this Cuban. “Have it your own way. Where’s the boat?”

“She’s down at the yacht basin,” Harry said.

“Who’s this?” the Cuban asked him, looking at me.

“My mate,” Harry said. The Cuban was looking me over and the other Cubans were looking us both over. “He looks hungry,” the Cuban said and laughed. The others didn’t laugh. “You want a drink?”

“All right,” Harry said.

“What? Bacardi?”

“Whatever you’re drinking,” Harry told him.

“Does your mate drink?”

“I’ll have one,” I said.

“Nobody asked you yet,” the big Cuban said. “I just asked if you drank.”

“Oh, cut it out, Roberto,” one of the other Cubans, a young one, not much more than a kid, said. “Can’t you do anything without getting nasty?”

“What do you mean nasty? I just asked if he drinks. If you hire somebody don’t you ask if he drinks?”

“Give him a drink,” said the other Cuban. “Let’s talk business.”

“What you want for the boat, big boy?” the deep-voiced Cuban called Roberto asked Harry.

“Depends on what you want to do with her,” Harry said.

“Take the four of us to Cuba.”

“Where in Cuba?”

“Cabañas. Close to Cabañas. Down the coast from Mariel. You know where it is?”

“Sure,” said Harry. “Just take you there?”

“That’s all. Take us there and put us ashore.”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“Too much. What if we charter you by the day and guarantee you two weeks’ charter?”

“Forty dollars a day and you put up fifteen hundred dollars for if anything happens to the boat. Do I have to clear it?”

“No.”

“You pay for the gas and oil,” Harry told them.

“We’ll give you two hundred dollars to take us over there and put us ashore.”

“No.”

“How much do you want?”

“I told you.”

“That’s too much.”

“No, it isn’t,” Harry told him. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what your business is and I don’t know who shoots at you. I got to cross the Gulf twice in the winter time. Anyway I’m risking my boat. I’ll carry you for two hundred and you can put up a thousand for a guaranty nothing happens to the boat.”

“That’s reasonable,” Bee-lips told them. “That’s more than reasonable.”

The Cubans started talking in Spanish. I couldn’t understand them but I knew Harry could.

“All right,” the big one, Roberto, said. “When can you start?”

“Any time tomorrow night.”

“Maybe we don’t want to go until the night after,” one of them said.

“That’s O.K. with me,” Harry said. “Only let me know in time.”

“Is your boat in good shape?”

“Sure,” said Harry.

“She is a nice looking boat,” the young one of them said.

“Where did you see her?”

“Mr. Simmons, the lawyer here, showed her to me.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“Have a drink,” said another of the Cubans. “Have you been to Cuba much?”

“A few times.”

“Speak Spanish?”

“I never learned it,” Harry said.

I saw Bee-lips, the lawyer, look at him, but he is so crooked himself that he’s always more pleased if people aren’t telling the truth. Just like when he came in to speak to Harry about this job he couldn’t speak to him straight. He had to pretend he wanted to see Juan Rodriguez, who is a poor stinking Gallego that would steal from his own mother that Bee-lips has got indicted again so he can defend him.

“Mr. Simmons speaks good Spanish,” the Cuban said.

“He’s got an education.”

“Can you navigate?”

“I can go and I can come.”

“You’re a fisherman?”

“Yes, sir,” said Harry.

“How do you fish with one arm?” the big faced one asked.

“You just fish twice as fast,” Harry told him. “Did you want to see me about anything else?”

“No.”

They were all talking Spanish together. “Then I’ll go,” said Harry.

“I’ll let you know about the boat,” Bee-lips told Harry.

“There’s some money got to be put up,” Harry said.

“We’ll do that tomorrow.”

“Well, good night,” Harry told them.

“Good night,” said the young pleasant speaking one. The big faced one didn’t say anything. There were two others with faces like Indians that hadn’t said anything at all any of the time except to talk in Spanish to the big faced one.

“I’ll see you later on,” Bee-lips said.

“Where?”

“At Freddy’s.”

We went out and through the kitchen again and Freda said, “How’s Marie, Harry?”

“She’s fine now,” Harry told her. “She’s feeling good now,” and we went out the door. We got in the car and he drove back to the boulevard and didn’t say anything at all. He was thinking about something all right.

“Should I drop you home?”

“All right.”

“You live out on the county road now?”

“Yes. What about the trip?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether there’s going to be any trip. See you tomorrow.”

He drops me in front of where we live and I go on in and I haven’t got the door open before my old woman is giving me hell for staying out and drinking and being late to the meal. I ask her how I can drink with no money and she says I must be running a credit. I ask her who she thinks will give me credit when I’m working on the relief and she says to keep my rummy breath away from her and sit down to the table. So I sit down. The kids are all gone to the diamond ball game and I sit there at the table and she brings the supper and won’t speak to me.

CHAPTER 10

Harry

I don’t want to fool with it but what choice have I got? They don’t give you any choice now. I can let it go; but what will the next thing be? I didn’t ask for any of this and if you’ve got to do it you’ve got to do it. Probably I shouldn’t take Albert. He’s dumb but he’s straight and he’s a good man in a boat. He doesn’t spook too easy but I don’t know whether I ought to take him. But I can’t take no rummy nor no nigger. I got to have somebody I can depend on. If we make it I’ll see he gets a share. But I can’t tell him or he wouldn’t go into it and I got to have somebody by me. It would be better alone, anything is better alone but I don’t think I can handle it alone. It would be much better alone. Albert is better off if he don’t know anything about it. The only thing is Bee-lips. There’s Bee-lips that will know about everything. Still they must have thought about that. They must figure on that. Do you suppose Bee-lips is so dumb he won’t know that’s what they will do? I wonder. Of course maybe that isn’t what they figure to do. Maybe they aren’t going to do any such thing. But it’s natural that’s what they would do and I heard that word. If they do it they’ll have to do it just when it closes or they’ll have the coast guard plane down from Miami. It’s dark now at six. She can’t fly it down under an hour. Once it’s dark they’re all right. Well, if I’m going to carry them I got to figure out about the boat. She won’t be hard to get out but if I take her out tonight and they find she’s gone they’ll maybe find her. Anyway there will be a big fuss. Tonight’s the only time I’ve got to get her out though. I can take her out with the tide and I can hide her. I can see what she needs if she needs anything, if they’ve taken off anything. But I got to fill gas and water. I got a hell of a busy night all right. Then when I’ve got her hid Albert will have to bring them in a speed boat. Maybe Walton’s. I can hire her. Or Bee-lips can hire her. That’s better. Bee-lips can help me get the boat out tonight. Bee-lips is the one. Because sure as hell they’ve figured about Bee-lips. They’ve got to have figured about Bee-lips. Suppose they figure about me and Albert. Did any of them look like sailors? Did any of them seem like they were sailors? Let me think? Maybe. The pleasant one, maybe. Possibly him, that young one. I have to find out about that because if they figure on doing without Albert or me from the start there’s no way. Sooner or later they will figure on us. But in the Gulf you got time. And I’m figuring all the time. I’ve got to think right all the time. I can’t make a mistake. Not a mistake. Not once. Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to do and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. With no boat to make a living with. That Bee-lips. He don’t know what he’s into. He ain’t got any idea what this is going to be like. I hope he shows up pretty soon down at Freddy’s. I got plenty to do tonight. I better get something to eat.

CHAPTER 11

It was about nine-thirty when Bee-lips came into the place. You could see they had given him plenty out at Richard’s because when he drinks it makes him cocky and he came in plenty cocky.

“Well, big shot,” he says to Harry.

“Don’t big shot me,” Harry told him.

“I want to talk to you, big shot.”

“Where? Back in your office?” Harry asked him.

“Yes, back there. Anybody back there, Freddy?”

“Not since that law. Say, how long are they going to have that six o’clock business?”

“Why don’t you retain me to do something about it?” Bee-lips says.

“Retain you hell,” Freddy tells him. And the two of them go back there where the booths and the cases with the empty bottles are.

There was one electric light on in the ceiling and Harry looked in all the booths where it was dark and saw there was no one.

“Well,” he said.

“They want it for late day after tomorrow afternoon,” Bee-lips told him.

“What they going to do?”

“You speak Spanish,” Bee-lips said.

“You didn’t tell them that though?”

“No. I’m your pal. You know that.”

“You’d rat on your own mother.”

“Cut it out. Look at what I’m letting you in on.”

“When did you get tough?”

“Listen, I need the money. I’ve got to get out of here. I’m all washed up here. You know that, Harry.”

“Who don’t know that?”

“You know how they’ve been financing this revolution with kidnapping and the rest of it.”

“I know.”

“This is the same sort of thing. They’re doing it for a good cause.”

“Yeah. But this is here. This is where you were born. You know everybody works there.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to anybody.”

“With those guys?”

“I thought you had cojones.”

“I got cojones. Don’t you worry about my cojones. But I’m figuring on keeping on living here.”

“I’m not,” Bee-lips said.

Jesus, thought Harry. He’s said it himself.

“I’m going to get out,” Bee-lips said.

“When are you going to get the boat out?”

“Tonight.”

“Who’s going to help you?”

“You.”

“Where you going to put her?”

“Where I always put her.”

There was nothing difficult about getting the boat out. It was as simple as Harry had figured it. The night watchman made his rounds on the hour and the rest of the time he was at the outer gate of the old Navy Yard. They came into the basin in a skiff, cut her loose on the ebb tide and she went out herself with the skiff towing her. Outside, while she drifted in the channel, Harry checked the motors and found all they had done was disconnect the distributor heads. He checked the gas and found she had close to a hundred and fifty gallons. They hadn’t syphoned any out of the tanks and she had what he had left coming across that last time. He had filled her up before they started and she had burned very little because they had to come across so slow in the heavy seas.

“I’ve got gas at the house in the tank,” he told Bee-lips. “I can take one load of demijohns out with me in the car and Albert can bring another if we need it. I’m going to put her up in the creek right where it crosses the road. They can come out in a car.”

“They wanted you to be right at the Porter Dock.”

“How can I lay there with this boat?”

“You can’t. But I don’t think they’ll want to do any car driving.”

“Well, we’ll put her there tonight and I can fill and do what needs to be done and then shift her. You can hire a speed boat to bring them out. I got to put her up there now. I got plenty to do. You scull in and drive out to the bridge and pick me up. I’ll be on the road there in about two hours. I’ll leave her and come out to the road.”

“I’ll pick you up,” Bee-lips told him, and Harry with the motors throttled down so that she moved quietly through the water, swung her around and towed the skiff close in to where the riding light of the cable schooner showed. He threw the clutches out and held the skiff while Bee-lips got in.

“In about two hours,” he said.

“All right,” said Bee-lips.

Sitting on the steering seat, moving ahead slowly in the dark, keeping well out from the lights at the head of the docks, Harry thought, Bee-lips is doing some work for his money all right. Wonder how much he thinks he is going to get? I wonder how he ever hooked up with those guys. There’s a smart kid who had a good chance once. He’s a good lawyer, too. But it made me cold to hear him say it himself. He put his mouth on his own self all right. It’s funny how a man can mouth something. When I heard him mouth himself it scared me.

CHAPTER 12

When he came in the house he did not turn on the light but took off his shoes in the hall and went up the bare stairs in his stocking feet. He undressed and got into bed wearing only his undershirt, before his wife woke. In the dark she said, “Harry?” and he said, “Go to sleep, old woman.”

“Harry, what’s the matter?”

“Going to make a trip.”

“Who with?”

“Nobody. Albert maybe.”

“Whose boat?”

“I got the boat again.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“You’ll go to jail, Harry.”

“Nobody knows I’ve got her.”

“Where is she?”

“Hid.”

Lying still in the bed he felt her lips on his face and searching for him and then her hand on him and he rolled over against her close.

“Do you want to?”

“Yes. Now.”

“I was asleep. Do you remember when we’d do it asleep?”

“Listen, do you mind the arm? Don’t it make you feel funny?”

“You’re silly. I like it. Any that’s you I like. Put it across there. Put it along there. Go on. I like it, true.”

“It’s like a flipper on a loggerhead.”

“You ain’t no loggerhead. Do they really do it three days? Coot for three days?”

“Sure. Listen, be quiet. We’ll wake the girls.”

“They don’t know what I’ve got. They won’t never know what I’ve got. Ah, Harry. That’s it. Ah, you honey.”

“Wait.”

“I don’t want no wait. Come on. That’s it. That’s where. Listen, did you ever do it with a nigger wench?”

“Sure.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like nurse shark.”

“You’re funny. Harry, I wish you didn’t have to go. I wish you didn’t ever have to go. Who’s the best you ever did it with?”

“You.”

“You lie. You always lie to me. There. There. There.”

“No. You’re the best.”

“I’m old.”

“You’ll never be old.”

“I’ve had that thing.”

“That don’t make no difference when a woman’s any good.”

“Go ahead. Go ahead now. Put the stump there. Hold it there. Hold it. Hold it now. Hold it.”

“We’re making too much noise.”

“We’re whispering.”

“I got to get out before it’s daylight.”

“You go to sleep. I’ll get you up. When you come back we’ll have a time. We’ll go to a hotel up in Miami like we used to. Just like we used to. Some place where they never seen either of us. Why couldn’t we go to New Orleans?”

“Maybe,” Harry said. “Listen Marie, I got to go to sleep now.”

“We’ll go to New Orleans?”

“Why not? Only I got to go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep. You’re my big honey. Go on to sleep. I’ll wake you. Don’t you worry.”

He went to sleep with the stump of his arm out wide on the pillow, and she lay for a long time looking at him. She could see his face in the street light through the window. I’m lucky, she was thinking. Those girls. They don’t know what they’ll get. I know what I’ve got and what I’ve had. I’ve been a lucky woman. Him saying like a loggerhead. I’m glad it was a arm and not a leg. I wouldn’t like him to have lost a leg. Why’d he have to lose that arm? It’s funny though, I don’t mind it. Anything about him I don’t mind. I’ve been a lucky woman. There ain’t no other men like that. People ain’t never tried them don’t know. I’ve had plenty of them. I’ve been lucky to have him. Do you suppose those turtles feel like we do? Do you suppose all that time they feel like that? Or do you suppose it hurts the she? I think of the damndest things. Look at him, sleeping just like a baby. I better stay awake so as to call him. Christ, I could do that all night if a man was built that way. I’d like to do it and never sleep. Never, never, no, never. No, never, never, never. Well, think of that, will you. Me at my age. I ain’t old. He said I was still good. Forty-five ain’t old. I’m two years older than him. Look at him sleep. Look at him asleep there like a kid.

Two hours before it was daylight they were out at the gas tank in the garage filling and corking demijohns and putting them in the back of the car. Harry wore a hook strapped to his right arm and shifted and lifted the wicker-covered demijohns handily.

“You don’t want no breakfast?”

“When I come back.”

“Don’t you want your coffee?”

“You got it?”

“Sure. I put it on when we came out.”

“Bring it out.”

She brought it out and he drank it in the dark sitting at the wheel of the car. She took the cup and put it on the shelf in the garage.

“I’m coming with you to help you handle the jugs,” she said.

“All right,” he told her and she got in beside him, a big woman, long legged, big handed, big hipped, still handsome, a hat pulled down over her bleached blonde hair. In the dark and the cold of the morning they drove out the county road through the mist that hung heavy over the flat.

“What you worried about, Harry?”

“I don’t know. I’m just worried. Listen, are you letting your hair grow out?”

“I thought I would. The girls have been after me.”

“The hell with them. You keep it like it is.”

“Do you really want me to?”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the way I like it.”

“You don’t think I look too old?”

“You look better than any of them.”

“I’ll fix it up then. I can make it blonder if you like it.”

“What have the girls got to say about what you do?” Harry said. “They got no business to bother you.”

“You know how they are. You know young girls are that way. Listen, if you make a good trip, we’ll go to New Orleans, should we?”

“Miami.”

“Well, Miami anyway. And we’ll leave them here.”

“I got some trip to make first.”

“You aren’t worried, are you?”

“No.”

“You know I lay awake almost four hours just thinking about you.”

“You’re some old woman.”

“I can think about you any time and get excited.”

“Well, we got to fill this gas now,” Harry told her.

CHAPTER 13

At ten o’clock in the morning in Freddy’s place Harry was standing in against the bar with four or five others, and two customs men had just left. They had asked him about the boat and he had said he did not know anything about it.

“Where were you last night?” one of them asked.

“Here and at home.”

“How late were you here?”

“Until the place shut.”

“Anybody see you here?”

“Plenty of people,” Freddy said.

“What’s the matter?” Harry asked them. “Do you think I’d steal my own boat? What would I do with it?”

“I just asked you where you were,” the Customs House officer said. “Don’t get plugged.”

“I’m not plugged,” Harry said. “I was plugged back when they seized the boat without any proof she carried liquor.”

“There was an affidavit sworn to,” the customs man said. “It wasn’t my affidavit. You know the man that made it.”

“All right,” said Harry. “Only don’t say I’m plugged at you asking me. I’d rather you had her tied up. Then I got a chance to get her back. What chance I got if she’s stolen?”

“None, I guess,” said the customs man.

“Well, go peddle your papers,” Harry said.

“Don’t get snotty,” said the customs man, “or I’ll see you get something to be snotty about.”

“After fifteen years,” said Harry.

“You haven’t been snotty fifteen years.”

“No, and I haven’t been in jail either.”

“Well, don’t be snotty or you will be.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. Just then this goofy Cuban that drives a taxi came in with a fellow from the plane and Big Rodger says to him,

“Hayzooz, they tell me you had a baby.”

“Yes, sir,” says Hayzooz very proudly.

“When did you get married?” Rodger asked him.

“Lasta month. Montha for last. You come the wedding?”

“No,” said Rodger. “I didn’t come the wedding.”

“You missa something,” said Hayzooz. “You missa damn fine wedding. Whas a matta you no come?”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hayzooz. “I forget. I didn’t ask you…. You get what you want?” he asked the stranger.

“Yes. I think so. Is that the best price you have on Bacardi?”

“Yes, sir,” Freddy told him. “That’s the real carta del oro.”

“Listen Hayzooz, what makes you think that’s your baby?” Rodger asks him. “That’s not your baby.”

“What you mean not my baby? What you mean? By God, I no let you talk like that! What you mean not my baby? You buy the cow you no get the calf? That’s my baby. My God, yes. My baby. Belong to me. Yes, sir!”

He goes out with the stranger and the bottle of Bacardi and the laugh is on Rodger all right. That Hayzooz is a character all right. Him and that other Cuban, Sweetwater.

Just then in comes Bee-lips the lawyer, and he says to Harry, “The customs just went out to take your boat.”

Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. Bee-lips went on in this same tone without any expression in it. “Somebody saw it in the mangroves from the top of one of those high WPA trucks and called up from where they’re building the camp out at Boca Chica to the Customs House. I just saw Herman Frederichs. He told me.”

Harry didn’t say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again. Then he said to Bee-lips, “You hear everything, don’t you?”

“I thought you’d like to know,” Bee-lips said in that same expressionless voice.

“It’s none of my concern,” Harry said. “They ought to take better care of a boat than that.”

The two of them stood there at the bar and neither one said anything until Big Rodger and the two or three others had drifted out. Then they went in the back.

“You’re poison,” Harry said. “Everything you touch is poison.”

“Is it my fault a truck could see it? You picked the place. You hid your own boat.”

“Shut up,” Harry said. “Did they ever have high trucks like that before? That’s the last chance I had to make any honest money. That’s the last chance I got to go in a boat where there’s any money.”

“I let you know as soon as it happened.”

“You’re like a buzzard.”

“Cut it out,” Bee-lips said. “They want to go late this afternoon now.”

“The hell they do.”

“They’re getting nervous about something.”

“What time do they want to go?”

“Five o’clock.”

“I’ll get a boat. I’ll carry them to hell.”

“That isn’t a bad idea.”

“Don’t mouth that now. Keep your mouth off my business.”

“Listen, you big murdering slob,” said Bee-lips, “I try to help you out and get you in on something — —”

“And all you do is poison me. Shut up. You’re poison to anybody that ever touched you.”

“Cut it out, you bully.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. “I got to think. All I’ve done is think one thing out and I got it thought out and now I got to think out something else.”

“Why don’t you let me help you?”

“You come here at twelve o’clock and bring that money to put up for the boat.”

As they came out Albert came up to the place and went up to Harry.

“I’m sorry, Albert, I can’t use you,” Harry said. He had thought it out that far already.

“I’d go cheap,” Albert said.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said. “I got no need for you now.”

“You won’t get a good man for what I’ll go for,” Albert said.

“I’m going by myself.”

“You don’t want to make a trip like that alone,” Albert said.

“Shut up,” said Harry. “What do you know about it? Do they teach you my business on the relief?”

“Go to hell,” said Albert.

“Maybe I will,” said Harry. Anybody looking at him could tell he was thinking plenty fast and he did not want to be bothered.

“I’d like to go,” Albert said.

“I can’t use you,” Harry said. “Let me alone, will you?”

Albert went out and Harry stood there at the bar looking at the nickel machine, the two dime machines and the quarter machine and at the picture of Custer’s Last Stand on the wall as though he’d never seen them.

“That was a good one Hayzooz told Big Rodger about the baby, wasn’t it?” Freddy said to him, putting some coffee glasses in the bucket of soapy water.

“Give me a package of Chesterfields,” Harry said to him. He held the package under the flap of his arm and opened it at one corner, took a cigarette out and put it in his mouth, then dropped the package in his pocket and lit the cigarette.

“What shape’s your boat in, Freddy?” he asked.

“I just had her on the ways,” Freddy said. “She’s in good shape.”

“Do you want to charter her?”

“What for?”

“For a trip across.”

“Not unless they put up the value of her.”

“What’s she worth?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

“I’ll charter her,” Harry said. “Will you trust me on her?”

“No,” Freddy told him.

“I’ll put up the house as security.”

“I don’t want your house. I want twelve hundred bucks up.”

“All right,” Harry said.

“Bring around the money,” Freddy told him.

“When Bee-lips comes in, tell him to wait for me,” Harry said and went out.

CHAPTER 14

Out at the house Marie and the girls were having lunch.

“Hello Daddy,” said the oldest girl. “Here’s Daddy.”

“What have you got to eat?” Harry asked.

“We’ve got a steak,” Marie said.

“Somebody said they stole your boat, Daddy.”

“They found her,” Harry said.

Marie looked at him.

“Who found her?” she asked.

“The Customs.”

“Oh, Harry,” she said, full of pity.

“Isn’t it better they found her, Daddy?” asked the second one of the girls.

“Don’t talk while you’re eating,” Harry told her. “Where’s my dinner? What you waiting for?”

“I’m bringing it.”

“I’m in a hurry,” Harry said. “You girls eat up and get out. I got to talk to your mother.”

“Can we have some money to go to the show this aft, Daddy?”

“Why don’t you go swimming. That’s free.”

“Oh, Daddy, it’s too cold to go swimming, and we want to go to the show.”

“All right,” said Harry. “All right.”

When the girls were out of the room he said to Marie, “Cut it up, will you?”

“Sure, Honey.”

She cut the meat as for a small boy.

“Thanks,” Harry said. “I’m a hell of a goddamn nuisance, ain’t I? Those girls aren’t much, are they?”

“No, Hon.”

“Funny we couldn’t get no boys.”

“That’s because you’re such a man. That way it always comes out girls.”

“I ain’t no hell of a man,” Harry said. “But listen, I’m going on a hell of a trip.”

“Tell me about the boat.”

“They saw it from a truck. A high truck.”

“Shucks.”

“Worse than that. Shit.”

“Aw, Harry, don’t talk like that in the house.”

“You talk worse than that in bed sometimes.”

“That’s different. I don’t like to hear shit at my own table.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Aw, Honey, you feel bad,” Marie said.

“No,” said Harry. “I’m just thinking.”

“Well, you think it out. I got confidence in you.”

“I got confidence. That’s the only thing I have got.”

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No. Only don’t worry no matter what you hear.”

“I won’t worry.”

“Listen, Marie. Go on up to the upstairs trap and bring me the Thompson gun and look in that wooden box with the shells and see all the clips are filled.”

“Don’t take that.”

“I got to.”

“Do you want any boxes of shells?”

“No. I can’t load any clips. I got four clips.”

“Honey, you aren’t going on that kind of a trip?”

“I’m going on a bad trip.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God, I wish you didn’t have to do these things.”

“Go on and get it and bring it down here. Get me some coffee.”

“O.K.,” said Marie. She leaned over the table and kissed him on the mouth.

“Leave me alone,” Harry said. “I got to think.”

He sat at the table and looked at the piano, the sideboard and the radio, the picture of September Morn, and the pictures of the cupids holding bows behind their heads, the shiny real-oak table and the shiny real-oak chairs and the curtains on the windows and he thought, What chance have I to enjoy my home? Why am I back to worse than where I started? It’ll all be gone too if I don’t play this right. The hell it will. I haven’t got sixty bucks left outside of the house, but I’ll get a stake out of this. Those damn girls. That’s all that old woman and I could get with what we’ve got. Do you suppose the boys in her went before I knew her?

“Here it is,” said Marie, carrying it by the web sling strap. “They’re all full.”

“I got to go,” Harry said. He lifted the chunky weight of the dismounted gun in its oil-stained, canvas-web case. “Put it under the front seat of the car.”

“Good-by,” Marie said.

“Good-by, old woman.”

“I won’t worry. But please take care of yourself.”

“Be good.”

“Aw, Harry,” she said and held him tight against her.

“Let me go. I ain’t got no time.”

He patted her on the back with his arm stump.

“You and your loggerhead flipper,” she said. “Oh, Harry. Be careful.”

“I got to go. Good-by, old woman.”

“Good-by, Harry.”

She watched him go out of the house, tall, wide-shouldered, flat-backed, his hips narrow, moving, still, she thought, like some kind of animal, easy and swift and not old yet, he moves so light and smooth-like, she thought, and when he got in the car she saw him blonde, with the sunburned hair, his face with the broad mongol cheek bones, and the narrow eyes, the nose broken at the bridge, the wide mouth and the round jaw, and getting in the car he grinned at her and she began to cry. “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every-time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.”

CHAPTER 15

There were three tourists at the bar at Freddy’s and Freddy was serving them. One was a very tall, thin, wide-shouldered man, in shorts, wearing thick-lensed spectacles, tanned, with small closely trimmed sandy mustache. The woman with him had her blonde curly hair cut short like a man’s, a bad complexion, and the face and build of a lady wrestler. She wore shorts, too.

“Oh, nerts to you,” she was saying to the third tourist, who had a rather swollen reddish face, a rusty-colored mustache, a white cloth hat with a green celluloid visor, and a trick of talking with a rather extraordinary movement of his lips as though he were eating something too hot for comfort.

“How charming,” said the green-visored man. “I’d never heard the expression actually used in conversation. I thought it was an obsolete phrase, something one saw in print in — er — the funny papers but never heard.”

“Nerts, nerts, double nerts to you,” said the lady wrestler lady in a sudden access of charm, giving him the benefit of her pimpled profile.

“How beautiful,” said the green-visored man. “You put it so prettily. Isn’t it from Brooklyn originally?”

“You mustn’t mind her. She’s my wife,” the tall tourist said. “Have you two met?”

“Oh, nerts to him and double nerts to meeting him,” said the wife. “How do you do?”

“Not so badly,” the green-visored man said. “How do you do?”

“She does marvellously,” the tall one said. “You ought to see her.”

Just then Harry came in and the tall tourist’s wife said, “Isn’t he wonderful? That’s what I want. Buy me that, Papa.”

“Can I speak to you?” Harry said to Freddy.

“Certainly. Go right ahead and say anything you like,” the tall tourist’s wife said.

“Shut up, you whore,” Harry said. “Come in the back, Freddy.”

In the back was Bee-lips, waiting at the table.

“Hello, Big Boy,” he said to Harry.

“Shut up,” said Harry.

“Listen,” Freddy said. “Cut it out. You can’t get away with that. You can’t call my trade names like that. You can’t call a lady a whore in a decent place like this.”

“A whore,” said Harry. “Hear what she said to me?”

“Well, anyway, don’t call her a name like that to her face.”

“All right. You got the money?”

“Of course,” said Bee-lips. “Why wouldn’t I have the money? Didn’t I say I’d have the money?”

“Let’s see it.”

Bee-lips handed it over. Harry counted ten hundred-dollar bills and four twenties.

“It should be twelve hundred.”

“Less my commission,” said Bee-lips.

“Come on with it.”

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You miserable little crut.”

“You big bully,” Bee-lips said. “Don’t try to strong arm it away from me because I haven’t got it here.”

“I see,” said Harry. “I should have thought of that. Listen Freddy. You’ve known me a long time. I know she’s worth twelve hundred. This is a hundred and twenty short. Take it and take a chance on the hundred and twenty and the charter.”

“That’s three hundred and twenty dollars,” Freddy said. It was a painful sum for him to name as a risk, and he sweated while he thought about it.

“I got a car and a radio in the house that’s good for it.”

“I can make out a paper on that,” Bee-lips said.

“I don’t want any paper,” Freddy said. He sweat again and his voice was hesitant. Then he said, “All right. I’ll take a chance. But for Christ’s sake be careful with the boat, will you Harry?”

“Like it was my own.”

“You lost your own,” said Freddy, still sweating, his suffering now intensified by that memory.

“I’ll take care of her.”

“I’ll put the money in my box in the bank,” Freddy said.

Harry looked at Bee-lips.

“That’s a good place,” he said, and grinned.

“Bartender,” some one called from the front.

“That’s you,” Harry said.

“Bartender,” came the voice again.

Freddy went out to the front.

“That man insulted me,” Harry could hear the high voice saying, but he was talking to Bee-lips.

“I’ll be tied up to the dock there at the front of the street. It isn’t half a block.”

“All right.”

“That’s all.”

“All right, Big Shot.”

“Don’t you big shot me.”

“However you like.”

“I’ll be there from four o’clock on.”

“Anything else?”

“They got to take me by force, see? I know nothing about it. I’m just working on the engine. I got nothing aboard to make a trip. I’ve hired her from Freddy to go charter fishing. They’ve got to hold a gun on me to make me start her and they’ve got to cut loose the lines.”

“What about Freddy? You didn’t hire her to go fishing from him.”

“I’m going to tell Freddy.”

“You better not.”

“I’m going to.”

“You better not.”

“Listen, I’ve done business with Freddy since during the war. Twice I’ve been partners with him and we never had trouble. You know how much stuff I’ve handled for him. He’s the only son-of-a-bitch in this town I would trust.”

“I wouldn’t trust anybody.”

“You shouldn’t. Not after the experiences you’ve had with yourself.”

“Lay off me.”

“All right. Go out and see your friends. What’s your out?”

“They’re Cubans. I met them out at the roadhouse. One of them wants to cash a certified check. What’s wrong with that?”

“And you don’t notice anything?”

“No. I tell them to meet me at the bank.”

“Who drives them?”

“Some taxi.”

“What’s he supposed to think they are, violinists?”

“We’ll get one that don’t think. There’s plenty of them that can’t think in this town. Look at Hayzooz.”

“Hayzooz is smart. He just talks funny.”

“I’ll have them call a dumb one.”

“Get one hasn’t any kids.”

“They all got kids. Ever see a taxi driver without kids?”

“You are a goddamn rat.”

“Well, I never killed anybody,” Bee-lips told him.

“Nor you never will. Come on, let’s get out of here. Just being with you makes me feel crummy.”

“Maybe you are crummy.”

“Can you get them from talking?”

“If you don’t paper your mouth.”

“Paper yours then.”

“I’m going to get a drink,” Harry said.

Out in front the three tourists sat on their high stools. As Harry came up to the bar the woman looked away from him to register disgust.

“What will you have?” asked Freddy.

“What’s the lady drinking,” Harry asked.

“A Cuba Libre.”

“Then give me a straight whiskey.”

The tall tourist with the little sandy mustache and the thick-lensed glasses leaned his large, straight-nosed face over toward Harry and said, “Say, what’s the idea of talking that way to my wife?”

Harry looked him up and down and said to Freddy, “What kind of a place you running?”

“What about it?” the tall one said.

“Take it easy,” Harry said to him.

“You can’t pull that with me.”

“Listen,” Harry said. “You came down here to get well and strong, didn’t you? Take it easy.” And he went out.

“I should have hit him, I guess,” the tall tourist said. “What do you think, dear?”

“I wish I was a man,” his wife said.

“You’d go a long way with that build,” the green-visored man said into his beer.

“What did you say,” the tall one asked.

“I said you could find out his name and address and write him a letter telling him what you think of him.”

“Say, what’s your name, anyway? What are you doing, kidding me?”

“Just call me Professor MacWalsey.”

“My name’s Laughton,” the tall one said. “I’m a writer.”

“I’m glad to meet you,” Professor MacWalsey said. “Do you write often?”

The tall man looked around him. “Let’s get out of here, dear,” he said. “Everybody is either insulting or nuts.”

“It’s a strange place,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Fascinating, really. They call it the Gibraltar of America and it’s three hundred and seventy-five miles south of Cairo, Egypt. But this place is the only part of it I’ve had time to see yet. It’s a fine place though.”

“I see you’re a professor all right,” the wife said. “You know, I like you.”

“I like you too, darling,” Professor MacWalsey said. “But I have to go now.”

He got up and went out to look for his bicycle.

“Everybody is nuts here,” the tall man said. “Should we have another drink, dear?”

“I liked the professor,” the wife said. “He had a sweet manner.”

“That other fellow — —”

“Oh, he had a beautiful face,” the wife said. “Like a Tartar or something. I wish he hadn’t been insulting. He looked kind of like Ghengis Khan in the face. Gee, he was big.”

“He had only one arm,” her husband said.

“I didn’t notice,” the wife said. “Should we have another drink? I wonder who’ll come in next!”

“Maybe Tamerlane,” the husband said.

“Gee, you’re educated,” the wife said. “But that Ghengis Khan one would do me. Why did the professor like to hear me say nerts?”

“I don’t know, dear,” Laughton, the writer, said. “I never did.”

“He seemed to like me for what I really am,” the wife said. “My, he was nice.”

“You’ll probably see him again.”

“Any time you come in here you’ll see him,” Freddy said. “He lives in here. He’s been here for two weeks now.”

“Who’s the other one who speaks so rude?”

“Him? Oh, he’s a fellow from around here.”

“What does he do?”

“Oh, a little of everything,” Freddy told her. “He’s a fisherman.”

“How did he lose his arm?”

“I don’t know. He got it hurt some way.”

“Gee, he’s beautiful,” the wife said.

Freddy laughed. “I heard him called a lot of things but I never heard him called that.”

“Don’t you think he has a beautiful face?”

“Take it easy, lady,” Freddy told her. “He’s got a face like a ham with a broken nose on it.”

“My, men are stupid,” the wife said. “He’s my dream man.”

“He’s a bad-dream man,” Freddy said.

All this time the writer sat there with a sort of stupid look on his face except when he’d look at his wife admiringly. Any one would have to be a writer or a F.E.R.A. man to have a wife look like that, Freddy thought. God, isn’t she awful?

Just then in came Albert.

“Where’s Harry?”

“Down at the dock.”

“Thanks,” said Albert.

He went out and the wife and the writer kept on sitting there and Freddy stood there worrying about the boat and thinking how his legs hurt from standing up all day. He had put a grating over the cement but it didn’t seem to do much good. His legs ached all the time. Still he was doing a good business, as good as anybody in town and with less overhead. That woman was goofy all right. And what kind of a man was it would pick out a woman like that to live with? Not even with your eyes shut, thought Freddy. Not with a borrowed. Still they were drinking mixed drinks. Expensive drinks. That was something.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Right away.”

A tanned-faced, sandy-haired, well-built man wearing a striped fisherman’s shirt and khaki shorts came in with a very pretty dark girl who wore a thin, white wool sweater and dark blue slacks.

“If it isn’t Richard Gordon,” said Laughton, standing up, “with the lovely Miss Helen.”

“Hello, Laughton,” said Richard Gordon. “Did you see anything of a rummy professor around here?”

“He just went out,” said Freddy.

“Do you want a vermouth, sweetheart?” Richard Gordon asked his wife.

“If you do,” she said. Then said, “Hello,” to the two Laughtons. “Make mine two parts of French to one Italian, Freddy.”

She sat on a high stool with her legs tucked under her and looked out at the street. Freddy looked at her admiringly. He thought she was the prettiest stranger in Key West that winter. Prettier even than the famous beautiful Mrs. Bradley. Mrs. Bradley was getting a little big. This girl had a lovely Irish face, dark hair that curled almost to her shoulders and smooth clear skin. Freddy looked at her brown hand holding the glass.

“How’s the work?” Laughton asked Richard Gordon.

“I’m going all right,” Gordon said. “How are you doing?”

“James won’t work,” Mrs. Laughton said. “He just drinks.”

“Say, who is this Professor MacWalsey?” Laughton asked.

“Oh, he’s some sort of professor of economics I think, on a sabbatical year or something. He’s a friend of Helen’s.”

“I like him,” said Helen Gordon.

“I like him, too,” said Mrs. Laughton.

“I liked him first,” Helen Gordon said happily.

“Oh, you can have him,” Mrs. Laughton said. “You good little girls always get what you want.”

“That’s what makes us so good,” said Helen Gordon.

“I’ll have another vermouth,” said Richard Gordon. “Have a drink?” he asked the Laughtons.

“Why not,” said Laughton. “Say, are you going to that big party the Bradleys are throwing tomorrow?”

“Of course he is,” said Helen Gordon.

“I like her, you know,” said Richard Gordon. “She interests me both as a woman and as a social phenomenon.”

“Gee,” said Mrs. Laughton. “You can talk as educated as the professor.”

“Don’t strut your illiteracy, dear,” said Laughton.

“Do people go to bed with a social phenomenon?” asked Helen Gordon, looking out the door.

“Don’t talk rot,” said Richard Gordon.

“I mean is it part of the homework of a writer?” Helen asked.

“A writer has to know about everything,” Richard Gordon said. “He can’t restrict his experience to conform to bourgeois standards.”

“Oh,” said Helen Gordon. “And what does a writer’s wife do?”

“Plenty, I guess,” Mrs. Laughton said. “Say, you ought to have seen the man who was just in here and insulted me and James. He was terrific.”

“I should have hit him,” Laughton said.

“He was really terrific,” said Mrs. Laughton.

“I’m going home,” said Helen Gordon. “Are you coming, Dick?”

“I thought I’d stay down town a while,” Richard Gordon said.

“Yes?” said Helen Gordon, looking in the mirror behind Freddy’s head.

“Yes,” Richard Gordon said.

Freddy, looking at her, figured that she was going to cry. He hoped it wouldn’t happen in the place.

“Don’t you want another drink?” Richard Gordon asked her.

“No.” She shook her head.

“Say, what’s the matter with you?” asked Mrs. Laughton. “Aren’t you having a good time?”

“A dandy time,” said Helen Gordon. “But I think I’d better go home just the same.”

“I’ll be back early,” Richard Gordon said.

“Don’t bother,” she told him. She went out. She hadn’t cried. She hadn’t found John MacWalsey either.

CHAPTER 16

Down at the dock Harry Morgan had driven up alongside of where the boat lay, seen there was no one around, lifted the front seat of his car, skidded the flat, web, oil-heavy case out and dropped it down into the cockpit of the launch.

He got in himself and opened the engine hatch and put the machine-gun case below out of sight. He turned on the gas valves and started both engines. The starboard engine ran smoothly after a couple of minutes, but the port engine missed on the second and fourth cylinders and he found the plugs were cracked, looked for some new plugs, but couldn’t find them.

“Got to get plugs and fill gas,” he thought.

Below with the engines, he opened the machine-gun case and fitted the stock to the gun. He found two pieces of fan belting and four screws, and cutting slits in the belting rigged a sling to hold the gun under the cockpit floor to the left of the hatch; just over the port engine. It lay there, cradled easily, and he shoved a clip from the four held in the web pockets in the case up into the gun. Kneeling between the two engines he reached up to take the gun. There were only two movements to make. First unhook the strap of belting that passed around the receiver just behind the bolt. Then pull the gun out of the other loop. He tried it and it came easily one-handed. He pushed the little lever all the way over from semi-automatic to automatic and made sure the safety was on. Then he fastened it up again. He could not figure out where to put the extra clips; so he shoved the case under a gas tank below, where he could reach it, with the butts of the clips lying toward his hand. If I go down a time first after we’re underway, I can put a couple in my pocket, he thought. Be better not to have it on but something might jar the damn thing off.

He stood up. It was a fine clear afternoon, pleasant, not cold, with a light north breeze. It was a nice afternoon all right. The tide was running out and there were two pelicans sitting on the piling at the edge of the channel. A grunt fishing boat, painted dark green, chugged past on the way around to the fish market, the Negro fisherman sitting in the stern holding the tiller. Harry looked out across the water, smooth with the wind blowing with the tide, gray blue in the afternoon sun, out to the sandy island formed when the channel was dredged where the shark camp had been located. There were white gulls flying over the island.

“Be a pretty night,” Harry thought. “Be a nice night to cross.”

He was sweating a little from being down around the engines, and he straightened up and wiped his face with a piece of waste.

There was Albert on the dock.

“Listen, Harry,” he said. “I wish you’d carry me.”

“What’s the matter with you now?”

“They’re only going to give us three days a week on the relief now. I just heard about it this morning. I got to do something.”

“All right,” said Harry. He had been thinking again. “All right.”

“That’s good,” said Albert. “I was afraid to go home to see my old woman. She gave me hell this noon like it was me had laid off the relief.”

“What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?”

“You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.”

“Listen, Al,” Harry told him. “Take my car and this and go around to the Marine Hardware and get six metric plugs like this one. Then go get a 20-cent piece of ice and a half a dozen mullets. Get two cans of coffee, four cans of cornbeef, two loaves of bread, some sugar and two cans of condensed milk. Stop at the Sinclair and tell them to come down here and put in a hundred and fifty gallons. Get back as soon as you can and change the number two and the number four plugs in the port engine counting back from the fly-wheel. Tell them I’ll be back to pay for the gas. They can wait or find me at Freddy’s. Can you remember all that? We’re taking a party out tarponing and fishing them tomorrow.”

“It’s too cold for tarpon,” Albert said.

“The party says no,” Harry told him.

“Hadn’t I better get a dozen mullets?” Albert asked. “In case the jacks tear ‘em up? There’s plenty jacks now in those channels.”

“Well, make it a dozen. But get back inside an hour and have the gas filled.”

“Why you want to put in so much gas?”

“We may be running early and late and not have time to fill.”

“What’s become of those Cubans that wanted to be carried?”

“Haven’t heard anything more from them.”

“That was a good job.”

“This is a good job too. Come on, get going.”

“What am I going to be working for?”

“Five bucks a day,” said Harry. “If you don’t want it don’t take it.”

“All right,” said Albert. “Which plugs was it?”

“The number two and the number four counting back from the flywheel,” Harry told him. Albert nodded his head. “I guess I can remember,” he said. He got into the car and made a turn in it and went off up the street.

From where Harry stood in the boat he could see the brick and stone building and the front entrance of the First State Trust and Savings Bank. It was just a block down at the foot of the street. He couldn’t see the side entrance. He looked at his watch. It was a little after two o’clock. He shut the engine hatch and climbed up on the dock. Well, now it comes off or it doesn’t, he thought. I’ve done what I can now. I’ll go up and see Freddy and then I’ll come back and wait. He turned to the right as he left the dock and walked down a back street so that he would not pass the bank.

CHAPTER 17

In at Freddy’s he wanted to tell him about it but he couldn’t. There wasn’t anybody in the bar and he sat on a stool and wanted to tell him, but it was impossible. As he was ready to tell him he knew Freddy would not stand for it. In the old days, maybe, yes, but not now. Maybe not in the old days either. It wasn’t until he thought of telling it to Freddy that he realized how bad it was. I could stay right here, he thought, and there wouldn’t be anything. I could stay right here and have a few drinks and get hot and I wouldn’t be in it. Except there’s my gun on the boat. But nobody knows it’s mine except the old woman. I got it in Cuba on a trip the time when I peddled those others. Nobody knows I’ve got it. I could stay here now and I’d be out of it. But what the hell would they eat on? Where’s the money coming from to keep Marie and the girls? I’ve got no boat, no cash, I got no education. What can a one-armed man work at? All I’ve got is my cojones to peddle. I could stay right here and have say five more drinks and it would all be over. It would be too late then. I could just let it all slide and do nothing.

“Give me a drink,” he said to Freddy.

“Sure.”

I could sell the house and we could rent until I got some kind of work. What kind of work? No kind of work. I could go down to the bank and squeal now and what would I get? Thanks. Sure. Thanks. One bunch of Cuban government bastards cost me my arm shooting at me with a load when they had no need to and another bunch of U. S. ones took my boat. Now I can give up my home and get thanks. No thanks. The hell with it, he thought. I got no choice in it.

He wanted to tell Freddy so there would be some one knew what he was doing. But he couldn’t tell him because Freddy wouldn’t stand for it. He was making good money now. There was nobody much in the daytime, but every night the place was full until two o’clock. Freddy wasn’t in a jam. He knew he wouldn’t stand for it. I have to do it alone, he thought, with that poor bloody Albert. Christ, he looked hungrier than ever down at the dock. There were Conchs that would starve to death before they’d steal all right. Plenty in this town with their bellies hollering right now. But they’d never make a move. They’d just starve a little every day. They started starving when they were born; some of them.

“Listen, Freddy,” he said. “I want a couple of quarts.”

“Of what?”

“Bacardi.”

“O.K.”

“Pull the corks, will you? You know I wanted to charter her to take some Cubans over.”

“That’s what you said.”

“I don’t know when they’ll be going. Maybe tonight. I haven’t heard.”

“She’s ready to go anytime. You’ve got a nice night if you cross tonight.”

“They said something about going fishing this afternoon.”

“She’s got tackle on board if the pelicans haven’t stole it off her.”

“It’s still there.”

“Well, make a good trip,” Freddy said.

“Thanks. Give me another one, will you?”

“Of what?”

“Whiskey.”

“I thought you were drinking Bacardi.”

“I’ll drink that if I get cold going across.”

“You’ll cross with this breeze astern all the way,” said Freddy. “I’d like to cross tonight.”

“It’ll be a pretty night all right. Let me have another, will you?”

Just then in came the tall tourist and his wife.

“If it isn’t my dream man,” she said, and sat down on the stool beside Harry.

He took one look at her and stood up.

“I’ll be back, Freddy,” he said. “I’m going down to the boat in case that party wants to go fishing.”

“Don’t go,” the wife said. “Please don’t go.”

“You’re comical,” Harry said to her and he went out.

Down the street Richard Gordon was on his way to the Bradleys’ big winter home. He was hoping Mrs. Bradley would be alone. She would be. Mrs. Bradley collected writers as well as their books but Richard Gordon did not know this yet. His own wife was on her way home walking along the beach. She had not run into John MacWalsey. Perhaps he would come by the house.

CHAPTER 18

Albert was on board the boat and the gas was loaded.

“I’ll start her up and try how those two cylinders hit,” Harry said. “You got the things stowed?”

“Yes.”

“Cut some baits then.”

“You want a wide bait?”

“That’s right. For tarpon.”

Albert was on the stern cutting baits and Harry was at the wheel warming up the motors when he heard a noise like a motor backfiring. He looked down the street and saw a man come out of the bank. He had a gun in his hand and he came running. Then he was out of sight. Two more men came out carrying leather brief cases and guns in their hands and ran in the same direction. Harry looked at Albert busy cutting baits. The fourth man, the big one, came out of the bank door as he watched, holding a Thompson gun in front of him, and as he backed out of the door the siren in the bank rose in a long breath-holding shriek and Harry saw the gun muzzle jump-jump-jump-jump and heard the bop-bop-bop-bop, small and hollow sounding in the wail of the siren. The man turned and ran, stopping to fire once more at the bank door, and as Albert stood up in the stern saying, “Christ, they’re robbing the bank. Christ, what can we do?” Harry heard the Ford taxi coming out of the side street and saw it careening up onto the dock.

There were three Cubans in the back and one beside the driver.

“Where’s the boat?” yelled one in Spanish.

“There, you fool,” said another.

“That’s not the boat.”

“That’s the captain.”

“Come on. Come on for Christ sake.”

“Get out,” said the Cuban to the driver. “Get your hands up.”

As the driver stood beside the car he put a knife inside his belt and ripping it toward him cut the belt and slit his pants almost to the knee. He yanked the trousers down. “Stand still,” he said. The two Cubans with the valises tossed them into the cockpit of the launch and they all came tumbling aboard.

“Geta going,” said one. The big one with the machine-gun poked it into Harry’s back.

“Come on, Cappie,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “Point that some place else.”

“Cast off those lines,” the big one said. “You!” to Albert.

“Wait a minute,” Albert said. “Don’t start her. These are the bank robbers.”

The biggest Cuban turned and swung the Thompson gun and held it on Albert. “Hey, don’t! Don’t!” Albert said. “Don’t!”

The burst was so close to his chest that the bullets whocked like three slaps. Albert slid down on his knees, his eyes wide, his mouth open. He looked like he was still trying to say, “Don’t!”

“You don’t need no mate,” the big Cuban said. “You one-armed son-of-a-bitch.” Then in Spanish, “Cut those lines with that fish knife.” And in English, “Come on. Let’s go.”

Then in Spanish, “Put a gun against his back!” and in English, “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll blow your head off.”

“We’ll go,” said Harry.

One of the Indian-looking Cubans was holding a pistol against the side his bad arm was on. The muzzle almost touched the hook.

As he swung her out, spinning the wheel with his good arm, he looked astern to watch the clearance past the piling, and saw Albert on his knees in the stern, his head slipped sidewise now, in a pool of it. On the dock was the Ford taxi, and the fat driver in his under-drawers, his trousers around his ankles, his hands above his head, his mouth open as wide as Albert’s. There was still no one coming down the street.

The pilings of the dock went past as she came out of the basin and then he was in the channel passing the lighthouse dock.

“Come on. Hook her up,” the big Cuban said. “Make some time.”

“Take that gun away,” Harry said. He was thinking, I could run her on Crawfish bar, but sure as hell that Cuban would plug me.

“Make her go,” said the big Cuban. Then, in Spanish, “Lie down flat, everybody. Keep the captain covered.” He lay down himself in the stern, pulling Albert flat down into the cockpit. The other three all lay flat in the cockpit now. Harry sat on the steering seat. He was looking ahead steering out the channel, past the opening into the sub-base now, with the notice board to yachts and the green blinker, out away from the jetty, past the fort now, past the red blinker; he looked back. The big Cuban had a green box of shells out of his pocket and was filling clips. The gun lay by his side and he was filling clips without looking at them, filling by feel, looking back over the stern. The others were all looking astern except the one that was watching him. This one, one of the two Indian-looking ones, motioned with his pistol for him to look ahead. No boat had started after them yet. The engines were running smoothly and they were going with the tide. He noticed the heavy slant seawards of the buoy he passed, with the current swirling at its base.

There are two speedboats that could catch us, Harry was thinking. One, Ray’s, is running the mail from Matecumbe. Where is the other? I saw her a couple of days ago on Ed. Taylor’s ways, he checked. That was the one I thought of having Bee-lips hire. There’s two more, he remembered now. One the State Road Department has up along the keys. The other’s laid up in the Garrison Bight. How far are we now? He looked back to where the fort was well astern, the red-brick building of the old Postoffice starting to show up above the Navy yard buildings and the yellow hotel building now dominating the short skyline of the town. There was the cove at the fort, and the lighthouse showed above the houses that strung out toward the big winter hotel. Four miles anyway, he thought. There they come, he thought. Two white fishing boats were rounding the breakwater and heading out toward him. They can’t do ten, he thought. It’s pitiful.

The Cubans were chattering in Spanish.

“How fast you going, Cappie?” the big one said, looking back from the stern.

“About twelve,” Harry said.

“What can those boats do?”

“Maybe ten.”

They were all watching them now, even the one who was supposed to keep him, Harry, covered. But what can I do? He thought. Nothing to do yet.

The two white boats got no larger.

“Look at that, Roberto,” said the nice-speaking one.

“Where?”

“Look!”

A long way back, so far you could hardly see it, a little spout rose in the water.

“They’re shooting at us,” the pleasant-speaking one said. “It’s silly.”

“For Christ’s sake,” the big-faced one said. “At three miles.”

“Four,” thought Harry. “All of four.”

Harry could see the tiny spouts rise on the calm surface but he could not hear the shots.

“Those Conchs are pitiful,” he thought. “They’re worse. They’re comical.”

“What government boat is there, Cappie?” asked the big-faced one looking away from the stern.

“Coast guard.”

“What can she make?”

“Maybe twelve.”

“Then we’re O.K. now.”

Harry did not answer.

“Aren’t we O.K. then?”

Harry said nothing. He was keeping the rising, widening spire of Sand Key on his left and the stake on little Sand Key shoals showed almost abeam to starboard. In ten more minutes they would be past the reef.

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you talk?”

“What did you ask me?”

“Is there anything can catch us now?”

“Coast guard plane,” said Harry.

“We cut the telephone wire before we came in town,” the pleasant-speaking one said.

“You didn’t cut the wireless, did you?” Harry asked.

“You think the plane can get here?”

“You got a chance of her until dark,” Harry said.

“What do you think, Cappy?” asked Roberto, the big-faced one.

Harry did not answer.

“Come on, what do you think?”

“What did you let that son-of-a-bitch kill my mate for?” Harry said to the pleasant-speaking one who was standing beside him now looking at the compass course.

“Shut up,” said Roberto. “Kill you, too.”

“How much money you get?” Harry asked the pleasant-speaking one.

“We don’t know. We haven’t counted it yet. It isn’t ours, anyway.”

“I guess not,” said Harry. He was past the light now and he put her on 225°, his regular course for Havana.

“I mean we do it not for ourselves. For a revolutionary organization.”

“You kill my mate for that, too?”

“I am very sorry,” said the boy. “I cannot tell you how badly I feel about that.”

“Don’t try,” said Harry.

“You see,” the boy said, speaking quietly, “this man Roberto is bad. He is a good revolutionary but a bad man. He kills so much in the time of Machado he gets to like it. He thinks it is funny to kill. He kills in a good cause, of course. The best cause.” He looked back at Roberto who sat now in one of the fishing chairs in the stern, the Thompson gun across his lap, looking back at the white boats which were, Harry saw, much smaller now.

“What you got to drink?” Roberto called from the stern.

“Nothing,” Harry said.

“I drink my own, then,” Roberto said. One of the other Cubans lay on one of the seats built over the gas tanks. He looked seasick already. The other was obviously seasick too, but still sitting up.

Looking back, Harry saw a lead-colored boat, now clear of the fort, coming up on the two white boats.

“There’s the coast guard boat,” he thought. “She’s pitiful too.”

“You think the seaplane will come?” the pleasant-spoken boy asked.

“Be dark in half an hour,” Harry said. He settled on the steering seat. “What you figure on doing? Killing me?”

“I don’t want to,” the boy said. “I hate killing.”

“What you doing?” Roberto, who sat now with a pint of whiskey in his hand, asked. “Making friends with the captain? What you want to do? Eat at the captain’s table?”

“Take the wheel,” Harry said to the boy. “See the course? Two twenty-five.” He straightened up from the stool and went aft.

“Let me have a drink,” Harry said to Roberto. “There’s your coast guard boat but she can’t catch us.”

He had abandoned anger, hatred and any dignity as luxuries, now, and had started to plan.

“Sure,” said Roberto. “She can’t catch us. Look at those seasick babies. What you say? You want a drink? You got any other last wishes, Cappie?”

“You’re some kidder,” Harry said. He took a long drink.

“Go easy!” Roberto protested. “That’s all there is.”

“I got some more,” Harry told him. “I was just kidding you.”

“Don’t kid me,” said Roberto suspiciously.

“Why should I try?”

“What you got?”

“Bacardi.”

“Bring it out.”

“Take it easy,” Harry said. “Why do you get so tough?”

He stepped over Albert’s body as he walked forward. As he came to the wheel he looked at the compass. The boy was about twenty-five degrees off and the compass dial was swinging. He’s no sailor, Harry thought. That gives me more time. Look at the wake.

The wake ran in two bubbling curves toward where the light, astern now, showed brown, conical and thinly latticed on the horizon. The boats were almost out of sight. He could just see a blur where the wireless masts of the town were. The engines were running smoothly. Harry put his head below and reached for one of the bottles of Bacardi. He went aft with it. At the stern he took a drink, then handed the bottle to Roberto. Standing, he looked down at Albert and he felt sick inside. The poor hungry bastard, he thought.

“What’s the matter? He scare you?” the big-faced Cuban asked.

“What you say we put him over?” Harry said. “No sense to carry him.”

“O.K.,” said Roberto. “You got good sense.”

“Take him under the arms,” said Harry. “I’ll take the legs.” Roberto laid the Thompson gun down on the wide stern and leaning down lifted the body by the shoulders.

“You know the heaviest thing in the world is a dead man,” he said. “You ever lift a dead man before, Cappie?”

“No,” said Harry. “You ever lift a big dead woman?”

Roberto pulled the body up onto the stern. “You’re a tough fellow,” he said. “What do you say we have a drink?”

“Go ahead,” said Harry.

“Listen, I’m sorry I killed him,” Roberto said. “When I kill you I feel worse.”

“Cut out talking that way,” Harry said. “What do you want to talk that way for?”

“Come on,” said Roberto. “Over he goes.”

As they leaned over and slid the body up and over the stern, Harry kicked the machine gun over the edge. It splashed at the same time Albert did, but while Albert turned over twice in the white, churned, bubbling back-suction of the propellor wash before sinking, the gun went straight down.

“That’s better, eh?” Roberto said. “Make it shipshape.” Then as he saw the gun was gone, “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

“With what?”

“The ametralladora!” going into Spanish in excitement.

“The what?”

“You know what.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“You knocked it off the stern. Now I’ll kill you, now.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “What the hell you going to kill me about?”

“Give me a gun,” Roberto said to one of the seasick Cubans in Spanish. “Give me a gun quick!”

Harry stood there, never having felt so tall, never having felt so wide, feeling the sweat trickle from under his armpits, feeling it go down his flanks.

“You kill too much,” he heard the seasick Cuban say in Spanish. “You kill the mate. Now you want to kill the captain. Who’s going to get us across?”

“Leave him alone,” said the other. “Kill him when we get over.”

“He knocked the machine gun overboard,” Roberto said.

“We got the money. What you want a machine gun for now? There’s plenty of machine guns in Cuba.”

“I tell you, you make a mistake if you don’t kill him now, I tell you. Give me a gun.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re drunk. Every time you’re drunk you want to kill somebody.”

“Have a drink,” said Harry looking out across the gray swell of the Gulf Stream where the round red sun was just touching the water. “Watch that. When she goes all the way under it’ll turn bright green.”

“The hell with that,” said the big-faced Cuban. “You think you got away with something.”

“I’ll get you another gun,” said Harry. “They only cost forty-five dollars in Cuba. Take it easy. You’re all right now. There ain’t any coast guard plane going to come now.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Roberto said, looking him over. “You did that on purpose. That’s why you got me to lift on that.”

“You don’t want to kill me,” Harry said. “Who’s going to take you across?”

“I ought to kill you now.”

“Take it easy,” said Harry. “I’m going to look at the engines.”

He opened the hatch, got down in, screwed down the grease cups on the two stuffing boxes, felt of the motors, and with his hand touched the butt of the Thompson gun. Not yet, he thought. No, better not yet. Christ, that was lucky. What the hell difference does it make to Albert when he’s dead? Saves his old woman to bury him. That big-faced bastard. That big-faced murdering bastard. Christ, I’d like to take him now. But I better wait.

He stood up, climbed out and shut the hatch.

“How you doing?” he said to Roberto. He put his hand on the fat shoulder. The big-faced Cuban looked at him and did not say anything.

“Did you see it turn green?” Harry asked.

“The hell with you,” Roberto said. He was drunk but he was suspicious and, like an animal, he knew how wrong something had gone.

“Let me take her a while,” Harry said to the boy at the wheel. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Emilio,” said the boy.

“Go below and you’ll find something to eat,” Harry said. “There’s bread and cornbeef. Make coffee if you want.”

“I don’t want any.”

“I’ll make some later,” Harry said. He sat at the wheel, the binnacle light on now, holding her on the point easily in the light following sea, looking out at the night coming on the water. He had no running lights on.

It would be a pretty night to cross, he thought, a pretty night. Soon as the last of that afterglow is gone I’ve got to work her east. If I don’t, we’ll sight the glare of Havana in another hour. In two, anyway. Soon as he sees the glare it may occur to that son-of-a-bitch to kill me. That was lucky getting rid of that gun. Damn, that was lucky. Wonder what that Marie’s having for supper. I guess she’s plenty worried. I guess she’s too worried to eat. Wonder how much money those bastards have got. Funny they don’t count it. If that ain’t a hell of a way to raise money for a revolution. Cubans are a hell of a people.

That’s a mean boy, that Roberto. I’ll get him tonight. I get him no matter how the rest of it comes out. That won’t help that poor damned Albert though. It made me feel bad to dump him like that. I don’t know what made me think of it.

He lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.

I’m doing all right, he thought. I’m doing better than I expected. The kid is a kind of nice kid. I wish I could get those other two on the same side. I wish there was some way to bunch them. Well, I’ll have to do the best I can. Easier I can make them take it beforehand the better. Smoother everything goes the better.

“Do you want a sandwich?” the boy asked.

“Thanks,” said Harry. “You give one to your partner?”

“He’s drinking. He won’t eat,” the boy said.

“What about the others?”

“Seasick,” the boy said.

“It’s a nice night to cross,” Harry said. He noticed the boy did not watch the compass so he kept letting her go off to the east.

“I’d enjoy it,” the boy said. “If it wasn’t for your mate.”

“He was a good fellow,” said Harry. “Did any one get hurt at the bank?”

“The lawyer. What was his name, Simmons.”

“Get killed?”

“I think so.”

So, thought Harry. Mr. Bee-lips. What the hell did he expect? How could he have thought he wouldn’t get it? That comes from playing at being tough. That comes from being too smart too often. Mr. Bee-lips. Good-by, Mr. Bee-lips.

“How he come to get killed?”

“I guess you can imagine,” the boy said. “That’s very different from your mate. I feel badly about that. You know he doesn’t mean to do wrong. It’s just what that phase of the revolution has done to him.”

“I guess he’s probably a good fellow,” Harry said, and thought, Listen to what my mouth says. God damn it, my mouth will say anything. But I got to try to make a friend of this boy in case ——

“What kind of revolution do you make now?” he asked.

“We are the only true revolutionary party,” the boy said. “We want to do away with all the old politicians, with all the American imperialism that strangles us, with the tyranny of the army. We want to start clean and give every man a chance. We want to end the slavery of the guajiros, you know, the peasants, and divide the big sugar estates among the people that work them. But we are not Communists.”

Harry looked up from the compass card at him.

“How you coming on?” he asked.

“We just raise money now for the fight,” the boy said. “To do that we have to use means that later we would never use. Also we have to use people we would not employ later. But the end is worth the means. They had to do the same thing in Russia. Stalin was a sort of brigand for many years before the revolution.”

He’s a radical, Harry thought. That’s what he is, a radical.

“I guess you’ve got a good program,” he said, “if you’re out to help the working man. I was out on strike plenty times in the old days when we had the cigar factories in Key West. I’d have been glad to do whatever I could if I’d known what kind of outfit you were.”

“Lots of people would help us,” the boy said. “But because of the state the movement is in at present we can’t trust people. I regret the necessity for the present phase very much. I hate terrorism. I also feel very badly about the methods for raising the necessary money. But there is no choice. You do not know how bad things are in Cuba.”

“I guess they’re plenty bad,” Harry said.

“You can’t know how bad they are. There is an absolutely murderous tyranny that extends over every little village in the country. Three people cannot be together on the street. Cuba has no foreign enemies and doesn’t need any army, but she has an army of twenty-five thousand now, and the army, from the corporals up, suck the blood from the nation. Every one, even the private soldiers, are out to make their fortunes. Now they have a military reserve with every kind of crook, bully and informer of the old days of Machado in it, and they take anything the army does not bother with. We have to get rid of the army before anything can start. Before we were ruled by clubs. Now we are ruled by rifles, pistols, machine guns, and bayonets.”

“It sounds bad,” Harry said, steering, and letting her go off to the eastward.

“You cannot realize how bad it is,” the boy said. “I love my poor country and I would do anything, anything to free it from this tyranny we have now. I do things I hate. But I would do things I hate a thousand times more.”

I want a drink, Harry was thinking. What the hell do I care about his revolution. F —— his revolution. To help the working man he robs a bank and kills a fellow works with him and then kills that poor damned Albert that never did any harm. That’s a working man he kills. He never thinks of that. With a family. It’s the Cubans run Cuba. They all double-cross each other. They sell each other out. They get what they deserve. The hell with their revolutions. All I got to do is make a living for my family and I can’t do that. Then he tells me about his revolution. The hell with his revolution.

“It must be bad, all right,” he said to the boy. “Take the wheel a minute, will you? I want to get a drink.”

“Sure,” said the boy. “How should I steer?”

“Two twenty-five,” Harry said.

It was dark now and there was quite a swell this far out in the Gulf Stream. He passed the two seasick Cubans lying out on the seats and went aft to where Roberto sat in the fishing chair. The water was racing past the boat in the dark. Roberto sat with his feet in the other fishing chair that was turned toward him.

“Let me have some of that,” Harry said to him.

“Go to hell,” said the big-faced man thickly. “This is mine.”

“All right,” said Harry, and went forward to get the other bottle. Below in the dark, with the bottle under the flap of his right arm, he pulled the cork that Freddy had drawn and re-inserted and took a drink.

Now’s as good as any time, he said to himself. No sense waiting now. Little boy’s spoke his piece. The big-faced bastard drunk. The other two seasick. It might as well be now.

He took another drink and the Bacardi warmed and helped him but he felt cold and hollow all around his stomach still. His whole insides were cold.

“Want a drink?” he asked the boy at the wheel.

“No, thanks,” the boy said. “I don’t drink.” Harry could see him smile in the binnacle light. He was a nice-looking boy all right. Pleasant talking, too.

“I’ll take one,” he said. He swallowed a big one but it could not warm the dank cold part that had spread from his stomach to all over the inside of his chest now. He put the bottle down on the cockpit door.

“Keep her on that course,” he said to the boy. “I’m going to have a look at the motors.”

He opened the hatch and stepped down. Then locked the hatch up with a long hook that set into a hole in the flooring. He stooped over the motors, with his one hand felt the water manifold, the cylinders, and put his hand on the stuffing boxes. He tightened the two grease cups a turn and a half each. Quit stalling, he said to himself. Come on, quit stalling. Where’re your balls now? Under my chin, I guess, he thought.

He looked out of the hatch. He could almost touch the two seats over the gas tanks where the seasick men lay. The boy’s back was toward him, sitting on the high stool, outlined clearly by the binnacle light. Turning, he could see Roberto sprawled in the chair in the stern, silhouetted against the dark water.

Twenty-one to a clip is four bursts of five at the most, he thought. I got to be light-fingered. All right. Come on. Quit stalling, you gutless wonder. Christ, what I’d give for another one. Well, there isn’t any other one now. He reached his left hand up, unhooked the length of belting, put his hand around the trigger guard, pushed the safety all the way over with his thumb and pulled the gun out. Squatting in the engine pit he sighted carefully on the base of the back of the boy’s head where it outlined against the light from the binnacle.

The gun made a big flame in the dark and the shells rattled against the lifted hatch and onto the engine. Before the slump of the boy’s body fell from the stool he had turned and shot into the figure on the left bunk, holding the jerking, flame-stabbing gun almost against the man, so close he could smell it burn his coat; then swung to put a burst into the other bunk where the man was sitting up, tugging at his pistol. He crouched low now and looked astern. The big-faced man was gone out of the chair. He could see both chairs silhouetted. Behind him the boy lay still. There wasn’t any doubt about him. On one bunk a man was flopping. On the other, he could see with the corner of his eye, a man lay half over the gunwale, fallen over on his face.

Harry was trying to locate the big-faced man in the dark. The boat was going in a circle now and the cockpit lightened a little. He held his breath and looked. That must be him where it was a little darker on the floor in the corner. He watched it and it moved a little. That was him.

The man was crawling toward him. No, toward the man who lay half overboard. He was after his gun. Crouching low, Harry watched him move until he was absolutely sure. Then he gave him a burst. The gun lighted him on hands and knees, and, as the flame and the bot-bot-bot-bot stopped, he heard him flopping heavily.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” said Harry. “You big-faced murdering bastard.”

All the cold was gone from around his heart now and he had the old hollow, singing feeling and he crouched low down and felt under the square, wood-crated gas tank for another clip to put in the gun.

He got the clip, but his hand was cold-drying wet.

Hit the tank, he said to himself. I’ve got to cut the engines. I don’t know where that tank cuts.

He pressed the curved lever, dropped the empty clip, shoved in the fresh one, and climbed up and out of the cockpit.

As he stood up, holding the Thompson gun in his left hand, looking around before shutting the hatch with the hook on his right arm, the Cuban who had lain on the port bunk and had been shot three times through the left shoulder, two shots going into the gas tank, sat up, took careful aim, and shot him in the belly.

Harry sat down in a backward lurch. He felt as though he had been struck in the abdomen with a club. His back was against one of the iron-pipe supports of the fishing chairs and while the Cuban shot at him again and splintered the fishing chair above his head, he reached down, found the Thompson gun, raised it carefully, holding the forward grip with the hook and rattled half of the fresh clip into the man who sat leaning forward, calmly shooting at him from the seat. The man was down on the seat in a heap and Harry felt around on the cockpit floor until he could find the big-faced man, who lay face down, felt for his head with the hook on his bad arm, hooked it around, then put the muzzle of the gun against the head and touched the trigger. Touching the head, the gun made a noise like hitting a pumpkin with a club. Harry put down the gun and lay on his side on the cockpit floor.

“I’m a son-of-a-bitch,” he said, his lips against the planking. I’m a gone son-of-a-bitch now. I got to cut the engines or we’ll all burn up, he thought. I got a chance still. I got a kind of a chance. Jesus Christ. One thing to spoil it. One thing to go wrong. God damn it. Oh, God damn that Cuban bastard. Who’d have thought I hadn’t got him?

He got on his hands and knees and letting one side of the hatch over the engines slam down, crawled over it forward to where the steering stool was. He pulled up on it, surprised to find how well he could move, then suddenly feeling faint and weak as he stood erect, he leaned forward with his bad arm resting on the compass and cut the two switches. The engines were quiet and he could hear the water against her sides. There was no other sound. She swung into the trough of the little sea the north wind had raised and began to roll.

He hung against the wheel, then eased himself onto the steering stool, leaning against the chart table. He could feel the strength drain out of him in a steady faint nausea. He opened his shirt with his good hand and felt the hole with the base of the palm of his hand, then fingered it. There was very little bleeding. All inside, he thought. I better lie down and give it a chance to quiet.

The moon was up now and he could see what was in the cockpit.

Some mess, he thought, some hell of a mess.

Better get down before I fall down, he thought and he lowered himself down to the cockpit floor.

He lay on his side and then, as the boat rolled, the moonlight came in and he could see everything in the cockpit clearly.

It’s crowded, he thought. That’s what it is, it’s crowded. Then, he thought, I wonder what she’ll do. I wonder what Marie will do? Maybe they’ll pay her the rewards. God damn that Cuban. She’ll get along, I guess. She’s a smart woman. I guess we would all have gotten along. I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I wish I could do something about Marie. Plenty money on this boat. I don’t even know how much. Anybody be O.K. with that money. I wonder if the coast guard will pinch it. Some of it, I guess. I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. There’s no honest money going in boats any more. If the bitch wouldn’t only roll. If she’d only quit rolling. I can feel all that slopping back and forth inside. Me. Mr. Bee-lips and Albert. Everybody that had to do with it. These bastards too. It must be an unlucky business. Some unlucky business. I guess what a man like me ought to do is run something like a filling station. Hell, I couldn’t run no filling station. Marie, she’ll run something. She’s too old to peddle her hips now. I wish this bitch wouldn’t roll. I’ll just have to take it easy. I got to take it as easy as I can. They say if you don’t drink water and lay still. They say especially if you don’t drink water.

He looked at what the moonlight showed in the cockpit.

Well, I don’t have to clean her up, he thought. Take it easy. That’s what I got to do. Take it easy. I’ve got to take it as easy as I can. I’ve got sort of a chance. If you lay still and don’t drink any water.

He lay on his back and tried to breathe steadily. The launch rolled in the Gulf Stream swell and Harry Morgan lay on his back in the cockpit. At first he tried to brace himself against the roll with his good hand. Then he lay quietly and took it.

CHAPTER 19

The next morning in Key West Richard Gordon was on his way home from a visit to Freddy’s Bar where he had gone to ask about the bank robbery. Riding his bicycle, he passed a heavy-set, big, blue-eyed woman, with bleached-blonde hair showing under her old man’s felt hat, hurrying across the road, her eyes red from crying. Look at that big ox, he thought. What do you suppose a woman like that thinks about? What do you suppose she does in bed? How does her husband feel about her when she gets that size? Who do you suppose he runs around with in this town? Wasn’t she an appalling looking woman? Like a battleship. Terrific.

He was almost home now. He left his bicycle on the front porch and went in the hallway, closing the front door the termites had tunnelled and riddled.

“What did you find out, Dick?” his wife called from the kitchen.

“Don’t talk to me,” he said. “I’m going to work. I have it all in my head.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

He sat down at the big table in the front room. He was writing a novel about a strike in a textile factory.

In today’s chapter he was going to use the big woman with the tear-reddened eyes he had just seen on the way home. Her husband when he came home at night hated her, hated the way she had coarsened and grown heavy, was repelled by her bleached hair, her too big breasts, her lack of sympathy with his work as an organizer. He would compare her to the young, firm-breasted, full-lipped little Jewess that had spoken at the meeting that evening. It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true. He had seen, in a flash of perception, the whole inner life of that type of woman.

Her early indifference to her husband’s caresses. Her desire for children and security. Her lack of sympathy with her husband’s aims. Her sad attempts to simulate an interest in the sexual act that had become actually repugnant to her. It would be a fine chapter.

The woman he had seen was Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, on her way home from the sheriff’s office.

CHAPTER 20

Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, 34 feet long, with a V number out of Tampa, was painted white; the forward deck was painted a color called Frolic green and the inside of the cockpit was painted Frolic green. The top of the house was painted the same color. Her name and home port, Key West, Fla., were painted in black across her stern. She was not equipped with outriggers and had no mast. She was equipped with glass windshields, one of which, that forward of the wheel, was broken. There were a number of fresh, wood-splintered holes in the newly painted planking of her hull. Splintered patches could be seen on both sides of her hull about a foot below the gunwale and a little forward of the center of the cockpit. There was another group of these splintered places almost at the water line on the starboard side of the hull opposite the aft stanchion that supported her house or awning. From the lower of these holes something dark had dripped and hung in ropy lines against the new paint of her hull.

She drifted broadside to the gentle north wind about ten miles outside of the north-bound tanker lanes, gay looking in her fresh white and green, against the dark, blue Gulf Stream water. There were patches of sun-yellowed Sargasso weed floating in the water near her that passed her slowly in the current going to the north and east, while the wind overcame some of the launch’s drift as it set her steadily further out into the stream. There was no sign of life on her although the body of a man showed, rather inflated looking, above the gunwale, lying on a bench over the port gasoline tank and, from the long seat alongside the starboard gunwale, a man seemed to be leaning over to dip his hand into the sea. His head and arms were in the sun and at the point where his fingers almost touched the water, there was a school of small fish, about two inches long, oval-shaped, golden-colored, with faint purple stripes, that had deserted the gulf weed to take shelter in the shade the bottom of the drifting launch made in the water, and each time anything dripped down into the sea, these fish rushed at the drop and pushed and milled until it was gone. Two gray sucker fish about eighteen inches long swam round and round the boat in the shadow in the water, their slit mouths on the tops of their flat heads opening and shutting; but they did not seem to comprehend the regularity of the drip the small fish fed on and were as likely to be on the far side of the launch when the drop fell as near it. They had long since pulled away the ropy, carmine clots and threads that trailed in the water from the lowest splintered holes, shaking their ugly, sucker-topped heads and their elongated, tapering, thin-tailed bodies as they pulled. They were reluctant now to leave a place where they had fed so well and unexpectedly.

Inside the cockpit of the launch there were three other men. One, dead, lay on his back where he had fallen below the steering stool. Another, dead, lay humped big against the scupper by the starboard aft stanchion. The third, still alive, but long out of his head, lay on his side with his head on his arm.

The bilge of the launch was full of gasoline and when she rolled at all this made a sloshing sound. The man, Harry Morgan, believed this sound was in his own belly and it seemed to him now that his belly was big as a lake and that it sloshed on both shores at once. That was because he was on his back now with his knees drawn up and his head back. The water of the lake that was his belly was very cold; so cold that when he stepped into its edge it numbed him, and he was extremely cold now and everything tasted of gasoline as though he had been sucking on a hose to syphon a tank. He knew there was no tank although he could feel a cold rubber hose that seemed to have entered his mouth and now was coiled, big, cold, and heavy all down through him. Each time he took a breath the hose coiled colder and firmer in his lower abdomen and he could feel it like a big, smooth-moving snake in there, above the sloshing of the lake. He was afraid of it, but although it was in him, it seemed a vast distance away and what he minded, now, was the cold.

The cold was all through him, an aching cold that would not numb away, and he lay quietly now and felt it. For a time he had thought that if he could pull himself up over himself it would warm him like a blanket, and he thought for a while that he had gotten himself pulled up and he had started to warm. But that warmth was really only the hemorrhage produced by raising his knees up; and as the warmth faded he knew now that you could not pull yourself up over yourself and there was nothing to do about the cold but take it. He lay there, trying hard in all of him not to die long after he could not think. He was in the shadow now, as the boat drifted, and it was colder all the time.

The launch had been drifting since 10 o’clock of the night before and it was now getting late in the afternoon. There was nothing else in sight across the surface of the Gulf Stream but the gulf weed, a few pink, inflated, membranous bubbles of Portuguese men-of-war cocked jauntily on the surface, and the distant smoke of a loaded tanker bound north from Tampico.

CHAPTER 21

“Well,” Richard Gordon said to his wife.

“You have lipstick on your shirt,” she said. “And over your ear.”

“What about this?”

“What about what?”

“What about finding you lying on the couch with that drunken slob?”

“You did not.”

“Where did I find you?”

“You found us sitting on the couch.”

“In the dark.”

“Where have you been?”

“At the Bradleys’.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. Don’t come near me. You reek of that woman.”

“What do you reek of?”

“Nothing. I’ve been sitting, talking to a friend.”

“Did you kiss him?”

“No.”

“Did he kiss you?”

“Yes, I liked it.”

“You bitch.”

“If you call me that I’ll leave you.”

“You bitch.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s over. If you weren’t so conceited and I weren’t so good to you, you’d have seen it was over a long time ago.”

“You bitch.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not a bitch. I’ve tried to be a good wife, but you’re as selfish and conceited as a barnyard rooster. Always crowing, ‘Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve made you happy. Now run along and cackle.’ Well, you don’t make me happy and I’m sick of you. I’m through cackling.”

“You shouldn’t cackle. You never produced anything to cackle about.”

“Whose fault was that? Didn’t I want children? But we never could afford them. But we could afford to go to the Cap d’Antibes to swim and to Switzerland to ski. We can afford to come down here to Key West. I’m sick of you. I dislike you. This Bradley woman today was the last straw.”

“Oh, leave her out of it.”

“You coming home with lipstick all over you. Couldn’t you even wash? There’s some on your forehead, too.”

“You kissed that drunken twirp.”

“No, I didn’t. But I would have if I’d known what you were doing.”

“Why did you let him kiss you?”

“I was furious at you. We waited and waited and waited. You never came near me. You went off with that woman and stayed for hours. John brought me home.”

“Oh, John, is it?”

“Yes, John. JOHN. John.”

“And what’s his last name? Thomas?”

“His name is MacWalsey.”

“Why don’t you spell it?”

“I can’t,” she said, and laughed. But it was the last time she laughed. “Don’t think it’s all right because I laugh,” she said, tears in her eyes, her lips working. “It’s not all right. This isn’t just an ordinary row. It’s over. I don’t hate you. It isn’t violent. I just dislike you. I dislike you thoroughly and I’m through with you.”

“All right,” he said.

“No. Not all right. All over. Don’t you understand?”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t guess.”

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Helen.”

“So I’m melodramatic, am I? Well, I’m not. I’m through with you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I won’t say it again.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I may marry John MacWalsey.”

“You will not.”

“I will if I wish.”

“He wouldn’t marry you.”

“Oh, yes, he will. He asked me to marry him this afternoon.”

Richard Gordon said nothing. A hollow had come in him where his heart had been, and everything he heard, or said, seemed to be overheard.

“He asked you what?” he said, his voice coming from a long way away.

“To marry him.”

“Why?”

“Because he loves me. Because he wants me to live with him. He makes enough money to support me.”

“You’re married to me.”

“Not really. Not in the church. You wouldn’t marry me in the church and it broke my poor mother’s heart as you well know. I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of pick-nose love. You writer.”

“You little mick slut.”

“Don’t call me names. I know the word for you.”

“All right.”

“No, not all right. All wrong and wrong again. If you were just a good writer I could stand for all the rest of it maybe. But I’ve seen you bitter, jealous, changing your politics to suit the fashion, sucking up to people’s faces and talking about them behind their backs. I’ve seen you until I’m sick of you. Then that dirty rich bitch of a Bradley woman today. Oh, I’m sick of it. I’ve tried to take care of you and humor you and look after you and cook for you and keep quiet when you wanted and cheerful when you wanted and give you your little explosions and pretend it made me happy, and put up with your rages and jealousies and your meannesses and now I’m through.”

“So now you want to start again with a drunken professor?”

“He’s a man. He’s kind and he’s charitable and he makes you feel comfortable and we come from the same thing and we have values that you’ll never have. He’s like my father was.”

“He’s a drunk.”

“He drinks. But so did my father. And my father wore wool socks and put his feet in them up on a chair and read the paper in the evening. And when we had croup he took care of us. He was a boiler maker and his hands were all broken and he liked to fight when he drank, and he could fight when he was sober. He went to mass because my mother wanted him to and he did his Easter duty for her and for Our Lord, but mostly for her, and he was a good union man and if he ever went with another woman she never knew it.”

“I’ll bet he went with plenty.”

“Maybe he did, but if he did he told the priest, not her, and if he did it was because he couldn’t help it and he was sorry and repented of it. He didn’t do it out of curiosity, or from barnyard pride, or to tell his wife what a great man he was. If he did it was because my mother was away with us kids for the summer, and he was out with the boys and got drunk. He was a man.”

“You ought to be a writer and write about him.”

“I’d be a better writer than you. And John MacWalsey is a good man. That’s what you’re not. You couldn’t be. No matter what your politics or your religion.”

“I haven’t any religion.”

“Neither have I. But I had one once and I’m going to have one again. And you won’t be there to take it away. Like you’ve taken away everything else.”

“No.”

“No. You can be in bed with some rich woman like Helène Bradley. How did she like you? Did she think you were wonderful?”

Looking at her sad, angry face, pretty with crying, the lips swollen freshly like something after rain, her curly dark hair wild about her face, Richard Gordon gave her up, then, finally:

“And you don’t love me any more?”

“I hate the word even.”

“All right,” he said, and slapped her hard and suddenly across the face.

She cried now from actual pain, not anger, her face down on the table.

“You didn’t need to do that,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I did,” he said. “You know an awful lot, but you don’t know how much I needed to do that.”

That afternoon she had not seen him as the door opened. She had not seen anything but the white ceiling with its cake-frosting modeling of cupids, doves and scroll work that the light from the open door suddenly made clear.

Richard Gordon had turned his head and seen him, standing heavy and bearded in the doorway.

“Don’t stop,” Helène had said. “Please don’t stop.” Her bright hair was spread over the pillow.

But Richard Gordon had stopped and his head was still turned, staring.

“Don’t mind him. Don’t mind anything. Don’t you see you can’t stop now?” the woman had said in desperate urgency.

The bearded man had closed the door softly. He was smiling.

“What’s the matter, darling?” Helène Bradley had asked, now in the darkness again.

“I must go.”

“Don’t you see you can’t go?”

“That man — —”

“That’s only Tommy,” Helène had said. “He knows all about these things. Don’t mind him. Come on, darling. Please do.”

“I can’t.”

“You must,” Helène had said. He could feel her shaking, and her head on his shoulder was trembling. “My God, don’t you know anything? Haven’t you any regard for a woman?”

“I have to go,” said Richard Gordon.

In the darkness he had felt the slap across his face that lighted flashes of light in his eyeballs. Then there was another slap. Across his mouth this time.

“So that’s the kind of man you are,” she had said to him. “I thought you were a man of the world. Get out of here.”

That was this afternoon. That was how it had finished at the Bradleys’.

Now his wife sat with her head forward on her hands that rested on the table and neither of them said anything. Richard Gordon could hear the clock ticking and he felt as hollow as the room was quiet. After a while his wife said without looking at him: “I’m sorry it happened. But you see it’s over, don’t you?”

“Yes, if that’s the way it’s been.”

“It hasn’t been all like that, but for a long time it’s been that way.”

“I’m sorry I slapped you.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. That hasn’t anything to do with it. That was just a way to say good-by.”

“Don’t.”

“I’ll have to get out,” she said very tiredly. “I’ll have to take the big suitcase, I’m afraid.”

“Do it in the morning,” he said. “You can do everything in the morning.”

“I’d rather do it now, Dick, and it would be easier. But I’m so tired. It’s made me awfully tired and given me a headache.”

“You do whatever you want.”

“Oh, God,” she said. “I wish it wouldn’t have happened. But it’s happened. I’ll try to fix everything up for you. You’ll need somebody to look after you. If I hadn’t of said some of that, or if you hadn’t hit me, maybe we could have fixed it up again.”

“No, it was over before that.”

“I’m so sorry for you, Dick.”

“Don’t you be sorry for me or I’ll slap you again.”

“I guess I’d feel better if you slapped me,” she said. “I am sorry for you. Oh, I am.”

“Go to hell.”

“I’m sorry I said it about you not being good in bed. I don’t know anything about that. I guess you’re wonderful.”

“You’re not such a star,” he said.

She began to cry again.

“That’s worse than slapping,” she said.

“Well, what did you say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I was so angry and you hurt me so.”

“Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter?”

“Oh, I don’t want it to be over. But it is and there’s nothing to do now.”

“You’ll have your rummy professor.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Can’t we just shut up and not talk any more?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll sleep out here.”

“No. You can have the bed. You must. I’m going out for a while.”

“Oh, don’t go out.”

“I’ve got to,” he said.

“Good-by,” she said, and he saw her face he always loved so much, that crying never spoiled, and her curly black hair, her small firm breasts under the sweater forward against the edge of the table, and he didn’t see the rest of her that he’d loved so much and thought he had pleased, but evidently hadn’t been any good to, that was all below the table, and as he went out the door she was looking at him across the table; and her chin was on her hands; and she was crying.

CHAPTER 22

He did not take the bicycle but walked down the street. The moon was up now and the trees were dark against it, and he passed the frame houses with their narrow yards, light coming from the shuttered windows; the unpaved alleys, with their double rows of houses; Conch town, where all was starched, well-shuttered, virtue, failure, grits and boiled grunts, under-nourishment, prejudice, righteousness, interbreeding and the comforts of religion; the open-doored, lighted Cuban bolito houses, shacks whose only romance was their names; The Red House, Chicha’s; the pressed stone church; its steeples sharp, ugly triangles against the moonlight; the big grounds and the long, black-domed bulk of the convent, handsome in the moonlight; a filling station and a sandwich place, bright-lighted beside a vacant lot where a miniature golf course had been taken out; past the brightly lit main street with the three drug stores, the music store, the five Jew stores, three poolrooms, two barbershops, five beer joints, three ice cream parlors, the five poor and the one good restaurant, two magazine and paper places, four second-hand joints (one of which made keys), a photographer’s, an office building with four dentists’ offices upstairs, the big dime store, a hotel on the corner with taxis opposite; and across, behind the hotel, to the street that led to jungle town, the big unpainted frame house with lights and the girls in the doorway, the mechanical piano going, and a sailor sitting in the street; and then on back, past the back of the brick courthouse with its clock luminous at half-past ten, past the whitewashed jail building shining in the moonlight, to the embowered entrance of the Lilac Time where motor cars filled the alley.

The Lilac Time was brightly lighted and full of people, and as Richard Gordon went in he saw the gambling room was crowded, the wheel turning and the little ball clicking brittle against metal partitions set in the bowl, the wheel turning slowly, the ball whirring, then clicking jumpily until it settled and there was only the turning of the wheel and the rattling of chips. At the bar, the proprietor who was serving with two bartenders, said “‘Allo, ‘allo, Mist’ Gordon. What you have?”

“I don’t know,” said Richard Gordon.

“You don’t look good. Whatsa matter? You don’t feel good?”

“No.”

“I fix you something just fine. Fix you up hokay. You ever try a Spanish absinthe, ojen?”

“Go ahead,” said Gordon.

“You drink him you feel good. Want to fight anybody in a house,” said the proprietor. “Make Mistah Gordon a ojen special.”

Standing at the bar, Richard Gordon drank three ojen specials but he felt no better; the opaque, sweetish, cold, licorice-tasting drink did not make him feel any different.

“Give me something else,” he said to the bartender.

“Whatsa matter? You no like a ojen special?” the proprietor asked. “You no feel good?”

“No.”

“You got be careful what you drink after him.”

“Give me a straight whiskey.”

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

A tall, very thin young man with a sparse stubble of blonde beard on his chin who was standing next to him at the bar said, “Aren’t you Richard Gordon?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Herbert Spellman. We met at a party in Brooklyn one time I believe.”

“Maybe,” said Richard Gordon. “Why not?”

“I liked your last book very much,” said Spellman. “I liked them all.”

“I’m glad,” said Richard Gordon. “Have a drink?”

“Have one with me,” said Spellman. “Have you tried this ojen?”

“It’s not doing me any good.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Feeling low.”

“Wouldn’t try another?”

“No. I’ll have whiskey.”

“You know, it’s something to me to meet you,” Spellman said. “I don’t suppose you remember me at that party.”

“No. But maybe it was a good party. You’re not supposed to remember a good party, are you?”

“I guess not,” said Spellman. “It was at Margaret Van Brunt’s. Do you remember?” he asked hopefully.

“I’m trying to.”

“I was the one set fire to the place,” Spellman said.

“No,” said Gordon.

“Yes,” said Spellman, happily. “That was me. That was the greatest party I was ever on.”

“What are you doing now?” Gordon asked.

“Not much,” said Spellman. “I get around a little. I’m taking it sort of easy now. Are you writing a new book?”

“Yes. About half done.”

“That’s great,” said Spellman. “What’s it about?”

“A strike in a textile plant.”

“That’s marvellous,” said Spellman. “You know I’m a sucker for anything on the social conflict.”

“What?”

“I love it,” said Spellman. “I go for it above anything else. You’re absolutely the best of the lot. Listen, has it got a beautiful Jewish agitator in it?”

“Why?” asked Richard Gordon, suspiciously.

“It’s a part for Sylvia Sidney. I’m in love with her. Want to see her picture?”

“I’ve seen it,” said Richard Gordon.

“Let’s have a drink,” said Spellman, happily. “Think of meeting you down here. You know, I’m a lucky fellow. Really lucky.”

“Why?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I’m crazy,” said Spellman. “Gee, it’s wonderful. It’s just like being in love only it always comes out right.”

Richard Gordon edged away a little.

“Don’t be that way,” said Spellman. “I’m not violent. That is, I’m almost never violent. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

“Have you been crazy long?”

“I think always,” said Spellman. “I tell you it’s the only way to be happy in times like these. What do I care what Douglas Aircraft does? What do I care what A. T. and T. does? They can’t touch me. I just pick up one of your books or I take a drink, or I look at Sylvia’s picture, and I’m happy. I’m likea bird. I’m better than a bird. I’m a—” he seemed to hesitate and hunt for a word, then hurried on. “I’m a lovely little stork,” he blurted out and blushed. He looked at Richard Gordon fixedly, his lips working, and a large blonde young man detached himself from a group down the bar and coming toward him put a hand on his arm.

“Come on, Harold,” he said. “We’d better be getting home.”

Spellman looked at Richard Gordon wildly. “He sneered at a stork,” he said. “He stepped away from a stork. A stork that wheels in circling flight—”

“Come on, Harold,” said the big young man.

Spellman put out his hand to Richard Gordon. “No offence,” he said. “You’re a good writer. Keep right on with it. Remember I’m always happy. Don’t let them confuse you. See you soon.”

With the large young man’s arm over his shoulder the two of them moved out through the crowd to the door. Spellman looked back and winked at Richard Gordon.

“Nice fella,” the proprietor said. He tapped his head. “Very well educate. Studies too much I guess. Likes to break glasses. He don’t mean no harm. Pay for everything he break.”

“Does he come in here much?”

“In the evening. What he say he was? A swan?”

“A stork.”

“Other night was a horse. With wings. Like a horse on a white horse bottle only with pair a wings. Nice fella all right. Plenty money. Gets a funny ideas. Family keep him down here now with his manager. He told me he like your books, Mr. Gordon. What you have to drink? On the house.”

“A whiskey,” said Richard Gordon. He saw the sheriff coming toward him. The sheriff was an extremely tall, rather cadaverous and very friendly man. Richard Gordon had seen him that afternoon at the Bradleys’ party and talked with him about the bank robbery.

“Say,” said the sheriff, “if you’re not doing anything come along with me a little later. The coast guard’s towing in Harry Morgan’s boat. A tanker signalled it up off Matecumbe. They’ve got the whole outfit.”

“My God,” said Richard Gordon. “They’ve got them all?”

“They’re all dead except one man, the message said.”

“You don’t know who it is?”

“No, they didn’t say. God knows what happened.”

“Have they got the money?”

“Nobody knows. But it must be aboard if they didn’t get to Cuba with it.”

“When will they be in?”

“Oh, it will be two or three hours yet.”

“Where will they bring the boat?”

“Into the Navy Yard, I suppose. Where the coast guard ties up.”

“Where’ll I see you to go down there?”

“I’ll drop in here for you.”

“Here or down at Freddy’s. I can’t stick it here much longer.”

“It’s pretty tough in at Freddy’s tonight. It’s full of those Vets from up on the Keys. They always raise the devil.”

“I’ll go down there and look at it,” Richard Gordon said. “I’m feeling kind of low.”

“Well, keep out of trouble,” the sheriff said. “I’ll pick you up there in a couple of hours. Want a lift down there?”

“Thanks.”

They went out through the crowd and Richard Gordon got in beside the sheriff in his car.

“What do you suppose happened in Morgan’s boat?” he asked.

“God knows,” the sheriff said. “It sounds pretty grizzly.”

“Didn’t they have any other information?”

“Not a thing,” said the sheriff. “Now look at that, will you?”

They were opposite the brightly lighted open front of Freddy’s place and it was jammed to the sidewalk. Men in dungarees, some bareheaded, others in caps, old service hats and in cardboard helmets, crowded the bar three deep, and the loud-speaking nickle-in-the-slot phonograph was playing “Isle of Capri.” As they pulled up a man came hurtling out of the open door, another man on top of him. They fell and rolled on the sidewalk, and the man on top, holding the other’s hair in both hands, banged his head up and down on the cement, making a sickening noise. No one at the bar was paying any attention.

The sheriff got out of the car and grabbed the man on top by the shoulder.

“Cut it out,” he said. “Get up there.”

The man straightened up and looked at the sheriff. “For Christ sake, can’t you mind your own business?”

The other man, blood in his hair, blood oozing from one ear, and more of it trickling down his freckled face, squared off at the sheriff.

“Leave my buddy alone,” he said thickly. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I can take it?”

“You can take it, Joey,” the man who had been hammering him said. “Listen,” to the sheriff, “could you let me take a buck?”

“No,” said the sheriff.

“Go to hell then.” He turned to Richard Gordon.

“What about it, pal?”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said Gordon.

“Come on,” said the Vet, and took hold of Gordon’s arm.

“I’ll be by later,” the sheriff said.

“Good. I’ll be waiting for you.”

As they edged in toward the end of the bar, the red-headed, freckle-faced man with the bloody ear and face gripped Gordon by the arm.

“My old buddy,” he said.

“He’s all right,” the other Vet said. “He can take it.”

“I can take it, see?” the bloody-faced one said. “That’s where I got it on them.”

“But you can’t hand it out,” some one said. “Cut out the shoving.”

“Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?”

“Listen,” the other Vet said as they finally reached the beer-wet bar, “you ought to have seen him at noon at the commissary at Camp Five. I had him down and I was hitting him on the head with a bottle. Just like playing on a drum. I bet I hit him fifty times.”

“More,” said the bloody-faced one.

“It didn’t make no impression on him.”

“I can take it,” said the other. He whispered in Richard Gordon’s ear, “It’s a secret.”

Richard Gordon handed over two of the three beers the white-jacketed, big-bellied nigger bartender drew and pushed toward him.

“What’s a secret?” he asked.

“Me,” said the bloody-faced one. “My secret.”

“He’s got a secret,” the other Vet said. “He isn’t lying.”

“Want to hear it?” the bloody-faced one said in Richard Gordon’s ear.

Gordon nodded.

“It don’t hurt.”

The other nodded. “Tell him the worst of it.”

The red-headed one put his bloody lips almost to Gordon’s ear.

“Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?”

At Gordon’s elbow was a tall, thin man with a scar that ran from one corner of his eye down over his chin. He looked down at the redheaded one and grinned.

“First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.”

“You make sick easy,” the first Vet said. “What outfit were you in?”

“It wouldn’t mean anything to you, punch drunk,” the tall man said.

“Have a drink?” Richard Gordon asked the tall man.

“Thanks,” the other said. “I’m drinking.”

“Don’t forget us,” said one of the two men Gordon had come in with.

“Three more beers,” said Richard Gordon, and the Negro drew them and pushed them over. There was not elbow room to lift them in the crowd and Gordon was pressed against the tall man.

“You off a ship?” asked the tall man.

“No, staying here. You down from the Keys?”

“We came in tonight from Tortugas,” the tall man said. “We raised enough hell so they couldn’t keep us there.”

“He’s a red,” the first Vet said.

“So would you be if you had any brains,” the tall man said. “They sent a bunch of us there to get rid of us but we raised too much hell for them.” He grinned at Richard Gordon.

“Nail that guy,” somebody yelled, and Richard Gordon saw a fist hit a face that showed close to him. The man who was hit was pulled away from the bar by two others. In the clear, one man hit him again, hard, in the face, and the other hit him in the body. He went down on the cement floor and covered his head with his arms and one of the men kicked him in the small of the back. All this time he had not made a sound. One of the men jerked him to his feet and pushed him up against the wall.

“Cool the son-of-a-bitch,” he said, and as the man sprawled, white faced against the wall, the second man set himself, knees slightly bent, and then swung up at him with a right fist that came from down near the cement floor and landed on the side of the white-faced man’s jaw. He fell forward on his knees and then rolled slowly over, his head in a little pool of blood. The two men left him there and came back to the bar.

“Boy, you can hit,” said one.

“That son-of-a-bitch comes in to town and puts all his pay in the postal savings and then hangs around here picking up drinks off the bar,” the other said. “That’s the second time I cooled him.”

“You cooled him this time.”

“When I hit him just then I felt his jaw go just like a bag of marbles,” the other said happily. The man lay against the wall and nobody paid any attention to him.

“Listen, if you landed on me like that it wouldn’t make no impression,” the red-headed Vet said.

“Shut up, slappy,” said the cooler. “You’ve got the old rale.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You punchies make me sick,” the cooler said. “Why should I bust my hands on you?”

“That’s just what you’d do, bust your hands,” the red-headed one said. “Listen, pal,” to Richard Gordon, “how’s to have another?”

“Aren’t they fine boys?” said the tall man. “War is a purifying and ennobling force. The question is whether only people like ourselves here are fitted to be soldiers or whether the different services have formed us.”

“I don’t know,” said Richard Gordon.

“I would like to bet you that not three men in this room were drafted,” the tall man said. “These are the elite. The very top cream of the scum. What Wellington won at Waterloo with. Well, Mr. Hoover ran us out of Anticosti Flats and Mr. Roosevelt has shipped us down here to get rid of us. They’ve run the camp in a way to invite an epidemic, but the poor bastards won’t die. They shipped a few of us to Tortugas but that’s healthy now. Besides, we wouldn’t stand for it. So they’ve brought us back. What’s the next move? They’ve got to get rid of us. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Why?”

“Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try to do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.”

“Are there many Communists in the camp?”

“Only about forty,” the tall man said. “Out of two thousand. It takes discipline and abnegation to be a Communist; a rummy can’t be a Communist.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed Vet said. “He’s just a goddamn radical.”

“Listen,” the other Vet who was drinking beer with Richard Gordon said, “let me tell you about in the Navy. Let me tell you, you goddamn radical.”

“Don’t listen to him,” the red-headed one said. “When the fleet’s in New York and you go ashore there in the evening up under Riverside Drive there’s old guys with long beards come down and you can piss in their beards for a dollar. What do you think about that?”

“I’ll buy you a drink,” said the tall man, “and you forget that one. I don’t like to hear that one.”

“I don’t forget anything,” the red-headed one said. “What’s the matter with you, pal?”

“Is that true about the beards?” Richard Gordon asked. He felt a little sick.

“I swear to God and my mother,” the red-headed one said. “Hell, that ain’t nothing.”

Up the bar a Vet was arguing with Freddy about the payment of a drink.

“That’s what you had,” said Freddy.

Richard Gordon watched the Vet’s face. He was very drunk, his eyes were bloodshot and he was looking for trouble.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” he said to Freddy.

“Eighty-five cents,” Freddy said to him.

“Watch this,” said the red-headed Vet.

Freddy spread his hands on the bar. He was watching the Vet.

“You’re a goddamn liar,” said the Vet, and picked up a beer glass to throw it. As his hand closed on it, Freddy’s right hand swung in a half circle over the bar and cracked a big saltcellar covered with a bar towel alongside the Vet’s head.

“Was it neat?” said the red-headed Vet. “Was it pretty?”

“You ought to see him tap them with that sawed-off billiard cue,” the other said.

Two Vets standing next to where the saltcellar man had slipped down looked at Freddy angrily. “What’s the idea of cooling him?”

“Take it easy,” said Freddy. “This one is on the house. Hey, Wallace,” he said. “Put that fellow over against the wall.”

“Was it pretty?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon. “Wasn’t that sweet?”

A heavy-set young fellow had dragged the saltcellared man out through the crowd. He pulled him to his feet and the man looked at him vacantly. “Run along,” he said to him. “Get yourself some air.”

Over against the wall the man who had been cooled sat with his head in his hands. The heavy-set young man went over to him.

“You run along, too,” he said to him. “You just get in trouble here.”

“My jaw’s broken,” the cooled one said thickly. Blood was running out of his mouth and down over his chin.

“You’re lucky you aren’t killed, that wallop he hit you,” the thick-set young man said. “You run along now.”

“My jaw’s broke,” the other said dully. “They broke my jaw.”

“You better run along,” the young man said. “You just get in trouble here.”

He helped the jaw-broken man to his feet and he staggered unsteadily out to the street.

“I’ve seen a dozen laying against the wall over there on a big night,” the red-headed Vet said. “One morning I seen that big boogie there mopping it up with a bucket. Didn’t I see you mop it up with a bucket?” he asked the big Negro bartender.

“Yes, sir,” said the bartender. “Plenty of times. Yes, sir. But you never seen me fight nobody.”

“Didn’t I tell you?” said the red-headed Vet. “With a bucket.”

“This looks like a big night coming on,” the other Vet said. “What do you say, pal?” to Richard Gordon. “O.K. we have another one?”

Richard Gordon could feel himself getting drunk. His face, reflected in the mirror behind the bar, was beginning to look strange to him.

“What’s your name?” he asked the tall Communist.

“Jacks,” the tall man said. “Nelson Jacks.”

“Where were you before you came here?”

“Oh, around,” the man said. “Mexico, Cuba, South America, and around.”

“I envy you,” said Richard Gordon.

“Why envy me? Why don’t you get to work?”

“I’ve written three books,” Richard Gordon said. “I’m writing one now about Gastonia.”

“Good,” said the tall man. “That’s fine. What did you say your name was?”

“Richard Gordon.”

“Oh,” said the tall man.

“What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

“Nothing,” said the tall man.

“Did you ever read the books?” Richard Gordon asked.

“Yes.”

“Didn’t you like them?”

“No,” said the tall man.

“Why?”

“I don’t like to say.”

“Go ahead.”

“I thought they were shit,” the tall man said and turned away.

“I guess this is my night,” said Richard Gordon. “This is my big night. What did you say you’d have?” he asked the red-headed Vet. “I’ve got two dollars left.”

“One beer,” said the red-headed man. “Listen, you’re my pal. I think your books are fine. To hell with that radical bastard.”

“You haven’t got a book with you?” asked the other Vet. “Pal, I’d like to read one. Did you ever write for Western Stories, or War Aces? I could read that War Aces every day.”

“Who is that tall bird?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I tell you he’s just a radical bastard,” said the second Vet. “The camp’s full of them. We’d run them out, but I tell you half the time most of the guys in camp can’t remember.”

“Can’t remember what?” asked the red-headed one.

“Can’t remember anything,” said the other.

“You see me?” asked the red-headed one.

“Yes,” said Richard Gordon.

“Would you guess I got the finest little wife in the world?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I have,” said the red-headed one. “And that girl is nuts about me. She’s like a slave. ‘Give me another cup of coffee,’ I say to her. ‘O.K., Pop,’ she says. And I get it. Anything else the same way. She’s carried away with me. If I got a whim, it’s her law.”

“Only where is she?” asked the other Vet.

“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “That’s it, pal. Where is she?”

“He don’t know where she is,” the second Vet said.

“Not only that,” said the red-headed one. “I don’t know where I saw her last.”

“He don’t even know what country she’s in.”

“But listen, buddy,” said the red-headed one. “Wherever she is, that little girl is faithful.”

“That’s God’s truth,” said the other Vet. “You can stake your life on that.”

“Sometimes,” said the red-headed one, “I think that she is maybe Ginger Rogers and that she has gone into the moving pictures.”

“Why not?” said the other.

“Then again, I just see her waiting there quietly where I live.”

“Keeping the home fires burning,” said the other.

“That’s it,” said the red-headed one. “She’s the finest little woman in the world.”

“Listen,” said the other, “my old mother is O.K., too.”

“That’s right.”

“She’s dead,” said the second Vet. “Let’s not talk about her.”

“Aren’t you married, pal?” the red-headed Vet asked Richard Gordon.

“Sure,” he said. Down the bar, about four men away, he could see the red face, the blue eyes and sandy, beer-dewed mustache of Professor MacWalsey. Professor MacWalsey was looking straight ahead of him and as Richard Gordon watched he finished his glass of beer and, raising his lower lip, removed the foam from his mustache. Richard Gordon noticed how bright blue his eyes were.

As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for.

“What’s the matter, pal?” asked the red-headed Vet.

“Nothing.”

“You don’t feel good. I can tell you feel bad.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon.

“You look like you seen a ghost.”

“You see that fellow down there with a mustache?” asked Richard Gordon.

“Him?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?” asked the second Vet.

“Nothing,” said Richard Gordon. “Goddamn it. Nothing.”

“Is he a bother to you? We can cool him. The three of us can jump him and you can put the boots to him.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

“We’ll get him when he goes outside,” the red-headed Vet said. “I don’t like the look of him. The son-of-a-bitch looks like a scab to me.”

“I hate him,” said Richard Gordon. “He’s ruined my life.”

“We’ll give him the works,” said the second Vet. “The yellow rat. Listen Red, get a hold of a couple of bottles. We’ll beat him to death. Listen, when did he do it, pal? O.K. we have another one?”

“We’ve got a dollar and seventy cents,” Richard Gordon said.

“Maybe we better get a pint then,” the red-headed Vet said. “My teeth are floating now.”

“No,” said the other. “This beer is good for you. This is draft beer. Stick with the beer. Let’s go and beat this guy up and come back drink some more beer.”

“No. Leave him alone.”

“No, pal. Not us. You said that rat ruined your wife.”

“My life. Not my wife.”

“Jese! Pardon me. I’m sorry, pal.”

“He defaulted and ruined the bank,” the other Vet said. “I’ll bet there’s a reward for him. By God, I seen a picture of him at the post office today.”

“What were you doing at the post office?” asked the other suspiciously.

“Can’t I get a letter?”

“What’s the matter with getting letters at camp?”

“Do you think I went to the postal savings?”

“What were you doing in the post office?”

“I just stopped by.”

“Take that,” said his pal and swung on him as well as he could in the crowd.

“There goes those two cell mates,” said somebody. Holding and punching, kneeing and butting, the two were pushed out of the door.

“Let ‘em fight on the sidewalk,” the wide-shouldered young man said. “Those bastards fight three or four times a night.”

“They’re a couple of punchies,” another Vet said. “Red could fight once but he’s got the old rale.”

“They’ve both got it.”

“Red got it fighting a fellow in the ring,” a short chunky Vet said. “This fellow had the old rale and he was all broke out on the shoulders and back. Every time they’d go into a clinch he’d rub his shoulder under Red’s nose or across his puss.”

“Oh, nuts. What did he put his face there for?”

“That was the way Red carried his head when he was in close. Down, like this. And this fellow was just roughing him.”

“Oh, nuts. That story is all bull. Nobody ever got the old rale from anybody in a fight.”

“That’s what you think. Listen, Red was as clean a living kid as you ever saw. I knew him. He was in my outfit. He was a good little fighter, too. I mean good. He was married, too, to a nice girl. I mean nice. And this Benny Sampson gave him that old rale just as sure as I’m standing here.”

“Then sit down,” said another Vet. “How did Poochy get it?”

“He got it in Shanghai.”

“Where did you get yours?”

“I ain’t got it.”

“Where did Suds get it?”

“Off a girl in Brest, coming home.”

“That’s all you guys ever talk about. The old rale. What difference does the old rale make?”

“None, the way we are now,” one Vet said. “You’re just as happy with it.”

“Poochy’s happier. He don’t know where he is.”

“What’s the old rale?” Professor MacWalsey asked the man next to him at the bar. The man told him.

“I wonder what the derivation is,” Professor MacWalsey said.

“I don’t know,” said the man. “I’ve always heard it called the old rale since my first enlistment. Some call it ral. But usually they call it the old rale.”

“I’d like to know,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Most of those terms are old English words.”

“Why do they call it the old rale?” the Vet next to Professor MacWalsey asked another.

“I don’t know.”

Nobody seemed to know but all enjoyed the atmosphere of serious philological discussion.

Richard Gordon was next to Professor MacWalsey at the bar now. When Red and Poochy had started fighting he had been pushed down there and he had not resisted the move.

“Hello,” Professor MacWalsey said to him. “Do you want a drink?”

“Not with you,” said Richard Gordon.

“I suppose you’re right,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Did you ever see anything like this?”

“No,” said Richard Gordon.

“It’s very strange,” said Professor MacWalsey. “They’re amazing. I always come here nights.”

“Don’t you ever get in trouble?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Drunken fights.”

“I never seem to have any trouble.”

“A couple of friends of mine wanted to beat you up a couple of minutes ago.”

“Yes.”

“I wish I would have let them.”

“I don’t think it would make much difference,” said Professor MacWalsey in the odd way of speaking he had. “If I annoy you by being here I can go.”

“No,” said Richard Gordon. “I sort of like to be near you.”

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

“Have you ever been married?” asked Richard Gordon.

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“My wife died during the influenza epidemic in 1918.”

“Why do you want to marry again now?”

“I think I’d be better at it now. I think perhaps I’d be a better husband now.”

“So you picked my wife.”

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

“Damn you,” said Richard Gordon, and hit him in the face.

Some one grabbed his arm. He jerked it loose and some one hit him crashingly behind the ear. He could see Professor MacWalsey, before him, still at the bar, his face red, blinking his eyes. He was reaching for another beer to replace the one Gordon had spilled, and Richard Gordon drew back his arm to hit him again. As he did so, something exploded again behind his ear and all the lights flared up, wheeled round, and then went out.

Then he was standing in the doorway of Freddy’s place. His head was ringing, and the crowded room was unsteady and wheeling slightly, and he felt sick to his stomach. He could see the crowd looking at him. The big-shouldered young man was standing by him. “Listen,” he was saying, “you don’t want to start any trouble in here. There’s enough fights in here with those rummies.”

“Who hit me?” asked Richard Gordon.

“I hit you,” said the wide young man. “That fellow’s a regular customer here. You want to take it easy. You don’t want to go to fight in here.”

Standing unsteadily Richard Gordon saw Professor MacWalsey coming toward him away from the crowd at the bar. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want anybody to slug you. I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do.”

“Goddamn you,” said Richard Gordon, and started toward him. It was the last thing he remembered doing for the wide young man set himself, dropped his shoulders slightly, and clipped him again, and he went down, this time, on the cement floor on his face. The wide young man turned to Professor MacWalsey. “That’s all right, Doc,” he said, hospitably. “He won’t annoy you now. What’s the matter with him anyway?”

“I’ve got to take him home,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Will he be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Help me to get him in a taxi,” said Professor MacWalsey. They carried Richard Gordon out between them and with the driver helping, put him in the old Model T taxi.

“You’re sure he’ll be all right?” asked Professor MacWalsey.

“Just pull on his ears good when you want to bring him to. Put some water on him. Look out he don’t want to fight when he comes to. Don’t let him grab you, Doc.”

“No,” said Professor MacWalsey.

Richard Gordon’s head lay back at an odd angle in the back of the taxi and he made a heavy, rasping noise when he breathed. Professor MacWalsey put his arm under his head and held it so it did not bump against the seat.

“Where are we going?” asked the taxi driver.

“Out on the other end of town,” said Professor MacWalsey. “Past the Park. Down the street from the place where they sell mullets.”

“That’s the Rocky Road,” the driver said.

“Yes,” said Professor MacWalsey.

As they passed the first coffee shop up the street, Professor MacWalsey told the driver to stop. He wanted to go in and get some cigarettes. He laid Richard Gordon’s head down carefully on the seat and went into the coffee shop. When he came out to get back into the taxi, Richard Gordon was gone.

“Where did he go?” he asked the driver.

“That’s him up the street,” the driver said.

“Catch up with him.”

As the taxi pulled up even with him, Professor MacWalsey got out and went up to Richard Gordon who was lurching along the sidewalk.

“Come on, Gordon,” he said. “We’re going home.”

Richard Gordon looked at him.

“We?” he said, swaying.

“I want you to go home in this taxi.”

“You go to hell.”

“I wish you’d come,” Professor MacWalsey said. “I want you to get home safely.”

“Where’s your gang?” said Richard Gordon.

“What gang?”

“Your gang that beat me up.”

“That was the bouncer. I didn’t know he was going to hit you.”

“You lie,” said Richard Gordon. He swung at the red-faced man in front of him and missed him. He slipped forward onto his knees and got up slowly. His knees were scraped raw from the sidewalk, but he did not know it.

“Come on and fight,” he said brokenly.

“I don’t fight,” said Professor MacWalsey. “If you’ll get into the taxi I’ll leave you.”

“Go to hell,” said Richard Gordon and started down the street.

“Leave him go,” said the taxi driver. “He’s all right now.”

“Do you think he’ll be all right?”

“Hell,” the taxi driver said. “He’s perfect.”

“I’m worried about him,” Professor MacWalsey said.

“You can’t get him in without fighting him,” the taxi driver said. “Let him go. He’s fine. Is he your brother?”

“In a way,” said Professor MacWalsey.

He watched Richard Gordon lurching down the street until he was out of sight in the shadow from the big trees whose branches dipped down to grow into the ground like roots. What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a mortal sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. The poor stupid man. The poor homeless man. I ought to stay with him, but I know that is too much for him to bear. I am ashamed and disgusted with myself and I hate what I have done. It all may turn out badly too. But I must not think about that. I will now return to the anaesthetic I have used for seventeen years and will not need much longer. Although it is probably a vice now for which I only invent excuses. Though at least it is a vice for which I am suited. But I wish I could help that poor man whom I am wronging.

“Drive me back to Freddy’s,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

The coast guard cutter towing the Queen Conch was coming down the hawk channel between the reef and the Keys. The cutter rolled in the cross chop the light north wind raised against the flood tide but the white boat was towing easily and well.

“She’ll be all right if it doesn’t breeze,” the coast guard captain said. “She tows pretty, too. That Robby built nice boats. Could you make out any of the guff he was talking?”

“He didn’t make any sense,” the mate said. “He’s way out of his head.”

“I guess he’ll die all right,” the captain said. “Shot in the belly that way. Do you suppose he killed those four Cubans?”

“You can’t tell. I asked him but he didn’t know what I was saying.”

“Should we go talk to him again?”

“Let’s have a look at him,” the captain said.

Leaving the quartermaster at the wheel, running the beacons down the channel, they went behind the wheelhouse into the captain’s cabin. Harry Morgan lay there on the iron pipe bunk. His eyes were closed but he opened them when the captain touched his wide shoulder.

“How you feeling, Harry?” the captain asked him. Harry looked at him and did not speak.

“Can we get you anything, boy?” the captain asked him.

Harry Morgan looked at him.

“He don’t hear you,” said the mate.

“Harry,” said the captain, “do you want anything, boy?”

He wet a towel in the water bottle on a gimbal by the bunk and moistened Harry Morgan’s deeply cracked lips. They were dry and black looking. Looking at him, Harry Morgan started speaking. “A man,” he said.

“Sure,” said the captain. “Go on.”

“A man,” said Harry Morgan, very slowly. “Ain’t got no hasn’t got any can’t really isn’t any way out.” He stopped. There had been no expression on his face at all when he spoke.

“Go on, Harry,” said the captain. “Tell us who did it. How did it happen, boy?”

“A man,” said Harry, looking at him now with his narrow eyes on the wide, high-cheek-boned face, trying now to tell him.

“Four men,” said the captain helpfully. He moistened the lips again, squeezing the towel so a few drops went between them.

“A man,” corrected Harry; then stopped.

“All right. A man,” the captain said.

“A man,” Harry said again very flatly, very slowly, talking with his dry mouth. “Now the way things are the way they go no matter what no.”

The captain looked at the mate and shook his head.

“Who did it, Harry?” the mate asked.

Harry looked at him.

“Don’t fool yourself,” he said. The captain and the mate both bent over him. Now it was coming. “Like trying to pass cars on the top of hills. On that road in Cuba. On any road. Anywhere. Just like that. I mean how things are. The way that they been going. For a while yes sure all right. Maybe with luck. A man.” He stopped. The captain shook his head at the mate again. Harry Morgan looked at him flatly. The captain wet Harry’s lips again. They made a bloody mark on the towel.

“A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”

He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all of his life to learn it.

He lay there his eyes open again.

“Come on,” said the captain to the mate. “You sure you don’t want anything, Harry?”

Harry Morgan looked at him but he did not answer. He had told them, but they had not heard.

“We’ll be back,” said the captain. “Take it easy, boy.”

Harry Morgan watched them go out of the cabin.

Forward in the wheelhouse, watching it get dark and the light of Sombrero starting to sweep out at sea, the mate said, “He gives you the willies out of his head like that.”

“Poor fellow,” said the captain. “Well, we’ll be in pretty soon now. We’ll get him in soon after midnight. If we don’t have to slow down for that tow.”

“Think he’ll live?”

“No,” said the captain. “But you can’t ever tell.”

CHAPTER 24

There were many people in the dark street outside the iron gates that closed the entrance to the old submarine base now transformed into a yacht basin. The Cuban watchman had orders to let no one in, and the crowd were pressing against the fence to look through between the iron rods into the dark enclosure lit, along the water, by the lights of the yachts that lay moored at the finger piers. The crowd was as quiet as only a Key West crowd can be. The yachtsmen pushed and elbowed their way through to the gate and by the watchman.

“Hey. You canna comein,” the watchman said.

“What the hell. We’re off a yacht.”

“Nobody supposacomein,” the watchman said. “Get back.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said one of the yachtsmen, and pushed him aside to go up the road toward the dock.

Behind them was the crowd outside the gates, where the little watchman stood uncomfortable and anxious in his cap, his long mustache and his dishevelled authority, wishing he had a key to lock the big gate and, as they strode heartily up the sloping road they saw ahead, then passed, a group of men waiting at the Coast Guard pier. They paid no attention to them but walked along the dock, past the piers where the other yachts lay to pier number five, and out on the pier to where the gang plank reached, in the glare of a flood light, from rough wooden pier to the teak deck of the New Exuma II. In the main cabin they sat in big leather chairs beside a long table on which magazines were spread, and one of them rang for the steward.

“Scotch and soda,” he said. “You, Henry?”

“Yes,” said Henry Carpenter.

“What was the matter with that silly ass at the gate?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Henry Carpenter.

The steward, in his white jacket, brought the two glasses.

“Play those disks I put out after dinner,” the yachtsman, whose name was Wallace Johnston, said.

“I’m afraid I put them away, sir,” the steward said.

“Damn you,” said Wallace Johnston. “Play that new Bach album then.”

“Very good, sir,” said the steward. He went over to the record cabinet and took out an album and moved with it to the phonograph. He began playing the “Sarabande.”

“Did you see Tommy Bradley today?” asked Henry Carpenter. “I saw him as the plane came in.”

“I can’t bear him,” said Wallace. “Neither him nor that whore of a wife of his.”

“I like Helène,” said Henry Carpenter. “She has such a good time.”

“Did you ever try it?”

“Of course. It’s marvellous.”

“I can’t stick her at any price,” said Wallace Johnston. “Why in God’s name does she live down here?”

“They have a lovely place.”

“It is a nice clean little yacht basin,” said Wallace Johnston. “Is it true Tommy Bradley’s impotent?”

“I shouldn’t think so. You hear that about every one. He’s simply broad minded.”

“Broad minded is excellent. She’s certainly a broad if there ever was one.”

“She’s a remarkably nice woman,” said Henry Carpenter. “You’d like her, Wally.”

“I would not,” said Wallace. “She represents everything I hate in a woman, and Tommy Bradley epitomizes everything I hate in a man.”

“You feel awfully strongly tonight.”

“You never feel strongly because you have no consistency,” Wallace Johnston said. “You can’t make up your mind. You don’t know what you are even.”

“Let’s drop me,” said Henry Carpenter. He lit a cigarette.

“Why should I?”

“Well, one reason you might is because I go with you on your bloody yacht, and at least half the time I do what you want to do, and that keeps you from paying blackmail to the bus boys and sailors, and one thing and another, that do know what they are, and what you are.”

“You’re in a pretty mood,” said Wallace Johnston. “You know I never pay blackmail.”

“No. You’re too tight to. You have friends like me instead.”

“I haven’t any other friends like you.”

“Don’t be charming,” said Henry. “I don’t feel up to it tonight. Just go ahead and play Bach and abuse your steward and drink a little too much and go to bed.”

“What’s gotten into you?” said the other, standing up. “Why are you getting so damned unpleasant? You’re not such a great bargain, you know.”

“I know,” said Henry. “I’ll be oh so jolly tomorrow. But tonight’s a bad night. Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights? I suppose when you’re rich enough there isn’t any difference.”

“You talk like a school girl.”

“Good night,” said Henry Carpenter. “I’m not a school girl nor a school boy. I’m going to bed. Everything will be awfully jolly in the morning.”

“What did you lose? Is that what makes you so gloomy?”

“I lost three hundred.”

“See? I told you that was it.”

“You always know, don’t you?”

“But look. You lost three hundred.”

“I’ve lost more than that.”

“How much more?”

“The jackpot,” said Henry Carpenter. “The eternal jackpot. I’m playing a machine now that doesn’t give jackpots any more. Only tonight I just happened to think about it. Usually I don’t think about it. Now I’m going to bed so I won’t bore you.”

“You don’t bore me. But just try not to be rude.”

“I’m afraid I’m rude and you bore me. Good night. Everything will be fine tomorrow.”

“You’re damned rude.”

“Take it or leave it,” said Henry. “I’ve been doing both all my life.”

“Good night,” said Wallace Johnston hopefully.

Henry Carpenter did not answer. He was listening to the Bach.

“Don’t go off to bed like that,” Wallace Johnston said. “Why be so temperamental?”

“Drop it.”

“Why should I? I’ve seen you come out of it before.”

“Drop it.”

“Have a drink and cheer up.”

“I don’t want a drink and it wouldn’t cheer me up.”

“Well, go off to bed, then.”

“I am,” said Henry Carpenter.

That was how it was that night on the New Exuma II, with a crew of twelve, Captain Nils Larson, master, and on board Wallace Johnston, owner, 38 years old, M.A. Harvard, composer, money from silk mills, unmarried, interdit de sejour in Paris, well known from Algiers to Biskra, and one guest, Henry Carpenter, 36, M.A. Harvard, money now two hundred a month in trust fund from his mother, formerly four hundred and fifty a month until the bank administering the Trust Fund had exchanged one good security for another good security, for other not so good securities, and, finally, for an equity in an office building the bank had been saddled with and which paid nothing at all. Long before this reduction in income it had been said of Henry Carpenter that if he were dropped from a height of 5500 feet without a parachute, he would land safely with his knees under some rich man’s table. But he gave value in good company for his entertainment and while it was only lately, and rarely, that he felt, or expressed himself, as he had tonight, his friends had felt for some time that he was cracking up. If he had not been felt to be cracking up, with that instinct for feeling something wrong with a member of the pack and healthy desire to turn him out, if it is impossible to destroy him, which characterizes the rich, he would not have been reduced to accepting the hospitality of Wallace Johnston. As it was, Wallace Johnston, with his rather special pleasures, was Henry Carpenter’s last stand, and he was defending his position better than he knew for his honest courting of an end to their relationship; his subsequent brutality of expression, and sincere insecurity of tenure intrigued and seduced the other who might, given Henry Carpenter’s age, have easily been bored by a steady compliance. Thus Henry Carpenter postponed his inevitable suicide by a matter of weeks if not of months.

The money on which it was not worth while for him to live was one hundred and seventy dollars more a month than the fisherman Albert Tracy had been supporting his family on at the time of his death three days before.

Aboard the other yachts lying at the finger piers there were other people with other problems. On one of the largest yachts, a handsome, black, barkentine rigged three-master, a sixty-year-old grain broker lay awake worrying about the report he had received from his office of the activities of the investigators from the Internal Revenue Bureau. Ordinarily, at this time of night, he would have quieted his worry with Scotch high balls and have reached the state where he felt as tough and regardless of consequences as any of the old brothers of the coast with whom, in character and standards of conduct, he had, truly, much in common. But his doctor had forbidden him all liquor for a month, for three months really, that is they had said it would kill him in a year if he did not give up alcohol for at least three months, so he was going to lay off it for a month; and now he worried about the call he had received from the Bureau before he left town asking him exactly where he was going and whether he planned to leave the United States coastal waters.

He lay, now, in his pyjamas, on his wide bed, two pillows under his head, the reading light on, but he could not keep his mind on the book, which was an account of a trip to Galapagos. In the old days he had never brought them to this bed. He’d had them in their cabins and he came to this bed afterwards. This was his own stateroom, as private to him as his office. He never wanted a woman in his room. When he wanted one he went to hers, and when he was through he was through, and now that he was through for good his brain had the same clear coldness always that had, in the old days, been an after effect. And he lay now, with no kindly blurring, denied all that chemical courage that had soothed his mind and warmed his heart for so many years, and wondered what the department had, what they had found and what they would twist, what they would accept as normal and what they would insist was evasion; and he was not afraid of them, but only hated them and the power they would use so insolently that all his own hard, small, tough and lasting insolence, the one permanent thing he had gained and that was truly valid, would be drilled through, and, if he were ever made afraid, shattered.

He did not think in any abstractions, but in deals, in sales, in transfers and in gifts. He thought in shares, in bales, in thousands of bushels, in options, holding companies, trusts, and subsidiary corporations, and as he went over it he knew they had plenty, enough so he would have no peace for years. If they would not compromise it would be very bad. In the old days he would not have worried, but the fighting part of him was tired now, along with the other part, and he was alone in all of this now and he lay on the big, wide, old bed and could neither read nor sleep.

His wife had divorced him ten years before after twenty years of keeping up appearances, and he had never missed her nor had he ever loved her. He had started with her money and she had borne him two male children, both of whom, like their mother, were fools. He had treated her well until the money he had made was double her original capital and then he could afford to take no notice of her. After his money had reached that point he had never been annoyed by her sick headaches, by her complaints, or by her plans. He had ignored them.

He had been admirably endowed for a speculative career because he had possessed extraordinary sexual vitality which gave him the confidence to gamble well; common sense, an excellent mathematical brain, a permanent but controlled skepticism; a skepticism which was as sensitive to impending disaster as an accurate aneroid barometer to atmospheric pressure; and a valid time sense that kept him from trying to hit tops or bottoms. These, coupled with a lack of morals, an ability to make people like him without ever liking or trusting them in return, while at the same time convincing them warmly and heartily of his friendship; not a disinterested friendship, but a friendship so interested in their success that it automatically made them accomplices; and an incapacity for either remorse or pity, had carried him to where he was now. And where he was now was lying in a pair of striped silk pyjamas that covered his shrunken old man’s chest, his bloated little belly, his now useless and disproportionately large equipment that had once been his pride, and his small flabby legs, lying on a bed unable to sleep because he finally had remorse.

His remorse was to think if only he had not been quite so smart five years ago. He could have paid the taxes then without any juggling, and if he had only done so he would be all right now. So he lay thinking of that and finally he slept; but because remorse had once found the crack and begun to seep in, he did not know he slept because his brain kept on as it had while he was awake. So there would be no rest and, at his age, it would not take so long for that to get him.

He used to say that only suckers worried and he would keep from worrying now until he could not sleep. He might keep from it until he slept, but then it would come in, and since he was this old its task was easy.

He would not need to worry about what he had done to other people, nor what had happened to them due to him, nor how they’d ended; who’d moved from houses on the Lake Shore drive to taking boarders out in Austin, whose debutante daughters now were dentists’ assistants when they had a job; who ended up a night watchman at sixty-three after that last corner; who shot himself early one morning before breakfast and which one of his children found him, and what the mess looked like; who now rode on the L to work, when there was work, from Berwyn, trying to sell, first, bonds; then motor cars; then house-to-housing novelties and specialties (we don’t want no peddlers, get out of here, the door slammed in his face) until he varied the leaning drop his father made from forty-two floors up, with no rush of plumes as when an eagle falls, to a step forward onto the third rail in front of the Aurora-Elgin train, his overcoat pocket full of unsaleable combination eggbeaters and fruit juice extracters. Just let me demonstrate it, madame. You attach it here, screw down on this little gadget here. Now watch. No, I don’t want it. Just try one. I don’t want it. Get out.

So he got out onto the sidewalk with the framehouses, the naked yards and the bare catalpa trees where no one wanted it or anything else, that led down to the Aurora-Elgin tracks.

Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up.

The men he broke made all these various exits but that never worried him. Somebody had to lose and only suckers worried.

No he would not have to think of them nor of the by-products of successful speculation. You win; somebody’s got to lose, and only suckers worry.

It would be enough for him to think about how much it would be better if he had not been quite so smart five years ago, and in a little while, at his age, the wish to change what can no longer be undone, will open up the gap that will let worry in. Only suckers worry. But he can knock the worry if he takes a Scotch and soda. The hell with what the doctor said. So he rings for one and the steward comes sleepily, and as he drinks it, the speculator is not a sucker now; except for death.

While on the next yacht beyond, a pleasant, dull and upright family are asleep. The father’s conscience is good and he sleeps soundly on his side, a clipper ship running before a blow framed above his head, the reading light on, a book dropped beside the bed. The mother sleeps well and dreams about her garden. She is fifty but is a handsome, wholesome, well-kept woman who looks attractive as she sleeps. The daughter dreams about her fiancé who comes tomorrow on the plane and she stirs in her sleep and laughs at something in the dream and, without waking, raises her knees almost against her chin, curled up like a cat, with curly blonde hair and her smooth-skinned pretty face, asleep she looks as her mother did when she was a girl.

They are a happy family and all love each other. The father is a man of civic pride and many good works, who opposed prohibition, is not bigoted and is generous, sympathetic, understanding and almost never irritable. The crew of the yacht are well-paid, well-fed and have good quarters. They all think highly of the owner and like his wife and daughter. The fiancé is a Skull and Bones man, voted most likely to succeed, voted most popular, who still thinks more of others than of himself and would be too good for any one except a lovely girl like Frances. He is probably a little too good for Frances too, but it will be years before Frances realizes this, perhaps; and she may never realize it, with luck. The type of man who is tapped for Bones is rarely also tapped for bed; but with a lovely girl like Frances intention counts as much as performance.

So, anyhow, they all sleep well and where did the money come from that they’re all so happy with and use so well and gracefully? The money came from selling something everybody uses by the millions of bottles, which costs three cents a quart to make, for a dollar a bottle in the large (pint) size, fifty cents in the medium, and a quarter in the small. But it’s more economical to buy the large, and if you make ten dollars a week the cost is just the same to you as though you were a millionaire, and the product’s really good. It does just what it says it will and more besides. Grateful users from all over the world keep writing in discovering new uses and old users are as loyal to it as Harold Tompkins, the fiancé, is to Skull and Bones or Stanley Baldwin is to Harrow. There are no suicides when money’s made that way and every one sleeps soundly on the yacht Alzira III, master Jon Jacobson, crew of fourteen, owner and family aboard.

At pier four there is a 34-foot yawl-rigged yacht with two of the three hundred and twenty-four Esthonians who are sailing around in different parts of the world, in boats between 28 and 36 feet long and sending back articles to the Esthonian newspapers. These articles are very popular in Esthonia and bring their authors between a dollar and a dollar and thirty cents a column. They take the place occupied by the baseball or football news in American newspapers and are run under the heading of Sagas of Our Intrepid Voyagers. No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sunburned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will sail to another yacht basin and write another saga. They are very happy too. Almost as happy as the people on the Alzira III. It’s great to be an Intrepid Voyager.

On the Irydia IV, a professional son-in-law of the very rich and his mistress, named Dorothy, the wife of that highly paid Hollywood director, John Hollis, whose brain is in the process of outlasting his liver so that he will end up calling himself a Communist, to save his soul, his other organs being too corroded to attempt to save them, are asleep. The son-in-law, big-framed, good looking in a poster way, lies on his back snoring, but Dorothy Hollis, the director’s wife, is awake and she puts on a dressing gown and, going out onto the deck, looks across the dark water of the yacht basin to the line the breakwater makes. It is cool on the deck and the wind blows her hair and she smooths it back from her tanned forehead, and pulling the robe tighter around her, her nipples rising in the cold, notices the lights of a boat coming along the outside of the breakwater. She watches them moving steadily and rapidly along and then at the entrance to the basin the boat’s searchlight is switched on and comes across the water in a sweep that blinds her as it passes, picking up the coast guard pier where it lit up the group of men waiting there and the shining black of the new ambulance from the funeral home which also doubles at funerals as a hearse.

I suppose it would be better to take some luminol, Dorothy thought. I must get some sleep. Poor Eddie’s tight as a tick. It means so much to him and he’s so nice, but he gets so tight he goes right off to sleep. He’s so sweet. Of course if I married him he’d be off with some one else, I suppose. He is sweet, though. Poor darling, he’s so tight. I hope he won’t feel miserable in the morning. I must go and set this wave and get some sleep. It looks like the devil. I do want to look lovely for him. He is sweet. I wish I’d brought a maid. I couldn’t though. Not even Bates. I wonder how poor John is. Oh, he’s sweet too. I hope he’s better. His poor liver. I wish I were there to look after him. I might go and get some sleep so I won’t look a fright tomorrow. Eddie is sweet. So’s John and his poor liver. Oh, his poor liver. Eddie is sweet. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. He’s so big and jolly and marvellous and all. Perhaps he won’t get so tight tomorrow.

She went below and found her way to her cabin, and sitting before the mirror commenced brushing her hair a hundred strokes. She smiled at herself in the mirror as the long bristled brush swept through her lovely hair. Eddie is sweet. Yes, he is. I wish he hadn’t gotten so tight. Men all have something that way. Look at John’s liver. Of course you can’t look at it. It must look dreadful really. I’m glad you can’t see it. Nothing about a man’s really ugly though. It’s funny how they think it is though. I suppose a liver though. Or kidneys. Kidneys en brochette. How many kidneys are there? There’s two of nearly everything except stomach and heart. And brain of course. There. That’s a hundred strokes. I love to brush my hair. It’s almost the only thing you do that’s good for you that’s fun. I mean by yourself. Oh, Eddie is sweet. Suppose I just went in there. No, he is too tight. Poor boy. I’ll take the luminol.

She looked at herself in the mirror. She was extraordinarily pretty, with a small, very fine figure. Oh, I’ll do, she thought. Some of it isn’t as good as some of the rest of it, but I’ll do for a while yet. You do have to have sleep though. I love to sleep. I wish I could get just one good natural real sleep the way we slept when we were kids. I suppose that’s the thing about growing up and marrying and having children and then drinking too much and then doing all the things you shouldn’t. If you could sleep well I don’t think any of it would be bad for you. Except drinking too much I suppose. Poor John and his liver and Eddie. Eddie is darling, anyway. He is cute. I’d better take the luminol.

She made a face at herself in the glass.

“You’d better take the luminol,” she said in a whisper. She took the luminol with a glass of water from the chronium-plated thermos carafe that was on the locker by the bed.

It makes you nervous, she thought. But you have to sleep. I wonder how Eddie would be if we were married. He would be running around with some one younger I suppose. I suppose they can’t help the way they’re built any more than we can. I just want a lot of it and I feel so fine, and being some one else or some one new doesn’t really mean a thing. It’s just it itself, and you would love them always if they gave it to you. The same one I mean. But they aren’t built that way. They want some one new, or some one younger, or some one that they shouldn’t have, or some one that looks like some one else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde. Or if you’re blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl I guess, and if they’ve had really enough they want Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what. I don’t know. Or they just get tired, I suppose. You can’t blame them if that’s the way they are and I can’t help John’s liver either or that he’s drunk so much he isn’t any good. He was good. He was marvellous. He was. He really was. And Eddie is. But now he’s tight. I suppose I’ll end up a bitch. Maybe I’m one now. I suppose you never know when you get to be one. Only her best friends would tell her. You don’t read it in Mr. Winchell. That would be a good new thing for him to announce. Bitch-hood. Mrs. John Hollis canined into town from the coast. Better than babies. More common I guess. But women have a bad time really. The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you. I suppose the good ones are made to have a lot of wives but it’s awfully wearing trying to be a lot of wives yourself, and then some one simple takes him when he’s tired of that. I suppose we all end up as bitches but whose fault is it? The bitches have the most fun but you have to be awfully stupid really to be a good one. Like Helène Bradley. Stupid and well-intentioned and really selfish to be a good one. Probably I’m one already. They say you can’t tell and that you always think you’re not. There must be men who don’t get tired of you or of it. There must be. But who has them? The ones we know are all brought up wrong. Let’s not go into that now. No, not into that. Nor back to all those cars and all those dances. I wish that luminol would work. Damn Eddie, really. He shouldn’t have really gotten so tight. It isn’t fair, really. No one can help the way they’re built but getting tight has nothing to do with that. I suppose I am a bitch all right, but if I lie here now all night and can’t sleep I’ll go crazy and if I take too much of that damned stuff I’ll feel awfully all day tomorrow and then sometimes it won’t put you to sleep and anyway I’ll be cross and nervous and feel frightful. Oh, well, I might as well. I hate to but what can you do? What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn’t, I’m sweet, yes you are, you’re lovely, oh, you’re so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn’t want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he’s not, he’s not even here, I’m here, I’m always here and I’m the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. And you’re me. So that’s it. So that’s the way it is. So what about it always now and over now. All over now. All right. I don’t care. What difference does it make? It isn’t wrong if I don’t feel badly. And I don’t. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I’ll do it again before I’m really awake.

She went to sleep then, remembering, just before she was finally asleep, to turn on her side so that her face did not rest on the pillow. She remembered, no matter how sleepy, how terribly bad it is for the face to sleep that way, resting on the pillow.

There were two other yachts in the harbor but every one was asleep on them, too, when the Coast Guard boat towed Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, into the dark yacht basin and tied up alongside the Coast Guard pier.

CHAPTER 25

Harry Morgan knew nothing about it when they handed a stretcher down from the pier, and, with two men holding it on the deck of the gray-painted cutter under a floodlight outside the captain’s cabin, two others picked him up from the captain’s bunk and moved unsteadily out to ease him onto the stretcher. He had been unconscious since the early evening and his big body sagged the canvas of the stretcher deeply as the four men lifted it up toward the pier.

“Up with it now.”

“Hold his legs. Don’t let him slip.”

“Up with it.”

They got the stretcher onto the pier.

“How is he, Doctor?” asked the sheriff as the men shoved the stretcher into the ambulance.

“He’s alive,” said the doctor. “That’s all you can say.”

“He’s been out of his head or unconscious ever since we picked him up,” the boatswain’s mate commanding the Coast Guard cutter said. He was a short chunky man with glasses that shone in the floodlight. He needed a shave. “All your Cuban stiffs are back in the launch. We left everything like it was. We didn’t touch anything. We just put the two down that might have gone overboard. Everything’s just like it was. The money and the guns. Everything.”

“Come on,” said the sheriff. “Can you run a floodlight back there?”

“I’ll have them plug one in on the dock,” the dockmaster said. He went off to get the light and the cord.

“Come on,” said the sheriff. They went astern with flashlights. “I want you to show me exactly how you found them. Where’s the money?”

“In those two bags.”

“How much is there?”

“I don’t know. I opened one up and saw it was the money and shut it up. I didn’t want to touch it.”

“That’s right,” said the sheriff. “That’s exactly right.”

“Everything’s just like it was except we put two of the stiffs off the tanks down into the cockpit so they wouldn’t roll overboard, and we carried that big ox of a Harry aboard and put him in my bunk. I figured him to pass out before we got him in. He’s in a hell of a shape.”

“He’s been unconscious all the time?”

“He was out of his head at first,” said the skipper. “But you couldn’t make out what he was saying. We listened to a lot of it but it didn’t make sense. Then he got unconscious. There’s your layout. Just like it was only that niggery looking one on his side is laying where Harry lay. He was on the bench over the starboard tank hanging over the coaming and the other dark one by the side of him was on the other bench, the port side, hunched over on his face. Watch out. Don’t light any matches. She’s full of gas.”

“There ought to be another body,” said the sheriff.

“That’s all there was. The money’s in that bag. The guns are right where they were.”

“We better have somebody from the bank to see the money opened,” said the sheriff.

“O.K.,” said the skipper. “That’s a good idea.”

“We can take the bag to my office and seal it.”

“That’s a good idea,” said the skipper.

Under the floodlight the green and white of the launch had a freshly shiny look. This came from the dew on her deck and on the top of the house. The splinterings showed fresh through her white paint. Astern of her the water was a clear green under the light and there were small fish about the pilings.

In the cockpit the inflated faces of the dead men were shiny under the light, lacquered brown where the blood had dried. There were empty .45 caliber shells in the cockpit around the dead and the Thompson gun lay in the stern where Harry had put it down. The two leather briefcases the men had brought the money aboard in, leaned against one of the gas tanks.

“I thought maybe I ought to take the money on board while we were towing her,” the skipper said. “Then I thought it was better to leave it just exactly like it was so long as the weather was light.”

“It was right to leave it,” the sheriff said. “What’s become of the other man, Albert Tracy, the fisherman?”

“I don’t know. This is just how it was except for shifting those two,” the skipper said. “They’re all shot to pieces except that one there under the wheel laying on his back. He’s just shot in the back of the head. It come out through the front. You can see what it did.”

“He’s the one that looked like a kid,” the sheriff said.

“He don’t look like anything now,” the skipper said.

“That big one there is the one had the submachine gun and who killed attorney Robert Simmons,” the sheriff said. “What do you suppose happened? How the devil did they all get shot?”

“They must have got fighting among themselves,” the skipper said. “They must have had a dispute on how to split the money.”

“We’ll cover them up until morning,” the sheriff said. “I’ll take those bags.”

Then, as they were standing there in the cockpit, a woman came running up the pier past the Coast Guard cutter, and behind her came the crowd. The woman was gaunt, middle-aged and bare-headed, and her stringy hair had come undone and was down on her neck although it was still knotted at the end. As she saw the bodies in the cockpit she commenced to scream. She stood on the pier screaming with her head back while two other women held her arms. The crowd, which had come close behind her, formed around her, jostled close, looking down at the launch.

“God damn it,” said the sheriff. “Who left that gate open? Get something to cover those bodies; blankets, sheets, anything, and we’ll get this crowd out of here.”

The woman stopped screaming and looked down into the launch, then put back her head and screamed again.

“Where they got him?” said one of the women near her.

“Where they put Albert?”

The woman who was screaming stopped it and looked in the launch again.

“He ain’t there,” she said. “Hey, you, Roger Johnson,” she shouted at the sheriff. “Where’s Albert? Where’s Albert?”

“He isn’t on board, Mrs. Tracy,” the sheriff said. The woman put her head back and screamed again, the chords in her scrawny throat rigid, her hands clenched, her hair shaking.

In the back of the crowd people were shoving and elbowing to get to the dock side.

“Come on. Let somebody else see.”

“They’re going to cover them up.”

And in Spanish, “Let me pass. Let me look. Hay cuatro muertos. Todos son muertos. Let me see.”

Now the woman was screaming, “Albert! Albert! Oh, my God, where’s Albert?”

In the back of the crowd two young Cubans who had just come up and who could not penetrate the crowd stepped back, then ran and shoved forward together. The front line of the crowd swayed and bulged, then, in the middle of a scream, Mrs. Tracy and her two supporters toppled, hung slanted forward in desperate unbalance and then, while the supporters wildly hung to safety, Mrs. Tracy, still screaming, fell into the green water, the scream becoming a splash and bubble.

Two Coast Guard men dove into the clear green water where Mrs. Tracy was splashing in the floodlight. The sheriff leaned out on the stern and shoved a boat hook out to her and finally, raised from below by the two Coast Guardsmen, pulled up by the arms by the sheriff, she was hoisted onto the stern of the launch. No one in the crowd had made a move to aid her, and, as she stood dripping on the stern, she looked up at them, shook both her fists at them and shouted, “Basards! Bishes!” Then as she looked into the cockpit she wailed, “Alber. Whersh Alber?”

“He’s not on board, Mrs. Tracy,” the sheriff said, taking up a blanket to put around her. “Try to be calm, Mrs. Tracy. Try to be brave.”

“My plate,” said Mrs. Tracy tragically. “Losht my plate.”

“We’ll dive it up in the morning,” the skipper of the Coast Guard cutter told her. “We’ll get it all right.”

The Coast Guard men had climbed up on the stern and were standing dripping. “Come on. Let’s go,” one of them said. “I’m getting cold.”

“Are you all right, Mrs. Tracy?” the sheriff said, putting the blanket around her.

“All rie?” said Mrs. Tracy. “All rie?” then clenched both her hands and put her head back to really scream. Mrs. Tracy’s grief was greater than she could bear.

The crowd listened to her and was silent and respectful. Mrs. Tracy provided just the sound effect that was needed to go with the sight of the dead bandits that were now being covered with Coast Guard blankets by the sheriff and one of the deputies, thus veiling the greatest sight the town had seen since the Isleño had been lynched, years before, out on the County Road and then hung up to swing from a telephone pole in the lights of all the cars that had come out to see it.

The crowd was disappointed when the bodies were covered but they alone of all the town had seen them. They had seen Mrs. Tracy fall into the water and they had, before they came in, seen Harry Morgan carried on a stretcher into the Marine Hospital. When the sheriff ordered them out of the yacht basin they went quietly and happily. They knew how privileged they had been.

Meanwhile at the Marine Hospital Harry Morgan’s wife, Marie, and her three daughters waited on a bench in the receiving room. The three girls were crying and Marie was biting on a handkerchief. She hadn’t been able to cry since about noon.

“Daddy’s shot in the stomach,” one of the girls said to her sister.

“It’s terrible,” said the sister.

“Be quiet,” said the older sister. “I’m praying for him. Don’t interrupt me.”

Marie said nothing and only sat there, biting on a handkerchief and on her lower lip.

After a while the doctor came out. She looked at him and he shook his head.

“Can I go in?” she asked.

“Not yet,” he said. She went over to him. “Is he gone?” she said.

“I’m afraid so, Mrs. Morgan.”

“Can I go in and see him?”

“Not yet. He’s in the operating room.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Marie. “Oh, Christ. I’ll take the girls home. Then I’ll be back.”

Her throat suddenly was swollen hard and shut so she could not swallow.

“Come on, you girls,” she said. The three girls followed her out to the old car where she got into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“How’s Daddy?” one of the girls asked.

Marie did not answer.

“How’s Daddy, Mother?”

“Don’t talk to me,” Marie said. “Just don’t talk to me.”

“But — —”

“Shut up, Honey,” said Marie. “Just shut up and pray for him.” The girls began to cry again.

“Damn it,” said Marie. “Don’t cry like that. I said pray for him.”

“We will,” said one of the girls. “I haven’t stopped since we were at the hospital.”

As they turned onto the worn white coral of the Rocky Road the headlight of the car showed a man walking unsteadily along ahead of them.

“Some poor rummy,” thought Marie. “Some poor goddamned rummy.”

They passed the man, who had blood on his face, and who kept on unsteadily in the dark after the lights of the car had gone on up the street. It was Richard Gordon on his way home.

At the door of the house Marie stopped the car.

“Go to bed, you girls,” she said. “Go on up to bed.”

“But what about Daddy?” one of the girls asked.

“Don’t you talk to me,” Marie said. “For Christ sake, please don’t speak to me.”

She turned the car in the road and started back toward the hospital.

Back at the hospital Marie Morgan climbed the steps in a rush. The doctor met her on the porch as he came out through the screen door. He was tired and on his way home.

“He’s gone, Mrs. Morgan,” he said.

“He’s dead?”

“He died on the table.”

“Can I see him?”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “He went very peacefully, Mrs. Morgan. He was in no pain.”

“Oh, hell,” said Marie. Tears began to run down her cheeks. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh.”

The doctor put his hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t touch me,” Marie said. Then, “I want to see him.”

“Come on,” the doctor said. He walked with her down a corridor and into the white room where Harry Morgan lay on a wheeled table, a sheet over his great body. The light was very bright and cast no shadows. Marie stood in the doorway looking terrified by the light.

“He didn’t suffer at all, Mrs. Morgan,” the doctor said. Marie did not seem to hear him.

“Oh, Christ,” she said, and began to cry again. “Look at his goddamned face.”

CHAPTER 26

I don’t know, Marie Morgan was thinking, sitting at the dining-room table. I can take it just a day at a time and a night at a time, and maybe it gets different. It’s the goddamned nights. If I cared about those girls it would be different. But I don’t care about those girls. I’ve got to do something about them though. I’ve got to get started on something. Maybe you get over being dead inside. I guess it don’t make any difference. I got to start to do something anyway. It’s been a week today. I’m afraid if I think about him on purpose I’ll get so I can’t remember how he looks. That was when I got that awful panic when I couldn’t remember his face. I got to get started doing something no matter how I feel. If he’d have left some money or if there’d been rewards it would have been better but I wouldn’t feel no better. First thing I’ve got to do is try to sell the house. The bastards that shot him. Oh, the dirty bastards. That’s the only feeling I got. Hate and a hollow feeling. I’m empty like a empty house. Well, I got to start to do something. I should have gone to the funeral. But I couldn’t go. I got to start to do something now though. Ain’t nobody going to come back any more when they’re dead.

Him, like he was, snotty and strong and quick, and like some kind of expensive animal. It would always get me just to watch him move. I was so lucky all that time to have him. His luck went bad first in Cuba. Then it kept right worse and worse until a Cuban killed him.

Cubans are bad luck for Conchs. Cubans are bad luck for anybody. They got too many niggers there too. I remember that time he took me over to Havana when he was making such good money and we were walking in the park and a nigger said something to me and Harry smacked him, and picked up his straw hat that fell off, and sailed it about a half a block and a taxi ran over it. I laughed so it made my belly ache.

That was the first time I ever made my hair blonde that time there in that beauty parlor on the Prado. They were working on it all afternoon and it was naturally so dark they didn’t want to do it and I was afraid I’d look terrible, but I kept telling them to see if they couldn’t make it a little lighter, and the man would go over it with that orange wood stick with cotton on the end, dipping it in that bowl that had the stuff in it sort of smoky like the way it steamed sort of, and the comb; parting the strands with one end of the stick and the comb and going over them and letting it dry and I was sitting there scared inside my chest of what I was having done and all I’d say was, just see if you can’t make it a little lighter.

And finally he said, that’s just as light as I can make it safely, Madame, and then he shampooed it, and put a wave in, and I was afraid to look even for fear it would be terrible, and he waved it parted on one side and high behind my ears with little tight curls in back, and it still wet I couldn’t tell how it looked except it looked all changed and I looked strange to myself. And he put a net over it wet and put me under the dryer and all the time I was scared about it. And then when I come out from under the dryer he took the net off and the pins out and combed it out and it was just like gold.

And I came out of the place and saw myself in the mirror and it shone so in the sun and was so soft and silky when I put my hand and touched it, and I couldn’t believe it was me and I was so excited I was choked with it.

I walked down the Prado to the café where Harry was waiting and I was so excited feeling all funny inside, sort of faint like, and he stood up when he saw me coming and he couldn’t take his eyes off me and his voice was thick and funny when he said, “Jesus, Marie, you’re beautiful.”

And I said, “You like me blonde?”

“Don’t talk about it,” he said. “Let’s go to the hotel.”

And I said, “O.K., then. Let’s go.” I was twenty-six then.

And that’s how he always was with me and that’s the way I always was about him. He said he never had anything like me and I know there wasn’t any men like him. I know it too damned well and now he’s dead.

Now I got to get started on something. I know I got to. But when you got a man like that and some lousy Cuban shoots him you can’t just start right out; because everything inside of you is gone. I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes all right.

And he was so goddamned good to me and reliable too, and he always made money some way and I never had to worry about money, only about him, and now that’s all gone.

It ain’t what happens to the one gets killed. I wouldn’t mind if it was me got killed. With Harry at the end there he was just tired, the doctor said. He never woke up even. I was glad he died easy because Jesus Christ he must have suffered in that boat. I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. I guess like that you don’t think about anybody. I guess it must have hurt too bad. But finally he was just too tired. I wish to Christ it was me was dead. But that ain’t any good to wish. Nothing is any good to wish.

I couldn’t go to the funeral. But people don’t understand that. They don’t know how you feel. Because good men are scarce. They just don’t have them. Nobody knows the way you feel, because they don’t know what it’s all about that way. I know. I know too well. And if I live now twenty years what am I going to do? Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. That’s what I got to do. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know.

How do you get through nights if you can’t sleep? I guess you find out like you find out how it feels to lose your husband. I guess you find out all right. I guess you find out everything in this goddamned life. I guess you do all right. I guess I’m probably finding out right now. You just go dead inside and everything is easy. You just get dead like most people are most of the time. I guess that’s how it is all right. I guess that’s just about what happens to you. Well, I’ve got a good start. I’ve got a good start if that’s what you have to do. I guess that’s what you have to do all right. I guess that’s it. I guess that’s what it comes to. All right. I got a good start then. I’m way ahead of everybody now.

Outside it was a lovely, cool, sub-tropical winter day and the palm branches were sawing in the light north wind. Some winter people rode by the house on bicycles. They were laughing. In the big yard of the house across the street a peacock squawked.

Through the window you could see the sea looking hard and new and blue in the winter light.

A large white yacht was coming into the harbor and seven miles out on the horizon you could see a tanker, small and neat in profile against the blue sea, hugging the reef as she made to the westward to keep from wasting fuel against the stream.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

For Whom the Bell Tolls was completed in the summer of 1940 and published by Scribner’s on 21 October of the same year. The author wrote the novel in Cuba, Florida and Idaho during 1939. It was inspired by his experiences of the Spanish Civil War and his time spent in the country reporting on the conflict. In 1922, Hemingway had covered the later stages of Greco-Turkish war for the Toronto Star. He had arrived in autumn, shortly after the ‘Smyrna Catastrophe’ — which involved thousands of Greek and Armenian civilians being killed, and many more being forced to leave the city after Turkish forces regained control of the territory. He did not witness the plight of these victims, but in November he wrote about the misery of Greek refugees who felt compelled to leave Eastern Thrace after Greek troops were ordered to retreat from the region.

In the spring of 1937, the author headed to Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He would continue to report on the war for over a year, choosing to return to the country in the autumn of 1938 in a non-work capacity. It is clear that he realised that the Fascists winning the war would not only devastate Spain, but would have dire consequences for the rest of the western world. The experience of the war altered Hemingway as a person and inspired what would be regarded as one of his greatest novels. The book was a commercial success and received critical acclaim, generating a plethora of adaptations since its first publication.

For Whom the Bell Tolls derives its title from a line in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by the metaphysical poet John Donne, which also includes his famous phrase ‘No man is an Island’. The novel begins in the summer of 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War and centres on the American Robert Jordan, who is fighting the Republican cause against Franco’s fascist forces. He is instructed by a Soviet general to assist a band of anti-fascist guerrillas in going behind enemy lines and destroying a bridge with explosives in order to assist a Loyalist attack on the Nationalists. He quickly becomes acquainted with the guerrilla fighters, including the mercurial and suspicious Pablo, and the vulnerable but ultimately resilient Maria, with whom Robert falls in love. When the likelihood of the bridge operation appears less likely to be successful, the protagonist must face the possibility of his impending death.

In the novel Hemingway is clear that both sides are engaged in lies and propaganda, and he is deeply critical of the empty rhetoric repeated by those leading fighters to their deaths. He exposes the military and strategic incompetence of the Republican generals and leaders, criticising their brutality and dogmatism. The author presents his protagonist reflecting on the fact that the men he is killing are most likely not fascists, but just young people recruited to fight the Loyalists. Jordan is clearly reluctant to kill and takes no pleasure in it, and yet, he ultimately believes that it is imperative to destroy fascism and will give his life to that cause. There has been much disagreement about Hemingway’s exact politics, but it is apparent in this work that his primary focus and commitment during the Spanish Civil War was the destruction of fascism and that the struggle and sacrifices and dedication to fight was a worthy endeavour.

The first edition, 1940

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Franco with his fascist forces in Reus, 1940

This book is for

MARTHA GELLHORN

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

JOHN DONNE

Chapter 1

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

“Is that the mill?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I do not remember it.”

“It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass.”

He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.

“Then you cannot see the bridge from here.”

“No,” the old man said. “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows gently. Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there is a steep gorge—”

“I remember.”

“Across this gorge is the bridge.”

“And where are their posts?”

“There is a post at the mill that you see there.”

The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the pocket of his faded, khaki flannel shirt, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, screwed the eyepieces around until the boards of the mill showed suddenly clearly and he saw the wooden bench beside the door; the huge pile of sawdust that rose behind the open shed where the circular saw was, and a stretch of the flume that brought the logs down from the mountainside on the other bank of the stream. The stream showed clear and smooth-looking in the glasses and, below the curl of the falling water, the spray from the dam was blowing in the wind.

“There is no sentry.”

“There is smoke coming from the millhouse,” the old man said. “There are also clothes hanging on a line.”

“I see them but I do not see any sentry.”

“Perhaps he is in the shade,” the old man explained. “It is hot there now. He would be in the shadow at the end we do not see.”

“Probably. Where is the next post?”

“Below the bridge. It is at the roadmender’s hut at kilometer five from the top of the pass.”

“How many men are here?” He pointed at the mill.

“Perhaps four and a corporal.”

“And below?”

“More. I will find out.”

“And at the bridge?”

“Always two. One at each end.”

“We will need a certain number of men,” he said. “How many men can you get?”

“I can bring as many men as you wish,” the old man said. “There are many men now here in the hills.”

“How many?”

“There are more than a hundred. But they are in small bands. How many men will you need?”

“I will let you know when we have studied the bridge.”

“Do you wish to study it now?”

“No. Now I wish to go to where we will hide this explosive until it is time. I would like to have it hidden in utmost security at a distance no greater than half an hour from the bridge, if that is possible.”

“That is simple,” the old man said. “From where we are going, it will all be downhill to the bridge. But now we must climb a little in seriousness to get there. Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” the young man said. “But we will eat later. How are you called? I have forgotten.” It was a bad sign to him that he had forgotten.

“Anselmo,” the old man said. “I am called Anselmo and I come from Barco de Avila. Let me help you with that pack.”

The young man, who was tall and thin, with sun-streaked fair hair, and a wind — and sun-burned face, who wore the sun-faded flannel shirt, a pair of peasant’s trousers and rope-soled shoes, leaned over, put his arm through one of the leather pack straps and swung the heavy pack up onto his shoulders. He worked his arm through the other strap and settled the weight of the pack against his back. His shirt was still wet from where the pack had rested.

“I have it up now,” he said. “How do we go?”

“We climb,” Anselmo said.

Bending under the weight of the packs, sweating, they climbed steadily in the pine forest that covered the mountainside. There was no trail that the young man could see, but they were working up and around the face of the mountain and now they crossed a small stream and the old man went steadily on ahead up the edge of the rocky stream bed. The climbing now was steeper and more difficult, until finally the stream seemed to drop down over the edge of a smooth granite ledge that rose above them and the old man waited at the foot of the ledge for the young man to come up to him.

“How are you making it?”

“All right,” the young man said. He was sweating heavily and his thigh muscles were twitchy from the steepness of the climb.

“Wait here now for me. I go ahead to warn them. You do not want to be shot at carrying that stuff.”

“Not even in a joke,” the young man said. “Is it far?”

“It is very close. How do they call thee?”

“Roberto,” the young man answered. He had slipped the pack off and lowered it gently down between two boulders by the stream bed.

“Wait here, then, Roberto, and I will return for you.”

“Good,” the young man said. “But do you plan to go down this way to the bridge?”

“No. When we go to the bridge it will be by another way. Shorter and easier.”

“I do not want this material to be stored too far from the bridge.”

“You will see. If you are not satisfied, we will take another place.”

“We will see,” the young man said.

He sat by the packs and watched the old man climb the ledge. It was not hard to climb and from the way he found hand-holds without searching for them the young man could see that he had climbed it many times before. Yet whoever was above had been very careful not to leave any trail.

The young man, whose name was Robert Jordan, was extremely hungry and he was worried. He was often hungry but he was not usually worried because he did not give any importance to what happened to himself and he knew from experience how simple it was to move behind the enemy lines in all this country. It was as simple to move behind them as it was to cross through them, if you had a good guide. It was only giving importance to what happened to you if you were caught that made it difficult; that and deciding whom to trust. You had to trust the people you worked with completely or not at all, and you had to make decisions about the trusting. He was not worried about any of that. But there were other things.

This Anselmo had been a good guide and he could travel wonderfully in the mountains. Robert Jordan could walk well enough himself and he knew from following him since before daylight that the old man could walk him to death. Robert Jordan trusted the man, Anselmo, so far, in everything except judgment. He had not yet had an opportunity to test his judgment, and, anyway, the judgment was his own responsibility. No, he did not worry about Anselmo and the problem of the bridge was no more difficult than many other problems. He knew how to blow any sort of bridge that you could name and he had blown them of all sizes and constructions. There was enough explosive and all equipment in the two packs to blow this bridge properly even if it were twice as big as Anselmo reported it, as he remembered it when he had walked over it on his way to La Granja on a walking trip in 1933, and as Golz had read him the description of it night before last in that upstairs room in the house outside of the Escorial.

“To blow the bridge is nothing,” Golz had said, the lamplight on his scarred, shaved head, pointing with a pencil on the big map. “You understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Absolutely nothing. Merely to blow the bridge is a failure.”

“Yes, Comrade General.”

“To blow the bridge at a stated hour based on the time set for the attack is how it should be done. You see that naturally. That is your right and how it should be done.”

Golz looked at the pencil, then tapped his teeth with it.

Robert Jordan had said nothing.

“You understand that is your right and how it should be done,” Golz went on, looking at him and nodding his head. He tapped on the map now with the pencil. “That is how I should do it. That is what we cannot have.”

“Why, Comrade General?”

“Why?” Golz said, angrily. “How many attacks have you seen and you ask me why? What is to guarantee that my orders are not changed? What is to guarantee that the attack is not annulled? What is to guarantee that the attack is not postponed? What is to guarantee that it starts within six hours of when it should start? Has any attack ever been as it should?”

“It will start on time if it is your attack,” Robert Jordan said.

“They are never my attacks,” Golz said. “I make them. But they are not mine. The artillery is not mine. I must put in for it. I have never been given what I ask for even when they have it to give. That is the least of it. There are other things. You know how those people are. It is not necessary to go into all of it. Always there is something. Always some one will interfere. So now be sure you understand.”

“So when is the bridge to be blown?” Robert Jordan had asked.

“After the attack starts. As soon as the attack has started and not before. So that no reinforcements will come up over that road.” He pointed with his pencil. “I must know that nothing will come up over that road.”

“And when is the attack?”

“I will tell you. But you are to use the date and hour only as an indication of a probability. You must be ready for that time. You will blow the bridge after the attack has started. You see?” he indicated with the pencil. “That is the only road on which they can bring up reinforcements. That is the only road on which they can get up tanks, or artillery, or even move a truck toward the pass which I attack. I must know that bridge is gone. Not before, so it can be repaired if the attack is postponed. No. It must go when the attack starts and I must know it is gone. There are only two sentries. The man who will go with you has just come from there. He is a very reliable man, they say. You will see. He has people in the mountains. Get as many men as you need. Use as few as possible, but use enough. I do not have to tell you these things.”

“And how do I determine that the attack has started?”

“It is to be made with a full division. There will be an aerial bombardment as preparation. You are not deaf, are you?”

“Then I may take it that when the planes unload, the attack has started?”

“You could not always take it like that,” Golz said and shook his head. “But in this case, you may. It is my attack.”

“I understand it,” Robert Jordan had said. “I do not say I like it very much.”

“Neither do I like it very much. If you do not want to undertake it, say so now. If you think you cannot do it, say so now.”

“I will do it,” Robert Jordan had said. “I will do it all right.”

“That is all I have to know,” Golz said. “That nothing comes up over that bridge. That is absolute.”

“I understand.”

“I do not like to ask people to do such things and in such a way,” Golz went on. “I could not order you to do it. I understand what you may be forced to do through my putting such conditions. I explain very carefully so that you understand and that you understand all of the possible difficulties and the importance.”

“And how will you advance on La Granja if that bridge is blown?”

“We go forward prepared to repair it after we have stormed the pass. It is a very complicated and beautiful operation. As complicated and as beautiful as always. The plan has been manufactured in Madrid. It is another of Vicente Rojo, the unsuccessful professor’s, masterpieces. I make the attack and I make it, as always, not in sufficient force. It is a very possible operation, in spite of that. I am much happier about it than usual. It can be successful with that bridge eliminated. We can take Segovia. Look, I show you how it goes. You see? It is not the top of the pass where we attack. We hold that. It is much beyond. Look — Here — Like this—”

“I would rather not know,” Robert Jordan said.

“Good,” said Golz. “It is less of baggage to carry with you on the other side, yes?”

“I would always rather not know. Then, no matter what can happen, it was not me that talked.”

“It is better not to know,” Golz stroked his forehead with the pencil. “Many times I wish I did not know myself. But you do know the one thing you must know about the bridge?”

“Yes. I know that.”

“I believe you do,” Golz said. “I will not make you any little speech. Let us now have a drink. So much talking makes me very thirsty, Comrade Hordan. You have a funny name in Spanish, Comrade Hordown.”

“How do you say Golz in Spanish, Comrade General?”

“Hotze,” said Golz grinning, making the sound deep in his throat as though hawking with a bad cold. “Hotze,” he croaked. “Comrade Heneral Khotze. If I had known how they pronounced Golz in Spanish I would pick me out a better name before I come to war here. When I think I come to command a division and I can pick out any name I want and I pick out Hotze. Heneral Hotze. Now it is too late to change. How do you like partizan work?” It was the Russian term for guerilla work behind the lines.

“Very much,” Robert Jordan said. He grinned. “It is very healthy in the open air.”

“I like it very much when I was your age, too,” Golz said. “They tell me you blow bridges very well. Very scientific. It is only hearsay. I have never seen you do anything myself. Maybe nothing ever happens really. You really blow them?” he was teasing now. “Drink this,” he handed the glass of Spanish brandy to Robert Jordan. “You really blow them?”

“Sometimes.”

“You better not have any sometimes on this bridge. No, let us not talk any more about this bridge. You understand enough now about that bridge. We are very serious so we can make very strong jokes. Look, do you have many girls on the other side of the lines?”

“No, there is no time for girls.”

“I do not agree. The more irregular the service, the more irregular the life. You have very irregular service. Also you need a haircut.”

“I have my hair cut as it needs it,” Robert Jordan said. He would be damned if he would have his head shaved like Golz. “I have enough to think about without girls,” he said sullenly.

“What sort of uniform am I supposed to wear?” Robert Jordan asked.

“None,” Golz said. “Your haircut is all right. I tease you. You are very different from me,” Golz had said and filled up the glasses again.

“You never think about only girls. I never think at all. Why should I? I am Général Sovietique. I never think. Do not try to trap me into thinking.”

Some one on his staff, sitting on a chair working over a map on a drawing board, growled at him in the language Robert Jordan did not understand.

“Shut up,” Golz had said, in English. “I joke if I want. I am so serious is why I can joke. Now drink this and then go. You understand, huh?”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan had said. “I understand.”

They had shaken hands and he had saluted and gone out to the staff car where the old man was waiting asleep and in that car they had ridden over the road past Guadarrama, the old man still asleep, and up the Navacerrada road to the Alpine Club hut where he, Robert Jordan, slept for three hours before they started.

That was the last he had seen of Golz with his strange white face that never tanned, his hawk eyes, the big nose and thin lips and the shaven head crossed with wrinkles and with scars. Tomorrow night they would be outside the Escorial in the dark along the road; the long lines of trucks loading the infantry in the darkness; the men, heavy loaded, climbing up into the trucks; the machine-gun sections lifting their guns into the trucks; the tanks being run up on the skids onto the long-bodied tank trucks; pulling the Division out to move them in the night for the attack on the pass. He would not think about that. That was not his business. That was Golz’s business. He had only one thing to do and that was what he should think about and he must think it out clearly and take everything as it came along, and not worry. To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.

He sat now by the stream watching the clear water flowing between the rocks and, across the stream, he noticed there was a thick bed of watercress. He crossed the stream, picked a double handful, washed the muddy roots clean in the current and then sat down again beside his pack and ate the clean, cool green leaves and the crisp, peppery-tasting stalks. He knelt by the stream and, pushing his automatic pistol around on his belt to the small of his back so that it would not be wet, he lowered himself with a hand on each of two boulders and drank from the stream. The water was achingly cold.

Pushing himself up on his hands he turned his head and saw the old man coming down the ledge. With him was another man, also in a black peasant’s smock and the dark gray trousers that were almost a uniform in that province, wearing rope-soled shoes and with a carbine slung over his back. This man was bareheaded. The two of them came scrambling down the rock like goats.

They came up to him and Robert Jordan got to his feet.

“Salud, Camarada,” he said to the man with the carbine and smiled.

“Salud,” the other said, grudgingly. Robert Jordan looked at the man’s heavy, beard-stubbled face. It was almost round and his head was round and set close on his shoulders. His eyes were small and set too wide apart and his ears were small and set close to his head. He was a heavy man about five feet ten inches tall and his hands and feet were large. His nose had been broken and his mouth was cut at one corner and the line of the scar across the upper lip and lower jaw showed through the growth of beard over his face.

The old man nodded his head at this man and smiled.

“He is the boss here,” he grinned, then flexed his arms as though to make the muscles stand out and looked at the man with the carbine in a half-mocking admiration. “A very strong man.”

“I can see it,” Robert Jordan said and smiled again. He did not like the look of this man and inside himself he was not smiling at all.

“What have you to justify your identity?” asked the man with the carbine.

Robert Jordan unpinned a safety pin that ran through his pocket flap and took a folded paper out of the left breast pocket of his flannel shirt and handed it to the man, who opened it, looked at it doubtfully and turned it in his hands.

So he cannot read, Robert Jordan noted.

“Look at the seal,” he said.

The old man pointed to the seal and the man with the carbine studied it, turning it in his fingers.

“What seal is that?”

“Have you never seen it?”

“No.”

“There are two,” said Robert Jordan. “One is S. I. M., the service of the military intelligence. The other is the General Staff.”

“Yes, I have seen that seal before. But here no one commands but me,” the other said sullenly. “What have you in the packs?”

“Dynamite,” the old man said proudly. “Last night we crossed the lines in the dark and all day we have carried this dynamite over the mountain.”

“I can use dynamite,” said the man with the carbine. He handed back the paper to Robert Jordan and looked him over. “Yes. I have use for dynamite. How much have you brought me?”

“I have brought you no dynamite,” Robert Jordan said to him evenly. “The dynamite is for another purpose. What is your name?”

“What is that to you?”

“He is Pablo,” said the old man. The man with the carbine looked at them both sullenly.

“Good. I have heard much good of you,” said Robert Jordan.

“What have you heard of me?” asked Pablo.

“I have heard that you are an excellent guerilla leader, that you are loyal to the republic and prove your loyalty through your acts, and that you are a man both serious and valiant. I bring you greetings from the General Staff.”

“Where did you hear all this?” asked Pablo. Robert Jordan registered that he was not taking any of the flattery.

“I heard it from Buitrago to the Escorial,” he said, naming all the stretch of country on the other side of the lines.

“I know no one in Buitrago nor in Escorial,” Pablo told him.

“There are many people on the other side of the mountains who were not there before. Where are you from?”

“Avila. What are you going to do with the dynamite?”

“Blow up a bridge.”

“What bridge?”

“That is my business.”

“If it is in this territory, it is my business. You cannot blow bridges close to where you live. You must live in one place and operate in another. I know my business. One who is alive, now, after a year, knows his business.”

“This is my business,” Robert Jordan said. “We can discuss it together. Do you wish to help us with the sacks?”

“No,” said Pablo and shook his head.

The old man turned toward him suddenly and spoke rapidly and furiously in a dialect that Robert Jordan could just follow. It was like reading Quevedo. Anselmo was speaking old Castilian and it went something like this, “Art thou a brute? Yes. Art thou a beast? Yes, many times Hast thou a brain? Nay. None. Now we come for something of consummate importance and thee, with thy dwelling place to be undisturbed, puts thy fox-hole before the interests of humanity. Before the interests of thy people. I this and that in the this and that of thy father. I this and that and that in thy this. Pick up that bag.”

Pablo looked down.

“Every one has to do what he can do according to how it can be truly done,” he said. “I live here and I operate beyond Segovia. If you make a disturbance here, we will be hunted out of these mountains. It is only by doing nothing here that we are able to live in these mountains. It is the principle of the fox.”

“Yes,” said Anselmo bitterly. “It is the principle of the fox when we need the wolf.”

“I am more wolf than thee,” Pablo said and Robert Jordan knew that he would pick up the sack.

“Hi. Ho…,” Anselmo looked at him. “Thou art more wolf than me and I am sixty-eight years old.”

He spat on the ground and shook his head.

“You have that many years?” Robert Jordan asked, seeing that now, for the moment, it would be all right and trying to make it go easier.

“Sixty-eight in the month of July.”

“If we should ever see that month,” said Pablo. “Let me help you with the pack,” he said to Robert Jordan. “Leave the other to the old man.” He spoke, not sullenly, but almost sadly now. “He is an old man of great strength.”

“I will carry the pack,” Robert Jordan said.

“Nay,” said the old man. “Leave it to this other strong man.”

“I will take it,” Pablo told him, and in his sullenness there was a sadness that was disturbing to Robert Jordan. He knew that sadness and to see it here worried him.

“Give me the carbine then,” he said and when Pablo handed it to him, he slung it over his back and, with the two men climbing ahead of him, they went heavily, pulling and climbing up the granite shelf and over its upper edge to where there was a green clearing in the forest.

They skirted the edge of the little meadow and Robert Jordan, striding easily now without the pack, the carbine pleasantly rigid over his shoulder after the heavy, sweating pack weight, noticed that the grass was cropped down in several places and signs that picket pins had been driven into the earth. He could see a trail through the grass where horses had been led to the stream to drink and there was the fresh manure of several horses. They picket them here to feed at night and keep them out of sight in the timber in the daytime, he thought. I wonder how many horses this Pablo has?

He remembered now noticing, without realizing it, that Pablo’s trousers were worn soapy shiny in the knees and thighs. I wonder if he has a pair of boots or if he rides in those alpargatas, he thought. He must have quite an outfit. But I don’t like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That’s the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out.

Ahead of them a horse whinnied in the timber and then, through the brown trunks of the pine trees, only a little sunlight coming down through their thick, almost-touching tops, he saw the corral made by roping around the tree trunks. The horses had their heads pointed toward the men as they approached, and at the foot of a tree, outside the corral, the saddles were piled together and covered with a tarpaulin.

As they came up, the two men with the packs stopped, and Robert Jordan knew it was for him to admire the horses.

“Yes,” he said. “They are beautiful.” He turned to Pablo. “You have your cavalry and all.”

There were five horses in the rope corral, three bays, a sorrel, and a buckskin. Sorting them out carefully with his eyes after he had seen them first together, Robert Jordan looked them over individually. Pablo and Anselmo knew how good they were and while Pablo stood now proud and less sad-looking, watching them lovingly, the old man acted as though they were some great surprise that he had produced, suddenly, himself.

“How do they look to you?” he asked.

“All these I have taken,” Pablo said and Robert Jordan was pleased to hear him speak proudly.

“That,” said Robert Jordan, pointing to one of the bays, a big stallion with a white blaze on his forehead and a single white foot, the near front, “is much horse.”

He was a beautiful horse that looked as though he had come out of a painting by Velasquez.

“They are all good,” said Pablo. “You know horses?”

“Yes.”

“Less bad,” said Pablo. “Do you see a defect in one of these?”

Robert Jordan knew that now his papers were being examined by the man who could not read.

The horses all still had their heads up looking at the man. Robert Jordan slipped through between the double rope of the corral and slapped the buckskin on the haunch. He leaned back against the ropes of the enclosure and watched the horses circle the corral, stood watching them a minute more, as they stood still, then leaned down and came out through the ropes.

“The sorrel is lame in the off hind foot,” he said to Pablo, not looking at him. “The hoof is split and although it might not get worse soon if shod properly, she could break down if she travels over much hard ground.”

“The hoof was like that when we took her,” Pablo said.

“The best horse that you have, the white-faced bay stallion, has a swelling on the upper part of the cannon bone that I do not like.”

“It is nothing,” said Pablo. “He knocked it three days ago. If it were to be anything it would have become so already.”

He pulled back the tarpaulin and showed the saddles. There were two ordinary vaquero’s or herdsman’s saddles, like American stock saddles, one very ornate vaquero’s saddle, with hand-tooled leather and heavy, hooded stirrups, and two military saddles in black leather.

“We killed a pair of guardia civil,” he said, explaining the military saddles.

“That is big game.”

“They had dismounted on the road between Segovia and Santa Maria del Real. They had dismounted to ask papers of the driver of a cart. We were able to kill them without injuring the horses.”

“Have you killed many civil guards?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Several,” Pablo said. “But only these two without injury to the horses.”

“It was Pablo who blew up the train at Arevalo,” Anselmo said. “That was Pablo.”

“There was a foreigner with us who made the explosion,” Pablo said. “Do you know him?”

“What is he called?”

“I do not remember. It was a very rare name.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was fair, as you are, but not as tall and with large hands and a broken nose.”

“Kashkin,” Robert Jordan said. “That would be Kashkin.”

“Yes,” said Pablo. “It was a very rare name. Something like that. What has become of him?”

“He is dead since April.”

“That is what happens to everybody,” Pablo said, gloomily. “That is the way we will all finish.”

“That is the way all men end,” Anselmo said. “That is the way men have always ended. What is the matter with you, man? What hast thou in the stomach?”

“They are very strong,” Pablo said. It was as though he were talking to himself. He looked at the horses gloomily. “You do not realize how strong they are. I see them always stronget always better armed. Always with more material. Here am I with horses like these. And what can I look forward to? To be hunted and to die. Nothing more.”

“You hunt as much as you are hunted,” Anselmo said.

“No,” said Pablo. “Not any more. And if we leave these mountains now, where can we go? Answer me that? Where now?”

“In Spain there are many mountains. There are the Sierra de Gredos if one leaves here.”

“Not for me,” Pablo said. “I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?” He turned to Robert Jordan. “What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?”

“I have not told you anything you must do,” Robert Jordan said to him.

“You will though,” Pablo said. “There. There is the badness.”

He pointed at the two heavy packs that they had lowered to the ground while they had watched the horses. Seeing the horses had seemed to bring this all to a head in him and seeing that Robert Jordan knew horses had seemed to loosen his tongue. The three of them stood now by the rope corral and the patchy sunlight shone on the coat of the bay stallion. Pablo looked at him and then pushed with his foot against the heavy pack. “There is the badness.”

“I come only for my duty,” Robert Jordan told him. “I come under orders from those who are conducting the war. If I ask you to help me, you can refuse and I will find others who will help me. I have not even asked you for help yet. I have to do what I am ordered to do and I can promise you of its importance. That I am a foreigner is not my fault. I would rather have been born here.”

“To me, now, the most important is that we be not disturbed here,” Pablo said. “To me, now, my duty is to those who are with me and to myself.”

“Thyself. Yes,” Anselmo said. “Thyself now since a long time. Thyself and thy horses. Until thou hadst horses thou wert with us. Now thou art another capitalist more.”

“That is unjust,” said Pablo. “I expose the horses all the time for the cause.”

“Very little,” said Anselmo scornfully. “Very little in my judgment. To steal, yes. To eat well, yes. To murder, yes. To fight, no.”

“You are an old man who will make himself trouble with his mouth.”

“I am an old man who is afraid of no one,” Anselmo told him. “Also I am an old man without horses.”

“You are an old man who may not live long.”

“I am an old man who will live until I die,” Anselmo said. “And I am not afraid of foxes.”

Pablo said nothing but picked up the pack.

“Nor of wolves either,” Anselmo said, picking up the other pack. “If thou art a wolf.”

“Shut thy mouth,” Pablo said to him. “Thou art an old man who always talks too much.”

“And would do whatever he said he would do,” Anselmo said, bent under the pack. “And who now is hungry. And thirsty. Go on, guerilla leader with the sad face. Lead us to something to eat.”

It is starting badly enough, Robert Jordan thought. But Anselmo’s a man. They are wonderful when they are good, he thought. There is no people like them when they are good and when they go bad there is no people that is worse. Anselmo must have known what he was doing when he brought us here. But I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.

The only good sign was that Pablo was carrying the pack and that he had given him the carbine. Perhaps he is always like that, Robert Jordan thought. Maybe he is just one of the gloomy ones.

No, he said to himself, don’t fool yourself. You do not know how he was before; but you do know that he is going bad fast and without hiding it. When he starts to hide it he will have made a decision. Remember that, he told himself. The first friendly thing he does, he will have made a decision. They are awfully good horses, though, he thought, beautiful horses. I wonder what could make me feel the way those horses make Pablo feel. The old man was right. The horses made him rich and as soon as he was rich he wanted to enjoy life. Pretty soon he’ll feel bad because he can’t join the Jockey Club, I guess, he thought. Pauvre Pablo. Il a manqué son Jockey.

That idea made him feel better. He grinned, looking at the two bent backs and the big packs ahead of him moving through the trees. He had not made any jokes with himself all day and now that he had made one he felt much better. You’re getting to be as all the rest of them, he told himself. You’re getting gloomy, too. He’d certainly been solemn and gloomy with Golz. The job had overwhelmed him a little. Slightly overwhelmed, he thought. Plenty overwhelmed. Golz was gay and he had wanted him to be gay too before he left, but he hadn’t been.

All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive. That was a complicated one. There were not many of them left though. No, there were not many of the gay ones left. There were very damned few of them left. And if you keep on thinking like that, my boy, you won’t be left either. Turn off the thinking now, old timer, old comrade. You’re a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker. Man, I’m hungry, he thought. I hope Pablo eats well.

Chapter 2

They had come through the heavy timber to the cup-shaped upper end of the little valley and he saw where the camp must be under the rim-rock that rose ahead of them through the trees.

That was the camp all right and it was a good camp. You did not see it at all until you were up to it and Robert Jordan knew it could not be spotted from the air. Nothing would show from above. It was as well hidden as a bear’s den. But it seemed to be little better guarded. He looked at it carefully as they came up.

There was a large cave in the rim-rock formation and beside the opening a man sat with his back against the rock, his legs stretched out on the ground and his carbine leaning against the rock. He was cutting away on a stick with a knife and he stared at them as they came up, then went on whittling.

“Hola,” said the seated man. “What is this that comes?”

“The old man and a dynamiter,” Pablo told him and lowered the pack inside the entrance to the cave. Anselmo lowered his pack, too, and Robert Jordan unslung the rifle and leaned it against the rock.

“Don’t leave it so close to the cave,” the whittling man, who had blue eyes in a dark, good-looking lazy gypsy face, the color of smoked leather, said. “There’s a fire in there.”

“Get up and put it away thyself,” Pablo said. “Put it by that tree.”

The gypsy did not move but said something unprintable, then, “Leave it there. Blow thyself up,” he said lazily. “Twill cure thy diseases.”

“What do you make?” Robert Jordan sat down by the gypsy. The gypsy showed him. It was a figure four trap and he was whittling the crossbar for it.

“For foxes,” he said. “With a log for a dead-fall. It breaks their backs.” He grinned at Jordan. “Like this, see?” He made a motion of the framework of the trap collapsing, the log falling, then shook his head, drew in his hand, and spread his arms to show the fox with a broken back. “Very practical,” he explained.

“He catches rabbits,” Anselmo said. “He is a gypsy. So if he catches rabbits he says it is foxes. If he catches a fox he would say it was an elephant.”

“And if I catch an elephant?” the gypsy asked and showed his white teeth again and winked at Robert Jordan.

“You’d say it was a tank,” Anselmo told him.

“I’ll get a tank,” the gypsy told him. “I will get a tank. And you can say it is what you please.”

“Gypsies talk much and kill little,” Anselmo told him.

The gypsy winked at Robert Jordan and went on whittling.

Pablo had gone in out of sight in the cave. Robert Jordan hoped he had gone for food. He sat on the ground by the gypsy and the afternoon sunlight came down through the tree tops and was warm on his outstretched legs. He could smell food now in the cave, the smell of oil and of onions and of meat frying and his stomach moved with hunger inside of him.

“We can get a tank,” he said to the gypsy. “It is not too difficult.”

“With this?” the gypsy pointed toward the two sacks.

“Yes,” Robert Jordan told him. “I will teach you. You make a trap. It is not too difficult.”

“You and me?”

“Sure,” said Robert Jordan. “Why not?”

“Hey,” the gypsy said to Anselmo. “Move those two sacks to where they will be safe, will you? They’re valuable.”

Anselmo grunted. “I am going for wine,” he told Robert Jordan. Robert Jordan got up and lifted the sacks away from the cave entrance and leaned them, one on each side of a tree trunk. He knew what was in them and he never liked to see them close together.

“Bring a cup for me,” the gypsy told him.

“Is there wine?” Robert Jordan asked, sitting down again by the gypsy.

“Wine? Why not? A whole skinful. Half a skinful, anyway.”

“And what to eat?”

“Everything, man,” the gypsy said. “We eat like generals.”

“And what do gypsies do in the war?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“They keep on being gypsies.”

“That’s a good job.”

“The best,” the gypsy said. “How do they call thee?”

“Roberto. And thee?”

“Rafael. And this of the tank is serious?”

“Surely. Why not?”

Anselmo came out of the mouth of the cave with a deep stone basin full of red wine and with his fingers through the handles of three cups. “Look,” he said. “They have cups and all.” Pablo came out behind them.

“There is food soon,” he said. “Do you have tobacco?”

Robert Jordan went over to the packs and opening one, felt inside an inner pocket and brought out one of the flat boxes of Russian cigarettes he had gotten at Golz’s headquarters. He ran his thumbnail around the edge of the box and, opening the lid, handed them to Pablo who took half a dozen. Pablo, holding them in one of his huge hands, picked one up and looked at it against the light. They were long narrow cigarettes with pasteboard cylinders for mouthpieces.

“Much air and little tobacco,” he said. “I know these. The other with the rare name had them.”

“Kashkin,” Robert Jordan said and offered the cigarettes to the gypsy and Anselmo, who each took one.

“Take more,” he said and they each took another. He gave them each four more, they making a double nod with the hand holding the cigarettes so that the cigarette dipped its end as a man salutes with a sword, to thank him.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “It was a rare name.”

“Here is the wine.” Anselmo dipped a cup out of the bowl and handed it to Robert Jordan, then dipped for himself and the gypsy.

“Is there no wine for me?” Pablo asked. They were all sitting together by the cave entrance.

Anselmo handed him his cup and went into the cave for another. Coming out he leaned over the bowl and dipped the cup full and they all touched cup edges.

The wine was good, tasting faintly resinous from the wineskin, but excellent, light and clean on his tongue. Robert Jordan drank it slowly, feeling it spread warmly through his tiredness.

“The food comes shortly,” Pablo said. “And this foreigner with the rare name, how did he die?”

“He was captured and he killed himself.”

“How did that happen?”

“He was wounded and he did not wish to be a prisoner.”

“What were the details?”

“I don’t know,” he lied. He knew the details very well and he knew they would not make good talking now.

“He made us promise to shoot him in case he were wounded at the business of the train and should be unable to get away,” Pablo said. “He spoke in a very rare manner.”

He must have been jumpy even then, Robert Jordan thought. Poor old Kashkin.

“He had a prejudice against killing himself,” Pablo said. “He told me that. Also he had a great fear of being tortured.”

“Did he tell you that, too?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“Yes,” the gypsy said. “He spoke like that to all of us.”

“Were you at the train, too?”

“Yes. All of us were at the train.”

“He spoke in a very rare manner,” Pablo said. “But he was very brave.”

Poor old Kashkin, Robert Jordan thought. He must have been doing more harm than good around here. I wish I would have known he was that jumpy as far back as then. They should have Pulled him out. You can’t have people around doing this sort of Work and talking like that. That is no way to talk. Even if they accomplish their mission they are doing more harm than good, talking that sort of stuff.

“He was a little strange,” Robert Jordan said. “I think he was a little crazy.”

“But very dexterous at producing explosions,” the gypsy said. “And very brave.”

“But crazy,” Robert Jordan said. “In this you have to have very much head and be very cold in the head. That was no way to talk.”

“And you,” Pablo said. “If you are wounded in such a thing as this bridge, you would be willing to be left behind?”

“Listen,” Robert Jordan said and, leaning forward, he dipped himself another cup of the wine. “Listen to me clearly. If ever I should have any little favors to ask of any man, I will ask him at the time.”

“Good,” said the gypsy approvingly. “In this way speak the good ones. Ah! Here it comes.”

“You have eaten,” said Pablo.

“And I can eat twice more,” the gypsy told him. “Look now who brings it.”

The girl stooped as she came out of the cave mouth carrying the big iron cooking platter and Robert Jordan saw her face turned at an angle and at the same time saw the strange thing about her. She smiled and said, “Hola, Comrade,” and Robert Jordan said, “Salud,” and was careful not to stare and not to look away. She set down the flat iron platter in front of him and he noticed her handsome brown hands. Now she looked him full in the face and smiled. Her teeth were white in her brown face and her skin and her eyes were the same golden tawny brown. She had high cheekbones, merry eyes and a straight mouth with full lips. Her hair was the golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in the sun but it was cut short all over her head so that it was but little longer than the fur on a beaver pelt. She smiled in Robert Jordan’s face and put her brown hand up and ran it over her head, flattening the hair which rose again as her hand passed. She has a beautiful face, Robert Jordan thought. She’d be beautiful if they hadn’t cropped her hair.

“That is the way I comb it,” she said to Robert Jordan and laughed. “Go ahead and eat. Don’t stare at me. They gave me this haircut in Valladolid. It’s almost grown out now.”

She sat down opposite him and looked at him. He looked back at her and she smiled and folded her hands together over her knees. Her legs slanted long and clean from the open cuffs of the trousers as she sat with her hands across her knees and he could see the shape of her small up-tilted breasts under the gray shirt. Every time Robert Jordan looked at her he could feel a thickness in his throat.

“There are no plates,” Anselmo said. “Use your own knife.” The girl had leaned four forks, tines down, against the sides of the iron dish.

They were all eating out of the platter, not speaking, as is the Spanish custom. It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chick peas in the red wine sauce. It was well cooked, the rabbit meat flaked off the bones, and the sauce was delicious. Robert Jordan drank another cup of wine while he ate. The girl watched him all through the meal. Every one else was watching his food and eating. Robert Jordan wiped up the last of the sauce in front of him with a piece of bread, piled the rabbit bones to one side, wiped the spot where they had been for sauce, then wiped his fork clean with the bread, wiped his knife and put it away and ate the bread. He leaned over and dipped his cup full of wine and the girl still watched him.

Robert Jordan drank half the cup of wine but the thickness still came in his throat when he spoke to the girl.

“How art thou called?” he asked. Pablo looked at him quickly when he heard the tone of his voice. Then he got up and walked away.

“Maria. And thee?”

“Roberto. Have you been long in the mountains?”

“Three months.”

“Three months?” He looked at her hair, that was as thick and short and rippling when she passed her hand over it, now in embarrassment, as a grain field in the wind on a hillside. “It was shaved,” she said. “They shaved it regularly in the prison at Valladolid. It has taken three months to grow to this. I was on the train. They were taking me to the south. Many of the prisoners were caught after the train was blown up but I was not. I came With these.”

“I found her hidden in the rocks,” the gypsy said. “It was when we were leaving. Man, but this one was ugly. We took her along but many times I thought we would have to leave her.”

“And the other one who was with them at the train?” asked Maria. “The other blond one. The foreigner. Where is he?”

“Dead,” Robert Jordan said. “In April.”

“In April? The train was in April.”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “He died ten days after the train.”

“Poor man,” she said. “He was very brave. And you do that same business?”

“Yes.”

“You have done trains, too?”

“Yes. Three trains.”

“Here?”

“In Estremadura,” he said. “I was in Estremadura before I came here. We do very much in Estremadura. There are many of us working in Estremadura.”

“And why do you come to these mountains now?”

“I take the place of the other blond one. Also I know this country from before the movement.”

“You know it well?”

“No, not really well. But I learn fast. I have a good map and I have a good guide.”

“The old man,” she nodded. “The old man is very good.”

“Thank you,” Anselmo said to her and Robert Jordan realized suddenly that he and the girl were not alone and he realized too that it was hard for him to look at her because it made his voice change so. He was violating the second rule of the two rules for getting on well with people that speak Spanish; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone; and he realized, very suddenly, that he did not care. There were so many things that he had not to care about, why should he care about that?

“You have a very beautiful face,” he said to Maria. “I wish I would have had the luck to see you before your hair was cut.”

“It will grow out,” she said. “In six months it will be long enough.”

“You should have seen her when we brought her from the train. She was so ugly it would make you sick.”

“Whose woman are you?” Robert Jordan asked, trying not to pull out of it. “Are you Pablo’s?”

She looked at him and laughed, then slapped him on the knee.

“Of Pablo? You have seen Pablo?”

“Well, then, of Rafael. I have seen Rafael.”

“Of Rafael neither.”

“Of no one,” the gypsy said. “This is a very strange woman. Is of no one. But she cooks well.”

“Really of no one?” Robert Jordan asked her.

“Of no one. No one. Neither in joke nor in seriousness. Nor of thee either.”

“No?” Robert Jordan said and he could feel the thickness coming in his throat again. “Good. I have no time for any woman. That is true.”

“Not fifteen minutes?” the gypsy asked teasingly. “Not a quarter of an hour?” Robert Jordan did not answer. He looked at the girl, Maria, and his throat felt too thick for him to trust himself to speak.

Maria looked at him and laughed, then blushed suddenly but kept on looking at him.

“You are blushing,” Robert Jordan said to her. “Do you blush much?”

“Never.”

“You are blushing now.”

“Then I will go into the cave.”

“Stay here, Maria.”

“No,” she said and did not smile at him. “I will go into the cave now.” She picked up the iron plate they had eaten from and the four forks. She moved awkwardly as a colt moves, but with that same grace as of a young animal.

“Do you want the cups?” she asked.

Robert Jordan was still looking at her and she blushed again.

“Don’t make me do that,” she said. “I do not like to do that.”

“Leave them,” they gypsy said to her. “Here,” he dipped into the stone bowl and handed the full cup to Robert Jordan who Watched the girl duck her head and go into the cave carrying the heavy iron dish.

“Thank you,” Robert Jordan said. His voice was all right again, now that she was gone. “This is the last one. We’ve had enough of this.”

“We will finish the bowl,” the gypsy said. “There is over half a skin. We packed it in on one of the horses.”

“That was the last raid of Pablo,” Anselmo said. “Since then he has done nothing.”

“How many are you?” Robert Jordan asked.

“We are seven and there are two women.”

“Two?”

“Yes. The mujer of Pablo.”

“And she?”

“In the cave. The girl can cook a little. I said she cooks well to please her. But mostly she helps the mujer of Pablo.”

“And how is she, the mujer of Pablo?”

“Something barbarous,” the gypsy grinned. “Something very barbarous. If you think Pablo is ugly you should see his woman. But brave. A hundred times braver than Pablo. But something barbarous.”

“Pablo was brave in the beginning,” Anselmo said. “Pablo was something serious in the beginning.”

“He killed more people than the cholera,” the gypsy said. “At the start of the movement, Pablo killed more people than the typhoid fever.”

“But since a long time he is muy flojo,” Anselmo said. “He is very flaccid. He is very much afraid to die.”

“It is possible that it is because he has killed so many at the beginning,” the gypsy said philosophically. “Pablo killed more than the bubonic plague.”

“That and the riches,” Anselmo said. “Also he drinks very much. Now he would like to retire like a matador de toros. Like a bullfighter. But he cannot retire.”

“If he crosses to the other side of the lines they will take his horses and make him go in the army,” the gypsy said. “In me there is no love for being in the army either.”

“Nor is there in any other gypsy,” Anselmo said.

“Why should there be?” the gypsy asked. “Who wants to be in an army? Do we make the revolution to be in an army? I am willing to fight but not to be in an army.”

“Where are the others?” asked Robert Jordan. He felt comfortable and sleepy now from the wine and lying back on the floor of the forest he saw through the tree tops the small afternoon clouds of the mountains moving slowly in the high Spanish sky.

“There are two asleep in the cave,” the gypsy said. “Two are on guard above where we have the gun. One is on guard below. They are probably all asleep.”

Robert Jordan rolled over on his side.

“What kind of a gun is it?”

“A very rare name,” the gypsy said. “It has gone away from me for the moment. It is a machine gun.”

It must be an automatic rifle, Robert Jordan thought.

“How much does it weigh?” he asked.

“One man can carry it but it is heavy. It has three legs that fold. We got it in the last serious raid. The one before the wine.”

“How many rounds have you for it?”

“An infinity,” the gypsy said. “One whole case of an unbelievable heaviness.”

Sounds like about five hundred rounds, Robert Jordan thought.

“Does it feed from a pan or a belt?”

“From round iron cans on the top of the gun.”

Hell, it’s a Lewis gun, Robert Jordan thought.

“Do you know anything about a machine gun?” he asked the old man.

“Nada,” said Anselmo. “Nothing.”

“And thou?” to the gypsy.

“That they fire with much rapidity and become so hot the barrel burns the hand that touches it,” the gypsy said proudly.

“Every one knows that,” Anselmo said with contempt.

“Perhaps,” the gypsy said. “But he asked me to tell what I know about a máquina and I told him.” Then he added, “Also, unlike an ordinary rifle, they continue to fire as long as you exert pressure on the trigger.”

“Unless they jam, run out of ammunition or get so hot they melt,” Robert Jordan said in English.

“What do you say?” Anselmo asked him.

“Nothing,” Robert Jordan said. “I was only looking into the future in English.”

“That is something truly rare,” the gypsy said. “Looking into the future in Inglés. Can you read in the palm of the hand?”

“No,” Robert Jordan said and he dipped another cup of wine. “But if thou canst I wish thee would read in the palm of my hand and tell me what is going to pass in the next three days.”

“The mujer of Pablo reads in the hands,” the gypsy said. “But she is so irritable and of such a barbarousness that I do not know if she will do it.”

Robert Jordan sat up now and took a swallow of the wine.

“Let us see the mujer of Pablo now,” he said. “If it is that bad let us get it over with.”

“I would not disturb her,” Rafael said. “She has a strong hatred for me.”

“Why?”

“She treats me as a time waster.”

“What injustice,” Anselmo taunted.

“She is against gypsies.”

“What an error,” Anselmo said.

“She has gypsy blood,” Rafael said. “She knows of what she speaks.” He grinned. “But she has a tongue that scalds and that bites like a bull whip. With this tongue she takes the hide from any one. In strips. She is of an unbelievable barbarousness.”

“How does she get along with the girl, Maria?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Good. She likes the girl. But let any one come near her seriously—” He shook his head and clucked with his tongue.

“She is very good with the girl,” Anselmo said. “She takes good care of her.”

“When we picked the girl up at the time of the train she was very strange,” Rafael said. “She would not speak and she cried all the time and if any one touched her she would shiver like a wet dog. Only lately has she been better. Lately she has been much better. Today she was fine. Just now, talking to you, she was very good. We would have left her after the train. Certainly it was not worth being delayed by something so sad and ugly and apparently worthless. But the old woman tied a rope to her and when the girl thought she could not go further, the old woman beat her with the end of the rope to make her go. Then when she could not really go further, the old woman carried her over her shoulder. When the old woman could not carry her, I carried her. We were going up that hill breast high in the gorse and heather. And when I could no longer carry her, Pablo carried her. But what the old woman had to say to us to make us do it!” He shook his head at the memory. “It is true that the girl is long in the legs but is not heavy. The bones are light and she weighs little. But she weighs enough when we had to carry her and stop to fire and then carry her again with the old woman lashing at Pablo with the rope and carrying his rifle, putting it in his hand when he would drop the girl, making him pick her up again and loading the gun for him while she cursed him; taking the shells from his pouches and shoving them down into the magazine and cursing him. The dusk was coming well on then and when the night came it was all right. But it was lucky that they had no cavalry.”

“It must have been very hard at the train,” Anselmo said. “I was not there,” he explained to Robert Jordan. “There was the band of Pablo, of El Sordo, whom we will see tonight, and two other bands of these mountains. I had gone to the other side of the lines.”

“In addition to the blond one with the rare name—” the gypsy said.

“Kashkin.”

“Yes. It is a name I can never dominate. We had two with a machine gun. They were sent also by the army. They could not get the gun away and lost it. Certainly it weighed no more than that girl and if the old woman had been over them they would have gotten it away.” He shook his head remembering, then went on. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing as when the explosion Was produced. The train was coming steadily. We saw it far away. And I had an excitement so great that I cannot tell it. We saw steam from it and then later came the noise of the whistle. Then it came chu-chu-chu-chu-chu-chu steadily larger and larger and then, at the moment of the explosion, the front wheels of the engine rose up and all of the earth seemed to rise in a great cloud of blackness and a roar and the engine rose high in the cloud of dirt and of the Wooden ties rising in the air as in a dream and then it fell onto its side like a great wounded animal and there was an explosion of white steam before the clods of the other explosion had ceased to fall on us and the máquina commenced to speak ta-tat-tat-ta!” went the gypsy shaking his two clenched fists up and down in front of him, thumbs up, on an imaginary machine gun. “Ta! Ta! Tat! Tat! Tat! Ta!” he exulted. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing, with the troops running from the train and the máquina speaking into them and the men falling. It was then that I put my hand on the máquina in my excitement and discovered that the barrel burned and at that moment the old woman slapped me on the side of the face and said,’Shoot, you fool! Shoot or I will kick your brains in!’Then I commenced to shoot but it was very hard to hold my gun steady and the troops were running up the far hill. Later, after we had been down at the train to see what there was to take, an officer forced some troops back toward us at the point of a pistol. He kept waving the pistol and shouting at them and we were all shooting at him but no one hit him. Then some troops lay down and commenced firing and the officer walked up and down behind them with his pistol and still we could not hit him and the máquina could not fire on him because of the position of the train. This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train. Then they lay flat again and fired. Then we left, with the máquina still speaking over us as we left. It was then I found the girl where she had run from the train to the rocks and she ran with us. It was those troops who hunted us until that night.”

“It must have been something very hard,” Anselmo said. “Of much emotion.”

“It was the only good thing we have done,” said a deep voice. “What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gypsy obscenity? What are you doing?”

Robert Jordan saw a woman of about fifty almost as big as Pablo, almost as wide as she was tall, in black peasant skirt and waist, with heavy wool socks on heavy legs, black rope-soled shoes and a brown face like a model for a granite monument. She had big but nice-looking hands and her thick curly black hair was twisted into a knot on her neck.

“Answer me,” she said to the gypsy, ignoring the others.

“I was talking to these comrades. This one comes as a dynamiter.”

“I know all that,” the mujer of Pablo said. “Get out of here now and relieve Andrés who is on guard at the top.”

“Me voy,” the gypsy said. “I go.” He turned to Robert Jordan. “I will see thee at the hour of eating.”

“Not even in a joke,” said the woman to him. “Three times you have eaten today according to my count. Go now and send me Andrés.

“Hola,” she said to Robert Jordan and put out her hand and smiled. “How are you and how is everything in the Republic?”

“Good,” he said and returned her strong hand grip. “Both with me and with the Republic.”

“I am happy,” she told him. She was looking into his face and smiling and he noticed she had fine gray eyes. “Do you come for us to do another train?”

“No,” said Robert Jordan, trusting her instantly. “For a bridge.”

“No es nada,” she said. “A bridge is nothing. When do we do another train now that we have horses?”

“Later. This bridge is of great importance.”

“The girl told me your comrade who was with us at the train is dead.”

“Yes.”

“What a pity. Never have I seen such an explosion. He was a man of talent. He pleased me very much. It is not possible to do another train now? There are many men here now in the hills. Too many. It is already hard to get food. It would be better to get out. And we have horses.”

“We have to do this bridge.”

“Where is it?”

“Quite close.”

“All the better,” the mujer of Pablo said. “Let us blow all the bridges there are here and get out. I am sick of this place. Here is too much concentration of people. No good can come of it. Here is a stagnation that is repugnant.”

She sighted Pablo through the trees.

“Borracho!” she called to him. “Drunkard. Rotten drunkard!” She turned back to Robert Jordan cheerfully. “He’s taken a leather wine bottle to drink alone in the woods,” she said. “He’s drinking all the time. This life is ruining him. Young man, I am very content that you have come.” She clapped him on the back. “Ah,” she said. “You’re bigger than you look,” and ran her hand over his shoulder, feeling the muscle under the flannel shirt. “Good. I am very content that you have come.”

“And I equally.”

“We will understand each other,” she said. “Have a cup of wine.”

“We have already had some,” Robert Jordan said. “But, will you?”

“Not until dinner,” she said. “It gives me heartburn.” Then she sighted Pablo again. “Borracho!” she shouted. “Drunkard!” She turned to Robert Jordan and shook her head. “He was a very good man,” she told him. “But now he is terminated. And listen to me about another thing. Be very good and careful about the girl. The Maria. She has had a bad time. Understandest thou?”

“Yes. Why do you say this?”

“I saw how she was from seeing thee when she came into the cave. I saw her watching thee before she came out.”

“I joked with her a little.”

“She was in a very bad state,” the woman of Pablo said. “Now she is better, she ought to get out of here.”

“Clearly, she can be sent through the lines with Anselmo.”

“You and the Anselmo can take her when this terminates.”

Robert Jordan felt the ache in his throat and his voice thickening. “That might be done,” he said.

The mujer of Pablo looked at him and shook her head. “Ayee. Ayee,” she said. “Are all men like that?”

“I said nothing. She is beautiful, you know that.”

“No she is not beautiful. But she begins to be beautiful, you mean,” the woman of Pablo said. “Men. It is a shame to us women that we make them. No. In seriousness. Are there not homes to care for such as her under the Republic?”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “Good places. On the coast near Valencia. In other places too. There they will treat her well and she can work with children. There are the children from evacuated villages. They will teach her the work.”

“That is what I want,” the mujer of Pablo said. “Pablo has a sickness for her already. It is another thing which destroys him. It lies on him like a sickness when he sees her. It is best that she goes now.”

“We can take her after this is over.”

“And you will be careful of her now if I trust you? I speak to you as though I knew you for a long time.”

“It is like that,” Robert Jordan said, “when people understand one another.”

“Sit down,” the woman of Pablo said. “I do not ask any promise because what will happen, will happen. Only if you will not take her out, then I ask a promise.”

“Why if I would not take her?”

“Because I do not want her crazy here after you will go. I have had her crazy before and I have enough without that.”

“We will take her after the bridge,” Robert Jordan said. “If we are alive after the bridge, we will take her.”

“I do not like to hear you speak in that manner. That manner of speaking never brings luck.”

“I spoke in that manner only to make a promise,” Robert Jordan said. “I am not of those who speak gloomily.”

“Let me see thy hand,” the woman said. Robert Jordan put his hand out and the woman opened it, held it in her own big hand, rubbed her thumb over it and looked at it, carefully, then dropped it. She stood up. He got up too and she looked at him without smiling.

“What did you see in it?” Robert Jordan asked her. “I don’t believe in it. You won’t scare me.”

“Nothing,” she told him. “I saw nothing in it.”

“Yes you did. I am only curious. I do not believe in such things.”

“In what do you believe?”

“In many things but not in that.”

“In what?”

“In my work.”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Tell me what else you saw.”

“I saw nothing else,” she said bitterly. “The bridge is very difficult you said?”

“No. I said it is very important.”

“But it can be difficult?”

“Yes. And now I go down to look at it. How many men have you here?”

“Five that are any good. The gypsy is worthless although his intentions are good. He has a good heart. Pablo I no longer trust.”

“How many men has El Sordo that are good?”

“Perhaps eight. We will see tonight. He is coming here. He is a very practical man. He also has some dynamite. Not very much, though. You will speak with him.”

“Have you sent for him?”

“He comes every night. He is a neighbor. Also a friend as well as a comrade.”

“What do you think of him?”

“He is a very good man. Also very practical. In the business of the train he was enormous.”

“And in the other bands?”

“Advising them in time, it should be possible to unite fifty rifles of a certain dependability.”

“How dependable?”

“Dependable within the gravity of the situation.”

“And how many cartridges per rifle?”

“Perhaps twenty. Depending how many they would bring for this business. If they would come for this business. Remember thee that in this of a bridge there is no money and no loot and in thy reservations of talking, much danger, and that afterwards there must be a moving from these mountains. Many will oppose this of the bridge.”

“Clearly.”

“In this way it is better not to speak of it unnecessarily.”

“I am in accord.”

“Then after thou hast studied thy bridge we will talk tonight with El Sordo.”

“I go down now with Anselmo.”

“Wake him then,” she said. “Do you want a carbine?”

“Thank you,” he told her. “It is good to have but I will not use it. I go to look, not to make disturbances. Thank you for what you have told me. I like very much your way of speaking.”

“I try to speak frankly.”

“Then tell me what you saw in the hand.”

“No,” she said and shook her head. “I saw nothing. Go now to thy bridge. I will look after thy equipment.”

“Cover it and that no one should touch it. It is better there than in the cave.”

“It shall be covered and no one shall touch it,” the woman of Pablo said. “Go now to thy bridge.”

“Anselmo,” Robert Jordan said, putting his hand on the shoulder of the old man who lay sleeping, his head on his arms.

The old man looked up. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Let us go.”

Chapter 3

They came down the last two hundred yards, moving carefully from tree to tree in the shadows and now, through the last pines of the steep hillside, the bridge was only fifty yards away. The late afternoon sun that still came over the brown shoulder of the mountain showed the bridge dark against the steep emptiness of the gorge. It was a steel bridge of a single span and there was a sentry box at each end. It was wide enough for two motor cars to pass and it spanned, in solid-flung metal grace, a deep gorge at the bottom of which, far below, a brook leaped in white water through rocks and boulders down to the main stream of the pass.

The sun was in Robert Jordan’s eyes and the bridge showed only in outline. Then the sun lessened and was gone and looking up through the trees at the brown, rounded height that it had gone behind, he saw, now, that he no longer looked into the glare, that the mountain slope was a delicate new green and that there were patches of old snow under the crest.

Then he was watching the bridge again in the sudden short trueness of the little light that would be left, and studying its construction. The problem of its demolition was not difficult. As he watched he took out a notebook from his breast pocket and made several quick line sketches. As he made the drawings he did not figure the charges. He would do that later. Now he was noting the points where the explosive should be placed in order to cut the support of the span and drop a section of it into the gorge. It could be done unhurriedly, scientifically and correctly with a half dozen charges laid and braced to explode simultaneously; or it could be done roughly with two big ones. They would need to be very big ones, on opposite sides and should go at the same time. He sketched quickly and happily; glad at last to have the problem under his hand; glad at last actually to be engaged upon it. Then he shut his notebook, pushed the pencil into its leather holder in the edge of the flap, put the notebook in his pocket and buttoned the pocket.

While he had sketched, Anselmo had been watching the road, the bridge and the sentry boxes. He thought they had come too close to the bridge for safety and when the sketching was finished, he was relieved.

As Robert Jordan buttoned the flap of his pocket and then lay flat behind the pine trunk, looking out from behind it, Anselmo put his hand on his elbow and pointed with one finger.

In the sentry box that faced toward them up the road, the sentry was sitting holding his rifle, the bayonet fixed, between his knees. He was smoking a cigarette and he wore a knitted cap and blanket style cape. At fifty yards, you could not see anything about his face. Robert Jordan put up his field glasses, shading the lenses carefully with his cupped hands even though there was now no sun to make a glint, and there was the rail of the bridge as clear as though you could reach out and touch it and there was the face of the senty so clear he could see the sunken cheeks, the ash on the cigarette and the greasy shine of the bayonet. It was a peasant’s face, the cheeks hollow under the high cheekbones, the beard stubbled, the eyes shaded by the heavy brows, big hands holding the rifle, heavy boots showing beneath the folds of the blanket cape. There was a worn, blackened leather wine bottle on the wall of the sentry box, there were some newspapers and there was no telephone. There could, of course, be a telephone on the side he could not see; but there were no wires running from the box that were visible. A telephone line ran along the road and its wires were carried over the bridge. There was a charcoal brazier outside the sentry box, made from an old petrol tin with the top cut off and holes punched in it, which rested on two stones; but he held no fire. There were some fire-blackened empty tins in the ashes under it.

Robert Jordan handed the glasses to Anselmo who lay flat beside him. The old man grinned and shook his head. He tapped his skull beside his eye with one finger.

“Ya lo veo,” he said in Spanish. “I have seen him,” speaking from the front of his mouth with almost no movement of his lips in the way that is quieter than any whisper. He looked at the sentry as Robert Jordan smiled at him and, pointing with one finger, drew the other across his throat. Robert Jordan nodded but he did not smile.

The sentry box at the far end of the bridge faced away from them and down the road and they could not see into it. The road, which was broad and oiled and well constructed, made a turn to the left at the far end of the bridge and then swung out of sight around a curve to the right. At this point it was enlarged from the old road to its present width by cutting into the solid bastion of the rock on the far side of the gorge; and its left or western edge, looking down from the pass and the bridge, was marked and protected by a line of upright cut blocks of stone where its edge fell sheer away to the gorge. The gorge was almost a canyon here, where the brook, that the bridge was flung over, merged with the main stream of the pass.

“And the other post?” Robert Jordan asked Anselmo.

“Five hundred meters below that turn. In the roadmender’s hut that is built into the side of the rock.”

“How many men?” Robert Jordan asked.

He was watching the sentry again with his glasses. The sentry rubbed his cigarette out on the plank wall of the box, then took a leather tobacco pouch from his pocket, opened the paper of the dead cigarette and emptied the remnant of used tobacco into the pouch. The sentry stood up, leaned his rifle against the wall of the box and stretched, then picked up his rifle, slung it over his shoulder and walked out onto the bridge. Anselmo flattened on the ground and Robert Jordan slipped his glasses into his shirt pocket and put his head well behind the pine tree.

“There are seven men and a corporal,” Anselmo said close to his ear. “I informed myself from the gypsy.”

“We will go now as soon as he is quiet,” Robert Jordan said. “We are too close.”

“Hast thou seen what thou needest?”

“Yes. All that I need.”

It was getting cold quickly now with the sun down and the light was failing as the afterglow from the last sunlight on the mountains behind them faded.

“How does it look to thee?” Anselmo said softly as they watched the sentry walk across the bridge toward the other box, his bayonet bright in the last of the afterglow, his figure unshapely in the blanket coat.

“Very good,” Robert Jordan said. “Very, very good.”

“I am glad,” Anselmo said. “Should we go? Now there is no chance that he sees us.”

The sentry was standing, his back toward them, at the far end of the bridge. From the gorge came the noise of the stream in the boulders. Then through this noise came another noise, a steady, racketing drone and they saw the sentry looking up, his knitted cap slanted back, and turning their heads and looking up they saw, high in the evening sky, three monoplanes in V formation, showing minute and silvery at that height where there still was sun, passing unbelievably quickly across the sky, their motors now throbbing steadily.

“Ours?” Anselmo asked.

“They seem so,” Robert Jordan said but knew that at that height you never could be sure. They could be an evening patrol of either side. But you always said pursuit planes were ours because it made people feel better. Bombers were another matter.

Anselmo evidently felt the same. “They are ours,” he said. “I recognize them. They are Moscas.”

“Good,” said Robert Jordan. “They seem to me to be Moscas, too.”

“They are Moscas,” Anselmo said.

Robert Jordan could have put the glasses on them and been sure instantly but he preferred not to. It made no difference to him who they were tonight and if it pleased the old man to have them be ours, he did not want to take them away. Now, as they moved out of sight toward Segovia, they did not look to be the green, red wing-tipped, low wing Russian conversion of the Boeing P32 that the Spaniards called Moscas. You could not see the colors but the cut was wrong. No. It was a Fascist Patrol coming home.

The sentry was still standing at the far box with his back turned.

“Let us go,” Robert Jordan said. He started up the hill, moving carefully and taking advantage of the cover until they were out of sight. Anselmo followed him at a hundred yards distance. When they were well out of sight of the bridge, he stopped and the old man came up and went into the lead and climbed steadily through the pass, up the steep slope in the dark.

“We have a formidable aviation,” the old man said happily.

“Yes.”

“And we will win.”

“We have to win.”

“Yes. And after we have won you must come to hunt.”

“To hunt what?”

“The boar, the bear, the wolf, the ibex—”

“You like to hunt?”

“Yes, man. More than anything. We all hunt in my village. You do not like to hunt?”

“No,” said Robert Jordan. “I do not like to kill animals.”

“With me it is the opposite,” the old man said. “I do not like to kill men.”

“Nobody does except those who are disturbed in the head,” Robert Jordan said. “But I feel nothing against it when it is necessary. When it is for the cause.”

“It is a different thing, though,” Anselmo said. “In my house, when I had a house, and now I have no house, there were the tusks of boar I had shot in the lower forest. There were the hides of wolves I had shot. In the winter, hunting them in the snow. One very big one, I killed at dusk in the outskirts of the village on my way home one night in November. There were four wolf hides on the floor of my house. They were worn by stepping on them but they were wolf hides. There were the horns of ibex that I had killed in the high Sierra, and there was an eagle stuffed by an embalmer of birds of Avila, with his wings spread, and eyes as yellow and real as the eyes of an eagle alive. It was a very beautiful thing and all of those things gave me great pleasure to contemplate.”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan.

“On the door of the church of my village was nailed the paw of a bear that I killed in the spring, finding him on a hillside in the snow, overturning a log with this same paw.”

“When was this?”

“Six years ago. And every time I saw that paw, like the hand of a man, but with those long claws, dried and nailed through the palm to the door of the church, I received a pleasure.”

“Of pride?”

“Of pride of remembrance of the encounter with the bear on that hillside in the early spring. But of the killing of a man, who is a man as we are, there is nothing good that remains.”

“You can’t nail his paw to the church,” Robert Jordan said.

“No. Such a barbarity is unthinkable. Yet the hand of a man is like the paw of a bear.”

“So is the chest of a man like the chest of a bear,” Robert Jordan said. “With the hide removed from the bear, there are many similarities in the muscles.”

“Yes,” Anselmo said. “The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother of man.”

“So do the Indians in America,” Robert Jordan said. “And when they kill a bear they apologize to him and ask his pardon. They put his skull in a tree and they ask him to forgive them before they leave it.”

“The gypsies believe the bear to be a brother to man because he has the same body beneath his hide, because he drinks beer, because he enjoys music and because he likes to dance.”

“So also believe the Indians.”

“Are the Indians then gypsies?”

“No. But they believe alike about the bear.”

“Clearly. The gypsies also believe he is a brother because he steals for pleasure.”

“Have you gypsy blood?”

“No. But I have seen much of them and clearly, since the movement, more. There are many in the hills. To them it is not a sin to kill outside the tribe. They deny this but it is true.”

“Like the Moors.”

“Yes. But the gypsies have many laws they do not admit to having. In the war many gypsies have become bad again as they were in olden times.”

“They do not understand why the war is made. They do not know for what we fight.”

“No,” Anselmo said. “They only know now there is a war and people may kill again as in the olden times without a surety of punishment.”

“You have killed?” Robert Jordan asked in the intimacy of the dark and of their day together.

“Yes. Several times. But not with pleasure. To me it is a sin to kill a man. Even Fascists whom we must kill. To me there is a great difference between the bear and the man and I do not believe the wizardry of the gypsies about the brotherhood with animals. No. I am against all killing of men.”

“Yet you have killed.”

“Yes. And will again. But if I live later, I will try to live in such a way, doing no harm to any one, that it will be forgiven.”

“By whom?”

“Who knows? Since we do not have God here any more, neither His Son nor the Holy Ghost, who forgives? I do not know.”

“You have not God any more?”

“No. Man. Certainly not. If there were God, never would He have permitted what I have seen with my eyes. Let them have God.”

“They claim Him.”

“Clearly I miss Him, having been brought up in religion. But now a man must be responsible to himself.”

“Then it is thyself who will forgive thee for killing.”

“I believe so,” Anselmo said. “Since you put it clearly in that way I believe that must be it. But with or without God, I think it is a sin to kill. To take the life of another is to me very grave. I will do it whenever necessary but I am not of the race of Pablo.”

“To win a war we must kill our enemies. That has always been true.”

“Clearly. In war we must kill. But I have very rare ideas,” Anselmo said.

They were walking now close together in the dark and he spoke softly, sometimes turning his head as he climbed. “I would not kill even a Bishop. I would not kill a proprietor of any kind. I would make them work each day as we have worked in the fields and as we work in the mountains with the timbet all of the rest of their lives. So they would see what man is born to. That they should sleep where we sleep. That they should eat as we eat. But above all that they should work. Thus they would learn.”

“And they would survive to enslave thee again.”

“To kill them teaches nothing,” Anselmo said. “You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred. That all our enemies should learn.”

“But still thou hast killed.”

“Yes,” Anselmo said. “Many times and will again. But not with pleasure and regarding it as a sin.”

“And the sentry. You joked of killing the sentry.”

“That was in joke. I would kill the sentry. Yes. Certainly and with a clear heart considering our task. But not with pleasure.”

“We will leave them to those who enjoy it,” Robert Jordan said. “There are eight and five. That is thirteen for those who enjoy it.”

“There are many of those who enjoy it,” Anselmo said in the dark. “We have many of those. More of those than of men who would serve for a battle.”

“Hast thou ever been in a battle?”

“Nay,” the old man said. “We fought in Segovia at the start of the movement but we were beaten and we ran. I ran with the others. We did not truly understand what we were doing, nor how it should be done. Also I had only a shotgun with cartridges of large buckshot and the guardia civil had Mausers. I could not hit them with buckshot at a hundred yards, and at three hundred yards they shot us as they wished as though we were rabbits. They shot much and well and we were like sheep before them.” He was silent. Then asked, “Thinkest thou there will be a battle at the bridge?”

“There is a chance.”

“I have never seen a battle without running,” Anselmo said. “I do not know how I would comport myself. I am an old man and I have wondered.”

“I will respond for thee,” Robert Jordan told him.

“And hast thou been in many battles?”

“Several.”

“And what thinkest thou of this of the bridge?”

“First I think of the bridge. That is my business. It is not difficult to destroy the bridge. Then we will make the dispositions for the rest. For the preliminaries. It will all be written.”

“Very few of these people read,” Anselmo said.

“It will be written for every one’s knowledge so that all know, but also it will be clearly explained.”

“I will do that to which I am assigned,” Anselmo said. “But remembering the shooting in Segovia, if there is to be a battle or even much exchanging of shots, I would wish to have it very clear what I must do under all circumstances to avoid running. I remember that I had a great tendency to run at Segovia.”

“We will be together,” Robert Jordan told him. “I will tell you what there is to do at all times.”

“Then there is no problem,” Anselmo said. “I can do anything that I am ordered.”

“For us will be the bridge and the battle, should there be one,” Robert Jordan said and saying it in the dark, he felt a little theatrical but it sounded well in Spanish.

“It should be of the highest interest,” Anselmo said and hearing him say it honestly and clearly and with no pose, neither the English pose of understatement nor any Latin bravado, Robert Jordan thought he was very lucky to have this old man and having seen the bridge and worked out and simplified the problem it would have been to surprise the posts and blow it in a normal way, he resented Golz’s orders, and the necessity for them. He resented them for what they could do to him and for what they could do to this old man. They were bad orders all right for those who would have to carry them out.

And that is not the way to think, he told himself, and there is not you, and there are no people that things must not happen to. Neither you nor this old man is anything. You are instruments to do your duty. There are necessary orders that are no fault of yours and there is a bridge and that bridge can be the point on which the future of the human race can turn. As it can turn on everything that happens in this war. You have only one thing to do and you must do it. Only one thing, hell, he thought. If it were one thing it was easy. Stop worrying, you windy bastard, he said to himself. Think about something else.

So he thought about the girl Maria, with her skin, the hair and the eyes all the same golden tawny brown, the hair a little darker than the rest but it would be lighter as her skin tanned deeper, the smooth skin, pale gold on the surface with a darkness underneath. Smooth it would be, all of her body smooth, and she moved awkwardly as though there were something of her and about her that embarrassed her as though it were visible, though it was not, but only in her mind. And she blushed with he looked at her, and she sitting, her hands clasped around her knees and the shirt open at the throat, the cup of her breasts uptilted against the shirt, and as he thought of her, his throat was choky and there was a difficulty in walking and he and Anselmo spoke no more until the old man said, “Now we go down through these rocks and to the camp.”

As they came through the rocks in the dark, a man spoke to them, “Halt. Who goes?” They heard a rifle bolt snick as it was drawn back and then the knock against the wood as it was pushed forward and down on the stock.

“Comrades,” Anselmo said.

“What comrades?”

“Comrades of Pablo,” the old man told him. “Dost thou not know us?”

“Yes,” the voice said. “But it is an order. Have you the password?”

“No. We come from below.”

“I know,” the man said in the dark. “You come from the bridge. I know all of that. The order is not mine. You must know the second half of a password.”

“What is the first half then?” Robert Jordan said.

“I have forgotten it,” the man said in the dark and laughed. “Go then unprintably to the campfire with thy obscene dynamite.”

“That is called guerilla discipline,” Anselmo said. “Uncock thy piece.”

“It is uncocked,” the man said in the dark. “I let it down with my thumb and forefinger.”

“Thou wilt do that with a Mauser sometime which has no knurl on the bolt and it will fire.”

“This is a Mauser,” the man said. “But I have a grip of thumb and forefinger beyond description. Always I let it down that way.”

“Where is the rifle pointed?” asked Anselmo into the dark.

“At thee,” the man said, “all the time that I descended the bolt. And when thou comest to the camp, order that some one should relieve me because I have indescribable and unprintable hunger and I have forgotten the password.”

“How art thou called?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Agustín,” the man said. “I am called Agustín and I am dying with boredom in this spot.”

“We will take the message,” Robert Jordan said and he thought how the word aburmiento which means boredom in Spanish was a word no peasant would use in any other language. Yet it is one of the most common words in the mouth of a Spaniard of any class.

“Listen to me,” Agustín said, and coming close he put his hand on Robert Jordan’s shoulder. Then striking a flint and steel together he held it up and blowing on the end of the cork, looked at the young man’s face in its glow.

“You look like the other one,” he said. “But something different. Listen,” he put the lighter down and stood holding his rifle. “Tell me this. Is it true about the bridge?”

“What about the bridge?”

“That we blow up an obscene bridge and then have to obscenely well obscenity ourselves off out of these mountains?”

“I know not.”

“You know not,” Agustín said. “What a barbarity! Whose then is the dynamite?”

“Mine.”

“And knowest thou not what it is for? Don’t tell me tales.”

“I know what it is for and so will you in time,” Robert Jordan said. “But now we go to the camp.”

“Go to the unprintable,” Agustín said. “And unprint thyself. But do you want me to tell you something of service to you?”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “If it is not unprintable,” naming the principal obscenity that had larded the conversation. The man, Agustín, spoke so obscenely, coupling an obscenity to every noun as an adjective, using the same obscenity as a verb, that Robert Jordan wondered if he could speak a straight sentence. Agustín laughed in the dark when he heard the word. “It is a way of speaking I have. Maybe it is ugly. Who knows? Each one speaks according to his manner. Listen to me. The bridge is nothing to me. As well the bridge as another thing. Also I have a boredom in these mountains. That we should go if it is needed. These mountains say nothing to me. That we should leave them. But I would say one thing. Guard well thy explosive.”

“Thank you,” Robert Jordan said. “From thee?”

“No,” Agustín said. “From people less unprintably equipped than I.”

“So?” asked Robert Jordan.

“You understand Spanish,” Agustín said seriously now. “Care well for thy unprintable explosive.”

“Thank you.”

“No. Don’t thank me. Look after thy stuff.”

“Has anything happened to it?”

“No, or I would not waste thy time talking in this fashion.”

“Thank you all the same. We go now to camp.”

“Good,” said Agustín, “and that they send some one here who knows the password.”

“Will we see you at the camp?”

“Yes, man. And shortly.”

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said to Anselmo.

They were walking down the edge of the meadow now and there was a gray mist. The grass was lush underfoot after the pineneedle floor of the forest and the dew on the grass wet through their canvas rope-soled shoes. Ahead, through the trees, Robert Jordan Could see a light where he knew the mouth of the cave must be.

“Agustín is a very good man,” Anselmo said. “He speaks very filthily and always in jokes but he is a very serious man.”

“You know him well?”

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

“And what he says?”

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

“And the best thing to do?”

“One shall guard it at all times.”

“Who?”

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

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

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

“And El Sordo?”

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

“You believe now that he is truly bad?”

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

“What do you carry?” Pablo said.

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

“Are they not well outside?” Pablo asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do not like anis,” Pablo said.

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

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

“What drink is that?” the gypsy asked.

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

“What is it for?”

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

“Let me taste it,” the gypsy said.

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s business?” he asked.

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

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

“Thee,” Robert Jordan said.

“Do you see anything rare?”

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

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

“Were you at the train?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Without this coward,” Anselmo said.

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

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

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

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

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

“No?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Equally,” said the other brother.

“Equally,” the gypsy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Neither is it foolish to know what is cowardly,” said Anselmo, unable to resist making the phrase.

“Do you want to die?” Pablo said to him seriously and Robert Jordan saw how unrhetorical was the question.

“No.”

“Then watch thy mouth. You talk too much about things you do not understand. Don’t you see that this is serious?” he said almost pitifully. “Am I the only one who sees the seriousness of this?”

I believe so, Robert Jordan thought. Old Pablo, old boy, I believe so. Except me. You can see it and I see it and the woman read it in my hand but she doesn’t see it, yet. Not yet she doesn’t see it.

“Am I a leader for nothing?” Pablo asked. “I know what I speak of. You others do not know. This old man talks nonsense. He is an old man who is nothing but a messenger and a guide for foreigners. This foreigner comes here to do a thing for the good of the foreigners. For his good we must be sacrificed. I am for the good and the safety of all.”

“Safety,” the wife of Pablo said. “There is no such thing as safety. There are so many seeking safety here now that they make a great danger. In seeking safety now you lose all.”

She stood now by the table with the big spoon in her hand.

“There is safety,” Pablo said. “Within the danger there is the safety of knowing what chances to take. It is like the bullfighter who knowing what he is doing, takes no chances and is safe.”

“Until he is gored,” the woman said bitterly. “How many times have I heard matadors talk like that before they took a goring. How often have I heard Finito say that it is all knowledge and that the bull never gored the man; rather the man gored himself on the horn of the bull. Always do they talk that way in their arrogance before a goring. Afterwards we visit them in the clinic.” Now she was mimicking a visit to a bedside, “Hello, old timer. Hello,” she boomed. Then, “Buenas, Compadre. How goes it, Pilar?” imitating the weak voice of the wounded bullfighter. “How did this happen, Finito, Chico, how did this dirty accident occur to thee?” booming it out in her own voice. Then talking weak and small, “It is nothing, woman. Pilar, it is nothing. It shouldn’t have happened. I killed him very well, you understand. Nobody could have killed him better. Then having killed him exactly as I should and him absolutely dead, swaying on his legs, and ready to fall of his own weight, I walked away from him with a certain amount of arrogance and much style and from the back he throws me this horn between the cheeks of my buttocks and it comes out of my liver.” She commenced to laugh, dropping the imitation of the almost effeminate bullfighter’s voice and booming again now. “You and your safety! Did I live nine years with three of the worst paid matadors in the world not to learn about fear and about safety? Speak to me of anything but safety. And thee. What illusions I put in thee and how they have turned out! From one year of war thou has become lazy, a drunkard and a coward.”

“In that way thou hast no right to speak,” Pablo said. “And less even before the people and a stranger.”

“In that way will I speak,” the wife of Pablo went on. “Have you not heard? Do you still believe that you command here?”

“Yes,” Pablo said. “Here I command.”

“Not in joke,” the woman said. “Here I command! Haven’t you heard la gente? Here no one commands but me. You can stay if you wish and eat of the food and drink of the wine, but not too bloody much, and share in the work if thee wishes. But here I command.”

“I should shoot thee and the foreigner both,” Pablo said suilenly.

“Try it,” the woman said. “And see what happens.”

“A cup of water for me,” Robert Jordan said, not taking his eyes from the man with his sullen heavy head and the woman standing proudly and confidently holding the big spoon as authoritatively as though it were a baton.

“Maria,” called the woman of Pablo and when the girl came in the door she said, “Water for this comrade.”

Robert Jordan reached for his flask and, bringing the flask out, as he brought it he loosened the pistol in the holster and swung it on top of his thigh. He poured a second absinthe into his cup and took the cup of water the girl brought him and commenced to drip it into the cup, a little at a time. The girl stood at his elbow, watching him.

“Outside,” the woman of Pablo said to her, gesturing with the spoon.

“It is cold outside,” the girl said, her cheek close to Robert Jordan’s, watching what was happening in the cup where the liquor was clouding.

“Maybe,” the woman of Pablo said. “But in here it is too hot.” Then she said, kindly, “It is not for long.”

The girl shook her head and went out.

I don’t think he is going to take this much more, Robert Jordan thought to himself. He held the cup in one hand and his other hand rested, frankly now, on the pistol. He had slipped the safety catch and he felt the worn comfort of the checked grip chafed almost smooth and touched the round, cool companionship of the trigger guard. Pablo no longer looked at him but only at the woman. She went on, “Listen to me, drunkard. You understand who commands here?”

“I command.”

“No. Listen. Take the wax from thy hairy ears. Listen well. I command.”

Pablo looked at her and you could tell nothing of what he was thinking by his face. He looked at her quite deliberately and then he looked across the table at Robert Jordan. He looked at him a long time contemplatively and then he looked back at the woman, again.

“All right. You command,” he said. “And if you want he can command too. And the two of you can go to hell.” He was looking the woman straight in the face and he was neither dominated by her nor seemed to be much affected by her. “It is possible that I am lazy and that I drink too much. You may consider me a coward but there you are mistaken. But I am not stupid.” He paused. “That you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eat.”

“Maria,” the woman of Pablo called.

The girl put her head inside the blanket across the cave mouth. “Enter now and serve the supper.”

The girl came in and walked across to the low table by the hearth and picked up the enameled-ware bowls and brought them to the table.

“There is wine enough for all,” the woman of Pablo said to Robert Jordan. “Pay no attention to what that drunkard says. When this is finished we will get more. Finish that rare thing thou art drinking and take a cup of wine.”

Robert Jordan swallowed down the last of the absinthe, feeling it, gulped that way, making a warm, small, fume-rising, wet, chemicalchange-producing heat in him and passed the cup for wine. The girl dipped it full for him and smiled.

“Well, did you see the bridge?” the gypsy asked. The others, who had not opened their mouths after the change of allegiance, were all leaning forward to listen now.

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “It is something easy to do. Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes, man. With much interest.”

Robert Jordan took out the notebook from his shirt pocket and showed them the sketches.

“Look how it seems,” the flat-faced man, who was named Primitivo, said. “It is the bridge itself.”

Robert Jordan with the point of the pencil explained how the bridge should be blown and the reason for the placing of the charges.

“What simplicity,” the scarred-faced brother, who was called Andrés, said. “And how do you explode them?”

Robert Jordan explained that too and, as he showed them, he felt the girl’s arm resting on his shoulder as she looked. The woman of Pablo was watching too. Only Pablo took no interest, sitting by himself with a cup of wine that he replenished by dipping into the big bowl Maria had filled from the wineskin that hung to the left of the entrance to the cave.

“Hast thou done much of this?” the girl asked Robert Jordan softly.

“Yes.”

“And can we see the doing of it?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“You will see it,” Pablo said from his end of the table. “I believe that you will see it.”

“Shut up,” the woman of Pablo said to him and suddenly remembering what she had seen in the hand in the afternoon she was wildly, unreasonably angry. “Shut up, coward. Shut up, bad luck bird. Shut up, murderer.”

“Good,” Pablo said. “I shut up. It is thou who commands now and you should continue to look at the pretty pictures. But remember that I am not stupid.”

The woman of Pablo could feel her rage changing to sorrow and to a feeling of the thwarting of all hope and promise. She knew this feeling from when she was a girl and she knew the things that caused it all through her life. It came now suddenly and she put it away from her and would not let it touch her, neither her nor the Republic, and she said, “Now we will eat. Serve the bowls from the pot, Maria.”

Chapter 5

Robert Jordan pushed aside the saddle blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and, stepping out, took a deep breath of the cold night air. The mist had cleared away and the stars were out. There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat dried in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat), of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream. Dew had fallen heavily since the wind had dropped, but, as he stood there, he thought there would be frost by morning.

As he stood breathing deep and then listening to the night, he heard first, firing far away, and then he heard an owl cry in the timber below, where the horse corral was slung. Then inside the cave he could hear the gypsy starting to sing and the soft chording of a guitar.

“I had an inheritance from my father,” the artificially hardened voice rose harshly and hung there. Then went on:

“It was the moon and the sun

“And though I roam all over the world

“The spending of it’s never done.”

The guitar thudded with chorded applause for the singer. “Good,” Robert Jordan heard some one say. “Give us the Catalan, gypsy.”

“No.”

“Yes. Yes. The Catalan.”

“All right,” the gypsy said and sang mournfully,

“My nose is flat.

“My face is black.

“But still I am a man.”

“Ole!” some one said. “Go on, gypsy!”

The gypsy’s voice rose tragically and mockingly.

“Thank God I am a Negro.

“And not a Catalan!”

“There is much noise,” Pablo’s voice said. “Shut up, gypsy.”

“Yes,” he heard the woman’s voice. “There is too much noise. You could call the guardia civil with that voice and still it has no quality.”

“I know another verse,” the gypsy said and the guitar commenced

“Save it,” the woman told him.

The guitar stopped.

“I am not good in voice tonight. So there is no loss,” the gypsy said and pushing the blanket aside he came out into the dark.

Robert Jordan watched him walk over to a tree and then come toward him.

“Roberto,” the gypsy said softly.

“Yes, Rafael,” he said. He knew the gypsy had been affected by the wine from his voice. He himself had drunk the two absinthes and some wine but his head was clear and cold from the strain of the difficulty with Pablo.

“Why didst thou not kill Pablo?” the gypsy said very softly.

“Why kill him?”

“You have to kill him sooner or later. Why did you not approve of the moment?”

“Do you speak seriously?”

“What do you think they all waited for? What do you think the woman sent the girl away for? Do you believe that it is possible to continue after what has been said?”

“That you all should kill him.”

“Qué va,” the gypsy said quietly. “That is your business. Three or four times we waited for you to kill him. Pablo has no friends.”

“I had the idea,” Robert Jordan said. “But I left it.”

“Surely all could see that. Every one noted your preparations. Why didn’t you do it?”

“I thought it might molest you others or the woman.”

“Qué va. And the woman waiting as a whore waits for the flight of the big bird. Thou art younger than thou appearest.”

“It is possible.”

“Kill him now,” the gypsy urged.

“That is to assassinate.”

“Even better,” the gypsy said very softly. “Less danger. Go on. Kill him now.”

“I cannot in that way. It is repugnant to me and it is not how one should act for the cause.”

“Provoke him then,” the gypsy said. “But you have to kill him. There is no remedy.”

As they spoke, the owl flew between the trees with the softness of all silence, dropping past them, then rising, the wings beating quickly, but with no noise of feathers moving as the bird hunted.

“Look at him,” the gypsy said in the dark. “Thus should men move.”

“And in the day, blind in a tree with crows around him,” Robert Jordan said.

“Rarely,” said the gypsy. “And then by hazard. Kill him,” he went on. “Do not let it become difficult.”

“Now the moment is passed.”

“Provoke it,” the gypsy said. “Or take advantage of the quiet.”

The blanket that closed the cave door opened and light came out. Some one came toward where they stood.

“It is a beautiful night,” the man said in a heavy, dull voice. “We will have good weather.”

It was Pablo.

He was smoking one of the Russian cigarettes and in the glow, as he drew on the cigarette, his round face showed. They could see his heavy, long-armed body in the starlight.

“Do not pay any attention to the woman,” he said to Robert Jordan. In the dark the cigarette glowed bright, then showed in his hand as he lowered it. “She is difficult sometimes. She is a good woman. Very loyal to the Republic.” The light of the cigarette jerked slightly now as he spoke. He must be talking with it in the corner of his mouth, Robert Jordan thought. “We should have no difficulties. We are of accord. I am glad you have come.” The cigarette glowed brightly. “Pay no attention to arguments,” he said. “You are very welcome here.

“Excuse me now,” he said. “I go to see how they have picketed the horses.”

He went off through the trees to the edge of the meadow and they heard a horse nicker from below.

“You see?” the gypsy said. “Now you see? In this way has the moment escaped.”

Robert Jordan said nothing.

“I go down there,” the gypsy said angrily.

“To do what?”

“Qué va, to do what. At least to prevent him leaving.”

“Can he leave with a horse from below?”

“No.”

“Then go to the spot where you can prevent him.”

“Agustín is there.”

“Go then and speak with Agustín. Tell him that which has happened.”

“Agustín will kill him with pleasure.”

“Less bad,” Robert Jordan said. “Go then above and tell him all as it happened.”

“And then?”

“I go to look below in the meadow.”

“Good. Man. Good,” he could not see Rafael’s face in the dark but he could feel him smiling. “Now you have tightened your garters,” the gypsy said approvingly.

“Go to Agustín,” Robert Jordan said to him.

“Yes, Roberto, yes,” said the gypsy.

Robert Jordan walked through the pines, feeling his way from tree to tree to the edge of the meadow. Looking across it in the darkness, lighter here in the open from the starlight, he saw the dark bulks of the picketed horses. He counted them where they were scattered between him and the stream. There were five. Robert Jordan sat down at the foot of a pine tree and looked out across the meadow.

I am tired, he thought, and perhaps my judgment is not good. But my obligation is the bridge and to fulfill that, I must take no useless risk of myself until I complete that duty. Of course it is sometimes more of a risk not to accept chances which are necessary to take but I have done this so far, trying to let the situation take its own course. If it is true, as the gypsy says, that they expected me to kill Pablo then I should have done that. But it was never clear to me that they did expect that. For a stranger to kill where he must work with the people afterwards is very bad. It may be done in action, and it may be done if backed by sufficient discipline, but in this case I think it would be very bad, although it was a temptation and seemed a short and simple way. But I do not believe anything is that short nor that simple in this country and, while I trust the woman absolutely, I could not tell how she would react to such a drastic thing. One dying in such a place can be very ugly, dirty and repugnant. You could not tell how she would react. Without the woman there is no organization nor any discipline here and with the woman it can be very good. It would be ideal if she would kill him, or if the gypsy would (but he will not) or if the sentry, Agustín, would. Anselmo will if I ask it, though he says he is against all killing. He hates him, I believe, and he already trusts me and believes in me as a representative of what he believes in. Only he and the woman really believe in the Republic as far as I can see; but it is too early to know that yet.

As his eyes became used to the starlight he could see that Pablo was standing by one of the horses. The horse lifted his head from grazing; then dropped it impatiently. Pablo was standing by the horse, leaning against him, moving with him as he swung with the length of the picket rope and patting him on the neck. The horse was impatient at the tenderness while he was feeding. Robert Jordan could not see what Pablo was doing, nor hear what he was saying to the horse, but he could see that he was neither unpicketing nor saddling. He sat watching him, trying to think his problem out clearly.

“Thou my big good little pony,” Pablo was saying to the horse in the dark; it was the big bay stallion he was speaking to. “Thou lovely white-faced big beauty. Thou with the big neck arching like the viaduct of my pueblo,” he stopped. “But arching more and much finer.” The horse was snatching grass, swinging his head sideways as he pulled, annoyed by the man and his talking. “Thou art no woman nor a fool,” Pablo told the bay horse. “Thou, oh, thou, thee, thee, my big little pony. Thou art no woman like a rock that is burning. Thou art no colt of a girl with cropped head and the movement of a foal still wet from its mother. Thou dost not insult nor lie nor not understand. Thou, oh, thee, oh my good big little pony.”

It would have been very interesting for Robert Jordan to have heard Pablo speaking to the bay horse but he did not hear him because now, convinced that Pablo was only down checking on his horses, and having decided that it was not a practical move to kill him at this time, he stood up and walked back to the cave. Pablo stayed in the meadow talking to the horse for a long time. The horse understood nothing that he said; only, from the tone of the voice, that they were endearments and he had been in the corral all day and was hungry now, grazing impatiently at the limits of his picket rope, and the man annoyed him. Pablo shifted the picket pin finally and stood by the horse, not talking now. The horse went on grazing and was relieved now that the man did not bother him.

Chapter 6

Inside the cave, Robert Jordan sat on one of the rawhide stools in a corner by the fire listening to the woman. She was washing the dishes and the girl, Maria, was drying them and putting them away, kneeling to place them in the hollow dug in the wall that was used as a shelf.

“It is strange,” she said. “That El Sordo has not come. He should have been here an hour ago.”

“Did you advise him to come?”

“No. He comes each night.”

“Perhaps he is doing something. Some work.”

“It is possible,” she said. “If he does not come we must go to see him tomorrow.”

“Yes. Is it far from here?”

“No. It will be a good trip. I lack exercise.”

“Can I go?” Maria asked. “May I go too, Pilar?”

“Yes, beautiful,” the woman said, then turning her big face, “Isn’t she pretty?” she asked Robert Jordan. “How does she seem to thee? A little thin?”

“To me she seems very well,” Robert Jordan said. Maria filled his cup with wine. “Drink that,” she said. “It will make me seem even better. It is necessary to drink much of that for me to seem beautiful.”

“Then I had better stop,” Robert Jordan said. “Already thou seemest beautiful and more.”

“That’s the way to talk,” the woman said. “You talk like the good ones. What more does she seem?”

“Intelligent,” Robert Jordan said lamely. Maria giggled and the woman shook her head sadly. “How well you begin and how it ends, Don Roberto.”

“Don’t call me Don Roberto.”

“It is a joke. Here we say Don Pablo for a joke. As we say the Señorita Maria for a joke.”

“I don’t joke that way,” Robert Jordan said. “Camarada to me is what all should be called with seriousness in this war. In the joking commences a rottenness.”

“Thou art very religious about thy politics,” the woman teased him. “Thou makest no jokes?”

“Yes. I care much for jokes but not in the form of address. It is like a flag.”

“I could make jokes about a flag. Any flag,” the woman laughed. “To me no one can joke of anything. The old flag of yellow and gold we called pus and blood. The flag of the Republic with the purple added we call blood, pus and permanganate. It is a joke.”

“He is a Communist,” Maria said. “They are very serious gente.”

“Are you a Communist?”

“No I am an anti-fascist.”

“For a long time?”

“Since I have understood fascism.”

“How long is that?”

“For nearly ten years.”

“That is not much time,” the woman said. “I have been a Republican for twenty years.”

“My father was a Republican all his life,” Maria said. “It was for that they shot him.”

“My father was also a Republican all his life. Also my grandfather,” Robert Jordan said.

“In what country?”

“The United States.”

“Did they shoot them?” the woman asked.

“Qué va,” Maria said. “The United States is a country of Republicans. They don’t shoot you for being a Republican there.”

“All the same it is a good thing to have a grandfather who was a Republican,” the woman said. “It shows a good blood.”

“My grandfather was on the Republican national committee,” Robert Jordan said. That impressed even Maria.

“And is thy father still active in the Republic?” Pilar asked.

“No. He is dead.”

“Can one ask how he died?”

“He shot himself.”

“To avoid being tortured?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “To avoid being tortured.”

Maria looked at him with tears in her eyes. “My father,” she said, “could not obtain a weapon. Oh, I am very glad that your father had the good fortune to obtain a weapon.”

“Yes. It was pretty lucky,” Robert Jordan said. “Should we talk about something else?”

“Then you and me we are the same,” Maria said. She put her hand on his arm and looked in his face. He looked at her brown face and at the eyes that, since he had seen them, had never been as young as the rest of her face but that now were suddenly hungry and young and wanting.

“You could be brother and sister by the look,” the woman said. “But I believe it is fortunate that you are not.”

“Now I know why I have felt as I have,” Maria said. “Now it is clear.”

“Qué va,” Robert Jordan said and reaching over, he ran his hand over the top of her head. He had been wanting to do that all day and now he did it, he could feel his throat swelling. She moved her head under his hand and smiled up at him and he felt the thick but silky roughness of the cropped head rippling between his fingers. Then his hand was on her neck and then he dropped it.

“Do it again,” she said. “I wanted you to do that all day.”

“Later,” Robert Jordan said and his voice was thick.

“And me,” the woman of Pablo said in her booming voice. “I am expected to watch all this? I am expected not to be moved? One cannot. For fault of anything better; that Pablo should come back.”

Maria took no notice of her now, nor of the others playing cards at the table by the candlelight.

“Do you want another cup of wine, Roberto?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

“You’re going to have a drunkard like I have,” the woman of Pablo said. “With that rare thing he drank in the cup and all. Listen to me, Inglés.”

“Not Inglés. American.”

“Listen, then, American. Where do you plan to sleep?”

“Outside. I have a sleeping robe.”

“Good,” she said. “The night is clear?”

“And will be cold.”

“Outside then,” she said. “Sleep thee outside. And thy materials can sleep with me.”

“Good,” said Robert Jordan.

“Leave us for a moment,” Robert Jordan said to the girl and put his hand on her shoulder.

“Why?”

“I wish to speak to Pilar.”

“Must I go?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?” the woman of Pablo said when the girl had gone over to the mouth of the cave where she stood by the big wineskin, watching the card players.

“The gypsy said I should have—” he began.

“No,” the woman interrupted. “He is mistaken.”

“If it is necessary that I—” Robert Jordan said quietly but with difficulty.

“Thee would have done it, I believe,” the woman said. “Nay, it is not necessary. I was watching thee. But thy judgment was good.”

“But if it is needful—”

“No,” the woman said. “I tell you it is not needful. The mind of the gypsy is corrupt.”

“But in weakness a man can be a great danger.”

“No. Thou dost not understand. Out of this one has passed all capacity for danger.”

“I do not understand.”

“Thou art very young still,” she said. “You will understand.” Then, to the girl, “Come, Maria. We are not talking more.”

The girl came over and Robert Jordan reached his hand out and patted her head. She stroked under his hand like a kitten. Then he thought that she was going to cry. But her lips drew up again and she looked at him and smiled.

“Thee would do well to go to bed now,” the woman said to Robert Jordan. “Thou hast had a long journey.”

“Good,” said Robert Jordan. “I will get my things.”

Chapter 7

He was asleep in the robe and he had been asleep, he thought, for a long time. The robe was spread on the forest floor in the lee of the rocks beyond the cave mouth and as he slept, he turned, and turning rolled on his pistol which was fastened by a lanyard to one wrist and had been by his side under the cover when he went to sleep, shoulder and back weary, leg-tired, his muscles pulled with tiredness so that the ground was soft, and simply stretching in the robe against the flannel lining was voluptuous with fatigue. Waking, he wondered where he was, knew, and then shifted the pistol from under his side and settled happily to stretch back into sleep, his hand on the pillow of his clothing that was bundled neatly around his rope-soled shoes. He had one arm around the pillow.

Then he felt her hand on his shoulder and turned quickly, his right hand holding the pistol under the robe.

“Oh, it is thee,” he said and dropping the pistol he reached both arms up and pulled her down. With his arms around her he could feel her shivering.

“Get in,” he said softly. “It is cold out there.”

“No. I must not.”

“Get in,” he said. “And we can talk about it later.”

She was trembling and he held her wrist now with one hand and held her lightly with the other arm. She had turned her head away.

“Get in, little rabbit,” he said and kissed her on the back of the neck.

“I am afraid.”

“No. Do not be afraid. Get in.”

“How?”

“Just slip in. There is much room. Do you want me to help you?”

“No,” she said and then she was in the robe and he was holding her tight to him and trying to kiss her lips and she was pressing her face against the pillow of clothing but holding her arms close around his neck. Then he felt her arms relax and she was shivering again as he held her.

“No,” he said and laughed. “Do not be afraid. That is the pistol.”

He lifted it and slipped it behind him.

“I am ashamed,” she said, her face away from him.

“No. You must not be. Here. Now.”

“No, I must not. I am ashamed and frightened.”

“No. My rabbit. Please.”

“I must not. If thou dost not love me.”

“I love thee.”

“I love thee. Oh, I love thee. Put thy hand on my head,” she said away from him, her face still in the pillow. He put his hand on her head and stroked it and then suddenly her face was away from the pillow and she was in his arms, pressed close against him, and her face was against his and she was crying.

He held her still and close, feeling the long length of the young body, and he stroked her head and kissed the wet saltiness of her eyes, and as she cried he could feel the rounded, firm-pointed breasts touching through the shirt she wore.

“I cannot kiss,” she said. “I do not know how.”

“There is no need to kiss.”

“Yes. I must kiss. I must do everything.”

“There is no need to do anything. We are all right. But thou hast many clothes.”

“What should I do?”

“I will help you.”

“Is that better?”

“Yes. Much. It is not better to thee?”

“Yes. Much better. And I can go with thee as Pilar said?”

“Yes.”

“But not to a home. With thee.”

“No, to a home.”

“No. No. No. With thee and I will be thy woman.”

Now as they lay all that before had been shielded was unshielded. Where there had been roughness of fabric all was smooth with a smoothness and firm rounded pressing and a long warm coolness, cool outside and warm within, long and light and closely holding, closely held, lonely, hollow-making with contours, happymaking, young and loving and now all warmly smooth with a hollowing, chest-aching, tight-held loneliness that was such that Robert Jordan felt he could not stand it and he said, “Hast thou loved others?”

“Never.”

Then suddenly, going dead in his arms, “But things were done to me.”

“By whom?”

“By various.”

Now she lay perfectly quietly and as though her body were dead and turned her head away from him.

“Now you will not love me.”

“I love you,” he said.

But something had happened to him and she knew it.

“No,” she said and her voice had gone dead and flat. “Thou wilt not love me. But perhaps thou wilt take me to the home. And I will go to the home and I will never be thy woman nor anything.”

“I love thee, Maria.”

“No. It is not true,” she said. Then as a last thing pitifully and hopefully.

“But I have never kissed any man.”

“Then kiss me now.”

“I wanted to,” she said. “But I know not how. Where things were done to me I fought until I could not see. I fought until — until — until one sat upon my head — and I bit him — and then they tied my mouth and held my arms behind my head — and others did things to me.”

“I love thee, Maria,” he said. “And no one has done anything to thee. Thee, they cannot touch. No one has touched thee, little rabbit.”

“You believe that?”

“I know it.”

“And you can love me?” warm again against him now.

“I can love thee more.”

“I will try to kiss thee very well.”

“Kiss me a little.”

“I do not know how.”

“Just kiss me.”

She kissed him on the cheek.

“No.”

“Where do the noses go? I always wondered where the noses would go.”

“Look, turn thy head,” and then their mouths were tight together and she lay close pressed against him and her mouth opened a little gradually and then, suddenly, holding her against him, he was happier than he had ever been, lightly, lovingly, exultingly, innerly happy and unthinking and untired and unworried and only feeling a great delight and he said, “My little rabbit. My darling. My sweet. My long lovely.”

“What do you say?” she said as though from a great distance away.

“My lovely one,” he said.

They lay there and he felt her heart beating against his and with the side of his foot he stroked very lightly against the side of hers.

“Thee came barefooted,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then thee knew thou wert coming to the bed.”

“Yes.”

“And you had no fear.”

“Yes. Much. But more fear of how it would be to take my shoes off.”

“And what time is it now? lo sabes?”

“No. Thou hast no watch?”

“Yes. But it is behind thy back.”

“Take it from there.”

“No.”

“Then look over my shoulder.”

It was one o’clock. The dial showed bright in the darkness that the robe made.

“Thy chin scratches my shoulder.”

“Pardon it. I have no tools to shave.”

“I like it. Is thy beard blond?”

“Yes.”

“And will it be long?”

“Not before the bridge. Maria, listen. Dost thou — ?”

“Do I what?”

“Dost thou wish?”

“Yes. Everything. Please. And if we do everything together, the other maybe never will have been.”

“Did you think of that?”

“No. I think it in myself but Pilar told me.”

“She is very wise.”

“And another thing,” Maria said softly. “She said for me to tell you that I am not sick. She knows about such things and she said to tell you that.”

“She told you to tell me?”

“Yes. I spoke to her and told her that I love you. I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before and I told Pilar and she said if I ever told you anything about anything, to tell you that I was not sick. The other thing she told me long ago. Soon after the train.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept and that if I loved some one it would take it all away. I wished to die, you see.”

“What she said is true.”

“And now I am happy that I did not die. I am so happy that I did not die. And you can love me?”

“Yes. I love you now.”

“And I can be thy woman?”

“I cannot have a woman doing what I ao. But thou art my woman now.”

“If once I am, then I will keep on. Am I thy woman now?”

“Yes, Maria. Yes, my little rabbit.”

She held herself tight to him and her lips looked for his and then found them and were against them and he felt her, fresh, new and smooth and young and lovely with the warm, scalding coolness and unbelievable to be there in the robe that was as familiar as his clothes, or his shoes, or his duty and then she said, frightenedly, “And now let us do quickly what it is we do so that the other is all gone.”

“You want?”

“Yes,” she said almost fiercely. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Chapter 8

It was cold in the night and Robert Jordan slept heavily. Once he woke and, stretching, realized that the girl was there, curled far down in the robe, breathing lightly and regularly, and in the dark, bringing his head in from the cold, the sky hard and sharp with stars, the air cold in his nostrils, he put his head under the warmth of the robe and kissed her smooth shoulder. She did not wake and he rolled onto his side away from her and with his head out of the robe in the cold again, lay awake a moment feeling the long, seeping luxury of his fatigue and then the smooth tactile happiness of their two bodies touching and then, as he pushed his legs out deep as they would go in the robe, he slipped down steeply into sleep.

He woke at first daylight and the girl was gone. He knew it as he woke and, putting out his arm, he felt the robe warm where she had been. He looked at the mouth of the cave where the blanket showed frost-rimmed and saw the thin gray smoke from the crack in the rocks that meant the kitchen fire was lighted.

A man came out of the timber, a blanket worn over his head like a poncho Robert Jordan saw it was Pablo and that he was smoking a cigarette. He’s been down corralling the horses, he thought.

Pablo pulled open the blanket and went into the cave without looking toward Robert Jordan.

Robert Jordan felt with his hand the light frost that lay on the worn, spotted green balloon silk outer covering of the five-year-old down robe, then settled into it again. Bueno, he said to himself, feeling the familiar caress of the flannel lining as he spread his legs wide, then drew them together and then turned on his side so that his head would be away from the direction where he knew the sun would come. Qué más da, I might as well sleep some more.

He slept until the sound of airplane motors woke him.

Lying on his back, he saw them, a fascist patrol of three Fiats, tiny, bright, fast-moving across the mountain sky, headed in the direction from which Anselmo and he had come yesterday. The three passed and then came nine more, flying much higher in the minute, pointed formations of threes, threes and threes.

Pablo and the gypsy were standing at the cave mouth, in the shadow, watching the sky and as Robert Jordan lay still, the sky now full of the high hammering roar of motors, there was a new droning roar and three more planes came over at less than a thousand feet above the clearing. These three were Heinkel one-elevens, twin-motor bombers.

Robert Jordan, his head in the shadow of the rocks, knew they would not see him, and that it did not matter if they did. He knew they could possibly see the horses in the corral if they were looking for anything in these mountains. If they were not looking for anything they might still see them but would naturally take them for some of their own cavalry mounts. Then came a new and louder droning roar and three more Heinkel one-elevens showed coming steeply, stiffly, lower yet, crossing in rigid formation, their pounding roar approaching in crescendo to an absolute of noise and then receding as they passed the clearing.

Robert Jordan unrolled the bundle of clothing that made his pillow and pulled on his shirt. It was over his head and he was pulling it down when he heard the next planes coming and he pulled his trousers on under the robe and lay still as three more of the Heinkel bimotor bombers came over. Before they were gone over the shoulder of the mountain, he had buckled on his pistol, rolled the robe and placed it against the rocks and sat now, close against the rocks, tying his rope-soled shoes when the approaching droning turned to a greater clattering roar than ever before and nine more Heinkel light bombers came in echelons; hammering the sky apart as they went over.

Robert Jordan slipped along the rocks to the mouth of the cave where one of the brothers, Pablo, the gypsy, Anselmo, Agustín and the woman stood in the mouth looking out.

“Have there been planes like this before?” he asked.

“Never,” said Pablo. “Get in. They will see thee.”

The sun had not yet hit the mouth of the cave. It was just now shining on the meadow by the stream and Robert Jordan knew they could not be seen in the dark, early morning shadow of the trees and the solid shade the rocks made, but he went in the cave in order not to make them nervous.

“They are many,” the woman said.

“And there will be more,” Robert Jordan said.

“How do you know?” Pablo asked suspiciously.

“Those, just now, will have pursuit planes with them.”

Just then they heard them, the higher, whining drone, and as they passed at about five thousand feet, Robert Jordan counted fifteen Fiats in echelon of echelons like a wild-goose flight of the V-shaped threes.

In the cave entrance their faces all looked very sober and Robert Jordan said, “You have not seen this many planes?”

“Never,” said Pablo.

“There are not many at Segovia?”

“Never has there been, we have seen three usually. Sometimes six of the chasers. Perhaps three Junkers, the big ones with the three motors, with the chasers with them. Never have we seen planes like this.”

It is bad, Robert Jordan thought. This is really bad. Here is a concentration of planes which means something very bad. I must listen for them to unload. But no, they cannot have brought up the troops yet for the attack. Certainly not before tonight or tomorrow night, certainly not yet. Certainly they will not be moving anything at this hour.

He could still hear the receding drone. He looked at his watch. By now they should be over the lines, the first ones anyway. He Pushed the knob that set the second hand to clicking and watched it move around. No, perhaps not yet. By now. Yes. Well over by now. Two hundred and fifty miles an hour for those one-elevens anyway. Five minutes would carry them there. By now they’re well beyond the pass with Castile all yellow and tawny beneath them now in the morning, the yellow crossed by white roads and spotted with the small villages and the shadows of the Heinkels moving over the land as the shadows of sharks pass over a sandy floor of the ocean.

There was no bump, bump, bumping thud of bombs. His watch ticked on.

They’re going on to Colmenar, to Escorial, or to the flying field at Manzanares el Real, he thought, with the old castle above the lake with the ducks in the reeds and the fake airfield just behind the real field with the dummy planes, not quite hidden, their props turning in the wind. That’s where they must be headed. They can’t know about the attack, he told himself and something in him said, why can’t they? They’ve known about all the others.

“Do you think they saw the horses?” Pablo asked.

“Those weren’t looking for horses,” Robert Jordan said.

“But did they see them?”

“Not unless they were asked to look for them.”

“Could they see them?”

“Probably not,” Robert Jordan said. “Unless the sun were on the trees.”

“It is on them very early,” Pablo said miserably.

“I think they have other things to think of besides thy horses,” Robert Jordan said.

It was eight minutes since he had pushed the lever on the stop watch and there was still no sound of bombing.

“What do you do with the watch?” the woman asked.

“I listen where they have gone.”

“Oh,” she said. At ten minutes he stopped looking at the watch knowing it would be too far away to hear, now, even allowing a minute for the sound to travel, and said to Anselmo, “I would speak to thee.”

Anselmo came out of the cave mouth and they walked a little way from the entrance and stood beside a pine tree.

“Qué tal?” Robert Jordan asked him. “How goes it?”

“All right.”

“Hast thou eaten?”

“No. No one has eaten.”

“Eat then and take something to eat at mid-day. I want you to go to watch the road. Make a note of everything that passes both up and down the road.”

“I do not write.”

“There is no need to,” Robert Jordan took out two leaves from his notebook and with his knife cut an inch from the end of his pencil. “Take this and make a mark for tanks thus,” he drew a slanted tank, “and then a mark for each one and when there are four, cross the four strokes for the fifth.”

“In this way we count also.”

“Good. Make another mark, two wheels and a box, for trucks. If they are empty make a circle. If they are full of troops make a straight mark. Mark for guns. Big ones, thus. Small ones, thus. Mark for cars. Mark for ambulances. Thus, two wheels and a box with a cross on it. Mark for troops on foot by companies, like this, see? A little square and then mark beside it. Mark for cavalry, like this, you see? Like a horse. A box with four legs. That is a troop of twenty horse. You understand? Each troop a mark.”

“Yes. It is ingenious.”

“Now,” he drew two large wheels with circles around them and a short line for a gun barrel. “These are anti-tanks. They have rubber tires. Mark for them. These are anti-aircraft,” two wheels with the gun barrel slanted up. “Mark for them also. Do you understand? Have you seen such guns?”

“Yes,” Anselmo said. “Of course. It is clear.”

“Take the gypsy with you that he will know from what point you will be watching so you may be relieved. Pick a place that is safe, not too close and from where you can see well and comfortably. Stay until you are relieved.”

“I understand.”

“Good. And that when you come back, I should know everything that moved upon the road. One paper is for movement up. One is for movement down the road.”

They walked over toward the cave.

“Send Rafael to me,” Robert Jordan said and waited by the tree. He watched Anselmo go into the cave, the blanket falling behind him. The gypsy sauntered out, wiping his mouth with his hand.

“Qué tal?” the gypsy said. “Did you divert yourself last night?”

“I slept.”

“Less bad,” the gypsy said and grinned. “Have you a cigarette?”

“Listen,” Robert Jordan said and felt in his pocket for the cigarettes. “I wish you to go with Anselmo to a place from which he will observe the road. There you will leave him, noting the place in order that you may guide me to it or guide whoever will relieve him later. You will then go to where you can observe the saw mill and note if there are any changes in the post there.”

“What changes?”

“How many men are there now?”

“Eight. The last I knew.”

“See how many are there now. See at what intervals the guard is relieved at that bridge.”

“Intervals?”

“How many hours the guard stays on and at what time a change is made.”

“I have no watch.”

“Take mine.” He unstrapped it.

“What a watch,” Rafael said admiringly. “Look at what complications. Such a watch should be able to read and write. Look at what complications of numbers. It’s a watch to end watches.”

“Don’t fool with it,” Robert Jordan said. “Can you tell time?”

“Why not? Twelve o’clock mid-day. Hunger. Twelve o’clock midnight. Sleep. Six o’clock in the morning, hunger. Six o’clock at night, drunk. With luck. Ten o’clock at night—”

“Shut up,” Robert Jordan said. “You don’t need to be a clown. I want you to check on the guard at the big bridge and the post on the road below in the same manner as the post and the guard at the saw mill and the small bridge.”

“It is much work,” the gypsy smiled. “You are sure there is no one you would rather send than me?”

“No, Rafael. It is very important. That you should do it very carefully and keeping out of sight with care.”

“I believe I will keep out of sight,” the gypsy said. “Why do you tell me to keep out of sight? You think I want to be shot?”

“Take things a little seriously,” Robert Jordan said. “This is serious.”

“Thou askest me to take things seriously? After what thou didst last night? When thou needest to kill a man and instead did what you did? You were supposed to kill one, not make one! When we have just seen the sky full of airplanes of a quantity to kill us back to our grandfathers and forward to all unborn grandsons including all cats, goats and bedbugs. Airplanes making a noise to curdle the milk in your mother’s breasts as they pass over darkening the sky and roaring like lions and you ask me to take things seriously. I take them too seriously already.”

“All right,” said Robert Jordan and laughed and put his hand on the gypsy’s shoulder. “Don’t take them too seriously then. Now finish your breakfast and go.”

“And thou?” the gypsy asked. “What do you do?”

“I go to see El Sordo.”

“After those airplanes it is very possible that thou wilt find nobody in the whole mountains,” the gypsy said. “There must have been many people sweating the big drop this morning when those passed.”

“Those have other work than hunting guerillas.”

“Yes,” the gypsy said. Then shook his head. “But when they care to undertake that work.”

“Qué va,” Robert Jordan said. “Those are the best of the German light bombers. They do not send those after gypsies.”

“They give me a horror,” Rafael said. “Of such things, yes, I am frightened.”

“They go to bomb an airfield,” Robert Jordan told him as they went into the cave. “I am almost sure they go for that.”

“What do you say?” the woman of Pablo asked. She poured him a bowl of coffee and handed him a can of condensed milk.

“There is milk? What luxury!”

“There is everything,” she said. “And since the planes there is much fear. Where did you say they went?”

Robert Jordan dripped some of the thick milk into his coffee from the slit cut in the can, wiped the can on the rim of the cup, and stirred the coffee until it was light brown.

“They go to bomb an airfield I believe. They might go to Escorial and Colmenar. Perhaps a!! three.”

“That they should go a long way and keep away from here,” Pablo said.

“And why are they here now?” the woman asked. “What brings them now? Never have we seen such planes. Nor in such quantity. Do they prepare an attack?”

“What movement was there on the road last night?” Robert Jordan asked. The girl Maria was close to him but he did not look at her.

“You,” the woman said. “Fernando. You were in La Granja last night. What movement was there?”

“Nothing,” a short, open-faced man of about thirty-five with a cast in one eye, whom Robert Jordan had not seen before, answered. “A few camions as usual. Some cars. No movement of troops while I was there.”

“You go into La Granja every night?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“I or another,” Fernando said. “Some one goes.”

“They go for the news. For tobacco. For small things,” the woman said.

“We have people there?”

“Yes. Why not? Those who work the power plant. Some others.”

“What was the news?”

“Pues nada. There was nothing. It still goes badly in the north. That is not news. In the north it has gone badly now since the beginning.”

“Did you hear anything from Segovia?”

“No, hombre. I did not ask.”

“Do you go into Segovia?”

“Sometimes,” Fernando said. “But there is danger. There are controls where they ask for your papers.”

“Do you know the airfield?”

“No, hombre. I know where it is but I was never close to it. There, there is much asking for papers.”

“No one spoke about these planes last night?”

“In La Gnanja? Nobody. But they will talk about them tonight certainly. They talked about the broadcast of Quiepo de Llano. Nothing more. Oh, yes. It seems that the Republic is preparing an offensive.”

“That what?”

“That the Republic is preparing an offensive.”

“Where?”

“It is not certain. Perhaps here. Perhaps for another pant of the Sierra. Hast thou heard of it?”

“They say this in La Granja?”

“Yes, hombre. I had forgotten it. But there is a!ways much talk of offensives.”

“Where does this talk come from?”

“Where? Why from different people. The officers speak in the cafés in Segovia and Avila and the waiters note it. The rumors come running. Since some time they speak of an offensive by the Republic in these parts.”

“By the Republic or by the Fascists?”

“By the Republic. If it were by the Fascists all would know of it. No, this is an offensive of quite some size. Some say there are two. One here and the other over the Alto del Leon near the Escorial. Have you heard aught of this?”

“What else did you hear?”

“Nada, hombre. Nothing. Oh, yes. There was some talk that the Republicans would try to blow up the bridges, if there was to be an offensive. But the bridges are guarded.”

“Art thou joking?” Robert Jordan said, sipping his coffee.

“No, hombre,” said Fernando.

“This one doesn’t joke,” the woman said. “Bad luck that he doesn’t.”

“Then,” said Robert Jordan. “Thank you for all the news. Did you hear nothing more?”

“No. They talk, as always, of troops to be sent to clear out these mountains. There is some talk that they are on the way. That they Rave been sent already from Valladolid. But they always talk in that Way. It is not to give any importance to.”

“And thou,” the woman of Pablo said to Pablo almost viciously. “With thy talk of safety.”

Pablo looked at her reflectively and scratched his chin. “Thou,” he said. “And thy bridges.”

“What bridges?” asked Fernando cheerfully.

“Stupid,” the woman said to him. “Thick head. Tonto. Take another cup of coffee and try to remember more news.”

“Don’t be angry, Pilar,” Fernando said calmly and cheerfully. “Neither should one become alarmed at rumors. I have told thee and this comrade all that I remember.”

“You don’t remember anything more?” Robert Jordan asked.

“No,” Fernando said with dignity. “And I am fortunate to remember this because, since it was but rumors, I paid no attention to any of it.”

“Then there may have been more?”

“Yes. It is possible. But I paid no attention. For a year I have heard nothing but rumors.”

Robert Jordan heard a quick, control-breaking sniff of laughter from the girl, Maria, who was standing behind him.

“Tell us one more rumor, Fernandito,” she said and then her shoulders shook again.

“If I could remember, I would not,” Fernando said. “It is beneath a man’s dignity to listen and give importance to rumors.”

“And with this we will save the Republic,” the woman said.

“No. You will save it by blowing bridges,” Pablo told her.

“Go,” said Robert Jordan to Anselmo and Rafael. “If you have eaten.”

“We go now,” the old man said and the two of them stood up. Robert Jordan felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Maria. “Thou shouldst eat,” she said and let her hand rest there. “Eat well so that thy stomach can support more rumors.”

“The rumors have taken the place of the appetite.”

“No. It should not be so. Eat this now before more rumors come.” She put the bowl before him.

“Do not make a joke of me,” Fernando said to her. “I am thy good friend, Maria.”

“I do not joke at thee, Fernando. I only joke with him and he should eat or he will be hungry.”

“We should all eat,” Fernando said. “Pilar, what passes that we are not served?”

“Nothing, man,” the woman of Pablo said and filled his bowl with the meat stew. “Eat. Yes, that’s what you can do. Eat now.”

“It is very good, Pilar,” Fernando said, all dignity intact.

“Thank you,” said the woman. “Thank you and thank you again.”

“Are you angry at me?” Fernando asked.

“No. Eat. Go ahead and eat.”

“I will,” said Fernando. “Thank you.”

Robert Jordan looked at Maria and her shoulders started shaking again and she looked away. Fernando ate steadily, a proud and dignified expression on his face, the dignity of which could not be affected even by the huge spoon that he was using or the slight dripping of juice from the stew which ran from the corners of his mouth.

“Do you like the food?” the woman of Pablo asked him.

“Yes, Pilar,” he said with his mouth full. “It is the same as usual.”

Robert Jordan felt Maria’s hand on his arm and felt her fingers tighten with delight.

“It is for that that you like it?” the woman asked Fernando.

“Yes,” she said. “I see. The stew; as usual. Como siempre. Things are bad in the north; as usual. An offensive here; as usual. That troops come to hunt us out; as usual. You could serve as a monument to as usual.”

“But the last two are only rumors, Pilar.”

“Spain,” the woman of Pablo said bitterly. Then turned to Robert Jordan. “Do they have people such as this in other countries?”

“There are no other countries like Spain,” Robert Jordan said politely.

“You are right,” Fernando said. “There is no other country in the world like Spain.”

“Hast thou ever seen any other country?” the woman asked him.

“Nay,” said Fernando. “Nor do I wish to.”

“You see?” the woman of Pablo said to Robert Jordan.

“Fernandito,” Maria said to him. “Tell us of the time thee went to Valencia”

“I did not like Valencia.”

“Why?” Maria asked and pressed Robert Jordan’s arm again. “Why did thee not like it?”

“The people had no manners and I could not understand them. All they did was shout ché at one another.”

“Could they understand thee?” Maria asked.

“They pretended not to,” Fernando said.

“And what did thee there?”

“I left without even seeing the sea,” Fernando said. “I did not like the people.”

“Oh, get out of here, you old maid,” the woman of Pablo said. “Get out of here before you make me sick. In Valencia I had the best time of my life. Vamos! Valencia. Don’t talk to me of Valencia.”

“What did thee there?” Maria asked. The woman of Pablo sat down at the table with a bowl of coffee, a piece of bread and a bowl of the stew.

“Qué? what did we there. I was there when Finito had a contract for three fights at the Feria. Never have I seen so many people. Never have I seen cafés so crowded. For hours it would be impossible to get a seat and it was impossible to board the tram cars. In Valencia there was movement all day and all night.”

“But what did you do?” Maria asked.

“All things,” the woman said. “We went to the beach and lay in the water and boats with sails were hauled up out of the sea by oxen. The oxen driven to the water until they must swim; then harnessed to the boats, and, when they found their feet, staggering up the sand. Ten yokes of oxen dragging a boat with sails out of the sea in the morning with the line of the small waves breaking on the beach. That is Valencia.”

“But what did thee besides watch oxen?”

“We ate in pavilions on the sand. Pastries made of cooked and shredded fish and red and green peppers and small nuts like grains of rice. Pastries delicate and flaky and the fish of a richness that was incredible. Prawns fresh from the sea sprinkled with lime juice. They were pink and sweet and there were four bites to a prawn. Of those we ate many. Then we ate paella with fresh sea food, clams in their shells, mussels, crayfish, and small eels. Then we ate even smaller eels alone cooked in oil and as tiny as bean sprouts and curled in all directions and so tender they disappeared in the mouth without chewing. All the time drinking a white wine, cold, light and good at thirty centimos the bottle. And for an end, melon. That is the home of the melon.”

“The melon of Castile is better,” Fernando said.

“Qué va,” said the woman of Pablo. “The melon of Castile is for self abuse. The melon of Valencia for eating. When I think of those melons long as one’s arm, green like the sea and crisp and juicy to cut and sweeter than the early morning in summer. Aye, when I think of those smallest eels, tiny, delicate and in mounds on the plate. Also the beer in pitchers all through the afternoon, the beer sweating in its coldness in pitchers the size of water jugs.”

“And what did thee when not eating nor drinking?”

“We made love in the room with the strip wood blinds hanging over the balcony and a breeze through the opening of the top of the door which turned on hinges. We made love there, the room dark in the day time from the hanging blinds, and from the streets there was the scent of the flower market and the smell of burned powder from the firecrackers of the traca that ran though the streets exploding each noon during the Feria. It was a line of fireworks that ran through all the city, the firecrackers linked together and the explosions running along on poles and wires of the tramways, exploding with great noise and a jumping from pole to pole with a sharpness and a cracking of explosion you could not believe.

“We made love and then sent for another pitcher of beer with the drops of its coldness on the glass and when the girl brought it, I took it from the door and I placed the coldness of the pitcher against the back of Finito as he lay, now, asleep, not having wakened when the beer was brought, and he said,’No, Pilar. No, woman, let me sleep.’And I said,’No, wake up and drink this to see how cold,’and he drank without opening his eyes and went to sleep again and I lay with my back against a pillow at the foot of the bed and watched him sleep, brown and dark-haired and young and quiet in his sleep, and drank the whole pitcher, listening now to the music of a band that was passing. You,” she said to Pablo. “Do you know aught of such things?”

“We have done things together,” Pablo said.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Why not? And thou wert more man than Finito in your time. But never did we go to Valencia. Never did we lie in bed together and hear a band pass in Valencia.”

“It was impossible,” Pablo told her. “We have had no opportunity to go to Valencia. Thou knowest that if thou wilt be reasonable. But, with Finito, neither did thee blow up any train.”

“No,” said the woman. “That is what is left to us. The train. Yes. Always the train. No one can speak against that. That remains of all the laziness, sloth and failure. That remains of the cowardice of this moment. There were many other things before too. I do not want to be unjust. But no one can speak against Valencia either. You hear me?”

“I did not like it,” Fernando said quietly. “I did not like Valencia.”

“Yet they speak of the mule as stubborn,” the woman said. “Clean up, Maria, that we may go.”

As she said this they heard the first sound of the planes returning.

Chapter 9

They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They are shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.

You ought to write, he told himself. Maybe you will again some time. He felt Maria holding to his arm. She was looking up and he said to her, “What do they look like to you, guapa?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Death, I think.”

“They look like planes to me,” the woman of Pablo said. “‘Where are the little ones?”

“They may be crossing at another part,” Robert Jordan said. “Those bombers are too fast to have to wait for them and have come back alone. We never follow them across the lines to fight. There aren’t enough planes to risk it.”

Just then three Heinkel fighters in V formation came low over the clearing coming toward them, just over the tree tops, like clattering, wing-tilting, pinch-nosed ugly toys, to enlarge suddenly, fearfully to their actual size; pouring past in a whining roar. They were so low that from the cave mouth all of them could see the pilots, helmeted, goggled, a scarf blowing back from behind the patrol leader’s head.

“Those can see the horses,” Pablo said.

“Those can see thy cigarette butts,” the woman said. “Let fall the blanket.”

No more planes came over. The others must have crossed farther up the range and when the droning was gone they went out of the cave into the open.

The sky was empty now and high and blue and clear.

“It seems as though they were a dream that you wake from,” Maria said to Robert Jordan. There was not even the last almost unheard hum that comes like a finger faintly touching and leaving and touching again after the sound is gone almost past hearing.

“They are no dream and you go in and clean up,” Pilar said to her. “What about it?” she turned to Robert Jordan. “Should we ride or walk?”

Pablo looked at her and grunted.

“As you will,” Robert Jordan said.

“Then let us walk,” she said. “I would like it for the liver.”

“Riding is good for the liver.”

“Yes, but hard on the buttocks. We will walk and thou—” She turned to Pablo. “Go down and count thy beasts and see they have not flown away with any.”

“Do you want a horse to ride?” Pablo asked Robert Jordan.

“No. Many thanks. What about the girl?”

“Better for her to walk,” Pilar said. “She’ll get stiff in too many places and serve for nothing.”

Robert Jordan felt his face reddening.

“Did you sleep well?” Pilar asked. Then said, “It is true that there is no sickness. There could have been. I know not why there wasn’t. There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him. Go on,” she said to Pablo. “This does not concern thee. This is of people younger than thee. Made of other material. Get on.” Then to Robert Jordan, “Agustín is looking after thy things. We go when he comes.”

It was a clear, bright day and warm now in the sun. Robert Jordan looked at the big, brown-faced woman with her kind, widely set eyes and her square, heavy face, lined and pleasantly ugly, the eyes merry, but the face sad until the lips moved. He looked at her and then at the man, heavy and stolid, moving off through the trees toward the corral. The woman, too, was looking after him.

“Did you make love?” the woman said.

“What did she say?”

“She would not tell me.”

“I neither.”

“Then you made love,” the woman said. “Be as careful with her as you can.”

“What if she has a baby?”

“That will do no harm,” the woman said. “That will do less harm.”

“This is no place for that.”

“She will not stay here. She will go with you.”

“And where will I go? I can’t take a woman where I go.”

“Who knows? You may take two where you go.”

“That is no way to talk.”

“Listen,” the woman said. “I am no coward, but I see things very clearly in the early morning and I think there are many that we know that are alive now who will never see another Sunday.”

“In what day are we?”

“Sunday.”

“Qué va,” said Robert Jordan. “Another Sunday is very far. If we see Wednesday we are all right. But I do not like to hear thee talk like this.”

“Every one needs to talk to some one,” the woman said. “Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone.”

“We are not alone. We are all together.”

“The sight of those machines does things to one,” the woman said. “We are nothing against such machines.”

“Yet we can beat them.”

“Look,” the woman said. “I confess a sadness to you, but do not think I lack resolution. Nothing has happened to my resolution.”

“The sadness will dissipate as the sun rises. It is like a mist.”

“Clearly,” the woman said. “If you want it that way. Perhaps it came from talking that foolishness about Valencia. And that failure of a man who has gone to look at his horses. I wounded him much with the story. Kill him, yes. Curse him, yes. But wound him, no.”

“How came you to be with him?”

“How is one with any one? In the first days of the movement and before too, he was something. Something serious. But now he is finished. The plug has been drawn and the wine has all run out of the skin.”

“I do not like him.”

“Nor does he like you, and with reason. Last night I slept with him.” She smiled now and shook her head. “ Vamos a ver,” she said. “I said to him,’Pablo, why did you not kill the foreigner?’

“‘He’s a good boy, Pilar,’he said.’He’s a good boy.’

“So I said,’You understand now that I command?’

“‘Yes, Pilar. Yes,’he said. Later in the night I hear him awake and he is crying. He is crying in a short and ugly manner as a man cries when it is as though there is an animal inside that is shaking him.

“‘What passes with thee, Pablo?’I said to him and I took hold of him and held him.

“‘Nothing, Pilar. Nothing.’

“‘Yes. Something passes with thee.’

“‘The people,’he said.’The way they left me. The gente.’

“‘Yes, but they are with me,’I said,’and I am thy woman.’

“‘Pilar,’he said,’remember the train.’Then he said,’May God aid thee, Pilar.’

“‘What are you talking of God for?’I said to him.’What way is that to speak?’

“‘Yes,’he said.’God and the Virgen.’

“‘Qué va, God and the Virgen,’I said to him.’Is that any way to talk?’

“‘I am afraid to die, Pilar,’he said.’Tengo miedo de morir. Dost thou understand?’

“‘Then get out of bed,’I said to him.’There is not room in one bed for me and thee and thy fear all together.’

“Then he was ashamed and was quiet and I went to sleep but, man, he’s a ruin.”

Robert Jordan said nothing.

“All my life I have had this sadness at intervals,” the woman said. “But it is not like the sadness of Pablo. It does not affect my resolution.”

“I believe that.”

“It may be it is like the times of a woman,” she said. “It may be it is nothing,” she paused, then went on. “I put great illusion in the Republic. I believe firmly in the Republic and I have faith. I believe in it with fervor as those who have religious faith believe in the mysteries.”

“I believe you.”

“And you have this same faith?”

“In the Republic?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” he said, hoping it was true.

“I am happy,” the woman said. “And you have no fear?”

“Not to die,” he said truly.

“But other fears?”

“Only of not doing my duty as I should.”

“Not of capture, as the other had?”

“No,” he said truly. “Fearing that, one would be so preoccupied as to be useless.”

“You are a very cold boy.”

“No,” he said. “I do not think so.”

“No. In the head you are very cold.”

“It is that I am very preoccupied with my work.”

“But you do not like the things of life?”

“Yes. Very much. But not to interfere with my work.”

“You like to drink, I know. I have seen.”

“Yes. Very much. But not to interfere with my work.”

“And women?”

“I like them very much, but I have not given them much importance.”

“You do not care for them?”

“Yes. But I have not found one that moved me as they say they should move you.”

“I think you lie.”

“Maybe a little.”

“But you care for Maria.”

“Yes. Suddenly and very much.”

“I, too. I care for her very much. Yes. Much.”

“I, too,” said Robert Jordan, and could feel his voice thickening. “I, too. Yes.” It gave him pleasure to say it and he said it quite formally in Spanish. “I care for her very much.”

“I will leave you alone with her after we have seen El Sordo.”

Robert Jordan said nothing. Then he said, “That is not necessary.”

“Yes, man. It is necessary. There is not much time.”

“Did you see that in the hand?” he asked.

“No. Do not remember that nonsense of the hand.”

She had put that away with all the other things that might do ill to the Republic.

Robert Jordan said nothing. He was looking at Maria putting away the dishes inside the cave. She wiped her hands and turned and smiled at him. She could not hear what Pilar was saying, but as she smiled at Robert Jordan she blushed dark under the tawny skin and then smiled at him again.

“There is the day also,” the woman said. “You have the night, but there is the day, too. Clearly, there is no such luxury as in Valencia in my time. But you could pick a few wild strawberries or something.” She laughed.

Robert Jordan put his arm on her big shoulder. “I care for thee, too,” he said. “I care for thee very much.”

“Thou art a regular Don Juan Tenorio,” the woman said, embarrassed now with affection. “There is a commencement of caring for every one. Here comes Agustín.”

Robert Jordan went into the cave and up to where Maria was standing. She watched him come toward her, her eyes bright, the blush again on her cheeks and throat.

“Hello, little rabbit,” he said and kissed her on the mouth. She held him tight to her and looked in his face and said, “Hello. Oh, hello. Hello.”

Fernando, still sitting at the table smoking a cigarette, stood up, shook his head and walked out, picking up his carbine from where it leaned against the wall.

“It is very unformal,” he said to Pilar. “And I do not like it. You should take care of the girl.”

“I am,” said Pilar. “That comrade is her novio.”

“Oh,” said Fernando. “In that case, since they are engaged, I encounter it to be perfectly normal.”

“I am pleased,” the woman said.

“Equally,” Fernando agreed gravely. “Salud, Pilar.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the upper post to relieve Primitivo.”

“Where the hell are you going?” Agustín asked the grave little man as he came up.

“To my duty,” Fernando said with dignity.

“Thy duty,” said Agustín mockingly. “I besmirch the milk of thy duty.” Then turning to the woman, “Where the un-nameable is this vileness that I am to guard?”

“In the cave,” Pilar said. “In two sacks. And I am tired of thy obscenity.”

“I obscenity in the milk of thy tiredness,” Agustín said.

“Then go and befoul thyself,” Pilar said to him without heat.

“Thy mother,” Agustín replied.

“Thou never had one,” Pilar told him, the insults having reached the ultimate formalism in Spanish in which the acts are never stated but only implied.

“What are they doing in there?” Agustín now asked confidentially.

“Nothing,” Pilar told him. “Nada. We are, after all, in the spring, animal.”

“Animal,” said Agustín, relishing the word. “Animal. And thou. Daughter of the great whore of whores. I befoul myself in the milk of the springtime.”

Pilar slapped him on the shoulder.

“You,” she said, and laughed that booming laugh. “You lack variety in your cursing. But you have force. Did you see the planes?”

“I un-name in the milk of their motors,” Agustín said, nodding his head and biting his lower lip.

“That’s something,” Pilar said. “That is really something. But really difficult of execution.”

“At that altitude, yes,” Agustín grinned. “Desde luego. But it is better to joke.”

“Yes,” the woman of Pablo said. “It is much better to joke, and you are a good man and you joke with force.”

“Listen, Pilar,” Agustín said seriously. “Something is preparing. It is not true?”

“How does it seem to you?”

“Of a foulness that cannot be worse. Those were many planes, woman. Many planes.”

“And thou hast caught fear from them like all the others?”

“Qué va,” said Agustín. “What do you think they are preparing?”

“Look,” Pilar said. “From this boy coming for the bridges obviously the Republic is preparing an offensive. From these planes obviously the Fascists are preparing to meet it. But why show the planes?”

“In this war are many foolish things,” Agustín said. “In this war there is an idiocy without bounds.”

“Clearly,” said Pilar. “Otherwise we could not be here.”

“Yes,” said Agustín. “We swim within the idiocy for a year now. But Pablo is a man of much understanding. Pablo is very wily.”

“Why do you say this?”

“I say it.”

“But you must understand,” Pilar explained. “It is now too late to be saved by wiliness and he has lost the other.”

“I understand,” said Agustín. “I know we must go. And since we must win to survive ultimately, it is necessary that the bridges must be blown. But Pablo, for the coward that he now is, is very smart.”

“I, too, am smart.”

“No, Pilar,” Agustín said. “You are not smart. You are brave. You are loyal. You have decision. You have intuition. Much decision and much heart. But you are not smart.”

“You believe that?” the woman asked thoughtfully.

“Yes, Pilar.”

“The boy is smart,” the woman said. “Smart and cold. Very cold in the head.”

“Yes,” Agustín said. “He must know his business or they would not have him doing this. But I do not know that he is smart. Pablo I know is smart.”

“But rendered useless by his fear and his disinclination to action.”

“But still smart.”

“And what do you say?”

“Nothing. I try to consider it intelligently. In this moment we need to act with intelligence. After the bridge we must leave at once. All must be prepared. We must know for where we are leaving and how.”

“Naturally.”

“For this — Pablo. It must be done smartly.”

“I have no confidence in Pablo.”

“In this, yes.”

“No. You do not know how far he is ruined.”

“Pero es muy vivo. He is very smart. And if we do not do this smartly we are obscenitied.”

“I will think about it,” Pilar said. “I have the day to think about it.”

“For the bridges; the boy,” Agustín said. “This he must know. Look at the fine manner in which the other organized the train.”

“Yes,” Pilar said. “It was really he who planned all.”

“You for energy and resolution,” Agustín said. “But Pablo for the moving. Pablo for the retreat. Force him now to study it.”

“You are a man of intelligence.”

“Intelligent, yes,” Agustín said. “But sin picardia. Pablo for that.”

“With his fear and all?”

“With his fear and all.”

“And what do you think of the bridges?”

“It is necessary. That I know. Two things we must do. We must leave here and we must win. The bridges are necessary if we are to Win.”

“If Pablo is so smart, why does he not see that?”

“He wants things as they are for his own weakness. He wants tO stay in the eddy of his own weakness. But the river is rising. Forced to a change, he will be smart in the change. Es muy vivo.”

“It is good that the boy did not kill him.”

“Qué va. The gypsy wanted me to kill him last night. The gypsy is an animal.”

“You’re an animal, too,” she said. “But intelligent.”

“We are both intelligent,” Agustín said. “But the talent is Pablo!”

“But difficult to put up with. You do not know how ruined.”

“Yes. But a talent. Look, Pilar. To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.”

“I will think it over,” she said. “We must start now. We are late.” Then, raising her voice, “English!” she called. “Inglés! Come on! Let us go.”

Chapter 10

“Let us rest,” Pilar said to Robert Jordan. “Sit down here, Maria, and let us rest.”

“We should continue,” Robert Jordan said. “Rest when we get there. I must see this man.”

“You will see him,” the woman told him. “There is no hurry. Sit down here, Maria.”

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said. “Rest at the top.”

“I rest now,” the woman said, and sat down by the stream. The girl sat by her in the heather, the sun shining on her hair. Only Robert Jordan stood looking across the high mountain meadow with the trout brook running through it. There was heather growing where he stood. There were gray boulders rising from the yellow bracken that replaced the heather in the lower part of the meadow and below was the dark line of the pines.

“How far is it to El Sordo’s?” he asked.

“Not far,” the woman said. “It is across this open country, down into the next valley and above the timber at the head of the stream. Sit thee down and forget thy seriousness.”

“I want to see him and get it over with.”

“I want to bathe my feet,” the woman said and, taking off her rope-soled shoes and pulling off a heavy wool stocking, she put her right foot into the stream. “My God, it’s cold.”

“We should have taken horses,” Robert Jordan told her.

“This is good for me,” the woman said. “This is what I have been missing. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, except that I am in a hurry.”

“Then calm yourself. There is much time. What a day it is and how I am contented not to be in pine trees. You cannot imagine how one can tire of pine trees. Aren’t you tired of the pines, guapa?”

“I like them,” the girl said.

“What can you like about them?”

“I like the odor and the feel of the needles under foot. I like the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other.”

“You like anything,” Pilar said. “You are a gift to any man if you could cook a little better. But the pine tree makes a forest of boredom. Thou hast never known a forest of beech, nor of oak, nor of chestnut. Those are forests. In such forests each tree differs and there is character and beauty. A forest of pine trees is boredom. What do you say, Inglés?”

“I like the pines, too.”

“Pero, venga,” Pilar said. “Two of you. So do I like the pines, but we have been too long in these pines. Also I am tired of the mountains. In mountains there are only two directions. Down and up and down leads only to the road and the towns of the Fascists.”

“Do you ever go to Segovia?”

“Qué va. With this face? This is a face that is known. How would you like to be ugly, beautiful one?” she said to Maria.

“Thou art not ugly.”

“Vamos, I’m not ugly. I was born ugly. All my life I have been ugly. You, Inglés, who know nothing about women. Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare,” she put the other foot in the stream, then removed it. “God, it’s cold. Look at the water wagtail,” she said and pointed to the gray ball of a bird that was bobbing up and down on a stone up the stream. “Those are no good for anything. Neither to sing nor to eat. Only to jerk their tails up and down. Give me a cigarette, Inglés,” she said and taking it, lit it from a flint and steel lighter in the pocket of her skirt. She puffed on the cigarette and looked at Maria and Robert Jordan.

“Life is very curious,” she said, and blew smoke from her nostrils. “I would have made a good man, but I am all woman and all ugly. Yet many men have loved me and I have loved many men. It is curious. Listen, Inglés, this is interesting. Look at me, as ugly as I am. Look closely, Inglés.”

“Thou art not ugly.”

“Qué no? Don’t lie to me. Or,” she laughed the deep laugh. “Has it begun to work with thee? No. That is a joke. No. Look at the ugliness. Yet one has a feeling within one that blinds a man while he loves you. You, with that feeling, blind him, and blind yourself. Then one day, for no reason, he sees you ugly as you really are and he is not blind any more and then you see yourself as ugly as he sees you and you lose your man and your feeling. Do you understand, guapa?” She patted the girl on the shoulder.

“No,” said Maria. “Because thou art not ugly.”

“Try to use thy head and not thy heart, and listen,” Pilar said. “I am telling you things of much interest. Does it not interest you, Inglés?”

“Yes. But we should go.”

“Qué va, go. I am very well here. Then,” she went on, addressing herself to Robert Jordan now as though she were speaking to a classroom; almost as though she were lecturing. “After a while, when you are as ugly as I am, as ugly as women can be, then, as I say, after a while the feeling, the idiotic feeling that you are beautiful, grows slowly in one again. It grows like a cabbage. And then, when the feeling is grown, another man sees you and thinks you are beautiful and it is all to do over. Now I think I am past it, but it still might come. You are lucky, guapa, that you are not ugly.”

“But I am ugly,” Maria insisted.

“Ask him,” said Pilar. “And don’t put thy feet in the stream because it will freeze them.”

“If Roberto says we should go, I think we should go,” Maria said.

“Listen to you,” Pilar said. “I have as much at stake in this as thy Roberto and I say that we are well off resting here by the stream and that there is much time. Furthermore, I like to talk. It is the only civilized thing we have. How otherwise can we divert ourselves? Does what I say not hold interest for you, Inglés?”

“You speak very well. But there are other things that interest me more than talk of beauty or lack of beauty.”

“Then let us talk of what interests thee.”

“Where were you at the start of the movement?”

“In my town.”

“Avila?”

“Qué va, Avila.”

“Pablo said he was from Avila.”

“He lies. He wanted to take a big city for his town. It was this town,” and she named a town.

“And what happened?”

“Much,” the woman said. “Much. And all of it ugly. Even that which was glorious.”

“Tell me about it,” Robert Jordan said.

“It is brutal,” the woman said. “I do not like to tell it before the girl.”

“Tell it,” said Robert Jordan. “And if it is not for her, that she should not listen.”

“I can hear it,” Maria said. She put her hand on Robert Jordan’s. “There is nothing that I cannot hear.”

“It isn’t whether you can hear it,” Pilar said. “It is whether I should tell it to thee and make thee bad dreams.”

“I will not get bad dreams from a story,” Maria told her. “You think after all that has happened with us I should get bad dreams from a story?”

“Maybe it will give the Inglés bad dreams.”

“Try it and see.”

“No, Inglés, I am not joking. Didst thou see the start of the movement in any small town?”

“No,” Robert Jordan said.

“Then thou hast seen nothing. Thou hast seen the ruin that now is Pablo, but you should have seen Pablo on that day.”

“Tell it.”

“Nay. I do not want to.”

“Tell it.”

“All right, then. I will tell it truly as it was. But thee, guapa, if it reaches a point that it molests thee, tell me.”

“I will not listen to it if it molests me,” Maria told her. “It cannot be worse than many things.”

“I believe it can,” the woman said. “Give me another cigarette, Inglés, and vamonos.”

The girl leaned back against the heather on the bank of the stream and Robert Jordan stretched himself out, his shoulders against the ground and his head against a clump of the heather. He reached out and found Maria’s hand and held it in his, rubbing their two hands against the heather until she opened her hand and laid it flat on top of his as they listened.

“It was early in the morning when the civiles surrendered at the barracks,” Pilar began.

“You had assaulted the barracks?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Pablo had surrounded it in the dark, cut the telephone wires, placed dynamite under one wall and called on the guardia civil to surrender. They would not. And at daylight he blew the wall open. There was fighting. Two civiles were killed. Four were wounded and four surrendered.

“We all lay on roofs and on the ground and at the edge of walls and of buildings in the early morning light and the dust cloud of the explosion had not yet settled, for it rose high in the air and there was no wind to carry it, and all of us were firing into the broken side of the building, loading and firing into the smoke, and from within there was still the flashing of rifles and then there was a shout from in the smoke not to fire more, and out came the four civiles with their hands up. A big part of the roof had fallen in and the wall was gone and they came out to surrender.

“‘Are there more inside?’Pablo shouted.

“‘There are wounded.’

“‘Guard these,’Pablo said to four who had come up from where we were firing.’Stand there. Against the wall,’he told the civiles. The four civiles stood against the wall, dirty, dusty, smoke-grimed, with the four who were guarding them pointing their guns at them and Pablo and the others went in to finish the wounded.

“After they had done this and there was no longer any noise of the wounded, neither groaning, nor crying out, nor the noise of shooting in the barracks, Pablo and the others came out and Pablo had his shotgun over his back and was carrying in his hand a Mauser pistol.

“‘Look, Pilar,’he said.’This was in the hand of the officer who killed himself. Never have I fired a pistol. You,’he said to one of the guards,’show me how it works. No. Don’t show me. Tell me.’

“The four civiles had stood against the wall, sweating and saying nothing while the shooting had gone on inside the barracks. They were all tall men with the faces of guardias civiles, which is the same model of face as mine is. Except that their faces were covered with the small stubble of this their last morning of not yet being shaved and they stood there against the wall and said nothing.

“‘You,’said Pablo to the one who stood nearest him.’Tell me how it works.’

“‘Pull the small lever down,’the man said in a very dry voice.’Pull the receiver back and let it snap forward.’

“‘What is the receiver?’asked Pablo, and he looked at the four civiles.’What is the receiver?’

“‘The block on top of the action.’

“Pablo pulled it back, but it stuck.’What now?’he said.’It is jammed. You have lied to me.’

“‘Pull it farther back and let it snap lightly forward,’the civil said, and I have never heard such a tone of voice. It was grayer than a morning without sunrise.

“Pablo pulled and let go as the man had told him and the block snapped forward into place and the pistol was cocked with the hammer back. It is an ugly pistol, small in the round handle, large and flat in the barrel, and unwieldy. All this time the civiles had been watching him and they had said nothing.

“‘What are you going to do with us?’one asked him.

“‘Shoot thee,’Pablo said.

“‘When?’the man asked in the same gray voice.

“‘Now,’said Pablo.

“‘Where?’asked the man.

“‘Here,’said Pablo.’Here. Now. Here and now. Have you anything to say?’

“‘Nada,’said the civil.’Nothing. But it is an ugly thing.’

“‘And you are an ugly thing,’Pablo said.’You murderer of peasants. You who would shoot your own mother.’

“‘I have never killed any one,’the civil said.’And do not speak of my mother.’

“‘Show us how to die. You, who have always done the killing.’

“‘There is no necessity to insult us,’another civil said.’And we know how to die.’

“‘Kneel down against the wall with your heads against the wall,’Pablo told them. The civiles looked at one another.

“‘Kneel, I say,’Pablo said.’Get down and kneel.’

“‘How does it seem to you, Paco?’one civil said to the tallest, who had spoken with Pablo about the pistol. He wore a corporal’s stripes on his sleeves and was sweating very much although the early morning was still cool.

“‘It is as well to kneel,’he answered.’It is of no importance.’

“‘It is closer to the earth,’the first one who had spoken said, trying to make a joke, but they were all too grave for a joke and no one smiled.

“‘Then let us kneel,’the first civil said, and the four knelt, looking very awkward with their heads against the wall and their hands by their sides, and Pablo passed behind them and shot each in turn in the back of the head with the pistol, going from one to another and putting the barrel of the pistol against the back of their heads, each man slipping down as he fired. I can hear the pistol still, sharp and yet muffled, and see the barrel jerk and the head of the man drop forward. One held his head still when the pistol touched it. One pushed his head forward and pressed his forehead against the stone. One shivered in his whole body and his head was shaking. Only one put his hands in front of his eyes, and he was the last one, and the four bodies were slumped against the wall when Pablo turned away from them and came toward us with the pistol still in his hand.

“‘Hold this for me, Pilar,’he said.’I do not know how to put down the hammer,’and he handed me the pistol and stood there looking at the four guards as they lay against the wall of the barracks. All those who were with us stood there too, looking at them, and no one said anything.

“We had won the town and it was still early in the morning and no one had eaten nor had any one drunk coffee and we looked at each other and we were all powdered with dust from the blowing up of the barracks, as powdered as men are at a threshing, and I stood holding the pistol and it was heavy in my hand and I felt weak in the stomach when I looked at the guards dead there against the wall; they all as gray and as dusty as we were, but each one was now moistening with his blood the dry dirt by the wall where they lay. And as we stood there the sun rose over the far hills and shone now on the road where we stood and on the white wall of the barracks and the dust in the air was golden in that first sun and the peasant who was beside me looked at the wall of the barracks and what lay there and then looked at us and then at the sun and said,’Vaya, a day that commences.’

“‘Now let us go and get coffee,’I said.

“‘Good, Pilar, good,’he said. And we went up into the town to the Plaza, and those were the last people who were shot in the village.”

“What happened to the others?” Robert Jordan asked. “Were there no other fascists in the village?”

“Qué va, were there no other fascists? There were more than twenty. But none was shot.”

“What was done?”

“Pablo had them beaten to death with flails and thrown from the top of the cliff into the river.”

“All twenty?”

“I will tell you. It is not so simple. And in my life never do I wish to see such a scene as the flailing to death in the plaza on the top of the cliff above the river.

“The town is built on the high bank above the river and there is a square there with a fountain and there are benches and there are big trees that give a shade for the benches. The balconies of the houses look out on the plaza. Six streets enter on the plaza and there is an arcade from the houses that goes around the plaza so that one can walk in the shade of the arcade when the sun is hot. On three sides of the plaza is the arcade and on the fourth side is the walk shaded by the trees beside the edge of the cliff with, far below, the river. It is three hundred feet down to the river.

“Pablo organized it all as he did the attack on the barracks. First he had the entrances to the streets blocked off with carts as though to organize the plaze for a capea. For an amateur bullfight. The fascists were all held in the Ayuntamiento, the city hall, which was the largest building on one side of the plaza. It was there the clock was set in the wall and it was in the buildings under the arcade that the club of the fascists was. And under the arcade on the sidewalk in front of their club was where they had their chairs and tables for their club. It was there, before the movement, that they were accustomed to take the apéritifs. The chairs and the tables were of wicker. It looked like a café but was more elegant.”

“But was there no fighting to take them?”

“Pablo had them seized in the night before he assaulted the barracks. But he had already surrounded the barracks. They were all seized in their homes at the same hour the attack started. That was intelligent. Pablo is an organizer. Otherwise he would have had people attacking him at his flanks and at his rear while he was assaulting the barracks of the guardia civil.

“Pablo is very intelligent but very brutal. He had this of the village well planned and well ordered. Listen. After the assault was successful, and the last four guards had surrendered, and he had shot them against the wall, and we had drunk coffee at the café that always opened earliest in the morning by the corner from which the early bus left, he proceeded to the organization of the plaza. Carts were piled exactly as for a capea except that the side toward the river was not enclosed. That was left open. Then Pablo ordered the priest to confess the fascists and give them the necessary sacraments.”

“Where was this done?”

“In the Ayuntamiento, as I said. There was a great crowd outside and while this was going on inside with the priest, there was some levity outside and shouting of obscenities, but most of the people were very serious and respectful. Those who made jokes were those who were already drunk from the celebration of the taking of the barracks and there were useless characters who would have been drunk at any time.

“While the priest was engaged in these duties, Pablo organized those in the plaza into two lines.

“He placed them in two lines as you would place men for a rope pulling contest, or as they stand in a city to watch the ending of a bicycle road race with just room for the cyclists to pass between, or as men stood to allow the passage of a holy image in a procession. Two meters was left between the lines and they extended from the door of the Ayuntamiento clear across the plaza to the edge of the cliff. So that, from the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, looking across the plaza, one coming out would see two solid lines of people waiting.

“They were armed with flails such as are used to beat out the grain and they were a good flail’s length apart. All did not have flails, as enough flails could not be obtained. But most had flails obtained from the store of Don Guillermo Martin, who was a fascist and sold all sorts of agricultural implements. And those who did not have flails had heavy herdsman’s clubs, or ox-goads, and some had wooden pitchforks; those with wooden tines that are used to fork the chaff and straw into the air after the flailing. Some had sickles and reaping hooks but these Pablo placed at the far end where the lines reached the edge of the cliff.

“These lines were quiet and it was a clear day, as today is clear, and there were clouds high in the sky, as there are now, and the plaza was not yet dusty for there had been a heavy dew in the night, and the trees cast a shade over the men in the lines and you could hear the water running from the brass pipe in the mouth of the lion and falling into the bowl of the fountain where the women bring the water jars to fill them.

“Only near the Ayuntamiento, where the priest was complying with his duties with the fascists, was there any ribaldry, and that came from those worthless ones who, as I said, were already drunk and were crowded around the windows shouting obscenities and jokes in bad taste in through the iron bars of the windows. Most of’the men in the lines were waiting quietly and I heard one say to another,’Will there be women?’

“And another said,’I hope to Christ, no.’

“Then one said,’Here is the woman of Pablo. Listen, Pilar. Will there be women?’

“I looked at him and he was a peasant dressed in his Sunday jacket and sweating heavily and I said,’No, Joaquín. There are no women. We are not killing the women. Why should we kill their women?’

“And he said,’Thanks be to Christ, there are no women and when does it start?’

“And I said,’As soon as the priest finishes.’

“‘And the priest?’

“‘I don’t know,’I told him and I saw his face working and the sweat coming down on his forehead.’I have never killed a man,’he said.

“‘Then you will learn,’the peasant next to him said.’But I do not think one blow with this will kill a man,’and he held his flail in both hands and looked at it with doubt.

“‘That is the beauty of it,’another peasant said.’There must be many blows.’

“‘They have taken Valladolid. They have Avila,’some one said.’I heard that before we came into town.’

“‘They will never take this town. This town is ours. We have struck ahead of them,’I said.’Pablo is not one to wait for them to strike.’

“‘Pablo is able,’another said.’But in this finishing off of the civiles he was egoistic. Don’t you think so, Pilar?’

“‘Yes,’I said.’But now all are participating in this.’

“‘Yes,’he said.’It is well organized. But why do we not hear more news of the movement?’

“‘Pablo cut the telephone wires before the assault on the barracks. They are not yet repaired.’

“‘Ah,’he said.’It is for this we hear nothing. I had my news from the roadmender’s station early this morning.’

“‘Why is this done thus, Pilar?’he said to me.

“‘To save bullets,’I said.’And that each man should have his share in the responsibility.’

“‘That it should start then. That it should start.’And I looked at him and saw that he was crying.

“‘Why are you crying, Joaquín?’I asked him.’This is not to cry about’

“‘I cannot help it, Pilar,’he said.’I have never killed any one.’

“If you have not seen the day of revolution in a small town where all know all in the town and always have known all, you have seen nothing. And on this day most of the men in the double line across the plaza wore the clothes in which they worked in the fields, having come into town hurriedly, but some, not knowing how one should dress for the first day of a movement, wore their clothes for Sundays or holidays, and these, seeing that the others, including those who had attacked the barracks, wore their oldest clothes, were ashamed of being wrongly dressed. But they did not like to take off their jackets for fear of losing them, or that they might be stolen by the worthless ones, and so they stood, sweating in the sun and waiting for it to commence.

“Then the wind rose and the dust was now dry in the plaza for the men walking and standing and shuffling had loosened it and it commenced to blow and a man in a dark blue Sunday jacket shouted’Agua! Agua!’and the caretaker of the plaza, whose duty it was to sprinkle the plaza each morning with a hose, came and turned the hose on and commenced to lay the dust at the edge of the plaza, and then toward the center. Then the two lines fell back and let him lay the dust over the center of the plaza; the hose sweeping in wide arcs and the water glistening in the sun and the men leaning on their flails or the clubs or the white wood pitchforks and watching the sweep of the stream of water. And then, when the plaza was nicely moistened and the dust settled, the lines formed up again and a peasant shouted,’When do we get the first fascist? When does the first one come out of the box?’

“‘Soon,’Pablo shouted from the door of the Ayuntamiento.’Soon the first one comes out.’His voice was hoarse from shouting in the assault and from the smoke of the barracks.

“‘What’s the delay?’some one asked.

“‘They’re still occupied with their sins,’Pablo shouted.

“‘Clearly, there are twenty of them,’a man said.

“‘More,’said another.

“‘Among twenty there are many sins to recount.’

“‘Yes, but I think it’s a trick to gain time. Surely facing such an emergency one could not remember one’s sins except for the biggest.’

“‘Then have patience. For with more than twenty of them there are enough of the biggest sins to take some time.’

“‘I have patience,’said the other.’But it is better to get it over with. Both for them and for us. It is July and there is much work. We have harvested but we have not threshed. We are not yet in the time of fairs and festivals.’

“‘But this will be a fair and festival today,’another said.’The Fair of Liberty and from this day, when these are extinguished, the town and the land are ours.’

“‘We thresh fascists today,’said one,’and out of the chaff comes the freedom of this pueblo.’

“‘We must administer it well to deserve it,’said another.’Pilar,’he said to me,’when do we have a meeting for organization?’

“‘Immediately after this is completed,’I told him.’In the same building of the Ayuntamiento.’

“I was wearing one of the three-cornered patent leather hats of the guardia civil as a joke and I had put the hammer down on the pistol, holding it with my thumb to lower it as I pulled on the trigger as seemed natural, and the pistol was held in a rope I had around my waist, the long barrel stuck under the rope. And when I put it on the joke seemed very good to me, although afterwards I wished I had taken the holster of the pistol instead of the hat. But one of the men in the line said to me,’Pilar, daughter. It seems to me bad taste for thee to wear that hat. Now we have finished with such things as the guardia civil.’

“‘Then,’I said,’I will take it off.’And I did.

“‘Give it to me,’he said.’It should be destroyed.’

“And as we were at the far end of the line where the walk runs along the cliff by the river, he took the hat in his hand and sailed it off over the cliff with the motion a herdsman makes throwing a stone underhand at the bulls to herd them. The hat sailed far out into space and we could see it smaller and smaller, the patent leather shining in the clear air, sailing down to the river. I looked back over the square and at all the windows and all the balconies there were people crowded and there was the double line of men across the square to the doorway of the Ayuntamiento and the crowd swarmed Outside against the windows of that building and there was the noise of many people talking, and then I heard a shout and some one said’Here comes the first one,’and it was Don Benito Garcia, the Mayor, and he came out bareheaded walking slowly from the door and down the porch and nothing happened; and he walked between the line of men with the flails and nothing happened. He passed two men, four men, eight men, ten men and nothing happened and he was walking between that line of men, his head up, his fat face gray, his eyes looking ahead and then flickering from side to side and walking steadily. And nothing happened.

“From a balcony some one cried out,’Qué pasa, cobardes? What is the matter, cowards?’and still Don Benito walked along between the men and nothing happened. Then I saw a man three men down from where I was standing and his face was working and he was biting his lips and his hands were white on his flail. I saw him looking toward Don Benito, watching him come on. And still nothing happened. Then, just before Don Benito came abreast of this man, the man raised his flail high so that it struck the man beside him and smashed a blow at Don Benito that hit him on the side of the head and Don Benito looked at him and the man struck again and shouted,’That for you, Cabron,’and the blow hit Don Benito in the face and he raised his hands to his face and they beat him until he fell and the man who had struck him first called to others to help him and he pulled on the collar of Don Benito’s shirt and others took hold of his arms and with his face in the dust of the plaza, they dragged him over the walk to the edge of the cliff and threw him over and into the river. And the man who hit him first was kneeling by the edge of the cliff looking over after him and saying,’The Cabron! The Cabron! Oh, the Cabron!’He was a tenant of Don Benito and they had never gotten along together. There had been a dispute about a piece of land by the river that Don Benito had taken from this man and let to another and this man had long hated him. This man did not join the line again but sat by the cliff looking down where Don Benito had fallen.

“After Don Benito no one would come out. There was no noise now in the plaza as all were waiting to see who it was that would come out. Then a drunkard shouted in a great voice,’Qué salga el toro! Let the bull out!’

“Then some one from by the windows of the Ayuntamiento yelled,’They won’t move! They are all praying!’

“Another drunkard shouted,’Pull them out. Come on, pull them out. The time for praying is finished.’

“But none came out and then I saw a man coming out of the door.

“It was Don Federico Gonzalez, who owned the mill and feed store and was a fascist of the first order. He was tall and thin and his hair was brushed over the top of his head from one side to the other to cover a baldness and he wore a nightshirt that was tucked into his trousers. He was barefooted as when he had been taken from his home and he walked ahead of Pablo holding his hands above his head, and Pablo walked behind him with the barrels of his shotgun pressing against the back of Don Federico Gonzalez until Don Federico entered the double line. But when Pablo left him and returned to the door of the Ayuntamiento, Don Federico could not walk forward, and stood there, his eyes turned up to heaven and his hands reaching up as though they would grasp the sky.

“‘He has no legs to walk,’some one said.

“‘What’s the matter, Don Federico? Can’t you walk?’some one shouted to him. But Don Federico stood there with his hands up and only his lips were moving.

“‘Get on,’Pablo shouted to him from the steps.’Walk.’

“Don Federico stood there and could not move. One of the drunkards poked him in the backside with a flail handle and Don Federico gave a quick jump as a balky horse might, but still stood in the same place, his hands up, and his eyes up toward the sky.

“Then the peasant who stood beside me said,’This is shameful. I have nothing against him but such a spectacle must terminate.’So he walked down the line and pushed through to where Don Federico was standing and said,’With your permission,’and hit him a great blow alongside of the head with a club.

“Then Don Federico dropped his hands and put them over the top of his head where the bald place was and with his head bent and covered by his hands, the thin long hairs that covered the bald place escaping through his fingers, he ran fast through the double line With flails falling on his back and shoulders until he fell and those at the end of the line picked him up and swung him over the cliff. Never did he open his mouth from the moment he came out pushed by the shotgun of Pablo. His only difficulty was to move forward. It was as though he had no command of his legs.

“After Don Federico, I saw there was a concentration of the hardest men at the end of the lines by the edge of the cliff and I left there and I went to the Arcade of the Ayuntamiento and pushed aside two drunkards and looked in the window. In the big room of the Ayuntamiento they were all kneeling in a half circle praying and the priest was kneeling and praying with them. Pablo and one named Cuatro Dedos, Four Fingers, a cobbler, who was much with Pablo then, and two others were standing with shotguns and Pablo said to the priest,’Who goes now?’and the priest went on praying and did not answer him.

“‘Listen, you,’Pablo said to the priest in his hoarse voice,’who goes now? Who is ready now?’

“The priest would not speak to Pablo and acted as though he were not there and I could see Pablo was becoming very angry.

“‘Let us all go together,’Don Ricardo Montalvo, who was a land owner, said to Pablo, raising his head and stopping praying to speak.

“‘Qué va,’said Pablo.’One at a time as you are ready.’

“‘Then I go now,’Don Ricardo said.’I’ll never be any more ready.’The priest blessed him as he spoke and blessed him again as he stood up, without interrupting his praying, and held up a crucifix for Don Ricardo to kiss and Don Ricardo kissed it and then turned and said to Pablo,’Nor ever again as ready. You Cabron of the bad milk. Let us go.’

“Don Ricardo was a short man with gray hair and a thick neck and he had a shirt on with no collar. He was bow-legged from much horseback riding.’Good-by,’he said to all those who were kneeling.’Don’t be sad. To die is nothing. The only bad thing is to die at the hands of this canalla. Don’t touch me,’he said to Pablo.’Don’t touch me with your shotgun.’

“He walked out of the front of the Ayuntamiento with his gray hair and his small gray eyes and his thick neck looking very short and angry. He looked at the double line of peasants and he spat on the ground. He could spit actual saliva which, in such a circumstance, as you should know, Inglés, is very rare and he said,’Arriba Espana! Down with the miscalled Republic and I obscenity in the milk of your fathers.’

“So they clubbed him to death very quickly because of the insult, beating him as soon as he reached the first of the men, beating him as he tried to walk with his head up, beating him until he fell and chopping at him with reaping hooks and the sickles, and many men bore him to the edge of the cliff to throw him over and there was blood now on their hands and on their clothing, and now began to be the feeling that these who came out were truly enemies and should be killed.

“Until Don Ricardo came out with that fierceness and calling those insults, many in the line would have given much, I am sure, never to have been in the line. And if any one had shouted from the line,’Come, let us pardon the rest of them. Now they have had their lesson,’I am sure most would have agreed.

“But Don Ricardo with all his bravery did a great disservice to the others. For he aroused the men in the line and where, before, they were performing a duty and with no great taste for it, now they were angry, and the difference was apparent.

“‘Let the priest out and the thing will go faster,’some one shouted.

“‘Let out the priest.’

“‘We’ve had three thieves, let us have the priest.’

“‘Two thieves,’a short peasant said to the man who had shouted.’It was two thieves with Our Lord.’

“‘Whose Lord?’the man said, his face angry and red.

“‘In the manner of speaking it is said Our Lord.’

“‘He isn’t my Lord; not in joke,’said the other.’And thee hadst best watch thy mouth if thou dost not want to walk between the lines.’

“‘I am as good a Libertarian Republican as thou,’the short peasant said.’I struck Don Ricardo across the mouth. I struck Don Federico across the back. I missed Don Benito. But I say Our Lord is the formal way of speaking of the man in question and that it was two thieves.’

“‘I obscenity in the milk of thy Republicanism. You speak of Don this and Don that.’

“‘Here are they so called.’

“‘Not by me, the cabrones. And thy Lord — Hi! Here comes a new one!’

“It was then that we saw a disgraceful sight, for the man who walked out of the doorway of the Ayuntamiento was Don Faustino Rivero, the oldest son of his father, Don Celestino Rivero, a land owner. He was tall and his hair was yellow and it was freshly combed back from his forehead for he always carried a comb in his pocket and he had combed his hair now before coming out. He was a great annoyer of girls, and he was a coward, and he had always wished to be an amateur bullfighter. He went much with gypsies and with builfighters and with bull raisers and delighted to wear the Andalucian costume, but he had no courage and was considered a joke. One time he was announced to appear in an amateur benefit fight for the old people’s home in Avila and to kill a bull from on horseback in the Andalucian style, which he had spent much time practising, and when he had seen the size of the bull that had been substituted for him in place of the little one, weak in the legs, he had picked out himself, he had said he was sick and, some said, put three fingers down his throat to make himself vomit.

“When the lines saw him, they commenced to shout,’Hola, Don Faustino. Take care not to vomit.’

“‘Listen to me, Don Faustino. There are beautiful girls over the cliff.’

“‘Don Faustino. Wait a minute and we will bring out a bull bigger than the other.’

“And another shouted,’Listen to me, Don Faustino. Hast thou ever heard speak of death?’

“Don Faustino stood there, still acting brave. He was still under the impulse that had made him announce to the others that he was going out. It was the same impulse that had made him announce himself for the bullfight. That had made him believe and hope that he could be an amateur matador. Now he was inspired by the example of Don Ricardo and he stood there looking both handsome and brave and he made his face scornful. But he could not speak.

“‘Come, Don Faustino,’some one called from the line.’Come, Don Faustino. Here is the biggest bull of all.’

“Don Faustino stood looking out and I think as he looked, that there was no pity for him on either side of the line. Still he looked both handsome and superb; but time was shortening and there was only one direction to go.

“‘Don Faustino,’some one called.’What are you waiting for, Don Faustino?’

“‘He is preparing to vomit,’some one said and the lines laughed.

“‘Don Faustino,’a peasant called.’Vomit if it will give thee pleasure. To me it is all the same.’

“Then, as we watched, Don Faustino looked along the lines and across the square to the cliff and then when he saw the cliff and the emptiness beyond, he turned quickly and ducked back toward the entrance of the Ayuntamiento.

“All the lines roared and some one shouted in a high voice,’Where do you go, Don Faustino? Where do you go?’

“‘He goes to throw up,’shouted another and they all laughed again.

“Then we saw Don Faustino coming out again with Pablo behind him with the shotgun. All of his style was gone now. The sight of the lines had taken away his type and his style and he came out now with Pablo behind him as though Pablo were cleaning a Street and Don Faustino was what he was pushing ahead of him. Don Faustino came out now and he was crossing himself and praying and then he put his hands in front of his eyes and walked down the steps toward the lines.

“‘Leave him alone,’some one shouted.’Don’t touch him.’

“The lines understood and no one made a move to touch Don Faustino and, with his hands shaking and held in front of his eyes, and with his mouth moving, he walked along between the lines.

“No one said anything and no one touched him and, when he was halfway through the lines, he could go no farther and fell to his knees.

“No one struck him. I was walking along parallel to the line to see what happened to him and a peasant leaned down and lifted him to his feet and said,’Get up, Don Faustino, and keep walking. The bull has not yet come out.’

“Don Faustino could not walk alone and the peasant in a black smock helped him on one side and another peasant in a black smock and herdsman’s boots helped him on the other, supporting him by the arms and Don Faustino walking along between the lines with his hands over his eyes, his lips never quiet, and his yellow hair slicked on his head and shining in the sun, and as he passed the peasants would say,’Don Faustino, buen provecho. Don Faustino, that you should have a good appetite,’and others said,’Don Faustino, a sus ordenes. Don Faustino at your orders,’and one, who had failed at bullfighting himself, said,’Don Faustino. Matador, a sus ordenes,’and another said,’Don Faustino, there are beautiful girls in heaven, Don Faustino.’And they walked Don Faustino through the lines, holding him close on either side, holding him up as he walked, with him with his hands over his eyes. But he must have looked through his fingers, because when they came to the edge of the cliff with him, he knelt again, throwing himself down and clutching the ground and holding to the grass, saying,’No. No. No. Please. NO. Please. Please. No. No.’

“Then the peasants who were with him and the others, the hard ones of the end of the line, squatted quickly behind him as he knelt, and gave him a rushing push and he was over the edge without ever having been beaten and you heard him crying loud and high as he fell.

“It was then I knew that the lines had become cruel and it was first the insults of Don Ricardo and second the cowardice of Don Faustino that had made them so.

“‘Let us have another,’a peasant called out and another peasant slapped him on the back and said,’Don Faustino! What a thing! Don Faustino!’

“‘He’s seen the big bull now,’another said.’Throwing up will never help him, now.’

“‘In my life,’another peasant said,’in my life I’ve never seen a thing like Don Faustino.’

“‘There are others,’another peasant said.’Have patience. Who knows what we may yet see?’

“‘There may be giants and dwarfs,’the first peasant said.’There may be Negroes and rare beasts from Africa. But for me never, never will there be anything like Don Faustino. But let’s have another one! Come on. Let’s have another one!’

“The drunkards were handing around bottles of anis and cognac that they had looted from the bar of the club of the fascists, drinking them down like wine, and many of the men in the lines were beginning to be a little drunk, too, from drinking after the strong emotion of Don Benito, Don Federico, Don Ricardo and especially Don Faustino. Those who did not drink from the bottles of liquor were drinking from leather wineskins that were passed about and one handed a wineskin to me and I took a long drink, letting the wine run cool down my throat from the leather bota for I was very thirsty, too.

“‘To kill gives much thirst,’the man with the wineskin said to me.

“‘Qué va,’I said.’Hast thou killed?’

“‘We have killed four,’he said, proudly.’Not counting the civiles. Is it true that thee killed one of the civiles, Pilar?’

“‘Not one,’I said.’I shot into the smoke when the wall fell, as did the others. That is all.’

“‘Where got thee the pistol, Pilar?’

“‘From Pablo. Pablo gave it to me after he killed the civiles.’

“‘Killed he them with this pistol?’

“‘With no other,’I said.’And then he armed me with it.’

“‘Can I see it, Pilar? Can I hold it?’

“‘Why not, man?’I said, and I took it out from under the rope and handed it to him. But I was wondering why no one else had come out and just then who should come out but Don Guillermo Martin from whose store the flails, the herdsman’s clubs, and the wooden pitchforks had been taken. Don Guillermo was a fascist but otherwise there Was nothing against him.

“It is true he paid little to those who made the flails but he charged little for them too and if one did not wish to buy flails from Don Guillermo, it was possible to make them for nothing more than the cost of the wood and the leather. He had a rude way of speaking and he was undoubtedly a fascist and a member of their club and he sat at noon and at evening in the cane chairs of their club to read El Debate, to have his shoes shined, and to drink vermouth and seltzer and eat roasted almonds, dried shrimps, and anchovies. But one does not kill for that, and I am sure if it had not been for the insults of Don Ricardo Montalvo and the lamentable spectacle of Don Faustino, and the drinking consequent on the emotion of them and the others, some one would have shouted,’That Don Guillermo should go in peace. We have his flails. Let him go.’

“Because the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right. But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out. I do not know how it is in other countries, and no one cares more for the pleasure of drinking than I do, but in Spain drunkenness, when produced by other elements than wine, is a thing of great ugliness and the people do things that they would not have done. Is it not so in your country, Inglés?”

“It is so,” Robert Jordan said. “When I was seven years old and going with my mother to attend a wedding in the state of Ohio at which I was to be the boy of a pair of boy and girl who carried flowers—”

“Did you do that?” asked Maria. “How nice!”

“In this town a Negro was hanged to a lamp post and later burned. It was an arc light. A light which lowered from the post to the pavement. And he was hoisted, first by the mechanism which was used to hoist the arc light but this broke—”

“A Negro,” Maria said. “How barbarous!”

“Were the people drunk?” asked Pilar. “Were they drunk thus to burn a Negro?”

“I do not know,” Robert Jordan said. “Because I saw it only looking out from under the blinds of a window in the house which stood on the corner where the arc light was. The street was full of people and when they lifted the Negro up for the second time—”

“If you had only seven years and were in a house, you could not tell if they were drunk or not,” Pilar said.

“As I said, when they lifted the Negro up for the second time, my mother pulled me away from the window, so I saw no more,” Robert Jordan said. “But since I have had experiences which demonstrate that drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal.”

“You were too young at seven,” Maria said. “You were too young for such things. I have never seen a Negro except in a circus. Unless the Moors are Negroes.”

“Some are Negroes and some are not,” Pilar said. “I can talk to you of the Moors.”

“Not as I can,” Maria said. “Nay, not as I can.”

“Don’t speak of such things,” Pilar said. “It is unhealthy. Where were we?”

“Speaking of the drunkenness of the lines,” Robert Jordan said. “Go on.”

“It is not fair to say drunkenness,” Pilar said. “For, yet, they were a long way from drunkenness. But already there was a change in them, and when Don Guillermo came out, standing straight, near-sighted, gray-headed, of medium height, with a shirt with a collar button but no collar, standing there and crossing himself once and looking ahead, but seeing little without his glasses, but walking forward well and calmly, he was an appearance to excite pity. But some one shouted from the line,’Here, Don Guillermo. Up here, Don Guillermo. In this direction. Here we all have your products.’

“They had had such success joking at Don Faustino that they could not see, now, that Don Guillermo was a different thing, and if Don Guillermo was to be killed, he should be killed quickly and with dignity.

“‘Don Guillermo,’another shouted.’Should we send to the house for thy spectacles?’

“Don Guillermo’s house was no house, since he had not much money and was only a fascist to be a snob and to console himself that he must work for little, running a wooden-implement shop. He was a fascist, too, from the religiousness of his wife which he accepted as his own due to his love for her. He lived in an apartment in the building three houses down the square and when Don Guillermo stood there, looking near-sightedly at the lines, the double lines he knew he must enter, a woman started to scream from the balcony of the apartment where he lived. She could see him from the balcony and she was his wife.

“‘Guillermo,’she cried.’Guillermo. Wait and I will be with thee.’

“Don Guillermo turned his head toward where the shouting came from. He could not see her. He tried to say something but he could not. Then he waved his hand in the direction the woman had called from and started to walk between the lines.

“‘Guillermo!’she cried.’Guillermo! Oh, Guillermo!’She was holding her hands on the rail of the balcony and shaking back and forth.’Guillermo!’

“Don Guillermo waved his hand again toward the noise and walked into the lines with his head up and you would not have known what he was feeling except for the color of his face.

“Then some drunkard yelled,’Guillermo!’from the lines, imitating the high cracked voice of his wife and Don Guillermo rushed toward the man, blindly, with tears now running down his cheeks and the man hit him hard across the face with his flail and Don Guillermo sat down from the force of the blow and sat there crying, but not from fear, while the drunkards beat him and one drunkard jumped on top of him, astride his shoulders, and beat him with a bottle. After this many of the men left the lines and their places were taken by the drunkards who had been jeering and saying things in bad taste through the windows of the Ayuntamiento.

“I myself had felt much emotion at the shooting of the guardia civil by Pablo,” Pilar said. “It was a thing of great ugliness, but I had thought if this is how it must be, this is how it must be, and at least there was no cruelty, only the depriving of life which, as we all have learned in these years, is a thing of ugliness but also a necessity to do if we are to win, and to preserve the Republic.

“When the square had been closed off and the lines formed, I had admired and understood it as a conception of Pablo, although it seemed to me to be somewhat fantastic and that it would be necessary for all that was to be done to be done in good taste if it were not to be repugnant. Certainly if the fascists were to be executed by the people, it was better for all the people to have a part in it, and I wished to share the guilt as much as any, just as I hoped to share in the benefits when the town should be ours. But after Don Guillermo I felt a feeling of shame and distaste, and with the coming of the drunkards and the worthless ones into the lines, and the abstention of those who left the lines as a protest after Don Guillermo, I wished that I might disassociate myself altogether from the lines, and I walked away, across the square, and sat down on a bench under one of the big trees that gave shade there.

“Two peasants from the lines walked over, talking together, and one of them called to me,’What passes with thee, Pilar?’

“‘Nothing, man,’I told him.

“‘Yes,’he said.’Speak. What passes.’

“‘I think that I have a belly-full,’I told him.

“‘Us, too,’he said and they both sat down on the bench. One of them had a leather wineskin and he handed it to me.

“‘Rinse out thy mouth,’he said and the other said, going on with the talking they had been engaged in,’The worst is that it will bring bad luck. Nobody can tell me that such things as the killing of Don Guillermo in that fashion will not bring bad luck.’

“Then the other said,’If it is necessary to kill them all, and I am not convinced of that necessity, let them be killed decently and without mockery.’

“‘Mockery is justified in the case of Don Faustino,’the other said.’Since he was always a farcer and was never a serious man. But to mock such a serious man as Don Guillermo is beyond all right.’

“‘I have a belly-full,’I told him, and it was literally true because I felt an actual sickness in all of me inside and a sweating and a nausea as though I had swallowed bad sea food.

“‘Then, nothing,’the one peasant said.’We will take no further part in it. But I wonder what happens in the other towns.’

“‘They have not repaired the telephone wires yet,’I said.’It is a lack that should be remedied.’

“‘Clearly,’he said.’Who knows but what we might be better employed putting the town into a state of defense than massacring people with this slowness and brutality.’

“‘I will go to speak with Pablo, I told them and I stood up from the bench and started toward the arcade that led to the door of the Ayuntamiento from where the lines spread across the square. The lines now were neither straight nor orderly and there was much and very grave drunkenness. Two men had fallen down and lay on their backs in the middle of the square and were passing a bottle back and forth between them. One would take a drink and then shout,’Viva la Anarquia!’lying on his back and shouting as though he were a madman. He had a red-and-black handkerchief around his neck. The other shouted,’Viva la Libertad!’and kicked his feet in the air and then bellowed,’Viva Ia Libertad!’again. He had a red-andblack handkerchief too and he waved it in one hand and waved the bottle with the other.

“A peasant who had left the lines and now stood in the shade of the arcade looked at them in disgust and said,’They should shout,”Long live drunkenness.” That’s all they believe in.’

“‘They don’t believe even in that,’another peasant said.’Those neither understand nor believe in anything.’

“Just then, one of the drunkards got to his feet and raised both arms with his fists clenched over his head and shouted,’Long live Anarchy and Liberty and I obscenity in the milk of the Republic!’

“The other drunkard who was still lying on his back, took hold of the ankle of the drunkard who was shouting and rolled over so that the shouting drunkard fell with him, and they rolled over together and then sat up and the one who had pulled the other down put his arm around the shouter’s neck and then handed the shouter a bottle and kissed the red-and-black handkerchief he wore and they both drank together.

“Just then, a yelling went up from the lines and, looking up the arcade, I could not see who it was that was coming out because the man’s head did not show above the heads of those crowded about the door of the Ayuntamiento. All I could see was that some one was being pushed out by Pablo and Cuatro Dedos with their shotguns but I could not see who it was and I moved on close toward the lines where they were packed against the door to try to see.

“There was much pushing now and the chairs and the tables of the fascists’café had been overturned except for one table on which a drunkard was lying with his head hanging down and his mouth open and I picked up a chair and set it against one of the pillars and mounted on it so that I could see over the heads of the crowd.

“The man who was being pushed out by Pablo and Cuatro Dedos was Don Anastasio Rivas, who was an undoubted fascist and the fattest man in the town. He was a grain buyer and the agent for several insurance companies and he also loaned money at high rates of interest. Standing on the chair, I saw him walk down the steps and toward the lines, his fat neck bulging over the back of the collar band of his shirt, and his bald head shining in the sun, but he never entered them because there was a shout, not as of different men shouting, but of all of them. It was an ugly noise and was the cry of the drunken lines all yelling together and the lines broke with the rush of men toward him and I saw Don Anastasio throw himself down with his hands over his head and then you could not see him for the men piled on top of him. And when the men got up from him, Don Anastasio was dead from his head being beaten against the stone flags of the paving of the arcade and there were no more lines but only a mob.

“‘We’re going in,’they commenced to shout.’We’re going in after them.’

“‘He’s too heavy to carry,’a man kicked at the body of Don Anastasio, who was lying there on his face.’Let him stay there.’

“‘Why should we lug that tub of tripe to the cliff? Let him lie there.’

“‘We are going to enter and finish with them inside,’a man shouted.’We’re going in.’

“‘Why wait all day in the sun?’another yelled.’Come on. Let us go.’

“The mob was now pressing into the arcade. They were shouting and pushing and they made a noise now like an animal and they were all shouting’Open up! Open up!’for the guards had shut the doors of the Ayuntamiento when the lines broke.

“Standing on the chair, I could see in through the barred window into the hail of the Ayuntamiento and in there it was as it had been before. The priest was standing, and those who were left were kneeling in a half circle around him and they were all praying. Pablo was sitting on the big table in front of the Mayor’s chair with his shotgun slung over his back. His legs were hanging down from the table and he was rolling a cigarette. Cuatro Dedos was sitting in the Mayor’s chair with his feet on the table and he was smoking a cigarette. All the guards were sitting in different chairs of the administration, holding their guns. The key to the big door was on the table beside Pablo.

“The mob was shouting,’Open up! Open up! Open up!’as though it were a chant and Pablo was sitting there as though he did not hear them. He said something to the priest but I could not hear what he said for the noise of the mob.

“The priest, as before, did not answer him but kept on praying. With many people pushing me, I moved the chair close against the wall, shoving it ahead of me as they shoved me from behind. I stood on the chair with my face close against the bars of the window and held on by the bars. A man climbed on the chair too and stood with his arms around mine, holding the wider bars.

“‘The chair will break,’I said to him.

“‘What does it matter?’he said.’Look at them. Look at them pray.’

“His breath on my neck smelled like the smell of the mob, sour, like vomit on paving stones and the smell of drunkenness, and then he put his mouth against the opening in the bars with his head over my shoulder, and shouted,’Open up! Open!’and it was as though the mob were on my back as a devil is on your back in a dream.

“Now the mob was pressed tight against the door so that those in front were being crushed by all the others who were pressing and from the square a big drunkard in a black smock with a red-and-black handkerchief around his neck, ran and threw himself against the press of the mob and fell forward onto the pressing men and then stood up and backed away and then ran forward again and threw himself against the backs of those men who were pushing, shouting,’Long live me and long live Anarchy.’

“As I watched, this man turned away from the crowd and went and sat down and drank from a bottle and then, while he was sitting down, he saw Don Anastasio, who was still lying face down on the stones, but much trampled now, and the drunkard got up and went over to Don Anastasio and leaned over and poured out of the bottle onto the head of Don Anastasio and onto his clothes, and then he took a matchbox out of his pocket and lit several matches, trying to make a fire with Don Anastasio. But the wind was blowing hard now and it blew the matches out and after a little the big drunkard sat there by Don Anastasio, shaking his head and drinking out of the bottle and every once in a while, leaning over and patting Don Anastasio on the shoulders of his dead body.

“All this time the mob was shouting to open up and the man on the chair with me was holding tight to the bars of the window and shouting to open up until it deafened me with his voice roaring past my ear and his breath foul on me and I looked away from watching the drunkard who had been trying to set fire to Don Anastasio and into the hall of the Ayuntamiento again; and it was just as it had been. They were still praying as they had been, the men all kneeling, with their shirts open, some with their heads down, others with their heads up, looking toward the priest and toward the crucifix that he held, and the priest praying fast and hard and looking Out over their heads, and in back of them Pablo, with his cigarette now lighted, was sitting there on the table swinging his legs, his shotgun slung over his back, and he was playing with the key.

“I saw Pablo speak to the priest again, leaning forward from the table and I could not hear what he said for the shouting. But the priest did not answer him but went on praying. Then a man stood up from among the half circle of those who were praying and I saw he wanted to go out. It was Don José Castro, whom every one called Don Pepe, a confirmed fascist, and a dealer in horses, and he stood up now small, neat-looking even unshaven and wearing a pajama top tucked into a pair of gray-striped trousers. He kissed the crucifix and the priest blessed him and he stood up and looked at Pablo and jerked his head toward the door.

“Pablo shook his head and went on smoking. I could see Don Pepe say something to Pablo but could not hear it. Pablo did not answer; he simply shook his head again and nodded toward the door.

“Then I saw Don Pepe look full at the door and realized that he had not known it was locked. Pablo showed him the key and he Stood looking at it an instant and then he turned and went and knelt down again. I saw the priest look around at Pablo and Pablo grinned at him and showed him the key and the priest seemed to realize for the first time that the door was locked and he seemed as though he started to shake his head, but he only inclined it and went back to praying.

“I do not know how they could not have understood the door was locked unless it was that they were so concentrated on their praying and their own thoughts; but now they certainly understood and they understood the shouting and they must have known now that all was changed. But they remained the same as before.

“By now the shouting was so that you could hear nothing and the drunkard who stood on the chair with me shook with his hands at the bars and yelled,’Open up! Open up!’until he was hoarse.

“I watched Pablo speak to the priest again and the priest did not answer. Then I saw Pablo unsling his shotgun and he reached over and tapped the priest on the shoulder with it. The priest paid no attention to him and I saw Pablo shake his head. Then he spoke over his shoulder to Cuatro Dedos and Cuatro Dedos spoke to the other guards and they all stood up and walked back to the far end of the room and stood there with their shotguns.

“I saw Pablo say something to Cuatro Dedos and he moved over two tables and some benches and the guards stood behind them with their shotguns. It made a barricade in that corner of the room. Pablo leaned over and tapped the priest on the shoulder again with the shotgun and the priest did not pay attention to him but I saw Don Pepe watching him while the others paid no attention but went on praying. Pablo shook his head and, seeing Don Pepe looking at him, he shook his head at Don Pepe and showed him the key, holding it up in his hand. Don Pepe understood and he dropped his head and commenced to pray very fast.

“Pablo swung his legs down from the table and walked around it to the big chair of the Mayor on the raised platform behind the long council table. He sat down in it and rolled himself a cigarette, all the time watching the fascists who were praying with the priest. You could not see any expression on his face at all. The key was on the table in front of him. It was a big key of iron, over a foot long. Then Pablo called to the guards something I could not hear and one guard went down to the door. I could see them all praying faster than ever and I knew that they all knew now.

“Pablo said something to the priest but the priest did not answer. Then Pablo leaned forward, picked up the key and tossed it underhand to the guard at the door. The guard caught it and Pablo smiled at him. Then the guard put the key in the door, turned it, and pulled the door toward him, ducking behind it as the mob rushed in.

“I saw them come in and just then the drunkard on the chair with me commenced to shout’Ayee! Ayee! Ayee!’and pushed his head forward so I could not see and then he shouted’Kill them! Kill them! Club them! Kill them!’and he pushed me aside with his two arms and I could see nothing.

“I hit my elbow into his belly and I said,’Drunkard, whose chair is this? Let me see.’

“But he just kept shaking his hands and arms against the bars and shouting,’Kill them! Club them! Club them! that’s it. Club them! Kill them! Cabrones! Cabrones! Cabrones!’

“I hit him hard with my elbow and said,’Cabron! Drunkard! Let me see.’

“Then he put both his hands on my head to push me down and so he might see better and leaned all his weight on my head and went on shouting,’Club them! that’s it. Club them!’

“‘Club yourself,’I said and I hit him hard where it would hurt him and it hurt him and he dropped his hands from my head and grabbed himself and said.’No hay derecho, mujer. This, woman, you have no right to do.’And in that moment, looking through the bars, I saw the hail full of men flailing away with clubs and striking with flails, and poking and striking and pushing and heaving against people with the white wooden pitchforks that now were red and with their tines broken, and this was going on all over the room while Pablo sat in the big chair with his shotgun on his knees, watching, and they were shouting and clubbing and stabbing and men were screaming as horses scream in a fire. And I saw the priest with his skirts tucked up scrambling over a bench and those after him were chopping at him with the sickles and the reaping hooks and then some one had hold of his robe and there was another scream and another scream and I saw two men chopping into his back with sickles while a third man held the skirt of his robe and the Priest’s arms were up and he was clinging to the back of a chair and then the chair I was standing on broke and the drunkard and I were on the pavement that smelled of spilled wine and vomit and the drunkard was shaking his finger at me and saying,’No hay derecho, mujer, no hay derecho. You could have done me an injury,’and the people were trampling over us to get into the hall of the Ayuntamiento and all I could see was legs of people going in the doorway and the drunkard sitting there facing me and holding himself where I had hit him.

“That was the end of the killing of the fascists in our town and I was glad I did not see more of it and, but for that drunkard, I would have seen it all. So he served some good because in the Ayuntamiento it was a thing one is sorry to have seen.

“But the other drunkard was something rarer still. As we got up after the breaking of the chair, and the people were still crowding into the Ayuntamiento, I saw this drunkard of the square with his red-and-black scarf, again pouring something over Don Anastasio. He was shaking his head from side to side and it was very hard for him to sit up, but he was pouring and lighting matches and then pouring and lighting matches and I walked over to him and said,’What are you doing, shameless?’

“‘Nada, mujer, nada,’he said.’Let me alone.’

“And perhaps because I was standing there so that my legs made a shelter from the wind, the match caught and a blue flame began to run up the shoulder of the coat of Don Anastasio and onto the back of his neck and the drunkard put his head up and shouted in a huge voice,’They’re burning the dead! They’re burning the dead!’

“‘Who?’somebody said.

“‘Where?’shouted some one else.

“‘Here,’bellowed the drunkard.’Exactly here!’

“Then some one hit the drunkard a great blow alongside the head with a flail and he fell back, and lying on the ground, he looked up at the man who had hit him and then shut his eyes and crossed his hands on his chest, and lay there beside Don Anastasio as though he were asleep. The man did not hit him again and he lay there and he was still there when they picked up Don Anastasio and put him with the others in the cart that hauled them all over to the cliff where they were thrown over that evening with the others after there had been a cleaning up in the Ayuntamiento. It would have been better for the town if they had thrown over twenty or thirty of the drunkards, especially those of the red-and-black scarves, and if we ever have another revolution I believe they should be destroyed at the start. But then we did not know this. But in the next days we were to learn.

“But that night we did not know what was to come. After the slaying in the Ayuntamiento there was no more killing but we could not have a meeting that night because there were too many drunkards. It was impossible to obtain order and so the meeting was postponed until the next day.

“That night I slept with Pablo. I should not say this to you, guapa, but on the other hand, it is good for you to know everything and at least what I tell you is true. Listen to this, Inglés. It is very curious.

“As I say, that night we ate and it was very curious. It was as after a storm or a flood or a battle and every one was tired and no one spoke much. I, myself, felt hollow and not well and I was full of shame and a sense of wrongdoing and I had a great feeling of oppression and of bad to come, as this morning after the planes. And certainly, bad came within three days.

“Pablo, when we ate, spoke little.

“‘Did you like it, Pilar?’he asked finally with his mouth full of roast young goat. We were eating at the inn from where the buses leave and the room was crowded and people were singing and there was difficulty serving.

“‘No,’I said.’Except for Don Faustino, I did not like it.’

“‘I liked it,’he said.

“‘All of it?’I asked him.

“‘All of it,’he said and cut himself a big piece of bread with his knife and commenced to mop up gravy with it.’All of it, except the priest.’

“‘You didn’t like it about the priest?’because I knew he hated priests even worse than he hated fascists.

“‘He was a disillusionment to me,’Pablo said sadly.

“So many people were singing that we had to almost shout to hear one another.

“‘Why?’

“‘He died very badly,’Pablo said.’He had very little dignity.’

“‘How did you want him to have dignity when he was being chased by the mob?’I said.’I thought he had much dignity all the time before. All the dignity that one could have.’

“‘Yes,’Pablo said.’But in the last minute he was frightened.’

“‘Who wouldn’t be?’I said.’Did you see what they were chasing him with?’

“‘Why would I not see?’Pablo said.’But I find he died badly.’

“‘In such circumstances any one dies badly,’I told him.’What do you want for your money? Everything that happened in the Ayuntamiento was scabrous.’

“‘Yes,’said Pablo.’There was little organization. But a priest. He has an example to set.’

“‘I thought you hated priests.’

“‘Yes,’said Pablo and cut some more bread.’But a Spanish priest. A Spanish priest should die very well.’

“‘I think he died well enough,’I said.’Being deprived of all formality.’

“‘No,’Pablo said.’To me he was a great disillusionment. All day I had waited for the death of the priest. I had thought he would be the last to enter the lines. I awaited it with great anticipation. I expected something of a culmination. I had never seen a priest die.’

“‘There is time,’I said to him sarcastically.’Only today did the movement start.’

“‘No,’he said.’I am disillusioned.’

“‘Now,’I said.’I suppose you will lose your faith.’

“‘You do not understand, Pilai’he said.’He was a Spanish priest.’

“‘What people the Spaniards are,’I said to him. And what a people they are for pride, eh, Inglés? What a people.”

“We must get on,” Robert Jordan said. He looked at the sun. “It’s nearly noon.”

“Yes,” Pilar said. “We will go now. But let me tell you about Pablo. That night he said to me,’Pilar, tonight we will do nothing.’

“‘Good,’I told him.’That pleases me.’

“‘I think it would be bad taste after the killing of so many people.’

“‘Qué va,’I told him.’What a saint you are. You think I lived years with bullfighters not to know how they are after the Corrida?’

“‘Is it true, Pilar?’he asked me.

“‘When did I lie to you?’I told him.

“‘It is true, Pilar, I am a finished man this night. You do not reproach me?’

“‘No, hombre,’I said to him.’But don’t kill people every day, Pablo.’

“And he slept that night like a baby and I woke him in the morning at daylight but I could not sleep that night and I got up and sat in a chair and looked out of the window and I could see the square in the moonlight where the lines had been and across the square the trees shining in the moonlight, and the darkness of their shadows, and the benches bright too in the moonlight, and the scattered bottles shining, and beyond the edge of the cliff where they had all been thrown. And there was no sound but the splashing of the water in the fountain and I sat there and I thought we have begun badly.

“The window was open and up the square from the Fonda I could hear a woman crying. I went out on the balcony standing there in my bare feet on the iron and the moon shone on the faces of all the buildings of the square and the crying was coming from the balcony of the house of Don Guillermo. It was his wife and she was on the balcony kneeling and crying.

“Then I went back inside the room and I sat there and I did not wish to think for that was the worst day of my life until one other day.”

“What was the other?” Maria asked.

“Three days later when the fascists took the town.”

“Do not tell me about it,” said Maria. “I do not want to hear it. This is enough. This was too much.”

“I told you that you should not have listened,” Pilar said. “See. I did not want you to hear it. Now you will have bad dreams.”

“No,” said Maria. “But I do not want to hear more.”

“I wish you would tell me of it sometime,” Robert Jordan said.

“I will,” Pilar said. “But it is bad for Maria.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Maria said pitifully. “Please, Pilar. And do not tell it if I am there, for I might listen in spite of myself.”

Her lips were working and Robert Jordan thought she would cry.

“Please, Pilar, do not tell it.”

“Do not worry, little cropped head,” Pilar said. “Do not worry. But I will tell the Inglés sometime.”

“But I want to be there when he is there,” Maria said. “Oh, Pilar, do not tell it at all.”

“I will tell it when thou art working.”

“No. No. Please. Let us not tell it at all,” Maria said.

“It is only fair to tell it since I have told what we did,” Pilar said. “But you shall never hear it.”

“Are there no pleasant things to speak of?” Maria said. “Do we have to talk always of horrors?”

“This afternoon,” Pilar said, “thou and Inglés. The two of you can speak of what you wish.”

“Then that the afternoon should come,” Maria said. “That it should come flying.”

“It will come,” Pilar told her. “It will come flying and go the same way and tomorrow will fly, too.”

“This afternoon,” Maria said. “This afternoon. That this afternoon should come.”

Chapter 11

As they came up, still deep in the shadow of the pines, after dropping down from the high meadow into the wooden valley and climbing up it on a trail that paralleled the stream and then left it to gain, steeply, the top of a rim-rock formation, a man with a carbine stepped out from behind a tree.

“Halt,” he said. Then, “Hola, Pilar. Who is this with thee?”

“An Inglés,” Pilar said. “But with a Christian name — Roberto. And what an obscenity of steepness it is to arrive here.”

“Salud, Camarada,” the guard said to Robert Jordan and put out his hand. “Are you well?”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “And thee?”

“Equally,” the guard said. He was very young, with a light build, thin, rather hawk-nosed face, high cheekbones and gray eyes. He wore no hat, his hair was black and shaggy and his handclasp was strong and friendly. His eyes were friendly too.

“Hello, Maria,” he said to the girl. “You did not tire yourself?”

“Qué va, Joaquín,” the girl said. “We have sat and talked more than we have walked.”

“Are you the dynamiter?” Joaquín asked. “We have heard you were here.”

“We passed the night at Pablo’s,” Robert Jordan said. “Yes, I am the dynamiter.”

“We are glad to see you,” Joaquín said. “Is it for a train?”

“Were you at the last train?” Robert Jordan asked and smiled.

“Was I not,” Joaquín said. “That’s where we got this,” he grinned at Maria. “You are pretty now,” he said to Maria. “Have they told thee how pretty?”

“Shut up, Joaquín, and thank you very much,” Maria said. “You’d be pretty with a haircut.”

“I carried thee,” Joaquín told the girl. “I carried thee over my shoulder.”

“As did many others,” Pilar said in the deep voice. “Who didn’t carry her? Where is the old man?”

“At the camp.”

“Where was he last night?”

“In Segovia.”

“Did he bring news?”

“Yes,” Joaquín said, “there is news.”

“Good or bad?”

“I believe bad.”

“Did you see the planes?”

“Ay,” said Joaquín and shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of that. Comrade Dynamiter, what planes were those?”

“Heinkel one eleven bombers. Heinkel and Fiat pursuit,” Robert Jordan told him.

“What were the big ones with the low wings?”

“Heinkel one elevens.”

“By any names they are as bad,” Joaquín said. “But I am delaying you. I will take you to the commander.”

“The commander?” Pilar asked.

Joaquín nodded seriously. “I like it better than’chief,” he said. “It is more military.”

“You are militarizing heavily,” Pilar said and laughed at him.

“No,” Joaquín said. “But I like military terms because it makes orders clearer and for better discipline.”

“Here is one according to thy taste, Inglés,” Pilar said. “A very serious boy.”

“Should I carry thee?” Joaquín asked the girl and put his arm on her shoulder and smiled in her face.

“Once was enough,” Maria told him. “Thank you just the same.”

“Can you remember it?” Joaquín asked her.

“I can remember being carried,” Maria said. “By you, no. I remember the gypsy because he dropped me so many times. But I thank thee, Joaquín, and I’ll carry thee sometime.”

“I can remember it well enough,” Joaquín said. “I can remember holding thy two legs and thy belly was on my shoulder and thy head over my back and thy arms hanging down against my back.”

“Thou hast much memory,” Maria said and smiled at him. “I remember nothing of that. Neither thy arms nor thy shoulders nor thy back.”

“Do you want to know something?” Joaquín asked her.

“What is it?”

“I was glad thou wert hanging over my back when the shots were coming from behind us.”

“What a swine,” Maria said. “And was it for this the gypsy too carried me so much?”

“For that and to hold onto thy legs.”

“My heroes,” Maria said. “My saviors.”

“Listen, guapa,” Pilar told her. “This boy carried thee much, and in that moment thy legs said nothing to any one. In that moment only the bullets talked clearly. And if he would have dropped thee he could soon have been out of range of the bullets.”

“I have thanked him,” Maria said. “And I will carry him sometime. Allow us to joke. I do not have to cry, do I, because he carried me?”

“I’d have dropped thee,” Joaquín went on teasing her. “But I was afraid Pilar would shoot me.”

“I shoot no one,” Pilar said.

“No hace falta,” Joaquín told her. “You don’t need to. You scare them to death with your mouth.”

“What a way to speak,” Pilar told him. “And you used to be such a polite little boy. What did you do before the movement, little boy?”

“Very little,” Joaquín said. “I was sixteen.”

“But what, exactly?”

“A few pairs of shoes from time to time.”

“Make them?”

“No. Shine them.”

“Qué va,” said Pilar. “There is more to it than that.” She looked at his brown face, his lithe build, his shock of hair, and the quick heel-and-toe way that he walked. “Why did you fail at it?”

“Fail at what?”

“What? You know what. You’re growing the pigtail now.”

“I guess it was fear,” the boy said.

“You’ve a nice figure,” Pilar told him. “But the face isn’t much. So it was fear, was it? You were all right at the train.”

“I have no fear of them now,” the boy said. “None. And we have seen much worse things and more dangerous than the bulls. It is clear no bull is as dangerous as a machine gun. But if I were in the ring with one now I do not know if I could dominate my legs.”

“He wanted to be a bullfighter,” Pilar explained to Robert Jordan. “But he was afraid.”

“Do you like the bulls, Comrade Dynamiter?” Joaquín grinned, showing white teeth.

“Very much,” Robert Jordan said. “Very, very much.”

“Have you seen them in Valladolid?” asked Joaquín.

“Yes. In September at the feria.”

“That’s my town,” Joaquín said. “What a fine town but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.” Then, his face grave, “There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.”

“What barbarians,” Robert Jordan said.

How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he had heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, “What barbarians.”

You only heard the statement of the loss. You did not see the father fall as Pilar made him see the fascists die in that story she had told by the stream. You knew the father died in some courtyard, or against some wall, or in some field or orchard, or at night, in the lights of a truck, beside some road. You had seen the lights of the car from the hills and heard the shooting and afterwards you had come down to the road and found the bodies. You did not see the mother shot, nor the sister, nor the brother. You heard about it; you heard the shots; and you saw the bodies.

Pilar had made him see it in that town.

If that woman could only write. He would try to write it and if he had luck and could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it. God, how she could tell a story. She’s better than Quevedo, he thought. He never wrote the death of any Don Faustino as well as she told it. I wish I could write well enough to write that story, he thought. What we did. Not what the others did to us. He knew enough about that. He knew plenty about that behind the lines. But you had to have known the people before. You had to know what they had been in the village.

Because of our mobility and because we did not have to stay afterwards to take the punishment we never knew how anything really ended, he thought. You stayed with a peasant and his family. You came at night and ate with them. In the day you were hidden and the next night you were gone. You did your job and cleared out. The next time you came that way you heard that they had been shot. It was as simple as that.

But you were always gone when it happened. The partizans did their damage and pulled out. The peasants stayed and took the punishment. I’ve always known about the other, he thought. What we did to them at the start I’ve always known it and hated it and I have heard it mentioned shamelessly and shamefully, bragged of, boasted of, defended, explained and denied. But that damned woman made me see it as though I had been there.

Well, he thought, it is part of one’s education. It will be quite an education when it’s finished. You learn in this war if you listen. You most certainly did. He was lucky that he had lived parts of ten years ifl Spain before the war. They trusted you on the language, principally. They trusted you on understanding the language completely and speaking it idiomatically and having a knowledge of the different places. A Spaniard was only really loyal to his village in the end. First Spain of course, then his own tribe, then his province, then his village, his family and finally his trade. If you knew Spanish he was prejudiced in your favor, if you knew his province it was that much better, but if you knew his village and his trade you were in as far as any foreigner ever could be. He never felt like a foreigner in Spanish and they did not really treat him like a foreigner most of the time; only when they turned on you.

Of course they turned on you. They turned on you often but they always turned on every one. They turned on themselves, too. If you had three together, two would unite against one, and then the two would start to betray each other. Not always, but often enough for you to take enough cases and start to draw it as a conclusion.

This was no way to think; but who censored his thinking? Nobody but himself. He would not think himself into any defeatism. The first thing was to win the war. If we did not win the war everything was lost. But he noticed, and listened to, and remembered everything. He was serving in a war and he gave absolute loyalty and as complete a performance as he could give while he was serving. But nobody owned his mind, nor his faculties for seeing and hearing, and if he were going to form judgments he would form them afterwards. And there would be plenty of material to draw them from. There was plenty already. There was a little too much sometimes.

Look at the Pilar woman, he thought. No matter what comes, if there is time, I must make her tell me the rest of that story. Look at her walking along with those two kids. You could not get three better-looking products of Spain than those. She is like a mountain and the boy and the girl are like young trees. The old trees are all cut down and the young trees are growing clean like that. In spite of what has happened to the two of them they look as fresh and clean and new and untouched as though they had never heard of misfortune. But according to Pilar, Maria has just gotten sound again. She must have been in an awful shape.

He remembered a Belgian boy in the Eleventh Brigade who had enlisted with five other boys from his village. It was a village Of about two hundred people and the boy had never been away froni the village before. When he first saw the boy, out at Hans’Brigade Staff, the other five from the village had all been killed and the boy was in very bad shape and they were using him as an orderly to wait on table at the staff. He had a big, blond, ruddy Flemish face and huge awkward peasant hands and he moved, with the dishes, as powerfully and awkwardly as a draft horse. But he cried all the time. All during the meal he cried with no noise at all.

You looked up and there he was, crying. If you asked for the wine, he cried and if you passed your plate for stew, he cried; turning away his head. Then he would stop; but if you looked up at him, tears would start coming again. Between courses he cried in the kitchen. Every one was very gentle with him. But it did no good. He would have to find out what became of him and whether he ever cleared up and was fit for soldiering again.

Maria was sound enough now. She seemed so anyway. But he was no psychiatrist. Pilar was the psychiatrist. It probably had been good for them to have been together last night. Yes, unless it stopped. It certainly had been good for him. He felt fine today; sound and good and unworried and happy. The show looked bad enough but he was awfully lucky, too. He had been in others that announced themselves badly. Announced themselves; that was thinking in Spanish. Maria was lovely.

Look at her, he said to himself. Look at her.

He looked at her striding happily in the sun; her khaki shirt open at the neck. She walks like a colt moves, he thought. You do not run onto something like that. Such things don’t happen. Maybe it never did happen, he thought. Maybe you dreamed it or made it up and it never did happen. Maybe it is like the dreams you have when some one you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely. He’d slept with them all that way When he was asleep in bed. He could remember Garbo still, and Harlow. Yes, Harlow many times. Maybe it was like those dreams.

But he could still remember the time Garbo came to his bed the flight before the attack at Pozoblanco and she was wearing a soft silky wool sweater when he put his arm around her and when she leaned forward her hair swept forward and over his face and she said why had he never told her that he loved her when she had loved him all this time? She was not shy, nor cold, nor distant. She was just lovely to hold and kind and lovely and like the old days with Jack Gilbert and it was as true as though it happened and he loved her much more than Harlow though Garbo was only there once while Harlow — maybe this was like those dreams.

Maybe it isn’t too, he said to himself. Maybe I could reach over and touch that Maria now, he said to himself. Maybe you are afraid to he said to himself. Maybe you would find out that it never happened and it was not true and it was something you made up like those dreams about the people of the cinema or how all your old girls come back and sleep in that robe at night on all the bare floors, in the straw of the haybarns, the stables, the corrales and the cortijos, the woods, the garages, the trucks and all the hills of Spain. They all came to that robe when he was asleep and they were all much nicer than they ever had been in life. Maybe it was like that. Maybe you would be afraid to touch her to see if it was true. Maybe you would, and probably it is something that you made up or that you dreamed.

He took a step across the trail and put his hand on the girl’s arm. Under his fingers he felt the smoothness of her arm in the worn khaki. She looked at him and smiled.

“Hello, Maria,” he said.

“Hello, Inglés,” she answered and he saw her tawny brown face and the yellow-gray eyes and the full lips smiling and the cropped sun-burned hair and she lifted her face at him and smiled in his eyes. It was true all right.

Now they were in sight of El Sordo’s camp in the last of the pines, where there was a rounded gulch-head shaped like an upturned basin. All these limestone upper basins must be full of caves, he thought. There are two caves there ahead. The scrub pines growing in the rock hide them well. This is as good or a better place than Pablo’s.

“How was this shooting of thy family?” Pilar was saying to Joaquín.

“Nothing, woman,” Joaquín said. “They were of the left as many others in Valladolid. When the fascists purified the town they shot first the father. He had voted Socialist. Then they shot the mother. She had voted the same. It was the first time she had ever voted. After that they shot the husband of one of the sisters. He was a member of the syndicate of tramway drivers. Clearly he could not drive a tram without belonging to the syndicate. But he was without politics. I knew him well. He was even a little hit shameless. I do not think he was even a good comrade. Then the husband of the other girl, the other sister, who was also in the trams, had gone to the hills as I had. They thought she knew where he was. But she did not. So they shot her because she would not tell them where he was.”

“What barbarians,” said Pilar. “Where is El Sordo? I do not see him.”

“He is here. He is probably inside,” answered Joaquín and stopping now, and resting the rifle butt on the ground, said, “Pilar, listen to me. And thou, Maria. Forgive me if I have molested you speaking of things of the family. I know that all have the same troubles and it is more valuable not to speak of them.”

“That you should speak,” Pilar said. “For what are we born if not to aid one another? And to listen and say nothing is a cold enough aid.”

“But it can molest the Maria. She has too many things of her own.”

“Qué va,” Maria said. “Mine are such a big bucket that yours falling in will never fill it. I am sorry, Joaquín, and I hope thy sister is well.”

“So far she’s all right,” Joaquín said. “They have her in prison and it seems they do not mistreat her much.”

“Are there others in the family?” Robert Jordan asked.

“No,” the boy said. “Me. Nothing more. Except the brother-inlaw who went to the hills and I think he is dead.”

“Maybe he is all right,” Maria said. “Maybe he is with a band in other mountains.”

“For me he is dead,” Joaquín said. “He was never too good at getting about and he was conductor of a tram and that is not the best preparation for the hills. I doubt if he could last a year. He was Somewhat weak in the chest too.”

“But he may be all right,” Maria put her arm on his shoulder.

“Certainly, girl. Why not?” said Joaquín.

As the boy stood there, Maria reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Joaquín turned his head away because he was crying.

“That is as a brother,” Maria said to him. “I kiss thee as a brother.”

The boy shook his head, crying without making any noise.

“I am thy sister,” Maria said. “And I love thee and thou hast a family. We are all thy family.”

“Including the Inglés,” boomed Pilar. “Isn’t it true, Inglés?”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said to the boy, “we are all thy family, Joaquín.”

“He’s your brother,” Pilar said. “Hey Inglés?”

Robert Jordan put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “We are all brothers,” he said. The boy shook his head.

“I am ashamed to have spoken,” he said. “To speak of such things makes it more difficult for all. I am ashamed of molesting you.”

“I obscenity in the milk of my shame,” Pilar said in her deep lovely voice. “And if the Maria kisses thee again I will commence kissing thee myself. It’s years since I’ve kissed a bullfighter, even an unsuccessful one like thee, I would like to kiss an unsuccessful bullfighter turned Communist. Hold him, Inglés, till I get a good kiss at him.”

“Deja,” the boy said and turned away sharply. “Leave me alone. I am all right and I am ashamed.”

He stood there, getting his face under control. Maria put her hand in Robert Jordan’s. Pilar stood with her hands on her hips looking at the boy mockingly now.

“When I kiss thee,” she said to him, “it will not be as any sister. This trick of kissing as a sister.”

“It is not necessary to joke,” the boy said. “I told you I am all right, I am sorry that I spoke.”

“Well then let us go and see the old man,” Pilar said. “I tire myself with such emotion.”

The boy looked at her. From his eyes you could see he was suddenly very hurt.

“Not thy emotion,” Pilar said to him. “Mine. What a tender thing thou art for a bullfighter.”

“I was a failure,” Joaquín said. “You don’t have to keep insisting on it.”

“But you are growing the pigtail another time.”

“Yes, and why not? Fighting stock serves best for that purpose economically. It gives employment to many and the State will control it. And perhaps now I would not be afraid.”

“Perhaps not,” Pilar said. “Perhaps not.”

“Why do you speak in such a brutal manner, Pilar?” Maria said to her. “I love thee very much but thou art acting very barbarous.”

“It is possible that I am barbarous,” Pilar said. “Listen, Inglés. Do you know what you are going to say to El Sordo?”

“Yes.”

“Because he is a man of few words unlike me and thee and this sentimental menagerie.”

“Why do you talk thus?” Maria asked again, angrily.

“I don’t know,” said Pilar as she strode along. “Why do you think?”

“I do not know.”

“At times many things tire me,” Pilar said angrily. “You understand? And one of them is to have forty-eight years. You hear me? Forty-eight years and an ugly face. And another is to see panic in the face of a failed bullfighter of Communist tendencies when I say, as a joke, I might kiss him.”

“It’s not true, Pilar,” the boy said. “You did not see that.”

“Qué va, it’s not true. And I obscenity in the milk of all of you. Ah, there he is. Hola, Santiago! Qué tal?”

The man to whom Pilar spoke was short and heavy, brownfaced, with broad cheekbones; gray haired, with wide-set yellowbrown eyes, a thin-bridged, hooked nose like an Indian’s, a long Upper lip and a wide, thin mouth. He was clean shaven and he walked toward them from the mouth of the cave, moving with the bow-legged walk that went with his cattle herdsman’s breeches and boots. The day was warm but he had on a sheep’s-wool-lined short leather jacket buttoned up to the neck. He put out a big brown hand toPilar. “Hola, woman,” he said. “Hola,” he said to Robert Jordan and shook his hand and looked him keenly in the face. Robert Jordan saw his eyes were yellow as a cat’s and flat as reptile’s eyes are. “Guapa,” he said to Maria and patted her shoulder.

“Eaten?” he asked Pilar. She shook her head.

“Eat,” he said and looked at Robert Jordan. “Drink?” he asked, making a motion with his hand decanting his thumb downward.

“Yes, thanks.”

“Good,” El Sordo said. “Whiskey?”

“You have whiskey?”

El Sordo nodded. “Inglés?” he asked. “Not Ruso?”

“Americano.”

“Few Americans here,” he said.

“Now more.”

“Less bad. North or South?”

“North.”

“Same as Inglés. When blow bridge?”

“You know about the bridge?”

El Sordo nodded.

“Day after tomorrow morning.”

“Good,” said El Sordo.

“Pablo?” he asked Pilar.

She shook her head. El Sordo grinned.

“Go away,” he said to Maria and grinned again. “Come back,” he looked at a large watch he pulled out on a leather thong from inside his coat. “Half an hour.”

He motioned to them to sit down on a flattened log that served as a bench and looking at Joaquín, jerked his thumb down the trail in the direction they had come from.

“I’ll walk down with Joaquín and come back,” Maria said.

El Sordo went into the cave and came out with a pinch bottle of Scotch whiskey and three glasses. The bottle was under one arm, and three glasses were in the hand of that arm, a finger in each glass, and his other hand was around the neck of an earthenware jar of water. He put the glasses and the bottle down on the log and set the jug on the ground.

“No ice,” he said to Robert Jordan and handed him the bottle.

“I don’t want any,” Pilar said and covered her glass with her hand.

“Ice last night on ground,” El Sordo said and grinned. “All melt. Ice up there,” El Sordo said and pointed to the snow that showed on the bare crest of the mountains. “Too far.”

Robert Jordan started to pour into El Sordo’s glass but the deaf man shook his head and made a motion for the other to pour for himself.

Robert Jordan poured a big drink of Scotch into the glass and El Sordo watched him eagerly and when he had finished, handed him the water jug and Robert Jordan filled the glass with the cold water that ran in a stream from the earthenware spout as he tipped up the jug.

El Sordo poured himself half a glassful of whiskey and filled the glass with water.

“Wine?” he asked Pilar.

“No. Water.”

“Take it,” he said. “No good,” he said to Robert Jordan and grinned. “Knew many English. Always much whiskey.”

“Where?”

“Ranch,” El Sordo said. “Friends of boss.”

“Where do you get the whiskey?”

“What?” he could not hear.

“You have to shout,” Pilar said. “Into the other ear.”

El Sordo pointed to his better ear and grinned.

“Where do you get the whiskey?” Robert Jordan shouted.

“Make it,” El Sordo said and watched Robert Jordan’s hand check on its way to his mouth with the glass.

“No,” El Sordo said and patted his shoulder. “Joke. Comes from La Granja. Heard last night comes English dynamiter. Good. Very happy. Get whiskey. For you. You like?”

“Very much,” said Robert Jordan. “It’s very good whiskey.”

“Am contented,” Sordo grinned. “Was bringing tonight with information”

“What information?”

Much troop movement.”

Where?

“Segovia. Planes you saw.”

“Yes.”

“Bad, eh?”

“Bad.”

“Troop movement?”

“Much between Villacastín and Segovia. On Valladolid road. Much between Villacastín and San Rafael. Much. Much.”

“What do you think?”

“We prepare something?”

“Possibly.”

“They know. Prepare too.”

“It is possible.”

“Why not blow bridge tonight?”

“Orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“General Staff.”

“So.”

“Is the time of the blowing important?” Pilar asked.

“Of all importance.”

“But if they are moving up troops?”

“I will send Anselmo with a report of all movement and concentrations. He is checking the road.”

“You have some one at road?” Sordo asked.

Robert Jordan did not know how much he had heard. You never know with a deaf man.

“Yes,” he said.

“Me, too. Why not blow bridge now?”

“I have my orders.”

“I don’t like it,” El Sordo said. “This I do not like.”

“Nor I,” said Robert Jordan.

El Sordo shook his head and took a sip of the whiskey. “You want of me?”

“How many men have you?”

“Eight.”

“To cut the telephone, attack the post at the house of the roadmenders, take it, and fall back on the bridge.”

“It is easy.”

“It will all be written out.”

“Don’t trouble. And Pablo?”

“Will cut the telephone below, attack the post at the sawmill, take it and fall back on the bridge.”

“And afterwards for the retreat?” Pilar asked. “We are seven men, two women and five horses. You are,” she shouted into Sordo’s ear.

“Eight men and four horses. Faltan caballos,” he said. “Lacks horses.”

“Seventeen people and nine horses,” Pilar said. “Without accounting for transport.”

Sordo said nothing.

“There is no way of getting horses?” Robert Jordan said into Sordo’s best ear.

“In war a year,” Sordo said. “Have four.” He showed four fingers. “Now you want eight for tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “Knowing you are leaving. Having no need to be careful as you have been in this neighborhood. Not having to be cautious here now. You could not cut out and steal eight head of horses?”

“Maybe,” Sordo said. “Maybe none. Maybe more.”

“You have an automatic rifle?” Robert Jordan asked.

Sordo nodded.

“Where?”

“Up the hill.”

“What kind?”

“Don’t know name. With pans.”

“How many rounds?”

“Five pans.”

“Does any one know how to use it?”

“Me. A little. Not shoot too much. Not want make noise here. Not want use cartridges.”

“I will look at it afterwards,” Robert Jordan said. “Have you hand grenades?”

Plenty.

“How many rounds per rifle?”

“Plenty.”

“How many?”

“One hundred fifty. More maybe.”

“What about other people?”

“For what?”

“To have sufficient force to take the posts and cover the bridge While I am blowing it. We should have double what we have.”

“Take posts don’t worry. What time day?”

“Daylight.”

“Don’t worry.”

“I could use twenty more men, to be sure,” Robert Jordan said.

“Good ones do not exist. You want undependables?”

“No. How many good ones?”

“Maybe four.”

“Why so few?”

“No trust.”

“For horseholders?”

“Must trust much to be horseholders.”

“I’d like ten more good men if I could get them.”

“Four.”

“Anselmo told me there were over a hundred here in these hills.”

“No good.”

“You said thirty,” Robert Jordan said to Pilar. “Thirty of a certain degree of dependability.”

“What about the people of Elias?” Pilar shouted to Sordo. He shook his head.

“No good.”

“You can’t get ten?” Robert Jordan asked. Sordo looked at him with his flat, yellow eyes and shook his head.

“Four,” he said and held up four fingers.

“Yours are good?” Robert Jordan asked, regretting it as he said it.

Sordo nodded.

“Dentro de la gravedad,” he said in Spanish. “Within the limits of the danger.” He grinned. “Will be bad, eh?”

“Possibly.”

“Is the same to me,” Sordo said simply and not boasting. “Better four good than much bad. In this war always much bad, very little good. Every day fewer good. And Pablo?” he looked at Pilar.

“As you know,” Pilar said. “Worse every day.”

Sordo shrugged his shoulders.

“Take drink,” Sordo said to Robert Jordan. “I bring mine and four more. Makes twelve. Tonight we discuss all. I have sixty sticks dynamite. You want?”

“What per cent?”

“Don’t know. Common dynamite. I bring.”

“We’ll blow the small bridge above with that,” Robert Jordan said. “That is fine. You’ll come down tonight? Bring that, will you? I’ve no orders for that but it should be blown.”

“I come tonight. Then hunt horses.”

“What chance for horses?”

“Maybe. Now eat.”

Does he talk that way to every one? Robert Jordan thought. Or is that his idea of how to make foreigners understand?

“And where are we going to go when this is done?” Pilar shouted into Sordo’s ear.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“All that must be arranged,” the woman said.

“Of course,” said Sordo. “Why not?”

“It is bad enough,” Pilar said. “It must be planned very well.”

“Yes, woman,” Sordo said. “What has thee worried?”

“Everything,” Pilar shouted.

Sordo grinned at her.

“You’ve been going about with Pablo,” he said.

So he does only speak that pidgin Spanish for foreigners, Robert Jordan thought. Good. I’m glad to hear him talking straight.

“Where do you think we should go?” Pilar asked.

“Where?”

“Yes, where?”

“There are many places,” Sordo said. “Many places. You know Gredos?”

“There are many people there. All these places will be cleaned up as soon as they have time.”

“Yes. But it is a big country and very wild.”

“It would be very difficult to get there,” Pilar said.

“Everything is difficult,” El Sordo said. “We can get to Gredos as well as to anywhere else. Travelling at night. Here it is very dangerous now. It is a miracle we have been here this long. Gredos is safer country than this.”

“Do you know where I want to go?” Pilar asked him.

“Where? The Paramera? That’s no good.”

“No,” Pilar said. “Not the Sierra de Paramera. I want to go to the Republic.”

“That is possible.”

“Would your people go?”

“Yes. If I say to.”

“Of mine, I do not know,” Pilar said. “Pablo would not want to although, truly, he might feel safer there. He is too old to have to go for a soldier unless they call more classes. The gypsy will not wish to go. I do not know about the others.”

“Because nothing passes her for so long they do not realize the danger,” El Sordo said.

“Since the planes today they will see it more,” Robert Jordan said. “But I should think you could operate very well from the Gredos.”

“What?” El Sordo said and looked at him with his eyes very flat. There was no friendliness in the way he asked the question.

“You could raid more effectively from there,” Robert Jordan said.

“So,” El Sordo said. “You know Gredos?”

“Yes. You could operate against the main line of the railway from there. You could keep cutting it as we are doing farther south in Estremadura. To operate from there would be better than returning to the Republic,” Robert Jordan said. “You are more useful there.”

They had both gotten sullen as he talked.

Sordo looked at Pilar and she looked back at him.

“You know Gredos?” Sordo asked. “Truly?”

“Sure,” said Robert Jordan.

“Where would you go?”

“Above Barco de Avila. Better places than here. Raid against the main road and the railroad between Béjar and Plasencia.”

“Very difficult,” Sordo said.

“We have worked against that same railroad in much more dangerous country in Estremadura,” Robert Jordan said.

“Who is we?”

“The guerrilleros group of Estremadura.”

“You are many?”

“About forty.”

“Was the one with the bad nerves and the strange name from there?” asked Pilar.

“Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

“Dead, as I told you.”

“You are from there, too?”

“Yes.”

“You see what I mean?” Pilar said to him.

And I have made a mistake, Robert Jordan thought to himself. I have told Spaniards we can do something better than they can when the rule is never to speak of your own exploits or abilities. When I should have flattered them I have told them what I think they should do and now they are furious. Well, they will either get over it or they will not. They are certainly much more useful in the Gredos than here. The proof is that here they have done nothing since the train that Kashkin organized. It was not much of a show. It cost the fascists one engine and killed a few troops but they all talk as though it were the high point of the war. Maybe they will shame into going to the Gredos. Yes and maybe I will get thrown out of here too. Well, it is not a very rosy-looking dish anyway that you look into it.

“Listen Inglés,” Pilar said to him. “How are your nerves?”

“All right,” said Robert Jordan. “O.K.”

“Because the last dynamiter they sent to work with us, although a formidable technician, was very nervous.”

“We have nervous ones,” Robert Jordan said.

“I do not say that he was a coward because he comported himself very well,” Pilar went on. “But he spoke in a very rare and windy way.” She raised her voice. “Isn’t it true, Santiago, that the last dynamiter, he of the train, was a little rare?”

“Algo raro,” the deaf man nodded and his eyes went over Robert Jordan’s face in a way that reminded him of the round opening at the end of the wand of a vacuum cleaner. “Si, algo raro, pero bueno.”

“Murió,” Robert Jordan said into the deaf man’s ear. “He is dead.”

“How was that?” the deaf man asked, dropping his eyes down from Robert Jordan’s eyes to his lips.

“I shot him,” Robert Jordan said. “He was too badly wounded to travel and I shot him.”

“He was always talking of such a necessity,” Pilar said. “It was his obsession.”

“Yes,” said Robert Jordan. “He was always talking of such a necessity and it was his obsession.”

“Como fué?” the deaf man asked. “Was it a train?”

“It was returning from a train,” Robert Jordan said. “The train was successful. Returning in the dark we encountered a fascist patrol and as we ran he was shot high in the back but without hitting any bone except the shoulder blade. He travelled quite a long way, but with the wound was unable to travel more. He was unwilling to be left behind and I shot him.”

“Menos mal,” said El Sordo. “Less bad.”

“Are you sure your nerves are all right?” Pilar said to Robert Jordan.

“Yes,” he told her. “I am sure that my nerves are all right and I think that when we terminate this of the bridge you would do well to go to the Gredos.”

As he said that, the woman started to curse in a flood of obscene invective that rolled over and around him like the hot white water splashing down from the sudden eruption of a geyser.

The deaf man shook his head at Robert Jordan and grinned in delight. He continued to shake his head happily as Pilar went on vilifying and Robert Jordan knew that it was all right again now. Finally she stopped cursing, reached for the water jug, tipped it up and took a drink and said, calmly, “Then just shut up about what we are to do afterwards, will you, Inglés? You go back to the Republic and you take your piece with you and leave us others alone here to decide what part of these hills we’ll die in.”

“Live in,” El Sordo said. “Calm thyself, Pilar.”

“Live in and die in,” Pilar said. “I can see the end of it well enough. I like thee, Inglés, but keep thy mouth off of what we must do when thy business is finished.”

“It is thy business,” Robert Jordan said. “I do not put my hand in it.”

“But you did,” Pilar said. “Take thy little cropped-headed whore and go back to the Republic but do not shut the door on others who are not foreigners and who loved the Republic when thou wert wiping thy mother’s milk off thy chin.”

Maria had come up the trail while they were talking and she heard this last sentence which Pilar, raising her voice again, shouted at Robert Jordan. Maria shook her head at Robert Jordan violently and shook her finger warningly. Pilar saw Robert Jordan looking at the girl and saw him smile and she turned and said, “Yes. I said whore and I mean it. And I suppose that you’ll go to Valencia together and we can eat goat crut in Gredos.”

“I’m a whore if thee wishes, Pilar,” Maria said. “I suppose I am in all case if you say so. But calm thyself. What passes with thee?”

“Nothing,” Pilar said and sat down on the bench, her voice calm now and all the metallic rage gone out of it. “I do not call thee that. But I have such a desire to go to the Republic.”

“We can all go,” Maria said.

“Why not?” Robert Jordan said. “Since thou seemest not to love the Gredos.”

Sordo grinned at him.

“We’ll see,” Pilar said, her rage gone now. “Give me a glass of that rare drink. I have worn my throat out with anger. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”

“You see, Comrade,” El Sordo explained. “It is the morning that is difficult.” He was not talking the pidgin Spanish now and he was looking into Robert Jordan’s eyes calmly and explainingly; not searchingly nor suspiciously, nor with the flat superiority of the old campaigner that had been in them before. “I understand your needs and I know the posts must be exterminated and the bridge covered while you do your work. This I understand perfectly. This is easy to do before daylight or at daylight.”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “Run along a minute, will you?” he said to Maria without looking at her.

The girl walked away out of hearing and sat down, her hands clasped over her ankles.

“You see,” Sordo said. “In that there is no problem. But to leave afterward and get out of this country in daylight presents a grave problem”

“Clearly,” said Robert Jordan. “I have thought of it. It is daylight for me also.”

“But you are one,” El Sordo said. “We are various.”

“There is the possibility of returning to the camps and leaving from there at dark,” Pilar said, putting the glass to her lips and then lowering it.

“That is very dangerous, too,” El Sordo explained. “That is perhaps even more dangerous.”

“I can see how it would be,” Robert Jordan said.

“To do the bridge in the night would be easy,” El Sordo said. “Since you make the condition that it must be done at daylight, it brings grave consequences.”

“I know it.”

“You could not do it at night?”

“I would be shot for it.”

“It is very possible we will all be shot for it if you do it in the daytime.”

“For me myself that is less important once the bridge is blown,” Robert Jordan said. “But I see your viewpoint. You cannot work Out a retreat for daylight?”

“Certainly,” El Sordo said. “We will work out such a retreat. But I explain to you why one is preoccupied and why one is irritated. You speak of going to Gredos as though it were a military manceuvre to be accomplished. To arrive at Gredos would be a miracle.”

Robert Jordan said nothing.

“Listen to me,” the deaf man said. “I am speaking much. But it is so we may understand one another. We exist here by a miracle. By a mixacle of laziness and stupidity of the fascists which they will remedy in time. Of course we are very careful and we make no disturbance in these hills.”

“I know.”

“But now, with this, we must go. We must think much about the manner of our going.”

“Clearly.”

“Then,” said El Sordo. “Let us eat now. I have talked much.”

“Never have I heard thee talk so much,” Pilar said. “Is it this?” she held up the glass.

“No,” El Sordo shook his head. “It isn’t whiskey. It is that never have I had so much to talk of.”

“I appreciate your aid and your loyalty,” Robert Jordan said. “I appreciate the difficulty caused by the timing of the blowing of the bridge.”

“Don’t talk of that,” El Sordo said. “We are here to do what we can do. But this is complicated.”

“And on paper very simple,” Robert Jordan grinned. “On paper the bridge is blown at the moment the attack starts in order that nothing shall come up the road. It is very simple.”

“That they should let us do something on paper,” El Sordo said. “That we should conceive and execute something on paper.”

“Paper bleeds little,” Robert Jordan quoted the proverb.

“But it is very useful,” Pilar said. “Es muy util. What I would like to do is use thy orders for that purpose.”

“Me too,” said Robert Jordan. “But you could never win a war like that.”

“No,” the big woman said. “I suppose not. But do you know what I would like?”

“To go to the Republic,” El Sordo said. He had put his good ear close to her as she spoke. “Ya irás, mujer. Let us win this and it will all be Republic.”

“All right,” Pilar said. “And now, for God’s sake let us eat.”

Chapter 12

They left El Sordo’s after eating and started down the trail. El Sordo had walked with them as far as the lower post.

“Salud,” he said. “Until tonight.”

“Salud, Camarada,” Robert Jordan had said to him and the three of them had gone on down the trail, the deaf man standing looking after them. Maria had turned and waved her hand at him and El Sordo waved disparagingly with the abrupt, Spanish upward flick of the forearm as though something were being tossed away which seems the negation of all salutation which has not to do with business. Through the meal he had never unbuttoned his sheepskin coat and he had been carefully polite, careful to turn his head to hear and had returned to speaking his broken Spanish, asking Robert Jordan about conditions in the Republic politely; but it was obvious he wanted to be rid of them.

As they had left him, Pilar had said to him, “Well, Santiago?”

“Well, nothing, woman,” the deaf man said. “It is all right. But I am thinking.”

“Me, too,” Pilar had said and now as they walked down the trail, the walking easy and pleasant down the steep trail through the pines that they had toiled up, Pilar said nothing. Neither Robert Jordan nor Maria spoke and the three of them travelled along fast until the trail rose steeply out of the wooded valley to come up through the timber, leave it, and come out into the high meadow.

It was hot in the late May afternoon and halfway up this last steep grade the woman stopped. Robert Jordan, stopping and looking back, saw the sweat beading on her forehead. He thought her brown face looked pallid and the skin sallow and that there were dark areas under her eyes.

“Let us rest a minute,” he said. “We go too fast.”

“No,” she said. “Let us go on.”

“Rest, Pilar,” Maria said. “You look badly.”

“Shut up,” the woman said. “Nobody asked for thy advice.”

She started on up the trail but at the top she was breathing heavily and her face was wet with perspiration and there was no doubt about her pallor now.

“Sit down, Pilar,” Maria said. “Please, please sit down.”

“All right,” said Pilar and the three of them sat down under a pine tree and looked across the mountain meadow to where the tops of the peaks seemed to jut out from the roll of the high country with snow shining bright on them now in the early afternoon sun.

“What rotten stuff is the snow and how beautiful it looks,” Pilar said. “What an illusion is the snow.” She turned to Maria. “I am sorry I was rude to thee, guapa. I don’t know what has held me today. I have an evil temper.”

“I never mind what you say when you are angry,” Maria told her. “And you are angry often.”

“Nay, it is worse than anger,” Pilar said, looking across at the peaks.

“Thou art not well,” Maria said.

“Neither is it that,” the woman said. “Come here, guapa, and put thy head in my lap.”

Maria moved close to her, put her arms out and folded them as One does who goes to sleep without a pillow and lay with her head on her arms. She turned her face up at Pilar and smiled at her but the big woman looked on across the meadow at the mountains. She stroked the girl’s head without looking down at her and ran a blunt finger across the girl’s forehead and then around the line of her ear and down the line where the hair grew on her neck.

“You can have her in a little while, Inglés,” she said. Robert Jordan was sitting behind her.

“Do not talk like that,” Maria said.

“Yes, he can have thee,” Pilar said and looked at neither of them. “I have never wanted thee. But I am jealous.”

“Pilar,” Maria said. “Do not talk thus.”

“He can have thee,” Pilar said and ran her finger around the lobe of the girl’s ear. “But I am very jealous.”

“But Pilar,” Maria said. “It was thee explained to me there was nothing like that between us.”

“There is always something like that,” the woman said. “There is always something like something that there should not be. But with me there is not. Truly there is not. I want thy happiness and nothing more.”

Maria said nothing but lay there, trying to make her head rest lightly.

“Listen, guapa,” said Pilar and ran her finger now absently but tracingly over the contours of her cheeks. “Listen, guapa, I love thee and he can have thee, I am no tortillera but a woman made for men. That is true. But now it gives me pleasure to say thus, in the daytime, that I care for thee.”

“I love thee, too.”

“Qué va. Do not talk nonsense. Thou dost not know even of what I speak.”

“I know.”

“Qué va, that you know. You are for the Inglés. That is seen and as it should be. That I would have. Anything else I would not have. I do not make perversions. I only tell you something true. Few people will ever talk to thee truly and no women. I am jealous and say it and it is there. And I say it.”

“Do not say it,” Maria said. “Do not say it, Pilar.”

“Por qué, do not say it,” the woman said, still not looking at either of them. “I will say it until it no longer pleases me to say it. And,” she looked down at the girl now, “that time has come already. I do not say it more, you understand?”

“Pilar,” Maria said. “Do not talk thus.”

“Thou art a very pleasant little rabbit,” Pilar said. “And lift thy head now because this silliness is over.”

“It was not silly,” said Maria. “And my head is well where it is.”

“Nay. Lift it,” Pilar told her and put her big hands under the girl’s head and raised it. “And thou, Inglés?” she said, still holding the girl’s head as she looked across at the mountains. “What cat has eaten thy tongue?”

“No cat,” Robert Jordan said.

“What animal then?” She laid the girl’s head down on the ground.

“No animal,” Robert Jordan told her.

“You swallowed it yourself, eh?”

“I guess so,” Robert Jordan said.

“And did you like the taste?” Pilar turned now and grinned at him.

“Not much.”

“I thought not,” Pilar said. “I thought not. But I give you back our rabbit. Nor ever did I try to take your rabbit. That’s a good name for her. I heard you call her that this morning.”

Robert Jordan felt his face redden.

“You are a very hard woman,” he told her.

“No,” Pilar said. “But so simple I am very complicated. Are you very complicated, Inglés?”

“No. Nor not so simple.”

“You please me, Inglés,” Pilar said. Then she smiled and leaned forward and smiled and shook her head. “Now if I could take the rabbit from thee and take thee from the rabbit.”

“You could not.”

“I know it,” Pilar said and smiled again. “Nor would I wish to. But when I was young I could have.”

“I believe it.”

“You believe it?”

“Surely,” Robert Jordan said. “But such talk is nonsense.”

“It is not like thee,” Maria said.

“I am not much like myself today,” Pilar said. “Very little like myself. Thy bridge has given me a headache, Inglés.”

“We can tell it the Headache Bridge,” Robert Jordan said. “But I will drop it in that gorge like a broken bird cage.”

“Good,” said Pilar. “Keep on talking like that.”

“I’ll drop it as you break a banana from which you have removed the skin.”

“I could eat a banana now,” said Pilar. “Go on, Inglés. Keep on talking largely.”

“There is no need,” Robert Jordan said. “Let us get to camp.”

“Thy duty,” Pilar said. “It will come quickly enough. I said that I would leave the two of you.”

“No. I have much to do.”

“That is much too and does not take long.”

“Shut thy mouth, Pilar,” Maria said. “You speak grossly.”

“I am gross,” Pilar said. “But I am also very delicate. Soy muy delicada. I will leave the two of you. And the talk of jealousness is nonsense. I was angry at Joaquín because I saw from his look how ugly I am. I am only jealous that you are nineteen. It is not a jealousy which lasts. You will not be nineteen always. Now I go.”

She stood up and with a hand on one hip looked at Robert Jordan, who was also standing. Maria sat on the ground under the tree, her head dropped forward.

“Let us all go to camp together,” Robert Jordan said. “It is better and there is much to do.”

Pilar nodded with her head toward Maria, who sat there, her head turned away from them, saying nothing.

Pilar smiled and shrugged her shoulders almost imperceptibly and said, “You know the way?”

“I know it,” Maria said, not raising her head.

“Pues me voy,” Pilar said. “Then I am going. We’ll have something hearty for you to eat, Inglés.”

She started to walk off into the heather of the meadow toward the stream that led down through it toward the camp.

“Wait,” Robert Jordan called to her. “It is better that we should all go together.”

Maria sat there and said nothing.

Pilar did not turn.

“Qué va, go together,” she said. “I will see thee at the camp.”

Robert Jordan stood there.

“Is she all right?” he asked Maria. “She looked ill before.”

“Let her go,” Maria said, her head still down.

“I think I should go with her.”

“Let her go,” said Maria. “Let her go!”

Chapter 13

They were walking through the heather of the mountain meadow and Robert Jordan felt the brushing of the heather against his legs, felt the weight of his pistol in its holster against his thigh, felt the sun on his head, felt the breeze from the snow of the mountain peaks cool on his back and, in his hand, he felt the girl’s hand firm and strong, the fingers locked in his. From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting. With the sun shining on her hair, tawny as wheat, and on her gold-brown smooth-lovely face and on the curve of her throat he bent her head back and held her to him and kissed her. He felt her trembling as he kissed her and he held the length of her body tight to him and felt her breasts against his chest through the two khaki shirts, he felt them small and firm and he reached and undid the buttons on her shirt and bent and kissed her and she stood shivering, holding her head back, his arm behind her. Then she dropped her chin to his head and then he felt her hands holding his head and rocking it against her. He straightened and with his two arms around her held her so tightly that she was lifted off the ground, tight against him, and he felt her trembling and then her lips were on his throat, and then he put her down and said, “Maria, oh, my Maria.”

Then he said, “Where should we go?”

She did not say anything but slipped her hand inside of his shirt and he felt her undoing the shirt buttons and she said, “You, too. I want to kiss, too.”

“No, little rabbit.”

“Yes. Yes. Everything as you.”

“Nay. That is an impossibility.”

“Well, then. Oh, then. Oh, then. Oh.”

Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Then he was lying on his side, his head deep in the heather, smelling it and the smell of the roots and the earth and the sun came through it and it was scratchy on his bare shoulders and along his flanks and the girl was lying opposite him with her eyes still shut and then she opened them and smiled at him and he said very tiredly and from a great but friendly distance, “Hello, rabbit.” And she smiled and from no distance said, “Hello, my Inglés.”

“I’m not an Inglés,” he said very lazily.

“Oh yes, you are,” she said. “You’re my Inglés,” and reached and took hold of both his ears and kissed him on the forehead.

“There,” she said. “How is that? Do I kiss thee better?”

Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, “Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

“Oh,” she said. “I die each time. Do you not die?”

“No. Almost. But did thee feel the earth move?”

“Yes. As I died. Put thy arm around me, please.”

“No. I have thy hand. Thy hand is enough.”

He looked at her and across the meadow where a hawk was hunting and the big afternoon clouds were coming now over the mountains.

“And it is not thus for thee with others?” Maria asked him, they now walking hand in hand.

“No. Truly.”

“Thou hast loved many others.”

“Some. But not as thee.”

“And it was not thus? Truly?”

“It was a pleasure but it was not thus.”

“And then the earth moved. The earth never moved before?”

“Nay. Truly never.”

“Ay,” she said. “And this we have for one day.”

He said nothing.

“But we have had it now at least,” Maria said. “And do you like me too? Do I please thee? I will look better later.”

“Thou art very beautiful now.”

“Nay,” she said. “But stroke thy hand across my head.”

He did that feeling her cropped hair soft and flattening and then rising between his fingers and he put both hands on her head and turned her face up to his and kissed her.

“I like to kiss very much,” she said. “But I do not do it well.”

“Thou hast no need to kiss.”

“Yes, I have. If I am to be thy woman I should please thee in all ways.”

“You please me enough. I would not be more pleased. There is no thing I could do if I were more pleased.”

“But you will see,” she said very happily. “My hair amuses thee now because it is odd. But every day it is growing. It will be long and then I will not look ugly and perhaps you will love me very much.”

“Thou hast a lovely body,” he said. “The loveliest in the world.”

“It is only young and thin.”

“No. In a fine body there is magic. I do not know what makes it in one and not in another. But thou hast it.”

“For thee,” she said.

“Nay.”

“Yes. For thee and for thee always and only for thee. But it is littie to bring thee. I would learn to take good care of thee. But tell me truly. Did the earth never move for thee before?”

“Never,” he said truly.

“Now am I happy,” she said. “Now am I truly happy.

“You are thinking of something else now?” she asked him.

“Yes. My work.”

“I wish we had horses to ride,” Maria said. “In my happiness I would like to be on a good horse and ride fast with thee riding fast beside me and we would ride faster and faster, galloping, and never pass my happiness.”

“We could take thy happiness in a plane,” he said absently.

“And go over and over in the sky like the little pursuit planes shining in the sun,” she said. “Rolling it in loops and in dives. Qué bueno!” she laughed. “My happiness would not even notice it.”

“Thy happiness has a good stomach,” he said half hearing what she said.

Because now he was not there. He was walking beside her but his mind was thinking of the problem of the bridge now and it was all clear and hard and sharp as when a camera lens is brought into focus. He saw the two posts and Anselmo and the gypsy watching. He saw the road empty and he saw movement on it. He saw where he would place the two automatic rifles to get the most level field of fire, and who will serve them, he thought, me at the end, but who at the start? He placed the charges, wedged and lashed them, sunk his caps and crimped them, ran his wires, hooked them up and got back to where he had placed the old box of the exploder and then he started to think of all the things that could have happened and that might go wrong. Stop it, he told himself. You have made love to this girl and now your head is clear, properly clear, and you start to worry. It is one thing to think you must do and it is another thing to worry. Don’t worry. You mustn’t worry. You know the things that you may have to do and you know what may happen. Certainly it may happen.

You went into it knowing what you were fighting for. You were fighting against exactly what you were doing and being forced into doing to have any chance of winning. So now he was compelled to use these people whom he liked as you should use troops toward whom you have no feeling at all if you were to be successful. Pablo was evidently the smartest. He knew how bad it was instantly. The woman was all for it, and still was; but the realization of what it really consisted in had overcome her steadily and it had done plenty to her already. Sordo recognized it instantly and would do it but he did not like it any more than he, Robert Jordan, liked it.

So you say that it is not that which will happen to yourself but that which may happen to the woman and the girl and to the others that you think of. All right. What would have happened to them if you had not come? What happened to them and what passed with them before you were ever here? You must not think in that way. You have no responsibility for them except in action. The orders do not come from you. They come from Golz. And who is Golz? A good general. The best you’ve ever served under. But should a man carry out impossible orders knowing what they lead to? Even though they come from Golz, who is the party as well as the army? Yes. He should carry them out because it is only in the performing of them that they can prove to be impossible. How do you know they are impossible until you have tried them? If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where Would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, “Impossible,” when orders came?

He had seen enough of commanders to whom all orders were impossible. That swine Gomez in Estremadura. He had seen enough attacks when the flanks did not advance because it was impossible. No, he would carry out the orders and it was bad luck that you liked the people you must do it with.

In all the work that they, the partizans, did, they brought added danger and bad luck to the people that sheltered them and worked with them. For what? So that, eventually, there should be no more danger and so that the country should be a good place to live in. That was true no matter how trite it sounded.

If the Republic lost it would be impossible for those who believed in it to live in Spain. But would it? Yes, he knew that it would be, from the things that happened in the parts the fascists had already taken.

Pablo was a swine but the others were fine people and was it not a betrayal of them all to get them to do this? Perhaps it was. But if they did not do it two squadrons of cavalry would come and hunt them out of these hills in a week.

No. There was nothing to be gained by leaving them alone. Except that all people should be left alone and you should interfere with no one. So he believed that, did he? Yes, he believed that. And what about a planned society and the rest of it? That was for the others to do. He had something else to do after this war. He fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved and he believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for all those people who believed in it. He was under Communist discipline for the duration of the war. Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their discipline for the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose program and whose discipline he could respect.

What were his politics then? He had none now, he told himself. But do not tell any one else that, he thought. Don’t ever admit that. And what are you going to do afterwards? I am going back and earn my living teaching Spanish as before, and I am going to write a true book. I’ll bet, he said. I’ll bet that will be easy.

He would have to talk with Pablo about politics. It would certainly be interesting to see what his political development had been. The classical move from left to right, probably; like old Lerroux. Pablo was quite a lot like Lerroux. Prieto was as bad. Pablo and Prieto had about an equal faith in the ultimate victory. They all had the politics of horse thieves. He believed in the Republic as a form of government but the Republic would have to get rid of all of that bunch of horse thieves that brought it to the pass it was in when the rebellion started. Was there ever a people whose leaders were as truly their enemies as this one?

Enemies of the people. That was a phrase he might omit. That was a catch phrase he would skip. That was one thing that sleeping with Maria had done. He had gotten to be as bigoted and hidebound about his politics as a hard-shelled Baptist and phrases like enemies of the people came into his mind without his much criticizing them in any way. Any sort of clichés both revolutionary and patriotic. His mind employed them without criticism. Of course they were true but it was too easy to be nimble about using them. But since last night and this afternoon his mind was much clearer and cleaner on that business. Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.

How would that premise stand up if he examined it? That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemianism. When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognized your own personal fallibility of that so mutable substitute for the apostles’creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Mayakovsky.

But Mayakovsky was a saint again. That was because he was safely dead. You’ll be safely dead yourself, he told himself. Now stop thinking that sort of thing. Think about Maria.

Maria was very hard on his bigotry. So far she had not affected his resolution but he would much prefer not to die. He would abandon a hero’s or a martyr’s end gladly. He did not want to make a Thermopylae, nor be Horatius at any bridge, nor be the Dutch boy With his finger in that dyke. No. He would like to spend some time With Maria. That was the simplest expression of it. He would like to spend a long, long time with her.

He did not believe there was ever going to be any such thing as a long time any more but if there ever was such a thing he would like to spend it with her. We could go into the hotel and register as Doctor and Mrs. Livingstone I presume, he thought.

Why not marry her? Sure, he thought. I will marry her. Then we will be Mt and Mrs. Robert Jordan of Sun Valley, Idaho. Or Corpus Christi, Texas, or Butte, Montana.

Spanish girls make wonderful wives. I’ve never had one so I know. And when I get my job back at the university she can be an instructor’s wife and when undergraduates who take Spanish IV come in to smoke pipes in the evening and have those so valuable informal discussions about Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Galdós and the other always admirable dead, Maria can tell them about how some of the blue-shirted crusaders for the true faith sat on her head while others twisted her arms and pulled her skirts up and stuffed them in her mouth.

I wonder how they will like Maria in Missoula, Montana? That is if I can get a job back in Missoula. I suppose that I am ticketed as a Red there now for good and will be on the general blacklist. Though you never know. You never can tell. They’ve no proof of what you do, and as a matter of fact they would never believe it if you told them, and my passport was valid for Spain before they issued the restrictions.

The time for getting back will not be until the fall of thirtyseven. I left in the summer of thirty-six and though the leave is for a year you do not need to be back until the fall term opens in the following year. There is a lot of time between now and the fall term. There is a lot of time between now and day after tomorrow if you want to put it that way. No. I think there is no need to worry about the university. Just you turn up there in the fall and it will be all right. Just try and turn up there.

But it has been a strange life for a long time now. Damned if it hasn’t. Spain was your work and your job, so being in Spain was natural and sound. You had worked summers on engineering projects and in the forest service building roads and in the park and learned to handle powder, so the demolition was a sound and normal job too. Always a little hasty, but sound.

Once you accept the idea of demolition as a problem it is only a problem. But there was plenty that was not so good that went with it although God knows you took it easily enough. There was the constant attempt to approximate the conditions of successful assassination that accompanied the demolition. Did big words make it more defensible? Did they make killing any more palatable? You took to it a little too readily if you ask me, he told himself. And what you will be like or just exactly what you will be suited for when you leave the service of the Republic is, to me, he thought, extremely doubtful. But my guess is you will get rid of all that by writing about it, he said. Once you write it down it is all gone. It will be a good book if you can write it. Much better than the other.

But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope), he thought and so you had better take what time there is and be very thankful for it. If the bridge goes bad. It does not look too good just now.

But Maria has been good. Has she not? Oh, has she not, he thought. Maybe that is what I am to get now from life. Maybe that is my life and instead of it being threescore years and ten it is fortyeight hours or just threescore hours and ten or twelve rather. Twenty-four hours in a day would be threescore and twelve for the three full days.

I suppose it is possible to live as full a life in seventy hours as in seventy years; granted that your life has been full up to the time that the seventy hours start and that you have reached a certain age.

What nonsense, he thought. What rot you get to thinking by yourself. That is really nonsense. And maybe it isn’t nonsense too. Well, we will see. The last time I slept with a girl was in Madrid. No it wasn’t. It was in the Escorial and, except that I woke in the night and thought it was some one else and was excited until I realized who it really was, it was just dragging ashes; except that it was pleasant enough. And the time before that was in Madrid and except for some lying and pretending I did to myself as to identity while things were going on, it was the same or something less. So I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish Woman nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that nor thought that it could happen.

So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it. Now, ahora, maintenant, heute. Now, it has a funny sound to be a whole world and your life. Esta noche, tonight, ce soir, heute abend. Life and wife, Vie and Mari. No it didn’t work out. The French turned it into husband. There was now and frau; but that did not prove anything either. Take dead, mort, muerto, and todt. Todt was the deadest of them all. War, guerre, guerra, and krieg. Krieg was the most like war, or was it? Or was it only that he knew German the least well? Sweetheart, chérie, prenda, and schatz. He would trade them all for Maria. There was a name.

Well, they would all be doing it together and it would not be long now. It certainly looked worse all the time. It was just something that you could not bring off in the morning. In an impossible situation you hang on until night to get away. You try to last out until night to get back in. You are all right, maybe, if you can stick it out until dark and then get in. So what if you start this sticking it out at daylight? How about that? And that poor bloody Sordo abandoning his pidgin Spanish to explain it to him so carefully. As though he had not thought about that whenever he had done any particularly bad thinking ever since Golz had first mentioned it. As though he hadn’t been living with that like a lump of undigested dough in the pit of his stomach ever since the night before the night before last.

What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing that you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counteroffensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria. Sure. That is what you would do. You ran into her rather late, that was all.

So a woman like that Pilar practically pushed this girl into your sleeping bag and what happens? Yes, what happens? What happens? You tell me what happens, please. Yes. That is just what happens. That is exactly what happens.

Don’t lie to yourself about Pilar pushing her into your sleeping robe and try to make it nothing or to make it lousy. You were gone when you first saw her. When she first opened her mouth and spoke to you it was there already and you know it. Since you have it and you never thought you would have it, there is no sense throwing dirt at it, when you know what it is and you know it came the first time you looked at her as she came out bent over carrying that iron cooking platter.

It hit you then and you know it and so why lie about it? You went all strange inside every time you looked at her and every time she looked at you. So why don’t you admit it? All right, I’ll admit it. And as for Pilar pushing her onto you, all Pilar did was be an intelligent woman. She had taken good care of the girl and she saw what was coming the minute the girl came back into the cave with the cooking dish.

So she made things easier. She made things easier so that there was last night and this afternoon. She is a damned sight more civilized than you are and she knows what time is all about. Yes, he said to himself, I think we can admit that she has certain notions about the value of time. She took a beating and all because she did not want other people losing what she’d lost and then the idea of admitting it was lost was too big a thing to swallow. So she took a beating back there on the hill and I guess we did not make it any easier for her.

Well, so that is what happens and what has happened and you might as well admit it and now you will never have two whole nights with her. Not a lifetime, not to live together, not to have what people were always supposed to have, not at all. One night that is past, once one afternoon, one night to come; maybe. No, sir.

Not time, not happiness, not fun, not children, not a house, not a bathroom, not a clean pair of pajamas, not the morning paper, not to wake up together, not to wake and know she’s there and that you’re not alone. No. None of that. But why, when this is all you are going to get in life of what you want; when you have found it; why not just one night in a bed with sheets?

You ask for the impossible. You ask for the ruddy impossible. So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor and cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn’t it. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely. Much more than likely and now lay off that sort of thinking. You can stop that now. That’s not good for you. Do nothing that is not good for you. Sure that’s it.

This was what Golz had talked about. The longer he was around, the smarter Golz seemed. So this was what he was asking about; the compensation of irregular service. Had Golz had this and was it the urgency and the lack of time and the circumstances that made it? Was this something that happened to every one given comparable circumstances? And did he only think it was something special because it was happening to him? Had Golz slept around in a hurry when he was commanding irregular cavalry in the Red Army and had the combination of the circumstances and the rest of it made the girls seem the way Maria was?

Probably Golz knew all about this too and wanted to make the point that you must make your whole life in the two nights that are given to you; that living as we do now you must concentrate all of that which you should always have into the short time that you can have it.

It was a good system of belief. But he did not believe that Maria had only been made by the circumstances. Unless, of course, she is a reaction from her own circumstance as well as his. Her one circumstance is not so good, he thought. No, not so good.

If this was how it was then this was how it was. But there was no law that made him say he liked it. I did not know that I could ever feel what I have felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.

So now do not worry, take what you have, and do your work and you will have a long life and a very merry one. Hasn’t it been merry lately? What are you complaining about? That’s the thing about this sort of work, he told himself, and was very pleased with the thought, it isn’t so much what you learn as it is the people you meet. He was pleased then because he was joking and he came back to the girl.

“I love you, rabbit,” he said to the girl. “What was it you were saying?”

“I was saying,” she told him, “that you must not worry about your work because I will not bother you nor interfere. If there is anything I can do you will tell me.”

“There’s nothing,” he said. “It is really very simple.”

“I will learn from Pilar what I should do to take care of a man well and those things I will do,” Maria said. “Then, as I learn, I will discover things for myself and other things you can tell me.”

“There is nothing to do.”

“Qué va, man, there is nothing! Thy sleeping robe, this morning, should have been shaken and aired and hung somewhere in the sun. Then, before the dew comes, it should be taken into shelter.”

“Go on, rabbit.”

“Thy socks should be washed and dried. I would see thee had two pair.”

“What else?”

“If thou would show me I would clean and oil thy pistol.”

“Kiss me,” Robert Jordan said.

“Nay, this is serious. Wilt thou show me about the pistol? Pilar has rags and oil. There is a cleaning rod inside the cave that should fit it.”

“Sure. I’ll show you.”

“Then,” Maria said. “If you will teach me to shoot it either one of us could shoot the other and himself, or herself, if one were wounded and it were necessary to avoid capture.”

“Very interesting,” Robert Jordan said. “Do you have many ideas like that?”

“Not many,” Maria said. “But it is a good one. Pilar gave me this and showed me how to use it,” she opened the breast pocket of her shirt and took out a cut-down leather holder such as pocket combs are carried in and, removing a wide rubber band that closed both ends, took out a Gem type, single-edged razor blade. “I keep this always,” she explained. “Pilar says you must make the cut here just below the ear and draw it toward here.” She showed him with her finger. “She says there is a big artery there and that drawing the blade from there you cannot miss it. Also, she says there is no pain and you must simply press firmly below the ear and draw it downward. She says it is nothing and that they cannot stop it if it is done.”

“That’s right,” said Robert Jordan. “That’s the carotid artery.”

So she goes around with that all the time, he thought, as a definitely accepted and properly organized possibility.

“But I would rather have thee shoot me,” Maria said. “Promise if there is ever any need that thou wilt shoot me.”

“Sure,” Robert Jordan said. “I promise.”

“Thank thee very much,” Maria told him. “I know it is not easy to do.”

“That’s all right,” Robert Jordan said.

You forget all this, he thought. You forget about the beauties of a civil war when you keep your mind too much on your work. You have forgotten this. Well, you are supposed to. Kashkin couldn’t forget it and it spoiled his work. Or do you think the old boy had a hunch? It was very strange because he had experienced absolutely no emotion about the shooting of Kashkin. He expected that at some time he might have it. But so far there had been absolutely none.

“But there are other things I can do for thee,” Maria told him, walking close beside him, now, very serious and womanly.

“Besides shoot me?”

“Yes. I can roll cigarettes for thee when thou hast no more of those with tubes. Pilar has taught me to roll them very well, tight and neat and not spilling.”

“Excellent,” said Robert Jordan. “Do you lick them yourself?”

“Yes,” the girl said, “and when thou art wounded I will care for thee and dress thy wound and wash thee and feed thee—”

“Maybe I won’t be wounded,” Robert Jordan said.

“Then when you are sick I will care for thee and make thee soups and clean thee and do all for thee. And I will read to thee.”

“Maybe I won’t get sick.”

“Then I will bring thee coffee in the morning when thou wakest—”

“Maybe I don’t like coffee,” Robert Jordan told her.

“Nay, but you do,” the girl said happily. “This morning you took two cups.”

“Suppose I get tired of coffee and there’s no need to shoot me and I’m neither wounded nor sick and I give up smoking and have only one pair of socks and hang up my robe myself. What then, rabbit?” he patted her on the back. “What then?”

“Then,” said Maria, “I will borrow the scissors of Pilar and cut thy hair.”

“I don’t like to have my hair cut.”

“Neither do I,” said Maria. “And I like thy hair as it is. So. If there is nothing to do for thee, I will sit by thee and watch thee and in the nights we will make love.”

“Good,” Robert Jordan said. “The last project is very sensible.”

“To me it seems the same,” Maria smiled. “Oh, Inglés,” she said.

“My name is Roberto.”

“Nay. But I call thee Inglés as Pilar does.”

“Still it is Roberto.”

“No,” she told him. “Now for a whole day it is Inglés. And Inglés, can I help thee with thy work?”

“No. What I do now I do alone and very coldly in my head.”

“Good,” she said. “And when will it be finished?”

“Tonight, with luck.”

“Good,” she said.

Below them was the last woods that led to the camp.

“Who is that?” Robert Jordan asked and pointed.

“Pilar,” the girl said, looking along his arm. “Surely it is Pilar.”

At the lower edge of the meadow where the first trees grew the woman was sitting, her head on her arms. She looked like a dark bundle from where they stood; black against the brown of the tree trunk.

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said and started to run toward her through the knee-high heather. It was heavy and hard to run in and when he had run a little way, he slowed and walked. He could see the woman’s head was on her folded arms and she looked broad and black against the tree trunk. He came up to her and said, “Pilar!” sharply.

The woman raised her head and looked up at him.

“Oh,” she said. “You have terminated already?”

“Art thou ill?” he asked and bent down by her.

“Qué va,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“Pilar,” Maria, who had come up, said and kneeled down by her. “How are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m magnificent,” Pilar said but she did not get up. She looked at the two of them. “Well, Inglés,” she said. “You have been doing manly tricks again?”

“You are all right?” Robert Jordan asked, ignoring the words.

“Why not? I slept. Did you?”

“No.”

“Well,” Pilar said to the girl. “It seems to agree with you.”

Maria blushed and said nothing.

“Leave her alone,” Robert Jordan said.

“No one spoke to thee,” Pilar told him. “Maria,” she said and her voice was hard. The girl did not look up.

“Maria,” the woman said again. “I said it seems to agree with thee.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Robert Jordan said again.

“Shut up, you,” Pilar said without looking at him. “Listen, Maria, tell me one thing.”

“No,” Maria said and shook her head.

“Maria,” Pilar said, and her voice was as hard as her face and there was nothing friendly in her face. “Tell me one thing of thy own volition.”

The girl shook her head.

Robert Jordan was thinking, if I did not have to work with this woman and her drunken man and her chicken-crut outfit, I would slap her so hard across the face that — .

“Go ahead and tell me,” Pilar said to the girl.

“No,” Maria said. “No.”

“Leave her alone,” Robert Jordan said and his voice did not sound like his own voice. I’ll slap her anyway and the hell with it, he thought.

Pilar did not even speak to him. It was not like a snake charming a bird, nor a cat with a bird. There was nothing predatory. Nor was there anything perverted about it. There was a spreading, though, as a cobra’s hood spreads. He could feel this. He could feel the menace of the spreading. But the spreading was a domination, not of evil, but of searching. I wish I did not see this, Robert Jordan thought. But it is not a business for slapping.

“Maria,” Pilar said. “I will not touch thee. Tell me now of thy own volition.”

“De tu propia voluntad,” the words were in Spanish.

The girl shook her head.

“Maria,” Pilar said. “Now and of thy own volition. You hear me? Anything at all.”

“No,” the girl said softly. “No and no.”

“Now you will tell me,” Pilar told her. “Anything at all. You will see. Now you will tell me.”

“The earth moved,” Maria said, not looking at the woman. “Truly. It was a thing I cannot tell thee.”

“So,” Pilar said and her voice was warm and friendly and there was no compulsion in it. But Robert Jordan noticed there were small drops of perspiration on her forehead and her lips. “So there was that. So that was it.”

“It is true,” Maria said and bit her lip.

“Of course it is true,” Pilar said kindly. “But do not tell it to your own people for they never will believe you. You have no Cali blood, Inglés?”

She got to her feet, Robert Jordan helping her up.

“No,” he said. “Not that I know of.”

“Nor has the Maria that she knows of,” Pilar said. “Pues es muy raro. It is very strange.”

“But it happened, Pilar,” Maria said.

“Cómo que no, hija?” Pilar said. “Why not, daughter? When I was young the earth moved so that you could feel it all shift in space and were afraid it would go out from under you. It happened every night.”

“You lie,” Maria said.

“Yes,” Pilar said. “I lie. It never moves more than three times in a lifetime. Did it really move?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “Truly.”

“For you, Inglés?” Pilar looked at Robert Jordan. “Don’t lie.”

“Yes,” he said. “Truly.”

“Good,” said Pilar. “Good. That is something.”

“What do you mean about the three times?” Maria asked. “Why do you say that?”

“Three times,” said Pilar. “Now you’ve had one.”

“Only three times?”

“For most people, never,” Pilar told her. “You are sure it moved?”

“One could have fallen off,” Maria said.

“I guess it moved, then,” Pilar said. “Come, then, and let us get to camp.”

“What’s this nonsense about three times?” Robert Jordan said to the big woman as they walked through the pines together.

“Nonsense?” she looked at him wryly. “Don’t talk to me of nonsense, little English.”

“Is it a wizardry like the palms of the hands?”

“Nay, it is common and proven knowledge with Gitanos.”

“But we are not Gitanos.”

“Nay. But you have had a little luck. Non-gypsies have a little luck sometimes.”

“You mean it truly about the three times?”

She looked at him again, oddly. “Leave me, Inglés,” she said. “Don’t molest me. You are too young for me to speak to.”

“But, Pilar,” Maria said.

“Shut up,” Pilar told her. “You have had one and there are two more in the world for thee.”

“And you?” Robert Jordan asked her.

“Two,” said Pilar and put up two fingers. “Two. And there will never be a third.”

“Why not?” Maria asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Pilar said. “Shut up. Busnes of thy age bore me.”

“Why not a third?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Oh, shut up, will you?” Pilar said. “Shut up!”

All right, Robert Jordan said to himself. Only I am not having any. I’ve known a lot of gypsies and they are strange enough. But so are we. The difference is we have to make an honest living. Nobody knows what tribes we came from nor what our tribal inheritance is nor what the mysteries were in the woods where the people lived that we came from. All we know is that we do not know. We know nothing about what happens to us in the nights. When it happens in the day though, it is something. Whatever happened, happened and now this woman not only has to make the girl say it when she did not want to; but she has to take it over and make it her own. She has to make it into a gypsy thing. I thought she took a beating up the hill but she was certainly dominating just now back there. If it had been evil she should have been shot. But it wasn’t evil. It was only wanting to keep her hold on life. To keep it through Maria.

When you get through with this war you might take up the study of women, he said to himself. You could start with Pilar. She has put in a pretty complicated day, if you ask me. She never brought in the gypsy stuff before. Except the hand, he thought. Yes, of course the hand. And I don’t think she was faking about the hand. She wouldn’t tell me what she saw, of course. Whatever she saw she believed in herself. But that proves nothing.

“Listen, Pilar,” he said to the woman.

Pilar looked at him and smiled.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Don’t be so mysterious,” Robert Jordan said. “These mysteries tire me very much.”

“So?” Pilar said.

“I do not believe in ogres, soothsayers, fortune tellers, or chicken-crut gypsy witchcraft.”

“Oh,” said Pilar.

“No. And you can leave the girl alone.”

“I will leave the girl alone.”

“And leave the mysteries,” Robert Jordan said. “We have enough work and enough things that will be done without complicating it with chicken-crut. Fewer mysteries and more work.”

“I see,” said Pilar and nodded her head in agreement. “And listen, Inglés,” she said and smiled at him. “Did the earth move?”

“Yes, God damn you. It moved.”

Pilar laughed and laughed and stood looking at Robert Jordan laughing.

“Oh, Inglés. Inglés,” she said laughing. “You are very comical. You must do much work now to regain thy dignity.”

The Hell with you, Robert Jordan thought. But he kept his mouth shut. While they had spoken the sun had clouded over and as he looked back up toward the mountains the sky was now heavy and gray.

“Sure,” Pilar said to him, looking at the sky. “It will snow.”

“Now? Almost in June?”

“Why not? These mountains do not know the names of the months. We are in the moon of May.”

“It can’t be snow,” he said. “It can’t snow.”

“Just the same, Inglés,” she said to him, “it will snow.”

Robert Jordan looked up at the thick gray of the sky with the sun gone faintly yellow, and now as he watched gone completely and the gray becoming uniform so that it was soft and heavy; the gray now cutting off the tops of the mountains.

“Yes,” he said. “I guess you are right.”

Chapter 14

By the time they reached the camp it was snowing and the flakes were dropping diagonally through the pines. They slanted through the trees, sparse at first and circling as they fell, and then, as the cold wind came driving down the mountain, they came whirling and thick and Robert Jordan stood in front of the cave in a rage and watched them.

“We will have much snow,” Pablo said. His voice was thick and his eyes were red and bleary.

“Has the gypsy come in?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“No,” Pablo said. “Neither him nor the old man.”

“Will you come with me to the upper post on the road?”

“No,” Pablo said. “I will take no part in this.”

“I will find it myself.”

“In this storm you might miss it,” Pablo said. “I would not go now.”

“It’s just downhill to the road and then follow it up.”

“You could find it. But thy two sentries will be coming up now with the snow and you would miss them on the way.”

“The old man is waiting for me.”

“Nay. He will come in now with the snow.

Pablo looked at the snow that was blowing fast now past the mouth of the cave and said, “You do not like the snow, Inglés?”

Robert Jordan swore and Pablo looked at him through his bleary eyes and laughed.

“With this thy offensive goes, Inglés,” he said. “Come into the cave and thy people will be in directly.”

Inside the cave Maria was busy at the fire and Pilar at the kitchen table. The fire was smoking but, as the girl worked with it, poking in a stick of wood and then fanning it with a folded paper, there was a puff and then a flare and the wood was burning, drawing brightly as the wind sucked a draft out of the hole in the roof.

“And this snow,” Robert Jordan said. “You think there will be much?”

“Much,” Pablo said contentedly. Then called to Pilar, “You don’t like it, woman, either? Now that you command you do not like this snow?”

“A mi qué?” Pilar said, over her shoulder. “If it snows it snows.”

“Drink some wine, Inglés,” Pablo said. “I have been drinking all day waiting for the snow.”

“Give me a cup,” Robert Jordan said.

“To the snow,” Pablo said and touched cups with him. Robert Jordan looked him in the eyes and clinked his cup. You bleary-eyed murderous sod, he thought. I’d like to clink this cup against your teeth. Take it easy, he told himself, take it easy.

“It is very beautiful the snow,” Pablo said. “You won’t want to sleep outside with the snow falling.”

So that’s on your mind too is it? Robert Jordan thought. You’ve a lot of troubles, haven’t you, Pablo?

“No?” he said, politely.

“No. Very cold,” Pablo said. “Very wet.”

You don’t know why those old eiderdowns cost sixty-five dollars, Robert Jordan thought. I’d like to have a dollar for every time I’ve slept in that thing in the snow.

“Then I should sleep in here?” he asked politely.

“Yes.”

“Thanks,” Robert Jordan said. “I’ll be sleeping outside.”

“In the snow?”

“Yes” (damn your bloody, red pig-eyes and your swine-bristly swines-end of a face). “In the snow.” (In the utterly damned, ruinous, unexpected, slutting, defeat-conniving, bastard-cessery of the snow.)

He went over to where Maria had just put another piece of pine on the fire.

“Very beautiful, the snow,” he said to the girl.

“But it is bad for the work, isn’t it?” she asked him. “Aren’t you worried?”

“Qué va,” he said. “Worrying is no good. When will supper be ready?”

“I thought you would have an appetite,” Pilar said. “Do you want a cut of cheese now?”

“Thanks,” he said and she cut him a slice, reaching up to unhook the big cheese that hung in a net from the ceiling, drawing a knife across the open end and handing him the heavy slice. He stood, eating it. It was just a little too goaty to be enjoyable.

“Maria,” Pablo said from the table where he was sitting.

“What?” the girl asked.

“Wipe the table clean, Maria,” Pablo said and grinned at Robert Jordan.

“Wipe thine own spillings,” Pilar said to him. “Wipe first thy chin and thy shirt and then the table.”

“Maria,” Pablo called.

“Pay no heed to him. He is drunk,” Pilar said.

“Maria,” Pablo called. “It is still snowing and the snow is beautiful.”

He doesn’t know about that robe, Robert Jordan thought. Good old pig-eyes doesn’t know why I paid the Woods boys sixty-five dollars for that robe. I wish the gypsy would come in though. As soon as the gypsy comes I’ll go after the old man. I should go now but it is very possible that I would miss them. I don’t know where he is posted.

“Want to make snowballs?” he said to Pablo. “Want to have a snowball fight?”

“What?” Pablo asked. “What do you propose?”

“Nothing,” Robert Jordan said. “Got your saddles covered up good?”

“Yes.”

Then in English Robert Jordan said, “Going to grain those horses or peg them out and let them dig for it?”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s your problem, old pal. I’m going out of here on my feet.”

“Why do you speak in English?” Pablo asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert Jordan said. “When I get very tired sometimes I speak English. Or when I get very disgusted. Or baffled, say. When I get highly baffled I just talk English to hear the sound of it. It’s a reassuring noise. You ought to try it sometime.”

“What do you say, Inglés?” Pilar said. “It sounds very interesting but I do not understand.”

“Nothing,” Robert Jordan said. “I said,’nothing’in English.”

“Well then, talk Spanish,” Pilar said. “It’s shorter and simpler in Spanish.”

“Surely,” Robert Jordan said. But oh boy, he thought, oh Pablo, oh Pilar, oh Maria, oh you two brothers in the corner whose names I’ve forgotten and must remember, but I get tired of it sometimes. Of it and of you and of me and of the war and why in all why did it have to snow now? That’s too bloody much. No, it’s not. Nothing is too bloody much. You just have to take it and fight out of it and now stop prima-donnaing and accept the fact that it is snowing as you did a moment ago and the next thing is to check with your gypsy and pick up your old man. But to snow! Now in this month. Cut it out, he said to himself. Cut it out and take it. It’s that cup, you know. How did it go about that cup? He’d either have to improve his memory or else never think of quotations because when you missed one it hung in your mind like a name you had forgotten and you could not get rid of it. How did it go about that cup?

“Let me have a cup of wine, please,” he said in Spanish. Then, “Lots of snow? Eh?” he said to Pablo. “Mucha nieve.”

The drunken man looked up at him and grinned. He nodded his head and grinned again.

“No offensive. No aviones. No bridge. Just snow,” Pablo said.

“You expect it to last a long time?” Robert Jordan sat down by him. “You think we’re going to be snowed in all summer, Pablo, old boy?”

“All summer, no,” Pablo said. “Tonight and tomorrow, yes.”

“What makes you think so?”

“There are two kinds of storms,” Pablo said, heavily and judiciously. “One comes from the Pyrenees. With this one there is great cold. It is too late for this one.”

“Good,” Robert Jordan said. “That’s something.”

“This storm comes from the Cantabrico,” Pablo said. “It comes from the sea. With the wind in this direction there will be a great storm and much snow.”

“Where did you learn all this, old timer?” Robert Jordan asked.

Now that his rage was gone he was excited by this storm as he was always by all storms. In a blizzard, a gale, a sudden line squall, a tropical storm, or a summer thunder shower in the mountains there was an excitement that came to him from no other thing. It was like the excitement of battle except that it was clean. There is a wind that blows through battle but that was a hot wind; hot and dry as your mouth; and it blew heavily; hot and dirtily; and it rose and died away with the fortunes of the day. He knew that wind well.

But a snowstorm was the opposite of all of that. In the snowstorm you came close to wild animals and they were not afraid. They travelled across country not knowing where they were and the deer stood sometimes in the lee of the cabin. In a snowstorm you rode up to a moose and he mistook your horse for another moose and trotted forward to meet you. In a snowstorm it always seemed, for a time, as though there were no enemies. In a snowstorm the wind could blow a gale; but it blew a white cleanness and the air was full of a driving whiteness and all things were changed and when the wind stopped there would be the stillness. This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it.

“I was an arroyero for many years,” Pablo said. “We trucked freight across the mountains with the big carts before the camions came into use. In that business we learned the weather.”

“And how did you get into the movement?”

“I was always of the left,” Pablo said. “We had many contacts with the people of Asturias where they are much developed politically. I have always been for the Republic.”

“But what were you doing before the movement?”

“I worked then for a horse contractor of Zaragoza. He furnished horses for the bull rings as well as remounts for the army. It was then that I met Pilar who was, as she told you, with the matador Finito de Palencia.”

He said this with considerable pride.

“He wasn’t much of a matador,” one of the brothers at the table said looking at Pilar’s back where she stood in front of the stove.

“No?” Pilar said, turning around and looking at the man. “He wasn’t much of a matador?”

Standing there now in the cave by the cooking fire she could see him, short and brown and sober-faced, with the sad eyes, the cheeks sunken and the black hair curled wet on his forehead where the tightfitting matador’s hat had made a red line that no one else noticed. She saw him stand, now, facing the five-year-old bull, facing the horns that had lifted the horses high, the great neck thrusting the horse up, up, as that rider poked into that neck with the spiked pole, thrusting up and up until the horse went over with a crash and the rider fell against the wooden fence and, with the bull’s legs thrusting him forward, the big neck swung the horns that searched the horse for the life that was in him. She saw him, Finito, the not-so-good matador, now standing in front of the bull and turning sideways toward him. She saw him now clearly as he furled the heavy flannel cloth around the stick; the flannel hanging blood-heavy from the passes where it had swept over the bull’s head and shoulders and the wet streaming shine of his withers and on down and over his back as the bull raised into the air and the banderillas clattered. She saw Finito stand five paces from the bull’s head, profiled, the bull standing still and heavy, and draw the sword slowly up until it was level with his shoulder and then sight along the dipping blade at a point he could not yet see because the bull’s head was higher than his eyes. He would bring that head down with the sweep his left arm would make with the wet, heavy cloth; but now he rocked back a little on his heels and sighted along the blade, profiled in front of the splintered horn; the bull’s chest heaving and his eyes watching the cloth.

She saw him very clearly now and she heard his thin, clear voice as he turned his head and looked toward the people in the first row of the ring above the red fence and said, “Let’s see if we can kill him like this!”

She could hear the voice and then see the first bend of the knee as he started forward and watch his voyage in onto the horn that lowered now magically as the bull’s muzzle followed the low swept cloth, the thin, brown wrist controlled, sweeping the horns down and past, as the sword entered the dusty height of the withers.

She saw its brightness going in slowly and steadily as though the bull’s rush plucked it into himself and out from the man’s hand and she watched it move in until the brown knuckles rested against the taut hide and the short, brown man whose eyes had never left the entry place of the sword now swung his sucked-in belly clear of the horn and rocked clear from the animal, to stand holding the cloth on the stick in his left hand, raising his right hand to watch the bull die.

She saw him standing, his eyes watching the bull trying to hold the ground, watching the bull sway like a tree before it falls, watching the bull fight to hold his feet to the earth, the short man’s hand raised in a formal gesture of triumph. She saw him standing there in the sweated, hollow relief of it being over, feeling the relief that the bull was dying, feeling the relief that there had been no shock, no blow of the horn as he came clear from it and then, as he stood, the bull could hold to the earth no longer and crashed over, rolling dead with all four feet in the air, and she could see the short, brown man walking tired and unsmiling to the fence.

She knew he could not run across the ring if his life depended on it and she watched him walk slowly to the fence and wipe his mouth on a towel and look up at her and shake his head and then wipe his face on the towel and start his triumphant circling of the ring.

She saw him moving slowly, dragging around the ring, smiling, bowing, smiling, his assistants walking behind him, stooping, picking up cigars, tossing back hats; he circling the ring sad-eyed and smiling, to end the circle before her. Then she looked over and saw him sitting now on the step of the wooden fence, his mouth in a towel.

Pilar saw all this as she stood there over the fire and she said, “So he wasn’t a good matador? With what class of people is my life passed now!”

“He was a good matador,” Pablo said. “He was handicapped by his short stature.”

“And clearly he was tubercular,” Primitivo said.

“Tubercular?” Pilar said. “Who wouldn’t be tubercular from the punishment he received? In this country where no poor man can ever hope to make money unless he is a criminal like Juan March, or a bullfighter, or a tenor in the opera? Why wouldn’t he be tubercular? In a country where the bourgeoisie over-eat so that their stomachs are all ruined and they cannot live without bicarbonate of soda and the poor are hungry from their birth till the day they die, why wouldn’t he be tubercular? If you travelled under the seats in third-class carriages to ride free when you were following the fairs learning to fight as a boy, down there in the dust and dirt with the fresh spit and the dry spit, wouldn’t you be tubercular if your chest was beaten out by horns?”

“Clearly,” Primitivo said. “I only said he was tubercular.”

“Of course he was tubercular,” Pilar said, standing there with the big wooden stirring spoon in her hand. “He was short of stature and he had a thin voice and much fear of bulls. Never have I seen a man with more fear before the bullfight and never have I seen a man with less fear in the ring.”You, “ she said to Pablo.”You are afraid to die now. You think that is something of importance. But Finito was afraid all the time and in the ring he was like a lion.”

“He had the fame of being very valiant,” the second brother said.

“Never have I known a man with so much fear,” Pilar said. “He would not even have a bull’s head in the house. One time at the feria of Valladolid he killed a bull of Pablo Romero very well—”

“I remember,” the first brother said. “I was at the ring. It was a soap-colored one with a curly forehead and with very high horns. It was a bull of over thirty arrobas. It was the last bull he killed in Valladolid.”

“Exactly,” Pilar said. “And afterwards the club of enthusiasts who met in the Café Colon and had taken his name for their club had the head of the bull mounted and presented it to him at a small banquet at the Café Colon. During the meal they had the head on the wall, but it was covered with a cloth. I was at the table and others were there, Pastora, who is uglier than I am, and the Nina de los Peines, and other gypsies and whores of great category. It was a banquet, small but of great intensity and almost of a violence due to a dispute between Pastora and one of the most significant whores over a question of propriety. I, myself, was feeling more than happy and I was sitting by Finito and I noticed he would not look up at the bull’s head, which was shrouded in a purple cloth as the images of the saints are covered in church duing the week of the passion of our former Lord.

“Finito did not eat much because he had received a palotaxo, a blow from the flat of the horn when he had gone in to kill in his last corrida of the year at Zaragoza, and it had rendered him unconscious for some time and even now he could not hold food on his stomach and he would put his handkerchief to his mouth and deposit a quantity of blood in it at intervals throughout the banquet. What was I going to tell you?”

“The bull’s head,” Primitivo said. “The stuffed head of the bull.”

“Yes,” Pilar said. “Yes. But I must tell certain details so that you will see it. Finito was never very merry, you know. He was essentially solemn and I had never known him when we were alone to laugh at anything. Not even at things which were very comic. He took everything with great seriousness. He was almost as serious as Fernando. But this was a banquet given him by a club of aficionados banded together into the Club Finito and it was necessary for him to give an appearance of gaiety and friendliness and merriment. So all during the meal he smiled and made friendly remarks and it was only I who noticed what he was doing with the handkerchief. He had three handkerchiefs with him and he filled the three of them and then he said to me in a very low voice,’Pilar, I can support this no further. I think I must leave.’

“‘Let us leave then,’I said. For I saw he was suffering much. There was great hilarity by this time at the banquet and the noise was tremendous.

“‘No. I cannot leave,’Finito said to me.’After all it is a club flamed for me and I have an obligation.’

“‘If thou art ill let us go,’I said.

“‘Nay,’he said.’I will stay. Give me some of that manzanilla.’

“I did not think it was wise of him to drink, since he had eaten nothing, and since he had such a condition of the stomach; but he was evidently unable to support the merriment and the hilarity and the noise longer without taking something. So I watched him drink, very rapidly, almost a bottle of the manzanilla. Having exhausted his handkerchiefs he was now employing his napkin for the use he had previously made of his handkerchiefs.

“Now indeed the banquet had reached a stage of great enthusiasm and some of the least heavy of the whores were being paraded around the table on the shoulders of various of the club members. Pastora was prevailed upon to sing and El Niño Ricardo played the guitar and it was very moving and an occasion of true joy and drunken friendship of the highest order. Never have I seen a banquet at which a higher pitch of real flamenco enthusiasm was reached and yet we had not arrived at the unveiling of the bull’s head which was, after all, the reason for the celebration of the banquet.

“I was enjoying myself to such an extent and I was so busy clapping my hands to the playing of Ricardo and aiding to make up a team to clap for the singing of the Nina de los Peines that I did not notice that Finito had filled his own napkin by now, and that he had taken mine. He was drinking more manzanilla now and his eyes were very bright, and he was nodding very happily to every one. He could not speak much because at any time, while speaking, he might have to resort to his napkin; but he was giving an appearance of great gayety and enjoyment which, after all, was what he was there for.

“So the banquet proceeded and the man who sat next to me had been the former manager of Rafael el Gallo and he was telling me a story, and the end of it was,’So Rafael came to me and said,”You are the best friend I have in the world and the noblest. I love you like a brother and I wish to make you a present.” So then he gave me a beautiful diamond stick pin and kissed me on both cheeks and we were both very moved. Then Rafael el Gallo, having given me the diamond stick pin, walked out of the café and I said to Retana who was sitting at the table,”That dirty gypsy had just signed a contract with another manager.”’

“‘”What do you mean?” Retana asked.’

“‘I’ve managed him for ten years and he has never given me a present before,’the manager of El Gallo had said.’That’s the only thing it can mean.’And sure enough it was true and that was how El Gallo left him.

“But at this point, Pastora intervened in the conversation, not perhaps as much to defend the good name of Rafael, since no one had ever spoken harder against him than she had herself, but because the manager had spoken against the gypsies by employing the phrase,’Dirty gypsy.’She intervened so forcibly and in such terms that the manager was reduced to silence. I intervened to quiet Pastora and another Gitana intervened to quiet me and the din was such that no one could distinguish any words which passed except the one great word’whore’which roared out above all other words until quiet was restored and the three of us who had intervened sat looking down into our glasses and then I noticed that Finito was staring at the bull’s head, still draped in the purple cloth, with a look of horror on his face.

“At this moment the president of the Club commenced the speech which was to precede the unveiling of the head and all through the speech which was applauded with shouts of’Ole!’and poundings on the table I was watching Finito who was making use of his, no, my, napkin and sinking further back in his chair and staring with horror and fascination at the shrouded bull’s head on the wall opposite him.

“Toward the end of the speech, Finito began to shake his head and he got further back in the chair all the time.

“‘How are you, little one?’I said to him but when he looked at me he did not recognize me and he only shook his head and said,’No. No. No.’

“So the president of the Club reached the end of the speech and then, with everybody cheering him, he stood on a chair and reached up and untied the cord that bound the purple shroud over the head and slowly pulled it clear of the head and it stuck on one of the horns and he lifted it clear and pulled it off the sharp polished horns and there was that great yellow bull with black horns that swung Way out and pointed forward, their white tips sharp as porcupine quills, and the head of the bull was as though he were alive; his forehead was curly as in life and his nostrils were open and his eyes were bright and he was there looking straight at Finito.

“Every one shouted and applauded and Finito sunk further back in the chair and then every one was quiet and looking at him and he said,’No. No,’and looked at the bull and pulled further back and then he said,’No!’very loudly and a big blob of blood came out and he didn’t even put up the napkin and it slid down his chin and he was still looking at the bull and he said,’All season, yes. To make money, yes. To eat, yes. But I can’t eat. Hear me? My stomach’s bad. But now with the season finished! No! No! No!’He looked around at the table and then he looked at the bull’s head and said,’No,’once more and then he put his head down and he put his napkin up to his mouth and then he just sat there like that and said nothing and the banquet, which had started so well, and promised to mark an epoch in hilarity and good fellowship was not a success.”

“Then how long after that did he die?” Primitivo asked.

“That winter,” Pilar said. “He never recovered from that last blow with the flat of the horn in Zaragoza. They are worse than a goring, for the injury is internal and it does not heal. He received one almost every time he went in to kill and it was for this reason he was not more successful. It was difficult for him to get out from over the horn because of his short stature. Nearly always the side of the horn struck him. But of course many were only glancing blows.”

“If he was so short he should not have tried to be a matador,” Primitivo said.

Pilar looked at Robert Jordan and shook her head. Then she bent over the big iron pot, still shaking her head.

What a people they are, she thought. What a people are the Spaniards, “and if he was so short he should not have tried to be a matador.” And I hear it and say nothing. I have no rage for that and having made an explanation I am silent. How simple it is when one knows nothing. Qué sencillo! Knowing nothing one says, “He was not much of a matador.” Knowing nothing another says, “He was tubercular.” And another says, after one, knowing, has explained, “If he was so short he should not have tried to be a matador.”

Now, bending over the fire, she saw on the bed again the naked brown body with the gnarled scars in both thighs, the deep, seared whorl below the ribs on the right side of the chest and the long white welt along the side that ended in the armpit. She saw the eyes closed and the solemn brown face and the curly black hair pushed back now from the forehead and she was sitting by him on the bed rubbing the legs, chafing the taut muscles of the calves, kneading them, loosening them, and then tapping them lightly with her folded hands, loosening the cramped muscles.

“How is it?” she said to him. “How are the legs, little one?”

“Very well, Pilar,” he would say without opening his eyes.

“Do you want me to rub the chest?”

“Nay, Pilar. Please do not touch it.”

“And the upper legs?”

“No. They hurt too badly.”

“But if I rub them and put liniment on, it will warm them and they will be better.”

“Nay, Pilar. Thank thee. I would rather they were not touched.”

“I will wash thee with alcohol.”

“Yes. Do it very lightly.”

“You were enormous in the last bull,” she would say to him and he would say, “Yes, I killed him very well.”

Then, having washed him and covered him with a sheet, she would lie by him in the bed and he would put a brown hand out and touch her and say, “Thou art much woman, Pilar.” It was the nearest to a joke he ever made and then, usually, after the fight, he would go to sleep and she would lie there, holding his hand in her two hands and listening to him breathe.

He was often frightened in his sleep and she would feel his hand grip tightly and see the sweat bead on his forehead and if he woke, she said, “It’s nothing,” and he slept again. She was with him thus five years and never was unfaithful to him, that is almost never, and then after the funeral, she took up with Pablo who led picador horses in the ring and was like all the bulls that Finito had spent his life killing. But neither bull force nor bull courage lasted, she knew now, and what did last? I last, she thought. Yes, I have lasted. But for what?

“Maria,” she said. “Pay some attention to what you are doing. That is a fire to cook with. Not to burn down a city.”

Just then the gypsy came in the door. He was covered with snow and he stood there holding his carbine and stamping the snow from his feet.

Robert Jordan stood up and went over to the door, “Well?” he said to the gypsy.

“Six-hour watches, two men at a time on the big bridge,” the gypsy said. “There are eight men and a corporal at the roadmender’s hut. Here is thy chronometer.”

“What about the sawmill post?”

“The old man is there. He can watch that and the road both.”

“And the road?” Robert Jordan asked.

“The same movement as always,” the gypsy said. “Nothing out of the usual. Several motor cars.”

The gypsy looked cold, his dark face was drawn with the cold and his hands were red. Standing in the mouth of the cave he took off his jacket and shook it.

“I stayed until they changed the watch,” he said. “It was changed at noon and at six. That is a long watch. I am glad I am not in their army.”

“Let us go for the old man,” Robert Jordan said, putting on his leather coat.

“Not me,” the gypsy said. “I go now for the fire and the hot soup. I will tell one of these where he is and he can guide you. Hey, loafers,” he called to the men who sat at the table. “Who wants to guide the Inglés to where the old man is watching the road?”

“I will go,” Fernando rose. “Tell me where it is.”

“Listen,” the gypsy said. “It is here—” and he told him where the old man, Anselmo, was posted.

Chapter 15

Anselmo was crouched in the lee of the trunk of a big tree and the snow blew past on either side. He was pressed close against the tree and his hands were inside of the sleeves of his jacket, each hand shoved up into the opposite sleeve, and his head was pulled as far down into the jacket as it would go. If I stay here much longer I will freeze, he thought, and that will be of no value. The Inglés told me to stay until I was relieved but he did not know then about this storm. There has been no abnormal movement on the road and I know the dispositions and the habits of this post at the sawmill across the road. I should go now to the camp. Anybody with sense would be expecting me to return to the camp. I will stay a little longer, he thought, and then go to the camp. It is the fault of the orders, which are too rigid. There is no allowance for a change in circumstance. He rubbed his feet together and then took his hands out of the jacket sleeves and bent over and rubbed his legs with them and patted his feet together to keep the circulation going. It was less cold there, out of the wind in the shelter of the tree, but he would have to start walking shortly.

As he crouched, rubbing his feet, he heard a motorcar on the road. It had on chains and one link of chain was slapping and, as he Watched, it came up the snow-covered road, green and brown painted, in broken patches of daubed color, the windows blued over so that you could not see in, with only a half circle left clear in the blue for the occupants to look out through. It was a two-year-old Rolls-Royce town car camouflaged for the use of the General Staff but Anselmo did not know that. He could not see into the car where three officers sat wrapped in their capes. Two were on the back seat and one sat on the folding chair. The officer on the folding chair was looking out of the slit in the blue of the window as the car passed but Anselmo did not know this. Neither of them saw the other.

The car passed in the snow directly below him. Anselmo saw the chauffeur, red-faced and steel-helmeted, his face and helmet projecting out of the blanket cape he wore and he saw the forward jut of the automatic rifle the orderly who sat beside the chauffeur carried. Then the car was gone up the road and Anselmo reached into the inside of his jacket and took out from his shirt pocket the two sheets torn from Robert Jordan’s notebook and made a mark after the drawing of a motorcar. It was the tenth car up for the day. Six had come down. Four were still up. It was not an unusual amount of cars to move upon that road but Anselmo did not distinguish between the Fords, Fiats, Opels, Renaults, and Citroens of the staff of the Division that held the passes and the line of the mountain and the Rolls-Royces, Lancias, Mercedes, and Isottas of the General Staff. This was the sort of distinction that Robert Jordan should have made and, if he had been there instead of the old man, he would have appreciated the significance of these cars which had gone up. But he was not there and the old man simply made a mark for a motorcar going up the road, on the sheet of note paper.

Anselmo was now so cold that he decided he had best go to camp before it was dark. He had no fear of missing the way, but he thought it was useless to stay longer and the wind was blowing colder all the time and there was no lessening of the snow. But when he stood up and stamped his feet and looked through the driving snow at the road he did not start off up the hillside but stayed leaning against the sheltered side of the pine tree.

The Inglés told me to stay, he thought. Even now he may be on the way here and, if I leave this place, he may lose himself in the snow searching for me. All through this war we have suffered from a lack of discipline and from the disobeying of orders and I will wait a while still for the Inglés. But if he does not come soon I must go in spite of all orders for I have a report to make now, and I have much to do in these days, and to freeze here is an exaggeration and without utility.

Across the road at the sawmill smoke was coming out of the chimney and Anselmo could smell it blown toward him through the snow. The fascists are warm, he thought, and they are comfortable, and tomorrow night we will kill them. It is a strange thing and I do not like to think of it. I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travellers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

These at this post are Gallegos. I know that from hearing them talk this afternoon. They cannot desert because if they do their families will be shot. Gallegos are either very intelligent or very dumb and brutal. I have known both kinds. Lister is a Gallego from the same town as Franco. I wonder what these Gallegos think of this snow now at this time of year. They have no high mountains such as these and in their country it always rains and it is always green.

A light showed in the window of the sawmill and Anselmo shivered and thought, damn that Inglés! There are the Gallegos warm and in a house here in our country, and I am freezing behind a tree and we live in a hole in the rocks like beasts in the mountain. But tomorrow, he thought, the beasts will come out of their hole and these that are now so comfortable will die warm in their blankets. As those died in the night when we raided Otero, he thought. He did not like to remember Otero.

In Otero, that night, was when he first killed and he hoped he would not have to kill in this of the suppressing of these posts. It was in Otero that Pablo knifed the sentry when Anselmo pulled the blanket over his head and the sentry caught Anselmo’s foot and held it, smothered as he was in the blanket, and made a crying noise in the blanket and Anselmo had to feel in the blanket and knife him until he let go of the foot and was still. He had his knee across the man’s throat to keep him silent and he was knifing into the bundle when Pablo tossed the bomb through the window into the room where the men of the post were all sleeping. And when the flash came it was as though the whole world burst red and yellow before your eyes and two more bombs were in already. Pablo had pulled the pins and tossed them quickly through the window, and those who were not killed in their beds were killed as they rose from bed when the second bomb exploded. That was in the great days of Pablo when he scourged the country like a tartar and no fascist post was safe at night.

And now, he is as finished and as ended as a boar that has been altered, Anselmo thought, and, when the altering has been accomplished and the squealing is over you cast the two stones away and the boar, that is a boar no longer, goes snouting and rooting up to them and eats them. No, he is not that bad, Anselmo grinned, one can think too badly even of Pablo. But he is ugly enough and changed enough.

It is too cold, he thought. That the Inglés should come and that I should not have to kill in this of the posts. These four Gallegos and their corporal are for those who like the killing. The Inglés said that. I will do it if it is my duty but the Inglés said that I would be with him at the bridge and that this would be left to others. At the bridge there will be a battle and, if I am able to endure the battle, then I will have done all that an old man may do in this war. But let the Inglés come now, for I am cold and to see the light in the mill where I know that the Gallegos are warm makes me colder still. I wish that I were in my own house again and that this war were over. But you have no house now, he thought. We must win this war before you can ever return to your house.

Inside the sawmill one of the soldiers was sitting on his bunk and greasing his boots. Another lay in his bunk sleeping. The third was cooking and the corporal was reading a paper. Their helmets hung on nails driven into the wall and their rifles leaned against the plank wall.

“What kind of country is this where it snows when it is almost June?” the soldier who was sitting on the bunk said.

“It is a phenomenon,” the corporal said.

“We are in the moon of May,” the soldier who was cooking said. “The moon of May has not yet terminated.”

“What kind of a country is it where it snows in May?” the soldier on the bunk insisted.

“In May snow is no rarity in these mountains,” the corporal said. “I have been colder in Madrid in the month of May than in any other month.”

“And hotter, too,” the soldier who was cooking said.

“May is a month of great contrasts in temperature,” the corporal said. “Here, in Castile, May is a month of great heat but it can have much cold.”

“Or rain,” the soldier on the bunk said. “In this past May it rained almost every day.”

“It did not,” the soldier who was cooking said. “And anyway this past May was the moon of April.”

“One could go crazy listening to thee and thy moons,” the corporal said. “Leave this of the moons alone.”

“Any one who lives either by the sea or by the land knows that it is the moon and not the month which counts,” the soldier who was cooking said. “Now for example, we have just started the moon of May. Yet it is coming on June.”

“Why then do we not get definitely behind in the seasons?” the corporal said. “The whole proposition gives me a headache.”

“You are from a town,” the soldier who was cooking said. “You are from Lugo. What would you know of the sea or of the land?”

“One learns more in a town than you analfabetos learn in thy sea or thy land.”

“In this moon the first of the big schools of sardines come,” the soldier who was cooking said. “In this moon the sardine boats will be outfitting and the mackerel will have gone north.”

“Why are you not in the navy if you come from Noya?” the corporal asked.

“Because I am not inscribed from Noya but from Negreira, where I was born. And from Negreira, which is up the river Tambre, they take you for the army.”

“Worse luck,” said the corporal.

“Do not think the navy is without peril,” the soldier who was sitting on the bunk said. “Even without the possibility of combat that is a dangerous coast in the winter.”

“Nothing can be worse than the army,” the corporal said.

“And you a corporal,” the soldier who was cooking said. “What a way of speaking is that?”

“Nay,” the corporal said. “I mean for dangers. I mean the endurance of bombardments, the necessity to attack, the life of the parapet.”

“Here we have little of that,” the soldier on the bunk said.

“By the Grace of God,” the corporal said. “But who knows when we will be subject to it again? Certainly we will not have something as easy as this forever!”

“How much longer do you think we will have this detail?”

“I don’t know,” the corporal said. “But I wish we could have it for all of the war.”

“Six hours is too long to be on guard,” the soldier who was cooking said.

“We will have three-hour watches as long as this storm holds,” the corporal said. “That is only normal.”

“What about all those staff cars?” the soldier on the bunk asked. “I did not like the look of all those staff cars.”

“Nor I,” the corporal said. “All such things are of evil omen.”

“And aviation,” the soldier who was cooking said. “Aviation is another bad sign.”

“But we have formidable aviation,” the corporal said. “The Reds have no aviation such as we have. Those planes this morning were something to make any man happy.”

“I have seen the Red planes when they were something serious,” the soldier on the bunk said. “I have seen those two motor bombers when they were a horror to endure.”

“Yes. But they are not as formidable as our aviation,” the corporal said. “We have an aviation that is insuperable.”

This was how they were talking in the sawmill while Anselmo waited in the snow watching the road and the light in the sawmill window.

I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all.

Anselmo was a very good man and whenever he was alone for long, and he was alone much of the time, this problem of the killing returned to him.

I wonder about the Inglés, he thought. He told me that he did not mind it. Yet he seems to be both sensitive and kind. It may be that in the younger people it does not have an importance. It may be that in foreigners, or in those who have not had our religion, there is not the same attitude. But I think any one doing it will be brutalized in time and I think that even though necessary, it is a great sin and that afterwards we must do something very strong to atone for it.

It was dark now and he looked at the light across the road and shook his arms against his chest to warm them. Now, he thought, he would certainly leave for the camp; but something kept him there beside the tree above the road. It was snowing harder and Anselmo thought: if only we could blow the bridge tonight. On a night like this it would be nothing to take the posts and blow the bridge and it would all be over and done with. On a night like this you could do anything.

Then he stood there against the tree stamping his feet softly and he did not think any more about the bridge. The coming of the dark always made him feel lonely and tonight he felt so lonely that there was a hollowness in him as of hunger. In the old days he could help this loneliness by the saying of prayers and often coming home from hunting he would repeat a great number of the same prayer and it made him feel better. But he had not prayed once since the movement. He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men were receiving.

No, he thought, I am lonely. But so are all the soldiers and the Wives of all the soldiers and all those who have lost families or parents. I have no wife, but I am glad that she died before the movement. She would not have understood it. I have no children and I never will have any children. I am lonely in the day when I am not working but when the dark comes it is a time of great loneliness. But one thing I have that no man nor any God can take from me and that is that I have worked well for the Republic. I have worked hard for the good that we will all share later. I have worked my best from the first of the movement and I have done nothing that I am ashamed of.

All that I am sorry for is the killing. But surely there will be an opportunity to atone for that because for a sin of that sort that so many bear, certainly some just relief will be devised. I would like to talk with the Inglés about it but, being young, it is possible that he might not understand. He mentioned the killing before. Or was it I that mentioned it? He must have killed much, but he shows no signs of liking it. In those who like it there is always a rottenness.

It must really be a great sin, he thought. Because certainly it is the one thing we have no right to do even though, as I know, it is necessary. But in Spain it is done too lightly and often without true necessity and there is much quick injustice which, afterward, can never be repaired. I wish I did not think about it so much, he thought. I wish there were a penance for it that one could commence now because it is the only thing that I have done in all my life that makes me feel badly when I am alone. All the other things are forgiven or one had a chance to atone for them by kindness or in some decent way. But I think this of the killing must be a very great sin and I would like to fix it up. Later on there may be certain days that one can work for the state or something that one can do that will remove it. It will probably be something that one pays as in the days of the Church, he thought, and smiled. The Church was well organized for sin. That pleased him and he was smiling in the dark when Robert Jordan came up to him. He came silently and the old man did not see him until he was there.

“Hola, viejo,” Robert Jordan whispered and clapped him on the back. “How’s the old one?”

“Very cold,” Anselmo said. Fernando was standing a little apart, his back turned against the driving snow.

“Come on,” Robert Jordan whispered. “Get on up to camp and get warm. It was a crime to leave you here so long.”

“That is their light,” Anselmo pointed.

“Where’s the sentry?”

“You do not see him from here. He is around the bend.”

“The hell with them,” Robert Jordan said. “You tell me at camp. Come on, let’s go.”

“Let me show you,” Anselmo said.

“I’m going to look at it in the morning,” Robert Jordan said. “Here, take a swallow of this.”

He handed the old man his flask. Anselmo tipped it up and swallowed.

“Ayee,” he said and rubbed his mouth. “It is fire.”

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said in the dark. “Let us go.”

It was so dark now you could only see the flakes blowing past and the rigid dark of the pine trunks. Fernando was standing a little way up the hill. Look at that cigar store Indian, Robert Jordan thought. I suppose I have to offer him a drink.

“Hey, Fernando,” he said as he came up to him. “A swallow?”

“No,” said Fernando. “Thank you.”

Thank you, I mean, Robert Jordan thought. I’m glad cigar store Indians don’t drink. There isn’t too much of that left. Boy, I’m glad to see this old man, Robert Jordan thought. He looked at Anselmo and then clapped him on the back again as they started up the hill.

“I’m glad to see you, viejo,” he said to Anselmo. “If I ever get gloomy, when I see you it cheers me up. Come on, let’s get up there.”

They were going up the hill in the snow.

“Back to the palace of Pablo,” Robert Jordan said to Anselmo. It sounded wonderful in Spanish.

“El Palacio del Miedo,” Anselmo said. “The Palace of Fear.”

“La cueva de los huevos perdidos,” Robert Jordan capped the other happily. “The cave of the lost eggs.”

“What eggs?” Fernando asked.

“A joke,” Robert Jordan said. “Just a joke. Not eggs, you know. The others.”

“But why are they lost?” Fernando asked.

“I don’t know,” said Robert Jordan. “Take a book to tell you. Ask Pilar,” then he put his arm around Anselmo’s shoulder and held him tight as they walked and shook him. “Listen,” he said. “I’m glad to see you, hear? You don’t know what it means to find somebody in this country in the same place they were left.”

It showed what confidence and intimacy he had that he could say anything against the country.

“I am glad to see thee,” Anselmo said. “But I was just about to leave.”

“Like hell you would have,” Robert Jordan said happily. “You’d have frozen first.”

“How was it up above?” Anselmo asked.

“Fine,” said Robert Jordan. “Everything is fine.”

He was very happy with that sudden, rare happiness that can come to any one with a command in a revolutionary arm; the happiness of finding that even one of your flanks holds. If both flanks ever held I suppose it would be too much to take, he thought. I don’t know who is prepared to stand that. And if you extend along a flank, any flank, it eventually becomes one man. Yes, one man. This was not the axiom he wanted. But this was a good man. One good man. You are going to be the left flank when we have the battle, he thought. I better not tell you that yet. It’s going to be an awfully small battle, he thought. But it’s going to be an awfully good one. Well, I always wanted to fight one on my own. I always had an opinion on what was wrong with everybody else’s, from Agincourt down. I will have to make this a good one. It is going to be small but very select. If I have to do what I think I will have to do it will be very select indeed.

“Listen,” he said to Anselmo. “I’m awfully glad to see you.”

“And me to see thee,” the old man said.

As they went up the hill in the dark, the wind at their backs, the storm blowing past them as they climbed, Anselmo did not feel lonely. He had not been lonely since the Inglés had clapped him on the shoulder. The Inglés was pleased and happy and they joked together. The Inglés said it all went well and he was not worried. The drink in his stomach warmed him and his feet were warming now climbing.

“Not much on the road,” he said to the Inglés.

“Good,” the Inglés told him. “You will show me when we get there.”

Anselmo was happy now and he was very pleased that he had stayed there at the post of observation.

If he had come in to camp it would have been all right. It would have been the intelligent and correct thing to have done under the circumstances, Robert Jordan was thinking. But he stayed as he was told, Robert Jordan thought. That’s the rarest thing that can happen in Spain. To stay in a storm, in a way, corresponds to a lot of things. It’s not for nothing that the Germans call an attack a storm. I could certainly use a couple more who would stay. I most certainly could. I wonder if that Fernando would stay. It’s just possible. After all, he is the one who suggested coming out just now. Do you suppose he would stay? Wouldn’t that be good? He’s just about stubborn enough. I’ll have to make some inquiries. Wonder what the old cigar store Indian is thinking about now.

“What are you thinking about, Fernando?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity,” Robert Jordan said. “I am a man of great curiosity.”

“I was thinking of supper,” Fernando said.

“Do you like to eat?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“How’s Pilar’s cooking?”

“Average,” Fernando answered.

He’s a second Coolidge, Robert Jordan thought. But, you know, I have just a hunch that he would stay.

The three of them plodded up the hill in the snow.

Chapter 16

“El Sordo was here,” Pilar said to Robert Jordan. They had come in out of the storm to the smoky warmth of the cave and the woman had motioned Robert Jordan over to her with a nod of her head. “He’s gone to look for horses.”

“Good. Did he leave any word for me?”

“Only that he had gone for horses.”

“And we?”

“No sé,” she said. “Look at him.”

Robert Jordan had seen Pablo when he came in and Pablo had grinned at him. Now he looked over at him sitting at the board table and grinned and waved his hand.

“Inglés,” Pablo called. “It’s still falling, Inglés.”

Robert Jordan nodded at him.

“Let me take thy shoes and dry them,” Maria said. “I will hang them here in the smoke of the fire.”

“Watch out you don’t burn them,” Robert Jordan told her. “I don’t want to go around here barefoot. What’s the matter?” he turned to Pilar. “Is this a meeting? Haven’t you any sentries out?”

“In this storm? Qué va.”

There were six men sitting at the table and leaning back against the wall. Anselmo and Fernando were still shaking the snow from their jackets, beating their trousers and rapping their feet against the wall by the entrance.

“Let me take thy jacket,” Maria said. “Do not let the snow melt on it.”

Robert Jordan slipped out of his jacket, beat the snow from his trousers, and untied his shoes.

“You will get everything wet here,” Pilar said.

“It was thee who called me.”

“Still there is no impediment to returning to the door for thy brushing.”

“Excuse me,” Robert Jordan said, standing in his bare feet on the dirt floor. “Hunt me a pair of socks, Maria.”

“The Lord and Master,” Pilar said and poked a piece of wood into the fire.

“Hay que aprovechar el tiempo,” Robert Jordan told her. “You have to take advantage of what time there is.”

“It is locked,” Maria said.

“Here is the key,” and he tossed it over.

“It does not fit this sack.”

“It is the other sack. They are on top and at the side.”

The girl found the pair of socks, closed the sack, locked it and brought them over with the key.

“Sit down and put them on and rub thy feet well,” she said. Robert Jordan grinned at her.

“Thou canst not dry them with thy hair?” he said for Pilar to hear.

“What a swine,” she said. “First he is the Lord of the Manor. Now he is our ex-Lord Himself. Hit him with a chunk of wood, Maria.”

“Nay,” Robert Jordan said to her. “I am joking because I am happy.”

“You are happy?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think everything goes very well.”

“Roberto,” Maria said. “Go sit down and dry thy feet and let me bring thee something to drink to warm thee.”

“You would think that man had never dampened foot before,” Pilar said. “Nor that a flake of snow had ever fallen.”

Maria brought him a sheepskin and put it on the dirt floor of the cave.

“There,” she said. “Keep that under thee until thy shoes are dry.”

The sheepskin was fresh dried and not tanned and as Robert Jordan rested his stocking feet on it he could feel it crackle like parchment.

The fire was smoking and Pilar called to Maria, “Blow up the fire, worthless one. This is no smokehouse.”

“Blow it thyself,” Maria said. “I am searching for the bottle that El Sordo left.”

“It is behind his packs,” Pilar told her. “Must you care for him as a sucking child?”

“No,” Maria said. “As a man who is cold and wet. And a man who has just come to his house. Here it is.” She brought the bottle to where Robert Jordan sat. “It is the bottle of this noon. With this bottle one could make a beautiful lamp. When we have electricity again, what a lamp we can make of this bottle.” She looked at the pinch-bottle admiringly. “How do you take this, Roberto?”

“I thought I was Inglés,” Robert Jordan said to her.

“I call thee Roberto before the others,” she said in a low voice and blushed. “How do you want it, Roberto?”

“Roberto,” Pablo said thickly and nodded his head at Robert Jordan. “How do you want it, Don Roberto?”

“Do you want some?” Robert Jordan asked him.

Pablo shook his head. “I am making myself drunk with wine,” he said with dignity.

“Go with Bacchus,” Robert Jordan said in Spanish.

“Who is Bacchus?” Pablo asked.

“A comrade of thine,” Robert Jordan said.

“Never have I heard of him,” Pablo said heavily. “Never in these mountains.”

“Give a cup to Anselmo,” Robert Jordan said to Maria. “It is he who is cold.” He was putting on the dry pair of socks and the whiskey and water in the cup tasted clean and thinly warming. But it does not curl around inside of you the way the absinthe does, he thought. There is nothing like absinthe.

Who would imagine they would have whiskey up here, he thought. But La Granja was the most likely place in Spain to find it when you thought it over. Imagine Sordo getting a bottle for the visiting dynamiter and then remembering to bring it down and leave it. It wasn’t just manners that they had. Manners would have been producing the bottle and having a formal drink. That was what the French would have done and then they would have saved what was left for another occasion. No, the true thoughtfulness of thinking the visitor would like it and then bringing it down for him to enjoy when you yourself were engaged in something where there was every reason to think of no one else but yourself and of nothing but the matter in hand — that was Spanish. One kind of Spanish, he thought. Remembering to bring the whiskey was one of the reasons you loved these people. Don’t go romanticizing them, he thought. There are as many sorts of Spanish as there are Americans. But still, bringing the whiskey was very handsome.

“How do you like it?” he asked Anselmo.

The old man was sitting by the fire with a smile on his face, his big hands holding the cup. He shook his head.

“No?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“The child put water in it,” Anselmo said.

“Exactly as Roberto takes it,” Maria said. “Art thou something special?”

“No,” Anselmo told her. “Nothing special at all. But I like to feel it burn as it goes down.”

“Give me that,” Robert Jordan told the girl, “and pour him some of that which burns.”

He tipped the contents of the cup into his own and handed it back empty to the girl, who poured carefully into it from the bottle.

“Ah,” Anselmo took the cup, put his head back and let it run down his throat. He looked at Maria standing holding the bottle and winked at her, tears coming from both eyes. “That,” he said. “That.” Then he licked his lips. “That is what kills the worm that haunts us.”

“Roberto,” Maria said and came over to him, still holding the bottle. “Are you ready to eat?”

“Is it ready?”

“It is ready when you wish it.”

“Have the others eaten?”

“All except you, Anselmo and Fernando.”

“Let us eat then,” he told her. “And thou?”

“Afterwards with Pilar.”

“Eat now with us.”

“No. It would not be well.”

“Come on and eat. In my country a man does not eat before his woman.”

“That is thy country. Here it is better to eat after.”

“Eat with him,” Pablo said, looking up from the table. “Eat with him. Drink with him. Sleep with him. Die with him. Follow the customs of his country.”

“Are you drunk?” Robert Jordan said, standing in front of Pablo. The dirty, stubble-faced man looked at him happily.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “Where is thy country, Inglés, where the women eat with the men?”

“In Estados Unidos in the state of Montana.”

“Is it there that the men wear skirts as do the women?”

“No. That is in Scotland.”

“But listen,” Pablo said. “When you wear skirts like that, Inglés—”

“I don’t wear them,” Robert Jordan said.

“When you are wearing those skirts,” Pablo went on, “what do you wear under them?”

“I don’t know what the Scotch wear,” Robert Jordan said. “I’ve wondered myself.”

“Not the Escoceses,” Pablo said. “Who cares about the Escoceses? Who cares about anything with a name as rare as that? Not me. I don’t care. You, I say, Inglés. You. What do you wear under your skirts in your country?”

“Twice I have told you that we do not wear skirts,” Robert Jordan said. “Neither drunk nor in joke.”

“But under your skirts,” Pablo insisted. “Since it is well known that you wear skirts. Even the soldiers. I have seen photographs and also I have seen them in the Circus of Price. What do you wear under your skirts, Inglés?”

“Los cojones,” Robert Jordan said.

Anselmo laughed and so did the others who were listening; all except Fernando. The sound of the word, of the gross word spoken before the women, was offensive to him.

“Well, that is normal,” Pablo said. “But it seems to me that with enough cojones you would not wear skirts.”

“Don’t let him get started again, Inglés,” the flat-faced man with the broken nose who was called Primitivo said. “He is drunk. Tell me, what do they raise in your country?”

“Cattle and sheep,” Robert Jordan said. “Much grain also and beans. And also much beets for sugar.”

The three were at the table now and the others sat close by except Pablo, who sat by himself in front of a bowl of the wine. It was the same stew as the night before and Robert Jordan ate it hungrily.

“In your country there are mountains? With that name surely there are mountains,” Primitivo asked politely to make conversation. He was embarrassed at the drunkenness of Pablo.

“Many mountains and very high.”

“And are there good pastures?”

“Excellent; high pasture in the summer in forests controlled by the government. Then in the fall the cattle are brought down to the lower ranges.”

“Is the land there owned by the peasants?”

“Most land is owned by those who farm it. Originally the land was owned by the state and by living on it and declaring the intent~on of improving it, a man could obtain a title to a hundred and fifty hectares.”

“Tell me how this is done,” Agustín asked. “That is an agrarian reform which means something.”

Robert Jordan explained the process of homesteading. He had never thought of it before as an agrarian reform.

“That is magnificent,” Primitivo said. “Then you have a communism in your country?”

“No. That is done under the Republic.”

“For me,” Agustín said, “everything can be done under the Republic. I see no need for other form of government.”

“Do you have no big proprietors?” Andrés asked.

“Many.”

“Then there must be abuses.”

“Certainly. There are many abuses.”

“But you will do away with them?”

“We try to more and more. But there are many abuses still.”

“But there are not great estates that must be broken up?”

“Yes. But there are those who believe that taxes will break them up.”

“How?”

Robert Jordan, wiping out the stew bowl with bread, explained how the income tax and inheritance tax worked. “But the big estates remain. Also there are taxes on the land,” he said.

“But surely the big proprietors and the rich will make a revolution against such taxes. Such taxes appear to me to be revolutionary. They will revolt against the government when they see that they are threatened, exactly as the fascists have done here,” Primitivo said.

“It is possible.”

“Then you will have to fight in your country as we fight here.”

“Yes, we will have to fight.”

“But are there not many fascists in your country?”

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

“But you cannot destroy them until they rebel?”

“No,” Robert Jordan said. “We cannot destroy them. But we can educate the people so that they will fear fascism and recognize it as it appears and combat it.”

“Do you know where there are no fascists?” Andrés asked.

“Where?”

“In the town of Pablo,” Andrés said and grinned.

“You know what was done in that village?” Primitivo asked Robert Jordan.

“Yes. I have heard the story.”

“From Pilar?”

“Yes.”

“You could not hear all of it from the woman,” Pablo said heavily. “Because she did not see the end of it because she fell from a chair outside of the window.”

“You tell him what happened then,” Pilar said. “Since I know not the story, let you tell it.”

“Nay,” Pablo said. “I have never told it.”

“No,” Pilar said. “And you will not tell it. And now you wish it had not happened.”

“No,” Pablo said. “That is not true. And if all had killed the fascists as I did we would not have this war. But I would not have had it happen as it happened.”

“Why do you say that?” Primitivo asked him. “Are you changing your politics?”

“No. But it was barbarous,” Pablo said. “In those days I was very barbarous.”

“And now you are drunk,” Pilar said.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “With your permission.”

“I liked you better when you were barbarous,” the woman said. “Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practise in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol.”

“You are a woman and you do not understand,” Pablo said equably. “I am drunk on wine and I would be happy except for those people I have killed. All of them fill me with sorrow.” He shook his head lugubriously.

“Give him some of that which Sordo brought,” Pilar said. “Give him something to animate him. He is becoming too sad to bear.”

“If I could restore them to life, I would,” Pablo said.

“Go and obscenity thyself,” Agustín said to him. “What sort of place is this?”

“I would bring them all back to life,” Pablo said sadly. “Every one.”

“Thy mother,” Agustín shouted at him. “Stop talking like this or get out. Those were fascists you killed.”

“You heard me,” Pablo said. “I would restore them all to life.”

“And then you would walk on the water,” Pilar said. “In my life I have never seen such a man. Up until yesterday you preserved some remnants of manhood. And today there is not enough of you left to make a sick kitten. Yet you are happy in your soddenness.”

“We should have killed all or none,” Pablo nodded his head. “All or none.”

“Listen, Inglés,” Agustín said. “How did you happen to come to Spain? Pay no attention to Pablo. He is drunk.”

“I came first twelve years ago to study the country and the language,” Robert Jordan said. “I teach Spanish in a university.”

“You look very little like a professoi” Primitivo said.

“He has no beard,” Pablo said. “Look at him. He has no beard.”

“Are you truly a professor?”

“An instructor.”

“But you teach?”

“Yes.”

“But why Spanish?” Andrés asked. “Would it not be easier to teach English since you are English?”

“He speaks Spanish as we do,” Anselmo said. “Why should he not teach Spanish?”

“Yes. But it is, in a way, presumptuous for a foreigner to teach Spanish,” Fernando said. “I mean nothing against you, Don Roberto.”

“He’s a false professor,” Pablo said, very pleased with himself. “He hasn’t got a beard.”

“Surely you know English better,” Fernando said. “Would it not be better and easier and clearer to teach English?”

“He doesn’t teach it to Spaniards—” Pilar started to intervene.

“I should hope not,” Fernando said.

“Let me finish, you mule,” Pilar said to him. “He teaches Spanish to Americans. North Americans.”

“Can they not speak Spanish?” Fernando asked. “South Americans can.”

“Mule,” Pilar said. “He teaches Spanish to North Americans who speak English.”

“Still and all I think it would be easier for him to teach English if that is what he speaks,” Fernando said.

“Can’t you hear he speaks Spanish?” Pilar shook her head hopelessly at Robert Jordan.

“Yes. But with an accent.”

“Of where?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Of Estremadura,” Fernando said primly.

“Oh my mother,” Pilar said. “What a people!”

“It is possible,” Robert Jordan said. “I have come here from there.”

“As he well knows,” Pilar said. “You old maid,” she turned to Fernando. “Have you had enough to eat?”

“I could eat more if there is a sufficient quantity,” Fernando told her. “And do not think that I wish to say anything against you, Don Roberto—”

“Milk,” Agustín said simply. “And milk again. Do we make the revolution in order to say Don Roberto to a comrade?”

“For me the revolution is so that all will say Don to all,” Fernando said. “Thus should it be under the Republic.”

“Milk,” Agustín said. “Black milk.”

“And I still think it would be easier and clearer for Don Roberto to teach English.”

“Don Roberto has no beard,” Pablo said. “He is a false professor.”

“What do you mean, I have no beard?” Robert Jordan said. “What’s this?” He stroked his chin and his cheeks where the threeday growth made a blond stubble.

“Not a beard,” Pablo said. He shook his head. “That’s not a beard.” He was almost jovial now. “He’s a false professor.”

“I obscenity in the milk of all,” Agustín said, “if it does not seem like a lunatic asylum here.”

“You should drink,” Pablo said to him. “To me everything appears normal. Except the lack of beard of Don Roberto.”

Maria ran her hand over Robert Jordan’s cheek.

“He has a beard,” she said to Pablo.

“You should know,” Pablo said and Robert Jordan looked at him.

I don’t think he is so drunk, Robert Jordan thought. No, not so drunk. And I think I had better watch myself.

“Thou,” he said to Pablo. “Do you think this snow will last?”

“What do you think?”

“I asked you.”

“Ask another,” Pablo told him. “I am not thy service of information. You have a paper from thy service of information. Ask the woman. She commands.”

“I asked thee.”

“Go and obscenity thyself,” Pablo told him. “Thee and the woman and the girl.”

“He is drunk,” Primitivo said. “Pay him no heed, Inglés.”

“I do not think he is so drunk,” Robert Jordan said.

Maria was standing behind him and Robert Jordan saw Pablo watching her over his shoulder. The small eyes, like a boar’s, were watching her out of the round, stubble-covered head and Robert Jordan thought: I have known many killers in this war and some before and they were all different; there is no common trait nor feature; nor any such thing as the criminal type; but Pablo is certainly not handsome.

“I don’t believe you can drink,” he said to Pablo. “Nor that you’re drunk.”

“I am drunk,” Pablo said with dignity. “To drink is nothing. It is to be drunk that is important. Estoy muy borracho.”

“I doubt it,” Robert Jordan told him. “Cowardly, yes.”

It was so quiet in the cave, suddenly, that he could hear the hissing noise the wood made burning on the hearth where Pilar cooked. He heard the sheepskin crackle as he rested his weight on his feet. He thought he could almost hear the snow falling outside. He could not, but he could hear the silence where it fell.

I’d like to kill him and have it over with, Robert Jordan was thinking. I don’t know what he is going to do, but it is nothing good. Day after tomorrow is the bridge and this man is bad and he constitutes a danger to the success of the whole enterprise. Come on. Let us get it over with.

Pablo grinned at him and put one finger up and wiped it across his throat. He shook his head that turned only a little each way on his thick, short neck.

“Nay, Inglés,” he said. “Do not provoke me.” He looked at Pilar and said to her, “It is not thus that you get rid of me.”

“Sinverguenza,” Robert Jordan said to him, committed now in his own mind to the action. “Cobarde.”

“It is very possible,” Pablo said. “But I am not to be provoked. Take something to drink, Inglés, and signal to the woman it was not successful.”

“Shut thy mouth,” Robert Jordan said. “I provoke thee for myself.”

“It is not worth the trouble,” Pablo told him. “I do not provoke.”

“Thou art a bicho raro,” Robert Jordan said, not wanting to let it go; not wanting to have it fail for the second time; knowing as he spoke that this had all been gone through before; having that feeling that he was playing a part from memory of something that he had read or had dreamed, feeling it all moving in a circle.

“Very rare, yes,” Pablo said. “Very rare and very drunk. To your health, Inglés.” He dipped a cup in the wine bowl and held it up. “Salud y cojones.”

He’s rare, all right, Robert Jordan thought, and smart, and very complicated. He could no longer hear the fire for the sound of his own breathing.

“Here’s to you,” Robert Jordan said, and dipped a cup into the wine. Betrayal wouldn’t amount to anything without all these pledges, he thought. Pledge up. “Salud,” he said. “Salud and Salud again,” you salud, he thought. Salud, you salud.

“Don Roberto,” Pablo said heavily.

“Don Pablo,” Robert Jordan said.

“You’re no professor,” Pablo said, “because you haven’t got a beard. And also to do away with me you have to assassinate me and, for this, you have not cojones.”

He was looking at Robert Jordan with his mouth closed so that his lips made a tight line, like the mouth of a fish, Robert Jordan thought. With that head it is like one of those porcupine fish that swallow air and swell up after they are caught.

“Salud, Pablo,” Robert Jordan said and raised the cup up and drank from it. “I am learning much from thee.”

“I am teaching the professor,” Pablo nodded his head. “Come on, Don Roberto, we will be friends.”

“We are friends already,” Robert Jordan said.

“But now we will be good friends.”

“We are good friends already.”

“I’m going to get out of here,” Agustín said. “Truly, it is said that we must eat a ton of it in this life but I have twenty-five pounds of it stuck in each of my ears this minute.”

“What is the matter, negro?” Pablo said to him. “Do you not like to see friendship between Don Roberto and me?”

“Watch your mouth about calling me negro.” Agustín went over to him and stood in front of Pablo holding his hands low.

“So you are called,” Pablo said.

“Not by thee.”

“Well, then, blanco—”

“Nor that, either.”

“What are you then, Red?”

“Yes. Red. Rojo. With the Red star of the army and in favor of the Republic. And my name is Agustín.”

“What a patriotic man,” Pablo said. “Look, Inglés, what an exemplary patriot.”

Agustín hit him hard across the mouth with his left hand, bringing it forward in a slapping, backhand sweep. Pablo sat there. The corners of his mouth were wine-stained and his expression did not change, but Robert Jordan watched his eyes narrow, as a cat’s pupils close to vertical slits in a strong light.

“Nor this,” Pablo said. “Do not count on this, woman.” He turned his head toward Pilar. “I am not provoked.”

Agustín hit him again. This time he hit him on the mouth with his closed fist. Robert Jordan was holding his pistol in his hand under the table. He had shoved the safety catch off and he pushed Maria away with his left hand. She moved a little way and he pushed her hard in the ribs with his left hand again to make her get really away. She was gone now and he saw her from the corner of his eye, slipping along the side of the cave toward the fire and now Robert Jordan watched Pablo’s face.

The round-headed man sat staring at Agustín from his flat little eyes. The pupils were even smaller now. He licked his lips then, put up an arm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked down and saw the blood on his hand. He ran his tongue over his lips, then spat.

“Nor that,” he said. “I am not a fool. I do not provoke.”

“Cabrón,” Agustín said.

“You should know,” Pablo said. “You know the woman.”

Agustín hit him again hard in the mouth and Pablo laughed at him, showing the yellow, bad, broken teeth in the reddened line of his mouth.

“Leave it alone,” Pablo said and reached with a cup to scoop some wine from the bowl. “Nobody here has cojones to kill me and this of the hands is silly.”

“Cobarde,” Agustín said.

“Nor words either,” Pablo said and made a swishing noise rinsing the wine in his mouth. He spat on the floor. “I am far past words.”

Agustín stood there looking down at him and cursed him, speaking slowly, clearly, bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field, lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.

“Nor of those,” Pablo said. “Leave it, Agustín. And do not hit me more. Thou wilt injure thy hands.”

Agustín turned from him and went to the door.

“Do not go out,” Pablo said. “It is snowing outside. Make thyself comfortable in here.”

“And thou! Thou!” Agustín turned from the door and spoke to him, putting all his contempt in the single, “Tu.”

“Yes, me,” said Pablo. “I will be alive when you are dead.”

He dipped up another cup of wine and raised it to Robert Jordan. “To the professor,” he said. Then turned to Pilar. “To the Señora Commander.” Then toasted them all, “To all the illusioned ones.”

Agustín walked over to him and, striking quickly with the side of his hand, knocked the cup out of his hand.

“That is a waste,” Pablo said. “That is silly.”

Agustín said something vile to him.

“No,” Pablo said, dipping up another cup. “I am drunk, seest thou? When I am not drunk I do not talk. You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”

“Go and obscenity in the milk of thy cowardice,” Pilar said to him. “I know too much about thee and thy cowardice.”

“How the woman talks,” Pablo said. “I will be going out to see the horses.”

“Go and befoul them,” Agustín said. “Is not that one of thy customs?”

“No,” Pablo said and shook his head. He was taking down his big blanket cape from the wall and he looked at Agustín. “Thou,” he said, “and thy violence.”

“What do you go to do with the horses?” Agustín said.

“Look to them,” Pablo said.

“Befoul them,” Agustín said. “Horse lover.”

“I care for them very much,” Pablo said. “Even from behind they are handsomer and have more sense than these people. Divert yourselves,” he said and grinned. “Speak to them of the bridge, Inglés. Explain their duties in the attack. Tell them how to conduct the retreat. Where will you take them, Inglés, after the bridge? Where will you take your patriots? I have thought of it all day while I have been drinking.”

“What have you thought?” Agustín asked.

“What have I thought?” Pablo said and moved his tongue around exploringly inside his lips. “Qué te importa, what have I thought.”

“Say it,” Agustín said to him.

“Much,” Pablo said. He pulled the blanket coat over his head, the roundness of his head protruding now from the dirty yellow folds of the blanket. “I have thought much.”

“What?” Agustín said. “What?”

“I have thought you are a group of illusioned people,” Pablo said. “Led by a woman with her brains between her thighs and a foreigner who comes to destroy you.”

“Get out,” Pilar shouted at him. “Get out and fist yourself into the snow. Take your bad milk out of here, you horse exhausted maricon.”

“Thus one talks,” Agustín said admiringly, but absent-mindedly. He was worried.

“I go,” said Pablo. “But I will be back shortly.” He lifted the blanket over the door of the cave and stepped out. Then from the door he called, “It’s still falling, Inglés.”

Chapter 17

The only noise in the cave now was the hissing from the hearth where snow was falling through the hole in the roof onto the coals of the fire.

“Pilar,” Fernando said. “Is there more of the stew?”

“Oh, shut up,” the woman said. But Maria took Fernando’s bowl over to the big pot set back from the edge of the fire and ladled into it. She brought it over to the table and set it down and then patted Fernando on the shoulder as he bent to eat. She stood for a moment beside him, her hand on his shoulder. But Fernando did not look up. He was devoting himself to the stew.

Agustín stood beside the fire. The others were seated. Pilar sat at the table opposite Robert Jordan.

“Now, Inglés,” she said, “you have seen how he is.”

“What will he do?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Anything,” the woman looked down at the table. “Anything. He is capable of doing anything.”

“Where is the automatic rifle?” Robert Jordan asked.

“There in the corner wrapped in the blanket,” Primitivo said. “Do you want it?”

“Later,” Robert Jordan said. “I wished to know where it is.”

“It is there,” Primitivo said. “I brought it in and I have wrapped it in my blanket to keep the action dry. The pans are in that sack.”

“He would not do that,” Pilar said. “He would not do anything with the máquina.”

“I thought you said he would do anything.”

“He might,” she said. “But he has no practice with the máquina. He could toss in a bomb. That is more his style.”

“It is an idiocy and a weakness not to have killed him,” the gypsy said. He had taken no part in any of the talk all evening. “Last night Roberto should have killed him.”

“Kill him,” Pilar said. Her big face was dark and tired looking. “I am for it now.”

“I was against it,” Agustín said. He stood in front of the fire, his long arms hanging by his sides, his cheeks, stubble-shadowed below the cheekbones, hollow in the firelight. “Now I am for it,” he said. “He is poisonous now and he would like to see us all destroyed.”

“Let all speak,” Pilar said and her voice was tired. “Thou, Andrés?”

“Matarlo,” the brother with the dark hair growing far down in the point on his forehead said and nodded his head.

“Eladio?”

“Equally,” the other brother said. “To me he seems to constitute a great danger. And he serves for nothing.”

“Primitivo?”

“Equally.”

“Fernando?”

“Could we not hold him as a prisoner?” Fernando asked.

“Who would look after a prisoner?” Primitivo said. “It would take two men to look after a prisoner and what would we do with him in the end?”

“We could sell him to the fascists,” the gypsy said.

“None of that,” Agustín said. “None of that filthiness.”

“It was only an idea,” Rafael, the gypsy, said. “It seems to me that the facciosos would be happy to have him.”

“Leave it alone,” Agustín said. “That is filthy.”

“No filthier than Pablo,” the gypsy justified himself.

“One filthiness does not justify another,” Agustín said. “Well, that is all. Except for the old man and the Inglés.”

“They are not in it,” Pilar said. “He has not been their leader.”

“One moment,” Fernando said. “I have not finished.”

“Go ahead,” Pilar said. “Talk until he comes back. Talk until he rolls a hand grenade under that blanket and blows this all up. Dynamite and all.”

“I think that you exaggerate, Pilar,” Fernando said. “I do not think that he has any such conception.”

“I do not think so either,” Agustín said. “Because that would blow the wine up too and he will be back in a little while to the wine.”

“Why not turn him over to El Sordo and let El Sordo sell him to the fascists?” Rafael suggested. “You could blind him and he would be easy to handle.”

“Shut up,” Pilar said. “I feel something very justified against thee too when thou talkest.”

“The fascists would pay nothing for him anyway,” Primitivo said. “Such things have been tried by others and they pay nothing. They will shoot thee too.”

“I believe that blinded he could be sold for something,” Rafael said.

“Shut up,” Pilar said. “Speak of blinding again and you can go with the other.”

“But, he, Pablo, blinded the guardia civil who was wounded,” the gypsy insisted. “You have forgotten that?”

“Close thy mouth,” Pilar said to him. She was embarrassed before Robert Jordan by this talk of blinding.

“I have not been allowed to finish,” Fernando interrupted.

“Finish,” Pilar told him. “Go on. Finish.”

“Since it is impractical to hold Pablo as a prisoner,” Fernando commenced, “and since it is repugnant to offer him—”

“Finish,” Pilar said. “For the love of God, finish.”

“ — in any class of negotiation,” Fernando proceeded calmly, “I am agreed that it is perhaps best that he should be eliminated in order that the operations projected should be insured of the maximum possibility of success.”

Pilar looked at the little man, shook her head, bit her lips and said nothing.

“That is my opinion,” Fernando said. “I believe we are justified in believing that he constitutes a danger to the Republic—”

“Mother of God,” Pilar said. “Even here one man can make a bureaucracy with his mouth.”

“Both from his own words and his recent actions,” Fernando continued. “And while he is deserving of gratitude for his actions in the early part of the movement and up until the most recent time—”

Pilar had walked over to the fire. Now she came up to the table.

“Fernando,” Pilar said quietly and handed a bowl to him. “Take this stew please in all formality and fill thy mouth with it and talk no more. We are in possession of thy opinion.”

“But, how then—” Primitivo asked and paused without completing the sentence.

“Estoy listo,” Robert Jordan said. “I am ready to do it. Since you are all decided that it should be done it is a service that I can do.”

What’s the matter? he thought. From listening to him I am beginning to talk like Fernando. That language must be infectious. French, the language of diplomacy. Spanish, the language of bureaucracy.

“No,” Maria said. “No.”

“This is none of thy business,” Pilar said to the girl. “Keep thy mouth shut.”

“I will do it tonight,” Robert Jordan said.

He saw Pilar looking at him, her fingers on her lips. She was looking toward the door.

The blanket fastened across the opening of the cave was lifted and Pablo put his head in. He grinned at them all, pushed under the blanket and then turned and fastened it again. He turned around and stood there, then pulled the blanket cape over his head and shook the snow from it.

“You were speaking of me?” he addressed them all. “I am interrupting?”

No one answered him and he hung the cape on a peg in the wall and walked over to the table.

“Qué tal?” he asked and picked up his cup which had stood empty on the table and dipped it into the wine bowl. “There is no wine,” he said to Maria. “Go draw some from the skin.”

Maria picked up the bowl and went over to the dusty, heavily distended, black-tarred wineskin that hung neck down from the wall and unscrewed the plug from one of the legs enough so that the wine squirted from the edge of the plug into the bowl. Pablo watched her kneeling, holding the bowl up and watched the light red wine flooding into the bowl so fast that it made a whirling motion as it filled it.

“Be careful,” he said to her. “The wine’s below the chest now.”

No one said anything.

“I drank from the belly-button to the chest today,” Pablo said. “It’s a day’s work. What’s the matter with you all? Have you lost your tongues?”

No one said anything at all.

“Screw it up, Maria,” Pablo said. “Don’t let it spill.”

“There’ll be plenty of wine,” Agustín said. “You’ll be able to be drunk.”

“One has encountered his tongue,” Pablo said and nodded to Agustín. “Felicitations. I thought you’d been struck dumb.”

“By what?” Agustín asked.

“By my entry.”

“Thinkest thou that thy entry carries importance?”

He’s working himself up to it, maybe, Robert Jordan thought. Maybe Agustín is going to do it. He certainly hates him enough. I don’t hate him, he thought. No, I don’t hate him. He is disgusting but I do not hate him. Though that blinding business puts him in a special class. Still this is their war. But he is certainly nothing to have around for the next two days. I am going to keep away out of it, he thought. I made a fool of myself with him once tonight and I am perfectly willing to liquidate him. But I am not going to fool with him beforehand. And there are not going to be any shooting matches or monkey business in here with that dynamite around either. Pablo thought of that, of course. And did you think of it, he said to himself? No, you did not and neither did Agustín. You deserve whatever happens to you, he thought.

“Agustín,” he said.

“What?” Agustín looked up sullenly and turned his head away from Pablo.

“I wish to speak to thee,” Robert Jordan said.

“Later.”

“Now,” Robert Jordan said. “Por favor.”

Robert Jordan had walked to the opening of the cave and Pablo followed him with his eyes. Agustín, tall and sunken cheeked, stood up and came over to him. He moved reluctantly and contemptuously.

“Thou hast forgotten what is in the sacks?” Robert Jordan said to him, speaking so low that it could not be heard.

“Milk!” Agustín said. “One becomes accustomed and one forgets.”

“I, too, forgot.”

“Milk!” Agustín said. “Leche! What fools we are.” He swung back loose-jointedly to the table and sat down. “Have a drink, Pablo, old boy,” he said. “How were the horses?”

“Very good,” Pablo said. “And it is snowing less.”

“Do you think it will stop?”

“Yes,” Pablo said. “It is thinning now and there are small, hard pellets. The wind will blow but the snow is going. The wind has changed.”

“Do you think it will clear tomorrow?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “I believe it will be cold and clear. This wind is shifting.”

Look at him, Robert Jordan thought. Now he is friendly. He has shifted like the wind. He has the face and the body of a pig and I know he is many times a murderer and yet he has the sensitivity of a good aneroid. Yes, he thought, and the pig is a very intelligent animal, too. Pablo has hatred for us, or perhaps it is only for our projects, and pushes his hatred with insults to the point where you are ready to do away with him and when he sees that this point has been reached he drops it and starts all new and clean again.

“We will have good weather for it, Inglés,” Pablo said to Robert Jordan.

“We,” Pilar said. “We?”

“Yes, we,” Pablo grinned at her and drank some of the wine. “Why not? I thought it over while I was outside. Why should we not agree?”

“In what?” the woman asked. “In what now?”

“In all,” Pablo said to her. “In this of the bridge. I am with thee now.”

“You are with us now?” Agustín said to him. “After what you have said?”

“Yes,” Pablo told him. “With the change of the weather I am with thee.”

Agustín shook his head. “The weather,” he said and shook his head again. “And after me hitting thee in the face?”

“Yes,” Pablo grinned at him and ran his fingers over his lips. “After that too.”

Robert Jordan was watching Pilar. She was looking at Pablo as at some strange animal. On her face there was still a shadow of the expression the mention of the blinding had put there. She shook her head as though to be rid of that, then tossed it back. “Listen,” she said to Pablo.

“Yes, woman.”

“What passes with thee?”

“Nothing,” Pablo said. “I have changed my opinion. Nothing more.”

“You were listening at the door,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said. “But I could hear nothing.”

“You fear that we will kill thee.”

“No,” he told her and looked at her over the wine cup. “I do not fear that. You know that.”

“Well, what passes with thee?” Agustín said. “One moment you are drunk and putting your mouth on all of us and disassociating yourself from the work in hand and speaking of our death in a dirty manner and insulting the women and opposing that which should be done—”

“I was drunk,” Pablo told him.

“And now—”

“I am not drunk,” Pablo said. “And I have changed my mind.”

“Let the others trust thee. I do not,” Agustín said.

“Trust me or not,” Pablo said. “But there is no one who can take thee to Gredos as I can.”

“Gredos?”

“It is the only place to go after this of the bridge.”

Robert Jordan, looking at Pilar, raised his hand on the side away from Pablo and tapped his right ear questioningly.

The woman nodded. Then nodded again. She said something to Maria and the girl came over to Robert Jordan’s side.

“She says,’Of course he heard,” Maria said in Robert Jordan’s ear.

“Then Pablo,” Fernando said judicially. “Thou art with us now and in favor of this of the bridge?”

“Yes, man,” Pablo said. He looked Fernando squarely in the eye and nodded.

“In truth?” Primitivo asked.

“De veras,” Pablo told him.

“And you think it can be successful?” Fernando asked. “You now have confidence?”

“Why not?” Pablo said. “Haven’t you confidence?”

“Yes,” Fernando said. “But I always have confidence.”

“I’m going to get out of here,” Agustín said.

“It is cold outside,” Pablo told him in a friendly tone.

“Maybe,” Agustín said. “But I can’t stay any longer in this manicomio.”

“Do not call this cave an insane asylum,” Fernando said.

“A manicomio for criminal lunatics,” Agustín said. “And I’m getting out before I’m crazy, too.”

Chapter 18

It is like a merry-go-round, Robert Jordan thought. Not a merry-goround that travels fast, and with a calliope for music, and the children ride on cows with gilded horns, and there are rings to catch with sticks, and there is the blue, gas-flare-lit early dark of the Avenue du Maine, with fried fish sold from the next stall, and a wheel of fortune turning with the leather flaps slapping against the posts of the numbered compartments, and the packages of lump sugar piled in pyramids for prizes. No, it is not that kind of a merrygo-round; although the people are waiting, like the men in caps and the women in knitted sweaters, their heads bare in the gaslight and their hair shining, who stand in front of the wheel of fortune as it spins. Yes, those are the people. But this is another wheel. This is like a wheel that goes up and around.

It has been around twice now. It is a vast wheel, set at an angle, and each time it goes around and then is back to where it starts. One side is higher than the other and the sweep it makes lifts you back and down to where you started. There are no prizes either, he thought, and no one would choose to ride this wheel. You ride it each time and make the turn with no intention ever to have mounted. There is only one turn; one large, elliptical, rising and falling turn and you are back where you have started. We are back again now, he thought, and nothing is settled.

It was warm in the cave and the wind had dropped outside. Now he was sitting at the table with his notebook in front of him figuring all the technical part of the bridge-blowing. He drew three sketches, figured his formulas, marked the method of blowing with two drawings as clearly as a kindergarten project so that Anselmo could complete it in case anything should happen to himself during the process of the demolition. He finished these sketches and studied them.

Maria sat beside him and looked over his shoulder while he worked. He was conscious of Pablo across the table and of the others talking and playing cards and he smelled the odors of the cave which had changed now from those of the meal and the cooking to the fire smoke and man smell, the tobacco, red-wine and brassy, stale body smell, and when Maria, watching him finishing a drawing, put her hand on the table he picked it up with his left hand and lifted it to his face and smelled the coarse soap and water freshness from her washing of the dishes. He laid her hand down without looking at her and went on working and he could not see her blush. She let her hand lie there, close to his, but he did not lift it again.

Now he had finished the demolition project and he took a new page of the notebook and commenced to write out the operation orders. He was thinking clearly and well on these and what he wrote pleased him. He wrote two pages in the notebook and read them over carefully.

I think that is all, he said to himself. It is perfectly clear and I do not think there are any holes in it. The two posts will be destroyed and the bridge will be blown according to Golz’s orders and that is all of my responsibility. All of this business of Pablo is something with which I should never have been saddled and it will be solved one way or another. There will be Pablo or there will be no Pablo. I care nothing about it either way. But I am not going to get on that wheel again. Twice I have been on that wheel and twice it has gone around and come back to where it started and I am taking no more rides on it.

He shut the notebook and looked up at Maria. “Hola, guapa,” he said to her. “Did you make anything out of all that?”

“No, Roberto,” the girl said and put her hand on his hand that still held the pencil. “Have you finished?”

“Yes. Now it is all written out and ordered.”

“What have you been doing, Inglés?” Pablo asked from across the table. His eyes were bleary again.

Robert Jordan looked at him closely. Stay off that wheel, he said to himself. Don’t step on that wheel. I think it is going to start to swing again.

“Working on the problem of the bridge,” he said civilly.

“How is it?” asked Pablo.

“Very good,” Robert Jordan said. “All very good.”

“I have been working on the problem of the retreat,” Pablo said and Robert Jordan looked at his drunken pig eyes and at the wine bowl. The wine bowl was nearly empty.

Keep off the wheel, he told himself. He is drinking again. Sure. But don’t you get on that wheel now. Wasn’t Grant supposed to be drunk a good part of the time during the Civil War? Certainly he was. I’ll bet Grant would be furious at the comparison if he could see Pablo. Grant was a cigar smoker, too. Well, he would have to see about getting Pablo a cigar. That was what that face really needed to complete it; a half chewed cigar. Where could he get Pablo a cigar?

“How does it go?” Robert Jordan asked politely.

“Very well,” Pablo said and nodded his head heavily and judiciously. “Muy bien.”

“You’ve thought up something?” Agustín asked from where they were playing cards.

“Yes,” Pablo said. “Various things.”

“Where did you find them? In that bowl?” Agustín demanded.

“Perhaps,” Pablo said. “Who knows? Maria, fill the bowl, will you, please?”

“In the wineskin itself there should be some fine ideas,” Agustín turned back to the card game. “Why don’t you crawl in and look for them inside the skin?”

“Nay,” said Pablo equably. “I search for them in the bowl.”

He is not getting on the wheel either, Robert Jordan thought. It must be revolving by itself. I suppose you cannot ride that wheel too long. That is probably quite a deadly wheel. I’m glad we are off of it. It was making me dizzy there a couple of times. But it is the thing that drunkards and those who are truly mean or cruel ride until they die. It goes around and up and the swing is never quite the same and then it comes around down. Let it swing, he thought. They will not get me onto it again. No sir, General Grant, I am off that wheel.

Pilar was sitting by the fire, her chair turned so that she could see over the shoulders of the two card players who had their backs to her. She was watching the game.

Here it is the shift from deadliness to normal family life that is the strangest, Robert Jordan thought. It is when the damned wheel comes down that it gets you. But I am off that wheel, he thought. And nobody is going to get me onto it again.

Two days ago I never knew that Pilar, Pablo nor the rest existed, he thought. There was no such thing as Maria in the world. It was certainly a much simpler world. I had instructions from Golz that were perfectly clear and seemed perfectly possible to carry out although they presented certain difficulties and involved certain consequences. After we blew the bridge I expected either to get back to the lines or not get back and if we got back I was going to ask for some time in Madrid. No one has any leave in this war but I am sure I could get two or three days in Madrid.

In Madrid I wanted to buy some books, to go to the Florida Hotel and get a room and to have a hot bath, he thought. I was going to send Luis the porter out for a bottle of absinthe if he could locate one at the MantequerIas Leonesas or at any of the places off the Gran Via and I was going to lie in bed and read after the bath and drink a couple of absinthes and then I was going to call up Gaylord’s and see if I could come up there and eat.

He did not want to eat at the Gran Via because the food was no good really and you had to get there on time or whatever there was of it would be gone. Also there were too many newspaper men there he knew and he did not want to have to keep his mouth shut. He wanted to drink the absinthes and to feel like talking and then go up to Gaylord’s and eat with Karkov, where they had good food and real beer, and find out what was going on in the war.

He had not liked Gaylord’s, the hotel in Madrid the Russians had taken over when he first went there because it seemed too luxurious and the food was too good for a besieged city and the talk too cynical for a war. But I corrupted very easily, he thought. Why should you not have as good food as could be organized when you came back from something like this? And the talk that he had thought of as cynicism when he had first heard it had turned out to be much too true. This will be something to tell at Gaylord’s, he thought, when this is over. Yes, when this is over.

Could you take Maria to Gaylord’s? No. You couldn’t. But you could leave her in the hotel and she could take a hot bath and be there when you came back from Gaylord’s. Yes, you could do that and after you had told Karkov about her, you could bring her later because they would be curious about her and want to see her.

Maybe you wouldn’t go to Gaylord’s at all. You could eat early at the Gran Via and hurry back to the Florida. But you knew you would go to Gaylord’s because you wanted to see all that again; you wanted to eat that food again and you wanted to see all the comfort of it and the luxury of it after this. Then you would come back to the Florida and there Maria would be. Sure, she would be there after this was over. After this was over. Yes, after this was over. If he did this well he would rate a meal at Gaylord’s.

Gaylord’s was the place where you met famous peasant and worker Spanish commanders who had sprung to arms from the people at the start of the war without any previous military training and found that many of them spoke Russian. That had been the first big disillusion to him a few months back and he had started to be cynical to himself about it. But when he realized how it happened it was all right. They were peasants and workers. They had been active in the 1934 revolution and had to flee the country when it failed and in Russia they had sent them to the military academy and to the Lenin Institute the Comintern maintained so they would be ready to fight the next time and have the necessary military education to command.

The Comintern had educated them there. In a revolution you could not admit to outsiders who helped you nor that any one knew more than he was supposed to know. He had learned that. If a thing was right fundamentally the lying was not supposed to matter. There was a lot of lying though. He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

It was at Gaylord’s that you learned that Valentin Gonzalez, called El Campesino or The Peasant, had never been a peasant but was an ex-sergeant in the Spanish Foreign Legion who had deserted and fought with Abd el Krim. That was all right, too. Why shouldn’t he be? You had to have these peasant leaders quickly in this sort of war and a real peasant leader might be a little too much like Pablo. You couldn’t wait for the real Peasant Leader to arrive and he might have too many peasant characteristics when he did. So you had to manufacture one. At that, from what he had seen of Campesino, with his black beard, his thick negroid lips, and his feverish, staring eyes, he thought he might give almost as much trouble as a real peasant leader. The last time he had seen him he seemed to have gotten to believe his own publicity and think he was a peasant. He was a brave, tough man; no braver in the world. But God, how he talked too much. And when he was excited he would say anything no matter what the consequences of his indiscretion. And those consequences had been many already. He was a wonderful Brigade Commander though in a situation where it looked as though everything was lost. He never knew when everything was lost and if it was, he would fight out of it.

At Gaylord’s, too, you met the simple stonemason, Enrique Lister from Galicia, who now commanded a division and who talked Russian, too. And you met the cabinet worker, Juan Modesto from AndalucIa who had just been given an Army Corps. He never learned his Russian in Puerto de Santa Maria although he might have if they had a Berlitz School there that the cabinet makers went to. He was the most trusted of the young soldiers by the Russians because he was a true party man, “a hundred per cent” they said, proud to use the Americanism. He was much more intelligent than Lister or El Campesino.

Sure, Gaylord’s was the place you needed to complete your education. It was there you learned how it was all really done instead of how it was supposed to be done. He had only started his education, he thought. He wondered whether he would continue with it long. Gaylord’s was good and sound and what he needed. At the start when he had still believed all the nonsense it had come as a shock to him. But now he knew enough to accept the necessity for all the deception and what he learned at Gaylord’s only strengthened him in his belief in the things that he did hold to be true. He liked to know how it really was; not how it was supposed to be. There was always lying in a war. But the truth of Lister, Modesto, and El Campesino was much better than the lies and legends. Well, some day they would tell the truth to every one and meantime he was glad there was a Gaylord’s for his own learning of it.

Yes, that was where he would go in Madrid after he had bought the books and after he had lain in the hot bath and had a couple of drinks and had read awhile. But that was before Maria had come into all this that he had that plan. All right. They would have two rooms and she could do what she liked while he went up there and he’d come back from Gaylord’s to her. She had waited up in the hills all this time. She could wait a little while at the Hotel Florida. They would have three days in Madrid. Three days could be a long time. He’d take her to see the Marx Brothers at the Opera. That had been running for three months now and would certainly be good for three months more. She’d like the Marx Brothers at the Opera, he thought. She’d like that very much.

It was a long way from Gaylord’s to this cave though. No, that was not the long way. The long way was going to be from this cave to Gaylord’s. Kashkin had taken him there first and he had not liked it. Kashkin had said he should meet Karkov because Karkov wanted to know Americans and because he was the greatest lover of Lope de Vega in the world and thought “Fuente Ovejuna” was the greatest play ever written. Maybe it was at that, but he, Robert Jordan, did not think so.

He had liked Karkov but not the place. Karkov was the most intelligent man he had ever met. Wearing black riding boots, gray breeches, and a gray tunic, with tiny hands and feet, puffily fragile of face and body, with a spitting way of talking through his bad teeth, he looked comic when Robert Jordan first saw him. But he had more brains and more inner dignity and outer insolence and humor than any man that he had ever known.

Gaylord’s itself had seemed indecently luxurious and corrupt. But why shouldn’t the representatives of a power that governed a sixth of the world have a few comforts? Well, they had them and Robert Jordan had at first been repelled by the whole business and then had accepted it and enjoyed it. Kashkin had made him out to be a hell of a fellow and Karkov had at first been insultingly polite and then, when Robert Jordan had not played at being a hero but had told a story that was really funny and obscenely discreditable to himself, Karkov had shifted from the politeness to a relieved rudeness and then to insolence and they had become friends.

Kashkin had only been tolerated there. There was something wrong with Kashkin evidently and he was working it out in Spain. They would not tell him what it was but maybe they would now that he was dead. Anyway, he and Karkov had become friends and he had become friends too with the incredibly thin, drawn, dark, loving, nervous, deprived and unbitter woman with a lean, neglected body and dark, gray-streaked hair cut short who was Karkov’s wife and who served as an interpreter with the tank corps. He was a friend too of Karkov’s mistress, who had cat-eyes, reddish gold hair (sometimes more red; sometimes more gold, depending on the coiffeurs), a lazy sensual body (made to fit well against other bodies), a mouth made to fit other mouths, and a stupid, ambitious and utterly loyal mind. This mistress loved gossip and enjoyed a periodically controlled promiscuity which seemed only to amuse Karkov. Karkov was supposed to have another wife somewhere besides the tank-corps one, maybe two more, but nobody was very sure about that. Robert Jordan liked both the wife he knew and the mistress. He thought he would probably like the other wife, too, if he knew her, if there was one. Karkov had good taste in women.

There were sentries with bayonets downstairs outside the portecochere at Gaylord’s and tonight it would be the pleasantest and most comfortable place in all of besieged Madrid. He would like to be there tonight instead of here. Though it was all right here, now they had stopped that wheel. And the snow was stopping too.

He would like to show his Maria to Karkov but he could not take her there unless he asked first and he would have to see how he was received after this trip. Golz would be there after this attack was over and if he had done well they would all know it from Golz. Golz would make fun of him, too, about Maria. After what he’d said to him about no girls.

He reached over to the bowl in front of Pablo and dipped up a cup of wine. “With your permission,” he said.

Pablo nodded. He is engaged in his military studies, I imagine, Robert Jordan thought. Not seeking the bubble reputation in the cannon’s mouth but seeking the solution to the problem in yonder bowl. But you know the bastard must be fairly able to have run this band successfully for as long as he did. Looking at Pablo he wondered what sort of guerilla leader he would have been in the American Civil War. There were lots of them, he thought. But we know very little about them. Not the Quantrills, nor the Mosbys, nor his own grandfathei but the little ones, the bushwhackers. And about the drinking. Do you suppose Grant really was a drunk? His grandfather always claimed he was. That he was always a little drunk by four o’clock in the afternoon and that before Vicksburg sometimes during the siege he was very drunk for a couple of days. But grandfather claimed that he functioned perfectly normally no matter how much he drank except that sometimes it was very hard to wake him. But if you could wake him he was normal.

There wasn’t any Grant, nor any Sherman nor any Stonewall Jackson on either side so far in this war. No. Nor any Jeb Stuart either. Nor any Sheridan. It was overrun with McClellans though. The fascists had plenty of McClellans and we had at least three of them.

He had certainly not seen any military geniuses in this war. Not a one. Nor anything resembling one. Kleber, Lucasz, and Hans had done a fine job of their share in the defense of Madrid with the International Brigades and then the old bald, spectacled, conceited, stupid-as-an-owl, unintelligent-in-conversation, brave — and-as-dumb-as-a-bull, propaganda-build-up defender of Madrid, Miaja, had been so jealous of the publicity Kleber received that he had forced the Russians to relieve Kieber of his command and send him to Valencia. Kieber was a good soldier; but limited and he did talk too much for the job he had. Golz was a good general and a fine soldier but they always kept him in a subordinate position and never gave him a free hand. This attack was going to be his biggest show so far and Robert Jordan did not like too much what he had heard about the attack. Then there was Gall, the Hungarian, who ought to be shot if you could believe half you heard at Gaylord’s. Make it if you can believe ten per cent of what you hear at Gaylord’s, Robert Jordan thought.

He wished that he had seen the fighting on the plateau beyond Guadalajara when they beat the Italians. But he had been down in Estremadura then. Hans had told him about it one night in Gaylord’s two weeks ago and made him see it all. There was one moment when it was really lost when the Italians had broken the line near Trijueque and the Twelfth Brigade would have been cut off if the Torija-Brihuega road had been cut. “But knowing they were Italians,” Hans had said, “we attempted to manœuvre which would have been unjustifiable against other troops. And it was successful.”

Hans had shown it all to him on his maps of the battle. Hans carried them around with him in his map case all the time and still seemed marvelled and happy at the miracle of it. Hans was a fine soldier and a good companion. Lister’s and Modesto’s and Campesino’s Spanish troops had all fought well in that battle, Hans had told him, and that was to be credited to their leaders and to the discipline they enforced. But Lister and Campesino and Modesto had been told many of the moves they should make by their Russian military advisers. They were like students flying a machine with dual controls which the pilot could take over whenever they made a mistake. Well, this year would show how much and how well they learned. After a while there would not be dual controls and then we would see how well they handled divisions and army corps alone.

They were Communists and they were disciplinarians. The discipline that they would enforce would make good troops. Lister was murderous in discipline. He was a true fanatic and he had the complete Spanish lack of respect for life. In a few armies since the Tartar’s first invasion of the West were men executed summarily for as little reason as they were under his command. But he knew how to forge a division into a fighting unit. It is one thing to hold positions. It is another to attack positions and take them and it is something very different to manœuvre an army in the field, Robert Jordan thought as he sat there at the table. From what I have seen of him, I wonder how Lister will be at that once the dual controls are gone? But maybe they won’t go, he thought. I wonder if they will go? Or whether they will strengthen? I wonder what the Russian stand is on the whole business? Gaylord’s is the place, he thought. There is much that I need to know now that I can learn only at Gaylord’s.

At one time he had thought Gaylord’s had been bad for him. It was the opposite of the puritanical, religious communism of Velazquez 63, the Madrid palace that had been turned into the International Brigade headquarters in the capital. At Velazquez 63 it was like being a member of a religious order — and Gaylord’s was a long way away from the feeling you had at the headquarters of the Fifth Regiment before it had been broken up into the brigades of the new army.

At either of those places you felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.

So you fought, he thought. And in the fighting soon there was no purity of feeling for those who survived the fighting and were good at it. Not after the first six months.

The defense of a position or of a city is a part of war in which you can feel that first sort of feeling. The fighting in the Sierras had been that way. They had fought there with the true comradeship of the revolution. Up there when there had been the first necessity for the enforcement of discipline he had approved and understood it. Under the shelling men had been cowards and had run. He had seen them shot and left to swell beside the road, nobody bothering to do more than strip them of their cartridges and their valuables. Taking their cartridges, their boots and their leather coats was right. Taking the valuables was only realistic. It only kept the anarchists from getting them.

It had seemed just and right and necessary that the men who ran were shot. There was nothing wrong about it. Their running was a selfishness. The fascists had attacked and we had stopped them on that slope in the gray rocks, the scrub pines and the gorse of the Guadarrama hillsides. We had held along the road under the bombing from the planes and the shelling when they brought their artillery up and those who were left at the end of that day had counterattacked and driven them back. Later, when they had tried to come down on the left, sifting down between the rocks and through the trees, we had held out in the Sanitarium firing from the windows and the roof although they had passed it on both sides, and we lived through knowing what it was to be surrounded until the counterattack had cleared them back behind the road again.

In all that, in the fear that dries your mouth and your throat, in the smashed plaster dust and the sudden panic of a wall falling, collapsing in the flash and roar of a shellburst, clearing the gun, dragging those away who had been serving it, lying face downward and covered with rubble, your head behind the shield working on a stoppage, getting the broken case out, straightening the belt again, you now lying straight behind the shield, the gun searching the roadside again; you did the thing there was to do and knew that you were right. You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into. You learned that fall, he thought, how to endure and how to ignore suffering in the long time of cold and wetness, of mud and of digging and fortifying. And the feeling of the summer and the fall was buried deep under tiredness, sleepiness, and nervousness and discomfort. But it was still there and all that you went through only served to validate it. It was in those days, he thought, that you had a deep and sound and selfless pride — that would have made you a bloody bore at Gaylord’s, he thought suddenly.

No, you would not have been so good at Gaylord’s then, he thought. You were too naïve. You were in a sort of state of grace. But Gaylord’s might not have been the way it was now at that time, either. No, as a matter of fact, it was not that way, he told himself. It was not that way at all. There was not any Gaylord’s then.

Karkov had told him about those days. At that time what Russians there were had lived at the Palace Hotel. Robert Jordan had known none of them then. That was before the first partizan groups had been formed; before he had met Kashkin or any of the others. Kashkin had been in the north at Irun, at San Sebastian and in the abortive fighting toward Vitoria. He had not arrived in Madrid until January and while Robert Jordan had fought at Carabanchel and at Usera in those three days when they stopped the right wing of the fascist attack on Madrid and drove the Moors and the Tercio back from house to house to clear that battered suburb on the edge of the gray, sun-baked plateau and establish a line of defense along the heights that would protect that corner of the city, Karkov had been in Madrid.

Karkov was not cynical about those times either when he talked. Those were the days they all shared when everything looked lost and each man retained now, better than any citation or decoration, the knowledge of just how he would act when everything looked lost. The government had abandoned the city, taking all the motor cars from the ministry of war in their flight and old Miaja had to ride down to inspect his defensive positions on a bicycle. Robert Jordan did not believe that one. He could not see Miaja on a bicycle even in his most patriotic imagination, but Karkov said it was true. But then he had written it for Russian papers so he probably wanted to believe it was true after writing it.

But there was another story that Karkov had not written. He had three wounded Russians in the Palace Hotel for whom he was responsible. They were two tank drivers and a flyer who were too bad to be moved, and since, at that time, it was of the greatest importance that there should be no evidence of any Russian intervention to justify an open intervention by the fascists, it was Karkov’s responsibility that these wounded should not fall into the hands of the fascists in case the city should be abandoned.

In the event the city should be abandoned, Karkov was to poison them to destroy all evidence of their identity before leaving the Palace Hotel. No one could prove from the bodies of three wounded men, one with three bullet wounds in his abdomen, one with his jaw shot away and his vocal cords exposed, one with his femur smashed to bits by a bullet and his hands and face so badly burned that his face was just an eyelashless, eyebrowless, hairless blister that they were Russians. No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead.

Robert Jordan had asked Karkov how he felt about the necessity of performing this act and Karkov had said that he had not looked forward to it. “How were you going to do it?” Robert Jordan had asked him and had added, “You know it isn’t so simple just suddenly to poison people.” And Karkov had said, “Oh, yes, it is when you carry it always for your own use.” Then he had opened his cigarette case and showed Robert Jordan what he carried in one side of it.

“But the first thing anybody would do if they took you prisoner would be to take your cigarette case,” Robert Jordan had objected. “They would have your hands up.”

“But I have a little more here,” Karkov had grinned and showed the lapel of his jacket. “You simply put the lapel in your mouth like this and bite it and swallow.”

“That’s much better,” Robert Jordan had said. “Tell me, does it smell like bitter almonds the way it always does in detective stories?”

“I don’t know,” Karkov said delightedly. “I have never smelled it. Should we break a little tube and smell it?”

“Better keep it.”

“Yes,” Karkov said and put the cigarette case away. “I am not a defeatist, you understand, but it is always possible that such serious times might come again and you cannot get this anywhere. Have you seen the communiqué from the Córdoba front? It is very beautiful. It is now my favorite among all the communiqués.”

“What did it say?” Robert Jordan had come to Madrid from the Córdoban Front and he had the sudden stiffening that comes when some one jokes about a thing which you yourself may joke about but which they may not. “Tell me?”

“Nuestra gloriosa tropa siga avanzando sin perder ni una sola palma de terreno,” Karkov said in his strange Spanish.

“It didn’t really say that,” Robert Jordan doubted.

“Our glorious troops continue to advance without losing a foot of ground,” Karkov repeated in English. “It is in the communiqué. I will find it for you.”

You could remember the men you knew who died in the fighting around Pozoblanco; but it was a joke at Gaylord’s.

So that was the way it was at Gaylord’s now. Still there had not always been Gaylord’s and if the situation was now one which produced such a thing as Gaylord’s out of the survivors of the early days, he was glad to see Gaylord’s and to know about it. You are a long way from how you felt in the Sierra and at Carabanchel and at Usera, he thought. You corrupt very easily, he thought. But was it corruption or was it merely that you lost the naïveté that you started with? Would it not be the same in anything? Who else kept that first chastity of mind about their work that young doctors, young priests, and young soldiers usually started with? The priests certainly kept it, or they got out. I suppose the Nazis keep it, he thought, and the Communists who have a severe enough selfdiscipline. But look at Karkov.

He never tired of considering the case of Karkov. The last time he had been at Gaylord’s Karkov had been wonderful about a certain British economist who had spent much time in Spain. Robert Jordan had read this man’s writing for years and he had always respected him without knowing anything about him. He had not cared very much for what this man had written about Spain. It was too clear and simple and too open and shut and many of the statistics he knew were faked by wishful thinking. But he thought you rarely cared for journalism written about a country you really knew about and he respected the man for his intentions.

Then he had seen the man, finally, on the afternoon when they had attacked at Carabanchel.They were sitting in the lee of the bull ring and there was shooting down the two streets and every one was nervous waiting for the attack. A tank had been promised and it had not come up and Montero was sitting with his head in his hand saying, “The tank has not come. The tank has not come.”

It was a cold day and the yellow dust was blowing down the street and Montero had been hit in the left arm and the arm was stiffening. “We have to have a tank,” he said. “We must wait for the tank, but we cannot wait.” His wound was making him sound petulant.

Robert Jordan had gone back to look for the tank which Montero said he thought might have stopped behind the apartment building on the corner of the tram-line. It was there all right. But it was not a tank. Spaniards called anything a tank in those days. It was an old armored car. The driver did not want to leave the angle of the apartment house and bring it up to the bull ring. He was standing behind it with his arms folded against the metal of the car and his head in the leather-padded helmet on his arms. He shook his head when Robert Jordan spoke to him and kept it pressed against his arms. Then he turned his head without looking at Robert Jordan.

“I have no orders to go there,” he said sullenly.

Robert Jordan had taken his pistol out of the holster and pushed the muzzle of the pistol against the leather coat of the armored car driver.

“Here are your orders,” he had told him. The man shook his head with the big padded-leather helmet like a football player’s on it and said, “There is no ammunition for the machine gun.”

“We have ammunition at the bull ring,” Robert Jordan had told him. “Come on, let’s go. We will fill the belts there. Come on.”

“There is no one to work the gun,” the driver said.

“Where is he? Where is your mate?”

“Dead,” the driver had said. “Inside there.”

“Get him out,” Robert Jordan had said. “Get him out of there.”

“I do not like to touch him,” the driver had said. “And he is bent over between the gun and the wheel and I cannot get past him.”

“Come on,” Robert Jordan had said. “We will get him out together.”

He had banged his head as he climbed into the armored car and it had made a small cut over his eyebrow that bled down onto his face. The dead man was heavy and so stiff you could not bend him and he had to hammer at his head to get it out from where it had wedged, face down, between his seat and the wheel. Finally he got it up by pushing with his knee up under the dead man’s head and then, pulling back on the man’s waist now that the head was loose, he pulled the dead man out himself toward the door.

“Give me a hand with him,” he had said to the driver.

“I do not want to touch him,” the driver had said and Robert Jordan had seen that he was crying. The tears ran straight down on each side of his nose on the powder-grimed slope of his face and his nose was running, too.

Standing beside the door he had swung the dead man out and the dead man fell onto the sidewalk beside the tram-line still in that hunched-over, doubled-up position. He lay there, his face waxy gray against the cement sidewalk, his hands bent under him as they had been in the car.

“Get in, God damn it,” Robert Jordan had said, motioning now with his pistol to the driver. “Get in there now.”

Just then he had seen this man who had come out from the lee of the apartment house building. He had on a long overcoat and he was bareheaded and his hair was gray, his cheekbones broad and his eyes were deep and set close together. He had a package of Chesterfields in his hand and he took one out and handed it toward Robert Jordan who was pushing the driver into the armored car with his pistol.

“Just a minute, Comrade,” he had said to Robert Jordan in Spanish. “Can you explain to me something about the fighting?”

Robert Jordan took the cigarette and put it in the breast pocket of his blue mechanic jumper. He had recognized this comrade from his pictures. It was the British economist.

“Go muck yourself,” he said in English and then, in Spanish, to the armored car driver. “Down there. The bull ring. See?” And he had pulled the heavy side door to with a slam and locked it and they had started down that long slope in the car and the bullets had commenced to hit against the car, sounding like pebbles tossed against an iron boiler. Then when the machine gun opened on them, they were like sharp hammer tappings. They had pulled up behind the shelter of the bull ring with the last October posters still pasted up beside the ticket window and the ammunition boxes knocked open and the comrades with the rifles, the grenades on their belts and in their pockets, waiting there in the lee and Montero had said, “Good. Here is the tank. Now we can attack.”

Later that night when they had the last houses on the hill, he lay comfortable behind a brick wall with a hole knocked in the bricks for a loophole and looked across the beautiful level field of fire they had between them and the ridge the fascists had retired to and thought, with a comfort that was almost voluptuous, of the rise of the hill with the smashed villa that protected the left flank. He had lain in a pile of straw in his sweat-soaked clothes and wound a blanket around him while he dried. Lying there he thought of the economist and laughed, and then felt sorry he had been rude. But at the moment, when the man had handed him the cigarette, pushing it out almost like offering a tip for information, the combatant’s hatred for the noncombatant had been too much for him.

Now he remembered Gaylord’s and Karkov speaking of this same man. “So it was there you met him,” Karkov had said. “I did not get farther than the Puente de Toledo myself on that day. He was very far toward the front. That was the last day of his bravery I believe. He left Madrid the next day. Toledo was where he was the bravest, I believe. At Toledo he was enormous. He was one of the architects of our capture of the Alcazar. You should have seen him at Toledo. I believe it was largely through his efforts and his advice that our siege was successful. That was the silliest part of the war. It reached an ultimate in silliness but tell me, what is thought of him in America?”

“In America,” Robert Jordan said, “he is supposed to be very close to Moscow.”

“He is not,” said Karkov. “But he has a wonderful face and his face and his manners are very successful. Now with my face I could do nothing. What little I have accomplished was all done in spite of my face which does not either inspire people nor move them to love me and to trust me. But this man Mitchell has a face he makes his fortune with. It is the face of a conspirator. All who have read of conspirators in books trust him instantly. Also he has the true manner of the conspirator. Any one seeing him enter a room knows that he is instantly in the presence of a conspirator of the first mark. All of your rich compatriots who wish sentimentally to aid the Soviet Union as they believe or to insure themselves a little against any eventual success of the party see instantly in the face of this man, and in his manner that he can be none other than a trusted agent of the Comintern.”

“Has he no connections in Moscow?”

“None. Listen, Comrade Jordan. Do you know about the two kinds of fools?”

“Plain and damn?”

“No. The two kinds of fools we have in Russia,” Karkov grinned and began. “First there is the winter fool. The winter fool comes to the door of your house and he knocks loudly. You go to the door and you see him there and you have never seen him before. He is an impressive sight. He is a very big man and he has on high boots and a fur coat and a fur hat and he is all covered with snow. First he stamps his boots and snow falls from them. Then he takes off his fur coat and shakes it and more snow falls. Then he takes off his fur hat and knocks it against the door. More snow falls from his fur hat. Then he stamps his boots again and advances into the room. Then you look at him and you see he is a fool. That is the winter fool.

“Now in the summer you see a fool going down the street and he is waving his arms and jerking his head from side to side and everybody from two hundred yards away can tell he is a fool. That is a summer fool. This economist is a winter fool.”

“But why do people trust him here?” Robert Jordan asked.

“His face,” Karkov said. “His beautiful gueule de conspirateur. And his invaluable trick of just having come from somewhere else where he is very trusted and important. Of course,” he smiled, “he must travel very much to keep the trick working. You know the Spanish are very strange,” Karkov went on. “This government has had much money. Much gold. They will give nothing to their friends. You are a friend. All right. You will do it for nothing and should not be rewarded. But to people representing an important firm or a country which is not friendly but must be influenced — to such people they give much. It is very interesting when you follow it closely.”

“I do not like it. Also that money belongs to the Spanish workers.”

“You are not supposed to like things. Only to understand,” Karkov had told him. “I teach you a little each time I see you and eventually you will acquire an education. It would be very interesting for a professor to be educated.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll be able to be a professor when I get back. They will probably run me out as a Red.”

“Well, perhaps you will be able to come to the Soviet Union and continue your studies there. That might be the best thing for you to do.”

“But Spanish is my field.”

“There are many countries where Spanish is spoken,” Karkov had said. “They cannot all be as difficult to do anything with as Spain is. Then you must remember that you have not been a professor now for almost nine months. In nine months you may have learned a new trade. How much dialectics have you read?”

“I have read the Handbook of Marxism that Emil Burns edited. That is all.”

“If you have read it all that is quite a little. There are fifteen hundred pages and you could spend some time on each page. But there are some other things you should read.”

“There is no time to read now.”

“I know,” Karkov had said. “I mean eventually. There are many things to read which will make you understand some of these things that happen. But out of this will come a book which is very necessary; which will explain many things which it is necessary to know. Perhaps I will write it. I hope that it will be me who will write it.”

“I don’t know who could write it better.”

“Do not flatter,” Karkov had said. “I am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature. Just now, I am very busy on a study of Calvo Sotelo. He was a very good fascist; a true Spanish fascist. Franco and these other people are not. I have been studying all of Sotelo’s writing and speeches. He was very intelligent and it was very intelligent that he was killed.”

“I thought that you did not believe in political assassination.”

“It is practised very extensively,” Karkov said. “Very, very extensively.”

“But—”

“We do not believe in acts of terrorism by individuals,” Karkov had smiled. “Not of course by criminal terrorist and counterrevolutionary organizations. We detest with horror the duplicity and villainy of the murderous hyenas of Bukharinite wreckers and such dregs of humanity as Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and their henchmen. We hate and loathe these veritable fiends,” he smiled again. “But I still believe that political assassination can be said to be practised very extensively.”

“You mean—”

“I mean nothing. But certainly we execute and destroy such veritable fiends and dregs of humanity and the treacherous dogs of generals and the revolting spectacle of admirals unfaithful to their trust. These are destroyed. They are not assassinated. You see the difference?”

“I see,” Robert Jordan had said.

“And because I make jokes sometime: and you know how dangerous it is to make jokes even in joke? Good. Because I make jokes, do not think that the Spanish people will not live to regret that they have not shot certain generals that even now hold commands. I do not like the shootings, you understand.”

“I don’t mind them,” Robert Jordan said. “I do not like them but I do not mind them any more.”

“I know that,” Karkov had said. “I have been told that.”

“Is it important?” Robert Jordan said. “I was only trying to be truthful about it.”

“It is regretful,” Karkov had said. “But it is one of the things that makes people be treated as reliable who would ordinarily have to spend much more time before attaining that category.”

“Am I supposed to be reliable?”

“In your work you are supposed to be very reliable. I must talk to you sometime to see how you are in your mind. It is regrettable that we never speak seriously.”

“My mind is in suspension until we win the war,” Robert Jordan had said.

“Then perhaps you will not need it for a long time. But you should be careful to exercise it a little.”

“I read Mundo Obrero,” Robert Jordan had told him and Karkov had said, “All right. Good. I can take a joke too. But there are very intelligent things in Mundo Obrero. The only intelligent things written on this war.”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan had said. “I agree with you. But to get a full picture of what is happening you cannot read only the party organ.”

“No,” Karkov had said. “But you will not find any such picture if you read twenty papers and then, if you had it, I do not know what you would do with it. I have such a picture almost constantly and what I do is try to forget it.”

“You think it is that bad?”

“It is better now than it was. We are getting rid of some of the worst. But it is very rotten. We are building a huge army now and some of the elements, those of Modesto, of El Campesino, of Lister and of Durán, are reliable. They are more than reliable. They are magnificent. You will see that. Also we still have the Brigades although their role is changing. But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline. We are making a huge conscript army without the time to implant the discipline that a conscript army must have, to behave properly under fire. We call it a people’s army but it will not have the assets of a true people’s army and it will not have the iron discipline that a conscript army needs. You will see. It is a very dangerous procedure.”

“You are not very cheerful today.”

“No,” Karkov had said. “I have just come back from Valencia where I have seen many people. No one comes back very cheerful from Valencia. In Madrid you feel good and clean and with no possibility of anything but winning. Valencia is something else. The cowards who fled from Madrid still govern there. They have settled happily into the sloth and bureaucracy of governing. They have only contempt for those of Madrid. Their obsession now is the weakening of the commissariat for war. And Barcelona. You should see Barcelona.”

“How is it?”

“It is all still comic opera. First it was the paradise of the crackpots and the romantic revolutionists. Now it is the paradise of the fake soldier. The soldiers who like to wear uniforms, who like to strut and swagger and wear red-and-black scarves. Who like everything about war except to fight. Valencia makes you sick and Barcelona makes you laugh.”

“What about the P.O.U.M. putsch?”

“The P.O.U.M. was never serious. It was a heresy of crackpots and wild men and it was really just an infantilism. There were some honest misguided people. There was one fairly good brain and there was a little fascist money. Not much. The poor P.O.U.M. They were very silly people.”

“But were many killed in the putsch?”

“Not so many as were shot afterwards or will be shot. The P.O.U.M. It is like the name. Not serious. They should have called it the M.U.M.P.S. or the M.E.A.S.L.E.S. But no. The Measles is much more dangerous. It can affect both sight and hearing. But they made one plot you know to kill me, to kill Walter, to kill Modesto and to kill Prieto. You see how badly mixed up they were? We are not at all alike. Poor P.O.U.M. They never did kill anybody. Not at the front nor anywhere else. A few in Barcelona, yes.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes. I have sent a cable describing the wickedness of that infamous organization of Trotskyite murderers and their fascist machinations all beneath contempt but, between us, it is not very serious, the P.O.U.M. Nin was their only man. We had him but he escaped from our hands.”

“Where is he now?”

“In Paris. We say he is in Paris. He was a very pleasant fellow but with bad political aberrations.”

“But they were in communication with the fascists, weren’t they?”

“Who is not?”

“We are not.”

“Who knows? I hope we are not. You go often behind their lines,” he grinned. “But the brother of one of the secretaries of the Republican Embassy at Paris made a trip to St. Jean de Luz last week to meet people from Burgos.”

“I like it better at the front,” Robert Jordan had said. “The closer to the front the better the people.”

“How do you like it behind the fascist lines?”

“Very much. We have fine people there.”

“Well, you see they must have their fine people behind our lines the same way. We find them and shoot them and they find ours and shoot them. When you are in their country you must always think of how many people they must send over to us.”

“I have thought about them.”

“Well,” Karkov had said. “You have probably enough to think about for today, so drink that beer that is left in the pitcher and run along now because I have to go upstairs to see people. Upstairs people. Come again to see me soon.”

Yes, Robert Jordan thought. You learned a lot at Gaylord’s. Karkov had read the one and only book he had published. The book had not been a success. It was only two hundred pages long and he doubted if two thousand people had ever read it. He had put in it what he had discovered about Spain in ten years of travelling in it, on foot, in third-class carriages, by bus, on horse — and mule-back and in trucks. He knew the Basque country, Navarre, Aragon, Galicia, the two Castiles and Estremadura well. There had been such good books written by Borrow and Ford and the rest that he had been able to add very little. But Karkov said it was a good book.

“It is why I bother with you,” he said. “I think you write absolutely truly and that is very rare. So I would like you to know some things.”

All right. He would write a book when he got through with this. But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew. But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war were not so simple.

Chapter 19

“What do you do sitting there?” Maria asked him. She was standing close beside him and he turned his head and smiled at her.

“Nothing,” he said. “I have been thinking.”

“What of? The bridge?”

“No. The bridge is terminated. Of thee and of a hotel in Madrid where I know some Russians, and of a book I will write some time.”

“Are there many Russians in Madrid?”

“No. Very few.”

“But in the fascist periodicals it says there are hundreds of thousands.”

“Those are lies. There are very few.”

“Do you like the Russians? The one who was here was a Russian.”

“Did you like him?”

“Yes. I was sick then but I thought he was very beautiful and very brave.”

“What nonsense, beautiful,” Pilar said. “His nose was flat as my hand and he had cheekbones as wide as a sheep’s buttocks.”

“He was a good friend and comrade of mine,” Robert Jordan said to Maria. “I cared for him very much.”

“Sure,” Pilar said. “But you shot him.”

When she said this the card players looked up from the table and Pablo stared at Robert Jordan. Nobody said anything and then the gypsy, Rafael, asked, “Is it true, Roberto?”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. He wished Pilar had not brought this up and he wished he had not told it at El Sordo’s. “At his request. He was badly wounded.”

“Qué cosa mas rara,” the gypsy said. “All the time he was with us he talked of such a possibility. I don’t know how many times I have promised him to perform such an act. What a rare thing,” he said again and shook his head.

“He was a very rare man,” Primitivo said. “Very singular.”

“Look,” Andrés, one of the brothers, said. “You who are Professor and all. Do you believe in the possibility of a man seeing ahead what is to happen to him?”

“I believe he cannot see it,” Robert Jordan said. Pablo was staring at him curiously and Pilar was watching him with no expression on her face. “In the case of this Russian comrade he was very nervous from being too much time at the front. He had fought at Irun which, you know, was bad. Very bad. He had fought later in the north. And since the first groups who did this work behind the lines were formed he had worked here, in Estremadura and in AndalucIa. I think he was very tired and nervous and he imagined ugly things.”

“He would undoubtedly have seen many evil things,” Fernando said.

“Like all the world,” Andrés said. “But listen to me, Inglés. Do you think there is such a thing as a man knowing in advance what will befall him?”

“No,” Robert Jordan said. “That is ignorance and superstition.”

“Go on,” Pilar said. “Let us hear the viewpoint of the professor.” She spoke as though she were talking to a precocious child.

“I believe that fear produces evil visions,” Robert Jordan said. “Seeing bad signs—”

“Such as the airplanes today,” Primitivo said.

“Such as thy arrival,” Pablo said softly and Robert Jordan looked across the table at him, saw it was not a provocation but only an expressed thought, then went on. “Seeing bad signs, one, with fear, imagines an end for himself and one thinks that imagining comes by divination,” Robert Jordan concluded. “I believe there is nothing more to it than that. I do not believe in ogres, nor soothsayers, nor in the supernatural things.”

“But this one with the rare name saw his fate clearly,” the gypsy said. “And that was how it happened.”

“He did not see it,” Robert Jordan said. “He had a fear of such a possibility and it became an obsession. No one can tell me that he saw anything.”

“Not I?” Pilar asked him and picked some dust up from the fire and blew it off the palm of her hand. “I cannot tell thee either?”

“No. With all wizardry, gypsy and all, thou canst not tell me either.”

“Because thou art a miracle of deafness,” Pilar said, her big face harsh and broad in the candlelight. “It is not that thou art stupid. Thou art simply deaf. One who is deaf cannot hear music. Neither can he hear the radio. So he might say, never having heard them, that such things do not exist. Qué va, Inglés. I saw the death of that one with the rare name in his face as though it were burned there with a branding iron.”

“You did not,” Robert Jordan insisted. “You saw fear and apprehension. The fear was made by what he had been through. The apprehension was for the possibility of evil he imagined.”

“Qué va,” Pilar said. “I saw death there as plainly as though it were sitting on his shoulder. And what is more he smelt of death.”

“He smelt of death,” Robert Jordan jeered. “Of fear maybe. There is a smell to fear.”

“De la muerte,” Pilar said. “Listen. When Blanquet, who was the greatest peon de brega who ever lived, worked under the orders of Granero he told me that on the day of Manolo Granero’s death, when they stopped in the chapel on the way to the ring, the odor of death was so strong on Manolo that it almost made Blanquet sick. And he had been with Manolo when he had bathed and dressed at the hotel before setting out for the ring. The odor was not present in the motorcar when they had sat packed tight together riding to the bull ring. Nor was it distinguishable to any one else but Juan Luis de la Rosa in the chapel. Neither Marcial nor Chicuelo smelled it neither then nor when the four of them lined up for the paseo. But Juan Luis was dead white, Blanquet told me, and he, Blanquet, spoke to him saying,’Thou also?’

“‘So that I cannot breathe,’Juan Luis said to him.’And from thy matador.’

“‘Pues nada,’Blanquet said.’There is nothing to do. Let us hope we are mistaken.’

“‘And the others?’Juan Luis asked Blanquet.

“‘Nada,’Blanquet said.’Nothing. But this one stinks worse than José at Talavera.’

“And it was on that afternoon that the bull Pocapena of the ranch of Veragua destroyed Manolo Granero against the planks of the barrier in front of tendido two in the Plaza de Toros of Madrid. I was there with Finito and I saw it. The horn entirely destroyed the cranium, the head of Manolo being wedged under the estribo at the base of the barrera where the bull had tossed him.”

“But did you smell anything?” Fernando asked.

“Nay,” Pilar said. “I was too far away. We were in the seventh row of the tendido three. It was thus, being at an angle, that I could see all that happened. But that same night Blanquet who had been under the orders of Joselito when he too was killed told Finito about it at Fornos, and Finito asked Juan Luis de la Rosa and he would say nothing. But he nodded his head that it was true. I was present when this happened. So, Inglés, it may be that thou art deaf to some things as Chicuelo and Marcial Lalanda and all of their banderilleros and picadors and all of the gente of Juan Luis and Manolo Granero were deaf to this thing on this day. But Juan Luis and Blanquet were not deaf. Nor am I deaf to such things.”

“Why do you say deaf when it is a thing of the nose?” Fernando asked.

“Leche!” Pilar said. “Thou shouldst be the professor in place of the Inglés. But I could tell thee of other things, Inglés, and do not doubt what thou simply cannot see nor cannot hear. Thou canst not hear what a dog hears. Nor canst thou smell what a dog smells. But already thou hast experienced a little of what can happen to man.”

Maria put her hand on Robert Jordan’s shoulder and let it rest there and he thought suddenly, let us finish all this nonsense and take advantage of what time we have. But it is too early yet. We have to kill this part of the evening. So he said to Pablo, “Thou, believest thou in this wizardry?”

“I do not know,” Pablo said. “I am more of thy opinion. No supernatural thing has ever happened to me. But feai yes certainly. Plenty. But I believe that the Pilar can divine events from the hand. If she does not lie perhaps it is true that she has smelt such a thing.”

“Qué va that I should lie,” Pilar said. “This is not a thing of my invention. This man Blanquet was a man of extreme seriousness and furthermore very devout. He was no gypsy but a bourgeois from Valencia. Hast thou never seen him?”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “I have seen him many times. He was small, gray-faced and no one handled a cape better. He was quick on his feet as a rabbit.”

“Exactly,” Pilar said. “He had a gray face from heart trouble and gypsies said that he carried death with him but that he could flick it away with a cape as you might dust a table. Yet he, who was no gypsy, smelled death on Joselito when he fought at Talavera. Although I do not see how he could smell it above the smell of manzanilla. Blanquet spoke of this afterwards with much diffidence but those to whom he spoke said that it was a fantasy and that what he had smelled was the life that José led at that time coming out in sweat from his armpits. But then, later, came this of Manolo Granero in which Juan Luis de la Rosa also participated. Clearly Juan Luis was a man of very little honor, but of much sensitiveness in his work and he was also a great layer of women. But Blanquet was serious and very quiet and completely incapable of telling an untruth. And I tell you that I smelled death on your colleague who was here.”

“I do not believe it,” Robert Jordan said. “Also you said that Blanquet smelled this just before the paseo. Just before the bullfight started. Now this was a successful action here of you and Kashkin and the train. He was not killed in that. How could you smell it then?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Pilar explained. “In the last season of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias he smelled so strongly of death that many refused to sit with him in the café. All gypsies knew of this.”

“After the death such things are invented,” Robert Jordan argued. “Every one knew that Sanchez Mejias was on the road to a cornada because he had been too long out of training, because his style was heavy and dangerous, and because his strength and the agility in his legs were gone and his reflexes no longer as they had been.”

“Certainly,” Pilar told him. “All of that is true. But all the gypsies knew also that he smelled of death and when he would come into the Villa Rosa you would see such people as Ricardo and Felipe Gonzalez leaving by the small door behind the bar.”

“They probably owed him money,” Robert Jordan said.

“It is possible,” Pilar said. “Very possible. But they also smelled the thing and all knew of it.”

“What she says is true, Inglés,” the gypsy, Rafael, said. “It is a well-known thing among us.”

“I believe nothing of it,” Robert Jordan said.

“Listen, Inglés,” Anselmo began. “I am against all such wizardry. But this Pilar has the fame of being very advanced in such things.”

“But what does it smell like?” Fernando asked. “What odor has it? If there be an odor it must be a definite odor.”

“You want to know, Fernandito?” Pilar smiled at him. “You think that you could smell it?”

“If it actually exists why should I not smell it as well as another?”

“Why not?” Pilar was making fun of him, her big hands folded across her knees. “Hast thou ever been aboard a ship, Fernando?”

“Nay. And I would not wish to.”

“Then thou might not recognize it. For part of it is the smell that comes when, on a ship, there is a storm and the portholes are closed up. Put your nose against the brass handle of a screwed-tight porthole on a rolling ship that is swaying under you so that you are faint and hollow in the stomach and you have a part of that smell.”

“It would be impossible for me to recognize because I will go on no ship,” Fernando said.

“I have been on ships several times,” Pilar said. “Both to go to Mexico and to Venezuela.”

“What’s the rest of it?” Robert Jordan asked. Pilar looked at him mockingly, remembering now, proudly, her voyages.

“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around hei with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”

“That one has taken my appetite,” the gypsy said. “That of the sprouts was too much.”

“Do you want to hear some more?” Pilar asked Robert Jordan.

“Surely,” he said. “If it is necessary for one to learn let us learn.”

“That of the sprouts in the face of the old women sickens me,” the gypsy said. “Why should that occur in old women, Pilar? With us it is not so.”

“Nay,” Pilar mocked at him. “With us the old woman, who was so slender in her youth, except of course for the perpetual bulge that is the mark of her husband’s favor, that every gypsy pushes always before her—”

“Do not speak thus,” Rafael said. “It is ignoble.”

“So thou art hurt,” Pilar said. “Hast thou ever seen a Gitana who was not about to have, or just to have had, a child?”

“Thou.”

“Leave it,” Pilar said. “There is no one who cannot be hurt. What I was saying is that age brings its own form of ugliness to all. There is no need to detail it. But if the Inglés must learn that odor that he covets to recognize he must go to the matadero early in the morning.”

“I will go,” Robert Jordan said. “But I will get the odor as they pass without kissing one. I fear the sprouts, too, as Rafael does.”

“Kiss one,” Pilar said. “Kiss one, Inglés, for thy knowledge’s sake and then, with this in thy nostrils, walk back up into the city and when thou seest a refuse pail with dead flowers in it plunge thy nose deep into it and inhale so that scent mixes with those thou hast already in thy nasal passages.”

“Now have I done it,” Robert Jordan said. “What flowers were they?”

“Chrysanthemums.”

“Continue,” Robert Jordan said. “I smell them.”

“Then,” Pilar went on, “it is important that the day be in autumn with rain, or at least some fog, or early winter even and now thou shouldst continue to walk through the city and down the Calle de Salud smelling what thou wilt smell where they are sweeping out the casas de putas and emptying the siop jars into the drains and, with this odor of love’s labor lost mixed sweetly with soapy water and cigarette butts only faintly reaching thy nostrils, thou shouldst go on to the JardIn Botánico where at night those girls who can no longer work in the houses do their work against the iron gates of the park and the iron picketed fences and upon the sidewalks. It is there in the shadow of the trees against the iron railings that they will perform all that a man wishes; from the simplest requests at a remuneration of ten centimos up to a peseta for that great act that we are born to and there, on a dead flower bed that has not yet been plucked out and replanted, and so serves to soften the earth that is so much softer than the sidewalk, thou wilt find an abandoned gunny sack with the odor of the wet earth, the dead flowers, and the doings of that night. In this sack will be contained the essence of it all, both the dead earth and the dead stalks of the flowers and their rotted blooms and the smell that is both the death and birth of man. Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe through it.”

“No.”

“Yes,” Pilar said. “Thou wilt wrap this sack around thy head and try to breathe and then, if thou hast not lost any of the previous odors, when thou inhalest deeply, thou wilt smell the odor of deathto-come as we know it.”

“All right,” Robert Jordan said. “And you say Kashkin smelt like that when he was here?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Robert Jordan gravely. “If that is true it is a good thing that I shot him.”

“Olé,” the gypsy said. The others laughed.

“Very good,” Primitivo approved. “That should hold her for a while.”

“But Pilar,” Fernando said. “Surely you could not expect one of Don Roberto’s education to do such vile things.”

“No,” Pilar agreed.

“All of that is of the utmost repugnance.”

“Yes,” Pilar agreed.

“You would not expect him actually to perform those degrading acts?”

“No,” Pilar said. “Go to bed, will you?”

“But, Pilar—” Fernando went on.

“Shut up, will you?” Pilar said to him suddenly and viciously. “Do not make a fool of thyself and I will try not to make a fool of myself talking with people who cannot understand what one speaks of.”

“I confess I do not understand,” Fernando began.

“Don’t confess and don’t try to understand,” Pilar said. “Is it still snowing outside?”

Robert Jordan went to the mouth of the cave, lifted the blanket and looked out. It was clear and cold in the night outside and no snow was falling. He looked through the tree trunks where the whiteness lay and up through the trees to where the sky was now clear. The air came into his lungs sharp and cold as he breathed.

El Sordo will leave plenty of tracks if he has stolen horses tonight, he thought.

He dropped the blanket and came back into the smoky cave. “It is clear,” he said. “The storm is over.”

Chapter 20

Now in the night he lay and waited for the girl to come to him. There was no wind now and the pines were still in the night. The trunks of the pines projected from the snow that covered all the ground, and he lay in the robe feeling the suppleness of the bed under him that he had made, his legs stretched long against the warmth of the robe, the air sharp and cold on his head and in his nostrils as he breathed. Under his head, as he lay on his side, was the bulge of the trousers and the coat that he had wrapped around his shoes to make a pillow and against his side was the cold metal of the big automatic pistol he had taken from the holster when he undressed and fastened by its lanyard to his right wrist. He pushed the pistol away and settled deeper into the robe as he watched, across the snow, the dark break in the rocks that was the entrance to the cave. The sky was clear and there was enough light reflected from the snow to see the trunks of the trees and the bulk of the rocks where the cave was.

Earlier in the evening he had taken the ax and gone outside of the cave and walked through the new snow to the edge of the clearing and cut down a small spruce tree. In the dark he had dragged it, butt first, to the lee of the rock wall. There close to the rock, he had held the tree upright, holding the trunk firm with one hand, and, holding the ax-haft close to the head had lopped off all the boughs until he had a pile of them. Then, leaving the pile of boughs, he had laid the bare pole of the trunk down in the snow and gone into the cave to get a slab of wood he had seen against the wall. With this slab he scraped the ground clear of the snow along the rock wall and then picked up his boughs and shaking them clean of snow laid them in rows, like overlapping plumes, until he had a bed. He put the pole across the foot of the bough bed to hold the branches in place and pegged it firm with two pointed pieces of wood he split from the edge of the slab.

Then he carried the slab and the ax back into the cave, ducking under the blanket as he came in, and leaned them both against the wall.

“What do you do outside?” Pilar had asked.

“I made a bed.”

“Don’t cut pieces from my new shelf for thy bed.”

“I am sorry.”

“It has no importance,” she said. “There are more slabs at the sawmill. What sort of bed hast thou made?”

“As in my country.”

“Then sleep well on it,” she had said and Robert Jordan had opened one of the packs and pulled the robe out and replaced those things wrapped in it back in the pack and carried the robe out, ducking under the blanket again, and spread it over the boughs so that the closed end of the robe was against the pole that was pegged cross-wise at the foot of the bed. The open head of the robe was protected by the rock wall of the cliff. Then he went back into the cave for his packs but Pilar said, “They can sleep with me as last night.”

“Will you not have sentries?” he asked. “The night is clear and the storm is over.”

“Fernando goes,” Pilar said.

Maria was in the back of the cave and Robert Jordan could not see her.

“Good night to every one,” he had said. “I am going to sleep.”

Of the others, who were laying out blankets and bedrolls on the floor in front of the cooking fire, pushing back the slab tables and the rawhide-covered stools to make sleeping space, Primitivo and Andrés looked up and said, “Buenas noches.”

Anselmo was already asleep in a corner, rolled in his blanket and his cape, not even his nose showing. Pablo was asleep in his chair.

“Do you want a sheep hide for thy bed?” Pilar asked Robert Jordan softly.

“Nay,” he said. “Thank thee. I do not need it.”

“Sleep well,” she said. “I will respond for thy material.”

Fernando had gone out with him and stood a moment where Robert Jordan had spread the sleeping robe.

“You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, Don Roberto,” he said standing there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.

“I am accustomed to it. Good night.”

“Since you are accustomed to it.”

“When are you relieved?”

“At four.”

“There is much cold between now and then.”

“I am accustomed to it,” Fernando said.

“Since, then, you are accustomed to it—” Robert Jordan said politely.

“Yes,” Fernando agreed. “Now I must get up there. Good night, Don Roberto.”

“Good night, Fernando.”

Then he had made a pillow of the things he took off and gotten into the robe and then lain and waited, feeling the spring of the boughs under the flannelly, feathered lightness of the robe warmth, watching the mouth of the cave across the snow; feeling his heart beat as he waited.

The night was clear and his head felt as clear and cold as the air. He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. Pilar, he thought. Pilar and the smell of death. This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of the cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? You must be hungry, he thought, and he lay on his side and watched the entrance of the cave in the light that the stars reflected from the snow.

Some one came out from under the blanket and he could see whoever it was standing by the break in the rock that made the entrance. Then he heard a slithering sound in the snow and then whoever it was ducked down and went back in.

I suppose she won’t come until they are all asleep, he thought. It is a waste of time. The night is half gone. Oh, Maria. Come now quickly, Maria, for there is little time. He heard the soft sound of snow falling from a branch onto the snow on the ground. A little wind was rising. He felt it on his face. Suddenly he felt a panic that she might not come. The wind rising now reminded him how soon it would be morning. More snow fell from the branches as he heard the wind now moving the pine tops.

Come now, Maria. Please come here now quickly, he thought. Oh, come here now. Do not wait. There is no importance any more to your waiting until they are asleep.

Then he saw her coming out from under the blanket that covered the cave mouth. She stood there a moment and he knew it was she but he could not see what she was doing. He whistled a low whistle and she was still at the cave mouth doing something in the darkness of the rock shadow. Then she came running, carrying something in her hands and he saw her running long-legged through the snow. Then she was kneeling by the robe, her head pushed hard against him, slapping snow from her feet. She kissed him and handed him her bundle.

“Put it with thy pillow,” she said. “I took these off there to save time.”

“You came barefoot through the snow?”

“Yes,” she said, “and wearing only my wedding shirt.”

He held her close and tight in his arms and she rubbed her head against his chin.

“Avoid the feet,” she said. “They are very cold, Roberto.”

“Put them here and warm them.”

“Nay,” she said. “They will warm quickly. But say quickly now that you love me.”

“I love thee.”

“Good. Good. Good.”

“I love thee, little rabbit.”

“Do you love my wedding shirt?”

“It is the same one as always.”

“Yes. As last night. It is my wedding shirt.”

“Put thy feet here.”

“Nay, that would be abusive. They will warm of themselves. They are warm to me. It is only that the snow has made them cold toward thee. Say it again.”

“I love thee, my little rabbit.”

“I love thee, too, and I am thy wife.”

“Were they asleep?”

“No,” she said. “But I could support it no longer. And what importance has it?”

“None,” he said, and felt her against him, slim and long and warmly lovely. “No other thing has importance.”

“Put thy hand on my head,” she said, “and then let me see if I can kiss thee.

“Was it well?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Take off thy wedding shirt.”

“You think I should?”

“Yes, if thou wilt not be cold.”

“Qué va, cold. I am on fire.”

“I, too. But afterwards thou wilt not be cold?”

“No. Afterwards we will be as one animal of the forest and be so close that neither one can tell that one of us is one and not the other. Can you not feel my heart be your heart?”

“Yes. There is no difference.”

“Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And I love thee, oh, I love thee so. Are you not truly one? Canst thou not feel it?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is true.”

“And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”

“Nor any other legs, nor feet, nor of the body.”

“But we are different,” she said. “I would have us exactly the same.”

“You do not mean that.”

“Yes I do. I do. That is a thing I had to tell thee.”

“You do not mean that.”

“Perhaps I do not,” she said speaking softly with her lips against his shoulder. “But I wished to say it. Since we are different I am glad that thou art Roberto and I Maria. But if thou should ever wish to change I would be glad to change. I would be thee because I love thee so.”

“I do not wish to change. It is better to be one and each one to be the one he is.”

“But we will be one now and there will never be a separate one.” Then she said, “I will be thee when thou are not there. Oh, I love thee so and I must care well for thee.”

“Maria.”

“Yes.”

“Maria.”

“Yes.”

“Maria.”

“Oh, yes. Please.”

“Art thou not cold?”

“Oh, no. Pull the robe over thy shoulders.”

“Maria.”

“I cannot speak.”

“Oh, Maria. Maria. Maria.”

Then afterwards, close, with the night cold outside, in the long warmth of the robe, her head touching his cheek, she lay quiet and happy against him and then said softly, “And thou?”

“Como tu,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “But it was not as this afternoon.”

“No.”

“But I loved it more. One does not need to die.”

“Ojala no,” he said. “I hope not.”

“I did not mean that.”

“I know. I know what thou meanest. We mean the same.”

“Then why did you say that instead of what I meant?”

“With a man there is a difference.”

“Then I am glad that we are different.”

“And so am I,” he said. “But I understood about the dying. I only spoke thus, as a man, from habit. I feel the same as thee.”

“However thou art and however thou speakest is how I would have thee be.”

“And I love thee and I love thy name, Maria.”

“It is a common name.”

“No,” he said. “It is not common.”

“Now should we sleep?” she said. “I could sleep easily.”

“Let us sleep,” he said, and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him, and he said, “Sleep well, little long rabbit.”

She said, “I am asleep already.”

“I am going to sleep,” he said. “Sleep well, beloved.” Then he was asleep and happy as he slept.

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true. But she was sleeping well and soundly and she did not wake. So he rolled away onto his side and pulled the robe over her head and kissed her once on her neck under the robe and then pulled the pistol lanyard up and put the pistol by his side where he could reach it handily and then he lay there in the night thinking.

Chapter 21

A warm wind came with daylight and he could hear the snow melting in the trees and the heavy sound of its falling. It was a late spring morning. He knew with the first breath he drew that the snow had been only a freak storm in the mountains and it would be gone by noon. Then he heard a horse coming, the hoofs balled with the wet snow thumping dully as the horseman trotted. He heard the noise of a carbine scabbard slapping loosely and the creak of leather.

“Maria,” he said, and shook the girl’s shoulder to waken her. “Keep thyself under the robe,” and he buttoned his shirt with one hand and held the automatic pistol in the othet loosening the safety catch with his thumb. He saw the girl’s cropped head disappear with a jerk under the robe and then he saw the horseman coming through the trees. He crouched now in the robe and holding the pistol in both hands aimed it at the man as he rode toward him. He had never seen this man before.

The horseman was almost opposite him now. He was riding a big gray gelding and he wore a khaki beret, a blanket cape like a poncho, and heavy black boots. From the scabbard on the right of his saddle projected the stock and the long oblong clip of a short automatic rifle. He had a young, hard face and at this moment he saw Robert Jordan.

He reached his hand down toward the scabbard and as he swung low, turning and jerking at the scabbard, Robert Jordan saw the scarlet of the formalized device he wore on the left breast of his khaki blanket cape.

Aiming at the center of his chest, a little lower than the device, Robert Jordan fired.

The pistol roared in the snowy woods.

The horse plunged as though he had been spurred and the young man, still tugging at the scabbard, slid over toward the ground, his right foot caught in the stirrup. The horse broke off through the trees dragging him, bumping, face downward, and Robert Jordan stood up holding the pistol now in one hand.

The big gray horse was galloping through the pines. There was a broad swath in the snow where the man dragged with a scarlet streak along one side of it. People were coming out of the mouth of the cave. Robert Jordan reached down and unrolled his trousers from the pillow and began to put them on.

“Get thee dressed,” he said to Maria.

Overhead he heard the noise of a plane flying very high. Through the trees he saw where the gray horse had stopped and was standing, his rider still hanging face down from the stirrup.

“Go catch that horse,” he called to Primitivo who had started over toward him. Then, “Who was on guard at the top?”

“Rafael,” Pilar said from the cave. She stood there, her hair still down her back in two braids.

“There’s cavalry out,” Robert Jordan said. “Get your damned gun up there.”

He heard Pilar call, “Agustín,” into the cave. Then she went into the cave and then two men came running out, one with the automatic rifle with its tripod swung on his shoulder; the other with a sackful of the pans.

“Get up there with them,” Robert Jordan said to Anselmo. “You lie beside the gun and hold the legs still,” he said.

The three of them went up the trail through the woods at a run.

The sun had not yet come up over the tops of the mountains and Robert Jordan stood straight buttoning his trousers and tightening his belt, the big pistol hanging from the lanyard on his wrist. He put the pistol in its holster on his belt and slipped the knot down on the lanyard and passed the ioop over his head.

Somebody will choke you with that sometime, he thought. Well, this has done it. He took the pistol out of the holster, removed the clip, inserted one of the cartridges from the row alongside of the holster and shoved the clip back into the butt of the pistol.

He looked through the trees to where Primitivo, holding the reins of the horse, was twisting the rider’s foot out of the stirrup. The body lay face down in the snow and as he watched Primitivo was going through the pockets.

“Come on,” he called. “Bring the horse.”

As he knelt to put on his rope-soled shoes, Robert Jordan could feel Maria against his knees, dressing herself under the robe. She had no place in his life now.

That cavalryman did not expect anything, he was thinking. He was not following horse tracks and he was not even properly alert, let alone alarmed. He was not even following the tracks up to the post. He must have been one of a patrol scattered out in these hills. But when the patrol misses him they will follow his tracks here. Unless the snow melts first, he thought. Unless something happens to the patrol.

“You better get down below,” he said to Pablo.

They were all out of the cave now, standing there with the carbines and with grenades on their belts. Pilar held a leather bag of grenades toward Robert Jordan and he took three and put them in his pocket. He ducked into the cave, found his two packs, opened the one with the submachine gun in it and took out the barrel and stock, slipped the stock onto the forward assembly and put one clip into the gun and three in his pockets. He locked the pack and started for the door. I’ve got two pockets full of hardware, he thought. I hope the seams hold. He came out of the cave and said to Pablo, “I’m going up above. Can Agustín shoot that gun?”

“Yes,” Pablo said. He was watching Primitivo leading up the horse.

“Mira qué caballo,” he said. “Look, what a horse.”

The big gray was sweating and shivering a little and Robert Jordan patted him on the withers.

“I will put him with the others,” Pablo said.

“No,” Robert Jordan said. “He has made tracks into here. He must make them out.”

“True,” agreed Pablo. “I will ride him out and will hide him and bring him in when the snow is melted. Thou hast much head today, Inglés.”

“Send some one below,” Robert Jordan said. “We’ve got to get up there.”

“It is not necessary,” Pablo said. “Horsemen cannot come that way. But we can get out, by there and by two other places. It is better not to make tracks if there are planes coming. Give me the bota with wine, Pilar.”

“To go off and get drunk,” Pilar said. “Here, take these instead.” He reached over and put two of the grenades in his pockets.

“Qué va, to get drunk,” Pablo said. “There is gravity in the situation. But give me the bota. I do not like to do all this on water.”

He reached his arms up, took the reins and swung up into the saddle. He grinned and patted the nervous horse. Robert Jordan saw him rub his leg along the horse’s flank affectionately.

“Qué caballo más bonito,” he said and patted the big gray again. “Qué caballo más hermoso. Come on. The faster this gets out of here the better.”

He reached down and pulled the light automatic rifle with its ventilated barrel, really a submachine gun built to take the 9 mm. pistol cartridge, from the scabbard, and looked at it. “Look how they are armed,” he said. “Look at modern cavalry.”

“There’s modern cavalry over there on his face,” Robert Jordan said. “Vamonos.”

“Do you, Andrés, saddle and hold the horses in readiness. If you hear firing bring them up to the woods behind the gap. Come with thy arms and leave the women to hold the horses. Fernando, see that my sacks are brought also. Above all, that my sacks are brought carefully. Thou to look after my sacks, too,” he said to Pilar. “Thou to verify that they come with the horses. Vamonos,” he said. “Let us go.”

“The Maria and I will prepare all for leaving,” Pilar said. Then to Robert Jordan, “Look at him,” nodding at Pablo on the gray horse, sitting him in the heavy-thighed herdsman manner, the horse’s nostrils widening as Pablo replaced the clip in the automatic rifle. “See what a horse has done for him.”

“That I should have two horses,” Robert Jordan said fervently.

“Danger is thy horse.”

“Then give me a mule,” Robert Jordan grinned.

“Strip me that,” he said to Pilar and jerked his head toward where the man lay face down in the snow. “And bring everything, all the letters and papers, and put them in the outside pocket of my sack. Everything, understand?”

“Yes.”

“Vamonos,” he said.

Pablo rode ahead and the two men followed in a single file in order not to track up the snow. Robert Jordan carried the submachine gun muzzle down, carrying it by its forward hand grip. I wish it took the same ammunition that saddle gun takes, he thought. But it doesn’t. This is a German gun. This was old Kashkin’s gun.

The sun was coming over the mountains now. A warm wind was blowing and the snow was melting. It was a lovely late spring morning.

Robert Jordan looked back and saw Maria now standing with Pilar. Then she came running up the trail. He dropped behind Primitivo to speak to her.

“Thou,” she said. “Can I go with thee?”

“No. Help Pilar.”

She was walking behind him and put her hand on his arm.

“I’m coming.”

“Nay.”

She kept on walking close behind him.

“I could hold the legs of the gun in the way thou told Anselmo.”

“Thou wilt hold no legs. Neither of guns nor of nothing.”

Walking beside him she reached forward and put her hand in his pocket.

“No,” he said. “But take good care of thy wedding shirt.”

“Kiss me,” she said, “if thou goest.”

“Thou art shameless,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “Totally.”

“Get thee back now. There is much work to do. We may fight here if they follow these horse tracks.”

“Thou,” she said. “Didst thee see what he wore on his chest?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“It was the Sacred Heart.”

“Yes. All the people of Navarre wear it.”

“And thou shot for that?”

“No. Below it. Get thee back now.”

“Thou,” she said. “I saw all.”

“Thou saw nothing. One man. One man from a horse. Vete. Get thee back.”

“Say that you love me.”

“No. Not now.”

“Not love me now?”

“Déjamos. Get thee back. One does not do that and love all at the same moment.”

“I want to go to hold the legs of the gun and while it speaks love thee all in the same moment.”

“Thou art crazy. Get thee back now.”

“I am crazy,” she said. “I love thee.”

“Then get thee back.”

“Good. I go. And if thou dost not love me, I love thee enough for both.”

He looked at her and smiled through his thinking.

“When you hear firing,” he said, “come with the horses. Aid the Pilar with my sacks. It is possible there will be nothing. I hope so.”

“I go,” she said. “Look what a horse Pablo rides.”

The big gray was moving ahead up the trail.

“Yes. But go.”

“I go.”

Her fist, clenched tight in his pocket, beat hard against his thigh. He looked at her and saw there were tears in her eyes. She pulled her fist out of his pocket and put both arms tight around his neck and kissed him.

“I go,” she said. “Me voy. I go.”

He looked back and saw her standing there, the first morning sunlight on her brown face and the cropped, tawny, burned-gold hair. She lifted her fist at him and turned and walked back down the trail, her head down.

Primitivo turned around and looked after her.

“If she did not have her hair cut so short she would be a pretty girl,” he said.

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. He was thinking of something else.

“How is she in the bed?” Primitivo asked.

“What?”

“In the bed.”

“Watch thy mouth.”

“One should not be offended when—”

“Leave it,” Robert Jordan said. He was looking at the position.

Chapter 22

“Cut me pine branches,” Robert Jordan said to Primitivo, “and bring them quickly.”

“I do not like the gun there,” he said to Agustín.

“Why?”

“Place it over there,” Robert Jordan pointed, “and later I will tell thee.”

“Here, thus. Let me help thee. Here,” he said, then squatted down.

He looked out across the narrow oblong, noting the height of the rocks on either side.

“It must be farther,” he said, “farther out. Good. Here. That will do until it can be done properly. There. Put the stones there. Here is one. Put another there at the side. Leave room for the muzzle to swing. The stone must be farther to this side. Anselmo. Get thee down to the cave and bring me an ax. Quickly.”

“Have you never had a proper emplacement for the gun?” he said to Agustín.

“We always placed it here.”

“Kashkin never said to put it there?”

“No. The gun was brought after he left.”

“Did no one bring it who knew how to use it?”

“No. It was brought by porters.”

“What a way to do things,” Robert Jordan said. “It was just given to you without instruction?”

“Yes, as a gift might be given. One for us and one for El Sordo. Four men brought them. Anselmo guided them.”

“It was a wonder they did not lose them with four men to cross the lines.”

“I thought so, too,” Agustín said. “I thought those who sent them meant for them to be lost. But Anselmo brought them well.”

“You know how to handle it?”

“Yes. I have experimented. I know. Pablo knows. Primitivo knows. So does Fernando. We have made a study of taking it apart and putting it together on the table in the cave. Once we had it apart and could not get it together for two days. Since then we have not had it apart.”

“Does it shoot now?”

“Yes. But we do not let the gypsy nor others frig with it.”

“You see? From there it was useless,” he said. “Look. Those rocks which should protect your flanks give cover to those who will attack you. With such a gun you must seek a flatness over which to fire. Also you must take them sideways. See? Look now. All that is dominated.”

“I see,” said Agustín. “But we have never fought in defense except when our town was taken. At the train there were soldiers with the máquina.”

“Then we will all learn together,” Robert Jordan said. “There are a few things to observe. Where is the gypsy who should be here?”

“I do not know.”

“Where is it possible for him to be?”

“I do not know.”

Pablo had ridden out through the pass and turned once and ridden in a circle across the level space at the top that was the field of fire for the automatic rifle. Now Robert Jordan watched him riding down the slope alongside the tracks the horse had left when he was ridden in. He disappeared in the trees turning to the left.

I hope he doesn’t run right into cavalry, Robert Jordan thought. I’m afraid we’d have him right here in our laps.

Primitivo brought the pine branches and Robert Jordan stuck them through the snow into the unfrozen earth, arching them over the gun from either side.

“Bring more,” he said. “There must be cover for the two men who serve it. This is not good but it will serve until the ax comes. Listen,” he said, “if you hear a plane lie flat wherever thou art in the shadows of the rocks. I am here with the gun.”

Now with the sun up and the warm wind blowing it was pleasant on the side of the rocks where the sun shone. Four horses, Robert Jordan thought. The two women and me, Anselmo, Primitivo, Fernando, Agustín, what the hell is the name of the other brother? That’s eight. Not counting the gypsy. Makes nine. Plus Pablo gone with one horse makes ten. Andrés is his name. The other brother. Plus the other, Eladio. Makes ten. That’s not one-half a horse apiece. Three men can hold this and four can get away. Five with Pablo. That’s two left over. Three with Eladio. Where the hell is he?

God knows what will happen to Sordo today if they picked up the trail of those horses in the snow. That was tough; the snow stopping that way. But it melting today will even things up. But not for Sordo. I’m afraid it’s too late to even it up for Sordo.

If we can last through today and not have to fight we can swing the whole show tomorrow with what we have. I know we can. Not well, maybe. Not as it should be, to be foolproof, not as we would have done; but using everybody we can swing it. If we don’t have to fight today. God help us if we have to fight today.

I don’t know any place better to lay up in the meantime than this. If we move now we only leave tracks. This is as good a place as any and if the worst gets to be the worst there are three ways out of this place. There is the dark then to come and from wherever we are in these hills, I can reach and do the bridge at daylight. I don’t know why I worried about it before. It seems easy enough now. I hope they get the planes up on time for once. I certainly hope that. Tomorrow is going to be a day with dust on the road.

Well, today will be very interesting or very dull. Thank God we’ve got that cavalry mount out and away from here. I don’t think even if they ride right up here they will go in the way those tracks are now. They’ll think he stopped and circled and they’ll pick up Pablo’s tracks. I wonder where the old swine will go. He’ll probably leave tracks like an old bull elk spooking out of the country and work way up and then when the snow melts circle back below. That horse certainly did things for him. Of course he may have just mucked off with him too. Well, he should be able to take care of himself. He’s been doing this a long time. I wouldn’t trust him farther than you can throw Mount Everest, though.

I suppose it’s smarter to use these rocks and build a good blind for this gun than to make a proper emplacement for it. You’d be digging and get caught with your pants down if they come or if the planes come. She will hold this, the way she is, as long as it is any use to hold it, and anyway I can’t stay to fight. I have to get out of here with that stuff and I’m going to take Anselmo with me. Who would stay to cover us while we got away if we have to fight here?

Just then, while he was watching all of the country that was visible, he saw the gypsy coming through the rocks to the left. He was walking with a loose, high-hipped, sloppy swing, his carbine was slung on his back, his brown face was grinning and he carried two big hares, one in each hand. He carried them by the legs, heads swinging.

“Hola, Roberto,” he called cheerfully.

Robert Jordan put his hand to his mouth, and the gypsy looked startled. He slid over behind the rocks to where Robert Jordan was crouched beside the brush-shielded automatic rifle. He crouched down and laid the hares in the snow. Robert Jordan looked up at him.

“You hijo de la gran puta!” he said softly. “Where the obscenity have you been?”

“I tracked them,” the gypsy said. “I got them both. They had made love in the snow.”

“And thy post?”

“It was not for long,” the gypsy whispered. “What passes? Is there an alarm?”

“There is cavalry out.”

“Rediós!” the gypsy said. “Hast thou seen them?”

“There is one at the camp now,” Robert Jordan said. “He came for breakfast.”

“I thought I heard a shot or something like one,” the gypsy said. “I obscenity in the milk! Did he come through here?”

“Here. Thy post.”

“Ay, mi madre!” the gypsy said. “I am a poor, unlucky man.”

“If thou wert not a gypsy, I would shoot thee.”

“No, Roberto. Don’t say that. I am sorry. It was the hares. Before daylight I heard the male thumping in the snow. You cannot imagine what a debauch they were engaged in. I went toward the noise but they were gone. I followed the tracks in the snow and high up I found them together and slew them both. Feel the fatness of the two for this time of year. Think what the Pilar will do with those two. I am sorry, Roberto, as sorry as thee. Was the cavalryman killed?”

“Yes.”

“By thee?”

“Yes.”

“Qué tio!” the gypsy said in open flattery. “Thou art a veritable phenomenon.”

“Thy mother!” Robert Jordan said. He could not help grinning at the gypsy. “Take thy hares to camp and bring us up some breakfast.”

He put a hand out and felt of the hares that lay limp, long, heavy, thick-furred, big-footed and long-eared in the snow, their round dark eyes open.

“They are fat,” he said.

“Fat!” the gypsy said. “There’s a tub of lard on the ribs of each one. In my life have I never dreamed of such hares.”

“Go then,” Robert Jordan said, “and come quickly with the breakfast and bring to me the documentation of that requeté. Ask Pilar for it.”

“You are not angry with me, Roberto?”

“Not angry. Disgusted that you should leave your post. Suppose it had been a troop of cavalry?”

“Rediós,” the gypsy said. “How reasonable you are.”

“Listen to me. You cannot leave a post again like that. Never. I do not speak of shooting lightly.”

“Of course not. And another thing. Never would such an opportunity as the two hares present itself again. Not in the life of one man.”

“Anda!” Robert Jordan said. “And hurry back.”

The gypsy picked up the two hares and slipped back through the rocks and Robert Jordan looked out across the flat opening and the slopes of the hill below. Two crows circled overhead and then lit in a pine tree below. Another crow joined them and Robert Jordan, watching them, thought: those are my sentinels. As long as those are quiet there is no one coming through the trees.

The gypsy, he thought. He is truly worthless. He has no political development, nor any discipline, and you could not rely on him for anything. But I need him for tomorrow. I have a use for him tomorrow. It’s odd to see a gypsy in a war. They should be exempted like conscientious objectors. Or as the physically and mentally unfit. They are worthless. But conscientious objectors weren’t exempted in this war. No one was exempted. It came to one and all alike. Well, it had come here now to this lazy outfit. They had it now.

Agustín and Primitivo came up with the brush and Robert Jordan built a good blind for the automatic rifle, a blind that would conceal the gun from the air and that would look natural from the forest. He showed them where to place a man high in the rocks to the right where he could see all the country below and to the right, and another where he could command the only stretch where the left wall might be climbed.

“Do not fire if you see any one from there,” Robert Jordan said. “Roll a rock down as a warning, a small rock, and signal to us with thy rifle, thus,” he lifted the rifle and held it over his head as though guarding it. “Thus for numbers,” he lifted the rifle up and down. “If they are dismounted point thy rifle muzzle at the ground. Thus. Do not fire from there until thou hearest the máquina fire. Shoot at a man’s knees when you shoot from that height. If you hear me whistle twice on this whistle get down, keeping behind cover, and come to these rocks where the máquina is.”

Primitivo raised the rifle.

“I understand,” he said. “It is very simple.”

“Send first the small rock as a warning and indicate the direction and the number. See that you are not seen.”

“Yes,” Primitivo said. “If I can throw a grenade?”

“Not until the máquina has spoken. It may be that cavalry will come searching for their comrade and still not try to enter. They may follow the tracks of Pablo. We do not want combat if it can be avoided. Above all that we should avoid it. Now get up there.”

“Me voy,” Primitivo said, and climbed up into the high rocks with his carbine.

“Thou, Agustín,” Robert Jordan said. “What do you know of the gun?”

Agustín squatted there, tall, black, stubbly joweled, with his sunken eyes and thin mouth and his big work-worn hands.

“Pues, to load it. To aim it. To shoot it. Nothing more.”

“You must not fire until they are within fifty meters and only when you are sure they will be coming into the pass which leads to the cave,” Robert Jordan said.

“Yes. How far is that?”

“That rock.”

“If there is an officer shoot him first. Then move the gun onto the others. Move very slowly. It takes little movement. I will teach Fernando to tap it. Hold it tight so that it does not jump and sight carefully and do not fire more than six shots at a time if you can help it. For the fire of the gun jumps upward. But each time fire at one man and then move from him to another. At a man on a horse, shoot at his belly.”

“Yes.”

“One man should hold the tripod still so that the gun does not jump. Thus. He will load the gun for thee.”

“And where will you be?”

“I will be here on the left. Above, where I can see all and I will cover thy left with this small máquina. Here. If they should come it would be possible to make a massacre. But you must not fire until they are that close.”

“I believe that we could make a massacre. Menuda matanza!”

“But I hope they do not come.”

“If it were not for thy bridge we could make a massacre here and get out.”

“It would avail nothing. That would serve no purpose. The bridge is a part of a plan to win the war. This would be nothing. This would be an incident. A nothing.”

“Qué va, nothing. Every fascist dead is a fascist less.”

“Yes. But with this of the bridge we can take Segovia. The Capital of a Province. Think of that. It will be the first one we will take.”

“Thou believest in this seriously? That we can take Segovia?”

“Yes. It is possible with the bridge blown correctly.”

“I would like to have the massacre here and the bridge, too.”

“Thou hast much appetite,” Robert Jordan told him.

All this time he had been watching the crows. Now he saw one was watching something. The bird cawed and flew up. But the other crow still stayed in the tree. Robert Jordan looked up toward Primitivo’s place high in the rocks. He saw him watching out over the country below but he made no signal. Robert Jordan leaned forward and worked the lock on the automatic rifle, saw the round in the chamber and let the lock down. The crow was still there in the tree. The other circled wide over the snow and then settled again. In the sun and the warm wind the snow was falling from the laden branches of the pines.

“I have a massacre for thee for tomorrow morning,” Robert Jordan said. “It is necessary to exterminate the post at the sawmill.”

“I am ready,” Agustín said, “Estoy listo.”

“Also the post at the roadmender’s hut below the bridge.”

“For the one or for the other,” Agustín said. “Or for both.”

“Not for both. They will be done at the same time,” Robert Jordan said.

“Then for either one,” Agustín said. “Now for a long time have I wished for action in this war. Pablo has rotted us here with inaction.”

Anselmo came up with the ax.

“Do you wish more branches?” he asked. “To me it seems well hidden.”

“Not branches,” Robert Jordan said. “Two small trees that we can plant here and there to make it look more natural. There are not enough trees here for it to be truly natural.”

“I will bring them.”

“Cut them well back, so the stumps cannot be seen.”

Robert Jordan heard the ax sounding in the woods behind him. He looked up at Primitivo above in the rocks and he looked down at the pines across the clearing. The one crow was still there. Then he heard the first high, throbbing murmur of a plane coming. He looked up and saw it high and tiny and silver in the sun, seeming hardly to move in the high sky.

“They cannot see us,” he said to Agustín. “But it is well to keep down. That is the second observation plane today.”

“And those of yesterday?” Agustín asked.

“They are like a bad dream now,” Robert Jordan said.

“They must be at Segovia. The bad dream waits there to become a reality.”

The plane was out of sight now over the mountains but the sound of its motors still persisted.

As Robert Jordan looked, he saw the crow fly up. He flew straight away through the trees without cawing.

Chapter 23

“Get thee down,” Robert Jordan whispered to Agustín, and he turned his head and flicked his hand Down, Down, to Anselmo who was coming through the gap with a pine tree, carrying it over his shoulder like a Christmas tree. He saw the old man drop his pine tree behind a rock and then he was out of sight in the rocks and Robert Jordan was looking ahead across the open space toward the timber. He saw nothing and heard nothing but he could feel his heart pounding and then he heard the clack of stone on stone and the leaping, dropping clicks of a small rock falling. He turned his head to the right and looking up saw Primitivo’s rifle raised and lowered four times horizontally. Then there was nothing more to see but the white stretch in front of him with the circle of horse tracks and the timber beyond.

“Cavalry,” he said softly to Agustín.

Agustín looked at him and his dark, sunken cheeks widened at their base as he grinned. Robert Jordan noticed he was sweating. He reached over and put his hand on his shoulder. His hand was still there as they saw the four horsemen ride out of the timber and he felt the muscles in Agustín’s back twitch under his hand.

One horseman was ahead and three rode behind. The one ahead was following the horse tracks. He looked down as he rode. The other three came behind him, fanned out through the timber. They were all watching carefully. Robert Jordan felt his heart beating against the snowy ground as he lay, his elbows spread wide and watched them over the sights of the automatic rifle.

The man who was leading rode along the trail to where Pablo had circled and stopped. The others rode up to him and they all stopped.

Robert Jordan saw them clearly over the blued steel barrel of the automatic rifle. He saw the faces of the men, the sabers hanging, the sweat-darkened flanks of the horses, and the cone-like slope of the khaki capes, and the Navarrese slant of the khaki berets. The leader turned his horse directly toward the opening in the rocks where the gun was placed and Robert Jordan saw his young, sunand wind-darkened face, his close-set eyes, hawk nose and the overlong wedge-shaped chin.

Sitting his horse there, the horse’s chest toward Robert Jordan, the horse’s head high, the butt of the light automatic rifle projecting forward from the scabbard at the right of the saddle, the leader pointed toward the opening where the gun was.

Robert Jordan sunk his elbows into the ground and looked along the barrel at the four riders stopped there in the snow. Three of them had their automatic rifles out. Two carried them across the pommels of their saddles. The other sat his horse with the rifle swung out to the right, the butt resting against his hip.

You hardly ever see them at such range, he thought. Not along the barrel of one of these do you see them like this. Usually the rear sight is raised and they seem miniatures of men and you have hell to make it carry up there; or they come running, flopping, running, and you beat a slope with fire or bar a certain street, or keep it on the windows; or far away you see them marching on a road. Only at the trains do you see them like this. Only then are they like now, and with four of these you can make them scatter. Over the gun sights, at this range, it makes them twice the size of men.

Thou, he thought, looking at the wedge of the front sight placed now firm in the slot of the rear sight, the top of the wedge against the center of the leader’s chest, a little to the right of the scarlet device that showed bright in the morning sun against the khaki cape. Though, he thought, thinking in Spanish now and pressing his fingers forward against the trigger guard to keep it away from where it would bring the quick, shocking, hurtling rush from the automatic rifle. Thou, he thought again, thou art dead now in thy youth. And thou, he thought, and thou, and thou. But let it not happen. Do not let it happen.

He felt Agustín beside him start to cough, felt him hold it, choke and swallow. Then as he looked along the oiled blue of the barrel out through the opening between the branches, his finger still pressed forward against the trigger guard, he saw the leader turn his horse and point into the timber where Pablo’s trail led. The four of them trotted into the timber and Agustín said softly, “Cabrones!”

Robert Jordan looked behind him at the rocks where Anselmo had dropped the tree.

The gypsy, Rafael, was coming toward them through the rocks, carrying a pair of cloth saddlebags, his rifle slung on his back. Robert Jordan waved him down and the gypsy ducked out of sight.

“We could have killed all four,” Agustín said quietly. He was still wet with sweat.

“Yes,” Robert Jordan whispered. “But with the firing who knows what might have come?”

Just then he heard the noise of another rock falling and he looked around quickly. But both the gypsy and Anselmo were out of sight. He looked at his wrist watch and then up to where Primitivo was raising and lowering his rifle in what seemed an infinity of short jerks. Pablo has forty-five minutes’start, Robert Jordan thought, and then he heard the noise of a body of cavalry coming.

“No te apures,” he whispered to Agustín. “Do not worry. They will pass as the others.”

They came into sight trotting along the edge of the timber in column of twos, twenty mounted men, armed and uniformed as the others had been, their sabers swinging, their carbines in their holsters; and then they went down into the timber as the others had.

“Tu ves?” Robert Jordan said to Agustín. “Thou seest?”

“There were many,” Agustín said.

“These would we have had to deal with if we had destroyed the others,” Robert Jordan said very softly. His heart had quieted now and his shirt felt wet on his chest from the melting snow. There was a hollow feeling in his chest.

The sun was bright on the snow and it was melting fast. He could see it hollowing away from the tree trunks and just ahead of the gun, before his eyes, the snow surface was damp and lacily fragile as the heat of the sun melted the top and the warmth of the earth breathed warmly up at the snow that lay upon it.

Robert Jordan looked up at Primitivo’s post and saw him signal, “Nothing,” crossing his two hands, palms down.

Anselmo’s head showed above a rock and Robert Jordan motioned him up. The old man slipped from rock to rock until he crept up and lay down flat beside the gun.

“Many,” he said. “Many!”

“I do not need the trees,” Robert Jordan said to him. “There is no need for further forestal improvement.”

Both Anselmo and Agustín grinned.

“This has stood scrutiny well and it would be dangerous to plant trees now because those people will return and perhaps they are not stupid.”

He felt the need to talk that, with him, was the sign that there had just been much danger. He could always tell how bad it had been by the strength of the desire to talk that came after.

“It was a good blind, eh?” he said.

“Good,” said Agustín. “To obscenity with all fascism good. We could have killed the four of them. Didst thou see?” he said to Anselmo.

“I saw.”

“Thou,” Robert Jordan said to Anselmo. “Thou must go to the post of yesterday or another good post of thy selection to watch the road and report on all movement as of yesterday. Already we are late in that. Stay until dark. Then come in and we will send another.”

“But the tracks that I will make?”

“Go from below as soon as the snow is gone. The road will be muddied by the snow. Note if there has been much traffic of trucks or if there are tank tracks in the softness on the road. That is all we can tell until you are there to observe.”

“With your permission?” the old man asked.

“Surely.”

“With your permission, would it not be better for me to go into La Granja and inquire there what passed last night and arrange for one to observe today thus in the manner you have taught me? Such a one could report tonight or, better, I could go again to La Granja for the report.”

“Have you no fear of encountering cavalry?”

“Not when the snow is gone.”

“Is there some one in La Granja capable of this?”

“Yes. Of this, yes. It would be a woman. There are various women of trust in La Granja.”

“I believe it,” Agustín said. “More, I know it, and several who serve for other purposes. You do not wish me to go?”

“Let the old man go. You understand this gun and the day is not over.”

“I will go when the snow melts,” Anselmo said. “And the snow is melting fast.”

“What think you of their chance of catching Pablo?” Robert Jordan asked Agustín.

“Pablo is smart,” Agustín said. “Do men catch a wise stag without hounds?”

“Sometimes,” Robert Jordan said.

“Not Pablo,” Agustín said. “Clearly, he is only a garbage of what he once was. But it is not for nothing that he is alive and comfortable in these hills and able to drink himself to death while there are so many others that have died against a wall.”

“Is he as smart as they say?”

“He is much smarter.”

“He has not seemed of great ability here.”

“Cómo qüe no? If he were not of great ability he would have died last night. It seems to me you do not understand politics, Inglés, nor guerilla warfare. In politics and this other the first thing is to continue to exist. Look how he continued to exist last night. And the quantity of dung he ate both from me and from thee.”

Now that Pablo was back in the movements of the unit, Robert Jordan did not wish to talk against him and as soon as he had uttered it he regretted saying the thing about his ability. He knew himself how smart Pablo was. It was Pablo who had seen instantly all that was wrong with the orders for the destruction of the bridge. He had made the remark only from dislike and he knew as he made it that it was wrong. It was part of the talking too much after a strain. So now he dropped the matter and said to Anselmo, “And to go into La Granja in daylight?”

“It is not bad,” the old man said. “I will not go with a military band.”

“Nor with a bell around his neck,” Agustín said. “Nor carrying a banner.”

“How will you go?”

“Above and down through the forest.”

“But if they pick you up.”

“I have papers.”

“So have we all but thou must eat the wrong ones quickly.”

Anselmo shook his head and tapped the breast pocket of his smock.

“How many times have I contemplated that,” he said. “And never did I like to swallow paper.”

“I have thought we should carry a little mustard on them all,” Robert Jordan said. “In my left breast pocket I carry our papers. In my right the fascist papers. Thus one does not make a mistake in an emergency.”

It must have been bad enough when the leader of the first patrol of cavalry had pointed toward the entry because they were all talking very much. Too much, Robert Jordan thought.

“But look, Roberto,” Agustín said. “They say the government moves further to the right each day. That in the Republic they no longer say Comrade but Señor and Señora. Canst shift thy pockets?”

“When it moves far enough to the right I will carry them in my hip pocket,” Robert Jordan said, “and sew it in the center.”

“That they should stay in thy shirt,” Agustín said. “Are we to win this war and lose the revolution?”

“Nay,” Robert Jordan said. “But if we do not win this war there will be no revolution nor any Republic nor any thou nor any me nor anything but the most grand carajo.”

“So say I,” Anselmo said. “That we should win the war.”

“And afterwards shoot the anarchists and the Communists and all this canalla except the good Republicans,” Agustín said.

“That we should win this war and shoot nobody,” Anselmo said. “That we should govern justly and that all should participate in the benefits according as they have striven for them. And that those who have fought against us should be educated to see their error.”

“We will have to shoot many,” Agustín said. “Many, many, many.”

He thumped his closed right fist against the palm of his left hand.

“That we should shoot none. Not even the leaders. That they should be reformed by work.”

“I know the work I’d put them at,” Agustín said, and he picked up some snow and put it in his mouth.

“What, bad one?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Two trades of the utmost brilliance.”

“They are?”

Agustín put some more snow in his mouth and looked across the clearing where the cavalry had ridden. Then he spat the melted snow out. “Vaya. What a breakfast,” he said. “Where is the filthy gypsy?”

“What trades?” Robert Jordan asked him. “Speak, bad mouth.”

“Jumping from planes without parachutes,” Agustín said, and his eyes shone. “That for those that we care for. And being nailed to the tops of fence posts to be pushed over backwards for the others.”

“That way of speaking is ignoble,” Anselmo said. “Thus we will never have a Republic.”

“I would like to swim ten leagues in a strong soup made from the cojones of all of them,” Agustín said. “And when I saw those four there and thought that we might kill them I was like a mare in the corral waiting for the stallion.”

“You know why we did not kill them, though?” Robert Jordan said quietly.

“Yes,” Agustín said. “Yes. But the necessity was on me as it is on a mare in heat. You cannot know what it is if you have not felt it.”

“You sweated enough,” Robert Jordan said. “I thought it was fear.”

“Fear, yes,” Agustín said. “Fear and the other. And in this life there is no stronger thing than the other.”

Yes, Robert Jordan thought. We do it coldly but they do not, nor ever have. It is their extra sacrament. Their old one that they had before the new religion came from the far end of the Mediterranean, the one they have never abandoned but only suppressed and hidden to bring it out again in wars and inquisitions. They are the people of the Auto de Fe; the act of faith. Killing is something one must do, but ours are different from theirs. And you, he thought, you have never been corrupted by it? You never had it in the Sierra? Nor at Usera? Nor through all the time in Estremadura? Nor at any time? Qué va, he told himself. At every train.

Stop making dubious literature about the Berbers and the old Iberians and admit that you have liked to kill as all who are soldiers by choice have enjoyed it at some time whether they lie about it or not. Anselmo does not like to because he is a hunter, not a soldier. Don’t idealize him, either. Hunters kill animals and soldiers kill men. Don’t lie to yourself, he thought. Nor make up literature about it. You have been tainted with it for a long time now. And do not think against Anselmo either. He is a Christian. Something very rare in Catholic countries.

But with Agustín I had thought it was fear, he thought. That natural fear before action. So it was the other, too. Of course, he may be bragging now. There was plenty of fear. I felt the fear under my hand. Well, it was time to stop talking.

“See if the gypsy brought food,” he said to Anselmo. “Do not let him come up. He is a fool. Bring it yourself. And however much he brought, send back for more. I am hungry.”

Chapter 24

Now the morning was late May, the sky was high and clear and the wind blew warm on Robert Jordan’s shoulders. The snow was going fast and they were eating breakfast. There were two big sandwiches of meat and the goaty cheese apiece, and Robert Jordan had cut thick slices of onion with his clasp knife and put them on each side of the meat and cheese between the chunks of bread.

“You will have a breath that will carry through the forest to the fascists,” Agustín said, his own mouth full.

“Give me the wineskin and I will rinse the mouth,” Robert Jordan said, his mouth full of meat, cheese, onion and chewed bread.

He had never been hungrier and he filled his mouth with wine, faintly tarry-tasting from the leather bag, and swallowed. Then he took another big mouthful of wine, lifting the bag up to let the jet of wine spurt into the back of his mouth, the wineskin touching the needles of the blind of pine branches that covered the automatic rifle as he lifted his hand, his head leaning against the pine branches as he bent it back to let the wine run down.

“Dost thou want this other sandwich?” Agustín asked him, handing it toward him across the gun.

“No. Thank you. Eat it.”

“I cannot. I am not accustomed to eat in the morning.”

“You do not want it, truly?”

“Nay. Take it.”

Robert Jordan took it and laid it on his lap while he got the onion out of his side jacket pocket where the grenades were and opened his knife to slice it. He cut off a thin sliver of the surface that had dirtied in his pocket, then cut a thick slice. An outer segment fell and he picked it up and bent the circle together and put it into the sandwich.

“Eatest thou always onions for breakfast?” Agustín asked.

“When there are any.”

“Do all in thy country do this?”

“Nay,” Robert Jordan said. “It is looked on badly there.”

“I am glad,” Agustín said. “I had always considered America a civilized country.”

“What hast thou against the onion?”

“The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose.”

Robert Jordan grinned at him with his mouth full.

“Like the rose,” he said. “Mighty like the rose. A rose is a rose is an onion.”

“Thy onions are affecting thy brain,” Agustín said. “Take care.”

“An onion is an onion is an onion,” Robert Jordan said cheerily and, he thought, a stone is a stein is a rock is a boulder is a pebble.

“Rinse thy mouth with wine,” Agustín said. “Thou art very rare, Inglés. There is great difference between thee and the last dynamiter who worked with us.”

“There is one great difference.”

“Tell it to me.”

“I am alive and he is dead,” Robert Jordan said. Then: what’s the matter with you? he thought. Is that the way to talk? Does food make you that slap happy? What are you, drunk on onions? Is that all it means to you, now? It never meant much, he told himself truly. You tried to make it mean something, but it never did. There is no need to lie in the time that is left.

“No,” he said, seriously now. “That one was a man who had suffered greatly.”

“And thou? Hast thou not suffered?”

“No,” said Robert Jordan. “I am of those who suffer little.”

“Me also,” Agustín told him. “There are those who suffer and those who do not. I suffer very little.”

“Less bad,” Robert Jordan tipped up the wineskin again. “And with this, less.”

“I suffer for others.”

“As all good men should.”

“But for myself very little.”

“Hast thou a wife?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

“But now you have the Maria.”

“Yes.”

“There is a rare thing,” Agustín said. “Since she came to us at the train the Pilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites. You cannot imagine with what fierceness she guarded her. You come, and she gives her to thee as a present. How does that seem to thee?”

“It was not thus.”

“How was it, then?”

“She has put her in my care.”

“And thy care is to joder with her all night?”

“With luck.”

“What a manner to care for one.”

“You do not understand that one can take good care of one thus?”

“Yes, but such care could have been furnished by any one of us.”

“Let us not talk of it any more,” Robert Jordan said. “I care for her seriously.”

“Seriously?”

“As there can be nothing more serious in this world.”

“And afterwards? After this of the bridge?”

“She goes with me.”

“Then,” Agustín said. “That no one speaks of it further and that the two of you go with all luck.”

He lifted the leather wine bag and took a long pull, then handed it to Robert Jordan.

“One thing more, Inglés,” he said.

“Of course.”

“I have cared much for her, too.”

Robert Jordan put his hand on his shoulder.

“Much,” Agustín said. “Much. More than one is able to imagine.”

“I can imagine.”

“She has made an impression on me that does not dissipate.”

“I can imagine.”

“Look. I say this to thee in all seriousness.”

“Say it.”

“I have never touched her nor had anything to do with her but I care for her greatly. Inglés, do not treat her lightly. Because she sleeps with thee she is no whore.”

“I will care for her.”

“I believe thee. But more. You do not understand how such a girl would be if there had been no revolution. You have much responsibility. This one, truly, has suffered much. She is not as we are.”

“I will marry her.”

“Nay. Not that. There is no need for that under the revolution. But—” he nodded his head— “it would be better.”

“I will marry her,” Robert Jordan said and could feel his throat swelling as he said it. “I care for her greatly.”

“Later,” Agustín said. “When it is convenient. The important thing is to have the intention.”

“I have it.”

“Listen,” Agustín said. “I am speaking too much of a matter in which I have no right to intervene, but hast thou known many girls of this country?”

“A few.”

“Whores?”

“Some who were not.”

“How many?”

“Several.”

“And did you sleep with them?”

“No.”

“You see?”

“Yes.”

“What I mean is that this Maria does not do this lightly.”

“Nor I.”

“If I thought you did I would have shot you last night as you lay with her. For this we kill much here.”

“Listen, old one,” Robert Jordan said. “It is because of the lack of time that there has been informality. What we do not have is time. Tomorrow we must fight. To me that is nothing. But for the Maria and me it means that we must live all of our life in this time.”

“And a day and a night is little time,” Agustín said.

“Yes. But there has been yesterday and the night before and last night.”

“Look,” Agustín said. “If I can aid thee.”

“No. We are all right.”

“If I could do anything for thee or for the cropped head—”

“No.”

“Truly, there is little one man can do for another.”

“No. There is much.”

“What?”

“No matter what passes today and tomorrow in respect to combat, give me thy confidence and obey even though the orders may appear wrong.”

“You have my confidence. Since this of the cavalry and the sending away of the horse.”

“That was nothing. You see that we are working for one thing. To win the war. Unless we win, all other things are futile. Tomorrow we have a thing of great importance. Of true importance. Also we will have combat. In combat there must be discipline. For many things are not as they appear. Discipline must come from trust and confidence.”

Agustín spat on the ground.

“The Maria and all such things are apart,” he said. “That you and the Maria should make use of what time there is as two human beings. If I can aid thee I am at thy orders. But for the thing of tomorrow I will obey thee blindly. If it is necessary that one should die for the thing of tomorrow one goes gladly and with the heart light.”

“Thus do I feel,” Robert Jordan said. “But to hear it from thee brings pleasure.”

“And more,” Agustín said. “That one above,” he pointed toward Primitivo, “is a dependable value. The Pilar is much, much more than thou canst imagine. The old man Anselmo, also. Andrés also. Eladio also. Very quiet, but a dependable element. And Fernando. I do not know how thou hast appreciated him. It is true he is heavier than mercury. He is fuller of boredom than a steer drawing a cart on the highroad. But to fight and to do as he is told. Es muy hombre! Thou wilt see.”

“We are lucky.”

“No. We have two weak elements. The gypsy and Pablo. But the band of Sordo are as much better than we are as we are better than goat manure.”

“All is well then.”

“Yes,” Agustín said. “But I wish it was for today.”

“Me, too. To finish with it. But it is not.”

“Do you think it will be bad?”

“It can be.”

“But thou are very cheerful now, Inglés.”

“Yes.”

“Me also. In spite of this of the Maria and all.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Perhaps it is the day. The day is good.”

“Who knows? Perhaps it is that we will have action.”

“I think it is that,” Robert Jordan said. “But not today. Of all things; of all importance we must avoid it today.”

As he spoke he heard something. It was a noise far off that came above the sound of the warm wind in the trees. He could not be sure and he held his mouth open and listened, glancing up at Primitivo as he did so. He thought he heard it but then it was gone. The wind was blowing in the pines and now Robert Jordan strained all of himself to listen. Then he heard it faintly coming down the wind.

“It is nothing tragic with me,” he heard Agustín say. “That I should never have the Maria is nothing. I will go with the whores as always.”

“Shut up,” he said, not listening, and lying beside him, his head having been turned away. Agustín looked over at him suddenly.

“Qué pasa?” he asked.

Robert Jordan put his hand over his own mouth and went on listening. There it came again. It came faint, muted, dry and far away. But there was no mistaking it now. It was the precise, crackling, curling roll of automatic rifle fire. It sounded as though pack after pack of miniature firecrackers were going off at a distance that was almost out of hearing.

Robert Jordan looked up at Primitivo who had his head up now, his face looking toward them, his hand cupped to his ear. As he looked Primitivo pointed up the mountain toward the highest country.

“They are fighting at El Sordo’s,” Robert Jordan said.

“Then let us go to aid them,” Agustín said. “Collect the people. Vamonos.”

“No,” Robert Jordan said. “We stay here.”

Chapter 25

Robert Jordan looked up at where Primitivo stood now in his lookout post, holding his rifle and pointing. He nodded his head but the man kept pointing, putting his hand to his ear and then pointing insistently and as though he could not possibly have been understood.

“Do you stay with this gun and unless it is sure, sure, sure that they are coming in do not fire. And then not until they reach that shrub,” Robert Jordan pointed. “Do you understand?”

“Yes. But—”

“No but. I will explain to thee later. I go to Primitivo.”

Anselmo was by him and he said to the old man:

“Viejo, stay there with Agustín with the gun.” He spoke slowly and unhurriedly. “He must not fire unless cavalry is actually entering. If they merely present themselves he must let them alone as we did before. If he must fire, hold the legs of the tripod firm for him and hand him the pans when they are empty.”

“Good,” the old man said. “And La Granja?”

“Later.”

Robert Jordan climbed up, over and around the gray boulders that were wet now under his hands as he pulled himself up. The sun was melting the snow on them fast. The tops of the boulders were drying and as he climbed he looked across the country and saw the pine woods and the long open glade and the dip of the country before the high mountains beyond. Then he stood beside Primitivo in a hollow behind two boulders and the short, brownfaced man said to him, “They are attacking Sordo. What is it that we do?”

“Nothing,” Robert Jordan said.

He heard the firing clearly here and as he looked across the country, he saw, far off, across the distant valley where the country rose steeply again, a troop of cavalry ride out of the timber and cross the snowy slope riding uphill in the direction of the firing. He saw the oblong double line of men and horses dark against the snow as they forced at an angle up the hill. He watched the double line top the ridge and go into the farther timber.

“We have to aid them,” Primitivo said. His voice was dry and flat.

“It is impossible,” Robert Jordan told him. “I have expected this all morning.”

“How?”

“They went to steal horses last night. The snow stopped and they tracked them up there.”

“But we have to aid them,” Primitivo said. “We cannot leave them alone to this. Those are our comrades.”

Robert Jordan put his hand on the other man’s shoulder.

“We can do nothing,” he said. “If we could I would do it.”

“There is a way to reach there from above. We can take that way with the horses and the two guns. This one below and thine. We can aid them thus.”

“Listen—” Robert Jordan said.

“That is what I listen to,” Primitivo said.

The firing was rolling in overlapping waves. Then they heard the noise of hand grenades heavy and sodden in the dry rolling of the automatic rifle fire.

“They are lost,” Robert Jordan said. “They were lost when the snow stopped. If we go there we are lost, too. It is impossible to divide what force we have.”

There was a gray stubble of beard stippled over Primitivo’s jaws, his lip and his neck. The rest of his face was flat brown with a broken, flattened nose and deep-set gray eyes, and watching him Robert Jordan saw the stubble twitching at the corners of his mouth and over the cord of his throat.

“Listen to it,” he said. “It is a massacre.”

“If they have surrounded the hollow it is that,” Robert Jordan said. “Some may have gotten out.”

“Coming on them now we could take them from behind,” Primitivo said. “Let four of us go with the horses.”

“And then what? What happens after you take them from behind?”

“We join with Sordo.”

“To die there? Look at the sun. The day is long.”

The sky was high and cloudless and the sun was hot on their backs. There were big bare patches now on the southern slope of the open glade below them and the snow was all dropped from the pine trees. The boulders below them that had been wet as the snow melted were steaming faintly now in the hot sun.

“You have to stand it,” Robert Jordan said. “Hay que aguantarse. There are things like this in a war.”

“But there is nothing we can do? Truly?” Primitivo looked at him and Robert Jordan knew he trusted him. “Thou couldst not send me and another with the small machine gun?”

“It would be useless,” Robert Jordan said.

He thought he saw something that he was looking for but it was a hawk that slid down into the wind and then rose above the line of the farthest pine woods. “It would be useless if we all went,” he said.

Just then the firing doubled in intensity and in it was the heavy bumping of the hand grenades.

“Oh, obscenity them,” Primitivo said with an absolute devoutness of blasphemy, tears in his eyes and his cheeks twitching. “Oh, God and the Virgin, obscenity them in the milk of their filth.”

“Calm thyself,” Robert Jordan said. “You will be fighting them soon enough. Here comes the woman.”

Pilar was climbing up to them, making heavy going of it in the boulders.

Primitivo kept saying. “Obscenity them. Oh, God and the Virgin, befoul them,” each time for firing rolled down the wind, and Robert Jordan climbed down to help Pilar up.

“Qué tal, woman,” he said, taking hold of both her wrists and hoisting as she climbed heavily over the last boulder.

“Thy binoculars,” she said and lifted their strap over her head. “So it has come to Sordo?”

“Yes.”

“Pobre,” she said in commiseration. “Poor Sordo.”

She was breathing heavily from the climb and she took hold of Robert Jordan’s hand and gripped it tight in hers as she looked out over the country.

“How does the combat seem?”

“Bad. Very bad.”

“He’s jodido?”

“I believe so.”

“Pobre,” she said. “Doubtless because of the horses?”

“Probably.”

“Pobre,” Pilar said. Then, “Rafael recounted me all of an entire novel of dung about cavalry. What came?”

“A patrol and part of a squadron.”

“Up to what point?”

Robert Jordan pointed out where the patrol had stopped and showed her where the gun was hidden. From where they stood they could just see one of Agustín’s boots protruding from the rear of the blind.

“The gypsy said they rode to where the gun muzzle pressed against the chest of the horse of the leader,” Pilar said. “What a race! Thy glasses were in the cave.”

“Have you packed?”

“All that can be taken. Is there news of Pablo?”

“He was forty minutes ahead of the cavalry. They took his trail.”

Pilar grinned at him. She still held his hand. Now she dropped it. “They’ll never see him,” she said. “Now for Sordo. Can we do anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Pobre,” she said. “I was fond of Sordo. Thou art sure, sure that he is jodido?”

“Yes. I have seen much cavalry.”

“More than were here?”

“Another full troop on their way up there.”

“Listen to it,” Pilar said. “Pobre, pobre Sordo.”

They listened to the firing.

“Primitivo wanted to go up there,” Robert Jordan said.

“Art thou crazy?” Pilar said to the flat-faced man. “What kind of locos are we producing here?”

“I wish to aid them.”

“Qué va,” Pilar said. “Another romantic. Dost thou not believe thou wilt die quick enough here without useless voyages?”

Robert Jordan looked at her, at the heavy brown face with the high Indian cheekbones, the wide-set dark eyes and the laughing mouth with the heavy, bitter upper lip.

“Thou must act like a man,” she said to Primitivo. “A grown man. You with your gray hairs and all.”

“Don’t joke at me,” Primitivo said sullenly. “If a man has a little heart and a little imagination—”

“He should learn to control them,” Pilar said. “Thou wilt die soon enough with us. There is no need to seek that with strangers. As for thy imagination. The gypsy has enough for all. What a novel he told me.”

“If thou hadst seen it thou wouldst not call it a novel,” Primitivo said. “There was a moment of great gravity.”

“Qué va,” Pilar said. “Some cavalry rode here and they rode away. And you all make yourselves a heroism. It is to this we have come with so much inaction.”

“And this of Sordo is not grave?” Primitivo said contemptuously now. He suffered visibly each time the firing came down the wind and he wanted either to go to the combat or have Pilar go and leave him alone.

“Total, qué?” Pilar said. “It has come so it has come. Don’t lose thy cojones for the misfortune of another.”

“Go defile thyself,” Primitivo said. “There are women of a stupidity and brutality that is insupportable.”

“In order to support and aid those men poorly equipped for procreation,” Pilar said, “if there is nothing to see I am going.”

Just then Robert Jordan heard the plane high overhead. He looked up and in the high sky it looked to be the same observation plane that he had seen earlier in the morning. Now it was returning from the direction of the lines and it was moving in the direction of the high country where El Sordo was being attacked.

“There is the bad luck bird,” Pilar said. “Will it see what goes on there?”

“Surely,” Robert Jordan said. “If they are not blind.”

They watched the plane moving high and silvery and steady in the sunlight. It was coming from the left and they could see the round disks of light the two propellers made.

“Keep down,” Robert Jordan said.

Then the plane was overhead, its shadows passing over the open glade, the throbbing reaching its maximum of portent. Then it was past and headed toward the top of the valley. They watched it go steadily on its course until it was just out of sight and then they saw it coming back in a wide dipping circle, to circle twice over the high country and then disappear in the direction of Segovia.

Robert Jordan looked at Pilar. There was perspiration on her forehead and she shook her head: She had been holding her lower lip between her teeth.

“For each one there is something,” she said. “For me it is those.”

“Thou hast not caught my fear?” Primitivo said sarcastically.

“Nay,” she put her hand on his shoulder. “Thou hast no fear to catch. I know that. I am sorry I joked too roughly with thee. We are all in the same caldron.” Then she spoke to Robert Jordan. “I will send up food and wine. Dost need anything more?”

“Not in this moment. Where are the others?”

“Thy reserve is intact below with the horses,” she grinned. “Everything is out of sight. Everything to go is ready. Maria is with thy material.”

“If by any chance we should have aviation keep her in the cave.”

“Yes, my Lord Inglés,” Pilar said. “Thy gypsy (I give him to thee) I have sent to gather mushrooms to cook with the hares. There are many mushrooms now and it seemed to me we might as well eat the hares although they would be better tomorrow or the day after.”

“I think it is best to eat them,” Robert Jordan said, and Pilar put her big hand on his shoulder where the strap of the submachine gun crossed his chest, then reached up and mussed his hair with her fingers. “What an Inglés,” Pilar said. “I will send the Maria with the puchero when they are cooked.”

The firing from far away and above had almost died out and now there was only an occasional shot.

“You think it is over?” Pilar asked.

“No,” Robert Jordan said. “From the sound that we have heard they have attacked and been beaten off. Now I would say the attackers have them surrounded. They have taken cover and they wait for the planes.”

Pilar spoke to Primitivo, “Thou. Dost understand there was no intent to insult thee?”

“Ya lo sé,” said Primitivo. “I have put up with worse than that from thee. Thou hast a vile tongue. But watch thy mouth, woman. Sordo was a good comrade of mine.”

“And not of mine?” Pilar asked him. “Listen, flat face. In war one cannot say what one feels. We have enough of our own without taking Sordo’s.”

Primitivo was still sullen.

“You should take a physic,” Pilar told him. “Now I go to prepare the meal.”

“Did you bring the documentation of the requeté?” Robert Jordan asked her.

“How stupid I am,” she said. “I forgot it. I will send the Maria.”

Chapter 26

It was three o’clock in the afternoon before the planes came. The snow had all been gone by noon and the rocks were hot now in the sun. There were no clouds in the sky and Robert Jordan sat in the rocks with his shirt off browning his back in the sun and reading the letters that had been in the pockets of the dead cavalryman. From time to time he would stop reading to look across the open slope to the line of the timber, look over the high country above and then return to the letters. No more cavalry had appeared. At intervals there would be the sound of a shot from the direction of El Sordo’s camp. But the firing was desultory.

From examining his military papers he knew the boy was from Tafalla in Navarra, twenty-one years old, unmarried, and the son of a blacksmith. His regiment was the Nth cavalry, which surprised Robert Jordan, for he had believed that regiment to be in the North. He was a Carlist, and he had been wounded at the fighting for Irun at the start of the war.

I’ve probably seen him run through the streets ahead of the bulls at the feria in Pamplona, Robert Jordan thought. You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself. Well, hardly ever, he amended and went on reading the letters.

The first letters he read were very formal, very carefully written and dealt almost entirely with local happenings. They were from his sister and Robert Jordan learned that everything was all right in Tafalla, that father was well, that mother was the same as always but with certain complaints about her back, that she hoped he was well and not in too great danger and she was happy he was doing away with the Reds to liberate Spain from the domination of the Marxist hordes. Then there was a list of those boys from Tafalla who had been killed or badly wounded since she wrote last. She mentioned ten who were killed. That is a great many for a town the size of Tafalla, Robert Jordan thought.

There was quite a lot of religion in the letter and she prayed to Saint Anthony, to the Blessed Virgin of Pilar, and to other Virgins to protect him and she wanted him never to forget that he was also protected by the Sacred Heart of Jesus that he wore still, she trusted, at all times over his own heart where it had been proven innumerable — this was underlined — times to have the power of stopping bullets. She was as always his loving sister Concha.

This letter was a little stained around the edges and Robert Jordan put it carefully back with the military papers and opened a letter with a less severe handwriting. It was from the boy’s novia, his fiancée, and it was quietly, formally, and completely hysterical with concern for his safety. Robert Jordan read it through and then put all the letters together with the papers into his hip pocket. He did not want to read the other letters.

I guess I’ve done my good deed for today, he said to himself. I guess you have all right, he repeated.

“What are those you were reading?” Primitivo asked him.

“The documentation and the letters of that requeté we shot this morning. Do you want to see it?”

“I can’t read,” Primitivo said. “Was there anything interesting?”

“No,” Robert Jordan told him. “They are personal letters.”

“How are things going where he came from? Can you tell from the letters?”

“They seem to be going all right,” Robert Jordan said. “There are many losses in his town.” He looked down to where the blind for the automatic rifle had been changed a little and improved after the snow melted. It looked convincing enough. He looked off across the country.

“From what town is he?” Primitivo asked.

“Tafalla,” Robert Jordan told him.

All right, he said to himself. I’m sorry, if that does any good.

It doesn’t, he said to himself.

All right then, drop it, he said to himself.

All right, it’s dropped.

But it would not drop that easily. How many is that you have killed? he asked himself. I don’t know. Do you think you have a right to kill any one? No. But I have to. How many of those you have killed have been real fascists? Very few. But they are all the enemy to whose force we are opposing force. But you like the people of Navarra better than those of any other part of Spain. Yes. And you kill them. Yes. If you don’t believe it go down there to the camp. Don’t you know it is wrong to kill? Yes. But you do it? Yes. And you still believe absolutely that your cause is right? Yes.

It is right, he told himself, not reassuringly, but proudly. I believe in the people and their right to govern themselves as they wish. But you mustn’t believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong.

But how many do you suppose you have killed? I don’t know because I won’t keep track. But do you know? Yes. How many? You can’t be sure how many. Blowing the trains you kill many. Very many. But you can’t be sure. But of those you are sure of? More than twenty. And of those how many were real fascists? Two that I am sure of. Because I had to shoot them when we took them prisoners at Usera. And you did not mind that? No. Nor did you like it? No. I decided never to do it again. I have avoided it. I have avoided killing those who are unarmed.

Listen, he told himself. You better cut this out. This is very bad for you and for your work. Then himself said back to him, You listen, see? Because you are doing something very serious and I have to see you understand it all the time. I have to keep you straight in your head. Because if you are not absolutely straight in your head you have no right to do the things you do for all of them are crimes and no man has a right to take another man’s life unless it is to prevent something worse happening to other people. So get it straight and do not lie to yourself.

But I won’t keep a count of people I have killed as though it were a trophy record or a disgusting business like notches in a gun, he told himself. I have a right to not keep count and I have a right to forget them.

No, himself said. You have no right to forget anything. You have no right to shut your eyes to any of it nor any right to forget any of it nor to soften it nor to change it.

Shut up, he told himself. You’re getting awfully pompous.

Nor ever to deceive yourself about it, himself went on.

All right, he told himself. Thanks for all the good advice and is it all right for me to love Maria?

Yes, himself said.

Even if there isn’t supposed to be any such thing as love in a purely materialistic conception of society?

Since when did you ever have any such conception? himself asked. Never. And you never could have. You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. You believe in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much dialectics. They are for some but not for you. You have to know them in order not to be a sucker. You have put many things in abeyance to win a war. If this war is lost all of those things are lost.

But afterwards you can discard what you do not believe in. There is plenty you do not believe in and plenty that you do believe in.

And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

Cut out the dying stuff, he said to himself. That’s not the way we talk. That’s the way our friends the anarchists talk. Whenever things get really bad they want to set fire to something and to die. It’s a very odd kind of mind they have. Very odd. Well, we’re getting through today, old timer, he told himself. It’s nearly three o’clock now and there is going to be some food sooner or later. They are still shooting up at Sordo’s, which means that they have him surrounded and are waiting to bring up more people, probably. Though they have to make it before dark.

I wonder what it is like up at Sordo’s. That’s what we all have to expect, given enough time. I imagine it is not too jovial up at Sordo’s. We certainly got Sordo into a fine jam with that horse business. How does it go in Spanish? Un callejón sin salida. A passageway with no exit. I suppose I could go through with it all right. You only have to do it once and it is soon over with. But wouldn’t it be luxury to fight in a war some time where, when you were surrounded, you could surrender? Estamos copados. We are surrounded. That was the great panic cry of this war. Then the next thing was that you were shot; with nothing bad before if you were lucky. Sordo wouldn’t be lucky that way. Neither would they when the time ever came.

It was three o’clock. Then he heard the far-off, distant throbbing and, looking up, he saw the planes.

Chapter 27

El Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop. He did not like this hill and when he saw it he thought it had the shape of a chancre. But he had had no choice except this hill and he had picked it as far away as he could see it and galloped for it, the automatic rifle heavy on his back, the horse laboring, barrel heaving between his thighs, the sack of grenades swinging against one side, the sack of automatic rifle pans banging against the other, and Joaquín and Ignacio halting and firing, halting and firing to give him time to get the gun in place.

There had still been snow then, the snow that had ruined them, and when his horse was hit so that he wheezed in a slow, jerking, climbing stagger up the last part of the crest, splattering the snow with a bright, pulsing jet, Sordo had hauled him along by the bridle, the reins over his shoulder as he climbed. He climbed as hard as he could with the bullets spatting on the rocks, with the two sacks heavy on his shoulders, and then, holding the horse by the mane, had shot him quickly, expertly, and tenderly just where he had needed him, so that the horse pitched, head forward down to plug a gap between two rocks. He had gotten the gun to firing over the horse’s back and he fired two pans, the gun clattering, the empty shells pitching into the snow, the smell of burnt hair from the burnt hide where the hot muzzle rested, him firing at what came up to the hill, forcing them to scatter for cover, while all the time there was a chill in his back from not knowing what was behind him. Once the last of the five men had reached the hilltop the chill went out of his back and he had saved the pans he had left until he would need them.

There were two more horses dead along the slope and three more were dead here on the hilltop. He had only succeeded in stealing three horses last night and one had bolted when they tried to mount him bareback in the corral at the camp when the first shooting had started.

Of the five men who had reached the hilltop three were wounded. Sordo was wounded in the calf of his leg and in two places in his left arm. He was very thirsty, his wounds had stiffened, and one of the wounds in his left arm was very painful. He also had a bad headache and as he lay waiting for the planes to come he thought of a joke in Spanish. It was, “Hay que tomar la muerte como si fuera aspirina,” which means, “You will have to take death as an aspirin.” But he did not make the joke aloud. He grinned somewhere inside the pain in his head and inside the nausea that came whenever he moved his arm and looked around at what there was left of his band.

The five men were spread out like the points of a five-pointed star. They had dug with their knees and hands and made mounds in front of their heads and shoulders with the dirt and piles of stones. Using this cover, they were linking the individual mounds up with stones and dirt. Joaquín, who was eighteen years old, had a steel helmet that he dug with and he passed dirt in it.

He had gotten this helmet at the blowing up of the train. It had a bullet hole through it and every one had always joked at him for keeping it. But he had hammered the jagged edges of the bullet hole smooth and driven a wooden plug into it and then cut the plug off and smoothed it even with the metal inside the helmet.

When the shooting started he had clapped this helmet on his head so hard it banged his head as though he had been hit with a casserole and, in the last lung-aching, leg-dead, mouth-dry, bulletspatting, bullet-cracking, bullet-singing run up the final slope of the hill after his horse was killed, the helmet had seemed to weigh a great amount and to ring his bursting forehead with an iron band. But he had kept it. Now he dug with it in a steady, almost machinelike desperation. He had not yet been hit.

“It serves for something finally,” Sordo said to him in his deep, throaty voice.

“Resistir y fortificar es vencer,” Joaquín said, his mouth stiff with the dryness of fear which surpassed the normal thirst of battle. It was one of the slogans of the Communist party and it meant, “Hold out and fortify, and you will win.”

Sordo looked away and down the slope at where a cavalryman was sniping from behind a boulder. He was very fond of this boy and he was in no mood for slogans.

“What did you say?”

One of the men turned from the building that he was doing. This man was lying flat on his face, reaching carefully up with his hands to put a rock in place while keeping his chin flat against the ground.

Joaquín repeated the slogan in his dried-up boy’s voice without checking his digging for a moment.

“What was the last word?” the man with his chin on the ground asked.

“Vencer,” the boy said. “Win.”

“Mierda,” the man with his chin on the ground said.

“There is another that applies to here,” Joaquín said, bringing them out as though they were talismans, “Pasionaria says it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

“Mierda again,” the man said and another man said, over his shoulder, “We’re on our bellies, not our knees.”

“Thou. Communist. Do you know your Pasionaria has a son thy age in Russia since the start of the movement?”

“It’s a lie,” Joaquín said.

“Qué va, it’s a lie,” the other said. “The dynamiter with the rare name told me. He was of thy party, too. Why should he lie?”

“It’s a lie,” Joaquín said. “She would not do such a thing as keep a son hidden in Russia out of the war.”

“I wish I were in Russia,” another of Sordo’s men said. “Will not thy Pasionaria send me now from here to Russia, Communist?”

“If thou believest so much in thy Pasionaria, get her to get us off this hill,” one of the men who had a bandaged thigh said.

“The fascists will do that,” the man with his chin in the dirt said.

“Do not speak thus,” Joaquín said to him.

“Wipe the pap of your mother’s breasts off thy lips and give me a hatful of that dirt,” the man with his chin on the ground said. “No one of us will see the sun go down this night.”

El Sordo was thinking: It is shaped like a chancre. Or the breast of a young girl with no nipple. Or the top cone of a volcano. You have never seen a volcano, he thought. Nor will you ever see one. And this hill is like a chancre. Let the volcanos alone. It’s late now for the volcanos.

He looked very carefully around the withers of the dead horse and there was a quick hammering of firing from behind a boulder well down the slope and he heard the bullets from the submachine gun thud into the horse. He crawled along behind the horse and looked out of the angle between the horse’s hindquarters and the rock. There were three bodies on the slope just below him where they had fallen when the fascists had rushed the crest under cover of the automatic rifle and submachine gunfire and he and the others had broken down the attack by throwing and rolling down hand grenades. There were other bodies that he could not see on the other sides of the hill crest. There was no dead ground by which attackers could approach the summit and Sordo knew that as long as his ammunition and grenades held out and he had as many as four men they could not get him out of there unless they brought up a trench mortar. He did not know whether they had sent to La Granja for a trench mortar. Perhaps they had not, because surely, soon, the planes would come. It had been four hours since the observation plane had flown over them.

This hill is truly like a chancre, Sordo thought, and we are the very pus of it. But we killed many when they made that stupidness. How could they think that they would take us thus? They have such modern armament that they lose all their sense with overconfidence. He had killed the young officer who had led the assault with a grenade that had gone bouncing and rolling down the slope as they came up it, running, bent half over. In the yellow flash and gray roar of smoke he had seen the officer dive forward to where he lay now like a heavy, broken bundle of old clothing marking the farthest point that the assault had reached. Sordo looked at this body and then, down the hill, at the others.

They are brave but stupid people, he thought. But they have sense enough now not to attack us again until the planes come. Unless, of course, they have a mortar coming. It would be easy with a mortar. The mortar was the normal thing and he knew that they would die as soon as a mortar came up, but when he thought of the planes coming up he felt as naked on that hilltop as though all of his clothing and even his skin had been removed. There is no nakeder thing than I feel, he thought. A flayed rabbit is as well covered as a bear in comparison. But why should they bring planes? They could get us out of here with a trench mortar easily. They are proud of their planes, though, and they will probably bring them. Just as they were so proud of their automatic weapons that they made that stupidness. But undoubtedly they must have sent for a mortar too.

One of the men fired. Then jerked the bolt and fired again, quickly.

“Save thy cartridges,” Sordo said.

“One of the sons of the great whore tried to reach that boulder,” the man pointed.

“Did you hit him?” Sordo asked, turning his head with difficulty.

“Nay,” the man said. “The fornicator ducked back.”

“Who is a whore of whores is Pilar,” the man with his chin in the dirt said. “That whore knows we are dying here.”

“She could do no good,” Sordo said. The man had spoken on the side of his good ear and he had heard him without turning his head. “What could she do?”

“Take these sluts from the rear.”

“Qué va,” Sordo said. “They are spread around a hillside. How would she come on them? There are a hundred and fifty of them. Maybe more now.”

“But if we hold out until dark,” Joaquín said.

“And if Christmas comes on Easter,” the man with his chin on the ground said.

“And if thy aunt had cojones she would be thy uncle,” another said to him. “Send for thy Pasionaria. She alone can help us.”

“I do not believe that about the son,” Joaquín said. “Or if he is there he is training to be an aviator or something of that sort.”

“He is hidden there for safety,” the man told him.

“He is studying dialectics. Thy Pasionaria has been there. So have Lister and Modesto and others. The one with the rare name told me.”

“That they should go to study and return to aid us,” Joaquín said.

“That they should aid us now,” another man said. “That all the cruts of Russian sucking swindlers should aid us now.” He fired and said, “Me cago en tal; I missed him again.”

“Save thy cartridges and do not talk so much or thou wilt be very thirsty,” Sordo said. “There is no water on this hill.”

“Take this,” the man said and rolling on his side he pulled a wineskin that he wore slung from his shoulder over his head and handed it to Sordo. “Wash thy mouth out, old one. Thou must have much thirst with thy wounds.”

“Let all take it,” Sordo said.

“Then I will have some first,” the owner said and squirted a long stream into his mouth before he handed the leather bottle around.

“Sordo, when thinkest thou the planes will come?” the man with his chin in the dirt asked.

“Any time,” said Sordo. “They should have come before.”

“Do you think these sons of the great whore will attack again?”

“Only if the planes do not come.”

He did not think there was any need to speak about the mortar. They would know it soon enough when the mortar came.

“God knows they’ve enough planes with what we saw yesterday.”

“Too many,” Sordo said.

His head hurt very much and his arm was stiffening so that the pain of moving it was almost unbearable. He looked up at the bright, high, blue early summer sky as he raised the leather wine bottle with his good arm. He was fifty-two years old and he was sure this was the last time he would see that sky.

He was not at all afraid of dying but he was angry at being trapped on this hill which was only utilizable as a place to die. If we could have gotten clear, he thought. If we could have made them come up the long valley or if we could have broken loose across the road it would have been all right. But this chancre of a hill. We must use it as well as we can and we have used it very well so far.

If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die on it would not have cheered him any for, in the moment he was passing through, men are not impressed by what has happened to other men in similar circumstances any more than a widow of one day is helped by the knowledge that other loved husbands have died. Whether one has fear of it or not, one’s death is difficult to accept. Sordo had accepted it but there was no sweetness in its acceptance even at fifty-two, with three wounds and him surrounded on a hill.

He joked about it to himself but he looked at the sky and at the far mountains and he swallowed the wine and he did not want it. If one must die, he thought, and clearly one must, I can die. But I hate it.

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

Sordo passed the wine bottle back and nodded his head in thanks. He leaned forward and patted the dead horse on the shoulder where the muzzle of the automatic rifle had burned the hide. He could still smell the burnt hair. He thought how he had held the horse there, trembling, with the fire around them, whispering and cracking, over and around them like a curtain, and had carefully shot him just at the intersection of the cross-lines between the two eyes and the ears. Then as the horse pitched down he had dropped down behind his warm, wet back to get the gun to going as they came up the hill.

“Eras mucho caballo,” he said, meaning, “Thou wert plenty of horse.”

El Sordo lay now on his good side and looked up at the sky. He was lying on a heap of empty cartridge hulls but his head was protected by the rock and his body lay in the lee of the horse. His wounds had stiffened badly and he had much pain and he felt too tired to move.

“What passes with thee, old one?” the man next to him asked.

“Nothing. I am taking a little rest.”

“Sleep,” the other said. “They will wake us when they come.”

Just then some one shouted from down the slope.

“Listen, bandits!” the voice came from behind the rocks where the closest automatic rifle was placed. “Surrender now before the planes blow you to pieces.”

“What is it he says?” Sordo asked.

Joaquín told him. Sordo rolled to one side and pulled himself up so that he was crouched behind the gun again.

“Maybe the planes aren’t coming,” he said. “Don’t answer them and do not fire. Maybe we can get them to attack again.”

“If we should insult them a little?” the man who had spoken to Joaquín about La Pasionaria’s son in Russia asked.

“No,” Sordo said. “Give me thy big pistol. Who has a big pistol?”

“Here.”

“Give it to me.” Crouched on his knees he took the big 9 mm. Star and fired one shot into the ground beside the dead horse, waited, then fired again four times at irregular intervals. Then he waited while he counted sixty and then fired a final shot directly into the body of the dead horse. He grinned and handed back the pistol.

“Reload it,” he whispered, “and that every one should keep his mouth shut and no one shoot.”

“Bandidos!” the voice shouted from behind the rocks.

No one spoke on the hill.

“Bandidos! Surrender now before we blow thee to little pieces.”

“They’re biting,” Sordo whispered happily.

As he watched, a man showed his head over the top of the rocks. There was no shot from the hilltop and the head went down again. El Sordo waited, watching, but nothing more happened. He turned his head and looked at the others who were all watching down their sectors of the slope. As he looked at them the others shook their heads.

“Let no one move,” he whispered.

“Sons of the great whore,” the voice came now from behind the rocks again.

“Red swine. Mother rapers. Eaters of the milk of thy fathers.”

Sordo grinned. He could just hear the bellowed insults by turning his good ear. This is better than the aspirin, he thought. How many will we get? Can they be that foolish?

The voice had stopped again and for three minutes they heard nothing and saw no movement. Then the sniper behind the boulder a hundred yards down the slope exposed himself and fired. The bullet hit a rock and ricocheted with a sharp whine. Then Sordo saw a man, bent double, run from the shelter of the rocks where the automatic rifle was across the open ground to the big boulder behind which the sniper was hidden. He almost dove behind the boulder.

Sordo looked around. They signalled to him that there was no movement on the other slopes. El Sordo grinned happily and shook his head. This is ten times better than the aspirin, he thought, and he waited, as happy as only a hunter can be happy.

Below on the slope the man who had run from the pile of stones to the shelter of the boulder was speaking to the sniper.

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know,” the sniper said.

“It would be logical,” the man, who was the officer in command, said. “They are surrounded. They have nothing to expect but to die.”

The sniper said nothing.

“What do you think?” the officer asked.

“Nothing,” the sniper said.

“Have you seen any movement since the shots?”

“None at all.”

The officer looked at his wrist watch. It was ten minutes to three o’clock.

“The planes should have come an hour ago,” he said. Just then another officer flopped in behind the boulder. The sniper moved over to make room for him.

“Thou, Paco,” the first officer said. “How does it seem to thee?”

The second officer was breathing heavily from his sprint up and across the hillside from the automatic rifle position.

“For me it is a trick,” he said.

“But if it is not? What a ridicule we make waiting here and laying siege to dead men.”

“We have done something worse than ridiculous already,” the second officer said. “Look at that slope.”

He looked up the slope to where the dead were scattered close to the top. From where he looked the line of the hilltop showed the scattered rocks, the belly, projecting legs, shod hooves jutting out, of Sordo’s horse, and the fresh dirt thrown up by the digging.

“What about the mortars?” asked the second officer.

“They should be here in an hour. If not before.”

“Then wait for them. There has been enough stupidity already.”

“Bandidos!” the first officer shouted suddenly, getting to his feet and putting his head well up above the boulder so that the crest of the hill looked much closer as he stood upright. “Red swine! Cowards!”

The second officer looked at the sniper and shook his head. The sniper looked away but his lips tightened.

The first officer stood there, his head all clear of the rock and with his hand on his pistol butt. He cursed and vilified the hilltop. Nothing happened. Then he stepped clear of the boulder and stood there looking up the hill.

“Fire, cowards, if you are alive,” he shouted. “Fire on one who has no fear of any Red that ever came out of the belly of the great whore.”

This last was quite a long sentence to shout and the officer’s face was red and congested as he finished.

The second officer, who was a thin sunburned man with quiet eyes, a thin, long-lipped mouth and a stubble of beard over his hollow cheeks, shook his head again. It was this officer who was shouting who had ordered the first assault. The young lieutenant who was dead up the slope had been the best friend of this other lieutenant who was named Paco Berrendo and who was listening to the shouting of the captain, who was obviously in a state of exaltation.

“Those are the swine who shot my sister and my mother,” the captain said. He had a red face and a blond, British-looking moustache and there was something wrong about his eyes. They were a light blue and the lashes were light, too. As you looked at them they seemed to focus slowly. Then “Reds,” he shouted. “Cowards!” and commenced cursing again.

He stood absolutely clear now and, sighting carefully, fired his pistol at the only target that the hilltop presented: the dead horse that had belonged to Sordo. The bullet threw up a puff of dirt fifteen yards below the horse. The captain fired again. The bullet hit a rock and sung off.

The captain stood there looking at the hilltop. The Lieutenant Berrendo was looking at the body of the other lieutenant just below the summit. The sniper was looking at the ground under his eyes. Then he looked up at the captain.

“There is no one alive up there,” the captain said. “Thou,” he said to the sniper, “go up there and see.”

The sniper looked down. He said nothing.

“Don’t you hear me?” the captain shouted at him.

“Yes, my captain,” the sniper said, not looking at him.

“Then get up and go.” The captain still had his pistol out. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes, my captain.”

“Why don’t you go, then?”

“I don’t want to, my captain.”

“You don’t want to?” The captain pushed the pistol against the small of the man’s back. “You don’t want to?”

“I am afraid, my captain,” the soldier said with dignity.

Lieutenant Berrendo, watching the captain’s face and his odd eyes, thought he was going to shoot the man then.

“Captain Mora,” he said.

“Lieutenant Berrendo?”

“It is possible the soldier is right.”

“That he is right to say he is afraid? That he is right to say he does not want to obey an order?”

“No. That he is right that it is a trick.”

“They are all dead,” the captain said. “Don’t you hear me say they are all dead?’

“You mean our comrades on the slope?” Berrendo asked him. “I agree with you.”

“Paco,” the captain said, “don’t be a fool. Do you think you are the only one who cared for Julián? I tell you the Reds are dead. Look!”

He stood up, then put both hands on top of the boulder and pulled himself up, kneeing-up awkwardly, then getting on his feet.

“Shoot,” he shouted, standing on the gray granite boulder and waved both his arms. “Shoot me! Kill me!”

On the hilltop El Sordo lay behind the dead horse and grinned.

What a people, he thought. He laughed, trying to hold it in because the shaking hurt his arm.

“Reds,” came the shout from below. “Red canaille. Shoot me! Kill me!”

Sordo, his chest shaking, barely peeped past the horse’s crupper and saw the captain on top of the boulder waving his arms. Another officer stood by the boulder. The sniper was standing at the other side. Sordo kept his eye where it was and shook his head happily.

“Shoot me,” he said softly to himself. “Kill me!” Then his shoulders shook again. The laughing hurt his arm and each time he laughed his head felt as though it would burst. But the laughter shook him again like a spasm.

Captain Mora got down from the boulder.

“Now do you believe me, Paco?” he questioned Lieutenant Berrendo.

“No,” said Lieutenant Berrendo.

“Cojones!” the captain said. “Here there is nothing but idiots and cowards.”

The sniper had gotten carefully behind the boulder again and Lieutenant Berrendo was squatting beside him.

The captain, standing in the open beside the boulder, commenced to shout filth at the hilltop. There is no language so filthy as Spanish. There are words for all the vile words in English and there are other words and expressions that are used only in countries where blasphemy keeps pace with the austerity of religion. Lieutenant Berrendo was a very devout Catholic. So was the sniper. They were Carlists from Navarra and while both of them cursed and blasphemed when they were angry they regarded it as a sin which they regularly confessed.

As they crouched now behind the boulder watching the captain and listening to what he was shouting, they both disassociated themselves from him and what he was saying. They did not want to have that sort of talk on their consciences on a day in which they might die. Talking thus will not bring luck, the sniper thought. Speaking thus of the Virgen is bad luck. This one speaks worse than the Reds.

Julián is dead, Lieutenant Berrendo was thinking. Dead there on the slope on such a day as this is. And this foul mouth stands there bringing more ill fortune with his blasphemies.

Now the captain stopped shouting and turned to Lieutenant Berrendo. His eyes looked stranger than ever.

“Paco,” he said, happily, “you and I will go up there.”

“Not me.”

“What?” The captain had his pistol out again.

I hate these pistol brandishers, Berrendo was thinking. They cannot give an order without jerking a gun out. They probably pull out their pistols when they go to the toilet and order the move they will make.

“I will go if you order me to. But under protest,” Lieutenant Berrendo told the captain.

“Then I will go alone,” the captain said. “The smell of cowardice is too strong here.”

Holding his pistol in his right hand, he strode steadily up the slope. Berrendo and the sniper watched him. He was making no attempt to take any cover and he was looking straight ahead of him at the rocks, the dead horse, and the fresh-dug dirt of the hilltop.

El Sordo lay behind the horse at the corner of the rock, watching the captain come striding up the hill.

Only one, he thought. We get only one. But from his manner of speaking he is caza mayor. Look at him walking. Look what an animal. Look at him stride forward. This one is for me. This one I take with me on the trip. This one coming now makes the same voyage I do. Come on, Comrade Voyager. Come striding. Come right along. Come along to meet it. Come on. Keep on walking. Don’t slow up. Come right along. Come as thou art coming. Don’t stop and look at those. That’s right. Don’t even look down. Keep on coming with your eyes forward. Look, he has a moustache. What do you think of that? He runs to a moustache, the Comrade Voyager. He is a captain. Look at his sleeves. I said he was caza mayor. He has the face of an Inglés. Look. With a red face and blond hair and blue eyes. With no cap on and his moustache is yellow. With blue eyes. With pale blue eyes. With pale blue eyes with something wrong with them. With pale blue eyes that don’t focus. Close enough. Too close. Yes, Comrade Voyager. Take it, Comrade Voyager.

He squeezed the trigger of the automatic rifle gently and it pounded back three times against his shoulder with the slippery jolt the recoil of a tripoded automatic weapon gives.

The captain lay on his face on the hillside. His left arm was under him. His right arm that had held the pistol was stretched forward of his head. From all down the slope they were firing on the hill crest again.

Crouched behind the boulder, thinking that now he would have to sprint across that open space under fire, Lieutenant Berrendo heard the deep hoarse voice of Sordo from the hilltop.

“Bandidos!” the voice came. “Bandidos! Shoot me! Kill me!”

On the top of the hill El Sordo lay behind the automatic rifle laughing so that his chest ached, so that he thought the top of his head would burst.

“Bandidos,” he shouted again happily. “Kill me, bandidos!” Then he shook his head happily. We have lots of company for the Voyage, he thought.

He was going to try for the other officer with the automatic rifle when he would leave the shelter of the boulder. Sooner or later he would have to leave it. Sordo knew that he could never command from there and he thought he had a very good chance to get him.

Just then the others on the hill heard the first sound of the coming of the planes.

El Sordo did not hear them. He was covering the down-slope edge of the boulder with his automatic rifle and he was thinking: when I see him he will be running already and I will miss him if I am not careful. I could shoot behind him all across that stretch. I should swing the gun with him and ahead of him. Or let him start and then get on him and ahead of him. I will try to pick him up there at the edge of the rock and swing just ahead of him. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder and he turned and saw the gray, fear-drained face of Joaquín and he looked where the boy was pointing and saw the three planes coming.

At this moment Lieutenant Berrendo broke from behind the boulder and, with his head bent and his legs plunging, ran down and across the slope to the shelter of the rocks where the automatic rifle was placed.

Watching the planes, Sordo never saw him go.

“Help me to pull this out,” he said to Joaquín and the boy dragged the automatic rifle clear from between the horse and the rock.

The planes were coming on steadily. They were in echelon and each second they grew larger and their noise was greater.

“Lie on your backs to fire at them,” Sordo said. “Fire ahead of them as they come.”

He was watching them all the time. “Cabrones! Hijos de puta!” he said rapidly.

“Ignacio!” he said. “Put the gun on the shoulder of the boy. Thou!” to Joaquín, “Sit there and do not move. Crouch over. More. No. More.”

He lay back and sighted with the automatic rifle as the planes came on steadily.

“Thou, Ignacio, hold me the three legs of that tripod.” They were dangling down the boy’s back and the muzzle of the gun was shaking from the jerking of his body that Joaquín could not control as he crouched with bent head hearing the droning roar of their coming.

Lying flat on his belly and looking up into the sky watching them come, Ignacio gathered the legs of the tripod into his two hands and steadied the gun.

“Keep thy head down,” he said to Joaquín. “Keep thy head forward.”

“Pasionaria says’Better to die on thy—’” Joaquín was saying to himself as the drone came nearer them. Then he shifted suddenly into “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among women and Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Holy Mary, Mother of God,” he started, then he remembered quickly as the roar came now unbearably and started an act of contrition racing in it, “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee who art worthy of all my love—”

Then there were the hammering explosions past his ears and the gun barrel hot against his shoulder. It was hammering now again and his ears were deafened by the muzzle blast. Ignacio was pulling down hard on the tripod and the barrel was burning his back. It was hammering now in the roar and he could not remember the act of contrition.

All he could remember was at the hour of our death. Amen. At the hour of our death. Amen. At the hour. At the hour. Amen. The others all were firing. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Then, through the hammering of the gun, there was the whistle of the air splitting apart and then in the red black roar the earth rolled under his knees and then waved up to hit him in the face and then dirt and bits of rock were falling all over and Ignacio was lying on him and the gun was lying on him. But he was not dead because the whistle came again and the earth rolled under him with the roar. Then it came again and the earth lurched under his belly and one side of the hilltop rose into the air and then fell slowly over them where they lay.

The planes came back three times and bombed the hilltop but no one on the hilltop knew it. Then the planes machine-gunned the hilltop and went away. As they dove on the hill for the last time with their machine guns hammering, the first plane pulled up and winged over and then each plane did the same and they moved from echelon to V-formation and went away into the sky in the direction of Segovia.

Keeping a heavy fire on the hilltop, Lieutenant Berrendo pushed a patrol up to one of the bomb craters from where they could throw grenades onto the crest. He was taking no chances of any one being alive and waiting for them in the mess that was up there and he threw four grenades into the confusion of dead horses, broken and split rocks, and torn yellow-stained explosive-stinking earth before he climbed out of the bomb crater and walked over to have a look.

No one was alive on the hilltop except the boy Joaquín, who was unconscious under the dead body of Ignacio. Joaquín was bleeding from the nose and from the ears. He had known nothing and had no feeling since he had suddenly been in the very heart of the thunder and the breath had been wrenched from his body when the one bomb struck so close and Lieutenant Berrendo made the sign of the cross and then shot him in the back of the head, as quickly and as gently, if such an abrupt movement can be gentle, as Sordo had shot the wounded horse.

Lieutenant Berrendo stood on the hilltop and looked down the slope at his own dead and then across the country seeing where they had galloped before Sordo had turned at bay here. He noticed all the dispositions that had been made of the troops and then he ordered the dead men’s horses to be brought up and the bodies tied across the saddles so that they might be packed in to La Granja.

“Take that one, too,” he said. “The one with his hands on the automatic rifle. That should be Sordo. He is the oldest and it was he with the gun. No. Cut the head off and wrap it in a poncho.” He considered a minute. “You might as well take all the heads. And of the others below on the slope and where we first found them. Collect the rifles and pistols and pack that gun on a horse.”

Then he walked down to where the lieutenant lay who had been killed in the first assault. He looked down at him but did not touch him.

“Qué cosa más mala es la guerra,” he said to himself, which meant, “What a bad thing war is.”

Then he made the sign of the cross again and as he walked down the hill he said five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys for the repose of the soul of his dead comrade. He did not wish to stay to see his orders being carried out.

Chapter 28

After the planes went away Robert Jordan and Primitivo heard the firing start and his heart seemed to start again with it. A cloud of smoke drifted over the last ridge that he could see in the high country and the planes were three steadily receding specks in the sky.

They’ve probably bombed hell out of their own cavalry and never touched Sordo and Company, Robert Jordan said to himself. The damned planes scare you to death but they don’t kill you.

“The combat goes on,” Primitivo said, listening to the heavy firing. He had winced at each bomb thud and now he licked his dry lips.

“Why not?” Robert Jordan said. “Those things never kill anybody.”

Then the firing stopped absolutely and he did not hear another shot. Lieutenant Berrendo’s pistol shot did not carry that far.

When the firing first stopped it did not affect him. Then as the quiet kept on a hollow feeling came in his chest. Then he heard the grenades burst and for a moment his heart rose. Then everything was quiet again and the quiet kept on and he knew that it was over.

Maria came up from the camp with a tin bucket of stewed hare with mushrooms sunken in the rich gravy and a sack with bread, a leather wine bottle, four tin plates, two cups and four spoons. She stopped at the gun and ladled out two plates for Agustín and Eladio, who had replaced Anselmo at the gun, and gave them bread and unscrewed the horn tip of the wine bottle and poured two cups of wine.

Robert Jordan watched her climbing lithely up to his lookout post, the sack over her shoulder, the bucket in one hand, her cropped head bright in the sun. He climbed down and took the bucket and helped her up the last boulder.

“What did the aviation do?” she asked, her eyes frightened.

“Bombed Sordo.”

He had the bucket open and was ladling out stew onto a plate.

“Are they still fighting?”

“No. It is over.”

“Oh,” she said and bit her lip and looked out across the country.

“I have no appetite,” Primitivo said.

“Eat anyway,” Robert Jordan told him.

“I could not swallow food.”

“Take a drink of this, man,” Robert Jordan said and handed him the wine bottle. “Then eat.”

“This of Sordo has taken away desire,” Primitivo said. “Eat, thou. I have no desire.”

Maria went over to him and put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

“Eat, old one,” she said. “Each one should take care of his strength.”

Primitivo turned away from her. He took the wine bottle and tipping his head back swallowed steadily while he squirted a jet of wine into the back of his mouth. Then he filled his plate from the bucket and commenced to eat.

Robert Jordan looked at Maria and shook his head. She sat down by him and put her arm around his shoulder. Each knew how the other felt and they sat there and Robert Jordan ate the stew, taking time to appreciate the mushrooms completely, and he drank the wine and they said nothing.

“You may stay here, guapa, if you want,” he said after a while when the food was all eaten.

“Nay,” she said. “I must go to Pilar.”

“It is all right to stay here. I do not think that anything will happen now.”

“Nay. I must go to Pilar. She is giving me instruction.”

“What does she give thee?”

“Instruction.” She smiled at him and then kissed him. “Did you never hear of religious instruction?” She blushed. “It is something like that.” She blushed again. “But different.”

“Go to thy instruction,” he said and patted her on the head. She smiled at him again, then said to Primitivo, “Do you want anything from below?”

“No, daughter,” he said. They both saw that he was still not yet recovered.

“Salud, old one,” she said to him.

“Listen,” Primitivo said. “I have no fear to die but to leave them alone thus—” his voice broke.

“There was no choice,” Robert Jordan told him.

“I know. But all the same.”

“There was no choice,” Robert Jordan repeated. “And now it is better not to speak of it.”

“Yes. But there alone with no aid from us—”

“Much better not to speak of it,” Robert Jordan said. “And thou, guapa, get thee to thy instruction.”

He watched her climb down through the rocks. Then he sat there for a long time thinking and watching the high country.

Primitivo spoke to him but he did not answer. It was hot in the sun but he did not notice the heat while he sat watching the hill slopes and the long patches of pine trees that stretched up the highest slope. An hour passed and the sun was far to his left now when he saw them coming over the crest of the slope and he picked up his glasses.

The horses showed small and minute as the first two riders came into sight on the long green slope of the high hill. Then there were four more horsemen coming down, spread out across the wide hill and then through his glasses he saw the double column of men and horses ride into the sharp clarity of his vision. As he watched them he felt sweat come from his armpits and run down his flanks. One man rode at the head of the column. Then came more horsemen. Then came the riderless horses with their burdens tied across the saddles. Then there were two riders. Then came the wounded with men walking by them as they rode. Then came more cavalry to close the column.

Robert Jordan watched them ride down the slope and out of sight into the timber. He could not see at that distance the load one saddle bore of a long rolled poncho tied at each end and at intervals so that it bulged between each lashing as a pod bulges with peas. This was tied across the saddle and at each end it was lashed to the stirrup leathers. Alongside this on the top of the saddle the automatic rifle Sordo had served was lashed arrogantly.

Lieutenant Berrendo, who was riding at the head of the column, his flankers out, his point pushed well forward, felt no arrogance. He felt only the hollowness that comes after action. He was thinking: taking the heads is barbarous. But proof and identification is necessary. I will have trouble enough about this as it is and who knows? This of the heads may appeal to them. There are those of them who like such things. It is possible they will send them all to Burgos. It is a barbarous business. The planes were muchos. Much. Much. But we could have done it all, and almost without losses, with a Stokes mortar. Two mules to carry the shells and a mule with a mortar on each side of the pack saddle. What an army we would be then! With the fire power of all these automatic weapons. And another mule. No, two mules to carry ammunition. Leave it alone, he told himself. It is no longer cavalry. Leave it alone. You’re building yourself an army. Next you will want a mountain gun.

Then he thought of Julián, dead on the hill, dead now, tied across a horse there in the first troop, and as he rode down into the dark pine forest, leaving the sunlight behind him on the hill, riding now in the quiet dark of the forest, he started to say a prayer for him again.

“Hail, holy queen mother of mercy,” he started. “Our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we send up our sighs, mournings and weepings in this valley of tears—”

He went on with the prayer the horses’hooves soft on the fallen pine needles, the light coming through the tree trunks in patches as it comes through the columns of a cathedral, and as he prayed he looked ahead to see his flankers riding through the trees.

He rode out of the forest onto the yellow road that led into La Granja and the horses’hooves raised a dust that hung over them as they rode. It powdered the dead who were tied face down across the saddles and the wounded, and those who walked beside them, were in thick dust.

It was here that Anselmo saw them ride past in their dust.

He counted the dead and the wounded and he recognized Sordo’s automatic rifle. He did not know what the poncho-wrapped bundle was which flapped against the led horse’s flanks as the stirrup leathers swung but when, on his way home, he came in the dark onto the hill where Sordo had fought, he knew at once what the long poncho roll contained. In the dark he could not tell who had been up on the hill. But he counted those that lay there and then made off across the hills for Pablo’s camp.

Walking alone in the dark, with a fear like a freezing of his heart from the feeling the holes of the bomb craters had given him, from them and from what he had found on the hill, he put all thought of the next day out of his mind. He simply walked as fast as he could to bring the news. And as he walked he prayed for the souls of Sordo and of all his band. It was the first time he had prayed since the start of the movement.

“Most kind, most sweet, most clement Virgin,” he prayed.

But he could not keep from thinking of the next day finally. So he thought: I will do exactly as the Inglés says and as he says to do it. But let me be close to him, O Lord, and may his instructions be exact for I do not think that I could control myself under the bombardment of the planes. Help me, O Lord, tomorrow to comport myself as a man should in his last hours. Help me, O Lord, to understand clearly the needs of the day. Help me, O Lord, to dominate the movement of my legs that I should not run when the bad moment comes. Help me, O Lord, to comport myself as a man tomorrow in the day of battle. Since I have asked this aid of thee, please grant it, knowing I would not ask it if it were not serious, and I will ask nothing more of thee again.

Walking in the dark alone he felt much better from having prayed and he was sure, now, that he would comport himself well. Walking now down from the high country, he went back to praying for the people of Sordo and in a short time he had reached the upper post where Fernando challenged him.

“It is I,” he answered, “Anselmo.”

“Good,” Fernando said.

“You know of this of Sordo, old one?” Anselmo asked Fernando, the two of them standing at the entrance of the big rocks in the dark.

“Why not?” Fernando said. “Pablo has told us.”

“He was up there?”

“Why not?” Fernando said stolidly. “He visited the hill as soon as the cavalry left.”

“He told you—”

“He told us all,” Fernando said. “What barbarians these fascists are! We must do away with all such barbarians in Spain.” He stopped, then said bitterly, “In them is lacking all conception of dignity.”

Anselmo grinned in the dark. An hour ago he could not have imagined that he would ever smile again. What a marvel, that Fernando, he thought.

“Yes,” he said to Fernando. “We must teach them. We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity.”

“Exactly,” Fernando said. “I am glad that you agree.”

Anselmo left him standing there alone with his dignity and went on down to the cave.

Chapter 29

Anselmo found Robert Jordan sitting at the plank table inside the cave with Pablo opposite him. They had a bowl poured full of wine between them and each had a cup of wine on the table. Robert Jordan had his notebook out and he was holding a pencil. Pilar and Maria were in the back of the cave out of sight. There was no way for Anselmo to know that the woman was keeping the girl back there to keep her from hearing the conversation and he thought that it was odd that Pilar was not at the table.

Robert Jordan looked up as Anselmo came in under the blanket that hung over the opening. Pablo stared straight at the table. His eyes were focused on the wine bowl but he was not seeing it.

“I come from above,” Anselmo said to Robert Jordan.

“Pablo has told us,” Robert Jordan said.

“There were six dead on the hill and they had taken the heads,” Anselmo said. “I was there in the dark.”

Robert Jordan nodded. Pablo sat there looking at the wine bowl and saying nothing. There was no expression on his face and his small pig-eyes were looking at the wine bowl as though he had never seen one before.

“Sit down,” Robert Jordan said to Anselmo.

The old man sat down at the table on one of the hide-covered stools and Robert Jordan reached under the table and brought up the pinch-bottle of whiskey that had been the gift of Sordo. It was about half-full. Robert Jordan reached down the table for a cup and poured a drink of whiskey into it and shoved it along the table to Anselmo.

“Drink that, old one,” he said.

Pablo looked from the wine bowl to Anselmo’s face as he drank and then he looked back at the wine bowl.

As Anselmo swallowed the whiskey he felt a burning in his nose, his eyes and his mouth, and then a happy, comforting warmth in his stomach. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Then he looked at Robert Jordan and said, “Can I have another?”

“Why not?” Robert Jordan said and poured another drink from the bottle and handed it this time instead of pushing it.

This time there was not the burning when he swallowed but the warm comfort doubled. It was as good a thing for his spirit as a saline injection is for a man who has suffered a great hemorrhage.

The old man looked toward the bottle again.

“The rest is for tomorrow,” Robert Jordan said. “What passed on the road, old one?”

“There was much movement,” Anselmo said. “I have it all noted down as you showed me. I have one watching for me and noting now. Later I will go for her report.”

“Did you see anti-tank guns? Those on rubber tires with the long barrels?”

“Yes,” Anselmo said. “There were four camions which passed on the road. In each of them there was such a gun with pine branches spread across the barrels. In the trucks rode six men with each gun.”

“Four guns, you say?” Robert Jordan asked him.

“Four,” Anselmo said. He did not look at his papers.

“Tell me what else went up the road.”

While Robert Jordan noted Anselmo told him everything he had seen move past him on the road. He told it from the beginning and in order with the wonderful memory of those who cannot read or write, and twice, while he was talking, Pablo reached out for more wine from the bowl.

“There was also the cavalry which entered La Granja from the high country where El Sordo fought,” Anselmo went on.

Then he told the number of the wounded he had seen and the number of the dead across the saddles.

“There was a bundle packed across one saddle that I did not understand,” he said. “But now I know it was the heads.” He went on without pausing. “It was a squadron of cavalry. They had only one officer left. He was not the one who was here in the early morning when you were by the gun. He must have been one of the dead. Two of the dead were officers by their sleeves. They were lashed face down over the saddles, their arms hanging. Also they had the máquina of El Sordo tied to the saddle that bore the heads. The barrel was bent. That is all,” he finished.

“It is enough,” Robert Jordan said and dipped his cup into the wine bowl. “Who beside you has been through the lines to the side of the Republic?”

“Andrés and Eladio.”

“Which is the better of those two?”

“Andrés.”

“How long would it take him to get to Navacerrada from here?”

“Carrying no pack and taking his precautions, in three hours with luck. We came by a longer, safer route because of the material.”

“He can surely make it?”

“No sé, there is no such thing as surely.”

“Not for thee either?”

“Nay.”

That decides that, Robert Jordan thought to himself. If he had said that he could make it surely, surely I would have sent him.

“Andrés can get there as well as thee?”

“As well or better. He is younger.”

“But this must absolutely get there.”

“If nothing happens he will get there. If anything happens it could happen to any one.”

“I will write a dispatch and send it by him,” Robert Jordan said. “I will explain to him where he can find the General. He will be at the Estado Mayor of the Division.”

“He will not understand all this of divisions and all,” Anselmo said. “Always has it confused me. He should have the name of the General and where he can be found.”

“But it is at the Estado Mayor of the Division that he will be found.”

“But is that not a place?”

“Certainly it is a place, old one,” Robert Jordan explained patiently. “But it is a place the General will have selected. It is where he will make his headquarters for the battle.”

“Where is it then?” Anselmo was tired and the tiredness was making him stupid. Also words like Brigades, Divisions, Army Corps confused him. First there had been columns, then there were regiments, then there were brigades. Now there were brigades and divisions, both. He did not understand. A place was a place.

“Take it slowly, old one,” Robert Jordan said. He knew that if he could not make Anselmo understand he could never explain it clearly to Andrés either. “The Estado Mayor of the Division is a place the General will have picked to set up his organization to command. He commands a division, which is two brigades. I do not know where it is because I was not there when it was picked. It will probably be a cave or dugout, a refuge, and wires will run to it. Andrés must ask for the General and for the Estado Mayor of the Division. He must give this to the General or to the Chief of his Estado Mayor or to another whose name I will write. One of them will surely be there even if the others are out inspecting the preparations for the attack. Do you understand now?”

“Yes.”

“Then get Andrés and I will write it now and seal it with this seal.” He showed him the small, round, wooden-backed rubber stamp with the seal of the S. I. M. and the round, tin-covered inking pad no bigger than a fifty-cent piece he carried in his pocket. “That seal they will honor. Get Andrés now and I will explain to him. He must go quickly but first he must understand.”

“He will understand if I do. But you must make it very clear. This of staffs and divisions is a mystery to me. Always have I gone to such things as definite places such as a house. In Navacerrada it is in the old hotel where the place of command is. In Guadarrama it is in a house with a garden.”

“With this General,” Robert Jordan said, “it will be some place very close to the lines. It will be underground to protect from the planes. Andrés will find it easily by asking, if he knows what to ask for. He will only need to show what I have written. But fetch him now for this should get there quickly.”

Anselmo went out, ducking under the hanging blanket. Robert Jordan commenced writing in his notebook.

“Listen, Inglés,” Pablo said, still looking at the wine bowl.

“I am writing,” Robert Jordan said without looking up.

“Listen, Inglés,” Pablo spoke directly to the wine bowl. “There is no need to be disheartened in this. Without Sordo we have plenty of people to take the posts and blow thy bridge.”

“Good,” Robert Jordan said without stopping writing.

“Plenty,” Pablo said. “I have admired thy judgment much today, Inglés,” Pablo told the wine bowl. “I think thou hast much picardia. That thou art smarter than I am. I have confidence in thee.”

Concentrating on his report to Golz, trying to put it in the fewest words and still make it absolutely convincing, trying to put it so the attack would be cancelled, absolutely, yet convince them he wasn’t trying to have it called off because of any fears he might have about the danger of his own mission, but wished only to put them in possession of all the facts, Robert Jordan was hardly half listening.

“Inglés,” Pablo said.

“I am writing,” Robert Jordan told him without looking up.

I probably should send two copies, he thought. But if I do we will not have enough people to blow it if I have to blow it. What do I know about why this attack is made? Maybe it is only a holding attack. Maybe they want to draw those troops from somewhere else. Perhaps they make it to draw those planes from the North. Maybe that is what it is about. Perhaps it is not expected to succeed. What do I know about it? This is my report to Golz. I do not blow the bridge until the attack starts. My orders are clear and if the attack is called off I blow nothing. But I’ve got to keep enough people here for the bare minimum necessary to carry the orders out.

“What did you say?” he asked Pablo.

“That I have confidence, Inglés.” Pablo was still addressing the wine bowl.

Man, I wish I had, Robert Jordan thought. He went on writing.

Chapter 30

So now everything had been done that there was to do that night. All orders had been given. Every one knew exactly what he was to do in the morning. Andrés had been gone three hours. Either it would come now with the coming of the daylight or it would not come. I believe that it will come, Robert Jordan told himself, walking back down from the upper post where he had gone to speak to Primitivo.

Golz makes the attack but he has not the power to cancel it. Permission to cancel it will have to come from Madrid. The chances are they won’t be able to wake anybody up there and if they do wake up they will be too sleepy to think. I should have gotten word to Golz sooner of the preparations they have made to meet the attack, but how could I send word about something until it happened? They did not move up that stuff until just at dark. They did not want to have any movement on the road spotted by planes. But what about all their planes? What about those fascist planes?

Surely our people must have been warned by them. But perhaps the fascists were faking for another offensive down through Guadalajara with them. There were supposed to be Italian troops concentrated in Soria, and at Siguenza again besides those operating in the North. They haven’t enough troops or material to run two major offensives at the same time though. That is impossible; so it must be just a bluff.

But we know how many troops the Italians have landed all last month and the month before at Cádiz. It is always possible they will try again at Guadalajara, not stupidly as before, but with three main fingers coming down to broaden it out and carry it along the railway to the west of the plateau. There was a way that they could do it all right. Hans had shown him. They made many mistakes the first time. The whole conception was unsound. They had not used any of the same troops in the Arganda offensive against the Madrid-Valencia road that they used at Guadalajara. Why had they not made those same drives simultaneously? Why? Why? When would we know why?

Yet we had stopped them both times with the very same troops. We never could have stopped them if they had pulled both drives at once. Don’t worry, he told himself. Look at the miracles that have happened before this. Either you will have to blow that bridge in the morning or you will not have to. But do not start deceiving yourself into thinking you won’t have to blow it. You will blow it one day or you will blow it another. Or if it is not this bridge it will be some other bridge. It is not you who decides what shall be done. You follow orders. Follow them and do not try to think beyond them.

The orders on this are very clear. Too very clear. But you must not worry nor must you be frightened. For if you allow yourself the luxury of normal fear that fear will infect those who must work with you.

But that heads business was quite a thing all the same, he told himself. And the old man running onto them on the hilltop alone. How would you have liked to run onto them like that? That impressed you, didn’t it? Yes, that impressed you, Jordan. You have been quite impressed more than once today. But you have behaved O.K. So far you have behaved all right.

You do very well for an instructor in Spanish at the University of Montana, he joked at himself. You do all right for that. But do not start to thinking that you are anything very special. You haven’t gotten very far in this business. Just remember Durán, who never had any military training and who was a composer and lad about town before the movement and is now a damned good general commanding a brigade. It was all as simple and easy to learn and understand to Durán as chess to a child chess prodigy. You had read on and studied the art of war ever since you were a boy and your grandfather had started you on the American Civil War. Except that Grandfather always called it the War of the Rebellion. But compared with Durán you were like a good sound chess player against a boy prodigy. Old Durán. It would be good to see Durán again. He would see him at Gaylord’s after this was over. Yes. After this was over. See how well he was behaving?

I’ll see him at Gaylord’s, he said to himself again, after this is over. Don’t kid yourself, he said. You do it all perfectly O.K. Cold. Without kidding yourself. You aren’t going to see Durán any more and it is of no importance. Don’t be that way either, he told himself. Don’t go in for any of those luxuries.

Nor for heroic resignation either. We do not want any citizens full of heroic resignation in these hills. Your grandfather fought four years in our Civil War and you are just finishing your first year in this war. You have a long time to go yet and you are very well fitted for the work. And now you have Maria, too. Why, you’ve got everything. You shouldn’t worry. What is a little brush between a guerilla band and a squadron of cavalry? That isn’t anything. What if they took the heads? Does that make any difference? None at all.

The Indians always took the scalps when Grandfather was at Fort Kearny after the war. Do you remember the cabinet in your father’s office with the arrowheads spread out on a shelf, and the eagle feathers of the war bonnets that hung on the wall, their plumes slanting, the smoked buckskin smell of the leggings and the shirts and the feel of the beaded moccasins? Do you remember the great stave of the buffalo bow that leaned in a corner of the cabinet and the two quivers of hunting and war arrows, and how the bundle of shafts felt when you closed your hand around them?

Remember something like that. Remember something concrete and practical. Remember Grandfather’s saber, bright and well oiled in its dented scabbard and Grandfather showed you how the blade had been thinned from the many times it had been to the grinder’s. Remember Grandfather’s Smith and Wesson. It was a single action, officer’s model.32 caliber and there was no trigger guard. It had the softest, sweetest trigger pull you had ever felt and it was always well oiled and the bore was clean although the finish was all worn off and the brown metal of the barrel and the cylinder was worn smooth from the leather of the holster. It was kept in the holster with a U.S. on the flap in a drawer in the cabinet with its cleaning equipment and two hundred rounds of cartridges. Their cardboard boxes were wrapped and tied neatly with waxed twine.

You could take the pistol out of the drawer and hold it. “Handle it freely,” was Grandfather’s expression. But you could not play with it because it was “a serious weapon.”

You asked Grandfather once if he had ever killed any one with it and he said, “Yes.”

Then you said, “When, Grandfather?” and he said, “In the War of the Rebellion and afterwards.”

You said, “Will you tell me about it, Grandfather?”

And he said, “I do not care to speak about it, Robert.”

Then after your father had shot himself with this pistol, and you had come home from school and they’d had the funeral, the coroner had returned it after the inquest saying, “Bob, I guess you might want to keep the gun. I’m supposed to hold it, but I know your dad set a lot of store by it because his dad packed it all through the War, besides out here when he first came out with the Cavalry, and it’s still a hell of a good gun. I had her out trying her this afternoon. She don’t throw much of a slug but you can hit things with her.”

He had put the gun back in the drawer in the cabinet where it belonged, but the next day he took it out and he had ridden up to the top of the high country above Red Lodge, with Chub, where they had built the road to Cooke City now over the pass and across the Bear Tooth plateau, and up there where the wind was thin and there was snow all summer on the hills they had stopped by the lake which was supposed to be eight hundred feet deep and was a deep green color, and Chub held the two horses and he climbed out on a rock and leaned over and saw his face in the still water, and saw himself holding the gun, and then he dropped it, holding it by the muzzle, and saw it go down making bubbles until it was just as big as a watch charm in that clear water, and then it was out of sight. Then he came back off the rock and when he swung up into the saddle he gave old Bess such a clout with the spurs she started to buck like an old rocking horse. He bucked her out along the shore Qf the lake and as soon as she was reasonable they went on back along the trail.

“I know why you did that with the old gun, Bob,” Chub said.

“Well, then we don’t have to talk about it,” he had said.

They never talked about it and that was the end of Grandfather’s side arms except for the saber. He still had the saber in his trunk with the rest of his things at Missoula.

I wonder what Grandfather would think of this situation, he thought. Grandfather was a hell of a good soldier, everybody said. They said if he had been with Custer that day he never would have let him be sucked in that way. How could he ever not have seen the smoke nor the dust of all those lodges down there in the draw along the Little Big Horn unless there must have been a heavy morning mist? But there wasn’t any mist.

I wish Grandfather were here instead of me. Well, maybe we will all be together by tomorrow night. If there should be any such damn fool business as a hereafter, and I’m sure there isn’t, he thought, I would certainly like to talk to him. Because there are a lot of things I would like to know. I have a right to ask him now because I have had to do the same sort of things myself. I don’t think he’d mind my asking now. I had no right to ask before. I understand him not telling me because he didn’t know me. But now I think that we would get along all right. I’d like to be able to talk to him now and get his advice. Hell, if I didn’t get advice I’d just like to talk to him. It’s a shame there is such a jump in time between ones like us.

Then, as he thought, he realized that if there was any such thing as ever meeting, both he and his grandfather would be acutely embarrassed by the presence of his father. Any one has a right to do it, he thought. But it isn’t a good thing to do. I understand it, but I do not approve of it. Lache was the word. But you do understand it? Sure, I understand it but. Yes, but. You have to be awfully occupied with yourself to do a thing like that.

Aw hell, I wish Grandfather was here, he thought. For about an hour anyway. Maybe he sent me what little I have through that other one that misused the gun. Maybe that is the only communication that we have. But, damn it. Truly damn it, but I wish the time-lag wasn’t so long so that I could have learned from him what the other one never had to teach me. But suppose the fear he had to go through and dominate and just get rid of finally in four years of that and then in the Indian fighting, although in that, mostly, there couldn’t have been so much fear, had made a cobarde out of the other one the way second generation bullfighters almost always are? Suppose that? And maybe the good juice only came through straight again after passing through that one?

I’ll never forget how sick it made me the first time I knew he was a cobarde. Go on, say it in English. Coward. It’s easier when you have it said and there is never any point in referring to a son of a bitch by some foreign term. He wasn’t any son of a bitch, though. He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have. Because if he wasn’t a coward he would have stood up to that woman and not let her bully him. I wonder what I would have been like if he had married a different woman? That’s something you’ll never know, he thought, and grinned. Maybe the bully in her helped to supply what was missing in the other. And you. Take it a little easy. Don’t get to referring to the good juice and such other things until you are through tomorrow. Don’t be snotty too soon. And then don’t be snotty at all. We’ll see what sort of juice you have tomorrow.

But he started thinking about Grandfather again.

“George Custer was not an intelligent leader of cavalry, Robert,” his grandfather had said. “He was not even an intelligent man.”

He remembered that when his grandfather said that he felt resentment that any one should speak against that figure in the buckskin shirt, the yellow curls blowing, that stood on that hill holding a service revolver as the Sioux closed in around him in the old Anheuser-Busch lithograph that hung on the poolroom wall in Red Lodge.

“He just had great ability to get himself in and out of trouble,” his grandfather went on, “and on the Little Big Horn he got into it but he couldn’t get out.

“Now Phil Sheridan was an intelligent man and so was Jeb Stuart. But John Mosby was the finest cavalry leader that ever lived.”

He had a letter in his things in the trunk at Missoula from General Phil Sheridan to old Killy-the-Horse Kilpatrick that said his grandfather was a finer leader of irregular cavalry than John Mosby.

I ought to tell Golz about my grandfather, he thought. He wouldn’t ever have heard of him though. He probably never even heard of John Mosby. The British all had heard of them though because they had to study our Civil War much more than people did on the Continent. Karkov said after this was over I could go to the Lenin Institute in Moscow if I wanted to. He said I could go to the military academy of the Red Army if I wanted to do that. I wonder what Grandfather would think of that? Grandfather, who never knowingly sat at table with a Democrat in his life.

Well, I don’t want to be a soldier, he thought. I know that. So that’s out. I just want us to win this war. I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else, he thought. That’s obviously untrue. Look at Napoleon and Wellington. You’re very stupid this evening, he thought.

Usually his mind was very good company and tonight it had been when he thought about his grandfather. Then thinking of his father had thrown him off. He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.

You better not think at all, he told himself. Soon you will be with Maria and you won’t have to think. That’s the best way now that everything is worked out. When you have been concentrating so hard on something you can’t stop and your brain gets to racing like a flywheel with the weight gone. You better just not think.

But just suppose, he thought. Just suppose that when the planes unload they smash those anti-tank guns and just blow hell out of the positions and the old tanks roll good up whatever hill it is for once and old Golz boots that bunch of drunks, clochards, bums, fanatics and heroes that make up the Quatorzieme Brigade ahead of him, and I know how good Durán’s people are in Golz’s other brigade, and we are in Segovia tomorrow night.

Yes. Just suppose, he said to himself. I’ll settle for La Granja, he told himself. But you are going to have to blow that bridge, he suddenly knew absolutely. There won’t be any calling off. Because the way you have just been supposing there for a minute is how the possibilities of that attack look to those who have ordered it. Yes, you will have to blow the bridge, he knew truly. Whatever happens to Andrés doesn’t matter.

Coming down the trail there in the dark, alone with the good feeling that everything that had to be done was over for the next four hours, and with the confidence that had come from thinking back to concrete things, the knowledge that he would surely have to blow the bridge came to him almost with comfort.

The uncertainty, the enlargement of the feeling of being uncertain, as when, through a misunderstanding of possible dates, one does not know whether the guests are really coming to a party, that had been with him ever since he had dispatched Andrés with the report to Golz, had all dropped from him now. He was sure now that the festival would not be cancelled. It’s much better to be sure, he thought. It’s always much better to be sure.

Chapter 31

So now they were in the robe again together and it was late in the last night. Maria lay close against him and he felt the long smoothness of her thighs against his and her breasts like two small hills that rise out of the long plain where there is a well, and the far country beyond the hills was the valley of her throat where his lips were. He lay very quiet and did not think and she stroked his head with her hand.

“Roberto,” Maria said very softly and kissed him. “I am ashamed. I do not wish to disappoint thee but there is a great soreness and much pain. I do not think I would be any good to thee.”

“There is always a great soreness and much pain,” he said. “Nay, rabbit. That is nothing. We will do nothing that makes pain.”

“It is not that. It is that I am not good to receive thee as I wish to.”

“That is of no importance. That is a passing thing. We are together when we lie together.”

“Yes, but I am ashamed. I think it was from when things were done to me that it comes. Not from thee and me.”

“Let us not talk of that.”

“Nor do I wish to. I meant I could not bear to fail thee now on this night and so I sought to excuse myself.”

“Listen, rabbit,” he said. “All such things pass and then there is no problem.” But he thought; it was not good luck for the last night.

Then he was ashamed and said, “Lie close against me, rabbit. I love thee as much feeling thee against me in here in the dark as I love thee making love.”

“I am deeply ashamed because I thought it might be again tonight as it was in the high country when we came down from El Sordo’s.”

“Qué va,” he said to her. “That is not for every day. I like it thus as well as the other.” He lied, putting aside disappointment. “We will be here together quietly and we will sleep. Let us talk together. I know thee very little from talking.”

“Should we speak of tomorrow and of thy work? I would like to be intelligent about thy work.”

“No,” he said and relaxed completely into the length of the robe and lay now quietly with his cheek against her shoulder, his left arm under her head. “The most intelligent is not to talk about tomorrow nor what happened today. In this we do not discuss the losses and what we must do tomorrow we will do. Thou art not afraid?”

“Qué va,” she said. “I am always afraid. But now I am afraid for thee so much I do not think of me.”

“Thou must not, rabbit. I have been in many things. And worse than this,” he lied.

Then suddenly surrendering to something, to the luxury of going into unreality, he said, “Let us talk of Madrid and of us in Madrid.”

“Good,” she said. Then, “Oh, Roberto, I am sorry I have failed thee. Is there not some other thing that I can do for thee?”

He stroked her head and kissed her and then lay close and relaxed beside her, listening to the quiet of the night.

“Thou canst talk with me of Madrid,” he said and thought: I’ll keep any oversupply of that for tomorrow. I’ll need all of that there is tomorrow. There are no pine needles that need that now as I will need it tomorrow. Who was it cast his seed upon the ground in the Bible? Onan. How did Onan turn out? he thought. I don’t remember ever hearing any more about Onan. He smiled in the dark.

Then he surrendered again and let himself slip into it, feeling a voluptuousness of surrender into unreality that was like a sexual acceptance of something that could come in the night when there was no understanding, only the delight of acceptance.

“My beloved,” he said, and kissed her. “Listen. The other night I was thinking about Madrid and I thought how I would get there and leave thee at the hotel while I went up to see people at the hotel of the Russians. But that was false. I would not leave thee at any hotel.”

“Why not?”

“Because I will take care of thee. I will not ever leave thee. I will go with thee to the Seguridad to get papers. Then I will go with thee to buy those clothes that are needed.”

“They are few, and I can buy them.”

“Nay, they are many and we will go together and buy good ones and thou wilt be beautiful in them.”

“I would rather we stayed in the room in the hotel and sent Out for the clothes. Where is the hotel?”

“It is on the Plaza del Callao. We will be much in that room in that hotel. There is a wide bed with clean sheets and there is hot running water in the bathtub and there are two closets and I will keep my things in one and thou wilt take the other. And there are tall, wide windows that open, and outside, in the streets, there is the spring. Also I know good places to eat that are illegal but with good food, and I know shops where there is still wine and whiskey. And we will keep things to eat in the room for when we are hungry and also whiskey for when I wish a drink and I will buy thee manzanilla.”

“I would like to try the whiskey.”

“But since it is difficult to obtain and if thou likest manzanilla.”

“Keep thy whiskey, Roberto,” she said. “Oh, I love thee very much. Thou and thy whiskey that I could not have. What a pig thou art.”

“Nay, you shall try it. But it is not good for a woman.”

“And I have only had things that were good for a woman,” Maria said. “Then there in bed I will still wear my wedding shirt?”

“Nay. I will buy thee various nightgowns and pajamas too if you should prefer them.”

“I will buy seven wedding shirts,” she said. “One for each day of the week. And I will buy a clean wedding shirt for thee. Dost ever wash thy shirt?”

“Sometimes.”

“I will keep everything clean and I will pour thy whiskey and put the water in it as it was done at Sordo’s. I will obtain olives and salted codfish and hazel nuts for thee to eat while thou drinkest and we will stay in the room for a month and never leave it. If I am fit to receive thee,” she said, suddenly unhappy.

“That is nothing,” Robert Jordan told her. “Truly it is nothing. It is possible thou wert hurt there once and now there is a scar that makes a further hurting. Such a thing is possible. All such things pass. And also there are good doctors in Madrid if there is truly anything.”

“But all was good before,” she said pleadingly.

“That is the promise that all will be good again.”

“Then let us talk again about Madrid.” She curled her legs between his and rubbed the top of her head against his shoulder. “But will I not be so ugly there with this cropped head that thou wilt be ashamed of me?”

“Nay. Thou art lovely. Thou hast a lovely face and a beautiful body, long and light, and thy skin is smooth and the color of burnt gold and every one will try to take thee from me.”

“Qué va, take me from thee,” she said. “No other man will ever touch me till I die. Take me from thee! Qué va.”

“But many will try. Thou wilt see.”

“They will see I love thee so that they will know it would be as unsafe as putting their hands into a caldron of melted lead to touch me. But thou? When thou seest beautiful women of the same culture as thee? Thou wilt not be ashamed of me?”

“Never. And I will marry thee.”

“If you wish,” she said. “But since we no longer have the Church I do not think it carries importance.”

“I would like us to be married.”

“If you wish. But listen. If we were ever in another country where there still was the Church perhaps we could be married in it there.”

“In my country they still have the Church,” he told her. “There we can be married in it if it means aught to thee. I have never been married. There is no problem.”

“I am glad thou hast never been married,” she said. “But I am glad thou knowest about such things as you have told me for that means thou hast been with many women and the Pilar told me that it is only such men who are possible for husbands. But thou wilt not run with other women now? Because it would kill me.”

“I have never run with many women,” he said, truly. “Until thee I did not think that I could love one deeply.”

She stroked his cheeks and then held her hands clasped behind his head. “Thou must have known very many.”

“Not to love them.”

“Listen. The Pilar told me something—”

“Say it.”

“No. It is better not to. Let us talk again about Madrid.”

“What was it you were going to say?”

“I do not wish to say it.”

“Perhaps it would be better to say it if it could be important.”

“You think it is important?”

“Yes.”

“But how can you know when you do not know what it is?”

“From thy manner.”

“I will not keep it from you then. The Pilar told me that we would all die tomorrow and that you know it as well as she does and that you give it no importance. She said this not in criticism but in admiration.”

“She said that?” he said. The crazy bitch, he thought, and he said, “That is more of her gypsy manure. That is the way old market women and café cowards talk. That is manuring obscenity.” He felt the sweat that came from under his armpits and slid down between his arm and his side and he said to himself, So you are scared, eh? and aloud he said, “She is a manure-mouthed superstitious bitch. Let us talk again of Madrid.”

“Then you know no such thing?”

“Of course not. Do not talk such manure,” he said, using a stronger, ugly word.

But this time when he talked about Madrid there was no slipping into make-believe again. Now he was just lying to his girl and to himself to pass the night before battle and he knew it. He liked to do it, but all the luxury of the acceptance was gone. But he started again.

“I have thought about thy hair,” he said. “And what we can do about it. You see it grows now all over thy head the same length like the fur of an animal and it is lovely to feel and I love it very much and it is beautiful and it flattens and rises like a wheatfield in the wind when I pass my hand over it.”

“Pass thy hand over it.”

He did and left his hand there and went on talking to her throat, as he felt his own throat swell. “But in Madrid I thought we could go together to the coiffeur’s and they could cut it neatly on the sides and in the back as they cut mine and that way it would look better in the town while it is growing out.”

“I would look like thee,” she said and held him close to her. “And then I never would want to change it.”

“Nay. It will grow all the time and that will only be to keep it neat at the start while it is growing long. How long will it take it to grow long?”

“Really long?”

“No. I mean to thy shoulders. It is thus I would have thee wear it.”

“As Garbo in the cinema?”

“Yes,” he said thickly.

Now the making believe was coming back in a great rush and he would take it all to him. It had him now, and again he surrendered and went on. “So it will hang straight to thy shoulders and curl at the ends as a wave of the sea curls, and it will be the color of ripe wheat and thy face the color of burnt gold and thine eyes the only color they could be with thy hair and thy skin, gold with the dark flecks in them, and I will push thy head back and look in thy eyes and hold thee tight against me—”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. Wherever it is that we are. How long will it take for thy hair to grow?”

“I do not know because it never had been cut before. But I think in six months it should be long enough to hang well below my ears and in a year as long as thou couldst ever wish. But do you know what will happen first?”

“Tell me.”

“We will be in the big clean bed in thy famous room in our famous hotel and we will sit in the famous bed together and look into the mirror of the armoire and there will be thee and there will be me in the glass and then I will turn to thee thus, and put my arms around thee thus, and then I will kiss thee thus.”

Then they lay quiet and close together in the night, hot-aching, rigid, close together and holding her, Robert Jordan held closely too all those things that he knew could never happen, and he went on with it deliberately and said, “Rabbit, we will not always live in that hotel.”

“Why not?”

“We can get an apartment in Madrid on that street that runs along the Parque of the Buen Retiro. I know an American woman who furnished apartments and rented them before the movement and I know how to get such an apartment for only the rent that was paid before the movement. There are apartments there that face on the park and you can see all of the park from the windows; the iron fence, the gardens, and the gravel walks and the green of the lawns where they touch the gravel, and the trees deep with shadows and the many fountains, and now the chestnut trees will be in bloom. In Madrid we can walk in the park and row on the lake if the water is back in it now.”

“Why would the water be out?”

“They drained it in November because it made a mark to sight from when the planes came over for bombing. But I think that the water is back in it now. I am not sure. But even if there is no water in it we can walk through all the park away from the lake and there is a part that is like a forest with trees from all parts of the world with their names on them, with placards that tell what trees they are and where they came from.”

“I would almost as soon go the cinema,” Maria said. “But the trees sound very interesting and I will learn them all with thee if I can remember them.”

“They are not as in a museum,” Robert Jordan said. “They grow naturally and there are hills in the park and part of the park is like a jungle. Then below it there is the book fair where along the sidewalks there are hundreds of booths with second-hand books in them and now, since the movement, there are many books, stolen in the looting of the houses which have been bombed and from the houses of the fascists, and brought to the book fair by those who stole them. I could spend all day every day at the stalls of the book fair as I once did in the days before the movement, if I ever could have any time in Madrid.”

“While thou art visiting the book fair I will occupy myself with the apartment,” Maria said. “Will we have enough money for a servant?”

“Surely. I can get Petra who is at the hotel if she pleases thee. She cooks well and is clean. I have eaten there with newspapermen that she cooks for. They have electric stoves in their rooms.”

“If you wish her,” Maria said. “Or I can find some one. But wilt thou not be away much with thy work? They would not let me go with thee on such work as this.”

“Perhaps I can get work in Madrid. I have done this work now for a long time and I have fought since the start of the movement. It is possible that they would give me work now in Madrid. I have never asked for it. I have always been at the front or in such work as this.

“Do you know that until I met thee I have never asked for anything? Nor wanted anything? Nor thought of anything except the movement and the winning of this war? Truly I have been very pure in my ambitions. I have worked much and now I love thee and,” he said it now in a complete embracing of all that would not be, “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and I love thee more. I love thee very much, rabbit. More than I can tell thee. But I say this now to tell thee a little. I have never had a wife and now I have thee for a wife and I am happy.”

“I will make thee as good a wife as I can,” Maria said. “Clearly I am not well trained but I will try to make up for that. If we live in Madrid; good. If we must live in any other place; good. If we live nowhere and I can go with thee; better. If we go to thy country I will learn to talk Inglés like the most Inglés that there is. I will study all their manners and as they do so will I do.”

“Thou wilt be very comic.”

“Surely. I will make mistakes but you will tell me and I will never make them twice, or maybe only twice. Then in thy country if thou art lonesome for our food I can cook for thee. And I will go to a school to learn to be a wife, if there is such a school, and study at it.”

“There are such schools but thou dost not need that schooling.”

“Pilar told me that she thought they existed in your country. She had read of them in a periodical. And she told me also that I must learn to speak Inglés and to speak it well so thou wouldst never be ashamed of me.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Today while we were packing. Constantly she talked to me about what I should do to be thy wife.”

I guess she was going to Madrid too, Robert Jordan thought, and said, “What else did she say?”

“She said I must take care of my body and guard the line of my figure as though I were a bullfighter. She said this was of great importance.”

“It is,” Robert Jordan said. “But thou hast not to worry about that for many years.”

“No. She said those of our race must watch that always as it can come suddenly. She told me she was once as slender as I but that in those days women did not take exercise. She told me what exercises I should take and that I must not eat too much. She told me which things not to eat. But I have forgotten and must ask her again.”

“Potatoes,” he said.

“Yes,” she went on. “It was potatoes and things that are fried. Also when I told her about this of the soreness she said I must not tell thee but must support the pain and not let thee know. But I told thee because I do not wish to lie to thee ever and also I feared that thou might think we did not have the joy in common any longer and that other, as it was in the high country, had not truly happened.”

“It was right to tell me.”

“Truly? For I am ashamed and I will do anything for thee that thou should wish. Pilar has told me of things one can do for a husband.”

“There is no need to do anything. What we have we have together and we will keep it and guard it. I love thee thus lying beside thee and touching thee and knowing thou art truly there and when thou art ready again we will have all.”

“But hast thou not necessities that I can care for? She explained that to me.”

“Nay. We will have our necessities together. I have no necessities apart from thee.”

“That seems much better to me. But understand always that I will do what you wish. But thou must tell me for I have great ignorance and much of what she told me I did not understand clearly. For I was ashamed to ask and she is of such great and varied wisdom.”

“Rabbit,” he said. “Thou art very wonderful.”

“Qué va,” she said. “But to try to learn all of that which goes into wifehood in a day while we are breaking camp and packing for a battle with another battle passing in the country above is a rare thing and if I make serious mistakes thou must tell me for I love thee. It could be possible for me to remember things incorrectly and much that she told me was very complicated.”

“What else did she tell thee?”

“Pues so many things I cannot remember them. She said I could tell thee of what was done to me if I ever began to think of it again because thou art a good man and already have understood it all. But that it were better never to speak of it unless it came on me as a black thing as it had been before and then that telling it to thee might rid me of it.”

“Does it weigh on thee now?”

“No. It is as though it had never happened since we were first together. There is the sorrow for my parents always. But that there will be always. But I would have thee know that which you should know for thy own pride if I am to be thy wife. Never did I submit to any one. Always I fought and always it took two of them or more to do me the harm. One would sit on my head and hold me. I tell thee this for thy pride.”

“My pride is in thee. Do not tell it.”

“Nay, I speak of thy own pride which it is necessary to have in thy wife. And another thing. My father was the mayor of the village and an honorable man. My mother was an honorable woman and a good Catholic and they shot her with my father because of the politics of my father who was a Republican. I saw both of them shot and my father said,’Viva la Republica,’when they shot him standing against the wall of the slaughterhouse of our village.

“My mother standing against the same wall said,’Viva my husband who was the Mayor of this village,’and I hoped they would shoot me too and I was going to say’Viva la Republica y vivan mis padres,’but instead there was no shooting but instead the doing of the things.

“Listen. I will tell thee of one thing since it affects us. After the shooting at the matadero they took us, those relatives who had seen it but were not shot, back from the matadero up the steep hill into the main square of the town. Nearly all were weeping but some were numb with what they had seen and the tears had dried in them. I myself could not cry. I did not notice anything that passed for I could only see my father and my mother at the moment of the shooting and my mother saying,’Long live my husband who was Mayor of this village,’and this was in my head like a scream that would not die but kept on and on. For my mother was not a Republican and she would not say,’Viva la Republica,’but only Viva my father who lay there, on his face, by her feet.

“But what she had said, she had said very loud, like a shriek and then they shot and she fell and I tried to leave the line to go to her but we were all tied. The shooting was done by the guardia civil and they were still there waiting to shoot more when the Falangists herded us away and up the hill leaving the guardias civiles leaning on their rifles and leaving all the bodies there against the wall. We were tied by the wrists in a long line of girls and women and they herded us up by the hill and through the streets to the square and in the square they stopped in front of the barbershop which was across the square from the city hail.

“Then the two men looked at us and one said,’That is the daughter of the Mayor,’and the other said,’Commence with her.’

“Then they cut the rope that was on each of my wrists, one saying to others of them,’Tie up the line,’and these two took me by the arms and into the barbershop and lifted me up and put me in the barber’s chair and held me there.

“I saw my face in the mirror of the barbershop and the faces of those who were holding me and the faces of three others who were leaning over me and I knew none of their faces but in the glass I saw myself and them, but they saw only me. And it was as though one were in the dentist’s chair and there were many dentists and they were all insane. My own face I could hardly recognize because my grief had changed it but I looked at it and knew that it was me. But my grief was so great that I had no fear nor any feeling but my grief.

“At that time I wore my hair in two braids and as I watched in the mirror one of them lifted one of the braids and pulled on it so it hurt me suddenly through my grief and then cut it off close to my head with a razor. And I saw myself with one braid and a slash where the other had been. Then he cut off the other braid but without pulling on it and the razor made a small cut on my ear and I saw blood come from it. Canst thou feel the scar with thy finger?”

“Yes. But would it be better not to talk of this?”

“This is nothing. I will not talk of that which is bad. So he had cut both braids close to my head with a razor and the others laughed and I did not even feel the cut on my ear and then he stood in front of me and struck me across the face with the braids while the other two held me and he said,’This is how we make Red nuns. This will show thee how to unite with thy proletarian brothers. Bride of the Red Christ!’

“And he struck me again and again across the face with the braids which had been mine and then he put the two of them in my mouth and tied them tight around my neck, knotting them in the back to make a gag and the two holding me laughed.

“And all of them who saw it laughed and when I saw them laugh in the mirror I commenced to cry because until then I had been too frozen in myself from the shooting to be able to cry.

“Then the one who had gagged me ran a clippers all over my head; first from the forehead all the way to the back of the neck and then across the top and then all over my head and close behind my ears and they held me so I could see into the glass of the barber’s mirror all the time that they did this and I could not believe it as I saw it done and I cried and I cried but I could not look away from the horror that my face made with the mouth open and the braids tied in it and my head coming naked under the clippers.

“And when the one with the clippers was finished he took a bottle of iodine from the shelf of the barber (they had shot the barber too for he belonged to a syndicate, and he lay in the doorway of the shop and they had lifted me over him as they brought me in) and with the glass wand that is in the iodine bottle he touched me on the ear where it had been cut and the small pain of that came through my grief and through my horror.

“Then he stood in front of me and wrote U. H. P. on my forehead with the iodine, lettering it slowly and carefully as though he were an artist and I saw all of this as it happened in the mirror and I no longer cried for my heart was frozen in me for my father and my mother and what happened to me now was nothing and I knew it.

“Then when he had finished the lettering, the Falangist stepped back and looked at me to examine his work and then he put down the iodine bottle and picked up the clippers and said,’Next,’and they took me out of the barbershop holding me tight by each arm and I stumbled over the barber lying there still in the doorway on his back with his gray face up, and we nearly collided with Concepción GracIa, my best friend, that two of them were bringing in and when she saw me she did not recognize me, and then she recognized me, and she screamed, and I could hear her screaming all the time they were shoving me across the square, and into the doorway, and up the stairs of the city hall and into the office of my father where they laid me onto the couch. And it was there that the bad things were done.”

“My rabbit,” Robert Jordan said and held her as close and as gently as he could. But he was as full of hate as any man could be. “Do not talk more about it. Do not tell me any more for I cannot bear my hatred now.”

She was stiff and cold in his arms and she said, “Nay. I will never talk more of it. But they are bad people and I would like to kill some of them with thee if I could. But I have told thee this only for thy pride if I am to be thy wife. So thou wouldst understand.”

“I am glad you told me,” he said. “For tomorrow, with luck, we will kill plenty.”

“But will we kill Falangists? It was they who did it.”

“They do not fight,” he said gloomily. “They kill at the rear. It is not them we fight in battle.”

“But can we not kill them in some way? I would like to kill some very much.”

“I have killed them,” he said. “And we will kill them again. At the trains we have killed them.”

“I would like to go for a train with thee,” Maria said. “The time of the train that Pilar brought me back from I was somewhat crazy. Did she tell thee how I was?”

“Yes. Do not talk of it.”

“I was dead in my head with a numbness and all I could do was cry. But there is another thing that I must tell thee. This I must. Then perhaps thou wilt not marry me. But, Roberto, if thou should not wish to marry me, can we not, then, just be always together?”

“I will marry thee.”

“Nay. I had forgotten this. Perhaps you should not. It is possible that I can never bear thee either a son or a daughter for the Pilar says that if I could it would have happened to me with the things which were done. I must tell thee that. Oh, I do not know why I had forgotten that.”

“It is of no importance, rabbit,” he said. “First it may not be true. That is for a doctor to say. Then I would not wish to bring either a son or a daughter into this world as this world is. And also you take all the love I have to give.”

“I would like to bear thy son and thy daughter,” she told him. “And how can the world be made better if there are no children of us who fight against the fascists?”

“Thou,” he said. “I love thee. Hearest thou? And now we must sleep, rabbit. For I must be up long before daylight and the dawn comes early in this month.”

“Then it is all right about the last thing I said? We can still be married?”

“We are married, now. I marry thee now. Thou art my wife. But go to sleep, my rabbit, for there is little time now.”

“And we will truly be married? Not just a talking?”

“Truly.”

“Then I will sleep and think of that if I wake.”

“I, too.”

“Good night, my husband.”

“Good night,” he said. “Good night, wife.”

He heard her breathing steadily and regularly now and he knew she was asleep and he lay awake and very still not wanting to waken her by moving. He thought of all the part she had not told him and he lay there hating and he was pleased there would be killing in the morning. But I must not take any of it personally, he thought.

Though how can I keep from it? I know that we did dreadful things to them too. But it was because we were uneducated and knew no better. But they did that on purpose and deliberately. Those who did that are the last flowering of what their education has produced. Those are the flowers of Spanish chivalry. What a people they have been. What sons of bitches from Cortez, Pizarro, Menéndez de Avila all down through Enrique Lister to Pablo. And what wonderful people. There is no finer and no worse people in the world. No kinder people and no crueler. And who understands them? Not me, because if I did I would forgive it all. To understand is to forgive. That’s not true. Forgiveness has been exaggerated. Forgiveness is a Christian idea and Spain has never been a Christian country. It has always had its own special idol worship within the Church. Otra Virgen más. I suppose that was why they had to destroy the virgins of their enemies. Surely it was deeper with them, with the Spanish religion fanatics, than it was with the people. The people had grown away from the Church because the Church was in the government and the government had always been rotten. This was the only country that the reformation never reached. They were paying for the Inquisition now, all right.

Well, it was something to think about. Something to keep your mind from worrying about your work. It was sounder than pretending. God, he had done a lot of pretending tonight. And Pilar had been pretending all day. Sure. What if they were killed tomorrow? What did it matter as long as they did the bridge properly? That was all they had to do tomorrow.

It didn’t. You couldn’t do these things indefinitely. But you weren’t supposed to live forever. Maybe I have had all my life in three days, he thought. If that’s true I wish we would have spent the last night differently. But last nights are never any good. Last nothings are any good. Yes, last words were good sometimes. “Viva my husband who was Mayor of this town” was good.

He knew it was good because it made a tingle run all over him when he said it to himself. He leaned over and kissed Maria who did not wake. In English he whispered very quietly, “I’d like to marry you, rabbit. I’m very proud of your family.”

Chapter 32

On that same night in Madrid there were many people at the Hotel Gaylord. A car pulled up under the porte-cochere of the hotel, its headlights painted over with blue calcimine and a little man in black riding boots, gray riding breeches and a short, gray high-buttoned jacket stepped out and returned the salute of the two sentries as he opened the door, nodded to the secret policeman who sat at the concierge’s desk and stepped into the elevator. There were two sentries seated on chairs inside the door, one on each side of the marble entrance hall, and these only looked up as the little man passed them at the door of the elevator. It was their business to feel every one they did not know along the flanks, under the armpits, and over the hip pockets to see if the person entering carried a pistol and, if he did, have him check it with the concierge. But they knew the short man in riding boots very well and they hardly looked up as he passed.

The apartment where he lived in Gaylord’s was crowded as he entered. People were sitting and standing about and talking together as in any drawing room and the men and the women were drinking vodka, whiskey and soda, and beer from small glasses filled from great pitchers. Four of the men were in uniform. The others wore windbreakers or leather jackets.and three of the four women were dressed in ordinary street dresses while the fourth, who was haggardly thin and dark, wore a sort of severely cut militiawoman’s uniform with a skirt with high boots under it.

When he came into the room, Karkov went at once to the woman in the uniform and bowed to her and shook hands. She was his wife and he said something to her in Russian that no one could hear and for a moment the insolence that had been in his eyes as he entered the room was gone. Then it lighted again as he saw the mahoganycolored head and the love-lazy face of the well-constructed girl who was his mistress and he strode with short, precise steps over to her and bowed and shook her hand in such a way that no one could tell it was not a mimicry of his greeting to his wife. His wife had not looked after him as he walked across the room. She was standing with a tall, good-looking Spanish officer and they were talking Russian now.

“Your great love is getting a little fat,” Karkov was saying to the girl. “All of our heroes are fattening now as we approach the second year.” He did not look at the man he was speaking of.

“You are so ugly you would be jealous of a toad,” the girl told him cheerfully. She spoke in German. “Can I go with thee to the offensive tomorrow?”

“No. Nor is there one.”

“Every one knows about it,” the girl said. “Don’t be so mysterious. Dolores is going. I will go with her or Carmen. Many people are going.”

“Go with whoever will take you,” Karkov said. “I will not.”

Then he turned to the girl and asked seriously, “Who told thee of it? Be exact.”

“Richard,” she said as seriously.

Karkov shrugged his shoulders and left her standing.

“Karkov,” a man of middle height with a gray, heavy, sagging face, puffed eye pouches and a pendulous under-lip called to him in a dyspeptic voice. “Have you heard the good news?”

Karkov went over to him and the man said, “I only have it now. Not ten minutes ago. It is wonderful. All day the fascists have been fighting among themselves near Segovia. They have been forced to quell the mutinies with automatic rifle and machine-gun fire. In the afternoon they were bombing their own troops with planes.”

“Yes?” asked Karkov.

“That is true,” the puffy-eyed man said. “Dolores brought the news herself. She was here with the news and was in such a state of radiant exultation as I have never seen. The truth of the news shone from her face. That great face—” he said happily.

“That great face,” Karkov said with no tone in his voice at all.

“If you could have heard her,” the puffy-eyed man said. “The news itself shone from her with a light that was not of this world. In her voice you could tell the truth of what she said. I am putting it in an article for Izvestia. It was one of the greatest moments of the war to me when I heard the report in that great voice where pity, compassion and truth are blended. Goodness and truth shine from her as from a true saint of the people. Not for nothing is she called La Pasionaria.”

“Not for nothing,” Karkov said in a dull voice. “You better write it for Izvestia now, before you forget that last beautiful lead.”

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

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

“Not just now.”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“What was the stuff?”

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

“You hear much talk of tomorrow.”

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

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

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

“Early tomorrow.”

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

“But about this—”

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

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

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

“Your friend Prieto can keep his mouth shut.”

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

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

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

Chapter 33

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

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

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

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

“When?” he asked.

“It must be an hour.”

“And?”

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

“So. What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You slept well.”

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

“Come on,” Robert Jordan said.

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

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

“Two ways.”

“Who’s at the top?”

“Eladio.”

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

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

“It must have been an hour.”

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

“I will guard them.”

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

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

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

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

“But what did he take?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I go to see Eladio.”

“He will have gone another way.”

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

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

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

“Let me sew them up.”

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

“I must have them early to sew them.”

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

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

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

Chapter 34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first time he had bit the ear like that and held onto it, his neck and jaws stiffened against the tossing, they had all made fun of him afterwards. But though they joked him about it they had great respect for him. And every year after that he had to repeat it. They called him the bulldog of Villaconejos and joked about him eating cattle raw. But every one in the village looked forward to seeing him do it and every year he knew that first the bull would come out, then there would be the charges and the tossing, and then when they yelled for the rush for the killing he would place himself to rush through the other attackers and leap for his hold. Then, when it was over, and the bull settled and sunk dead finally under the weight of the killers, he would stand up and walk away ashamed of the ear part, but also as proud as a man could be. And he would go through the carts to wash his hands at the stone fountain and men would clap him on the back and hand him wineskins and say, “Hurray for you, Bulldog. Long life to your mother.”

Or they would say, “That’s what it is to have a pair of cojones! Year after year!”

Andrés would be ashamed, empty-feeling, proud and happy, and he would shake them all off and wash his hands and his right arm and wash his knife well and then take one of the wineskins and rinse the ear-taste out of his mouth for that year; spitting the wine on the stone flags of the plaza before he lifted the wineskin high and let the wine spurt into the back of his mouth.

Surely. He was the Bulldog of Villaconejos and not for anything would he have missed doing it each year in his village. But he knew there was no better feeling than that one the sound of the rain gave when he knew he would not have to do it.

But I must go back, he told himself. There is no question but that I must go back for the affair of the posts and the bridge. My brother Eladio is there, who is of my own bone and flesh. Anselmo, Primitivo, Fernando, Agustín, Rafael, though clearly he is not serious, the two women, Pablo and the Inglés, though the Inglés does not count since he is a foreigner and under orders. They are all in for it. It is impossible that I should escape this proving through the accident of a message. I must deliver this message now quickly and well and then make all haste to return in time for the assault on the posts. It would be ignoble of me not to participate in this action because of the accident of this message. That could not be clearer. And besides, he told himself, as one who suddenly remembers that there will be pleasure too in an engagement only the onerous aspects of which he has been considering, and besides I will enjoy the killing of some fascists. It has been too long since we have destroyed any. Tomorrow can be a day of much valid action. Tomorrow can be a day of concrete acts. Tomorrow can be a day which is worth something. That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.

Just then, as knee deep in the gorse he climbed the steep slope that led to the Republican lines, a partridge flew up from under his feet, exploding in a whirr of wingbeats in the dark and he felt a sudden breath-stopping fright. It is the suddenness, he thought. How can they move their wings that fast? She must be nesting now. I probably trod close to the eggs. If there were not this war I would tie a handkerchief to the bush and come back in the daytime and search out the nest and I could take the eggs and put them under a setting hen and when they hatched we would have little partridges in the poultry yard and I would watch them grow and, when they were grown, I’d use them for callers. I wouldn’t blind them because they would be tame. Or do you suppose they would fly off? Probably. Then I would have to blind them.

But I don’t like to do that after I have raised them. I could clip the wings or tether them by one leg when I used them for calling. If there was no war I would go with Eladio to get crayfish from that stream back there by the fascist post. One time we got four dozen from that stream in a day. If we go to the Sierra de Gredos after this of the bridge there are fine streams there for trout and for crayfish also. I hope we go to Gredos, he thought. We could make a good life in Gredos in the summer time and in the fall but it would be terribly cold in winter. But by winter maybe we will have won the war.

If our father had not been a Republican both Eladio and I would be soldiers now with the fascists and if one were a soldier with them then there would be no problem. One would obey orders and one would live or die and in the end it would be however it would be. It was easier to live under a regime than to fight it.

But this irregular fighting was a thing of much responsibility. There was much worry if you were one to worry. Eladio thinks more than I do. Also he worries. I believe truly in the cause and I do not worry. But it is a life of much responsibility.

I think that we are born into a time of great difficulty, he thought. I think any other time was probably easier. One suffers little because all of us have been formed to resist suffering. They who suffer are unsuited to this climate. But it is a time of difficult decisions. The fascists attacked and made our decision for us. We fight to live. But I would like to have it so that I could tie a handkerchief to that bush back there and come in the daylight and take the eggs and put them under a hen and be able to see the chicks of the partridge in my own courtyard. I would like such small and regular things.

But you have no house and no courtyard in your no-house, he thought. You have no family but a brother who goes to battle tomorrow and you own nothing but the wind and the sun and an empty belly. The wind is small, he thought, and there is no sun. You have four grenades in your pocket but they are only good to throw away. You have a carbine on your back but it is only good to give away bullets. You have a message to give away. And you’re full of crap that you can give to the earth, he grinned in the dark. You can anoint it also with urine. Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man, he told himself and grinned again.

But for all his noble thinking a little while before there was in him that reprieved feeling that had always come with the sound of rain in the village on the morning of the fiesta. Ahead of him now at the top of the ridge was the government position where he knew he would be challenged.

Chapter 35

Robert Jordan lay in the robe beside the girl Maria who was still sleeping. He lay on his side turned away from the girl and he felt her long body against his back and the touch of it now was just an irony. You, you, he raged at himself. Yes, you. You told yourself the first time you saw him that when he would be friendly would be when the treachery would come. You damned fool. You utter blasted damned fool. Chuck all that. That’s not what you have to do now.

What are the chances that he hid them or threw them away? Not so good. Besides you’d never find them in the dark. He would have kept them. He took some dynamite, too. Oh, the dirty, vile, treacherous sod. The dirty rotten crut. Why couldn’t he have just mucked off and not have taken the exploder and the detonators? Why was I such an utter goddamned fool as to leave them with that bloody woman? The smart, treacherous ugly bastard. The dirty cabrón.

Cut it out and take it easy, he told himself. You had to take chances and that was the best there was. You’re just mucked, he told himself. You’re mucked for good and higher than a kite. Keep your damned head and get the anger out and stop this cheap lamenting like a damned wailing wall. It’s gone. God damn you, it’s gone. Oh damn the dirty swine to hell. You can muck your way out of it. You’ve got to, you know you’ve got to blow it if you have to stand there and — cut Out that stuff, too. Why don’t you ask your grandfather?

Oh, muck my grandfather and muck this whole treacherous muckfaced mucking country and every mucking Spaniard in it on either side and to hell forever. Muck them to hell together, Largo, Prieto, Asensio, Miaja, Rojo, all of them. Muck every one of them to death to hell. Muck the whole treachery-ridden country. Muck their egotism and their selfishness and their selfishness and their egotism and their conceit and their treachery. Muck them to hell and always. Muck them before we die for them. Muck them after we die for them. Muck them to death and hell. God muck Pablo. Pablo is all of them. God pity the Spanish people. Any leader they have will muck them. One good man, Pablo Iglesias, in two thousand years and everybody else mucking them. How do we know how he would have stood up in this war? I remember when I thought Largo was O.K. Durruti was good and his own people shot him there at the Puente de los Franceses. Shot him because he wanted them to attack. Shot him in the glorious discipline of indiscipline. The cowardly swine. Oh muck them all to hell and be damned. And that Pablo that just mucked off with my exploder and my box of detonators. Oh muck him to deepest hell. But no. He’s mucked us instead. They always muck you instead, from Cortez and Menendez de Avila down to Miaja. Look at what Miaja did to Kleber. The bald egotistical swine. The stupid egg-headed bastard. Muck all the insane, egotistical, treacherous swine that have always governed Spain and ruled her armies. Muck everybody but the people and then be damned careful what they turn into when they have power.

His rage began to thin as he exaggerated more and more and spread his scorn and contempt so widely and unjustly that he could no longer believe in it himself. If that were true what are you here for? It’s not true and you know it. Look at all the good ones. Look at all the fine ones. He could not bear to be unjust. He hated injustice as he hated cruelty and he lay in his rage that blinded his mind until gradually the anger died down and the red, black, blinding, killing anger was all gone and his mind now as quiet, empty-calm and sharp, cold-seeing as a man is after he has had sexual intercourse with a woman that he does not love.

“And you, you poor rabbit,” he leaned over and said to Maria, who smiled in her sleep and moved close against him. “I would have struck thee there awhile back if thou had spoken. What an animal a man is in a rage.”

He lay close to the girl now with his arms around her and his chin on her shoulder and lying there he figured out exactly what he would have to do and how he would have to do it.

And it isn’t so bad, he thought. It really isn’t so bad at all. I don’t know whether any one has ever done it before. But there will always be people who will do it from now on, given a similar jam. If we do it and if they hear about it. If they hear about it, yes. If they do not just wonder how it was we did it. We are too short of people but there is no sense to worry about that. I will do the bridge with what we have. God, I’m glad I got over being angry. It was like not being able to breathe in a storm. That being angry is another damned luxury you can’t afford.

“It’s all figured out, guapa,” he said softly against Maria’s shoulder. “You haven’t been bothered by any of it. You have not known about it. We’ll be killed but we’ll blow the bridge. You have not had to worry about it. That isn’t much of a wedding present. But is not a good night’s sleep supposed to be priceless? You had a good night’s sleep. See if you can wear that like a ring on your finger. Sleep, guapa. Sleep well, my beloved. I do not wake thee. That is all I can do for thee now.”

He lay there holding her very lightly, feeling her breathe and feeling her heart beat, and keeping track of the time on his wrist watch.

Chapter 36

Andrés had challenged at the government position. That is, he had lain down where the ground fell sharply away below the triple belt of wire and shouted up at the rock and earth parapet. There was no continual defensive line and he could easily have passed this position in the dark and made his way farther into the government territory before running into some one who would challenge him. But it seemed safer and simpler to get it over here.

“Salud!” he had shouted. “Salud, milicianos!”

He heard a bolt snick as it was pulled back. Then, from farther down the parapet, a rifle fired. There was a crashing crack and a downward stab of yellow in the dark. Andrés had flattened at the click, the top of his head hard against the ground.

“Don’t shoot, Comrades,” Andrés shouted. “Don’t shoot! I want to come in.”

“How many are you?” some one called from behind the parapet.

“One. Me. Alone.”

“Who are you?”

“Andrés Lopez of Villaconejos. From the band of Pablo. With a message.”

“Have you your rifle and equipment?”

“Yes, man.”

“We can take in none without rifle and equipment,” the voice said. “Nor in larger groups than three.”

“I am alone,” Andrés shouted. “It is important. Let me come in.”

He could hear them talking behind the parapet but not what they were saying. Then the voice shouted again, “How many are you?”

“One. Me. Alone. For the love of God.”

They were talking behind the parapet again. Then the voice came, “Listen, fascist.”

“I am not a fascist,” Andrés shouted. “I am a guerrillero from the band of Pablo. I come with a message for the General Staff.”

“He’s crazy,” he heard some one say. “Toss a bomb at him.”

“Listen,” Andrés said. “I am alone. I am completely by myself. I obscenity in the midst of the holy mysteries that I am alone. Let me come in.”

“He speaks like a Christian,” he heard some one say and laugh.

Then some one else said, “The best thing is to toss a bomb down on him.”

“No,” Andrés shouted. “That would be a great mistake. This is important. Let me come in.”

It was for this reason that he had never enjoyed trips back and forth between the lines. Sometimes it was better than others. But it was never good.

“You are alone?” the voice called down again.

“Me cago en la leche,” Andrés shouted. “How many times must I tell thee? I AM ALONE.”

“Then if you should be alone stand up and hold thy rifle over thy head.”

Andrés stood up and put the carbine above his head, holding it in both hands.

“Now come through the wire. We have thee covered with the máquina,” the voice called.

Andrés was in the first zigzag belt of wire. “I need my hands to get through the wire,” he shouted.

“Keep them up,” the voice commanded.

“I am held fast by the wire,” Andrés called.

“It would have been simpler to have thrown a bomb at him,” a voice said.

“Let him sling his rifle,” another voice said. “He cannot come through there with his hands above his head. Use a little reason.”

“All these fascists are the same,” the other voice said. “They demand one condition after another.”

“Listen,” Andrés shouted. “I am no fascist but a guerrillero from the band of Pablo. We’ve killed more fascists than the typhus.”

“I have never heard of the band of Pablo,” the man who was evidently in command of the post said. “Neither of Peter nor of Paul nor of any of the other saints nor apostles. Nor of their bands. Sling thy rifle over thy shoulder and use thy hands to come through the wire.”

“Before we loose the máquina on thee,” another shouted.

“Qué poco amables sois!” Andrés said. “You’re not very amiable.”

He was working his way through the wire.

“Amables,” some one shouted at him. “We are in a war, man.”

“It begins to appear so,” Andrés said.

“What’s he say?”

Andrés heard a bolt click again.

“Nothing,” he shouted. “I say nothing. Do not shoot until I get through this fornicating wire.”

“Don’t speak badly of our wire,” some one shouted. “Or we’ll toss a bomb on you.”

“Quiero decir, qué buena alambrada,” Andrés shouted. “What beautiful wire. God in a latrine. What lovely wire. Soon I will be with thee, brothers.”

“Throw a bomb at him,” he heard the one voice say. “I tell you that’s the soundest way to deal with the whole thing.”

“Brothers,” Andrés said. He was wet through with sweat and he knew the bomb advocate was perfectly capable of tossing a grenade at any moment. “I have no importance.”

“I believe it,” the bomb man said.

“You are right,” Andrés said. He was working carefully through the third belt of wire and he was very close to the parapet. “I have no importance of any kind. But the affair is serious. Muy, muy serio.”

“There is no more serious thing than liberty,” the bomb man shouted. “Thou thinkest there is anything more serious than liberty?” he asked challengingly.

“No, man,” Andrés said, relieved. He knew now he was up against the crazies; the ones with the black-and-red scarves. “Viva la Libertad!”

“Viva la F. A. I. Viva la C.N.T.,” they shouted back at him from the parapet. “Viva el anarco-sindicalismo and liberty.”

“Viva nosotros,” Andrés shouted. “Long life to us.”

“He is a coreligionary of ours,” the bomb man said. “And I might have killed him with this.”

He looked at the grenade in his hand and was deeply moved as Andrés climbed over the parapet. Putting his arms around him, the grenade still in one hand, so that it rested against Andrés’s shoulder blade as he embraced him, the bomb man kissed him on both cheeks.

“I am content that nothing happened to thee, brother,” he said. “I am very content.”

“Where is thy officer?” Andrés asked.

“I command here,” a man said. “Let me see thy papers.”

He took them into a dugout and looked at them with the light of a candle. There was the little square of folded silk with the colors of the Republic and the seal of the S. I. M. in the center. There was the Salvoconducto or safe-conduct pass giving his name, age, height, birthplace and mission that Robert Jordan had written out on a sheet from his notebook and sealed with the S. I. M. rubber stamp and there were the four folded sheets of the dispatch to Golz which were tied around with a cord and sealed with wax and the impression of the metal S. I. M. seal that was set in the top end of the wooden handle of the rubber stamp.

“This I have seen,” the man in command of the post said and handed back the piece of silk. “This you all have, I know. But its possession proves nothing without this.” He lifted the Salvoconducto and read it through again. “Where were you born?”

“Villaconejos,” Andrés said.

“And what do they raise there?”

“Melons,” Andrés said. “As all the world knows.”

“Who do you know there?”

“Why? Are you from there?”

“Nay. But I have been there. I am from Aranjuëz.”

“Ask me about any one.”

“Describe José Rincon.”

“Who keeps the bodega?”

“Naturally.”

“With a shaved head and a big belly and a cast in one eye.”

“Then this is valid,” the man said and handed him back the paper. “But what do you do on their side?”

“Our father had installed himself at Villacastín before the movement,” Andrés said. “Down there beyond the mountains on the plain. It was there we were surprised by the movement. Since the movement I have fought with the band of Pablo. But I am in a great hurry, man, to take that dispatch.”

“How goes it in the country of the fascists?” the man commanding asked. He was in no hurry.

“Today we had much tomate,” Andrés said proudly. “Today there was plenty of dust on the road all day. Today they wiped out the band of Sordo.”

“And who is Sordo?” the other asked deprecatingly.

“The leader of one of the best bands in the mountains.”

“All of you should come in to the Republic and join the army,” the officer said. “There is too much of this silly guerilla nonsense going on. All of you should come in and submit to our Libertarian discipline. Then when we wished to send out guerillas we would send them out as they are needed.”

Andrés was a man endowed with almost supreme patience. He had taken the coming in through the wire calmly. None of this examination had flustered him. He found it perfectly normal that this man should have no understanding of them nor of what they were doing and that he should talk idiocy was to be expected. That it should all go slowly should be expected too; but now he wished to go.

“Listen, Compadre,” he said. “It is very possible that you are right. But I have orders to deliver that dispatch to the General commanding the Thirty-Fifth Division, which makes an attack at daylight in these hills and it is already late at night and I must go.”

“What attack? What do you know of an attack?”

“Nay. I know nothing. But I must go now to Navacerrada and go on from there. Wilt thou send me to thy commander who will give me transport to go on from there? Send one with me now to respond to him that there be no delay.”

“I distrust all of this greatly,” he said. “It might have been better to have shot thee as thou approached the wire.”

“You have seen my papers, Comrade, and I have explained my mission,” Andrés told him patiently.

“Papers can be forged,” the officer said. “Any fascist could invent such a mission. I will go with thee myself to the Commander.”

“Good,” Andrés said. “That you should come. But that we should go quickly.”

“Thou, Sanchez. Thou commandest in my place,” the officer said. “Thou knowest thy duties as well as I do. I take this so-called Comrade to the Commander.”

They started down the shallow trench behind the crest of the hill and in the dark Andrés smelt the foulness the defenders of the hill crest had made all through the bracken on that slope. He did not like these people who were like dangerous children; dirty, foul, undisciplined, kind, loving, silly and ignorant but always dangerous because they were armed. He, Andrés, was without politics except that he was for the Republic. He had heard these people talk many times and he thought what they said was often beautiful and fine to hear but he did not like them. It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes, he thought. No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist. Until they learn that from the cat I cannot respect them.

Ahead of him the officer stopped suddenly.

“You have your carabine still,” he said.

“Yes,” Andrés said. “Why not?”

“Give it to me,” the officer said. “You could shoot me in the back with it.”

“Why?” Andrés asked him. “Why would I shoot thee in the back?”

“One never knows,” the officer said. “I trust no one. Give me the carbine.”

Andrés unslung it and handed it to him.

“If it pleases thee to carry it,” he said.

“It is better,” the officer said. “We are safer that way.”

They went on down the hill in the dark.

Chapter 37

Now Robert Jordan lay with the girl and he watched time passing on his wrist. It went slowly, almost imperceptibly, for it was a small watch and he could not see the second hand. But as he watched the minute hand he found he could almost check its motion with his concentration. The girl’s head was under his chin and when he moved his head to look at the watch he felt the cropped head against his cheek, and it was as soft but as alive and silkily rolling as when a marten’s fur rises under the caress of your hand when you spread the trap jaws open and lift the marten clear and, holding it, stroke the fur smooth. His throat swelled when his cheek moved against Maria’s hair and there was a hollow aching from his throat all through him as he held his arms around her; his head dropped, his eyes close to the watch where the lance-pointed, luminous splinter moved slowly up the left face of the dial. He could see its movement clearly and steadily now and he held Maria close now to slow it. He did not want to wake her but he could not leave her alone now in this last time and he put his lips behind her ear and moved them up along her neck, feeling the smooth skin and the soft touch of her hair on them. He could see the hand moving on the watch and he held her tighter and ran the tip of his tongue along her cheek and onto the lobe of her ear and along the lovely convolutions to the sweet, firm rim at the top, and his tongue was trembling. He felt the trembling run through all of the hollow aching and he saw the hand of the watch now mounting in sharp angle toward the top where the hour was. Now while she still slept he turned her head and put his lips to hers. They lay there, just touching lightly against the sleep-firm mouth and he swung them softly across it, feeling them brush lightly. He turned himself toward her and he felt her shiver along the long, light lovely body and then she sighed, sleeping, and then she, still sleeping, held him too and then, unsleeping, her lips were against his firm and hard and pressing and he said, “But the pain.”

And she said, “Nay, there is no pain.”

“Rabbit.”

“Nay, speak not.”

“My rabbit.”

“Speak not. Speak not.”

Then they were together so that as the hand on the watch moved, unseen now, they knew that nothing could ever happen to the one that did not happen to the othei that no other thing could happen more than this; that this was all and always; this was what had been and now and whatever was to come. This, that they were not to have, they were having. They were having now and before and always and now and now and now. Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no other now but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Come now, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; and on and always please then always now, always now, for now always one now; one only one, there is no other one but one now, one, going now, rising now, sailing now, leaving now, wheeling now, soaring now, away now, all the way now, all of all the way now; one and one is one, is one, is one, is one, is still one, is still one, is one descendingly, is one softly, is one longingly, is one kindly, is one happily, is one in goodness, is one to cherish, is one now on earth with elbows against the cut and slept-on branches of the pine tree with the smell of the pine boughs and the night; to earth conclusively now, and with the morning of the day to come. Then he said, for the other was only in his head and he had said nothing, “Oh, Maria, I love thee and I thank thee for this.”

Maria said, “Do not speak. It is better if we do not speak.”

“I must tell thee for it is a great thing.”

“Nay.”

“Rabbit—”

But she held him tight and turned her head away and he asked softly, “Is it pain, rabbit?”

“Nay,” she said. “It is that I am thankful too to have been another time in la gloria.”

Then afterwards they lay quiet, side by side, all length of ankle, thigh, hip and shoulder touching, Robert Jordan now with the watch where he could see it again and Maria said, “We have had much good fortune.”

“Yes,” he said, “we are people of much luck.”

“There is not time to sleep?”

“No,” he said, “it starts soon now.”

“Then if we must rise let us go to get something to eat.”

“All right.”

“Thou. Thou art not worried about anything?”

“No.”

“Truly?”

“No. Not now.”

“But thou hast worried before?”

“For a while.”

“Is it aught I can help?”

“Nay,” he said. “You have helped enough.”

“That? That was for me.”

“That was for us both,” he said. “No one is there alone. Come, rabbit, let us dress.”

But his mind, that was his best companion, was thinking La Gloria. She said La Gloria. It has nothing to do with glory nor La Gloire that the French write and speak about. It is the thing that is in the Cante Hondo and in the Saetas. It is in Greco and in San Juan de la Cruz, of course, and in the others. I am no mystic, but to deny it is as ignorant as though you denied the telephone or that the earth revolves around the sun or that there are other planets than this.

How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I’d like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.

“You taught me a lot, guapa,” he said in English.

“What did you say?”

“I have learned much from thee.”

“Qué va,” she said, “it is thou who art educated.”

Educated, he thought. I have the very smallest beginnings of an education. The very small beginnings. If I die on this day it is a waste because I know a few things now. I wonder if you only learn them now because you are oversensitized because of the shortness of the time? There is no such thing as a shortness of time, though. You should have sense enough to know that too. I have been all my life in these hills since I have been here. Anselmo is my oldest friend. I know him better than I know Charles, than I know Chub, than I know Guy, than I know Mike, and I know them well. Agustín, with his vile mouth, is my brother, and I never had a brother. Maria is my true love and my wife. I never had a true love. I never had a wife. She is also my sister, and I never had a sister, and my daughter, and I never will have a daughter. I hate to leave a thing that is so good. He finished tying his rope-soled shoes.

“I find life very interesting,” he said to Maria. She was sitting beside him on the robe, her hands clasped around her ankles. Some one moved the blanket aside from the entrance to the cave and they both saw the light. It was night still and here was no promise of morning except that as he looked up through the pines he saw how low the stars had swung. The morning would be coming fast now in this month.

“Roberto,” Maria said.

“Yes, guapa.”

“In this of today we will be together, will we not?”

“After the start, yes.”

“Not at the start?”

“No. Thou wilt be with the horses.”

“I cannot be with thee?”

“No. I have work that only I can do and I would worry about thee.”

“But you will come fast when it is done?”

“Very fast,” he said and grinned in the dark. “Come, guapa, let us go and eat.”

“And thy robe?”

“Roll it up, if it pleases thee.”

“It pleases me,” she said.

“I will help thee.”

“Nay. Let me do it alone.”

She knelt to spread and roll the robe, then changed her mind and stood up and shook it so it flapped. Then she knelt down again to straighten it and roll it. Robert Jordan picked up the two packs, holding them carefully so that nothing would spill from the slits in them, and walked over through the pines to the cave mouth where the smoky blanket hung. It was ten minutes to three by his watch when he pushed the blanket aside with his elbow and went into the cave.

Chapter 38

They were in the cave and the men were standing before the fire Maria was fanning. Pilar had coffee ready in a pot. She had not gone back to bed at all since she had roused Robert Jordan and now she was sitting on a stool in the smoky cave sewing the rip in one of Jordan’s packs. The other pack was already sewed. The firelight lit up her face.

“Take more of the stew,” she said to Fernando. “What does it matter if thy belly should be full? There is no doctor to operate if you take a goring.”

“Don’t speak that way, woman,” Agustín said. “Thou hast the tongue of the great whore.”

He was leaning on the automatic rifle, its legs folded close against the fretted barrel, his pockets were full of grenades, a sack of pans hung from one shoulder, and a full bandolier of ammunition hung over the other shoulder. He was smoking a cigarette and he held a bowl of coffee in one hand and blew smoke onto its surface as he raised it to his lips.

“Thou art a walking hardware store,” Pilar said to him. “Thou canst not walk a hundred yards with all that.”

“Qué va, woman,” Agustín said. “It is all downhill.”

“There is a climb to the post,” Fernando said. “Before the downward slope commences.”

“I will climb it like a goat,” Agustín said.

“And thy brother?” he asked Eladio. “Thy famous brother has mucked off?”

Eladio was standing against the wall.

“Shut up,” he said.

He was nervous and he knew they all knew it. He was always nervous and irritable before action. He moved from the wall to the table and began filling his pockets with grenades from one of the rawhide-covered panniers that leaned, open, against the table leg.

Robert Jordan squatted by the pannier beside him. He reached into the pannier and picked out four grenades. Three were the oval Mill bomb type, serrated, heavy iron with a spring level held down in position by a cotter pin with pulling rig attached.

“Where did these come from?” he asked Eladio.

“Those? Those are from the Republic. The old man brought them.”

“How are they?”

“Valen más que pesan,” Eladio said. “They are worth a fortune apiece.”

“I brought those,” Anselmo said. “Sixty in one pack. Ninety pounds, Inglés.”

“Have you used those?” Robert Jordan asked Pilar.

“Qué va have we used them?” the woman said. “It was with those Pablo slew the post at Otero.”

When she mentioned Pablo, Agustín started cursing. Robert Jordan saw the look on Pilar’s face in the firelight.

“Leave it,” she said to Agustín sharply. “It does no good to talk.”

“Have they always exploded?” Robert Jordan held the graypainted grenade in his hand, trying the bend of the cotter pin with his thumbnail.

“Always,” Eladio said. “There was not a dud in any of that lot we used.”

“And how quickly?”

“In the distance one can throw it. Quickly. Quickly enough.”

“And these?”

He held up a soup-tin-shaped bomb, with a tape wrapping around a wire loop.

“They are a garbage,” Eladio told him. “They blow. Yes. But it is all flash and no fragments.”

“But do they always blow?”

“Qué va, always,” Pilar said. “There is no always either with our munitions or theirs.”

“But you said the other always blew.”

“Not me,” Pilar told him. “You asked another, not me. I have seen no always in any of that stuff.”

“They all blew,” Eladio insisted. “Speak the truth, woman.”

“How do you know they all blew?” Pilar asked him. “It was Pablo who threw them. You killed no one at Otero.”

“That son of the great whore,” Agustín began.

“Leave it alone,” Pilar said sharply. Then she went on. “They are all much the same, Inglés. But the corrugated ones are more simple.”

I’d better use one of each on each set, Robert Jordan thought. But the serrated type will lash easier and more securely.

“Are you going to be throwing bombs, Inglés?” Agustín asked.

“Why not?” Robert Jordan said.

But crouched there, sorting out the grenades, what he was thinking was: it is impossible. How I could have deceived myself about it I do not know. We were as sunk when they attacked Sordo as Sordo was sunk when the snow stopped. It is that you can’t accept it. You have to go on and make a plan that you know is impossible to carry out. You made it and now you know it is no good. It’s no good, now, in the morning. You can take either of the posts absolutely O.K. with what you’ve got here. But you can’t take them both. You can’t be sure of it, I mean. Don’t deceive yourself. Not when the daylight comes.

Trying to take them both will never work. Pablo knew that all the time. I suppose he always intended to muck off but he knew we were cooked when Sordo was attacked. You can’t base an operation on the presumption that miracles are going to happen. You will kill them all off and not even get your bridge blown if you have nothing better than what you have now. You will kill off Pilar, Anselmo, Agustín, Primitivo, this jumpy Eladio, the worthless gypsy and old Fernando, and you won’t get your bridge blown. Do you suppose there will be a miracle and Golz will get the message from Andrés and stop it? If there isn’t, you are going to kill them all off with those orders. Maria too. You’ll kill her too with those orders. Can’t you even get her out of it? God damn Pablo to hell, he thought.

No. Don’t get angry. Getting angry is as bad as getting scared. But instead of sleeping with your girl you should have ridden all night through these hills with the woman to try to dig up enough people to make it work. Yes, he thought. And if anything happened to me so I was not here to blow it. Yes. That. That’s why you weren’t out. And you couldn’t send anybody out because you couldn’t run a chance of losing them and being short one more. You had to keep what you had and make a plan to do it with them.

But your plan stinks. It stinks, I tell you. It was a night plan and it’s morning now. Night plans aren’t any good in the morning. The way you think at night is no good in the morning. So now you know it is no good.

What if John Mosby did get away with things as impossible as this? Sure he did. Much more difficult. And remember, do not undervaluate the element of surprise. Remember that. Remember it isn’t goofy if you can make it stick. But that is not the way you are supposed to make it. You should make it not only possible but sure. But look at how it all has gone. Well, it was wrong in the first place and such things accentuate disaster as a snowball rolls up wet snow.

He looked up from where he was squatted by the table and saw Maria and she smiled at him. He grinned back with the front of his face and selected four more grenades and put them in his pockets. I could unscrew the detonators and just use them, he thought. But I don’t think the fragmentation will have any bad effect. It will come instantaneously with the explosion of the charge and it won’t disperse it. At least, I don’t think it will. I’m sure it won’t. Have a little confidence, he told himself. And you, last night, thinking about how you and your grandfather were so terrific and your father was a coward. Show yourself a little confidence now.

He grinned at Maria again but the grin was still no deeper than the skin that felt tight over his cheekbones and his mouth.

She thinks you’re wonderful, he thought. I think you stink. And the gloria and all that nonsense that you had. You had wonderful ideas, didn’t you? You had this world all taped, didn’t you? The hell with all of that.

Take it easy, he told himself. Don’t get into a rage. That’s just a way out too. There are always ways out. You’ve got to bite on the nail now. There isn’t any need to deny everything there’s been just because you are going to lose it. Don’t be like some damned snake with a broken back biting at itself; and your back isn’t broken either, you hound. Wait until you’re hurt before you start to cry. Wait until the fight before you get angry. There’s lots of time for it in a fight. It will be some use to you in a fight.

Pilar came over to him with the bag.

“It is strong now,” she said. “Those grenades are very good, Inglés. You can have confidence in them.”

“How do you feel, woman?”

She looked at him and shook her head and smiled. He wondered how far into her face the smile went. It looked deep enough.

“Good,” she said. “Dentro de la gravedad.”

Then she said, squatting by him, “How does it seem to thee now that it is really starting?”

“That we are few,” Robert Jordan said to her quickly.

“To me, too,” she said. “Very few.”

Then she said still to him alone, “The Maria can hold the horses by herself. I am not needed for that. We will hobble them. They are cavalry horses and the firing will not panic them. I will go to the lower post and do that which was the duty of Pablo. In this way we are one more.”

“Good,” he said. “I thought you might wish to.”

“Nay, Inglés,” Pilar said looking at him closely. “Do not be worried. All will be well. Remember they expect no such thing to come to them.”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said.

“One other thing, Inglés,” Pilar said as softly as her harsh whisper could be soft. “In that thing of the hand—”

“What thing of the hand?” he said angrily.

“Nay, listen. Do not be angry, little boy. In regard to that thing of the hand. That is all gypsy nonsense that I make to give myself an importance. There is no such thing.”

“Leave it alone,” he said coldly.

“Nay,” she said harshly and lovingly. “It is just a lying nonsense that I make. I would not have thee worry in the day of battle.”

“I am not worried,” Robert Jordan said.

“Yes, Inglés,” she said. “Thou art very worried, for good cause. But all will be well, Inglés. It is for this that we are born.”

“I don’t need a political commissar,” Robert Jordan told her.

She smiled at him again, smiling fairly and truly with the harsh lips and the wide mouth, and said, “I care for thee very much, Inglés.”

“I don’t want that now,” he said. “Ni tu, ni Dios.”

“Yes,” Pilar said in that husky whisper. “I know. I only wished to tell thee. And do not worry. We will do all very well.”

“Why not?” Robert Jordan said and the very thinnest edge of the skin in front of his face smiled. “Of course we will. All will be well.”

“When do we go?” Pilar asked.

Robert Jordan looked at his watch.

“Any time,” he said.

He handed one of the packs to Anselmo.

“How are you doing, old one?” he asked.

The old man was finishing whittling the last of a pile of wedges he had copied from a model Robert Jordan had given him. These were extra wedges in case they should be needed.

“Well,” the old man said and nodded. “So far, very well.” He held his hand out. “Look,” he said and smiled. His hands were perfectly steady.

“Bueno, y qué?” Robert Jordan said to him. “I can always keep the whole hand steady. Point with one finger.”

Anselmo pointed. The finger was trembling. He looked at Robert Jordan and shook his head.

“Mine too,” Robert Jordan showed him. “Always. That is normal.”

“Not for me,” Fernando said. He put his right forefinger out to show them. Then the left forefinger.

“Canst thou spit?” Agustín asked him and winked at Robert Jordan.

Fernando hawked and spat proudly onto the floor of the cave, then rubbed it in the dirt with his foot.

“You filthy mule,” Pilar said to him. “Spit in the fire if thou must vaunt thy courage.”

“I would not have spat on the floor, Pilar, if we were not leaving this place,” Fernando said primly.

“Be careful where you spit today,” Pilar told him. “It may be some place you will not be leaving.”

“That one speaks like a black cat,” Agustín said. He had the nervous necessity to joke that is another form of what they all felt.

“I joke,” said Pilar.

“Me too,” said Agustín. “But me cago en la leche, but I will be content when it starts.”

“Where is the gypsy?” Robert Jordan asked Eladio.

“With the horses,” Eladio said. “You can see him from the cave mouth.”

“How is he?”

Eladio grinned. “With much fear,” he said. It reassured him to speak of the fear of another.

“Listen, Inglés—” Pilar began. Robert Jordan looked toward her and as he did he saw her mouth open and the unbelieving look come on her face and he swung toward the cave mouth reaching for his pistol. There, holding the blanket aside with one hand, the short automatic rifle muzzle with its flash-cone jutting above his shoulder, was Pablo standing short, wide, bristly-faced, his small red-rimmed eyes looking toward no one in particular.

“Thou—” Pilar said to him unbelieving. “Thou.”

“Me,” said Pablo evenly. He came into the cave.

“Hola, Inglés,” he said. “I have five from the bands of Elias and Alejandro above with their horses.”

“And the exploder and the detonators?” Robert Jordan said. “And the other material?”

“I threw them down the gorge into the river,” Pablo said still looking at no one. “But I have thought of a way to detonate using a grenade.”

“So have I,” Robert Jordan said.

“Have you a drink of anything?” Pablo asked wearily.

Robert Jordan handed him the flask and he swallowed fast, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“What passes with you?” Pilar asked.

“Nada,” Pablo said, wiping his mouth again. “Nothing. I have come back.”

“But what?”

“Nothing. I had a moment of weakness. I went away but I am come back.”

He turned to Robert Jordan. “En el fondo no soy cobarde,” he said. “At bottom I am not a coward.”

But you are very many other things, Robert Jordan thought. Damned if you’re not. But I’m glad to see you, you son of a bitch.

“Five was all I could get from Elias and Alejandro,” Pablo said. “I have ridden since I left here. Nine of you could never have done it. Never. I knew that last night when the Inglés explained it. Never. There are seven men and a corporal at the lower post. Suppose there is an alarm or that they fight?”

He looked at Robert Jordan now. “When I left I thought you would know that it was impossible and would give it up. Then after I had thrown away thy material I saw it in another manner.”

“I am glad to see thee,” Robert Jordan said. He walked over to him. “We are all right with the grenades. That will work. The other does not matter now.”

“Nay,” Pablo said. “I do nothing for thee. Thou art a thing of bad omen. All of this comes from thee. Sordo also. But after I had thrown away thy material I found myself too lonely.”

“Thy mother—” Pilar said.

“So I rode for the others to make it possible for it to be successful. I have brought the best that I could get. I have left them at the top so I could speak to you, first. They think I am the leader.”

“Thou art,” Pilar said. “If thee wishes.” Pablo looked at her and said nothing. Then he said simply and quietly, “I have thought much since the thing of Sordo. I believe if we must finish we must finish together. But thou, Inglés. I hate thee for bringing this to us.”

“But Pablo—” Fernando, his pockets full of grenades, a bandolier of cartridges over his shoulder, he still wiping in his pan of stew with a piece of bread, began. “Do you not believe the operation can be successful? Night before last you said you were convinced it would be.”

“Give him some more stew,” Pilar said viciously to Maria. Then to Pablo, her eyes softening, “So you have come back, eh?”

“Yes, woman,” Pablo said.

“Well, thou art welcome,” Pilar said to him. “I did not think thou couldst be the ruin thou appeared to be.”

“Having done such a thing there is a loneliness that cannot be borne,” Pablo said to her quietly.

“That cannot be borne,” she mocked him. “That cannot be borne by thee for fifteen minutes.”

“Do not mock me, woman. I have come back.”

“And thou art welcome,” she said. “Didst not hear me the first time? Drink thy coffee and let us go. So much theatre tires me.”

“Is that coffee?” Pablo asked.

“Certainly,” Fernando said.

“Give me some, Maria,” Pablo said. “How art thou?” He did not look at her.

“Well,” Maria told him and brought him a bowl of coffee. “Do you want stew?” Pablo shook his head.

“No me gusta estar solo,” Pablo went on explaining to Pilar as though the others were not there. “I do not like to be alone. Sabes? Yesterday all day alone working for the good of all I was not lonely. But last night. Hombre! Qué mal lo pasé!”

“Thy predecessor the famous Judas Iscariot hanged himself,” Pilar said.

“Don’t talk to me that way, woman,” Pablo said. “Have you not seen? I am back. Don’t talk of Judas nor nothing of that. I am back.”

“How are these people thee brought?” Pilar asked him. “Hast brought anything worth bringing?”

“Son buenos,” Pablo said. He took a chance and looked at Pilar squarely, then looked away.

“Buenos y bobos. Good ones and stupids. Ready to die and all. A tu gusto. According to thy taste. The way you like them.”

Pablo looked Pilar in the eyes again and this time he did not look away. He kept on looking at her squarely with his small, redrimmed pig eyes.

“Thou,” she said and her husky voice was fond again. “Thou. I suppose if a man has something once, always something of it remains.”

“Listo,” Pablo said, looking at her squarely and flatly now. “I am ready for what the day brings.”

“I believe thou art back,” Pilar said to him. “I believe it. But, hombre, thou wert a long way gone.”

“Lend me another swallow from thy bottle,” Pablo said to Robert Jordan. “And then let us be going.”

Chapter 39

In the dark they came up the hill through the timber to the narrow pass at the top. They were all loaded heavily and they climbed slowly. The horses had loads too, packed over the saddles.

“We can cut them loose if it is necessary,” Pilar had said. “But with that, if we can keep it, we can make another camp.”

“And the rest of the ammunition?” Robert Jordan had asked as they lashed the packs.

“In those saddlebags.”

Robert Jordan felt the weight of his heavy pack, the dragging on his neck from the pull of his jacket with its pockets full of grenades, the weight of his pistol against his thigh, and the bulging of his trouser pockets where the clips for the submachine gun were. In his mouth was the taste of the coffee, in his right hand he carried the submachine gun and with his left hand he reached and pulled up the collar of his jacket to ease the pull of the pack straps.

“Inglés,” Pablo said to him, walking close beside him in the dark.

“What, man?”

“These I have brought think this is to be successful because I have brought them,” Pablo said. “Do not say anything to disillusion them.”

“Good,” Robert Jordan said. “But let us make it successful.”

“They have five horses, sabes?” Pablo said cautiously.

“Good,” said Robert Jordan. “We will keep all the horses together.”

“Good,” said Pablo, and nothing more.

I didn’t think you had experienced any complete conversion on the road to Tarsus, old Pablo, Robert Jordan thought. No. Your coming back was miracle enough. I don’t think there will ever be any problem about canonizing you.

“With those five I will deal with the lower post as well as Sordo would have,” Pablo said. “I will cut the wire and fall back upon the bridge as we convened.”

We went over this all ten minutes ago, Robert Jordan thought. I wonder why this now —

“There is a possibility of making it to Gredos,” Pablo said. “Truly, I have thought much of it.”

I believe you’ve had another flash in the last few minutes, Robert Jordan said to himself. You have had another revelation. But you’re not going to convince me that I am invited. No, Pablo. Do not ask me to believe too much.

Ever since Pablo had come into the cave and said he had five men Robert Jordan felt increasingly better. Seeing Pablo again had broken the pattern of tragedy into which the whole operation had seemed grooved ever since the snow, and since Pablo had been back he felt not that his luck had turned, since he did not believe in luck, but that the whole thing had turned for the better and that now it was possible. Instead of the surety of failure he felt confidence rising in him as a tire begins to fill with air from a slow pump. There was little difference at first, although there was a definite beginning, as when the pump starts and the rubber of the tube crawls a little, but it came now as steadily as a tide rising or the sap rising in a tree until he began to feel the first edge of that negation of apprehension that often turned into actual happiness before action.

This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one’s self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work.

And you, he said to himself, I am glad to see you getting a little something back that was badly missing for a time. But you were pretty bad back there. I was ashamed enough of you, there for a while. Only I was you. There wasn’t any me to judge you. We were all in bad shape. You and me and both of us. Come on now. Quit thinking like a schizophrenic. One at a time, now. You’re all right again now. But listen, you must not think of the girl all day ever. You can do nothing now to protect her except to keep her out of it, and that you are doing. There are evidently going to be plenty of horses if you can believe the signs. The best thing you can do for her is to do the job well and fast and get out, and thinking of her will only handicap you in this. So do not think of her ever.

Having thought this out he waited until Maria came up walking with Pilar and Rafael and the horses.

“Hi, guapa,” he said to her in the dark, “how are you?”

“I am well, Roberto,” she said.

“Don’t worry about anything,” he said to her and shifting the gun to his left hand he put a hand on her shoulder.

“I do not,” she said.

“It is all very well organized,” he told her. “Rafael will be with thee with the horses.”

“I would rather be with thee.”

“Nay. The horses is where thou art most useful.”

“Good,” she said. “There I will be.”

Just then one of the horses whinnied and from the open place below the opening through the rocks a horse answered, the neigh rising into a shrill sharply broken quaver.

Robert Jordan saw the bulk of the new horses ahead in the dark. He pressed forward and came up to them with Pablo. The men were standing by their mounts.

“Salud,” Robert Jordan said.

“Salud,” they answered in the dark. He could not see their faces.

“This is the Inglés who comes with us,” Pablo said. “The dynamiter.”

No one said anything to that. Perhaps they nodded in the dark.

“Let us get going, Pablo,” one man said. “Soon we will have the daylight on us.”

“Did you bring any more grenades?” another asked.

“Plenty,” said Pablo. “Supply yourselves when we leave the animals.”

“Then let us go,” another said. “We’ve been waiting here half the night.”

“Hola, Pilar,” another said as the woman came up.

“Que me maten, if it is not Pepe,” Pilar said huskily. “How are you, shepherd?”

“Good,” said the man. “Dentro de la gravedad.”

“What are you riding?” Pilar asked him.

“The gray of Pablo,” the man said. “It is much horse.”

“Come on,” another man said. “Let us go. There is no good in gossiping here.”

“How art thou, Elicio?” Pilar said to him as he mounted.

“How would I be?” he said rudely. “Come on, woman, we have work to do.”

Pablo mounted the big bay horse.

“Keep thy mouths shut and follow me,” he said. “I will lead you to the place where we will leave the horses.”

Chapter 40

During the time that Robert Jordan had slept through, the time he had spent planning the destruction of the bridge and the time that he had been with Maria, Andrés had made slow progress. Until he had reached the Republican lines he had travelled across country and through the fascist lines as fast as a countryman in good physical condition who knew the country well could travel in the dark. But once inside the Republican lines it went very slowly.

In theory he should only have had to show the safe-conduct given him by Robert Jordan stamped with the seal of the S. I. M. and the dispatch which bore the same seal and be passed along toward his destination with the greatest speed. But first he had encountered the company commander in the front line who had regarded the whole mission with owlishly grave suspicion.

He had followed this company commander to battalion headquarters where the battalion commander, who had been a barber before the movement, was filled with enthusiasm on hearing the account of his mission. This commander, who was named Gomez, cursed the company commander for his stupidity, patted Andrés on the back, gave him a drink of bad brandy and told him that he himself, the ex-barber, had always wanted to be a guerrillero. He had then roused his adjutant, turned over the battalion to him, and sent his orderly to wake up and bring his motorcyclist. Instead of sending Andrés back to brigade headquarters with the motorcyclist, Gomez had decided to take him there himself in order to expedite things and, with Andrés holding tight onto the seat ahead of him, they roared, bumping down the shell-pocked mountain road between the double row of big trees, the headlight of the motorcycle showing their whitewashed bases and the places on the trunks where the whitewash and the bark had been chipped and torn by shell fragments and bullets during the fighting along this road in the first summer of the movement. They turned into the little smashed-roofed mountain-resort town where brigade headquarters was and Gomez had braked the motorcycle like a dirt-track racer and leaned it against the wall of the house where a sleepy sentry came to attention as Gomez pushed by him into the big room where the walls were covered with maps and a very sleepy officer with a green eyeshade sat at a desk with a reading lamp, two telephones and a copy of Mundo Obrero.

This officer looked up at Gomez and said, “What doest thou here? Have you never heard of the telephone?”

“I must see the Lieutenant-Colonel,” Gomez said.

“He is asleep,” the officer said. “I could see the lights of that bicycle of thine for a mile coming down the road. Dost wish to bring on a shelling?”

“Call the Lieutenant-Colonel,” Gomez said. “This is a matter of the utmost gravity.”

“He is asleep, I tell thee,” the officer said. “What sort of a bandit is that with thee?” he nodded toward Andrés.

“He is a guerrillero from the other side of the lines with a dispatch of the utmost importance for the General Golz who commands the attack that is to be made at dawn beyond Navacerrada,” Gomez said excitedly and earnestly. “Rouse the Teniente-Coronel for the love of God.”

The officer looked at him with his droopy eyes shaded by the green celluloid.

“All of you are crazy,” he said. “I know of no General Golz nor of no attack. Take this sportsman and get back to your battalion.”

“Rouse the Teniente-Coronel, I say,” Gomez said and Andrés saw his mouth tightening.

“Go obscenity yourself,” the officer said to him lazily and turned away.

Gomez took his heavy 9 mm. Star pistol out of its holster and shoved it against the officer’s shoulder.

“Rouse him, you fascist bastard,” he said. “Rouse him or I’ll kill you.”

“Calm yourself,” the officer said. “All you barbers are emotional.”

Andrés saw Gomez’s face draw with hate in the light of the reading lamp. But all he said was, “Rouse him.”

“Orderly,” the officer called in a contemptuous voice.

A soldier came to the door and saluted and went out.

“His fiancée is with him,” the officer said and went back to reading the paper. “It is certain he will be delighted to see you.”

“It is those like thee who obstruct all effort to win this war,” Gomez said to the staff officer.

The officer paid no attention to him. Then, as he read on, he remarked, as though to himself, “What a curious periodical this is!”

“Why don’t you read El Debate then? That is your paper,” Gomez said to him naming the leading Catholic-Conservative organ published in Madrid before the movement.

“Don’t forget I am thy superior officer and that a report by me on thee carries weight,” the officer said without looking up. “I never read El Debate. Do not make false accusations.”

“No. You read A. B. C.,” Gomez said. “The army is still rotten with such as thee. With professionals such as thee. But it will not always be. We are caught between the ignorant and the cynical. But we will educate the one and eliminate the other.”

“‘Purge’is the word you want,” the officer said, still not looking up. “Here it reports the purging of more of thy famous Russians. They are purging more than the epsom salts in this epoch.”

“By any name,” Gomez said passionately. “By any name so that such as thee are liquidated.”

“Liquidated,” the officer said insolently as though speaking to himself. “Another new word that has little of Castilian in it.”

“Shot, then,” Gomez said. “That is Castilian. Canst understand it?”

“Yes, man, but do not talk so loudly. There are others beside the Teniente-Coronel asleep in this Brigade Staff and thy emotion bores me. It was for that reason that I always shaved myself. I never liked the conversation.”

Gomez looked at Andrés and shook his head. His eyes were shining with the moistness that rage and hatred can bring. But he shook his head and said nothing as he stored it all away for some time in the future. He had stored much in the year and a half in which he had risen to the command of a battalion in the Sierra and now, as the Lieutenant-Colonel came into the room in his pajamas he drew himself stiff and saluted.

The Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda, who was a short, gray-faced man, who had been in the army all his life, who had lost the love of his wife in Madrid while he was losing his digestion in Morocco, and become a Republican when he found he could not divorce his wife (there was never any question of recovering his digestion), had entered the civil war as a Lieutenant-Colonel. He had only one ambition, to finish the war with the same rank. He had defended the Sierra well and he wanted to be left alone there to defend it whenever it was attacked. He felt much healthier in the war, probably due to the forced curtailment of the number of meat courses, he had an enormous stock of sodium-bicarbonate, he had his whiskey in the evening, his twenty-three-year-old mistress was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as milicianas in the July of the year before, and now he came into the room, nodded in answer to Gomez’s salute and put out his hand.

“What brings thee, Gomez?” he asked and then, to the officer at the desk who was his chief of operation, “Give me a cigarette, please, Pepe.”

Gomez showed him Andrés’s papers and the dispatch. The Lieutenant-Colonel looked at the Salvoconducto quickly, looked at Andrés, nodded and smiled, and then looked at the dispatch hungrily. He felt of the seal, tested it with his forefinger, then handed both the safe-conduct and dispatch back to Andrés.

“Is the life very hard there in the hills?” he asked.

“No, my Lieutenant-Colonel,” Andrés said.

“Did they tell thee where would be the closest point to find General Golz’s headquarters?”

“Navacerrada, my Lieutenant-Colonel,” Andrés said. “The Inglés said it would be somewhere close to Navacerrada behind the lines to the right of there.”

“What Inglés?” the Lieutenant-Colonel asked quietly.

“The Inglés who is with us as a dynamiter.”

The Lieutenant-Colonel nodded. It was just another sudden unexplained rarity of this war. “The Inglés who is with us as a dynamiter.”

“You had better take him, Gomez, on the motor,” the Lieutenant-Colonel said. “Write them a very strong Salvoconducto to the Estado Mayor of General Golz for me to sign,” he said to the officer in the green celluloid eyeshade. “Write it on the machine, Pepe. Here are the details,” he motioned for Andrés to hand over his safe-conduct, “and put on two seals.” He turned to Gomez. “You will need something strong tonight. It is rightly so. People should be careful when an offensive is projected. I will give you something as strong as I can make it.” Then to Andrés, very kindly, he said, “Dost wish anything? To eat or to drink?”

“No, my Lieutenant-Colonel,” Andrés said. “I am not hungry. They gave me cognac at the last place of command and more would make me seasick.”

“Did you see any movement or activity opposite my front as you came through?” the Lieutenant-Colonel asked Andrés politely.

“It was as usual, my Lieutenant-Colonel. Quiet. Quiet.”

“Did I not meet thee in Cercedilla about three months back?” the Lieutenant-Colonel asked.

“Yes, my Lieutenant-Colonel.”

“I thought so,” the Lieutenant-Colonel patted him on the shoulder. “You were with the old man Anselmo. How is he?”

“He is well, my Lieutenant-Colonel,” Andrés told him.

“Good. It makes me happy,” the Lieutenant-Colonel said. The officer showed him what he had typed and he read it over and signed it. “You must go now quickly,” he said to Gomez and Andrés. “Be careful with the motor,” he said to Gomez. “Use your lights. Nothing will happen from a single motor and you must be careful. My compliments to Comrade General Golz. We met after Peguerinos.” He shook hands with them both. “Button the papers inside thy shirt,” he said. “There is much wind on a motor.”

After they went out he went to a cabinet, took out a glass and a bottle, and poured himself some whiskey and poured plain water into it from an earthenware crock that stood on the floor against the wall. Then holding the glass and sipping the whiskey very slowly he stood in front of the big map on the wall and studied the offensive possibilities in the country above Navacerrada.

“I am glad it is Golz and not me,” he said finally to the officer who sat at the table. The officer did not answer and looking away from the map and at the officer the Lieutenant-Colonel saw he was asleep with his head on his arms. The Lieutenant-Colonel went over to the desk and pushed the two phones close together so that one touched the officer’s head on either side. Then he walked to the cupboard, poured himself another whiskey, put water in it, and went back to the map again.

Andrés, holding tight onto the seat where Gomez was forking the motor, bent his head against the wind as the motorcycle moved, noisily exploding, into the light-split darkness of the country road that opened ahead sharp with the high black of the poplars beside it, dimmed and yellow-soft now as the road dipped into the fog along a stream bed, sharpening hard again as the road rose and, ahead of them at the crossroads, the headlight showed the gray bulk of the empty trucks coming down from the mountains.

Chapter 41

Pablo stopped and dismounted in the dark. Robert Jordan heard the creaking and the heavy breathing as they all dismounted and the clinking of a bridle as a horse tossed his head. He smelled the horses and the unwashed and sour slept-in-clothing smell of the new men and the wood-smoky sleep-stale smell of the others who had been in the cave. Pablo was standing close to him and he smelled the brassy, dead-wine smell that came from him like the taste of a copper coin in your mouth. He lit a cigarette, cupping his hand to hide the light, pulled deep on it, and heard Pablo say very softly, “Get the grenade sack, Pilar, while we hobble these.”

“Agustín,” Robert Jordan said in a whisper, “you and Anselmo come now with me to the bridge. Have you the sack of pans for the máquina?”

“Yes,” Agustín said. “Why not?”

Robert Jordan went over to where Pilar was unpacking one of the horses with the help of Primitivo.

“Listen, woman,” he said softly.

“What now?” she whispered huskily, swinging a cinch hook clear from under the horse’s belly.

“Thou understandest that there is to be no attack on the post until thou hearest the falling of the bombs?”

“How many times dost thou have to tell me?” Pilar said. “You are getting like an old woman, Inglés.”

“Only to check,” Robert Jordan said. “And after the destruction of the post you fall back onto the bridge and cover the road from above and my left flank.”

“The first time thou outlined it I understood it as well as I will ever understand it,” Pilar whispered to him. “Get thee about thy business.”

“That no one should make a move nor fire a shot nor throw a bomb until the noise of the bombardment comes,” Robert Jordan said softly.

“Do not molest me more,” Pilar whispered angrily. “I have understood this since we were at Sordo’s.”

Robert Jordan went to where Pablo was tying the horses. “I have only hobbled those which are liable to panic,” Pablo said. “These are tied so a pull of the rope will release them, see?”

“Good.”

“I will tell the girl and the gypsy how to handle them,” Pablo said. His new men were standing in a group by themselves leaning on their carbines.

“Dost understand all?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Why not?” Pablo said. “Destroy the post. Cut the wire. Fall back on the bridge. Cover the bridge until thou blowest.”

“And nothing to start until the commencement of the bombardment.”

“Thus it is.”

“Well then, much luck.”

Pablo grunted. Then he said, “Thou wilt cover us well with the máquina and with thy small máquina when we come back, eh, Inglés?”

“Dela primera,” Robert Jordan said. “Off the top of the basket.”

“Then,” Pablo said. “Nothing more. But in that moment thou must be very careful, Inglés. It will not be simple to do that unless thou art very careful.”

“I will handle the máquina myself,” Robert Jordan said to him.

“Hast thou much experience? For I am of no mind to be shot by Agustín with his belly full of good intentions.”

“I have much experience. Truly. And if Agustín uses either máquina I will see that he keeps it way above thee. Above, above and above.”

“Then nothing more,” Pablo said. Then he said softly and confidentially, “There is still a lack of horses.”

The son of a bitch, Robert Jordan thought. Or does he think I did not understand him the first time.

“I go on foot,” he said. “The horses are thy affair.”

“Nay, there will be a horse for thee, Inglés,” Pablo said softly. “There will be horses for all of us.”

“That is thy problem,” Robert Jordan said. “Thou dost not have to count me. Hast enough rounds for thy new máquina?”

“Yes,” Pablo said. “All that the cavalryman carried. I have fired only four to try it. I tried it yesterday in the high hills.”

“We go now,” Robert Jordan said. “We must be there early and well hidden.”

“We all go now,” Pablo said. “Suerte, Inglés.”

I wonder what the bastard is planning now, Robert Jordan said. But I am pretty sure I know. Well, that is his, not mine. Thank God I do not know these new men.

He put his hand out and said, “Suerte, Pablo,” and their two hands gripped in the dark.

Robert Jordan, when he put his hand out, expected that it would be like grasping something reptilian or touching a leper. He did not know what Pablo’s hand would feel like. But in the dark Pablo’s hand gripped his hard and pressed it frankly and he returned the grip. Pablo had a good hand in the dark and feeling it gave Robert Jordan the strangest feeling he had felt that morning. We must be allies now, he thought. There was always much handshaking with allies. Not to mention decorations and kissing on both cheeks, he thought. I’m glad we do not have to do that. I suppose all allies are like this. They always hate each other au fond. But this Pablo is a strange man.

“Suerte, Pablo,” he said and gripped the strange, firm, purposeful hand hard. “I will cover thee well. Do not worry.”

“I am sorry for having taken thy material,” Pablo said. “It was an equivocation.”

“But thou has brought what we needed.”

“I do not hold this of the bridge against thee, Inglés,” Pablo said. “I see a successful termination for it.”

“What are you two doing? Becoming maricones?” Pilar said suddenly beside them in the dark. “That is all thou hast lacked,” she said to Pablo. “Get along, Inglés, and cut thy good-bys short before this one steals the rest of thy explosive.”

“Thou dost not understand me, woman,” Pablo said. “The Inglés and I understand one another.”

“Nobody understands thee. Neither God nor thy mother,” Pilar said. “Nor I either. Get along, Inglés. Make thy good-bys with thy cropped head and go. Me cago en tu padre, but I begin to think thou art afraid to see the bull come out.”

“Thy mother,” Robert Jordan said.

“Thou never hadst one,” Pilar whispered cheerfully. “Now go, because I have a great desire to start this and get it over with. Go with thy people,” she said to Pablo. “Who knows how long their stern resolution is good for? Thou hast a couple that I would not trade thee for. Take them and go.”

Robert Jordan slung his pack on his back and walked over to the horses to find Maria.

“Good-by, guapa,” he said. “I will see thee soon.”

He had an unreal feeling about all of this now as though he had said it all before or as though it were a train that were going, especially as though it were a train and he was standing on the platform of a railway station.

“Good-by, Roberto,” she said. “Take much care.”

“Of course,” he said. He bent his head to kiss her and his pack rolled forward against the back of his head so that his forehead bumped hers hard. As this happened he knew this had happened before too.

“Don’t cry,” he said, awkward not only from the load.

“I do not,” she said. “But come back quickly.”

“Do not worry when you hear the firing. There is bound to be much firing.”

“Nay. Only come back quickly.”

“Good-by, guapa,” he said awkwardly.

“Salud, Roberto.”

Robert Jordan had not felt this young since he had taken the train at Red Lodge to go down to Billings to get the train there to go away to school for the first time. He had been afraid to go and he did not want any one to know it and, at the station, just before the conductor picked up the box he would step up on to reach the steps of the day coach, his father had kissed him good-by and said, “May the Lord watch between thee and me while we are absent the one from the other.” His father had been a very religious man and he had said it simply and sincerely. But his moustache had been moist and his eyes were damp with emotion and Robert Jordan had been so embarrassed by all of it, the damp religious sound of the prayer, and by his father kissing him good-by, that he had felt suddenly so much older than his father and sorry for him that he could hardly bear it.

After the train started he had stood on the rear platform and watched the station and the water tower grow smaller and smaller and the rails crossed by the ties narrowed toward a point where the station and the water tower stood now minute and tiny in the steady clicking that was taking him away.

The brakeman said, “Dad seemed to take your going sort of hard, Bob.”

“Yes,” he had said watching the sagebrush that ran from the edge of the road bed between the passing telegraph poles across to the streaming-by dusty stretching of the road. He was looking for sage hens.

“You don’t mind going away to school?”

“No,” he had said and it was true.

It would not have been true before but it was true that minute and it was only now, at this parting, that he ever felt as young again as he had felt before that train left. He felt very young now and very awkward and he was saying good-by as awkwardly as one can be when saying good-by to a young girl when you are a boy in school, saying good-by at the front porch, not knowing whether to kiss the girl or not. Then he knew it was not the good-by he was being awkward about. It was the meeting he was going to. The good-by was only a part of the awkwardness he felt about the meeting.

You’re getting them again, he told himself. But I suppose there is no one that does not feel that he is too young to do it. He would not put a name to it. Come on, he said to himself. Come on. It is too early for your second childhood.

“Good-by, guapa,” he said. “Good-by, rabbit.”

“Good-by, my Roberto,” she said and he went over to where Anselmo and Agustín were standing and said, “Vamonos.”

Anselmo swung his heavy pack up. Agustín, fully loaded since the cave, was leaning against a tree, the automatic rifle jutting over the top of his load.

“Good,” he said, “Vamonos.”

The three of them started down the hill.

“Buena suerte, Don Roberto,” Fernando said as the three of them passed him as they moved in single file between the trees. Fernando was crouched on his haunches a little way from where they passed but he spoke with great dignity.

“Buena suerte thyself, Fernando,” Robert Jordan said.

“In everything thou doest,” Agustín said.

“Thank you, Don Roberto,” Fernando said, undisturbed by Agustín.

“That one is a phenomenon, Inglés,” Agustín whispered.

“I believe thee,” Robert Jordan said. “Can I help thee? Thou art loaded like a horse.”

“I am all right,” Agustín said. “Man, but I am content we are started.”

“Speak softly,” Anselmo said. “From now on speak little and softly.”

Walking carefully, downhill, Anselmo in the lead, Agustín next, Robert Jordan placing his feet carefully so that he would not slip, feeling the dead pine needles under his rope-soled shoes, bumping a tree root with one foot and putting a hand forward and feeling the cold metal jut of the automatic rifle barrel and the folded legs of the tripod, then working sideways down the hill, his shoes sliding and grooving the forest floor, putting his left hand out again and touching the rough bark of a tree trunk, then as he braced himself his hand feeling a smooth place, the base of the palm of his hand coming away sticky from the resinous sap where a blaze had been cut, they dropped down the steep wooded hillside to the point above the bridge where Robert Jordan and Anselmo had watched the first day.

Now Anselmo was halted by a pine tree in the dark and he took Robert Jordan’s wrist and whispered, so low Jordan could hardly hear him, “Look. There is the fire in his brazier.”

It was a point of light below where Robert Jordan knew the bridge joined the road.

“Here is where we watched,” Anselmo said. He took Robert Jordan’s hand and bent it down to touch a small fresh blaze low on a tree trunk. “This I marked while thou watched. To the right is where thou wished to put the máquina.”

“We will place it there.”

“Good.”

They put the packs down behind the base of the pine trunks and the two of them followed Anselmo over to the level place where there was a clump of seedling pines.

“It is here,” Anselmo said. “Just here.”

“From here, with daylight,” Robert Jordan crouched behind the small trees whispered to Agustín, “thou wilt see a small stretch of road and the entrance to the bridge. Thou wilt see the length of the bridge and a small stretch of road at the other end before it rounds the curve of the rocks.”

Agustín said nothing.

“Here thou wilt lie while we prepare the exploding and fire on anything that comes from above or below.”

“Where is that light?” Agustín asked.

“In the sentry box at this end,” Robert Jordan whispered.

“Who deals with the sentries?”

“The old man and I, as I told thee. But if we do not deal with them, thou must fire into the sentry boxes and at them if thou seest them.”

“Yes. You told me that.”

“After the explosion when the people of Pablo come around that corner, thou must fire over their heads if others come after them. Thou must fire high above them when they appear in any event that others must not come. Understandest thou?”

“Why not? It is as thou saidst last night.”

“Hast any questions?”

“Nay. I have two sacks. I can load them from above where it will not be seen and bring them here.”

“But do no digging here. Thou must be as well hid as we were at the top.”

“Nay. I will bring the dirt in them in the dark. You will see. They will not show as I will fix them.”

“Thou are very close. Sabes? In the daylight this clump shows clearly from below.”

“Do not worry, Inglés. Where goest thou?”

“I go close below with the small máquina of mine. The old man will cross the gorge now to be ready for the box of the other end. It faces in that direction.”

“Then nothing more,” said Agustín. “Salud, Inglés. Hast thou tobacco?”

“Thou canst not smoke. It is too close.”

“Nay. Just to hold in the mouth. To smoke later.”

Robert Jordan gave him his cigarette case and Agustín took three cigarettes and put them inside the front flap of his herdsman’s flat cap. He spread the legs of his tripod with the gun muzzle in the low pines and commenced unpacking his load by touch and laying the things where he wanted them.

“Nada mas,” he said. “Well, nothing more.”

Anselmo and Robert Jordan left him there and went back to where the packs were.

“Where had we best leave them?” Robert Jordan whispered.

“I think here. But canst thou be sure of the sentry with thy small máquina from here?”

“Is this exactly where we were on that day?”

“The same tree,” Anselmo said so low Jordan could barely hear him and he knew he was speaking without moving his lips as he had spoken that first day. “I marked it with my knife.”

Robert Jordan had the feeling again of it all having happened before, but this time it came from his own repetition of a query and Anselmo’s answer. It had been the same with Agustín, who had asked a question about the sentries although he knew the answer.

“It is close enough. Even too close,” he whispered. “But the light is behind us. We are all right here.”

“Then I will go now to cross the gorge and be in position at the other end,” Anselmo said. Then he said, “Pardon me, Inglés. So that there is no mistake. In case I am stupid.”

“What?” he breathed very softly.

“Only to repeat it so that I will do it exactly.”

“When I fire, thou wilt fire. When thy man is eliminated, cross the bridge to me. I will have the packs down there and thou wilt do as I tell thee in the placing of the charges. Everything I will tell thee. If aught happens to me do it thyself as I showed thee. Take thy time and do it well, wedging all securely with the wooden wedges and lashing the grenades firmly.”

“It is all clear to me,” Anselmo said. “I remember it all. Now I go. Keep thee well covered, Inglés, when daylight comes.”

“When thou firest,” Robert Jordan said, “take a rest and make very sure. Do not think of it as a man but as a target, de acuerdo? Do not shoot at the whole man but at a point. Shoot for the exact center of the belly — if he faces thee. At the middle of the back, if he is looking away. Listen, old one. When I fire if the man is sitting down he will stand up before he runs or crouches. Shoot then. If he is still sitting down shoot. Do not wait. But make sure. Get to within fifty yards. Thou art a hunter. Thou hast no problem.”

“I will do as thou orderest,” Anselmo said.

“Yes. I order it thus,” Robert Jordan said.

I’m glad I remembered to make it an order, he thought. That helps him out. That takes some of the curse off. I hope it does, anyway. Some of it. I had forgotten about what he told me that first day about the killing.

“It is thus I have ordered,” he said. “Now go.”

“Me voy,” said Anselmo. “Until soon, Inglés.”

“Until soon, old one,” Robert Jordan said.

He remembered his father in the railway station and the wetness of that farewell and he did not say Salud nor good-by nor good luck nor anything like that.

“Hast wiped the oil from the bore of thy gun, old one?” he whispered. “So it will not throw wild?”

“In the cave,” Anselmo said. “I cleaned them all with the pullthrough.”

“Then until soon,” Robert Jordan said and the old man went off, noiseless on his rope-soled shoes, swinging wide through the trees.

Robert Jordan lay on the pine-needle floor of the forest and listened to the first stirring in the branches of the pines of the wind that would come with daylight. He took the clip out of the submachine gun and worked the lock back and forth. Then he turned the gun, with the lock open and in the dark he put the muzzle to his lips and blew through the barrel, the metal tasting greasy and oily as his tongue touched the edge of the bore. He laid the gun across his forearm, the action up so that no pine needles or rubbish could get in it, and shucked all the cartridges out of the clip with his thumb and onto a handkerchief he had spread in front of him. Then, feeling each cartridge in the dark and turning it in his fingers, he pressed and slid them one at a time back into the clip. Now the clip was heavy again in his hand and he slid it back into the submachine gun and felt it click home. He lay on his belly behind the pine trunk, the gun across his left forearm and watched the point of light below him. Sometimes he could not see it and then he knew that the man in the sentry box had moved in front of the brazier. Robert Jordan lay there and waited for daylight.

Chapter 42

During the time that Pablo had ridden back from the hills to the cave and the time the band had dropped down to where they had left the horses Andrés had made rapid progress toward Golz’s headquarters. Where they came onto the main highroad to Navacerrada on which the trucks were rolling back from the mountain there was a control. But when Gomez showed the sentry at the control his safe-conduct from the Lieutenant-Colonel Miranda the sentry put the light from a flashlight on it, showed it to the other sentry with him, then handed it back and saluted.

“Siga,” he said. “Continue. But without lights.”

The motorcycle roared again and Andrés was holding tight onto the forward seat and they were moving along the highway, Gomez riding carefully in the traffic. None of the trucks had lights and they were moving down the road in a long convoy. There were loaded trucks moving up the road too, and all of them raised a dust that Andrés could not see in that dark but could only feel as a cloud that blew in his face and that he could bite between his teeth.

They were close behind the tailboard of a truck now, the motorcycle chugging, then Gomez speeded up and passed it and another, and another, and another with the other trucks roaring and rolling down past them on the left. There was a motorcar behind them now and it blasted into the truck noise and the dust with its klaxon again and again; then flashed on lights that showed the dust like a solid yellow cloud and surged past them in a whining rise of gears and a demanding, threatening, bludgeoning of klaxoning.

Then ahead all the trucks were stopped and riding on, working his way ahead past ambulances, staff cars, an armored car, another, and a third, all halted, like heavy, metal, gun-jutting turtles in the hot yet settled dust, they found another control where there had been a smash-up. A truck, halting, had not been seen by the truck which followed it and the following truck had run into it smashing the rear of the first truck in and scattering cases of small-arms ammunition over the road. One case had burst open on landing and as Gomez and Andrés stopped and wheeled the motorcycle forward through the stalled vehicles to show their safe-conduct at the control Andrés walked over the brass hulls of the thousand of cartridges scattered across the road in the dust. The second truck had its radiator completely smashed in. The truck behind it was touching its tail gate. A hundred more were piling up behind and an overbooted officer was running back along the road shouting to the drivers to back so that the smashed truck could be gotten off the road.

There were too many trucks for them to be able to back unless the officer reached the end of the ever mounting line and stopped it from increasing and Andrés saw him running, stumbling, with his flashlight, shouting and cursing and, in the dark, the trucks kept coming up.

The man at the control would not give the safe-conduct back. There were two of them, with rifles slung on their backs and flashlights in their hands and they were shouting too. The one carrying the safe-conduct in his hand crossed the road to a truck going in the downhill direction to tell it to proceed to the next control and tell them there to hold all trucks until his jam was straightened out. The truck driver listened and went on. Then, still holding the safeconduct, the control patrol came over, shouting, to the truck driver whose load was spilled.

“Leave it and get ahead for the love of God so we can clear this!” he shouted at the driver.

“My transmission is smashed,” the driver, who was bent over by the rear of his truck, said.

“Obscene your transmission. Go ahead, I say.”

“They do not go ahead when the differential is smashed,” the driver told him and bent down again.

“Get thyself pulled then, get ahead so that we can get this other obscenity off the road.”

The driver looked at him sullenly as the control man shone the electric torch on the smashed rear of the truck.

“Get ahead. Get ahead,” the man shouted, still holding the safeconduct pass in his hand.

“And my paper,” Gomez spoke to him. “My safe-conduct. We are in a hurry.”

“Take thy safe-conduct to hell,” the man said and handing it to him ran across the road to halt a down-coming truck.

“Turn thyself at the crossroads and put thyself in position to pull this wreck forward,” he said to the driver.

“My orders are—”

“Obscenity thy orders. Do as I say.”

The driver let his truck into gear and rolled straight ahead down the road and was gone in the dust.

As Gomez started the motorcycle ahead onto the now clear right-hand side of the road past the wrecked truck, Andrés, holding tight again, saw the control guard halting another truck and the driver leaning from the cab and listening to him.

Now they went fast, swooping along the road that mounted steadily toward the mountain. All forward traffic had been stalled at the control and there were only the descending trucks passing, passing and passing on their left as the motorcycle climbed fast and steadily now until it began to overtake the mounting traffic which had gone on ahead before the disaster at the control.

Still without lights they passed four more armored cars, then a long line of trucks loaded with troops. The troops were silent in the dark and at first Andrés only felt their presence rising above him, bulking above the truck bodies through the dust as they passed. Then another staff came behind them blasting with its klaxon and flicking its lights off and on, and each time the lights shone Andrés saw the troops, steel-helmeted, their rifles vertical, their machine guns pointed up against the dark sky, etched sharp against the night that they dropped into when the light flicked off. Once as he passed close to a troop truck and the lights flashed he saw their faces fixed and sad in the sudden light. In their steel helmets, riding in the trucks in the dark toward something that they only knew was an attack, their faces were drawn with each man’s own problem in the dark and the light revealed them as they would not have looked in day, from shame to show it to each other, until the bombardment and the attack would commence, and no man would think about his face.

Andrés now passing them truck after truck, Gomez still keeping successfully ahead of the following staff car, did not think any of this about their faces. He only thought, “What an army. What equipment. What a mechanization. Vaya gente! Look at such people. Here we have the army of the Republic. Look at them. Camion after camion. All uniformed alike. All with casques of steel on their heads. Look at the máquinas rising from the trucks against the coming of planes. Look at the army that has been builded!”

And as the motorcycle passed the high gray trucks full of troops, gray trucks with high square cabs and square ugly radiators, steadily mounting the road in the dust and the flicking lights of the pursuing staff car, the red star of the army showing in the light when it passed over the tail gates, showing when the light came onto the sides of the dusty truck bodies, as they passed, climbing steadily now, the air colder and the road starting to turn in bends and switchbacks now, the trucks laboring and grinding, some steaming in the light flashes, the motorcycle laboring now too, and Andrés clinging tight to the front seat as they climbed, Andrés thought this ride on a motorcycle was mucho, mucho. He had never been on a motorcycle before and now they were climbing a mountain in the midst of all the movement that was going to an attack and, as they climbed, he knew now there was no problem of ever being back in time for the assault on the posts. In this movement and confusion he would be lucky to get back by the next night. He had never seen an offensive or any of the preparations for one before and as they rode up the road he marvelled at the size and power of this army that the Republic had built.

Now they rode on a long slanting, rising stretch of road that ran across the face of the mountain and the grade was so steep as they neared the top that Gomez told him to get down and together they pushed the motorcycle up the last steep grade of the pass. At the left, just past the top, there was a loop of road where cars could turn and there were lights winking in front of a big stone building that bulked long and dark against the night sky.

“Let us go to ask there where the headquarters is,” Gomez said to Andrés and they wheeled the motorcycle over to where two sentries stood in front of the closed door of the great stone building. Gomez leaned the motorcycle against the wall as a motorcyclist in a leather suit, showing against the light from inside the building as the door opened, came out of the door with a dispatch case hung over his shoulder, a wooden-holstered Mauser pistol swung against his hip. As the light went off, he found his motorcycle in the dark by the door, pushed it until it sputtered and caught, then roared off up the road.

At the door Gomez spoke to one of the sentries. “Captain Gomez of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade,” he said. “Can you tell me where to find the headquarters of General Golz commanding the ThirtyFifth Division?”

“It isn’t here,” the sentry said.

“What is here?”

“The Comandancia.”

“What comandancia?”

“Well, the Comandancia.”

“The comandancia of what?”

“Who art thou to ask so many questions?” the sentry said to Gomez in the dark. Here on the top of the pass the sky was very clear with the stars out and Andrés, out of the dust now, could see quite clearly in the dark. Below them, where the road turned to the right, he could see clearly the outline of the trucks and cars that passed against the sky line.

“I am Captain Rogelio Gomez of the first battalion of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade and I ask where is the headquarters of General Golz,” Gomez said.

The sentry opened the door a little way. “Call the corporal of the guard,” he shouted inside.

Just then a big staff car came up over the turn of the road and circled toward the big stone building where Andrés and Gomez were standing waiting for the corporal of the guard. It came toward them and stopped outside the door.

A large man, old and heavy, in an oversized khaki beret, such as chasseurs a pied wear in the French Army, wearing an overcoat, carrying a map case and wearing a pistol strapped around his greatcoat, got out of the back of the car with two other men in the uniform of the International Brigades.

He spoke in French, which Andrés did not understand and of which Gomez, who had been a barber, knew only a few words, to his chauffeur telling him to get the car away from the door and into shelter.

As he came into the door with the other two officers, Gomez saw his face clearly in the light and recognized him. He had seen him at political meetings and he had often read articles by him in Mundo Obrero translated from the French. He recognized his bushy eyebrows, his watery gray eyes, his chin and the double chin under it, and he knew him for one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures who had led the mutiny of the French Navy in the Black Sea. Gomez knew this man’s high political place in the International Brigades and he knew this man would know where Golz’s headquarters were and be able to direct him there. He did not know what this man had become with time, disappointment, bitterness both domestic and political, and thwarted ambition and that to question him was one of the most dangerous things that any man could do. Knowing nothing of this he stepped forward into the path of this man, saluted with his clenched fist and said, “Comrade Marty, we are the bearers of a dispatch for General Golz. Can you direct us to his headquarters? It is urgent.”

The tall, heavy old man looked at Gomez with his outthrust head and considered him carefully with his watery eyes. Even here at the front in the light of a bare electric bulb, he having just come in from driving in an open car on a brisk night, his gray face had a look of decay. His face looked as though it were modelled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.

“You have what, Comrade?” he asked Gomez, speaking Spanish with a strong Catalan accent. His eyes glanced sideways at Andrés, slid over him, and went back to Gomez.

“A dispatch for General Golz to be delivered at his headquarters, Comrade Marty.”

“Where is it from, Comrade?”

“From behind the fascist lines,” Gomez said.

André Marty extended his hand for the dispatch and the other papers. He glanced at them and put them in his pocket.

“Arrest them both,” he said to the corporal of the guard. “Have them searched and bring them to me when I send for them.”

With the dispatch in his pocket he strode on into the interior of the big stone house.

Outside in the guard room Gomez and Andrés were being searched by the guard.

“What passes with that man?” Gomez said to one of the guards.

“Está loco,” the guard said. “He is crazy.”

“No. He is a political figure of great importance,” Gomez said. “He is the chief commissar of the International Brigades.”

“Apesar de eso, está loco,” the corporal of the guard said. “All the same he’s crazy. What do you behind the fascist lines?”

“This comrade is a guerilla from there,” Gomez told him while the man searched him. “He brings a dispatch to General Golz. Guard well my papers. Be careful with that money and that bullet on the string. It is from my first wound at Guadarama.”

“Don’t worry,” the corporal said. “Everything will be in this drawer. Why didn’t you ask me where Golz was?”

“We tried to. I asked the sentry and he called you.”

“But then came the crazy and you asked him. No one should ask him anything. He is crazy. Thy Golz is up the road three kilometers from here and to the right in the rocks of the forest.”

“Can you not let us go to him now?”

“Nay. It would be my head. I must take thee to the crazy. Besides, he has thy dispatch.”

“Can you not tell some one?”

“Yes,” the corporal said. “I will tell the first responsible one I see. All know that he is crazy.”

“I had always taken him for a great figure,” Gomez said. “For one of the glories of France.”

“He may be a glory and all,” the corporal said and put his hand on Andrés’s shoulder. “But he is crazy as a bedbug. He has a mania for shooting people.”

“Truly shooting them?”

“Como lo oyes,” the corporal said. “That old one kills more than the bubonic plague. Mata más que la peste bubonica. But he doesn’t kill fascists like we do. Qué va. Not in joke. Mata bichos raros. He kills rare things. Trotzkyites. Divagationers. Any type of rare beasts.”

Andrés did not understand any of this.

“When we were at Escorial we shot I don’t know how many for him,” the corporal said. “We always furnish the firing party. The men of the Brigades would not shoot their own men. Especially the French. To avoid difficulties it is always us who do it. We shot French. We have shot Belgians. We have shot others of divers nationality. Of all types. Tiene mania de fusilar gente. Always for political things. He’s crazy. Purifica más que el Salvarsán. He purifies more than Salvarsan.”

“But you will tell some one of this dispatch?”

“Yes, man. Surely. I know every one of these two Brigades. Every one comes through here. I know even up to and through the Russians, although only a few speak Spanish. We will keep this crazy from shooting Spaniards.”

“But the dispatch.”

“The dispatch, too. Do not worry, Comrade. We know how to deal with this crazy. He is only dangerous with his own people. We understand him now.”

“Bring in the two prisoners,” came the voice of André Marty.

“Quereis echar un trago?” the corporal asked. “Do you want a drink?”

“Why not?”

The corporal took a bottle of anis from a cupboard and both Gomez and Andrés drank. So did the corporal. He wiped his mouth on his hand.

“Vamonos,” he said.

They went out of the guard room with the swallowed burn of the anis warming their mouths, their bellies and their hearts and walked down the hall and entered the room where Marty sat behind a long table, his map spread in front of him, his red-and-blue pencil, with which he played at being a general officer, in his hand. To Andrés it was only one more thing. There had been many tonight. There were always many. If your papers were in order and your heart was good you were in no danger. Eventually they turned you loose and you were on your way. But the Inglés had said to hurry. He knew now he could never get back for the bridge but they had a dispatch to deliver and this old man there at the table had put it in his pocket.

“Stand there,” Marty said without looking up.

“Listen, Comrade Marty,” Gomez broke out, the anis fortifying his anger. “Once tonight we have been impeded by the ignorance of the anarchists. Then by the sloth of a bureaucratic fascist. Now by the oversuspicion of a Communist.”

“Close your mouth,” Marty said without looking up. “This is not a meeting.”

“Comrade Marty, this is a matter of utmost urgence,” Gomez said. “Of the greatest importance.”

The corporal and the soldier with them were taking a lively interest in this as though they were at a play they had seen many times but whose excellent moments they could always savor.

“Everything is of urgence,” Marty said. “All things are of importance.” Now he looked up at them, holding the pencil. “How did you know Golz was here? Do you understand how serious it is to come asking for an individual general before an attack? How could you know such a general would be here?”

“Tell him, tu,” Gomez said to Andrés.

“Comrade General,” Andrés started — André Marty did not correct him in the mistake in rank— “I was given that packet on the other side of the lines—”

“On the other side of the lines?” Marty said. “Yes, I heard him say you came from the fascist lines.”

“It was given to me, Comrade General, by an Inglés named Roberto who had come to us as a dynamiter for this of the bridge. Understandeth?”

“Continue thy story,” Marty said to Andrés; using the term story as you would say lie, falsehood, or fabrication.

“Well, Comrade General, the Inglés told me to bring it to the General Golz with all speed. He makes an attack in these hills now on this day and all we ask is to take it to him now promptly if it pleases the Comrade General.”

Marty shook his head again. He was looking at Andrés but he was not seeing him.

Golz, he thought in a mixture of horror and exultation as a man might feel hearing that a business enemy had been killed in a particularly nasty motor accident or that some one you hated but whose probity you had never doubted had been guilty of defalcation. That Golz should be one of them, too. That Golz should be in such obvious communication with the fascists. Golz that he had known for nearly twenty years. Golz who had captured the gold train that winter with Lucacz in Siberia. Golz who had fought against Kolchak, and in Poland. In the Caucasus. In China, and here since the first October. But he had been close to Tukachevsky. To Voroshilov, yes, too. But to Tukachevsky. And to who else? Here to Karkov, of course. And to Lucacz. But all the Hungarians had been intriguers. He hated Gall. Golz hated Gall. Remember that. Make a note of that. Golz has always hated Gall. But he favors Putz. Remember that. And Duval is his chief of staff. See what stems from that. You’ve heard him say Copic’s a fool. That is definitive. That exists. And now this dispatch from the fascist lines. Only by pruning out of these rotten branches can the tree remain healthy and grow. The rot must become apparent for it is to be destroyed. But Golz of all men. That Golz should be one of the traitors. He knew that you could trust no one. No one. Ever. Not your wife. Not your brother. Not your oldest comrade. No one. Ever.

“Take them away,” he said to the guards. “Guard them carefully.” The corporal looked at the soldier. This had been very quiet for one of Marty’s performances.

“Comrade Marty,” Gomez said. “Do not be insane. Listen to me, a loyal officer and comrade. That is a dispatch that must be delivered. This comrade has brought it through the fascist lines to give to Comrade General Golz.”

“Take them away,” Marty said, now kindly, to the guard. He was sorry for them as human beings if it should be necessary to liquidate them. But it was the tragedy of Golz that oppressed him. That it should be Golz, he thought. He would take the fascist communication at once to Varloff. No, better he would take it to Golz himself and watch him as he received it. That was what he would do. How could he be sure of Varloff if Golz was one of them? No. This was a thing to be very careful about.

Andrés turned to Gomez, “You mean he is not going to send the dispatch?” he asked, unbelieving.

“Don’t you see?” Gomez said.

“Me cago en su puta madre!” Andrés said. “Está loco.”

“Yes,” Gomez said. “He is crazy. You are crazy! Hear! Crazy!” he shouted at Marty who was back now bending over the map with his red-and-blue pencil. “Hear me, you crazy murderer?”

“Take them away,” Marty said to the guard. “Their minds are unhinged by their great guilt.”

There was a phrase the corporal recognized. He had heard that before.

“You crazy murderer!” Gomez shouted.

“Hijo de la gran puta,” Andrés said to him. “Loco.”

The stupidity of this man angered him. If he was a crazy let him be removed as a crazy. Let the dispatch be taken from his pocket. God damn this crazy to hell. His heavy Spanish anger was rising out of his usual calm and good temper. In a little while it would blind him.

Marty, looking at his map, shook his head sadly as the guards took Gomez and Andrés out. The guards had enjoyed hearing him cursed but on the whole they had been disappointed in the performance. They had seen much better ones. André Marty did not mind the men cursing him. So many men had cursed him at the end. He was always genuinely sorry for them as human beings. He always told himself that and it was one of the last true ideas that was left to him that had ever been his own.

He sat there, his moustache and his eyes focused on the map, on the map that he never truly understood, on the brown tracing of the contours that were traced fine and concentric as a spider’s web. He could see the heights and the valleys from the contours but he never really understood why it should be this height and why this valley was the one. But at the General Staff where, because of the system of Political Commissars, he could intervene as the political head of the Brigades, he would put his finger on such and such a numbered, brown-thin-lined encircled spot among the greens of woods cut by the lines of roads that parallel the never casual winding of a river and say, “There. That is the point of weakness.”

Gall and Copic, who were men of politics and of ambition, would agree and later, men who never saw the map, but heard the number of the hill before they left their starting place and had the earth of diggings on it pointed out, would climb its side to find their death along its slope or, being halted by machine guns placed in olive groves would never get up it at all. Or on other fronts they might scale it easily and be no better off than they had been before. But when Marty put his finger on the map in Golz’s staff the scarheaded, white-faced General’s jaw muscles would tighten and he would think, “I should shoot you, André Marty, before I let you put that gray rotten finger on a contour map of mine. Damn you to hell for all the men you’ve killed by interfering in matters you know nothing of. Damn the day they named tractor factories and villages and co-operatives for you so that you are a symbol that I cannot touch. Go and suspect and exhort and intervene and denounce and butcher some other place and leave my staff alone.”

But instead of saying that Golz would only lean back away from the leaning bulk, the pushing finger, the watery gray eyes, the graywhite moustache and the bad breath and say, “Yes, Comrade Marty. I see your point. It is not well taken, however, and I do not agree. You can try to go over my head if you like. Yes. You can make it a Party matter as you say. But I do not agree.”

So now André Marty sat working over his map at the bare table with the raw light on the unshaded electric light bulb over his head, the overwide beret pulled forward to shade his eyes, referring to the mimeographed copy of the orders for the attack and slowly and laboriously working them out on the map as a young officer might work a problem at a staff college. He was engaged in war. In his mind he was commanding troops; he had the right to interfere and this he believed to constitute command. So he sat there with Robert Jordan’s dispatch to Golz in his pocket and Gomez and Andrés waited in the guard room and Robert Jordan lay in the woods above the bridge.

It is doubtful if the outcome of Andrés’s mission would have been any different if he and Gomez had been allowed to proceed without André Marty’s hindrance. There was no one at the front with sufficient authority to cancel the attack. The machinery had been in motion much too long for it to be stopped suddenly now. There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and movement is under way they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

But on this night the old man, his beret pulled forward, was still sitting at the table with his map when the door opened and Karkov the Russian journalist came in with two other Russians in civilian clothes, leather coats and caps. The corporal of the guard closed the door reluctantly behind them. Karkov had been the first responsible man he had been able to communicate with.

“Tovarich Marty,” said Karkov in his politely disdainful lisping voice and smiled, showing his bad teeth.

Marty stood up. He did not like Karkov, but Karkov, coming from Pravda and in direct communication with Stalin, was at this moment one of the three most important men in Spain.

“Tovarich Karkov,” he said.

“You are preparing the attack?” Karkov said insolently, nodding toward the map.

“I am studying it,” Marty answered.

“Are you attacking? Or is it Golz?” Karkov asked smoothly.

“I am only a commissar, as you know,” Marty told him.

“No,” Karkov said. “You are modest. You are really a general. You have your map and your field glasses. But were you not an admiral once, Comrade Marty?”

“I was a gunner’s mate,” said Marty. It was a lie. He had really been a chief yeoman at the time of the mutiny. But he thought now, always, that he had been a gunner’s mate.

“Ah. I thought you were a first-class yeoman,” Karkov said. “I always get my facts wrong. It is the mark of the journalist.”

The other Russians had taken no part in the conversation. They were both looking over Marty’s shoulder at the map and occasionally making a remark to each other in their own language. Marty and Karkov spoke French after the first greeting.

“It is better not to get facts wrong in Pravda,” Marty said. He said it brusquely to build himself up again. Karkov always punctured him. The French word is dégonfler and Marty was worried and made wary by him. It was hard, when Karkov spoke, to remember with what importance he, André Marty, came from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. It was hard to remember, too, that he was untouchable. Karkov seemed always to touch him so lightly and whenever he wished. Now Karkov said, “I usually correct them before I send them to Pravda, I am quite accurate in Pravda. Tell me, Comrade Marty, have you heard anything of any message coming through for Golz from one of our partizan groups operating toward Segovia? There is an American comrade there named Jordan that we should have heard from. There have been reports of fighting there behind the fascist lines. He would have sent a message through to Golz.”

“An American?” Marty asked. Andrés had said an Inglés. So that is what it was. So he had been mistaken. Why had those fools spoken to him anyway?”

“Yes,” Karkov looked at him contemptuously, “a young American of slight political development but a great way with the Spaniards and a fine partizan record. Just give me the dispatch, Comrade Marty. It has been delayed enough.”

“What dispatch?” Marty asked. It was a very stupid thing to say and he knew it. But he was not able to admit he was wrong that quickly and he said it anyway to delay the moment of humiliation, not accepting any humiliation. “And the safe-conduct pass,” Karkov said through his bad teeth.

André Marty put his hand in his pocket and laid the dispatch on the table. He looked Karkov squarely in the eye. All right. He was wrong and there was nothing he could do about it now but he was not accepting any humiliation. “And the safe-conduct pass,” Karkov said softly.

Marty laid it beside the dispatch.

“Comrade Corporal,” Karkov called in Spanish.

The corporal opened the door and came in. He looked quickly at André Marty, who stared back at him like an old boar which has been brought to bay by hounds. There was no fear on Marty’s face and no humiliation. He was only angry, and he was only temporarily at bay. He knew these dogs could never hold him.

“Take these to the two comrades in the guard room and direct them to General Golz’s headquarters,” Karkov said. “There has been too much delay.”

The corporal went out and Marty looked after him, then looked at Karkov.

“Tovarich Marty,” Karkov said, “I am going to find out just how untouchable you are.”

Marty looked straight at him and said nothing.

“Don’t start to have any plans about the corporal, either,” Karkov went on. “It was not the corporal. I saw the two men in the guard room and they spoke to me” (this was a lie). “I hope all men always will speak to me” (this was the truth although it was the corpora! who had spoken). But Karkov had this belief in the good which could come from his own accessibility and the humanizing possibility of benevolent intervention. It was the one thing he was never cynical about.

“You know when I am in the U.S.S.R. people write to me in Pravda when there is an injustice in a town in Azerbaijan. Did you know that? They say’Karkov will help us.”

André Marty looked at him with no expression on his face except anger and dislike. There was nothing in his mind now but that Karkov had done something against him. All right, Karkov, power and all, could watch out.

“This is something else,” Karkov went on, “but it is the same principle. I am going to find Out just how untouchable you are, Comrade Marty. I would like to know if it could not be possible to change the name of that tractor factory.”

André Marty looked away from him and back to the map.

“What did young Jordan say?” Karkov asked him.

“I did not read it,” André Marty said. “Et maintenant fiche moi la paix, Comrade Karkov.”

“Good,” said Karkov. “I leave you to your military labors.”

He stepped out of the room and walked to the guard room. Andrés and Gomez were already gone and he stood there a moment looking up the road and at the mountain tops beyond that showed now in the first gray of daylight. We must get on up there, he thought. It will be soon, now.

Andrés and Gomez were on the motorcycle on the road again and it was getting light. Now Andrés, holding again to the back of the seat ahead of him as the motorcycle climbed turn after switchback turn in a faint gray mist that lay over the top of the pass, felt the motorcycle speed under him, then skid and stop and they were standing by the motorcycle on a long, down-slope of road and in the woods, on their left, were tanks covered with pine branches. There were troops here all through the woods. Andrés saw men carrying the long poles of stretchers over their shoulders. Three staff cars were off the road to the right, in under the trees, with branches laid against their sides and other pine branches over their tops.

Gomez wheeled the motorcycle up to one of them. He leaned it against a pine tree and spoke to the chauffeur who was sitting by the car, his back against a tree.

“I’ll take you to him,” the chauffeur said. “Put thy moto out of sight and cover it with these.” He pointed to a pile of cut branches.

With the sun just starting to come through the high branches of the pine trees, Gomez and Andrés followed the chauffeur, whose name was Vicente, through the pines across the road and up the slope to the entrance of a dugout from the roof of which signal wires ran on up over the wooded slope. They stood outside while the chauffeur went in and Andrés admired the construction of the dugout which showed only as a hole in the hillside, with no dirt scattered about, but which he could see, from the entrance, was both deep and profound with men moving around in it freely with no need to duck their heads under the heavy timbered roof.

Vicente, the chauffeur, came out.

“He is up above where they are deploying for the attack,” he said. “I gave it to his Chief of Staff. He signed for it. Here.”

He handed Gomez the receipted envelope. Gomez gave it to Andrés, who looked at it and put it inside his shirt.

“What is the name of him who signed?” he asked.

“Duval,” Vicente said.

“Good,” said Andrés. “He was one of the three to whom I might give it.”

“Should we wait for an answer?” Gomez asked Andrés.

“It might be best. Though where I will find the Inglés and the others after that of the bridge neither God knows.”

“Come wait with me,” Vicente said, “until the General returns. And I will get thee coffee. Thou must be hungry.”

“And these tanks,” Gomez said to him.

They were passing the branch-covered, mud-colored tanks, each with two deep-ridged tracks over the pine needles showing where they had swung and backed from the road. Their 45-mm. guns jutted horizontally under the branches and the drivers and gunners in their leather coats and ridged helmets sat with their backs against the trees or lay sleeping on the ground.

“These are the reserve,” Vicente said. “Also these troops are in reserve. Those who commence the attack are above.”

“They are many,” Andrés said.

“Yes,” Vicente said. “It is a full division.”

Inside the dugout Duval, holding the opened dispatch from Robert Jordan in his left hand, glancing at his wrist watch on the same hand, reading the dispatch for the fourth time, each time feeling the sweat come out from under his armpit and run down his flank, said into the telephone, “Get me position Segovia, then. He’s left? Get me position Avila.”

He kept on with the phone. It wasn’t any good. He had talked to both brigades. Golz had been up to inspect the dispositions for the attack and was on his way to an observation post. He called the observation post and he was not there.

“Get me planes one,” Duval said, suddenly taking all responsibility. He would take responsibility for holding it up. It was better to hold it up. You could not send them to a surprise attack against an enemy that was waiting for it. You couldn’t do it. It was just murder. You couldn’t. You mustn’t. No matter what. They could shoot him if they wanted. He would call the airfield directly and get the bombardment cancelled. But suppose it’s just a holding attack? Suppose we were supposed to draw off all that material and those forces? Suppose that is what it is for? They never tell you it is a holding attack when you make it.

“Cancel the call to planes one,” he told the signaller. “Get me the Sixty-Ninth Brigade observation post.”

He was still calling there when he heard the first sound of the planes.

It was just then he got through to the observation post.

“Yes,” Golz said quietly.

He was sitting leaning back against the sandbag, his feet against a rock, a cigarette hung from his lower lip and he was looking up and over his shoulder while he was talking. He was seeing the expanding wedges of threes, silver and thundering in the sky that were coming over the far shoulder of the mountain where the first sun was striking. He watched them come shining and beautiful in the sun. He saw the twin circles of light where the sun shone on the propellers as they came.

“Yes,” he said into the telephone, speaking in French because it was Duval on the wire. “Nous sommes foutus. Oui. Comme toujours. Oui. C’est dommage. Oui. It’s a shame it came too late.”

His eyes, watching the planes coming, were very proud. He saw the red wing markings now and he watched their steady, stately roaring advance. This was how it could be. These were our planes. They had come, crated on ships, from the Black Sea through the Straits of Marmora, through the Dardanelles, through the Mediterranean and to here, unloaded lovingly at Alicante, assembled ably, tested and found perfect and now flown in lovely hammering precision, the V’s tight and pure as they came now high and silver in the morning sun to blast those ridges across there and blow them roaring high so that we can go through.

Golz knew that once they had passed overhead and on, the bombs would fall, looking like porpoises in the air as they tumbled. And then the ridge tops would spout and roar in jumping clouds and disappear in one great blowing cloud. Then the tanks would grind clanking up those two slopes and after them would go his two brigades. And if it had been a surprise they could go on and down and over and through, pausing, cleaning up, dealing with, much to do, much to be done intelligently with the tanks helping, with the tanks wheeling and returning, giving covering fire and others bringing the attackers up then slipping on and over and through and pushing down beyond. This was how it would be if there was no treason and if all did what they should.

There were the two ridges, and there were the tanks ahead and there were his two good brigades ready to leave the woods and here came the planes now. Everything he had to do had been done as it should be.

But as he watched the planes, almost up to him now, he felt sick at his stomach for he knew from having heard Jordan’s dispatch over the phone that there would be no one on those two ridges. They’d be withdrawn a little way below in narrow trenches to escape the fragments, or hiding in the timber and when the bombers passed they’d get back up there with their machine guns and their automatic weapons and the anti-tank guns Jordan had said went up the road, and it would be one famous balls up more. But the planes, now coming deafeningly, were how it could have been and Golz watching them, looking up, said into the telephone, “No. Rien a faire. Rien. Faut pas penser. Faut accepter.”

Golz watched the planes with his hard proud eyes that knew how things could be and how they would be instead and said, proud of how they could be, believing in how they could be, even if they never were, “Bon. Nous ferons notre petit possible,” and hung up.

But Duval did not hear him. Sitting at the table holding the receiver, all he heard was the roar of the planes and he thought, now, maybe this time, listen to them come, maybe the bombers will blow them all off, maybe we will get a break-through, maybe he will get the reserves he asked for, maybe this is it, maybe this is the time. Go on. Come on. Go on. The roar was such that he could not hear what he was thinking.

Chapter 43

Robert Jordan lay behind the trunk of a pine tree on the slope of the hill above the road and the bridge and watched it become daylight. He loved this hour of the day always and now he watched it; feeling it gray within him, as though he were a part of the slow lightening that comes before the rising of the sun; when solid things darken and space lightens and the lights that have shone in the night go yellow and then fade as the day comes. The pine trunks below him were hard and clear now, their trunks solid and brown and the road was shiny with a wisp of mist over it. The dew had wet him and the forest floor was soft and he felt the give of the brown, dropped pine needles under his elbows. Below he saw, through the light mist that rose from the stream bed, the steel of the bridge, straight and rigid across the gap, with the wooden sentry boxes at each end. But as he looked the structure of the bridge was still spidery and fine in the mist that hung over the stream.

He saw the sentry now in his box as he stood, his back with the hanging blanket coat topped by the steel casque on his head showing as he leaned forward over the hole-punched petrol tin of the brazier, warming his hands. Robert Jordan heard the stream, far down in the rocks, and he saw a faint, thin smoke that rose from the sentry box.

He looked at his watch and thought, I wonder if Andrés got through to Golz? If we are going to blow it I would like to breathe very slowly and slow up the time again and feel it. Do you think he made it? Andrés? And if he did would they call it off? If they had time to call it off? Qué va. Do not worry. They will or they won’t. There are no more decisions and in a little while you will know. Suppose the attack is successful. Golz said it could be. That there was a possibility. With our tanks coming down that road, the people coming through from the right and down and past La Granja and the whole left of the mountains turned. Why don’t you ever think of how it is to win? You’ve been on the defensive for so long that you can’t think of that. Sure. But that was before all that stuff went up this road. That was before all the planes came. Don’t be so naïve. But remember this that as long as we can hold them here we keep the fascists tied up. They can’t attack any other country until they finish with us and they can never finish with us. If the French help at all, if only they leave the frontier open and if we get planes from America they can never finish with us. Never, if we get anything at all. These people will fight forever if they’re well armed.

No you must not expect victory here, not for several years maybe. This is just a holding attack. You must not get illusions about it now. Suppose we got a break-through today? This is our first big attack. Keep your sense of proportion. But what if we should have it? Don’t get excited, he told himself. Remember what went up the road. You’ve done what you could about that. We should have portable short-wave sets, though. We will, in time. But we haven’t yet. You just watch now and do what you should.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of this war is that way. You are getting very pompous in the early morning, he told himself. Look there what’s coming now.

He saw the two men in blanket capes and steel helmets come around the corner of the road walking toward the bridge, their rifles slung over their shoulders. One stopped at the far end of the bridge and was out of sight in the sentry box. The other came on across the bridge, walking slowly and heavily. He stopped on the bridge and spat into the gorge, then came on slowly to the near end of the bridge where the other sentry spoke to him and then started off back over the bridge. The sentry who was relieved walked faster than the other had done (because he’s going to coffee, Robert Jordan thought) but he too spat down into the gorge.

I wonder if that is superstition? Robert Jordan thought. I’ll have to take me a spit in that gorge too. If I can spit by then. No. It can’t be very powerful medicine. It can’t work. I’ll have to prove it doesn’t work before I am out there.

The new sentry had gone inside the box and sat down. His rifle with the bayonet fixed was leaning against the wall. Robert Jordan took his glasses from his shirt pocket and turned the eyepieces until the end of the bridge showed sharp and gray-painted-metal clear. Then he moved them onto the sentry box.

The sentry sat leaning against the wall. His helmet hung on a peg and his face showed clearly. Robert Jordan saw he was the same man who had been there on guard two days before in the afternoon watch. He was wearing the same knitted stocking-cap. And he had not shaved. His cheeks were sunken and his cheekbones prominent. He had bushy eyebrows that grew together in the center. He looked sleepy and as Robert Jordan watched him he yawned. Then he took out a tobacco pouch and a packet of papers and rolled himself a cigarette. He tried to make a lighter work and finally put it in his pocket and went over to the brazier, leaned over, reached inside, brought up a piece of charcoal, juggled it in one hand while he blew on it, then lit the cigarette and tossed the lump of charcoal back into the brazier.

Robert Jordan, looking through the Zeiss 8-power glasses, watched his face as he leaned against the wall of the sentry box drawing on the cigarette. Then he took the glasses down, folded them together and put them in his pocket.

I won’t look at him again, he told himself.

He lay there and watched the road and tried not to think at all. A squirrel chittered from a pine tree below him and Robert Jordan watched the squirrel come down the tree trunk, stopping on his way down to turn his head and look toward where the man was watching. He saw the squirrel’s eyes, small and bright, and watched his tail jerk in excitement. Then the squirrel crossed to another tree, moving on the ground in long, small-pawed, tail-exaggerated bounds. On the tree trunk he looked back at Robert Jordan, then pulled himself around the trunk and out of sight. Then Robert Jordan heard the squirrel chitter from a high branch of the pine tree and he watched him there, spread flat along the branch, his tail jerking.

Robert Jordan looked down through the pines to the sentry box again. He would like to have had the squirrel with him in his pocket. He would like to have had anything that he could touch. He rubbed his elbows against the pine needles but it was not the same. Nobody knows how lonely you can be when you do this. Me, though, I know. I hope that Rabbit will get out of this all right. Stop that now. Yes, sure. But I can hope that and I do. That I blow it well and that she gets out all right. Good. Sure. Just that. That is all I want now.

He lay there now and looked away from the road and the sentry box and across to the far mountain. Just do not think at all, he told himself. He lay there quietly and watched the morning come. It was a fine early summer morning and it came very fast now in the end of May. Once a motorcyclist in a leather coat and all-leather helmet with an automatic rifle in a holster by his left leg came across the bridge and went on up the road. Once an ambulance crossed the bridge, passed below him, and went up the road. But that was all. He smelled the pines and he heard the stream and the bridge showed clear now and beautiful in the morning light. He lay there behind the pine tree, with the submachine gun across his left forearm, and he never looked at the sentry box again until, long after it seemed that it was never coming, that nothing could happen on such a lovely late May morning, he heard the sudden, clustered, thudding of the bombs.

As he heard the bombs, the first thumping noise of them, before the echo of them came back in thunder from the mountain, Robert Jordan drew in a long breath and lifted the submachine gun from where it lay. His arm felt stiff from its weight and his fingers were heavy with reluctance.

The man in the sentry box stood up when he heard the bombs. Robert Jordan saw him reach for his rifle and step forward out of the box listening. He stood in the road with the sun shining on him. The knitted cap was on the side of his head and the sun was on his unshaved face as he looked up into the sky toward where the planes were bombing.

There was no mist on the road now and Robert Jordan saw the man, clearly and sharply, standing there on the road looking up at the sky. The sun shone bright on him through the trees.

Robert Jordan felt his own breath tight now as though a strand of wire bound his chest and, steadying his elbows, feeling the corrugations of the forward grip against his fingers, he put the oblong of the foresight, settled now in the notch of the rear, onto the center of the man’s chest and squeezed the trigger gently.

He felt the quick, liquid, spastic lurching of the gun against his shoulder and on the road the man, looking surprised and hurt, slid forward on his knees and his forehead doubled to the road. His rifle fell by him and lay there with one of the man’s fingers twisted through the trigger guard, his wrist bent forward. The rifle lay, bayonet forward on the road. Robert Jordan looked away from the man lying with his head doubled under on the road to the bridge, and the sentry box at the other end. He could not see the other sentry and he looked down the slope to the right where he knew Agustín was hidden. Then he heard Anselmo shoot, the shot smashing an echo back from the gorge. Then he heard him shoot again.

With that second shot came the cracking boom of grenades from around the corner below the bridge. Then there was the noise of grenades from well up the road to the left. Then he heard rifle-firing up the road and from below came the noise of Pablo’s cavalry automatic rifle spat-spat-spat-spatting into the noise of grenades. He saw Anselmo scrambling down the steep cut to the far end of the bridge and he slung the submachine gun over his shoulder and picked up the two heavy packs from behind the pine trunks and with one in each hand, the packs pulling his arms so that he felt the tendons would pull out of his shoulders, he ran lurching down the steep slope to the road.

As he ran he heard Agustín shouting, “Buena caza, Inglés. Buena caza!” and he thought, “Nice hunting, like hell, nice hunting,” and just then he heard Anselmo shoot at the far end of the bridge, the noise of the shot clanging in the steel girders. He passed the sentry where he lay and ran onto the bridge, the packs swinging.

The old man came running toward him, holding his carbine in one hand. “Sin novedad,” he shouted. “There’s nothing wrong. Tuve que rematarlo. I had to finish him.”

Robert Jordan, kneeling, opening the packs in the center of the bridge taking out his material, saw that tears were running down Anselmo’s cheeks through the gray beard stubble.

“Yo maté uno tambien,” he said to Anselmo. “I killed one too,” and jerked his head toward where the sentry lay hunched over in the road at the end of the bridge.

“Yes, man, yes,” Anselmo said. “We have to kill them and we kill them.”

Robert Jordan was climbing down into the framework of the bridge. The girders were cold and wet with dew under his hands and he climbed carefully, feeling the sun on his back, bracing himself in a bridge truss, hearing the noise of the tumbling water below him, hearing firing, too much firing, up the road at the upper post. He was sweating heavily now and it was cool under the bridge. He had a coil of wire around one arm and a pair of pliers hung by a thong from his wrist.

“Hand me that down a package at a time, viejo,” he called up to Anselmo. The old man leaned far over the edge handing down the oblong blocks of explosive and Robert Jordan reached up for them, shoved them in where he wanted them, packed them close, braced them, “Wedges, viejo! Give me wedges!” smelling the fresh shingle smell of the new whittled wedges as he tapped them in tight to hold the charge between the girders.

Now as he worked, placing, bracing, wedging, lashing tight with wire, thinking only of demolition, working fast and skillfully as a surgeon works, he heard a rattle of firing from below on the road. Then there was the noise of a grenade. Then another, booming through the rushing noise the water made. Then it was quiet from that direction.

“Damn,” he thought. “I wonder what hit them then?”

There was still firing up the road at the upper post. Too damned much firing, and he was lashing two grenades side by side on top of the braced blocks of explosive, winding wire over their corrugations so they would hold tight and firm and lashing it tight; twisting it with the pliers. He felt of the whole thing and then, to make it more solid, tapped in a wedge above the grenades that blocked the whole charge firmly in against the steel.

“The other side now, viejo,” he shouted up to Anselmo and climbed across through the trestling, like a bloody Tarzan in a rolled steel forest, he thought, and then coming out from under the dark, the stream tumbling below him, he looked up and saw Anselmo’s face as he reached the packages of explosive down to him. Goddamn good face, he thought. Not crying now. That’s all to the good. And one side done. This side now and we’re done. This will drop it like what all. Come on. Don’t get excited. Do it. Clean and fast as the last one. Don’t fumble with it. Take your time. Don’t try to do it faster than you can. You can’t lose now. Nobody can keep you from blowing one side now. You’re doing it just the way you should. This is a cool place. Christ, it feels cool as a wine cellar and there’s no crap. Usually working under a stone bridge it’s full of crap. This is a dream bridge. A bloody dream bridge. It’s the old man on top who’s in a bad spot. Don’t try to do it faster than you can. I wish that shooting would be over up above. “Give me some wedges, viejo.” I don’t like that shooting still. Pilar has got in trouble there. Some of the post must have been out. Out back; or behind the mill. They’re still shooting. That means there’s somebody still at the mill. And all that damned sawdust. Those big piles of sawdust. Sawdust, when it’s old and packed, is good stuff to fight behind. There must be several of them still. It’s quiet below with Pablo. I wonder what that second flare-up was. It must have been a car or a motorcyclist. I hope to God they don’t have any armored cars come up or any tanks. Go on. Put it in just as fast as you can and wedge it tight and lash it fast. You’re shaking, like a Goddamn woman. What the hell is the matter with you? You’re trying to do it too fast. I’ll bet that Goddamn woman up above isn’t shaking. That Pilar. Maybe she is too. She sounds as though she were in plenty trouble. She’ll shake if she gets in enough. Like everybody bloody else.

He leaned out and up into the sunlight and as he reached his hand up to take what Anselmo handed him, his head now above the noise of the falling water, the firing increased sharply up the road and then the noise of grenades again. Then more grenades.

“They rushed the sawmill then.”

It’s lucky I’ve got this stuff in blocks, he thought. Instead of sticks. What the hell. It’s just neater. Although a lousy canvas sack full of jelly would be quicker. Two sacks. No. One of that would do. And if we just had detonators and the old exploder. That son of a bitch threw my exploder in the river. That old box and the places that it’s been. In this river he threw it. That bastard Pablo. He gave them hell there below just now. “Give me some more of that, viejo.”

The old man’s doing very well. He’s in quite a place up there. He hated to shoot that sentry. So did I but I didn’t think about it. Nor do I think about it now. You have to do that. But then Anselmo got a cripple. I know about cripples. I think that killing a man with an automatic weapon makes it easier. I mean on the one doing it. It is different. After the first touch it is it that does it. Not you. Save that to go into some other time. You and your head. You have a nice thinking head old Jordan. Roll Jordan, Roll! They used to yell that at football when you lugged the ball. Do you know the damned Jordan is really not much bigger than that creek down there below. At the source, you mean. So is anything else at the source. This is a place here under this bridge. A home away from home. Come on Jordan, pull yourself together. This is serious Jordan. Don’t you understand? Serious. It’s less so all the time. Look at that other side. Para qué? I’m all right now however she goes. As Maine goes, so goes the nation. As Jordan goes so go the bloody Israelites. The bridge, I mean. As Jordan goes, so goes the bloody bridge, other way around, really.

“Give me some more of that, Anselmo old boy,” he said. The old man nodded. “Almost through,” Robert Jordan said. The old man nodded again.

Finishing wiring the grenades down, he no longer heard the firing from up the road. Suddenly he was working only with the noise of the stream. He looked down and saw it boiling up white below him through the boulders and then dropping down to a clear pebbled pool where one of the wedges he had dropped swung around in the current. As he looked a trout rose for some insect and made a circle on the surface close to where the chip was turning. As he twisted the wire tight with the pliers that held these two grenades in place, he saw, through the metal of the bridge, the sunlight on the green slope of the mountain. It was brown three days ago, he thought.

Out from the cool dark under the bridge he leaned into the bright sun and shouted to Anselmo’s bending face, “Give me the big coil of wire.”

The old man handed it down.

For God’s sake don’t loosen them any yet. This will pull them. I wish you could string them through. But with the length of wire you are using it’s O.K., Robert Jordan thought as he felt the cotter pins that held the rings that would release the levers on the hand grenades. He checked that the grenades, lashed on their sides, had room for the levers to spring when the pins were pulled (the wire that lashed them ran through under the levers), then he attached a length of wire to one ring, wired it onto the main wire that ran to the ring of the outside grenade, paid off some slack from the coil and passed it around a steel brace and then handed the coil up to Anselmo. “Hold it carefully,” he said.

He climbed up onto the bridge, took the coil from the old man and walked back as fast as he could pay out wire toward where the sentry was slumped in the road, leaning over the side of the bridge and paying out wire from the coil as he walked.

“Bring the sacks,” he shouted to Anselmo as he walked backwards. As he passed he stooped down and picked up the submachine gun and slung it over his shoulder again.

It was then, looking up from paying out wire, that he saw, well up the road, those who were coming back from the upper post.

There were four of them, he saw, and then he had to watch his wire so it would be clear and not foul against any of the outer work of the bridge. Eladio was not with them.

Robert Jordan carried the wire clear past the end of the bridge, took a ioop around the last stanchion and then ran along the road until he stopped beside a stone marker. He cut the wire and handed it to Anselmo.

“Hold this, viejo,” he said. “Now walk back with me to the bridge. Take up on it as you walk. No. I will.”

At the bridge he pulled the wire back out through the hitch so it now ran clear and unfouled to the grenade rings and handed it, stretching alongside the bridge but running quite clear, to Anselmo.

“Take this back to that high stone,” he said. “Hold it easily but firmly. Do not put any force on it. When thou pullest hard, hard, the bridge will blow. Comprendes?”

“Yes.”

“Treat it softly but do not let it sag so it will foul. Keep it lightly firm but not pulling until thou pullest. Comprendes?”

“Yes.”

“When thou pullest really pull. Do not jerk.”

Robert Jordan while he spoke was looking up the road at the remainder of Pilar’s band. They were close now and he saw Primitivo and Rafael were supporting Fernando. He looked to be shot through the groin for he was holding himself there with both hands while the man and the boy held him on either side. His right leg was dragging, the side of the shoe scraping on the road as they walked him. Pilar was climbing the bank into the timber carrying three rifles. Robert Jordan could not see her face but her head was up and she was climbing as fast as she could.

“How does it go?” Primitivo called.

“Good. We’re almost finished,” Robert Jordan shouted back.

There was no need to ask how it went with them. As he looked away the three were on the edge of the road and Fernando was shaking his head as they tried to get him up the bank.

“Give me a rifle here,” Robert Jordan heard him say in a choky voice.

“No, hombre. We will get thee to the horses.”

“What would I do with a horse?” Fernando said. “I am very well here.”

Robert Jordan did not hear the rest for he was speaking to Anselmo.

“Blow it if tanks come,” he said. “But only if they come onto it. Blow it if armored cars come. If they come onto it. Anything else Pablo will stop.”

“I will not blow it with thee beneath it.”

“Take no account of me. Blow it if thou needest to. I fix the other wire and come back. Then we will blow it together.”

He started running for the center of the bridge.

Anselmo saw Robert Jordan run up the bridge, coil of wire over his arm, pliers hanging from one wrist and the submachine gun slung over his back. He saw him climb down under the rail of the bridge and out of sight. Anselmo held the wire in his hand, his right hand, and he crouched behind the stone marker and looked down the road and across the bridge. Halfway between him and the bridge was the sentry, who had settled now closer to the road, sinking closer onto the smooth road surface as the sun weighed on his back. His rifle, lying on the road, the bayonet fixed, pointed straight toward Anselmo. The old man looked past him along the surface of the bridge crossed by the shadows of the bridge rail to where the road swung to the left along the gorge and then turned out of sight behind the rocky wall. He looked at the far sentry box with the sun shining on it and then, conscious of the wire in his hand, he turned his head to where Fernando was speaking to Primitivo and the gypsy.

“Leave me here,” Fernando said. “It hurts much and there is much hemorrhage inside. I feel it in the inside when I move.”

“Let us get thee up the slope,” Primitivo said. “Put thy arms around our shoulders and we will take thy legs.”

“It is inutile,” Fernando said. “Put me here behind a stone. I am as useful here as above.”

“But when we go,” Primitivo said.

“Leave me here,” Fernando said. “There is no question of my travelling with this. Thus it gives one horse more. I am very well here. Certainly they will come soon.”

“We can take thee up the hill,” the gypsy said. “Easily.”

He was, naturally, in a deadly hurry to be gone, as was Primitivo. But they had brought him this far.

“Nay,” Fernando said. “I am very well here. What passes with Eladio?”

The gypsy put his finger on his head to show where the wound had been.

“Here,” he said. “After thee. When we made the rush.”

“Leave me,” Fernando said. Anselmo could see he was suffering much. He held both hands against his groin now and put his head back against the bank, his legs straight out before him. His face was gray and sweating.

“Leave me now please, for a favor,” he said. His eyes were shut with pain, the edges of the lips twitching. “I find myself very well here.”

“Here is a rifle and cartridges,” Primitivo said.

“Is it mine?” Fernando asked, his eyes shut.

“Nay, the Pilar has thine,” Primitivo said. “This is mine.”

“I would prefer my own,” Fernando said. “I am more accustomed to it.”

“I will bring it to thee,” the gypsy lied to him. “Keep this until it comes.”

“I am in a very good position here,” Fernando said. “Both for up the road and for the bridge.” He opened his eyes, turned his head and looked across the bridge, then shut them as the pain came.

The gypsy tapped his head and motioned with his thumb to Primitivo for them to be off.

“Then we will be down for thee,” Primitivo said and started up the slope after the gypsy, who was climbing fast.

Fernando lay back against the bank. In front of him was one of the whitewashed stones that marked the edge of the road. His head was in the shadow but the sun shone on his plugged and bandaged wound and on his hands that were cupped over it. His legs and his feet also were in the sun. The rifle lay beside him and there were three clips of cartridges shining in the sun beside the rifle. A fly crawled on his hands but the small tickling did not come through the pain.

“Fernando!” Anselmo called to him from where he crouched, holding the wire. He had made a loop in the end of the wire and twisted it close so he could hold it in his fist.

“Fernando!” he called again.

Fernando opened his eyes and looked at him.

“How does it go?” Fernando asked.

“Very good,” Anselmo said. “Now in a minute we will be blowing it.”

“I am pleased. Anything you need me for advise me,” Fernando said and shut his eyes again and the pain lurched in him.

Anselmo looked away from him and out onto the bridge.

He was watching for the first sight of the coil of wire being handed up onto the bridge and for the Inglés’s sunburnt head and face to follow it as he would pull himself up the side. At the same time he was watching beyond the bridge for anything to come around the far corner of the road. He did not feel afraid now at all and he had not been afraid all the day. It goes so fast and it is so normal, he thought. I hated the shooting of the guard and it made me an emotion but that is passed now. How could the Inglés say that the shooting of a man is like the shooting of an animal? In all hunting I have had an elation and no feeling of wrong. But to shoot a man gives a feeling as though one had struck one’s own brother when you are grown men. And to shoot him various times to kill him. Nay, do not think of that. That gave thee too much emotion and thee ran blubbering down the bridge like a woman.

That is over, he told himself, and thou canst try to atone for it as for the others. But now thou has what thou asked for last night coming home across the hills. Thou art in battle and thou hast no problem. If I die on this morning now it is all right.

Then he looked at Fernando lying there against the bank with his hands cupped over the groove of his hip, his lips blue, his eyes tight shut, breathing heavily and slowly, and he thought, If I die may it be quickly. Nay I said I would ask nothing more if I were granted what I needed for today. So I will not ask. Understand? I ask nothing. Nothing in any way. Give me what I asked for and I leave all the rest according to discretion.

He listened to the noise that came, far away, of the battle at the pass and he said to himself, Truly this is a great day. I should realize and know what a day this is.

But there was no lift or any excitement in his heart. That was all gone and there was nothing but a calmness. And now, as he crouched behind the marker stone with the looped wire in his hand and another loop of it around his wrist and the gravel beside the road under his knees he was not lonely nor did he feel in any way alone. He was one with the wire in his hand and one with the bridge, and one with the charges the Inglés had placed. He was one with the Inglés still working under the bridge and he was one with all of the battle and with the Republic.

But there was no excitement. It was all calm now and the sun beat down on his neck and on his shoulders as he crouched and as he looked up he saw the high, cloudless sky and the slope of the mountain rising beyond the river and he was not happy but he was neither lonely nor afraid.

Up the hill slope Pilar lay behind a tree watching the road that came down from the pass. She had three loaded rifles by her and she handed one to Primitivo as he dropped down beside her.

“Get down there,” she said. “Behind that tree. Thou, gypsy, over there,” she pointed to another tree below. “Is he dead?”

“Nay. Not yet,” Primitivo said.

“It was bad luck,” Pilar said. “If we had had two more it need not have happened. He should have crawled around the sawdust pile. Is he all right there where he is?”

Primitivo shook his head.

“When the Inglés blows the bridge will fragments come this far?” the gypsy asked from behind his tree.

“I don’t know,” Pilar said. “But Agustín with the máquina is closer than thee. The Inglés would not have placed him there if it were too close.”

“But I remember with the blowing of the train the lamp of the engine blew by over my head and pieces of steel flew by like swallows.”

“Thou hast poetic memories,” Pilar said. “Like swallows. Joder! They were like wash boilers. Listen, gypsy, thou hast comported thyself well today. Now do not let thy fear catch up with thee.”

“Well, I only asked if it would blow this far so I might keep well behind the tree trunk,” the gypsy said.

“Keep it thus,” Pilar told him. “How many have we killed?”

“Pues five for us. Two here. Canst thou not see the other at the far end? Look there toward the bridge. See the box? Look! Dost see?” He pointed. “Then there were eight below for Pablo. I watched that post for the Inglés.”

Pilar grunted. Then she said violently and raging, “What passes with that Inglés? What is he obscenitying off under that bridge. Vaya mandanga! Is he building a bridge or blowing one?”

She raised her head and looked down at Anselmo crouched behind the stone marker.

“Hey, viejo!” she shouted. “What passes with thy obscenity of an Inglés?”

“Patience, woman,” Anselmo called up, holding the wire lightly but firmly. “He is terminating his work.”

“But what in the name of the great whore does he take so much time about?”

“Es muy concienzudo!” Anselmo shouted. “It is a scientific labor.”

“I obscenity in the milk of science,” Pilar raged to the gypsy. “Let the filth-faced obscenity blow it and be done. Maria!” she shouted in her deep voice up the hill. “Thy Inglés—” and she shouted a flood of obscenity about Jordan’s imaginary actions under the bridge.

“Calm yourself, woman,” Anselmo called from the road. “He is doing an enormous work. He is finishing it now.”

“The hell with it,” Pilar raged. “It is speed that counts.”

Just then they all heard firing start down the road where Pablo was holding the post he had taken. Pilar stopped cursing and listened. “Ay,” she said. “Ayee. Ayee. That’s it.”

Robert Jordan heard it as he swung the coil of wire up onto the bridge with one hand and then pulled himself up after it. As his knees rested on the edge of the iron of the bridge and his hands were on the surface he heard the machine gun firing around the bend below. It was a different sound from Pablo’s automatic rifle. He got to his feet, leaned over, passed his coil of wire clear and commenced to pay out wire as he walked backwards and sideways along the bridge.

He heard the firing and as he walked he felt it in the pit of his stomach as though it echoed on his own diaphragm. It was closer now as he walked and he looked back at the bend of the road. But it was still clear of any car, or tank or men. It was still clear when he was halfway to the end of the bridge. It was still clear when he was three quarters of the way, his wire running clear and unfouled, and it was still clear as he climbed around behind the sentry box, holding his wire out to keep it from catching on the iron work. Then he was on the road and it was still clear below on the road and then he was moving fast backwards up the little washed-out gully by the lower side of the road as an outfielder goes backwards for a long fly ball, keeping the wire taut, and now he was almost opposite Anselmo’s stone and it was still clear below the bridge.

Then he heard the truck coming down the road and he saw it over his shoulder just coming onto the long slope and he swung his wrist once around the wire and yelled to Anselmo, “Blow her!” and he dug his heels in and leaned back hard onto the tension of the wire with a turn of it around his wrist and the noise of the truck was coming behind and ahead there was the road with the dead sentry and the long bridge and the stretch of road below, still clear and then there was a cracking roar and the middle of the bridge rose up in the air like a wave breaking and he felt the blast from the explosion roll back against him as he dove on his face in the pebbly gully with his hands holding tight over his head. His face was down against the pebbles as the bridge settled where it had risen and the familiar yellow smell of it rolled over him in acrid smoke and then it commenced to rain pieces of steel.

After the steel stopped falling he was still alive and he raised his head and looked across the bridge. The center section of it was gone. There were jagged pieces of steel on the bridge with their bright, new torn edges and ends and these were all over the road. The truck had stopped up the road about a hundred yards. The driver and the two men who had been with him were running toward a culvert.

Fernando was still lying against the bank and he was still breathing. His arms straight by his sides, his hands relaxed.

Anselmo lay face down behind the white marking stone. His left arm was doubled under his head and his right arm was stretched straight out. The loop of wire was still around his right fist. Robert Jordan got to his feet, crossed the road, knelt by him and made sure that he was dead. He did not turn him over to see what the piece of steel had done. He was dead and that was all.

He looked very small, dead, Robert Jordan thought. He looked small and gray-headed and Robert Jordan thought, I wonder how he ever carried such big loads if that is the size he really was. Then he saw the shape of the calves and the thighs in the tight, gray herdsman’s breeches and the worn soles of the rope-soled shoes and he picked up Anselmo’s carbine and the two sacks, practically empty now and went over and picked up the rifle that lay beside Fernando. He kicked a jagged piece of steel off the surface of the road. Then he swung the two rifles over his shoulder, holding them by the muzzles, and started up the slope into the timber. He did not look back nor did he even look across the bridge at the road. They were still firing around the bend below but he cared nothing about that now.

He was coughing from the TNT fumes and he felt numb all through himself.

He put one of the rifles down by Pilar where she lay behind the tree. She looked and saw that made three rifles that she had again.

“You are too high up here,” he said. “There’s a truck up the road where you can’t see it. They thought it was planes. You better get farther down. I’m going down with Agustín to cover Pablo.”

“The old one?” she asked him, looking at his face.

“Dead.”

He coughed again, wrackingly, and spat on the ground.

“Thy bridge is blown, Inglés,” Pilar looked at him. “Don’t forget that.”

“I don’t forget anything,” he said. “You have a big voice,” he said to Pilar. “I have heard thee bellow. Shout up to the Maria and tell her that I am all right.”

“We lost two at the sawmill,” Pilar said, trying to make him understand.

“So I saw,” Robert Jordan said. “Did you do something stupid?”

“Go and obscenity thyself, Inglés,” Pilar said. “Fernando and Eladio were men, too.”

“Why don’t you go up with the horses?” Robert Jordan said. “I can cover here better than thee.”

“Thou art to cover Pablo.”

“The hell with Pablo. Let him cover himself with mierda.”

“Nay, Inglés. He came back. He has fought much below there. Thou hast not listened? He is fighting now. Against something bad. Do you not hear?”

“I’ll cover him. But obscenity all of you. Thou and Pablo both.”

“Inglés,” Pilar said. “Calm thyself. I have been with thee in this as no one could be. Pablo did thee a wrong but he returned.”

“If I had had the exploder the old man would not have been killed. I could have blown it from here.”

“If, if, if—” Pilar said.

The anger and the emptiness and the hate that had come with the let-down after the bridge, when he had looked up from where he had lain and crouching, seen Anselmo dead, were still all through him. In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw.

“If there had been no snow—” Pilar said. And then, not suddenly, as a physical release could have been (if the woman would have put her arm around him, say) but slowly and from his head he began to accept it and let the hate go out. Sure, the snow. That had done it. The snow. Done itto others. Once you saw it again as it was to others, once you got rid of your own self, the always ridding of self that you had to do in war. Where there could be no self. Where yourself is only to be lost. Then, from his losing of it, he heard Pilar say, “Sordo—”

“What?” he said.

“Sordo—”

“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. He grinned at her, a cracked, stiff, too-tightened-facial-tendoned grin. “Forget it. I was wrong. I am sorry, woman. Let us do this well and all together. And the bridge is blown, as thou sayest.”

“Yes. Thou must think of things in their place.”

“Then I go now to Agustín. Put thy gypsy much farther down so that he can see well up the road. Give those guns to Primitivo and take this máquina. Let me show thee.”

“Keep the máquina,” Pilar said. “We will not be here any time. Pablo should come now and we will be going.”

“Rafael,” Robert Jordan said, “come down here with me. Here. Good. See those coming out of the culvert. There, above the truck? Coming toward the truck? Hit me one of those. Sit. Take it easy.”

The gypsy aimed carefully and fired and as he jerked the bolt back and ejected the shell Robert Jordan said, “Over. You threw against the rock above. See the rock dust? Lower, by two feet. Now, careful. They’re running. Good. Sigue tirando.”

“I got one,” the gypsy said. The man was down in the road halfway between the culvert and the truck. The other two did not stop to drag him. They ran for the culvert and ducked in.

“Don’t shoot at him,” Robert Jordan said. “Shoot for the top part of a front tire on the truck. So if you miss you’ll hit the engine. Good.” He watched with the glasses. “A little lower. Good. You shoot like hell. Mucho! Mucho! Shoot me the top of the radiator. Anywhere on the radiator. Thou art a champion. Look. Don’t let anything come past that point there. See?”

“Watch me break the windshield in the truck,” the gypsy said happily.

“Nay. The truck is already sick,” Robert Jordan said. “Hold thy fire until anything comes down the road. Start firing when it is opposite the culvert. Try to hit the driver. That you all should fire, then,” he spoke to Pilar who had come farther down the slope with Primitivo. “You are wonderfully placed here. See how that steepness guards thy flank?”

“That you should get about thy business with Agustín,” Pilar said. “Desist from thy lecture. I have seen terrain in my time.”

“Put Primitivo farther up there,” Robert Jordan said. “There. See, man? This side of where the bank steepens.”

“Leave me,” said Pilar. “Get along, Inglés. Thou and thy perfection. Here there is no problem.”

Just then they heard the planes.

Maria had been with the horses for a long time, but they were no comfort to her. Nor was she any to them. From where she was in the forest she could not see the road nor could she see the bridge and when the firing started she put her arm around the neck of the big white-faced bay stallion that she had gentled and brought gifts to many times when the horses had been in the corral in the trees below the camp. But her nervousness made the big stallion nervous, too, and he jerked his head, his nostrils widening at the firing and the noise of the bombs. Maria could not keep still and she walked around patting and gentling the horses and making them all more nervous and agitated.

She tried to think of the firing not as just a terrible thing that was happening, but to realize that it was Pablo below with the new men, and Pilar with the others above, and that she must not worry nor get into a panic but must have confidence in Roberto. But she could not do this and all the firing above and below the bridge and the distant sound of the battle that rolled down from the pass like the noise of a far-off storm with a dried, rolling rattle in it and the irregular beat of the bombs was simply a horrible thing that almost kept her from breathing.

Then later she heard Pilar’s big voice from away below on the hillside shouting up some obscenity to her that she could not understand and she thought, Oh, God no, no. Don’t talk like that with him in peril. Don’t offend any one and make useless risks. Don’t give any provocation.

Then she commenced to pray for Roberto quickly and automatically as she had done at school, saying the prayers as fast as she could and counting them on the fingers of her left hand, praying by tens of each of the two prayers she was repeating. Then the bridge blew and one horse snapped his halter when he rose and jerked his head at the cracking roar and he went off through the trees. Maria caught him finally and brought him back, shivering, trembling, his chest dark with sweat, the saddle down, and coming back through the trees she heard shooting below and she thought I cannot stand this longer. I cannot live not knowing any longer. I cannot breathe and my mouth is so dry. And I am afraid and I am no good and I frighten the horses and only caught this horse by hazard because he knocked the saddle down against a tree and caught himself kicking into the stirrups and now as I get the saddle up, Oh, God, I do not know. I cannot bear it. Oh please have him be all right for all my heart and all of me is at the bridge. The Republic is one thing and we must win is another thing. But, Oh, Sweet Blessed Virgin, bring him back to me from the bridge and I will do anything thou sayest ever. Because I am not here. There isn’t any me. I am only with him. Take care of him for me and that will be me and then I will do the things for thee and he will not mind. Nor will it be against the Republic. Oh, please forgive me for I am very confused. I am too confused now. But if thou takest care of him I will do whatever is right. I will do what he says and what you say. With the two of me I will do it. But this now not knowing I cannot endure.

Then, the horse tied again, she with the saddle up now, the blanket smoothed, hauling tight on the cinch she heard the big, deep voice from the timber below, “Maria! Maria! Thy Inglés is all right. Hear me? All right. Sin Novedad!”

Maria held the saddle with both hands and pressed her cropped head hard against it and cried. She heard the deep voice shouting again and she turned from the saddle and shouted, choking, “Yes! Thank you!” Then, choking again, “Thank you! Thank you very much!”

When they heard the planes they all looked up and the planes were coming from Segovia very high in the sky, silvery in the high sky, their drumming rising over all the other sounds.

“Those!” Pilar said. “There has only lacked those!”

Robert Jordan put his arm on her shoulders as he watched them. “Nay, woman,” he said. “Those do not come for us. Those have no time for us. Calm thyself.”

“I hate them.”

“Me too. But now I must go to Agustín.”

He circled the hillside through the pines and all the time there was the throbbing, drumming of the planes and across the shattered bridge on the road below, around the bend of the road there was the intermittent hammering fire of a heavy machine gun.

Robert Jordan dropped down to where Agustín lay in the clump of scrub pines behind the automatic rifle and more planes were coming all the time.

“What passes below?” Agustín said. “What is Pablo doing? Doesn’t he know the bridge is gone?”

“Maybe he can’t leave.”

“Then let us leave. The hell with him.”

“He will come now if he is able,” Robert Jordan said. “We should see him now.”

“I have not heard him,” Agustín said. “Not for five minutes. No. There! Listen! There he is. That’s him.”

There was a burst of the spot-spot-spotting fire of the cavalry submachine gun, then another, then another.

“That’s the bastard,” Robert Jordan said.

He watched still more planes coming over in the high cloudless blue sky and he watched Agustín’s face as he looked up at them. Then he looked down at the shattered bridge and across to the stretch of road which still was clear. He coughed and spat and listened to the heavy machine gun hammer again below the bend. It sounded to be in the same place that it was before.

“And what’s that?” Agustín asked. “What the unnameable is that?”

“It has been going since before I blew the bridge,” Robert Jordan said. He looked down at the bridge now and he could see the stream through the torn gap where the center had fallen, hanging like a bent steel apron. He heard the first of the planes that had gone over now bombing up above at the pass and more were still coming. The noise of their motors filled all the high sky and looking up he saw their pursuit, minute and tiny, circling and wheeling high above them.

“I don’t think they ever crossed the lines the other morning,” Primitivo said. “They must have swung off to the west and then come back. They could not be making an attack if they had seen these.”

“Most of these are new,” Robert Jordan said.

He had the feeling of something that had started normally and had then brought great, outsized, giant repercussions. It was as though you had thrown a stone and the stone made a ripple and the ripple returned roaring and toppling as a tidal wave. Or as though you shouted and the echo came back in rolls and peals of thunder, and the thunder was deadly. Or as though you struck one man and he fell and as far as you could see other men rose up all armed and armored. He was glad he was not with Golz up at the pass.

Lying there, by Agustín, watching the planes going over, listening for firing behind him, watching the road below where he knew he would see something but not what it would be, he still felt numb with the surprise that he had not been killed at the bridge. He had accepted being killed so completely that all of this now seemed unreal. Shake out of that, he said to himself. Get rid of that. There is much, much, much to be done today. But it would not leave him and he felt, consciously, all of this becoming like a dream.

“You swallowed too much of that smoke,” he told himself. But he knew it was not that. He could feel, solidly, how unreal it all was through the absolute reality and he looked down at the bridge and then back to the sentry lying on the road, to where Anselmo lay, to Fernando against the bank and back up the smooth, brown road to the stalled truck and still it was unreal.

“You better sell out your part of you quickly,” he told himself. “You’re like one of those cocks in the pit where nobody has seen the wound given and it doesn’t show and he is already going cold with it.”

“Nuts,” he said to himself. “You are a little groggy is all, and you have a let-down after responsibility, is all. Take it easy.”

Then Agustín grabbed his arm and pointed and he looked across the gorge and saw Pablo.

They saw Pablo come running around the corner of the bend in the road. At the sheer rock where the road went out of sight they saw him stop and lean against the rock and fire back up the road. Robert Jordan saw Pablo, short, heavy and stocky, his cap gone, leaning against the rock wall and firing the short cavalry automatic rifle and he could see the bright flicker of the cascading brass hulls as the sun caught them. They saw Pablo crouch and fire another burst. Then, without looking back, he came running, short, bowlegged, fast, his head bent down straight toward the bridge.

Robert Jordan had pushed Agustín over and he had the stock of the big automatic rifle against his shoulder and was sighting on the bend of the road. His own submachine gun lay by his left hand. It was not accurate enough for that range.

As Pablo came toward them Robert Jordan sighted on the bend but nothing came. Pablo had reached the bridge, looked over his shoulder once, glanced at the bridge, and then turned to his left and gone down into the gorge and out of sight. Robert Jordan was still watching the bend and nothing had come in sight. Agustín got up on one knee. He could see Pablo climbing down into the gorge like a goat. There had been no noise of firing below since they had first seen Pablo.

“You see anything up above? On the rocks above?” Robert Jordan asked.

“Nothing.”

Robert Jordan watched the bend of the road. He knew the wall just below that was too steep for any one to climb but below it eased and some one might have circled up above.

If things had been unreal before, they were suddenly real enough now. It was as though a reflex lens camera had been suddenly brought into focus. It was then he saw the low-bodied, angled snout and squat green, gray and brown-splashed turret with the projecting machine gun come around the bend into the bright sun. He fired on it and he could hear the spang against the steel. The little whippet tank scuttled back behind the rock wall. Watching the corner, Robert Jordan saw the nose just reappear, then the edge of the turret showed and the turret swung so that the gun was pointing down the road.

“It seems like a mouse coming out of his hole,” Agustín said. “Look, Inglés.”

“He has little confidence,” Robert Jordan said.

“This is the big insect Pablo has been fighting,” Agustín said. “Hit him again, Inglés.”

“Nay. I cannot hurt him. I don’t want him to see where we are.”

The tank commenced to fire down the road. The bullets hit the road surface and sung off and now they were pinging and clanging in the iron of the bridge. It was the same machine gun they had heard below.

“Cabrón!” Agustín said. “Is that the famous tanks, Inglés?”

“That’s a baby one.”

“Cabrón. If I had a baby bottle full of gasoline I would climb up there and set fire to him. What will he do, Inglés?”

“After a while he will have another look.”

“And these are what men fear,” Agustín said. “Look, Inglés! He’s rekilling the sentries.”

“Since he has no other target,” Robert Jordan said. “Do not reproach him.”

But he was thinking, Sure, make fun of him. But suppose it was you, way back here in your own country and they held you up with firing on the main road. Then a bridge was blown. Wouldn’t you think it was mined ahead or that there was a trap? Sure you would. He’s done all right. He’s waiting for something else to come up. He’s engaging the enemy. It’s only us. But he can’t tell that. Look at the little bastard.

The little tank had nosed a little farther around the corner.

Just then Agustín saw Pablo coming over the edge of the gorge, pulling himself over on hands and knees, his bristly face running with sweat.

“Here comes the son of a bitch,” he said.

“Who?”

“Pablo.”

Robert Jordan looked, saw Pablo, and then he commenced firing at the part of the camouflaged turret of the tank where he knew the slit above the machine gun would be. The little tank whirred backwards, scuttling out of sight and Robert Jordan picked up the automatic rifle, clamped the tripod against the barrel and swung the gun with its still hot muzzle over his shoulder. The muzzle was so hot it burned his shoulder and he shoved it far behind him turning the stock flat in his hand.

“Bring the sack of pans and my little máquina,” he shouted, “and come running.”

Robert Jordan ran up the hill through the pines. Agustín was close behind him and behind him Pablo was coming.

“Pilar!” Jordan shouted across the hill. “Come on, woman!”

The three of them were going as fast as they could up the steep slope. They could not run any more because the grade was too severe and Pablo, who had no load but the light cavalry submachine gun, had closed up with the other two.

“And thy people?” Agustín said to Pablo out of his dry mouth.

“All dead,” Pablo said. He was almost unable to breathe. Agustín turned his head and looked at him.

“We have plenty of horses now, Inglés,” Pablo panted.

“Good,” Robert Jordan said. The murderous bastard, he thought. “What did you encounter?”

“Everything,” Pablo said. He was breathing in lunges. “What passed with Pilar?”

“She lost Fernando and the brother—”

“Eladio,” Agustín said.

“And thou?” Pablo asked.

“I lost Anselmo.”

“There are lots of horses,” Pablo said. “Even for the baggage.”

Agustín bit his lip, looked at Robert Jordan and shook his head. Below them, out of sight through the trees, they heard the tank firing on the road and bridge again.

Robert Jordan jerked his head. “What passed with that?” he said to Pablo. He did not like to look at Pablo, nor to smell him, but he wanted to hear him.

“I could not leave with that there,” Pablo said. “We were barricaded at the lower bend of the post. Finally it went back to look for something and I came.”

“What were you shooting at, at the bend?” Agustín asked bluntly.

Pablo looked at him, started to grin, thought better of it, and said nothing.

“Did you shoot them all?” Agustín asked. Robert Jordan was thinking, keep your mouth shut. It is none of your business now. They have done all that you could expect and more. This is an intertribal matter. Don’t make moral judgments. What do you expect from a murderer? You’re working with a murderer. Keep your mouth shut. You knew enough about him before. This is nothing new. But you dirty bastard, he thought. You dirty, rotten bastard.

His chest was aching with climbing as though it would split after the running and ahead now through the trees he saw the horses.

“Go ahead,” Agustín was saying. “Why do you not say you shot them?”

“Shut up,” Pablo said. “I have fought much today and well. Ask the Inglés.”

“And now get us through today,” Robert Jordan said. “For it is thee who has the plan for this.”

“I have a good plan,” Pablo said. “With a little luck we will be all right.”

He was beginning to breathe better.

“You’re not going to kill any of us, are you?” Agustín said. “For I will kill thee now.”

“Shut up,” Pablo said. “I have to look after thy interest and that of the band. This is war. One cannot do what one would wish.”

“Cabrón,” said Agustín. “You take all the prizes.”

“Tell me what thou encountered below,” Robert Jordan said to Pablo.

“Everything,” Pablo repeated. He was still breathing as though it were tearing his chest but he could talk steadily now and his face and head were running with sweat and his shoulders and chest were soaked with it. He looked at Robert Jordan cautiously to see if he were really friendly and then he grinned. “Everything,” he said again. “First we took the post. Then came a motorcyclist. Then another. Then an ambulance. Then a camion. Then the tank. Just before thou didst the bridge.”

“Then—”

“The tank could not hurt us but we could not leave for it commanded the road. Then it went away and I came.”

“And thy people?” Agustín put in, still looking for trouble.

“Shut up,” Pablo looked at him squarely, and his face was the face of a man who had fought well before any other thing had happened. “They were not of our band.”

Now they could see the horses tied to the trees, the sun coming down on them through the pine branches and them tossing their heads and kicking against the botflies and Robert Jordan saw Maria and the next thing he was holding her tight, tight, with the automatic rifle leaning against his side, the flash-cone pressing against his ribs and Maria saying, “Thou, Roberto. Oh, thou.”

“Yes, rabbit. My good, good rabbit. Now we go.”

“Art thou here truly?”

“Yes. Yes. Truly. Oh, thou!”

He had never thought that you could know that there was a woman if there was battle; nor that any part of you could know it, or respond to it; nor that if there was a woman that she should have breasts small, round and tight against you through a shirt; nor that they, the breasts, could know about the two of them in battle. But it was true and he thought, good. That’s good. I would not have believed that and he held her to him once hard, hard, but he did not look at her, and then he slapped her where he never had slapped her and said, “Mount. Mount. Get on that saddle, guapa.”

Then they were untying the halters and Robert Jordan had given the automatic rifle back to Agustín and slung his own submachine gun over his back, and he was putting bombs out of his pockets into the saddlebags, and he stuffed one empty pack inside the other and tied that one behind his saddle. Then Pilar came up, so breathless from the climb she could not talk, but only motioned.

Then Pablo stuffed three hobbles he had in his hand into a saddlebag, stood up and said, “Qué tal, woman?” and she only nodded, and then they were all mounting.

Robert Jordan was on the big gray he had first seen in the snow of the morning of the day before and he felt that it was much horse between his legs and under his hands. He was wearing rope-soled shoes and the stirrups were a little too short; his submachine gun was slung over his shoulder, his pockets were full of clips and he was sitting reloading the one used clip, the reins under one arm, tight, watching Pilar mount into a strange sort of seat on top of the duffle lashed onto the saddle of the buckskin.

“Cut that stuff loose for God’s sake,” Primitivo said. “Thou wilt fall and the horse cannot carry it.”

“Shut up,” said Pilar. “We go to make a life with this.”

“Canst ride like that, woman?” Pablo asked her from the guardia civil saddle on the great bay horse.

“Like any milk peddler,” Pilar told him. “How do you go, old one?”

“Straight down. Across the road. Up the far slope and into the timber where it narrows.”

“Across the road?” Agustín wheeled beside him, kicking his soft-heeled, canvas shoes against the stiff, unresponding belly of one of the horses Pablo had recruited in the night.

“Yes, man. It is the only way,” Pablo said. He handed him one of the lead ropes. Primitivo and the gypsy had the others.

“Thou canst come at the end if thou will, Inglés,” Pablo said. “We cross high enough to be out of range of that máquina. But we will go separately and riding much and then be together where it narrows above.”

“Good,” said Robert Jordan.

They rode down through the timber toward the edge of the road. Robert Jordan rode just behind Maria. He could not ride beside her for the timber. He caressed the gray once with his thigh muscles, and then held him steady as they dropped down fast and sliding through the pines, telling the gray with his thighs as they dropped down what the spurs would have told him if they had been on level ground.

“Thou,” he said to Maria, “go second as they cross the road. First is not so bad though it seems bad. Second is good. It is later that they are always watching for.”

“But thou—”

“I will go suddenly. There will be no problem. It is the places in line that are bad.”

He was watching the round, bristly head of Pablo, sunk in his shoulders as he rode, his automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. He was watching Pilar, her head bare, her shoulders broad, her knees higher than her thighs as her heels hooked into the bundles. She looked back at him once and shook her head.

“Pass the Pilar before you cross the road,” Robert Jordan said to Maria.

Then he was looking through the thinning trees and he saw the oiled dark of the road below and beyond it the green slope of the hillside. We are above the culvert, he saw, and just below the height where the road drops down straight toward the bridge in that long sweep. We are around eight hundred yards above the bridge. That is not out of range for the Fiat in that little tank if they have come up to the bridge.

“Maria,” he said. “Pass the Pilar before we reach the road and ride wide up that slope.”

She looked back at him but did not say anything. He did not look at her except to see that she had understood.

“Comprendes?” he asked her.

She nodded.

“Move up,” he said.

She shook her head.

“Move up!”

“Nay,” she told him, turning around and shaking her head. “I go in the order that I am to go.”

Just then Pablo dug both his spurs into the big bay and he plunged down the last pine-needled slope and cross the road in a pounding, sparking of shod hooves. The others came behind him and Robert Jordan saw them crossing the road and slamming on up the green slope and heard the machine gun hammer at the bridge. Then he heard a noise come sweeeish-crack-boom! The boom was a sharp crack that widened in the cracking and on the hillside he saw a small fountain of earth rise with a plume of gray smoke. Sweeish-crack-boom! It came again, the swishing like the noise of a rocket and there was another up-pulsing of dirt and smoke farther up the hillside.

Ahead of him the gypsy was stopped beside the road in the shelter of the last trees. He looked ahead at the slope and then he looked back toward Robert Jordan.

“Go ahead, Rafael,” Robert Jordan said. “Gallop, man!”

The gypsy was holding the lead rope with the pack-horse pulling his head taut behind him.

“Drop the pack-horse and gallop!” Robert Jordan said.

He saw the gypsy’s hand extended behind him, rising higher and higher, seeming to take forever as his heels kicked into the horse he was riding and the rope came taut, then dropped, and he was across the road and Robert Jordan was kneeing against a frightened packhorse that bumped back into him as the gypsy crossed the hard, dark road and he heard his horse’s hooves clumping as he galloped up the slope.

Wheeeeeeish-ca-rack! The flat trajectory of the shell came and he saw the gypsy jink like a running boar as the earth spouted the little black and gray geyser ahead of him. He watched him galloping, slow and reaching now, up the long green slope and the gun threw behind him and ahead of him and he was under the fold of the hill with the others.

I can’t take the damned pack-horse, Robert Jordan thought. Though I wish I could keep the son of a bitch on my off side. I’d like to have him between me and that 47 mm. they’re throwing with. By God, I’ll try to get him up there anyway.

He rode up to the pack-horse, caught hold of the hackamore, and then, holding the rope, the horse trotting behind him, rode fifty yards up through the trees. At the edge of the trees he looked down the road past the truck to the bridge. He could see men out on the bridge and behind it looked like a traffic jam on the road. Robert Jordan looked around, saw what he wanted finally and reached up and broke a dead limb from a pine tree. He dropped the hackamore, edged the pack-horse up to the slope that slanted down to the road and then hit him hard across the rump with the tree branch. “Go on, you son of a bitch,” he said, and threw the dead branch after him as the pack-horse crossed the road and started across the slope. The branch hit him and the horse broke from a run into a gallop.

Robert Jordan rode thirty yards farther up the road; beyond that the bank was too steep. The gun was firing now with the rocket whish and the cracking, dirt-spouting boom. “Come on, you big gray fascist bastard,” Robert Jordan said to the horse and put him down the slope in a sliding plunge. Then he was out in the open, over the road that was so hard under the hooves he felt the pound of it come up all the way to his shoulders, his neck and his teeth, onto the smooth of the slope, the hooves finding it, cutting it, pounding it, reaching, throwing, going, and he looked down across the slope to where the bridge showed now at a new angle he had never seen. It crossed in profile now without foreshortening and in the center was the broken place and behind it on the road was the little tank and behind the little tank was a big tank with a gun that flashed now yellow-bright as a mirror and the screech as the air ripped apart seemed almost over the gray neck that stretched ahead of him, and he turned his head as the dirt fountained up the hillside. The pack-horse was ahead of him swinging too far to the right and slowing down and Robert Jordan, galloping, his head turned a little toward the bridge, saw the line of trucks halted behind the turn that showed now clearly as he was gaining height, and he saw the bright yellow flash that signalled the instant whish and boom, and the shell fell short, but he heard the metal sailing from where the dirt rose.

He saw them all ahead in the edge of the timber watching him and he said, “Arre caballo! Go on, horse!” and felt his big horse’s chest surging with the steepening of the slope and saw the gray neck stretching and the gray ears ahead and he reached and patted the wet gray neck, and he looked back at the bridge and saw the bright flash from the heavy, squat, mud-colored tank there on the road and then he did not hear any whish but only a banging acrid smelling clang like a boiler being ripped apart and he was under the gray horse and the gray horse was kicking and he was trying to pull out from under the weight.

He could move all right. He could move toward the right. But his left leg stayed perfectly flat under the horse as he moved to the right. It was as though there was a new joint in it; not the hip joint but another one that went sideways like a hinge. Then he knew what it was all right and just then the gray horse knee-ed himself up and Robert Jordan’s right leg, that had kicked the stirrup loose just as it should, slipped clear over the saddle and came down beside him and he felt with his two hands of his thigh bone where the left leg lay flat against the ground and his hands both felt the sharp bone and where it pressed against the skin.

The gray horse was standing almost over him and he could see his ribs heaving. The grass was green where he sat and there were meadow flowers in it and he looked down the slope across to the road and the bridge and the gorge and the road and saw the tank and waited for the next flash. It came almost at once with again no whish and in the burst of it, with the smell of the high explosive, the dirt clods scattering and the steel whirring off, he saw the big gray horse sit quietly down beside him as though it were a horse in a circus. And then, looking at the horse sitting there, he heard the sound the horse was making.

Then Primitivo and Agustín had him under the armpits and were dragging him up the last slope and the new joint in his leg let it swing any way the ground swung it. Once a shell whished close over them and they dropped him and fell flat, but the dirt scattered over them and and the metal sung off and they picked him up again. And then they had him up to the shelter of the long draw in the timber where the horses were, and Maria, Pilar and Pablo were standing over him.

Maria was kneeling by him and saying, “Roberto, what hast thou?”

He said, sweating heavily, “The left leg is broken, guapa.”

“We will bind it up,” Pilar said. “Thou canst ride that.” She pointed to one of the horses that was packed. “Cut off the load.”

Robert Jordan saw Pablo shake his head and he nodded at him.

“Get along,” he said. Then he said, “Listen, Pablo. Come here.”

The sweat-streaked, bristly face bent down by him and Robert Jordan smelt the full smell of Pablo.

“Let us speak,” he said to Pilar and Maria. “I have to speak to Pablo.”

“Does it hurt much?” Pablo asked. He was bending close over Robert Jordan.

“No. I think the nerve is crushed. Listen. Get along. I am mucked, see? I will talk to the girl for a moment. When I say to take her, take her. She will want to stay. I will only speak to her for a moment.”

“Clearly, there is not much time,” Pablo said.

“Clearly.”

“I think you would do better in the Republic,” Robert Jordan said.

“Nay. I am for Gredos.”

“Use thy head.”

“Talk to her now,” Pablo said. “There is little time. I am sorry thou hast this, Inglés.”

“Since I have it—” Robert Jordan said. “Let us not speak of it. But use thy head. Thou hast much head. Use it.”

“Why would I not?” said Pablo. “Talk now fast, Inglés. There is no time.”

Pablo went over to the nearest tree and watched down the slope, across the slope and up the road across the gorge. Pablo was looking at the gray horse on the slope with true regret on his face and Pilar and Maria were with Robert Jordan where he sat against the tree trunk.

“Slit the trouser, will thee?” he said to Pilar. Maria crouched by him and did not speak. The sun was on her hair and her face was twisted as a child’s contorts before it cries. But she was not crying.

Pilar took her knife and slit his trouser leg down below the lefthand pocket. Robert Jordan spread the cloth with his hands and looked at the stretch of his thigh. Ten inches below the hip joint there was a pointed, purple swelling like a sharp-peaked little tent and as he touched it with his fingers he could feel the snapped-off thigh bone tight against the skin. His leg was lying at an odd angle. He looked up at Pilar. Her face had the same expression as Maria’s.

“Anda,” he said to her. “Go.”

She went away with her head down without saying anything nor looking back and Robert Jordan could see her shoulders shaking.

“Guapa,” he said to Maria and took hold of her two hands. “Listen. We will not be going to Madrid—”

Then she started to cry.

“No, guapa, don’t,” he said. “Listen. We will not go to Madrid now but I go always with thee wherever thou goest. Understand?”

She said nothing and pushed her head against his cheek with her arms around him.

“Listen to this well, rabbit,” he said. He knew there was a great hurry and he was sweating very much, but this had to be said and understood. “Thou wilt go now, rabbit. But I go with thee. As long as there is one of us there is both of us. Do you understand?”

“Nay, I stay with thee.”

“Nay, rabbit. What I do now I do alone. I could not do it well with thee. If thou goest then I go, too. Do you not see how it is? Whichever one there is, is both.”

“I will stay with thee.”

“Nay, rabbit. Listen. That people cannot do together. Each one must do it alone. But if thou goest then I go with thee. It is in that way that I go too. Thou wilt go now, I know. For thou art good and kind. Thou wilt go now for us both.”

“But it is easier if I stay with thee,” she said. “It is better for me.”

“Yes. Therefore go for a favor. Do it for me since it is what thou canst do.”

“But you don’t understand, Roberto. What about me? It is worse for me to go.”

“Surely,” he said. “It is harder for thee. But I am thee also now.”

She said nothing.

He looked at her and he was sweating heavily and he spoke now, trying harder to do something than he had ever tried in all his life.

“Now you will go for us both,” he said. “You must not be selfish, rabbit. You must do your duty now.”

She shook her head.

“You are me now,” he said. “Surely thou must feel it, rabbit.

“Rabbit, listen,” he said. “Truly thus I go too. I swear it to thee.”

She said nothing.

“Now you see it,” he said. “Now I see it is clear. Now thou wilt go. Good. Now you are going. Now you have said you will go.”

She had said nothing.

“Now I thank thee for it. Now you are going well and fast and far and we both go in thee. Now put thy hand here. Now put thy head down. Nay, put it down. That is right. Now I put my hand there. Good. Thou art so good. Now do not think more. Now art thou doing what thou should. Now thou art obeying. Not me but us both. The me in thee. Now you go for us both. Truly. We both go in thee now. This I have promised thee. Thou art very good to go and very kind.”

He jerked his head at Pablo, who was half-looking at him from the tree and Pablo started over. He motioned with his thumb to Pilar.

“We will go to Madrid another time, rabbit,” he said. “Truly. Now stand up and go and we both go. Stand up. See?”

“No,” she said and held him tight around the neck.

He spoke now still calmly and reasonably but with great authority.

“Stand up,” he said. “Thou art me too now. Thou art all there will be of me. Stand up.”

She stood up slowly, crying, and with her head down. Then she dropped quickly beside him and then stood up again, slowly and tiredly, as he said, “Stand up, guapa.”

Pilar was holding her by the arm and she was standing there.

“Vamonos,” Pilar said. “Dost lack anything, Inglés?” She looked at him and shook her head.

“No,” he said and went on talking to Maria.

“There is no good-by, guapa, because we are not apart. That it should be good in the Gredos. Go now. Go good. Nay,” he spoke now still calmly and reasonably as Pilar walked the girl along. “Do not turn around. Put thy foot in. Yes. Thy foot in. Help her up,” he said to Pilar. “Get her in the saddle. Swing up now.”

He turned his head, sweating, and looked down the slope, then back toward where the girl was in the saddle with Pilar by her and Pablo just behind. “Now go,” he said. “Go.”

She started to look around. “Don’t look around,” Robert Jordan said. “Go.” And Pablo hit the horse across the crupper with a hobbling strap and it looked as though Maria tried to slip from the saddle but Pilar and Pablo were riding close up against her and Pilar was holding her and the three horses were going up the draw.

“Roberto,” Maria turned and shouted. “Let me stay! Let me stay!”

“I am with thee,” Robert Jordan shouted. “I am with thee now. We are both there. Go!” Then they were out of sight around the corner of the draw and he was soaking wet with sweat and looking at nothing.

Agustín was standing by him.

“Do you want me to shoot thee, Inglés?” he asked, leaning down close. “Quieres? It is nothing.”

“No hace falta,” Robert Jordan said. “Get along. I am very well here.”

“Me cago en la leche que me han dado!” Agustín said. He was crying so he could not see Robert Jordan clearly. “Salud, Inglés.”

“Salud, old one,” Robert Jordan said. He was looking down the slope now. “Look well after the cropped head, wilt thou?”

“There is no problem,” Agustín said. “Thou has what thou needest?”

“There are very few shells for this máquina, so I will keep it,” Robert Jordan said. “Thou canst now get more. For that other and the one of Pablo, yes.”

“I cleaned out the barrel,” Agustín said. “Where thou plugged it in the dirt with the fall.”

“What became of the pack-horse?”

“The gypsy caught it.”

Agustín was on the horse now but he did not want to go. He leaned far over toward the tree where Robert Jordan lay.

“Go on, viejo,” Robert Jordan said to him. “In war there are many things like this.”

“Qué puta es Ia guerra,” Agustín said. “War is a bitchery.”

“Yes, man, yes. But get on with thee.”

“Salud, Inglés,” Agustín said, clenching his right fist.

“Salud,” Robert Jordan said. “But get along, man.”

Agustín wheeled his horse and brought his right fist down as though he cursed again with the motion of it and rode up the draw. All the others had been out of sight long before. He looked back where the draw turned in the timber and waved his fist. Robert Jordan waved and then Agustín, too, was out of sight…. Robert Jordan looked down the green slope of the hillside to the road and the bridge. I’m as well this way as any, he thought. It wouldn’t be worth risking getting over on my belly yet, not as close as that thing was to the surface, and I can see better this way.

He felt empty and drained and exhausted from all of it and from them going and his mouth tasted of bile. Now, finally and at last, there was no problem. however all of it had been and however all of it would ever be now, for him, no longer was there any problem.

They were all gone now and he was alone with his back against a tree. He looked down across the green slope, seeing the gray horse where Agustín had shot him, and on down the slope to the road with the timber-covered country behind it. Then he looked at the bridge and across the bridge and watched the activity on the bridge and the road. He could see the trucks now, all down the lower road. The gray of the trucks showed through the trees. Then he looked back up the road to where it came down over the hill. They will be coming soon now, he thought.

Pilar will take care of her as well as any one can. You know that. Pablo must have a sound plan or he would not have tried it. You do not have to worry about Pablo. It does no good to think about Maria. Try to believe what you told her. That is the best. And who says it is not true? Not you. You don’t say it, any more than you would say the things did not happen that happened. Stay with what you believe now. Don’t get cynical. The time is too short and you have just sent her away. Each one does what he can. You can do nothing for yourself but perhaps you can do something for another. Well, we had all our luck in four days. Not four days. It was afternoon when I first got there and it will not be noon today. That makes not quite three days and three nights. Keep it accurate, he said. Quite accurate.

I think you better get down now, he thought. You better get fixed around some way where you will be useful instead of leaning against this tree like a tramp. You have had much luck. There are many worse things than this. Every one has to do this, one day or another. You are not afraid of it once you know you have to do it, are you? No, he said, truly. It was lucky the nerve was crushed, though. I cannot even feel that there is anything below the break. He touched the lower part of his leg and it was as though it were not part of his body.

He looked down the hill slope again and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have.

I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life. You’ve had just as good a life as grandfather’s though not as long. You’ve had as good a life as any one because of these last days. You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I’ve learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end. I’d like to talk to Karkov. That is in Madrid. Just over the hills there, and down across the plain. Down out of the gray rocks and the pines, the heather and the gorse, across the yellow high plateau you see it rising white and beautiful. That part is just as true as Pilar’s old women drinking the blood down at the slaughterhouse. There’s no one thing that’s true. It’s all true. The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours or theirs. The hell they are, he thought.

You take it easy, now, he said. Get turned over now while you still have time. Listen, one thing. Do you remember? Pilar and the hand? Do you believe that crap? No, he said. Not with everything that’s happened? No, I don’t believe it. She was nice about it early this morning before the show started. She was afraid maybe I believed it. I don’t, though. But she does. They see something. Or they feel something. Like a bird dog. What about extra-sensory perception? What about obscenity? he said. She wouldn’t say good-by, he thought, because she knew if she did Maria would never go. That Pilar. Get yourself turned over, Jordan. But he was reluctant to try it.

Then he remembered that he had the small flask in his hip pocket and he thought, I’ll take a good spot of the giant killer and then I’ll try it. But the flask was not there when he felt for it. Then he felt that much more alone because he knew there was not going to be even that. I guess I’d counted on that, he said.

Do you suppose Pablo took it? Don’t be silly. You must have lost it at the bridge. “Come on now, Jordan,” he said. “Over you go.”

Then he took hold of his left leg with both hands and pulled on it hard, pulling toward the foot while he lay down beside the tree he had been resting his back against. Then lying flat and pulling hard on the leg, so the broken end of the bone would not come up and cut through the thigh, he turned slowly around on his rump until the back of his head was facing downhill. Then with his broken leg, held by both hands, uphill, he put the sole of his right foot against the instep of his left foot and pressed hard while he rolled, sweating, over onto his face and chest. He got onto his elbows, stretched the left leg well behind him with both hands and a far, sweating, push with the right foot and there he was. He felt with his fingers on the left thigh and it was all right. The bone end had not punctured the skin and the broken end was well into the muscle now.

The big nerve must have been truly smashed when that damned horse rolled on it, he thought. It truly doesn’t hurt at all. Except now in certain changes of positions. That’s when the bone pinches something else. You see? he said. You see what luck is? You didn’t need the giant killer at all.

He reached over for the submachine gun, took the clip out that was in the magazine, felt in his pocket for clips, opened the action and looked through the barrel, put the clip back into the groove of the magazine until it clicked, and then looked down the hill slope. Maybe half an hour, he thought. Now take it easy.

Then he looked at the hillside and he looked at the pines and he tried not to think at all.

Then he looked at the stream and he remembered how it had been under the bridge in the cool of the shadow. I wish they would come, he thought. I do not want to get in any sort of mixed-up state before they come.

Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear. It is only missing it that’s bad. Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you. That is where you have all the luck, see? You don’t have any of that.

It’s wonderful they’ve got away. I don’t mind this at all now they are away. It is sort of the way I said. It is really very much that way. Look how different it would be if they were all scattered out across that hill where that gray horse is. Or if we were all cooped up here waiting for it. No. They’re gone. They’re away. Now if the attack were only a success. What do you want? Everything. I want everything and I will take whatever I get. If this attack is no good another one will be. I never noticed when the planes came back. God, that was lucky I could make her go.

I’d like to tell grandfather about this one. I’ll bet he never had to go over and find his people and do a show like this. How do you know? He may have done fifty. No, he said. Be accurate. Nobody did any fifty like this one. Nobody did five. Nobody did one maybe not just like this. Sure. They must have.

I wish they would come now, he said. I wish they would come right now because the leg is starting to hurt now. It must be the swelling.

We were going awfully good when that thing hit us, he thought. But it was only luck it didn’t come while I was under the bridge. When a thing is wrong something’s bound to happen. You were bitched when they gave Golz those orders. That was what you knew and it was probably that which Pilar felt. But later on we will have these things much better organized. We ought to have portable short wave transmitters. Yes, there’s a lot of things we ought to have. I ought to carry a spare leg, too.

He grinned at that sweatily because the leg, where the big nerve had been bruised by the fall, was hurting badly now. Oh, let them come, he said. I don’t want to do that business that my father did. I will do it all right but I’d much prefer not to have to. I’m against that. Don’t think about that. Don’t think at all. I wish the bastards would come, he said. I wish so very much they’d come.

His leg was hurting very badly now. The pain had started suddenly with the swelling after he had moved and he said, Maybe I’ll just do it now. I guess I’m not awfully good at pain. Listen, if I do that now you wouldn’t misunderstand, would you? Who are you talking to? Nobody, he said. Grandfather, I guess. No. Nobody. Oh bloody it, I wish that they would come.

Listen, I may have to do that because if I pass out or anything like that I am no good at all and if they bring me to they will ask me a lot of questions and do things and all and that is no good. It’s much best not to have them do those things. So why wouldn’t it be all right to just do it now and then the whole thing would be over with? Because oh, listen, yes, listen, let them come now.

You’re not good at this, Jordan, he said. Not so good at this. And who is so good at this? I don’t know and I don’t really care right now. But you are not. That’s right. You’re not at all. Oh not at all, at all. I think it would be all right to do it now? Don’t you?

No, it isn’t. Because there is something you can do yet. As long as you know what it is you have to do it. As long as you remember what it is you have to wait for that. Come on. Let them come. Let them come. Let them come!

Think about them being away, he said. Think about them going through the timber. Think about them crossing a creek. Think about them riding through the heather. Think about them going up the slope. Think about them O.K. tonight. Think about them travelling, all night. Think about them hiding up tomorrow. Think about them. God damn it, think about them. That’s just as far as I can think about them, he said.

Think about Montana. I can’t. Think about Madrid. I can’t. Think about a cool drink of water. All right. That’s what it will be like. Like a cool drink of water. You’re a liar. It will just be nothing. That’s all it will be. Just nothing. Then do it. Do it. Do it now. It’s all right to do it now. Go on and do it now. No, you have to wait. What for? You know all right. Then wait.

I can’t wait any longer now, he said. If I wait any longer I’ll pass out. I know because I’ve felt it starting to go three times now and I’ve held it. I held it all right. But I don’t know about any more. What I think is you’ve got an internal hemorrhage there from where that thigh bone’s cut around inside. Especially on that turning business. That makes the swelling and that’s what weakens you and makes you start to pass. It would be all right to do it now. Really, I’m telling you that it would be all right.

And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make —

All right, he said. And he lay very quietly and tried to hold on to himself that he felt slipping away from himself as you feel snow starting to slip sometimes on a mountain slope, and he said, now quietly, then let me last until they come.

Robert Jordan’s luck held very good because he saw, just then, the cavalry ride out of the timber and cross the road. He watched them coming riding up the slope. He saw the trooper who stopped by the gray horse and shouted to the officer who rode over to him. He watched them both looking down at the gray horse. They recognized him of course. He and his rider had been missing since the early morning of the day before.

Robert Jordan saw them there on the slope, close to him now, and below he saw the road and the bridge and the long lines of vehicles below it. He was completely integrated now and he took a good long look at everything. Then he looked up at the sky. There were big white clouds in it. He touched the palm of his hand against the pine needles where he lay and he touched the bark of the pine trunk that he lay behind.

Then he rested easily as he could with his two elbows in the pine needles and the muzzle of the submachine gun resting against the trunk of the pine tree.

As the officer came trotting now on the trail of the horses of the band he would pass twenty yards below where Robert Jordan lay. At that distance there would be no problem. The officer was Lieutenant Berrendo. He had come up from La Granja when they had been ordered up after the first report of the attack on the lower post. They had ridden hard and had then had to swing back, because the bridge had been blown, to cross the gorge high above and come around through the timber. Their horses were wet and blown and they had to be urged into the trot.

Lieutenant Berrendo, watching the trail, came riding up, his thin face serious and grave. His submachine gun lay across his saddle in the crook of his left arm. Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his hands steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES

Across the River and into the Trees was serialised in Cosmopolitan Magazine between February and June 1950. The author had become good friends with the editor, novelist and biographer, A. E. Hotchner, who was working for the magazine at the time. Hemingway had been asked to write an article for the publication in the late 1940’s, which did not happen, but he did decide to submit his next novel to them for serialisation. The work was published in book form in September 1950 by Scribner’s and quickly became a commercial success in America. However, it was largely attacked by critics, causing the author great offence. He was irritated by criticisms about the lack of plot and unused to having his work written about in such a negative way.

The novel was composed between early 1949 and the start of 1950, being Hemingway’s first work of fiction since his 1940 Spanish Civil War novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. He began to write during a skiing trip to Northern Italy before continuing to work on it in a variety of locations, including Cuba and Paris. It was during his time in Italy in late 1948 that he met the wealthy eighteen-year-old aristocrat, Adrianna Ivancich, who would come to be the inspiration for the heroine of his novel.

Across the River and into the Trees relays the story of a dying middle aged American general, Richard Cantwell. The majority of the novel details the protagonist’s memories and reflections on war, while he drives around the countryside and takes walks in Venice. The central relationship in his life is a romance with the young countess, Renata, with whom he shares a deeply passionate and emotional connection. He is encouraged by her to share his thoughts and stories of war, and the reader later learns that the young woman’s interest in the topic is motivated by personal loss. The themes of war and death are often found in Hemingway’s works, and here is no exception; they permeate the novel, as the author has Cantwell draw parallels between the ‘dignity’ of his approach to his military career and the ‘good’ way he is facing death.

The first edition from 1950

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Hemingway in Venice

Hemingway with Adrianna Ivancich, the model for Renata

Chapter I

They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.

Four of the boats went on up the main canal towards the big lagoon to the north. A fifth boat had already turned off into a side canal. Now, the sixth boat turned south into a shallow lagoon, and there was no broken water.

It was all ice, new-frozen during the sudden, windless cold of the night. It was rubbery and bending against the thrust of the boatman’s oar. Then it would break as sharply as a pane of glass, but the boat made little forward progress.

‘Give me an oar,’ the shooter in the sixth boat said. He stood up and braced himself carefully. He could hear the ducks passing in the darkness, and feel the restless lurching of the dog. To the north he heard the sound of breaking ice from the other boats.

‘Be careful,’ the poler in the stern said. ‘Don’t tip the boat over.’

‘I am a boatman, too,’ the shooter said.

He took the long oar the boatman handed him and reversed it so he could hold it by the blade. Holding the blade he reached forward and punched the handle through the ice. He felt the firm bottom of the shallow lagoon, put his weight on the top of the wide oar-blade, and holding with both hands and, first pulling, then shoving, until the pole-hold was well to the stern, he drove the boat ahead to break the ice. The ice broke like sheets of plate glass as the boat drove into it, and onto it, and astern the boatman shoved them ahead into the broken passage.

After a while, the shooter, who was working hard and steadily and sweating in his heavy clothes, asked the boatman, ‘Where is the shooting barrel?’

‘Off there to the left. In the middle of the next bay.’

‘Should I turn for it now?’

‘As you wish.’

‘What do you mean, as I wish? You know the water. Is there water to carry us there?’

‘The tide is low. Who knows?’

‘It will be daylight before we get there if we don’t hurry.’

The boatman did not answer.

All right, you surly jerk, the shooter thought to himself. We are going to get there. We’ve made two-thirds of the way now and if you are worried about having to work to break ice to pick up birds, that is altogether too bad.

‘Get your back in it, jerk,’ he said in English.

‘What?’ the boatman asked in Italian.

‘I said let’s go. It’s going to be light.’

It was daylight before they reached the oaken-staved hogshead sunk in the bottom of the lagoon. It was surrounded by a sloping rim of earth that had been planted with sedge and grass, and the shooter swung carefully up onto this, feeling the frozen grasses break as he stepped on them. The boatman lifted the combination shooting stool and shell box out of the boat and handed it to the shooter, who leaned over and placed it in the bottom of the big barrel.

The shooter, wearing his hip boots and an old combat jacket, with a patch on the left shoulder that no one understood, and with the slight light places on the straps, where stars had been removed, climbed down into the barrel and the boatman handed him his two guns.

He placed them against the wall of the barrel and hung his other shell bag between them, hanging it on two hooks built into the wall of the sunken barrel. Then he leaned the guns against each side of the shell bag.

‘Is there water?’ he asked the boatman.

‘No water,’ the boatman said.

‘Can you drink the lagoon water?’

‘No. It is unhealthy.’

The shooter was thirsty from the hard work of breaking the ice and driving the boat in and he felt his anger rise, and then held it, and said, ‘Can I help you in the boat to break ice to put out the decoys?’

‘No,’ the boatman said and shoved the boat savagely out on to the thin sheet ice that cracked and ripped as the boat drove up on to it. The boatman commenced smashing at the ice with the blade of his oar and then started tossing decoys out to the side and behind him.

He’s in a beautiful mood, the shooter thought. He’s a big brute, too. I worked like a horse coming out here. He just pulled his weight and that’s all. What the hell is eating him? This is his trade, isn’t it?

He arranged the shooting stool so he would have the maximum swing to left and right, opened a box of shells, and filled his pockets and opened another of the boxes of shells in the shell bag so he could reach into it easily. In front of him, where the lagoon lay glazed in the first light, was the black boat and the tall, heavily built boatman smashing with his oar at the ice and tossing decoys overboard as though he were ridding himself of something obscene.

It was getting lighter now and the shooter could see the low line of the near point across the lagoon. Beyond that point he knew there were two other shooting posts and far beyond it there was more marsh and then the open sea. He loaded both his guns and checked the position of the boat that was putting out decoys.

From behind him, he heard the incoming whisper of wings and he crouched, took hold of his right-hand gun with his right hand as he looked up from under the rim of the barrel, then stood to shoot at the two ducks that were dropping down, their wings set to brake, coming down dark to the grey dim sky, slanting towards the decoys.

His head low, he swung the gun on a long slant, down, well and ahead of the second duck, then without looking at the result of his shot he raised the gun smoothly, up, up ahead and to the left of the other duck that was climbing to the left and as he pulled, saw it fold in flight and drop among the decoys in the broken ice. He looked to his right and saw the first duck a black patch on the same ice. He knew he had shot carefully on the first duck, far to the right of where the boat was and on the second, high out and to the left, letting the duck climb far up and to the left to be sure the boat was out of any line of fire. It was a lovely double, shot exactly as he should have shot, with complete consideration and respect for the position of the boat and he felt very good as he reloaded.

‘Listen,’ the man in the boat called. ‘Don’t shoot towards the boat.’

I’ll be a sad son of a bitch, the shooter said to himself. I will indeed.

‘Get your decoys out,’ he called to the man in the boat. ‘But get them out fast. I won’t shoot until they are all out. Except straight overhead.’

The man in the boat said nothing that could be heard.

I can’t figure it, the shooter thought to himself. He knows the game. He knows I split the work, or more, coming out. I never shot a safer or more careful duck in my life than that. What’s the matter with him? I offered to put the dekes out with him. The hell with him.

Out on the right now, the boatman was still chopping angrily at the ice and tossing out the wooden decoys in a hatred that showed in every move he made.

Don’t let him spoil it, the shooter told himself. There won’t be much shooting with this ice unless the sun should melt it later on, You probably will only have a few birds, so don’t let him spoil it for you. You don’t know how many more times you will shoot ducks and do not let anything spoil it for you.

He watched the sky lightening beyond the long point of marsh and turning in the sunken barrel, he looked out across the frozen lagoon and the marsh and saw the snow-covered mountains a long way off. Low as he was, no foot-hills showed and the mountains rose abruptly from the plain. As he looked towards the mountains he could feel a breeze on his face and he knew, then, the wind would come from there, rising with the sun and that some birds would surely come flying in from the sea when the wind disturbed them.

The boatman had finished putting out the decoys. They were in two bunches, one straight ahead and to the left towards where the sun would rise and the other to the shooter’s right. Now he dropped over the hen mallard with her string and anchor and the calling duck bobbed her head under water and raising and dipping her head, splashed water on to her back.

‘Don’t you think it would be good to break more ice around the edges?’ the shooter called to the boatman. ‘There’s not much water to attract them.’

The boatman said nothing but commenced to smash at the jagged perimeter of ice with his oar. This ice breaking was unnecessary and the boatman knew it. But the shooter did not know it and he thought, I do not understand him but I must not let him ruin it. I must keep it entire and not let him do it. Every time you shoot now can be the last shoot and no stupid son of a bitch should be allowed to ruin it. Keep your temper, boy, he told himself.

Chapter II

But he was not a boy. He was fifty and a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States and to pass a physical examination that he had to take the day before he came down to Venice for this shoot, he had taken enough mannitol hexanitrate to, well he did not quite know what to — to pass, he said to himself.

The surgeon had been quite sceptical. But he noted the readings after taking them twice.

‘You know, Dick,’ he said. ‘It isn’t indicated; in fact it is definitely contra-indicated in increased intra-colour and intra-cranial pressure.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ the shooter, who was not a shooter, then, except potentially and was a Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States, reduced from being a general officer, said.

‘I have known you a long time, Colonel. Or maybe it just seems a long time,’ the surgeon told him.

‘It’s been a long time,’ the Colonel said.

‘We sound like song writers,’ the surgeon said. ‘But don’t you ever run into anything, or let any sparks strike you, when you’re really souped up on nitroglycerin. They ought to make you drag a chain like a high-octane truck.’

‘Wasn’t my cardiograph O.K.?’ the Colonel asked.

‘Your cardiograph was wonderful, Colonel. It could have been that of a man of twenty-five. It might have been that of a boy of nineteen.’

‘Then what are you talking about?’ the Colonel asked.

That much mannitol hexanitrate produced a certain amount of nausea, sometimes, and he was anxious for the interview to terminate. He was also anxious to lie down and take a seconal. I ought to write the manual of minor tactics for the heavy pressure platoon, he thought. Wish I could tell him that. Why don’t I just throw myself on the mercy of the court? You never do, he told himself. You always plead them non-guilty.

‘How many times have you been hit in the head?’ the surgeon asked him.

‘You know,’ the Colonel told him. ‘It’s in my 201.’

‘How many times have you been hit on the head?’

‘Oh Christ.’ Then he said. ‘You are asking for the army or as my physician?’

‘As your physician. You didn’t think I’d try to wind your clock, did you?’

‘No, Wes. I’m sorry. Just what was it you wanted to know?’

‘Concussions.’

‘Real ones?’

‘Any time you were cold or couldn’t remember afterwards.’

‘Maybe ten,’ the Colonel said. ‘Counting polo. Give or take three.’

‘You poor old son of a bitch,’ the surgeon said. ‘Colonel, sir,’ he added.

‘Can I go now?’ the Colonel asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ the surgeon said. ‘You’re in good shape.’

‘Thanks,’ the Colonel said. ‘Want to go on a duck shoot down in the marshes at the mouth of the Tagliamento? Wonderful shoot. Some nice Italian kids I met up at Cortina own it.’

‘Is that where they shoot coots?’

‘No. They shoot real ducks at this one. Good kids. Good shoot. Real ducks. Mallard, pin-tail, widgeon. Some geese. Just as good as at home when we were kids.’

‘I was kids in ‘twenty-nine and ‘thirty.’

‘That’s the first mean thing I ever heard you say.’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant I didn’t remember when duck shooting was good. I’m a city boy, too.’

‘That’s the only God-damn trouble with you, too. I never saw a city boy yet that was worth a damn.’

‘You don’t mean that, do you, Colonel?’

‘Of course not. You know damn well I don’t.’

‘You’re in good shape, Colonel,’ the surgeon said. ‘I’m sorry I can’t go on the shoot. I can’t even shoot.’

‘Hell,’ said the Colonel. ‘That doesn’t make any difference. Neither can anybody else in this army. I’d like to have you around.’

‘I’ll give you something else to back up what you’re using.’

‘Is there anything?’

‘Not really. They’re working on stuff, though.’

‘Let ‘em work,’ the Colonel said.

‘I think that’s a laudable attitude, sir.’

‘Go to hell,’ the Colonel said. ‘You sure you don’t want to go?’

‘I get my ducks at Longchamps on Madison Avenue,’ the surgeon said. ‘It’s air-conditioned in the summer and it’s warm in the winter and I don’t have to get up before first light and wear long-horned underwear.’

‘All right, City Boy. You’ll never know.’

‘I never wanted to know,’ the surgeon said. ‘You’re in good shape, Colonel, sir.’

‘Thanks,’ said the Colonel and went out.

Chapter III

That was the day before yesterday. Yesterday he had driven down from Trieste to Venice along the old road that ran from Montfalcone to Latisana and across the flat country. He had a good driver and he relaxed completely in the front seat of the car and looked out at all this country he had known when he was a boy.

It looks quite differently now, he thought. I suppose it is because the distances are all changed. Everything is much smaller when you are older. Then, too, the roads are better now and there is no dust. The only times I used to ride through it was in a camion. The rest of the times we walked. I suppose what I looked for then, was patches of shade when we fell out, and wells in farmyards. And ditches, too, he thought. I certainly looked for plenty of ditches.

They made a curve and crossed the Tagliamento on a temporary bridge. It was green along the banks and men were fishing along the far shore where it ran deep. The blown bridge was being repaired with a snarl of riveting hammers, and eight hundred yards away the smashed buildings and outbuildings of what was now a ruined country house once built by Longhena showed where the mediums had dropped their loads.

‘Look at it,’ the driver said. ‘In this country you find a bridge or a railway station. Then go half a mile from it in any direction and you find it like that.’

‘I guess the lesson is,’ the Colonel said, ‘don’t ever build yourself a country house, or a church, or hire Giotto to paint you any frescoes, if you’ve got a church, eight hundred yards away from any bridge.’

‘I knew there must be a lesson in it, sir,’ the driver said.

They were past the ruined villa now and on to the straight road with the willows growing by the ditches still dark with winter, and the fields full of mulberry trees. Ahead a man was pedalling a bicycle and using both his hands to read a paper.

‘If there are heavies the lesson ought to say a mile,’ the driver said. ‘Would that be about right, sir?’

‘If it’s guided missiles,’ the Colonel said. ‘Better make it two hundred and fifty miles. Better give that cyclist some horn.’

The driver did, and the man moved over to the side of the road without either looking up or touching his handlebars. As they passed him, the Colonel tried to see what paper he was reading, but it was folded over.

‘I guess a man would do better now not to build himself a fine house or a church, or to get who did you say it was to paint frescoes?’

‘Giotto, I said. But it could be Piero della Francesca or Mantegna. Could be Michelangelo.’

‘Do you know a lot about painters, sir?’ the driver asked.

They were on a straight stretch of road now and were making time so that one farm blended, almost blurred, into another farm and you could only see what was far ahead and moving towards you. Lateral vision was just a condensation of flat, low country in the winter. I’m not sure I like speed, the Colonel thought. Brueghel would have been in a hell of a shape if he had to look at the country like this.

‘Painters?’ he answered the driver. ‘I know quite a little about them, Burnham.’

‘I’m Jackson, sir. Burnham’s up at the rest centre at Cortina. That’s a fine place, sir.’

‘I’m getting stupid,’ the Colonel said. ‘Excuse me, Jackson. It is a fine place. Good chow. Well run. Nobody bothers you.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jackson agreed. ‘Now the reason I asked you about painters, is these madonnas. I thought I ought to see some painting so I went to that big place in Florence.’

‘The Uffizi? The Pitti?’

‘Whatever they call it. The biggest one. And I kept looking at those paintings until madonnas started to run out of my ears. I tell you, Colonel, sir, a man who hasn’t been checked out on this painting can only see just about so many madonnas and it gets him. You know my theory? You know how crazy they are about bambinis and the less they got to eat the more bambinis they got and that they have coming? Well, I think these painters were probably big bambini lovers like all Italians. I don’t know these ones you mentioned just now, so I don’t include them in my theory and you’ll put me straight anyway. But it looks to me like these madonnas, that I really saw plenty of, sir, it looks to me like these just straight ordinary madonna painters were sort of a manifest, say, of this whole bambini business, if you understand what I mean.’

‘Plus the fact that they were restricted to religious subjects.’

‘Yes, sir. Then you think there is something to my theory?’

‘Sure. I think it is a little more complicated, though.’

‘Naturally, sir. It’s just my preliminary theory.’

‘Do you have any other theories on art, Jackson?’

‘No, sir. That bambini theory is as far as I’ve thought it through. What I wish is, though, they would paint some good pictures of that high country up around the rest centre at Cortina.’

‘Titian came from up there,’ the Colonel said. ‘At least they say he did. I went down the valley and saw the house where he was supposed to be born.’

‘Was it much of a place, sir?’

‘Not so much.’

‘Well, if he painted any pictures of that country up around there, with those sunset colour rocks and the pines and the snow and all the pointed steeples — —’

‘Campaniles,’ the Colonel said. ‘Like that one ahead at Ceggia. It means bell tower.’

‘Well, if he painted any really good pictures of that country I’d sure as hell like to trade him out of some of them.’

‘He painted some wonderful women,’ the Colonel said.

‘If I had a joint or a roadhouse or some sort of an inn, say, I could use one of those,’ the driver said. ‘But if I brought home a picture of some woman, my old woman would run me from Rawlins to Buffalo. I’d be lucky if I got to Buffalo.’

‘You could give it to the local museum.’

‘All they got in the local museum is arrow heads, war bonnets, scalping knives, different scalps, petrified fish, pipes of peace, photographs of Liver Eating Johnston, and the skin of some bad man that they hanged him and some doctor skinned him out. One of those women pictures would be out of place there.’

‘See that next campanile down there across the plain?’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll show you a place down there where we used to fight when I was a kid.’

‘Did you fight here, too, sir?’

‘Yeah,’ the Colonel said.

‘Who had Trieste in that war?’

‘The Krauts. The Austrians, I mean.’

‘Did we ever get it?’

‘Not till the end when it was over.’

‘Who had Florence and Rome?’

‘We did.’

‘Well, I guess you weren’t so damned bad off then.’

‘Sir,’ the Colonel said gently.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the driver said quickly. ‘I was in the Thirty-Sixth Division, sir.’

‘I’ve seen the patch.’

‘I was thinking about the Rapido, sir, I didn’t mean to be insolent or lacking in respect.’

‘You weren’t,’ the Colonel said. ‘You were just thinking about the Rapido. Listen, Jackson, everybody who’s soldiered a long time has had their Rapidos and more than one.’

‘I couldn’t take more than one, sir.’

The car went through the cheerful town of San Dona di Piave. It was built up and new, but no more ugly than a middle western town, and it was as prosperous and as cheery as Fossalta, just up the river, is miserable and gloomy, the Colonel thought. Did Fossalta never get over the first war? I never saw it before it was smacked, he thought. They shelled it badly before the big fifteenth of June offensive in ‘eighteen. Then we shelled it really badly before we re-took it. He remembered how the attack had taken off from Monastier, gone through Fornace, and on this winter day he remembered how it had been that summer.

A few weeks ago he had gone through Fossalta and had gone out along the sunken road to find the place where he had been hit, out on the river bank. It was easy to find because of the bend of the river, and where the heavy machine gun post had been the crater was smoothly grassed. It had been cropped, by sheep or goats, until it looked like a designed depression in a golf course. The river was slow and a muddy blue here, with reeds along the edges, and the Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before.

‘A poor effort,’ he said aloud to the river and the river bank that were heavy with autumn quiet and wet from the fall rains. ‘But my own.

He stood up and looked around. There was no one in sight and he had left the car down the sunken road in front of the last and saddest rebuilt house in Fossalta.

‘Now I’ll complete the monument,’ he said to no one but the dead, and he took an old Solingen clasp knife, such as German poachers carry, from his pocket. It locked on opening and, twirling it, he dug a neat hole in the moist earth. He cleaned the knife on his right combat boot and then inserted a brown ten thousand lira note in the hole and tamped it down and put the grass that he had cored out over it.

‘That is twenty years at five hundred lira a year for the Medaglia d’Argento al Valore Militare. The V.C. carries ten guineas, I believe. The D.S.C. is non-productive. The Silver Star is free. I’ll keep the change,’ he said.

It’s fine now, he thought. It has merde, money, blood; look how that grass grows; and the iron’s in the earth along with Gino’s leg, both of Randolfo’s legs and my right knee-cap. It’s a wonderful monument. It has everything. Fertility, money, blood and iron. Sounds like a nation. Where fertility, money, blood and iron is; there is the fatherland. We need coal though. We ought to get some coal.

Then he looked across the river to the rebuilt white house that had once been rubble, and he spat in the river. It was a long spit and he just made it.

‘I couldn’t spit that night nor afterwards for a long time,’ he said. ‘But I spit good now for a man who doesn’t chew.’

He walked slowly back to where the car was parked. The driver was asleep.

‘Wake up, son,’ he had said. ‘Turn her around and take that road towards Treviso. We don’t need a map on this part. I’ll give you the turns.’

Chapter IV

Now, on his way into Venice, keeping strictly controlled and unthinking his great need to be there, the big Buick cleared the last of San Dona and came up on to the bridge over the Piave.

They crossed the bridge and were on the Italian side of the river and he saw the old sunken road again. It was as smooth and undistinguished now, as it was all along the river. But he could see the old positions. And now, along each side of the straight, flat, canal-bordered road they were making time on were the willows of the two canals that had contained the dead. There had been a great killing at the last of the offensive and someone, to clear the river bank positions and the road in the hot weather, had ordered the dead thrown into the canals. Unfortunately, the canal gates were still in the Austrians’ hands down the river, and they were closed.

So there was little movement to the water, and the dead had stayed, there a long time, floating and bloating face up and face down regardless of nationality until they had attained colossal proportions. Finally, after organization had been established, labour troops hauled them out at night and buried them close to the road. The Colonel looked for added greenness close to the road but could not note any. However, there were many ducks and geese in the canals, and men were fishing in them all along the road.

They dug them all up anyway, the Colonel thought, and buried them in that big ossario up by Nervesa.

‘We fought along here when I was a kid,’ the Colonel told the driver.

‘It’s a God-damn flat country to fight in,’ the driver said. ‘Did you hold that river?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘We held it and lost it and took it back again.’

‘There isn’t a contour here as far as you can see.’

‘That was the trouble,’ the Colonel said. ‘You had to use contours you couldn’t see, they were so small, and ditches and houses and canal banks and hedgerows. It was like Normandy only flatter. I think it must have been something like fighting in Holland.’

‘That river sure doesn’t look anything like the Rapido.’

‘It was a pretty good old river,’ the Colonel said. ‘Up above, it had plenty of water then, before all these hydro-electric projects. And it had very deep and tricky channels in the pebbles and shingle when it was shallow.’

He knew how boring any man’s war is to any other man, and he stopped talking about it. They always take it personally, he thought. No one is interested in it, abstractly, except soldiers and there are not many soldiers. You make them and the good ones are killed, and above they are always bucking for something so hard they never look or listen. They are always thinking of what they have seen and while you are talking they are thinking of what they will say and what it may lead to in their advancement or their privilege. There was no sense boring this boy, who, for all his combat infantryman badge, his Purple Heart and the other things he wore, was in no sense a soldier but only a man placed, against his will, in uniform, who had elected to remain in the army for his own ends.

‘What did you do in civil life, Jackson?’ he asked.

‘I was partners with my brother in a garage in Rawlins, Wyoming, sir.

‘Are you going back there?’

‘My brother got killed in the Pacific and the guy who was running the garage was no good,’ the driver said. ‘We lost what we had put in it.’

‘That’s bad,’ the Colonel said.

‘You’re God-damned right it’s bad,’ the driver said and added, ‘sir’.

The Colonel looked up the road.

He knew that if they kept on this road they would come, shortly, to the turn that he was waiting for; but he was impatient.

‘Keep your eyes open and take a left hand turn on the road leading off this pike,’ he told the driver.

‘Do you think those low roads will be good with this big car, sir?’

‘We’ll see,’ the Colonel said. ‘Hell, man, it hasn’t rained in three weeks.’

‘I don’t trust those side roads in this low country.’

‘If we get stuck, I’ll haul you out with oxen.’

‘I was only thinking about the car, sir.’

‘Well, think about what I told you and turn off on the first left side road you see if it looks practicable.’

‘That looks like one coming up, from the hedges,’ the driver said.

‘You’re all clear behind. Pull up just ahead of it and I’ll go over and have a look.’

He stepped out of the car and walked across the wide, hard-surfaced road and looked at the narrow dirt road, with the swift flowing canal beside it, and the thick hedge beyond. Beyond the hedge, he saw a low red farmhouse with a big barn. The road was dry. There were not even cart ruts sunk in it. He got back into the car.

‘It’s a boulevard,’ he said. ‘Quit worrying.’

‘Yes, sir. It’s your car, sir.’

‘I know,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m still paying for it. Say, Jackson, do you always suffer so much any time you go off a highway on to a secondary road?’

‘No, sir. But there’s a lot of difference between a jeep, and a car as low hung as this. Do you know the clearance you have on your differential and your body frame on this?’

‘I’ve got a shovel in the truck and we’ve got chains. Wait till you see where we’re going after we leave Venice.’

‘Do we go all the way in this car?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll see.’

‘Think about your fenders, sir.’

‘We’ll cut the fenders off like the Indians do in Oklahoma. She’s over-fendered right now. She’s got too much of everything except engine. Jackson, that’s a real engine she’s got.’

‘It certainly is, sir. It’s a great pleasure to drive that big engine on the good roads. That’s why I don’t want anything to happen to her.’

‘That’s very good of you, Jackson. Now just quit suffering.’

‘I’m not suffering, sir.’

‘Good,’ said the Colonel.

He was not, either, because just then he saw, beyond the line of close-bunched brown trees ahead, a sail moving along. It was a big red sail, raked sharply down from the peak, and it moved slowly behind the trees.

Why should it always move your heart to see a sail moving along through the country, the Colonel thought. Why does it move my heart to see the great, slow, pale oxen? It must be the gait as well as the look of them and the size and the colour.

But a good fine big mule, or a string of pack mules in good condition, moves me, too. So does a coyote every time I ever see one, and a wolf, gaited like no other animal, grey and sure of himself, carrying that heavy head and with the hostile eyes.

‘Ever see any wolves out around Rawlins, Jackson?’

‘No, sir. Wolves were gone before my time; they poisoned them out. Plenty coyotes, though.’

‘Do you like coyotes?’

‘I like to hear them nights.’

‘So do I. Better than anything, except seeing a ship sailing along through the country.’

‘There’s a boat doing that over there, sir.’

‘On the Sile canal,’ the Colonel told him. ‘She’s a sailing barge going to Venice. This wind is off the mountains now and she makes it along pretty good. It’s liable to turn really cold to-night if this wind holds and it ought to bring in plenty ducks. Turn to your left here and we’ll run along the canal. There’s a good road.’

‘They didn’t have much duck shooting where I came from. But there was plenty of it in Nebraska along the Platte.’

‘Do you want to shoot where we’re going?’

‘I don’t believe so, sir. I’m not much of a shot, and I’d rather stay in that sack. It’s a Sunday morning, you know.’

‘I know,’ the Colonel said. ‘You can stay in the sack until noon if you want.’

‘I brought my repellent. I ought to sleep O.K.’

‘I’m not sure you’ll need it,’ the Colonel said. ‘Did you bring any K-rations or Ten in One? They’re liable to eat Italian food, you know.’

‘I brought a few cans to help out and a little stuff to give away.’

‘That’s good,’ the Colonel said.

He was looking ahead now to see where the canal road joined the main highway again. There he knew that he would see it on a clear day such as this was. Across the marshes, brown as those at the mouths of the Mississippi around Pilot Town are in winter, and with their reeds bent by the heavy north wind, he saw the squared tower of the church at Torcello and the high campanile of Burano beyond it. The sea was a slate blue and he could see the sails of twelve sailing barges running with the wind for Venice.

I’ll have to wait until we cross the Dese River above Noghera to see it perfectly, he thought. It is strange to remember how we fought back there along the canal that winter to defend it and we never saw it. Then one time, I was back as far as Noghera and it was clear and cold like to-day, and I saw it across the water. But I never got into it. It is my city, though, because I fought for it when I was a boy, and now that I am half a hundred years old, they know I fought for it and am a part owner and they treat me well.

Do you think that’s why they treat you well, he asked himself.

Maybe, he thought. Maybe they treat me well because I’m a chicken colonel on the winning side. I don’t believe it, though. I hope not, anyway. It is not France, he thought.

There you fight your way into a city that you love and are very careful about breaking anything and then, if you have good sense, you are careful not to go back because you will meet some military characters who will resent your having fought your way in. Vive la France et les pommes de terre frites. Liberté, Venalité, et Stupidité. The great clarte of the French military thinking. They haven’t had a military thinker since du Picq. He was a poor bloody Colonel, too. Mangin, Maginot and Gamelin. Take your choice, Gentlemen. Three schools of thought. One; I hit them on the nose. Two; I hide behind this thing which does not cover my left flank. Three; I hide my head in the sand like an ostrich, confident in the greatness of France as a military power and then take off.

Take off is putting it very cleanly and pleasantly. Sure, he thought, whenever you over-simplify you become unjust. Remember all the fine ones in the Resistance, remember Foch both fought and organized and remember how fine the people were. Remember your good friends and remember your deads. Remember plenty things and your best friends again and the finest people that you know. Don’t be a bitter nor a stupid. And what has that to do with soldiering as a trade? Cut it out, he told himself. You’re on a trip to have fun.

‘Jackson,’ he said, ‘are you happy?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. Shortly, we are coming to a view that I want you to see. You only have to take one look at it. The entire operation will be practically painless.’

I wonder what he’s riding me for now, the driver thought. Just because he was a B.G. once he knows everything. If he was any good as a B.G. why didn’t he hold it? He’s been beat up so much he’s slug-nutty.

‘There’s the view, Jackson,’ the Colonel said. ‘Stop her by the side of the road and we’ll take a look.’

The Colonel and the driver walked over to the Venice side of the road and looked across the lagoon that was whipped by the strong, cold wind from the mountains that sharpened all the outlines of buildings so that they were geometrically clear.

‘That’s Torcello directly opposite us,’ the Colonel pointed. ‘That where the people lived that were driven off the mainland by the Visigoths. They built that church you see there with the square tower. There were thirty thousand people lived there once and they built that church to honour their Lord and to worship him. Then, after they built it, the mouth of the Sile River silted up or a big flood changed it, and all that land we came through just now got flooded and started to breed mosquitoes and malaria hit them. They all started to die, so the elders got together and decided they should pull out to a healthy place that would be defensible with boats, and where the Visigoths and the Lombards and the other bandits couldn’t get at them, because these bandits had no sea-power. The Torcello boys were all great boatmen. So they took the stones of all their houses in barges, like that one we just saw, and they built Venice.’

He stopped. ‘Am I boring you, Jackson?’

‘No, sir. I had no idea who pioneered Venice.’

‘It was the boys from Torcello. They were very tough and they had very good taste in building. They came from a little place up the coast called Caorle. But they drew on all the people from the towns and the farms behind when the Visigoths overran them. It was a Torcello boy who was running arms into Alexandria, who located the body of St. Mark and smuggled it out under a load of fresh pork so the infidel customs guards wouldn’t check him. This boy brought the remains of St. Mark to Venice, and he’s their patron saint and they have a cathedral there to him. But by that time, they were trading so far to the east that the architecture is pretty Byzantine for my taste. They never built any better than at the start there in Torcello. That’s Torcello there.’

It was, indeed.

‘St Mark’s square is where the pigeons are and where they have that big cathedral that looks sort of like a moving picture palace, isn’t it?’

‘Right, Jackson. You’re on the ball. If that’s the way you look at it. Now you look beyond Torcello you will see the lovely campanile on Burano that has damn near as much list on it as the leaning tower of Pisa. That Burano is a very over-populated little island where the women make wonderful lace, and the men make bambinis and work day-times in the glass factories in that next island you see on beyond with the other campanile, which is Murano. They make wonderful glass day-times for the rich of all the world, and then they come home on the little vaporetto and make bambinis. Not everyone passes every night with his wife though. They hunt ducks nights too, with big punt guns, out along the edge of the marshes on this lagoon you’re looking across now. All night long on a moonlight night you hear the shots.’ He paused.

‘Now when you look past Murano you see Venice. That’s my town. There’s plenty more I could show you, but I think we probably ought to roll now. But take one good look at it. This is where you can see how it all happened. But nobody ever looks at it from here.’

‘It’s a beautiful view. Thank you, sir.’

‘O.K.,’ the Colonel said. ‘Let’s roll.’

Chapter V

But he continued to look and it was all as wonderful to him and it moved him as it had when he was eighteen years old and had seen it first, understanding nothing of it and only knowing that it was beautiful. The winter had come very cold that year and all the mountains were white beyond the plain. It was necessary for the Austrians to try to break through at the angle where the Sile River and the old bed of the Piave were the only lines of defence.

If you had the old bed of the Piave then you had the Sile to fall back on if the first line did not hold. Beyond the Sile there was nothing but bare-assed plain and a good road network into the Veneto plain and the plains of Lombardy, and the Austrians attacked again and again and again late through the winter, to try to get on to this fine road that they were rolling on now which led straight to Venice. That winter the Colonel, who was a lieutenant then, and in a foreign army, which had always made him slightly suspect afterwards in his own army, and had done his career no good, had a sore throat all winter. This sore throat was from being in the water so much. You could not get dry and it was better to get wet quickly and stay wet.

The Austrian attacks were ill co-ordinated, but they were constant and exasperated and you first had the heavy bombardment which was supposed to put you out of business, and then, when it lifted, you checked your positions and counted the people. But you had no time to care for wounded, since you knew that the attack was coming immediately, and then you killed the men who came wading across the marshes, holding their rifles above the water and coming as slow as men wade, waist deep.

If they did not lift the shelling when it started, the Colonel, then a lieutenant, often thought, I do not know what we would be able to do. But they always lifted it and moved it back ahead of the attack.

If we had lost the old Piave and were on the Sile they would move it back to the second and third lines; although such lines were quite untenable, and they should have brought all their guns up very close and whammed it in all the time they attacked and until they breached us. But thank God, some high fool always controls it, the Colonel thought, and they did it piecemeal.

All that winter, with a bad sore throat, he had killed men who came, wearing the stick bombs hooked up on a harness under their shoulders with the heavy, calf-hide packs and the bucket helmets. They were the enemy.

But he never hated them; nor could have any feeling about them. He commanded with an old sock around his throat, which had been dipped in turpentine, and they broke down the attacks with rifle fire and with the machine guns which still existed, or were usable, after the bombardment. He taught his people to shoot, really, which is a rare ability in continental troops, and to be able to look at the enemy when they came, and, because there was always a dead moment when the shooting was free, they became very good at it.

But you always had to count and count fast after the bombardment to know how many shooters you would have. He was hit three times that winter, but they were all gift wounds; small wounds in the flesh of the body without breaking bone, and he had become quite confident of his personal immortality since he knew he should have been killed in the heavy artillery bombardment that always preceded the attacks. Finally, he did get hit properly and for good. No one of his other wounds had ever done to him what the first big one did. I suppose it is just the loss of the immortality, he thought. Well, in a way, that is quite a lot to lose.

This country meant very much to him, more than he could, or would ever tell anyone and now he sat in the car happy that in another half hour they would be in Venice. He took two mannitol hexanitrate tablets; since he had always been able to spit since 1918, he could take them dry, and asked:

‘How are you doing, Jackson?’

‘Fine, sir.’

‘Take the left outside road when we hit the fork for Mestre and we’ll be able to see the boats along the canal and miss that main traffic.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the driver said. ‘Will you check me on the fork?’

‘Of course,’ the Colonel said.

They were coming up on Mestre fast, and already it was like going to New York the first time you were ever there in the old days when it was shining, white and beautiful. I stole that, he thought. But that was before the smoke. We are coming into my town, he thought. Christ, what a lovely town.

They made the left turn and came along the canal where the fishing boats tied up, and the Colonel looked at them and his heart was happy because of the brown nets and the wicker fish traps and the clean, beautiful lines of the boats. It’s not that they are picturesque. The hell with picturesque. They are just damned beautiful.

They passed the long line of boats in the slow canal that carried water from the Brenta, and he thought about the long stretch of the Brenta where the great villas were, with their lawns and their gardens and the plane trees and the cypresses. I’d like to be buried out there, he thought. I know the place very well. I don’t believe you could fix it, though. I don’t know. I know some people that might let me be buried on their place. I’ll ask Alberto. He might think it was morbid, though.

For a long time he had been thinking about all the fine places he would like to be buried and what parts of the earth he would like to be a part of. The stinking, putrefying part doesn’t last very long, really, he thought, and anyway you are just a sort of mulch, and even the bones will be some use finally. I’d like to be buried way out at the edge of the grounds, but in sight of the old graceful house and the tall, great trees. I don’t think it would be much of a nuisance to them. I could be a part of the ground where the children play in the evenings, and in the mornings, maybe, they would still be training jumping horses and their hoofs would make the thudding on the turf, and trout would rise in the pool when there was a hatch of fly.

They were up on the causeway from Mestre to Venice now with the ugly Breda works that might have been Hammond, Indiana.

‘What do they make there, sir?’ Jackson asked.

‘The company makes locomotives in Milan,’ the Colonel said. ‘Here they make a little of everything in the metallurgic line.’

It was a miserable view of Venice now and he always disliked this causeway except that you made such good time and you could see the buoys and the channels.

‘This town makes a living on its own,’ he said to Jackson. ‘She used to be the queen of the seas and the people are very tough and they give less of a good God-damn about things than almost anybody you’ll ever meet. It’s a tougher town than Cheyenne when you really know it, and everybody is very polite.’

‘I wouldn’t say Cheyenne was a tough town, sir.’

‘Well, it’s a tougher town than Casper.’

‘Do you think that’s a tough town, sir?’

‘It’s an oil town. It’s a nice town.’

‘But I don’t think it’s tough, sir. Or ever was.’

‘O.K., Jackson. Maybe we move in different circles. Or maybe we have a differing definition for the word. But this town of Venice, with everybody being polite and having good manners, is as tough as Cooke City, Montana, on the day they have the Old Timers’ Fish Fry.’

‘My idea of a tough town is Memphis.’

‘Not like Chicago, Jackson. Memphis is only tough if you are a Negro. Chicago is tough North, South, there isn’t any East and West. But nobody has any manners. But in this country, if you ever want to know a really tough town where they eat wonderfully, too, go to Bologna.’

‘I never was there.’

‘Well, there’s the Fiat garage where we leave the car,’ the Colonel said. ‘You can leave the key at the office. They don’t steal. I’ll go in the bar while you park upstairs. They have people that will bring the bags.’

‘Is it O.K. to leave your gun and shooting gear in the trunk, sir?’

‘Sure. They don’t steal here. I told you that once.’

‘I wanted to take the necessary precautions, sir, on your valuable property.’

‘You’re so damned noble that sometimes you stink,’ the Colonel said. ‘Get the wax out of your ears and hear what I say the first time.’

‘I heard you, sir,’ Jackson said. The Colonel looked at him contemplatively and with the old deadliness.

He sure is a mean son of a bitch, Jackson thought, and he can be so God-damn nice.

‘Get my and your bag out and park her up there and check your oil, your water and your tyres,’ the Colonel said, and walked across the oil and rubber stained cement of the entry of the bar.

Chapter VI

In the bar, sitting at the first table as he came in, there was a post-war rich from Milan, fat and hard as only Milanese can be, sitting with his expensive looking and extremely desirable mistress. They were drinking negronis, a combination of two sweet vermouths and seltzer water, and the Colonel wondered how much taxes the man had escaped to buy that sleek girl in her long mink coat and the convertible he had seen the chauffeur take up the long, winding ramp to lock away. The pair stared at him with the bad manners of their kind and he saluted, lightly and said to them in Italian, ‘I am sorry that I am in uniform. But it is a uniform. Not a costume.’

Then he turned his back on them, without waiting to see the effect of his remark, and walked to the bar. From the bar you could watch your luggage, just as well as the two pescecani were watching theirs.

He is probably a Commendatore, he thought. She is a beautiful, hard piece of work. She is damned beautiful, actually. I wonder what it would have been like if I had ever had the money to buy me that kind and put them into the mink? I’ll settle for what I have, he thought, and they can go and hang themselves.

The bar-tender shook hands with him. This bar-tender was an Anarchist but he did not mind the Colonel being a Colonel at all. He was delighted by it and proud and loving about it as though the Anarchists had a Colonel, too, and in some ways, in the several months that they had known each other, he seemed to feel that he had invented, or at least erected, the Colonel as you might be happy about participating in the erection of a campanile, or even the old church at Torcello.

The bar-tender had heard the conversation, or, rather, the flat statement at the table and he was very happy.

He had already sent down, via the dumb-waiter, for a Gordon’s gin and Campari and he said, ‘It is coming up in that hand-pulled device. How does everything go at Trieste?’

‘About as you would imagine.’

‘I couldn’t even imagine.’

‘Then don’t strain,’ the Colonel said, ‘and you will never get piles.’

‘I wouldn’t mind it if I was a Colonel.’

‘I never mind it.’

‘You’d be overrun like a dose of salts,’ the waiter said.

‘Don’t tell the Honorable Pacciardi,’ the Colonel said.

He and the bar-tender had a joke about this because the Honourable Pacciardi was Minister of Defence in the Italian Republic. He was the same age as the Colonel and had fought very well in the first world war, and had also fought in Spain as a battalion commander where the Colonel had known him when he, himself, was an observer. The seriousness with which the Honourable Pacciardi took the post of Minister of Defence of an indefensible country was a bond between the Colonel and the bar-tender. The two of them were quite practical men and the vision of the Honourable Pacciardi defending the Italian Republic stimulated their minds.

‘It’s sort of funny up there,’ the Colonel said, ‘and I don’t mind it.’

‘We must mechanize the Honourable Pacciardi,’ the bar-tender said. ‘And supply him with the atomic bomb.’

‘I’ve got three of them in the back of the car,’ the Colonel said. ‘The new model, complete with handles. But we can’t leave him unarmed. We must supply him with botulism and anthrax.’

‘We cannot fail the Honourable Pacciardi,’ the bar-tender said. ‘Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.’

‘Better to die on our feet than to live on our knees,’ the Colonel said. ‘Though you better get on your belly damn fast if you want to stay alive in plenty places.’

‘Colonel, do not say anything subversive.’

‘We will strangle them with our bare hands,’ the Colonel said. ‘A million men will spring to arms overnight.’

‘Whose arms?’ the bar-tender asked.

‘All that will be attended to,’ the Colonel said. ‘It’s only a phase in the Big Picture.’

Just then the driver came in the door. The Colonel saw that while they had been joking, he had not watched the door and he was annoyed, always, with any lapse of vigilance or of security.

‘What the hell’s been keeping you, Jackson? Have a drink.’

‘No, thank you, sir.’

You prissy jerk, the Colonel thought. But I better stop riding him; he corrected.

‘We’ll be going in a minute,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ve been trying to learn Italian from my friend here.’ He turned to look at the Milan profiteers; but they were gone.

I’m getting awfully slow, he thought. Somebody will take me any day now. Maybe even the Honourable Pacciardi, he thought.

‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked the bar-tender shortly.

The bar-tender told him and looked at him with his wise Italian eyes, not merry now, although the lines of merriment were clearly cut where they radiated from the corners of each eye. I hope there is nothing wrong with him, the bar-tender thought. I hope to God, or anything else, there’s nothing really bad.

‘Good-bye, my Colonel,’ he said.

‘Ciao,’ the Colonel said. ‘Jackson, we are going down the long ramp and due north from the exit to where the small launches are moored. The varnished ones. There is a porter with the two bags. It is necessary to let them carry them since they have a concession.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jackson.

The two of them went out the door and no one looked back at anyone.

At the imbarcadero, the Colonel tipped the man who had carried their two bags and then looked around for a boatman he knew.

He did not recognize the man in the launch that was first on call, but the boatman said, ‘Good day, my Colonel. I’m the first.’

‘How much is it to the Gritti?’

‘You know as well as I, my Colonel. We do not bargain. We have a fixed tariff.’

‘What’s the tariff?’

‘Three thousand five hundred.’

‘We could go on the vaporetto for sixty.’

‘And nothing prevents you going,’ the boatman, who was an elderly man with a red but un-choleric face, said. ‘They won’t take you to the Gritti but they will stop at the imbarcadero past Harry’s, and you can telephone for someone from the Gritti to get your bags.’

And what would I buy with the God-damn three thousand five hundred lire; and this is a good old man.

‘Do you want me to send that man there?’ he pointed to a destroyed old man who did odd jobs and ran errands around the docks, always ready with the un-needed aid to the elbow of the ascending or descending passenger, always ready to help when no help was needed, his old felt hat held out as he bowed after the unneeded act. ‘He’ll take you to the vaporetto. There’s one in twenty minutes.’

‘The hell with it,’ the Colonel said. ‘Take us to the Gritti.’

‘Con piacere,’ the boatman said.

The Colonel and Jackson lowered themselves into the launch which looked like a speed boat. It was radiantly varnished and lovingly kept and was powered with a marine conversion of a tiny Fiat engine that had served its allotted time in the car of a provincial doctor and had been purchased out of one of the graveyards of automobiles; those mechanical elephant cemeteries that are the one certain thing you may find in our world near any populated centre; and been re-conditioned and re-converted to start this new life on the canals of this city.

‘How is the motor doing?’ the Colonel asked. He could hear her sounding like a stricken tank or T.D., except the noises were in miniature from the lack of power.

‘So-so,’ the boatman said. He moved his free hand in a parallel motion.

‘You ought to get the smallest model Universal puts out. That’s the best and lightest small marine engine I know.’

‘Yes,’ the boatman said. ‘There are quite a few things I should get.’

‘Maybe you’ll have a good year.’

‘It’s always possible. Lots of pescecani come down from Milano to gamble at the Lido. But nobody would ride twice in this thing on purpose. As a boat, it is fine, too. It is a well built, pleasant boat. Not beautiful as a gondola is, of course. But it needs an engine.’

‘I might get you a jeep engine. One that was condemned and you could work it over.’

‘Don’t talk about such things,’ the boatman said. ‘Things like that don’t happen. I don’t want to think about it.’

‘You can think about it,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m talking true.’

‘You mean it.’

‘Sure. I don’t guarantee anything. I’ll see what I can do. How many children have you got?’

‘Six. Two male and four female.’

‘Hell, you mustn’t have believed in the Regime. Only six.’

‘I didn’t believe in the Regime.’

‘You don’t have to give me that stuff,’ the Colonel said. ‘It would have been quite natural for you to have believed in it. Do you think I hold that against a man after we’ve won?’

They were through the dull part of the canal that runs from Piazzale Roma to Ca’Foscari, though none of it is dull, the Colonel thought.

It doesn’t all have to be palaces nor churches. Certainly that isn’t dull. He looked to the right, the starboard, he thought. I’m on the water. It was a long low pleasant building and there was a trattoria next to it.

I ought to live here. On retirement pay I could make it all right. No Gritti Palace. A room in a house like that and the tides and the boats going by. I could read in the mornings and walk around town before lunch and go every day to see the Tintorettos at the Accademia and to the Sculoa San Rocco and eat in good cheap joints behind the market or, maybe, the woman that ran the house would cook in the evenings.

I think it would be better to have lunch out and get some exercise walking. It’s a good town to walk in. I guess the best, probably. I never walked in it that it wasn’t fun. I could learn it really well, he thought, and then I’d have that.

It’s a strange, tricky town and to walk from any part to any other given part of it is better than working crossword puzzles. It’s one of the few things to our credit that we never smacked it, and to their credit that they respected it.

Christ, I love it, he said, and I’m so happy I helped defend it when I was a punk kid, and with an insufficient command of the language and I never even saw her until that clear day in the winter when I went back to have that small wound dressed, and saw her rising from the sea. Merde, he thought, we did very well that winter up at the junction.

I wish I could fight it again, he thought. Knowing what I know now and having what we have now. But they’d have it too and the essential problem is just the same, except who holds the air.

And all this time he had been watching the bow of the beat-up beautifully varnished, delicately brass-striped boat, with the brass all beautifully polished, cut the brown water and seen the small traffic problems.

They went under the white bridge and under the unfinished wood bridge. Then they left the red bridge on the right and passed under the first high-flying white bridge. Then there was the black iron fret-work bridge on the canal leading into the Rio Nuovo and they passed the two stakes chained together but not touching: like us the Colonel thought. He watched the tide pull at them and he saw how the chains had worn the wood since he first had seen them. That’s us, he thought. That’s our monument. And how many monuments are there to us in the canals of this town?

Then they still went slowly until the great lantern that was on the right of the entrance to the Grand Canal where the engine commenced its metallic agony that produced a slight increase in speed.

Now they came down and under the Accademia between the pilings where they passed, at touching distance, a heavily loaded black, diesel boat full of cut timber, cut to chunks, to burn for firewood in the damp houses of the Sea City.

‘That’s beech, isn’t it?’ the Colonel asked the boatman.

‘Beech and another wood that is cheaper that I do not recall, at this moment, the name of.’

‘Beech is, to an open fire, as anthracite coal is to a stove. Where do they cut that beech?’

‘I’m not a man of the mountains. But I think it comes from up beyond Bassano on the other side of the Grappa. I went there to the Grappa to see where my brother was buried. It was an excursion that they made from Bassano, and we went to the big ossario. But we returned by Feltre. I could see it was a fine timber country on the other side as you came down the mountains into the valley. We came down that military road, and they were hauling lots of wood.’

‘In what year was your brother killed on Grappa?’

‘In nineteen-eighteen. He was a patriot and inflamed by hearing d’Annunzio talk, and he volunteered before his class was called. We never knew him very well because he went so quickly.’

‘How many were you in the family?’

‘We were six. We lost two beyond the Isonzo, one on the Bainsizza and one on the Carso. Then we lost this brother I speak of on the Grappa and I remained.’

‘I’ll get you the God-damned jeep complete with handles,’ the Colonel said. ‘Now let’s not be morbid and look for all the places where my friends live.’

They were moving up the Grand Canal now and it was easy to see where your friends lived.

‘That’s the house of the Contessa Dandolo,’ the Colonel said.

He did not say, but thought, she is over eighty, and she is as gay as a girl and does not have any fear of dying. She dies her hair red and it looks very well. She is a good companion and an admirable woman.

Her palazzo was pleasant looking, set well back from the Canal with a garden in front and a landing place of its own where many gondolas had come, in their various times, bringing hearty, cheerful, sad and disillusioned people. But most of them had been cheerful because they were going to see the Contessa Dandolo.

Now, beating up the Canal, against the cold wind off the mountains, and with the houses as clear and sharp as on a winter day, which, of course, it was, they saw the old magic of the city and its beauty. But it was conditioned, for the Colonel, by his knowing many of the people who lived in the palazzos; or if no one lived there now, knowing to what use the different places had been put.

There’s Alvarito’s mother’s house, he thought, and did not say.

She never lives there much and stays out at the country house near Treviso where they have trees. She’s tired of there not being trees in Venice. She lost a fine man and nothing really interests her now except efficiency.

But the family at one time lent the house to George Gordon, Lord Byron, and nobody sleeps now in Byron’s bed nor in the other bed, two flights below, where he used to sleep with the gondolier’s wife. They are not sacred, nor relics. They are just extra beds that were not used afterwards for various reasons, or possibly to respect Lord Byron who was well loved in this town, in spite of all the errors he committed. You have to be a tough boy in this town to be loved, the Colonel thought. They never cared anything for Robert Browning, nor Mrs. Robert Browning, nor for their dog. They weren’t Venetians no matter how well he wrote of it. And what is a tough boy, he asked himself. You use it so loosely you should be able to define it. I suppose it is a man who will make his play and then backs it up. Or just a man who backs his play. And I’m not thinking of the theatre, he thought. Lovely as the theatre can be.

And yet, he thought, seeing now the little villa, close up against the water, ugly as a building you would see on the boat train from Havre or Cherbourg, coming into the banlieue before Paris as you came into town. It was overrun with badly administered trees, and not a place that you would live in if you could help it. There he lived.

They loved him for his talent, and because he was bad, and he was brave. A Jewish boy with nothing, he stormed the country with his talent, and his rhetoric. He was a more miserable character than any that I know and as mean. But the man I think of to compare him with never put the chips on the line and went to war, the Colonel thought, and Gabriele d’Annunzio (I always wondered what his real name was, he thought, because nobody is named d’Annunzio in a practical country and perhaps he was not Jewish and what difference did it make if he was or was not) had moved through the different arms of the service as he had moved into and out of the arms of different women.

All the arms were pleasant that d’Annunzio served with and the mission was fast and easily over, except the Infantry. He remembered how d’Annunzio had lost an eye in a crash, flying as an observer, over Trieste or Pola, and how, afterwards, he had always worn a patch over it and people who did not know, for, then, no one really knew, thought it had been shot out at the Veliki or San Michele or some other bad place beyond the Carso where everyone died, or was incapacitated, that you knew. But d’Annunzio, truly, was only making heroic gestures with the other things. An Infantryman knows a strange trade, he thought; perhaps the strangest. He, Gabriele, flew, but he was not a flier. He was in the Infantry but he was not an Infantryman and it was always the same appearances.

And the Colonel remembered one time when he had stood, commanding a platoon of assault troops, while it was raining in one of the interminable winters, when the rain fell always; or at least, always when there were parades or speeches to the troops, and d’Annunzio, with his lost eye, covered by the patch, and his white face, as white as the belly of a sole, new turned over in the market, the brown side not showing, and looking thirty hours dead, was shouting. ‘Morire non a basta,’ and the Colonel, then a lieutenant, had thought, ‘What the muck more do they want of us?’

But he had followed the discourse and, at the end, when the Lieutenant-Colonel d’Annunzio, writer and national hero, certified and true if you must have heroes, and the Colonel did not believe in heroes, asked for a moment of silence for our glorious dead, he had stood stiffly to attention. But his platoon, who had not followed the speech, there being no loud speakers then, and they being slightly out of hearing of the orator, responded, as one man, at the pause for the moment of silence for our glorious dead, with a solid and ringing ‘Evviva d’Annunzio’.

They had been addressed before by d’Annunzio after victories, and before defeats, and they knew what they should shout if there was any pause by an orator.

The Colonel, being then a lieutenant, and loving his platoon, had joined with them and uttered, with the tone of command, ‘Evviva d’Annunzio’, thus absolving all those who had not listened to the discourse, speech, or harangue and attempting, in the small way a lieutenant can attempt anything, except to hold an indefensible position; or intelligently direct his own part in an attack; to share their guilt.

But now he was passing the house where the poor beat-up old boy had lived with his great, sad and never properly loved actress and he thought of her wonderful hands and her so transformable face, that was not beautiful, but that gave you all love, glory and delight and sadness; and of the way the curve of her forearm could break your heart, and he thought, Christ they are dead and I do not know where either one is buried even. But I certainly hope they had fun in that house.

‘Jackson,’ he said, ‘that small villa on the left belonged to Gabriele d’Annunzio, who was a great writer.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jackson, ‘I’m glad to know about him. I never heard of him.’

‘I’ll check you out on what he wrote if you ever want to read him,’ the Colonel said. ‘There are some fair English translations.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Jackson. ‘I’d like to read him any time I have time. He has a nice practical looking place. What did you say the name was?’

‘D’Annunzio,’ the Colonel said. ‘Writer.’

He added to himself, not wishing to confuse Jackson, nor be difficult, as he had been with the man several times that day, writer, poet, national hero, phraser of the dialectic of Fascism, macabre egotist, aviator, commander, or rider, in the first of the fast torpedo attack boats, Lieutenant-Colonel of Infantry without knowing how to command a company, nor a platoon properly, the great, lovely writer of Notturno whom we respect, and jerk.

Up ahead now there was a crossing place of gondolas at the Santa Maria del Giglio and, beyond, was the wooden dock of the Gritti.

‘That’s the hotel where we are stopping at, Jackson.’

The Colonel indicated the three-storey, rose-coloured, small, pleasant palace abutting on the Canal. It had been a dependence of the Grand Hotel — but now it was its own hotel and a very good one. It was probably the best hotel, if you did not wish to be fawned on, or fussed over, or over-flunkied, in a city of great hotels and the Colonel loved it.

‘It looks O.K. to me, sir,’ Jackson said.

‘It is O.K.,’ the Colonel said.

The motor boat came gallantly up beside the piling of the dock. Every move she makes, the Colonel thought, is a triumph of the gallantry of the ageing machine. We do not have war horses now like old Traveller, or Marbot’s Lysette who fought, personally, at Eylau. We have the gallantry of worn through-rods that refuse to break; the cylinder head that does not blow though it has every right to and the rest of it.

‘We’re at the dock, sir,’ Jackson said.

‘Where the hell else would we be, man. Jump out while I settle with this sportsman.’

He turned to the boatman and said, ‘That was thirty-five hundred, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, my Colonel.’

‘I’ll not forget about the over-age jeep engine. Take this and buy your horse some oats.’

The porter, who was taking the bags from Jackson, heard this and laughed.

‘No veterinarian will ever fix his horse.’

‘She still runs,’ the boatman said.

‘But she doesn’t win any races,’ the porter said. ‘How are you, my Colonel?’

‘I couldn’t be better,’ the Colonel said. ‘How are all the members of the Order?’

‘All members are well.’

‘Good,’ said the Colonel. ‘I will go in and see the Grand Master.’

‘He is waiting for you, my Colonel.’

‘Let us not keep him waiting, Jackson,’ the Colonel said. ‘You may proceed to the lobby with this gentleman and tell them to sign me in. See the sergeant gets a room,’ he said to the porter. ‘We’re here for the night only.’

‘The Baron Alvarito was here looking for you.’

‘I’ll find him at Harry’s.’

‘Good, my Colonel.’

‘Where is the Grand Master?’

‘I’ll find him for you.’

‘Tell him I’ll be in the bar.’

Chapter VII

The bar was just across from the lobby of the Gritti, although lobby the Colonel thought, was not the accurate term to describe that gracious entrance. Didn’t Giotto describe a circle, he thought? No, that was in maths. What he remembered and loved best as an anecdote about that painter was: ‘It was easy,’ said Giotto as he drew the perfect circle. Who the hell had said that and where?

‘Good evening, Privy Councillor,’ he said to the bar-man, who was not a full paid-up member of the order but whom he did not wish to offend. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Drink, my Colonel.’

The Colonel looked out of the windows and the door of the bar on to the waters of the Grand Canal. He could see the big black hitching post for the gondolas and the later afternoon winter light on the wind-swept water. Across the Canal was the old Palace and a wood barge, black and broad, was coming up the Canal, her bluff bows pushing up a wave even though she had the wind behind her.

‘Make it a very dry Martini,’ the Colonel said. ‘A double.’

Just then the Grand Master came into the room. He was wearing his formal attire as a head waiter. He was truly handsome as a man should be, from the inside out, so that his smile starts from his heart, or whatever is the centre of the body, and comes frankly and beautifully to the surface, which is the face.

He had a fine face with the long, straight nose of his part of the Veneto; the kind, gay, truthful eyes and the honourable white hair of his age, which was two years older than that of the Colonel.

He advanced smiling, lovingly and yet conspiratorially, since they both shared many secrets and he extended his hand, which was a big, long, strong, spatular-fingered hand; well kept as was becoming, as well as necessary, to his position and the Colonel extended his own hand, which had been shot through twice and was slightly misshapen. Thus contact was made between two old inhabitants of the Veneto, both men and brothers in their membership in the human race, the only club that either one paid dues to and brothers, too, in their love of an old country, much fought over and always triumphant in defeat, which they had both defended in their youth.

Their handshake was only long enough to feel, firmly, the contact and the pleasure of meeting and then the Maitre d’Hotel said, ‘My Colonel.’

The Colonel said, ‘Gran Maestro.’

Then the Colonel asked the Gran Maestro to accompany him in a drink, but the Maitre d’Hotel said that he was working. It was impossible as well as forbidden.

‘ —— forbidden,’ said the Colonel.

‘Of course,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘But everyone must comply with his duty and here the rules are reasonable and we all should comply with them; me especially, as a matter of precept.’

‘Not for nothing are you the Gran Maestro,’ the Colonel said.

‘Give me a small Carpano punto e mezzo,’ the Gran Maestro said to the bar-tender, who was still outside of the Order for some small, not defined, unstated reason. ‘To drink to the ordine.’

Thus, violating orders and the principle of precept and example in command, the Colonel and the Gran Maestro downed a quick one. They did not hurry nor did the Gran Maestro worry. They simply made it fast.

‘Now, let us discuss the affairs of the Order,’ the Colonel said. ‘Are we in the secret chamber?’

‘We are,’ said the Gran Maestro. ‘Or I declare it to be such.’

‘Continue,’ said the Colonel.

The Order, which was a purely fictitious organization, had been founded in a series of conversations between the Gran Maestro and the Colonel. Its name was El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli. The Colonel and the head waiter both spoke Spanish and since that is the best language for founding orders, they had used it in the naming of this one, which was named after a particularly notorious multi-millionaire non-taxpaying profiteer of Milan, who had, in the course of a dispute over property, accused his young wife, publicly and legally through due process of law, of having deprived him of his judgment through her extraordinary sexual demands.

‘Gran Maestro,’ the Colonel said. ‘Have you heard from our Leader, The Reverend One?’

‘Not a word. He is silent these days.’

‘He must be thinking.’

‘He must.’

‘Perhaps he is meditating on new and more distinguished shameful acts.’

‘Perhaps. He has not given me any word.’

‘But we can have confidence in him.’

‘Until he dies,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘After that he can roast in hell and we will revere his memory.’

‘Giorgio,’ the Colonel said. ‘Give the Gran Maestro another short Carpano.’

‘If it is your order,’ the Gran Maestro said, ‘I can only obey.’

They touched glasses.

‘Jackson,’ the Colonel called. ‘You’re on the town. You can sign here for chow. I don’t want to see you until eleven hundred to-morrow in the lobby, unless you get into trouble. Do you have money?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jackson said and thought, the old son of a bitch really is as crazy as they say. But he might have called me instead of shouting.

‘I don’t want to see you,’ the Colonel said.

Jackson had entered the room and stood before him at a semblance of attention.

‘I’m tired of seeing you, because you worry and you don’t have fun. For Christ sake have yourself some fun.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You understand what I said?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Repeat it.’

‘Ronald Jackson, T5 Serial Number 100678, will present himself in the lobby of this Gritti Hotel at 11.00 to-morrow morning, I don’t know the date, sir, and will absent himself from the Colonel’s sight and will have some fun. Or,’ he added, ‘will make every reasonable attempt to attain that objective.’

‘I’m sorry, Jackson,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m a —— .’

‘I beg to differ with the Colonel,’ Jackson said.

‘Thank you, Jackson,’ the Colonel told him. ‘Maybe I’m not. I hope you are correct. Now muck off. You’ve got a room here, or you should have and you can sign for chow. Now try and have some fun.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jackson.

When he was gone, the Gran Maestro said to the Colonel, ‘What is the boy? One of those sad Americans?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘And by Jesus Christ we’ve got a lot of them. Sad, self-righteous, over-fed and undertrained. If they are under-trained, it is my fault. But we’ve got some good ones, too.’

‘Do you think they would have done Grappa, Pasubio and the Basso Piave as we did?’

‘The good ones, yes. Maybe better. But you know, in our army, they don’t even shoot for self-inflicted wounds.’

‘Jesus,’ said the Gran Maestro. He and the Colonel both remembered the men who decided that they did not wish to die, not thinking that he who dies on Thursday does not have to die on Friday and how one soldier would wrap another’s puttee-ed leg in a sandbag so there would be no powder burns and loose off at his friend from as far a distance as he figured he could hit the calf of the leg without hitting bone and then fire twice over the parapet to alibi the shot. They had this knowledge shared between them and it was for this reason and for a true, good hatred of all those who profited by war that they had founded the Order.

They knew, the two of them, who loved and respected each other, how poor boys who did not want to die, would share the contents of a match-box to produce the infection that would keep them from the next murderous frontal attack.

They knew about the other boys who put the big ten-centime pieces under their arm-pits to produce jaundice. And they knew, too, about the richer boys who, in different cities, had paraffin injected under their knee-caps so they would not have to go to the war.

They knew how garlic could be used to produce certain effects which could absent a man from an attack and they knew all, or nearly all, of the other tricks; for one had been a sergeant and the other a lieutenant of infantry and they had fought on the three key points, Pasubio, Grappa and the Piave, where it all made sense.

They had fought, too, in the earlier stupid butchery on the Isonzo and the Carso. But they were both ashamed of those who had ordered that and they never thought about it except as a shameful, stupid thing to be forgotten and the Colonel remembered it technically as something to learn from. So, now, they had founded the Order of Brusadelli; noble, military and religious, and there were only five members.

‘What is the news of the Order?’ the Colonel asked the Gran Maestro.

‘We have ascended the cook at the Magnificent to the rank of Commendatore. He comported himself as a man three times on his fiftieth birthday. I accepted his statement without corroboration. He never lied ever.’

‘No. He never lied. But it is a topic on which you must be chary in your credibility.’

‘I believed him. He looked ruined.’

‘I can remember him when he was a tough kid and we called him the cherry buster.’

‘Anch’ io.’

‘Have you any concrete plans for the Order during the winter?’

‘No, Supreme Commander.’

‘Do you think we should give a homage to the Honourable Pacciardi?’

‘As you wish.’

‘Let’s defer it,’ the Colonel said. He thought a moment, and signalled for another dry Martini.

‘Do you think we might organize a homage and manifestation in some historic place such as San Marco or the old Church at Torcello in favour of our Great Patron, Brusadelli, the Revered One?’

‘I doubt if the religious authorities would permit it at this moment.’

‘Then let us abandon all ideas of public manifestations for this winter, and work within our cadres, for the good of the Order.’

‘I think that is soundest,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘We will regroup.’

‘And how are you, yourself?’

‘Awful,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘I have low blood pressure, ulcers and I owe money.’

‘Are you happy?’

‘All the time,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘I like my work very much and I meet extraordinary and interesting characters, also many Belgians. They are what we have instead of the locusts this year. Formerly we had the Germans. What was it Caesar said, ‘And the bravest of these are the Belgians.’ But not the best dressed. Do you agree?’

‘I’ve seen them quite well costumed in Brussels,’ the Colonel said. ‘A well-fed, gay capital. Win, lose, or draw.’

‘We should have fought in Flanders in the old days.’

‘We were not born in the old days,’ the Colonel said. ‘So we automatically could not have fought then.’

‘I wish we could have fought with the Condottieri when all you had to do was out-think them and they conceded. You could think and I would convey your orders.’

‘We’d have to take a few towns for them to respect our thinking.’

‘We would sack them if they defended them,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘What towns would you take?’

‘Not this one,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’d take Vicenza, Bergamo and Verona. Not necessarily in that order.’

‘You’d have to take two more.’

‘I know,’ the Colonel said. He was a general now again and he was happy. ‘I figured that I’d by-pass Brescia. It could fall of its own weight.’

‘And how are you, Supreme Commander?’ the Gran Maestro said, for this taking of towns had pulled him out of his depth.

He was at home in his small house in Treviso, close to the fast-flowing river under the old walls. The weeds waved in the current and the fish hung in the shelter of the weeds and rose to insects that touched the water in the dusk. He was at home, too, in all operations that did not involve more than a company and understood them as clearly as he understood the proper serving of a small dining-room; or a large dining-room.

But when the Colonel became a general officer again, as he had once been and thought in terms that were as far beyond him as calculus is distant from a man who has only the knowledge of arithmetic, then he was not at home and their contact was strained and he wished the Colonel would return to things they both knew together when they were a lieutenant and a sergeant.

‘What would you do about Mantova?’ the Colonel asked.

‘I do not know, my Colonel. I do not know whom you are fighting, nor what forces are at your disposal.’

‘I thought you said we were Condottieri. Based on this town or on Padova.’

‘My Colonel,’ the Gran Maestro said, and he had diminished in no way, ‘I know nothing, truly, about Condottieri. Nor really how they fought then. I only said I would like to fight under you in such times.’

‘There aren’t any such times any more,’ the Colonel said and the spell was broken.

What the hell, maybe there never was any spell, the Colonel thought. The hell with you, he said to himself. Cut it out and be a human being when you’re half a hundred years old.

‘Have another Carpano,’ he said to the Gran Maestro.

‘My Colonel, you will allow me to refuse because of the ulcers?’

‘Yes. Yes. Of course. Boy, what’s your name, Giorgio? Another dry Martini. Secco, molto secco e doppio.’

Breaking spells, he thought. It is not my trade. My trade is killing armed men. A spell should be armed if I’m to break it. But we have killed many things which were not armed. All right, spell breaker, retract.

‘Gran Maestro,’ he said. ‘You are still Gran Maestro and —— the Condottieri.’

‘They were —— many years ago, Supreme Commander.’

‘Exactly,’ the Colonel said.

But the spell was broken.

‘I’ll see you at dinner,’ the Colonel said. ‘What is there?’

‘We will have anything you wish and what we do not have I will send out for.’

‘Do you have any fresh asparagus?’

‘You know we cannot have it in these months. It comes in April and from Bassano.’

‘Then you think of something and I’ll eat it,’ the Colonel said,

‘How many will you be?’ the Maitre d’Hotel asked.

‘We’ll be two,’ the Colonel said. ‘What time do you close the bistro?’

‘We will serve dinner as late as you wish to eat, my Colonel.’

‘I’ll try to be in at a sound hour,’ the Colonel said. ‘Good-bye, Gran Maestro,’ he said and smiled and gave the Gran Maestro his crooked hand.

‘Good-bye, Supreme Commander,’ said the Gran Maestro and the spell was existent again and almost complete.

But it was not quite complete and the Colonel knew it and he thought: why am I always a bastard and why can I not suspend this trade of arms and be a kind and good man as I would have wished to be.

I try always to be just, but I am brusque and I am brutal and it is not that I have erected the defence against brown-nosing my superiors and brown-nosing the world. I should be a better man with less wild boar blood in the small time which remains. We will try it out to-night, he thought. With whom, he thought and where, and God help me not to be bad.

‘Giorgio,’ he said to the barman, who had a face as white as a leper, but with no bulges and without the silver shine.

Giorgio did not really like the Colonel very much, or perhaps he was simply from Piemonte and cared for no one truly; which was understandable in cold people from a border province. Borderers are not trusters and the Colonel knew about this and expected nothing from anyone that they did not have to give.

‘Giorgio,’ he said to the pale-faced barman. ‘Write these down for me, please.’

He went out, walking as he had always walked, with a slightly exaggerated confidence, even when it was not needed and, in his always renewed plan of being kind, decent and good, he greeted the concierge, who was a friend, the assistant manager, who spoke Swahili and had been a prisoner of war in Kenya and was a most amiable man, young, full of juice, handsome, perhaps not yet a member of the Order, and experienced.

‘And the cavaliere ufficiale who manages this place?’ he asked. ‘My friend?’

‘He is not here,’ the assistant manager said. ‘For the moment, naturally,’ he added.

‘Give him my compliments,’ the Colonel said. ‘And have somebody show me to my room.’

‘It is the usual room. You still wish it?’

‘Yes. Have you taken care of the Sergeant?’

‘He is well taken care of.’

‘Good,’ said the Colonel.

The Colonel proceeded to his room accompanied by the boy who carried his bag.

‘This way, my Colonel,’ the boy said, when the elevator halted with slight hydraulic inaccuracy at the top floor.

‘Can’t you run an elevator properly?’ the Colonel asked.

‘No, my Colonel,’ the boy said. ‘The current is not stable.’

Chapter VIII

The colonel said nothing and preceded the boy down the corridor. It was large, wide and high ceilinged and there was a long and distinguished interval between the doors of the rooms on the side of the Grand Canal. Naturally, since it had been a palace, there were no rooms without excellent views, except those which had been made for the servants.

The Colonel found the walk long, although it was a very short one and when the waiter, who served the room, appeared, short, dark and with his glass eye in the left eye socket, gleaming, unable to smile his full, true smile as he worked the big key in the lock, the Colonel wished that the door would open more rapidly.

‘Open it up,’ he said.

‘I will, my Colonel,’ the waiter said. ‘But you know these locks.’

Yes, the Colonel thought. I know them, but I wish that he would get it open.

‘How are your family?’ he said to the waiter, who had swung the door wide so that the Colonel, now entered, was within the room with the high, dark but well-mirrored armoire, the two good beds, the great chandelier and the view, through the still closed windows, on to the wind-beaten water of the Grand Canal.

The Canal was grey as steel now in the quick, failing, winter light and the Colonel said, ‘Arnaldo, open the windows.’

‘There is much wind, my Colonel, and the room is badly heated due to the lack of electric power.’

‘Due to the lack of rainfall,’ the Colonel said. ‘Open the windows. All of them.’

‘As you wish, my Colonel.’

The waiter opened the windows and the north wind came into the room.

‘Please call the desk and ask them to ring this number.’ The waiter made the call while the Colonel was in the bathroom.

‘The Contessa is not at home, my Colonel,’ he said. ‘They believe you might find her at Harry’s.’

‘You find everything on earth at Harry’s.’

‘Yes, my Colonel. Except, possibly, happiness.’

‘I’ll damn well find happiness, too,’ the Colonel assured him. ‘Happiness, as you know, is a movable feast.’

‘I am aware of that,’ the waiter said. ‘I have brought Campari bitters and a bottle of Gordon Gin. May I make you a Campari with gin and soda?’

‘You’re a good boy,’ the Colonel said. ‘Where did you bring them from. The bar?’

‘No. I bought them while you were away so that you would not have to spend money at the bar. The bar is very costly.’

‘I agree,’ the Colonel agreed. ‘But you should not use your own money on such a project.’

‘I took a chance. We have both taken many. The gin was 3200 lire and is legitimate. The Campari was 800.’

‘You’re a very good boy,’ the Colonel told him. ‘How were the ducks?’

‘My wife still speaks of them. We had never had wild ducks, since they are of such expense, and outside of our way of life. But one of our neighbours told her how to prepare them and these same neighbours ate them with us. I never knew that anything could be so wonderful to eat. When your teeth close on the small slice of meat it is an almost unbelievable delight.’

‘I think so, too. There is nothing lovelier to eat than those fat iron-curtain ducks. You know their fly-way is through the great grain fields of the Danube. This is a splinter flight we have here, but they always come the same way since before there were shot-guns.’

‘I know nothing about shooting for sport,’ the waiter said. ‘We were too poor.’

‘But many people without money shoot in the Veneto.’

‘Yes. Of course. One hears them shoot all night. But we were poorer than that. We were poorer than you can know, my Colonel.’

‘I think I can know.’

‘Perhaps,’ the waiter said. ‘My wife also saved all the feathers and she asked me to thank you.’

‘If we have any luck the day after to-morrow, we’ll get plenty. The big ducks with the green heads. Tell your wife, with luck, there will be good eating ducks, fat as pigs with what they have eaten from the Russians and with beautiful feathers.’

‘How do you feel about the Russians, if it is not indiscreet to ask, my Colonel?’

‘They are our potential enemy. So, as a soldier, I am prepared to fight them. But I like them very much and I have never known finer people nor people more as we are.’

‘I have never had the good fortune to know them.’

‘You will, boy. You will. Unless the Honourable Pacciardi stops them on the line of the Piave, which is a river which no longer contains water. It has been siphoned off for hydro-electric projects. Perhaps the Honorable Pacciardi will fight there. But I do not think he will fight for long.’

‘I do not know the Honourable Pacciardi.’

‘I know him,’ said the Colonel.

‘Now ask them to ring Harry’s and see if the Contessa is there. If not, have them ring the house again.’

The Colonel took the drink Arnaldo, the glass-eyed waiter, made him. He did not want it and he knew that it was bad for him.

But he took it with his old wild-boar truculence, as he had taken everything all of his life and he moved, still cat-like when he moved, although it was an old cat now, over to the open window and looked out on the great Canal which was now becoming as grey as though Degas had painted it on one of his greyest days.

‘Thanks very much for the drink,’ the Colonel said and Arnaldo, who was talking into the telephone, nodded and smiled his glass-eyed smile.

I wish he did not have to have that glass eye, the Colonel thought. He only loved people, he thought, who had fought or been mutilated.

Other people were fine and you liked them and were good friends; but you only felt true tenderness and love for those who had been there and had received the castigation that everyone receives who goes there long enough.

So I’m a sucker for cripes, he thought, drinking the unwanted drink. And any son of a bitch who has been hit solidly, as every man will be if he stays, then I love him.

Yes, his other, good side said. You love them.

I’d rather not love anyone, the Colonel thought. I’d rather have fun.

And fun, his good side said to him, you have no fun when you do not love.

All right. I love more than any son of the great bitch alive, the Colonel said, but not aloud.

Aloud, he said, ‘Where are you getting on that call, Arnaldo?’

‘Cipriani has not come in,’ the waiter said. ‘They are expecting him at any moment and I am keeping the line open in case he arrives.’

‘A costly procedure,’ the Colonel said. ‘Get me a reading on who’s there so we don’t waste time. I want to know exactly who is there.’

Arnaldo spoke guardedly into the mouthpiece of the telephone.

He covered the mouth of the phone with his hand and said, ‘I am talking to Ettore. He says the Barone Alvarito is not there. The Count Andrea is there and he is rather drunk, Ettore says, but not too drunk for you to have fun together. The group of ladies that comes in each afternoon are there and there is a Greek princess, that you know and several people that you do not know. Riff-raff from the American Consulate who have stayed on since noon.’

‘Tell him to call back when the riff-raff goes and I’ll come over.’

Arnaldo spoke into the phone, then turned to the Colonel who was looking out of the window at the Dome of the Dogana, ‘Ettore says he will try to move them, but he is afraid Cipriani will not like it.’

‘Tell him not to move them. They don’t have to work this afternoon and there is no reason why they should not get drunk like any other man. I just don’t want to see them.’

‘Ettore says he will call back. He told me to tell you he thinks the position will fall of its own weight.’

‘Thank him for calling,’ the Colonel said.

He watched a gondola working up the Canal against the wind and thought, not with Americans drinking. I know they are bored. In this town, too. They are bored in this town. I know the place is cold and their wages are inadequate and what fuel costs. I admire their wives, for the valiant efforts they make to transport Keokuk to Venice, and their children already speak Italian like little Venetians. But no snapshots to-day, Jack. To-day we are giving the snapshots, the bar-room confidences, the unwanted comradely drinks and the tedious woes of the Consular services a miss.

‘No second, third or fourth vice-consuls to-day, Arnaldo.’

‘There are some very pleasant people from the Consulate.’

‘Yeah,’ the Colonel said. ‘They had a hell of a nice consul here in 1918. Everybody liked him. I’ll try to remember his name.’

‘You go back a long way back, my Colonel.’

‘I go back so damn far back that it isn’t funny.’

‘Do you remember everything from the old days?’

‘Everything,’ the Colonel said. ‘Carroll was the man’s name.’

‘I have heard of him.’

‘You weren’t born then.’

‘Do you think it is necessary to have been born at the time to know about things that have happened in this town, my Colonel?’

‘You’re perfectly correct. Tell me, does everybody always know about everything that happens in this town?’

‘Not everybody. But nearly everybody,’ the waiter said. ‘After all, sheets are sheets and someone has to change them and someone has to wash them. Naturally I do not refer to the sheets in a hotel such as this.’

‘I’ve had some damn good times in my life without sheets.’

‘Naturally. But the gondoliers, while they are the most co-operative and, for me, the finest people that we have, speak among themselves.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Then the clergy. While they would never violate the secrecy of the confessional, talk among themselves.’

‘It is to be expected.’

‘Their housekeepers talk among themselves.’

‘It is their right.’

‘Then the waiters,’ Arnaldo said. ‘People talk at a table as though the waiter were stone-deaf. The waiter, according to his ethics, makes no attempt to ever overhear a conversation. But sometimes he cannot escape from hearing. Naturally, we have our own conversations among ourselves. Never in this hotel of course. I could go on.’

‘I believe I get the point.’

‘Not to mention the coiffeurs and the hair-dressers.’

‘And what’s the news from the Rialto now?’

‘You will get it all at Harry’s except the part you figure in.’

‘Do I figure?’

‘Everyone knows everything.’

‘Well, it’s a damn pleasant story.’

‘Some people don’t understand the Torcello part.’

‘I’m damned if I do sometimes myself.’

‘How old are you, my Colonel, if it is not too indiscreet to ask?’

‘Fifty plus one. Why didn’t you find out from the concierge? I fill out a slip there for the Questura.’

‘I wanted to hear it from you yourself and to congratulate you.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Let me congratulate you anyway.’

‘I can’t accept it.’

‘You are very well liked in this city.’

‘Thank you. That is a very great compliment.’

Just then the telephone buzzed.

‘I’ll take it,’ the Colonel said and heard Ettore’s voice say, ‘Who speaks?’

‘Colonel Cantwell.’

‘The position has fallen, my Colonel.’

‘Which way did they go?’

‘Towards the Piazza.’

‘Good. I will be there at once.’

‘Do you want a table?’

‘In the corner,’ said the Colonel and hung up.

‘I am off for Harry’s.’

‘Good hunting.’

‘I hunt ducks day after tomorrow before first light in a botte in the marshes.’

‘It will be cold, too.’

‘I dare say,’ the Colonel said and put on his trench coat and looked at his face in the glass of the long mirror as he put on his cap.

‘An ugly face,’ he said to the glass. ‘Did you ever see a more ugly face?’

‘Yes,’ said Arnaldo. ‘Mine. Every morning when I shave.’

‘We both ought to shave in the dark,’ the Colonel told him and went out the door.

Chapter IX

As Colonel Cantwell stepped out of the door of the Gritti Palace Hotel he came out into the last sunlight of that day. There was still sunlight on the opposite side of the Square but the gondoliers preferred to be sheltered from the cold wind by lounging in the lee of the Gritti, than to use the last remaining heat of the sun on the wind-swept side of the Square.

After noting this, the Colonel turned to the right and walked along the Square to the paved street which turned off on the right. As he turned, he stopped for a moment and looked at the church of Santa Maria del Giglio.

What a fine, compact, and yet ready to be air-borne building, he thought. I never realized a small church could look like a P47. Must find out when it was built and who built it. Damn, I wish I might walk around this town all my life. All my life, he thought. What a gag that is. A gag to gag on. A throttle to throttle you with. Come on, boy, he said to himself. No horse named Morbid ever won a race.

Besides, he thought, as he looked in the windows of the various shops he passed, the charcuteri with the Parmesan cheeses and the hams from San Daniele and the sausages alla cacciatora and the bottles of good Scotch whisky and real Gordon’s gin, the cutlery store, an antique dealer’s with some good pieces and some old maps and prints, a second-rate restaurant disguised expensively as one of the first class and then came to the first bridge crossing a feeder canal with steps to be climbed; I don’t feel so badly. There is only the buzzing. I remember when that started and I thought perhaps it was seven-year locusts in the trees and I did not like to ask young Lowry but I did. And he answered, ‘No, General, I don’t hear any crickets or seven-year locusts. The night is perfectly quiet except for the usual noises.’

Then, as he climbed, he felt the twinges and coming down the other side, he saw two lovely looking girls. They were beautiful and hatless and poorly but chicly dressed, and they were talking very fast to each other and the wind was blowing their hair as they climbed with their long, easy striding Venetian legs and the Colonel said to himself, ‘I’d better quit window gazing along this street and make that next bridge and two squares afterwards you turn due right and keep along it till you are in Harry’s.’

He did just that, twinging on the bridge, but walking with his same old stride and only seeing, quickly, the people that he passed. There’s a lot of oxygen in this air, he thought, as he faced into the wind and breathed deeply.

Then he was pulling open the door of Harry’s bar and was inside and he had made it again and was at home.

At the bar a tall, very tall, man, with a ravaged face of great breeding, merry blue eyes and the long, loose-coupled body of a buffalo wolf said, ‘My ancient and depraved Colonel.’

‘My wicked Andrea.’

They embraced and the Colonel felt the rough texture of Andrea’s handsome tweed coat that must have been entering, at least, its twentieth year.

‘You look well, Andrea,’ the Colonel said.

It was a lie and they both knew it.

‘I am,’ said Andrea, returning the lie. ‘I must say I never felt better. You look extraordinarily well, yourself.’

‘Thank you, Andrea. Us healthy bastards shall inherit the earth.’

‘Very good idea. I must say I wouldn’t mind inheriting something these days.’

‘You have no kick. You’ll inherit well over six feet four of it.’

‘Six feet six,’ said Andrea. ‘You wicked old man. Are you still slaving away at la vie militaire?’

‘I don’t slave too hard at it,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m down to shoot at San Relajo.’

‘I know. But don’t make jokes in Spanish at this hour. Alvarito was looking for you. He said to tell you he’d be back.’

‘Good. Is your lovely wife and are the children well?’

‘Absolutely, and they asked me to remember them to you if I saw you. They’re down in Rome. There comes your girl. Or one of your girls.’ He was so tall he could see into the now almost dark street, but this was a girl you could recognize if it was much darker than it was at this hour.

‘Ask her to have a drink with us here before you carry her off to that corner table. Isn’t she a lovely girl?’

‘She is.’

Then she came into the room, shining in her youth and tall striding beauty and the carelessness the wind had made of her hair. She had a pale, almost olive-coloured skin, a profile that could break your, or anyone else’s, heart and her dark hair, of an alive texture, hung down over her shoulders.

‘Hello, my great beauty,’ the Colonel said.

‘Oh, oh, hello,’ she said. ‘I thought I would miss you. I am so sorry to be late.’

Her voice was low and delicate and she spoke English with caution.

‘Ciao, Andrea,’ she said. ‘How is Emily and are the children?’

‘Probably just the same as when I answered that same question for you at noon.’

‘I am so sorry,’ she said and blushed. ‘I am so excited and I always say the wrong things. What should I say? Have you had a good time here all afternoon?’

‘Yes,’ said Andrea. ‘With my old friend and severest critic.’

‘Who is that?’

‘Scotch whisky and water.’

‘I suppose if he must tease me he must,’ she said to the Colonel. ‘But you won’t tease me, will you?’

‘Take him over to that corner table and talk to him. I’m tired of you both.’

‘I’m not tired of you,’ the Colonel told him. ‘But I think it is a good idea. Should we have a drink sitting down, Renata?’

‘I’d love to if Andrea isn’t angry.’

‘I’m never angry.’

‘Would you have a drink with us, Andrea?’

‘No,’ said Andrea. ‘Get along to your table. I’m sick of seeing it unoccupied.’

‘Good-bye, Carlo. Thanks for the drink we didn’t have.’

‘Ciao, Ricardo,’ Andrea said and that was all.

He turned his fine, long, tall back on them and looked into the mirror that is placed behind bars so a man can tell when he is drinking too much and decided that he did not like what he saw there. ‘Ettore,’ he said. ‘Please put this nonsense on my bill.’

He walked out after waiting carefully for his coat, swinging into it and tipping the man who brought it exactly what he should be tipped plus twenty per cent.

At the corner table, Renata said, ‘Do you think we hurt his feelings?’

‘No. He loves you and he likes me.’

‘Andrea is so nice. And you’re so nice.’

‘Waiter,’ the Colonel called; then asked, ‘Do you want a dry Martini, too?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’d love one.’

‘Two very dry Martinis,’ the Colonel said. ‘Montgomerys. Fifteen to one.’

The waiter, who had been in the desert, smiled and was gone and the Colonel turned to Renata.

‘You’re nice,’ he said. ‘You’re also very beautiful and lovely and I love you.’

‘You always say that and I don’t know what it means but I like to hear it.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘Nearly nineteen. Why?’

‘And you don’t know what it means?’

‘No. Why should I? Americans always say it to you before they go away. It seems to be necessary to them. But I love you very much, too, whatever that is.’

‘Let’s have a fine time,’ the Colonel said. ‘Let’s not think about anything at all.’

‘I would like that. I cannot think very well this time of day at any rate.’

‘Here are the drinks,’ the Colonel said. ‘Remember not to say, chin-chin.’

‘I remember that from before. I never say chin-chin, nor here’s to you, nor bottoms up.’

‘We just raise the glass to each other and, if you wish, we can touch the edges.’

‘I wish,’ she said.

The Martinis were icy cold and true Montgomerys and, after touching the edges, they felt them glow happily all through their upper bodies.

‘And what have you been doing?’ the Colonel asked.

‘Nothing. I still wait to go away to school.’

‘Where now?’

‘God knows. Wherever I go to learn English.’

‘Turn your head and raise your chin once for me.’

‘You’re not making fun?’

‘No. I’m not making fun.’

She turned her head and raised her chin, without vanity, nor coquetry and the Colonel felt his heart turn over inside him, as though some sleeping animal had rolled over in its burrow and frightened, deliciously, the other animal sleeping close beside.

‘Oh, you,’ he said. ‘Would you ever like to run for Queen of Heaven?’

‘That would be sacrilegious.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it would and I withdraw the suggestion.’

‘Richard,’ she said. ‘No, I can’t say it.’

‘Say it.’

‘No.’

The Colonel thought, I order you to say it. And she said, ‘Please never look at me like that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ the Colonel said. ‘I had just slipped into my trade unconsciously.’

‘And if we were such a thing as married would you practise your trade in the home?’

‘No. I swear it. I never have. Not in my heart.’

‘With no one?’

‘With no one of your sex.’

‘I don’t like that word your sex. It sounds as though you were practising your trade.’

‘I throw my trade out of that God-damn window into the Grand Canal.’

‘There,’ she said. ‘You see how quickly you practise it?’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I love you and my trade can gently leave.’

‘Let me feel your hand,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. You can put it on the table.’

‘Thank you,’ the Colonel said.

‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘I wanted to feel it because all last week, every night, or I think nearly every night, I dreamed about it and it was a strange mixed-up dream and I dreamed it was the hand of Our Lord.’

‘That’s bad. You oughtn’t to do that.’

‘I know it. That’s just what I dreamed.’

‘You aren’t on the junk, are you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean and please don’t make fun when I tell you something true. I dreamed just as I say.’

‘What did the hand do?’

‘Nothing. Or maybe that is not true. Mostly it was just a hand.’

‘Like this one?’ The Colonel asked, looking at the mis-shapen hand with distaste and remembering the two times that had made it that way.

‘Not like. It was that one. May I touch it carefully with my fingers if it does not hurt?’

‘It does not hurt. Where it hurts is in the head, the legs and the feet. I don’t believe there’s any sensation in that hand.’

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Richard. There is very much sensation in that hand.’

‘I don’t like to look at it much. You don’t think we could skip it?’

‘Of course. But you don’t have to dream about it.’

‘No. I have other dreams.’

‘Yes. I can imagine. But I dream lately about this hand. Now that I have touched it carefully, we can talk about funny things if you like. What is there funny we should talk about?’

‘Let’s look at the people and discuss them.’

‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘And we won’t do it with malice. Only with our best wit. Yours and mine.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘Waiter, Ancora due Martini.’

He did not like to call for Montgomerys in a tone that could be overheard because there were two obvious Britishers at the next table.

The male might have been wounded, the Colonel thought, although, from his looks, it seems unlikely. But God help me to avoid brutality. And look at Renata’s eyes, he thought. They are probably the most beautiful of all the beautiful things she has with the longest honest lashes I have ever seen and she never uses them for anything except to look at you honestly and straight. What a damn wonderful girl and what am I doing here anyway? It is wicked. She is your last and true and only love, he thought, and that’s not evil. It is only unfortunate. No, he thought, it is damned fortunate and you are very fortunate.

They sat at a small table in the corner of the room and on their right there were four women at a larger table. One of the women was in mourning; a mourning so theatrical that it reminded the Colonel of the Lady Diana Manners playing the nun in Max Reinhardt’s ‘The Miracle’. This woman had an attractive, plump, naturally gay face and her mourning was incongruous.

At the table there was another woman who had hair three times as white as hair can be, the Colonel thought she, also, had a pleasant face. There were two other women whose faces meant nothing to the Colonel.

‘Are they lesbians?’ he asked the girl.

‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘They are all very nice people.’

‘I should say they are lesbians. But maybe they are just good friends. Maybe they are both. It means nothing to me and it was not a criticism.’

‘You are nice when you are gentle.’

‘Do you suppose the word gentleman derives from a man who is gentle?’

‘I do not know.’ the girl said, and she ran her fingers very lightly over the scarred hand. ‘But I love you when you are gentle.’

‘I’ll try very hard to be gentle,’ the Colonel said. ‘Who do you suppose that son of a bitch is at the table beyond them?’

‘You don’t stay gentle very long,’ the girl said. ‘Let us ask Ettore.’

They looked at the man at the third table. He had a strange face like an over-enlarged, disappointed weasel or ferret. It looked as pock-marked and as blemished as the mountains of the moon seen through a cheap telescope and, the Colonel thought, it looked like Goebbels’s face, if Herr Goebbels had ever been in a plane that burned and not been able to bale out before the fire reached him.

Above this face, which was ceaselessly peering, as though the answer might be found by enough well directed glances and by queries, there was black hair that seemed to have no connection with the human race. The man looked as though he had been scalped and then the hair replaced. Very interesting, the Colonel thought. Can he be a compatriot? Yes, he must.

A little spit ran out of the corner of his mouth as he spoke, peeringly, with the elderly, wholesome looking woman who was with him. She looks like anybody’s mother in an illustration in The Ladies’ Home Journal, the Colonel thought. The Ladies’ Home Journal was one of the magazines received regularly at the Officers’s Club in Trieste and the Colonel looked through it when it came. It is a wonderful magazine, he thought, because it combines sexology and beautiful foods. It makes me hungry both ways.

But who do you suppose that character is? He looks like a caricature of an American who has been run one half way through a meat chopper and then been boiled, slightly, in oil. I’m not being so gentle, he thought.

Ettore, with his emaciated face and his love of joking and fundamental and abiding disrespect, came over and the Colonel said, ‘Who is that spiritual character?’

Ettore shook his head.

The man was short and dark with glossy black hair that did not seem to go with his strange face. He looked, the Colonel thought, as though he had forgotten to change his wig as he grew older. Has a wonderful face though, the Colonel thought. Looks like some of the hills around Verdun. I don’t suppose he could be Goebbels and he picked up that face in the last days when they were all playing at Gotterdammerung. Komm’ Susser Tod, he thought. Well they sure bought themselves a nice big piece of Susser Tod at the end.

‘You don’t want a nice Susser Tod sandwich do you Miss Renata?’

‘I don’t think so,’ the girl said. ‘Though I love Bach and I am sure Cipriani could make one.’

‘I was not talking against Bach,’ the Colonel said.

‘I know it.’

‘Hell,’ the Colonel said. ‘Bach was practically a co-belligerent. As you were,’ he added.

‘I don’t think we have to talk against me.’

‘Daughter,’ the Colonel said. ‘When will you learn that I might joke against you because I love you?’

‘Now,’ she said. ‘I’ve learned it. But you know it’s fun not to joke too rough.’

‘Good. I’ve learned it.’

‘How often do you think of me during the week?’

‘All of the time.’

‘No. Tell me truly.’

‘All of the time. Truly.’

‘Do you think it is this bad for everyone?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ the Colonel said. ‘That’s one of the things I would not know.’

‘I hope it’s not this bad for everyone. I had no idea it could be this bad.’

‘Well you know now.’

‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘I know now. I know now and for keeps and for always. Is that the correct way to say it?’

‘I know now is enough,’ the Colonel said. ‘Ettore, that character with the inspiring face and the nice looking woman with him doesn’t live at the Gritti does he?’

‘No,’ Ettore said. ‘He lives next door but he goes to the Gritti sometimes to eat.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘It will be wonderful to see him if I should ever be down-hearted. Who is the woman with him? His wife? His mother? His daughter?’

‘There you have me,’ Ettore said. ‘We haven’t kept track of him in Venice. He has aroused neither love, hate, dislike, fear nor suspicion. Do you really want to know anything about him? I could ask Cipriani.’

‘Let us skip him,’ the girl said. ‘Is that how you say it?’

‘Let’s skip him,’ the Colonel said.

‘When we have so little time, Richard. He is rather a waste of time.’

‘I was looking at him as at a drawing by Goya. Faces are pictures, too.’

‘Look at mine and I will look at yours. Please skip the man. He didn’t come here to do anyone any harm.’

‘Let me look at your face and you not look at mine.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not fair. I have to remember yours all week.’

‘And what do I do?’ the Colonel asked her.

Ettore came over, unable to avoid conspiracy and, having gathered his intelligence rapidly and as a Venetian should, said:

‘My colleague who works at his hotel, says that he drinks three or four highballs and then writes vastly and fluently far into the night.’

‘I daresay that makes marvellous reading.’

‘I daresay,’ Ettore said. ‘But it was hardly the method of Dante.’

‘Dante was another vieux con,’ the Colonel said. ‘I mean as a man. Not as a writer.’

‘I agree,’ Ettore said. ‘I think you will find no one, outside of Firenze, who has studied his life who would not agree.’

‘Eff Florence,’ the Colonel said.

‘A difficult manoeuvre,’ Ettore said. ‘Many have attempted it but very few have succeeded. Why do you dislike it, my Colonel?’

‘Too complicated to explain. But it was the depot,’ he said deposito, ‘of my old regiment when I was a boy.’

‘That I can understand. I have my own reasons for disliking it, too. You know a good town?’

‘Yes,’ said the Colonel. ‘This one. A part of Milano; and Bologna. And Bergamo.’

‘Cipriani has a large store of vodka in case the Russians should come,’ Ettore said, loving to joke rough.

‘They’ll bring their own vodka, duty free.’

‘Still I believe Cipriani is prepared for them.’

‘Then he is the only man who is,’ the Colonel said. ‘Tell him not to take any cheques from junior officers on the Bank of Odessa and thank you for the data on my compatriot. I won’t take more of your time.’

Ettore left and the girl turned towards him and looked in his old steel eyes and put both her hands on his bad one and said, ‘You were quite gentle.’

‘And you are most beautiful and I love you.’

‘It’s nice to hear it anyway.’

‘What are we going to do about dinner?’

‘I will have to call my home and find out if I can come out.’

‘Why do you look sad now?’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am not, really. I am as happy as I ever am. Truly. Please believe me, Richard. But how would you like to be a girl nineteen years old in love with a man over fifty years old that you knew was going to die?’

‘You put it a little bluntly,’ the Colonel said. ‘But you are very beautiful when you say it.’

‘I never cry,’ the girl said. ‘Never. I made a rule not to. But I would cry now.’

‘Don’t cry,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m gentle now and the hell with the rest of it.’

‘Say once again that you love me.’

‘I love you and I love you and I love you.’

‘Will you do your best not to die?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did the doctor say?’

‘So-so.’

‘Not worse?’

‘No,’ he lied.

‘Then let us have another Martini,’ the girl said. ‘You know I never drank a Martini until we met.’

‘I know. But you drink them awfully well.’

‘Shouldn’t you take the medicine?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I should take the medicine.’

‘May I give it to you?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘You may give it to me.’

They continued to sit at the table in the corner and some people went out and others came in. The Colonel felt a little dizzy from the medicine and he let it ride. That’s the way it always is, he thought. To hell with it.

He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled and it was still as sound as your grandfather’s Purdey shot-gun. I guess my older brother has that, he thought. Well, he could always shoot better than I could and he deserves it.

‘Listen, Daughter,’ he said. ‘Don’t be sorry for me.’

‘I’m not. Not at all. I just love you.’

‘It isn’t much of a trade is it?’ He said oficio instead of trade, because they spoke Spanish together, too, when they left French and when they did not wish to speak English before other people. Spanish is a rough language, the Colonel thought, rougher than a corncob sometimes. But you can say what you mean in it and make it stick.

‘Es un oficio bastante malo,’ he repeated, ‘loving me.’

‘Yes. But it is the only one I have.’

‘Don’t you write any more poetry?’

‘It was young girl poetry. Like young girl painting. Everyone is talented at a certain age.’

At what age do you become old in this country, the Colonel thought. No one is ever old in Venice, but they grow up very fast. I grew up very rapidly in the Veneto myself and I was never as old as I was at twenty-one.

‘How is your mother?’ he asked lovingly.

‘She is very well. She does not receive and she sees almost no one because of her sorrow.’

‘Do you think she would mind if we had a baby?’

‘I don’t know. She is very intelligent, you know. But I would have to marry someone, I suppose. I don’t really want to.’

‘We could be married.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought it over and I thought we should not. It is just a decision as the one about crying.’

‘Maybe you make wrong decisions. Christ knows I’ve made a few and too many men are dead from when I was wrong.’

‘I think, perhaps, you exaggerate. I don’t believe you made many wrong decisions.’

‘Not many,’ the Colonel said. ‘But enough. Three is plenty in my trade and I made all three.’

‘I’d like to know about them.’

‘They’d bore you,’ the Colonel told her. ‘They beat the hell out of me to remember them. So what would they do to some outsider?’

‘Am I an outsider?’

‘No. You’re my true love. My last and only and true love.’

‘Did you make them early or late? The decisions.’

‘I made them early. In the middle. And late.’

‘Wouldn’t you tell me about them? I would like to have a share in your sad trade.’

‘The hell with them,’ the Colonel said. ‘They were made and they’ve all been paid for. Only you can’t pay for that.’

‘Can you tell me about that and why?’

‘No,’ the Colonel said. And that was the end of that.

‘Then let’s have fun.’

‘Let’s,’ the Colonel said. ‘With our one and only life.’

‘Maybe there are others. Other lives.’

‘I don’t think so,’ the Colonel said. ‘Turn your head sideways, beauty.’

‘Like this?’

‘Like that,’ the Colonel said. ‘Exactly like that.’

So, the Colonel thought, here we come into the last round and I do not know even the number of the round. I have loved but three women and have lost them thrice.

You lose them the same way you lose a battalion; by errors of judgment; orders that are impossible to fulfil and through impossible conditions. Also through brutality.

I have lost three battalions in my life and three women and now I have a fourth and loveliest and where the hell does it end?

You tell me, General, and, incidentally, while we are discussing the matter and it is frank discussion of the situation and in no sense a Council of War, as you have so often pointed out to me General: GENERAL WHERE IS YOUR CAVALRY?

I have thought so, he said to himself. The Commanding Officer does not know where his cavalry is and his cavalry are not completely accurate as to their situation, nor their mission and they will, some of them, enough, muck off as cavalry have always mucked off in all the wars since they, the Cavalry, had the big horses.

‘Beauty,’ he said, ‘Ma très chère et bien aimée. I am very dull and I am sorry.’

‘You are never dull, to me, and I love you and I only wish we could be cheerful to-night.’

‘We damn well will be,’ said the Colonel. ‘Do you know anything particular we should be cheerful about?’

‘We might be cheerful about us, and about the town. You’ve often been very cheerful.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel agreed. ‘I have been.’

‘Don’t you think we could do it once more?’

‘Sure. Of course. Why not?’

‘Do you see the boy with the wave in his hair, that is natural, and he only pushes it a little, skilfully, to be more handsome?’

‘I see him,’ the Colonel said.

‘He is a very good painter, but he has false teeth in front because he was a little bit pédéraste once and other pédérastes attacked him one night on the Lido when there was a full moon.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I will be nineteen.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I know it from the Gondoliere. This boy is a very good painter, for now. There aren’t any really good painters now. But with false teeth, now, in his twenty-fifth year, what a thing.’

‘I love you very truly,’ the Colonel said.

‘I love you very truly, too. Whatever that means in American. I also love you in Italian, against all my judgment and all of my wishes.’

‘We shouldn’t wish for too God-damn much,’ the Colonel said. ‘Because we are always liable to get it.’

‘I agree,’ she said. ‘But I would like to get what I wish for now.’

Neither of them said anything and then the girl said, ‘That boy, he is a man now, of course, and goes with very many women to hide what he is, painted my portrait once. You can have it if you like.’

‘Thank you,’ the Colonel said. ‘I would love it.’

‘It is very romantic. My hair is twice as long as it has ever been and I look as though I were rising from the sea without the head wet. Actually, you rise from the sea with the hair very flat and coming to points at the end. It is almost the look of a very nearly dead rat. But Daddy paid him adequately for the portrait, and, while it is not truly me, it is the way you like to think of me.’

‘I think of you when you come from the sea too.’

‘Of course. Very ugly. But you might like to have this portrait for a souvenir.’

‘Your lovely mother would not mind?’

‘Mummy would not mind. She would be glad to be rid of it, I think. We have better pictures in the house.’

‘I love you and your mother both very much.’

‘I must tell her,’ the girl said.

‘Do you think that pock-marked jerk is really a writer?’

‘Yes. If Ettore says so. He loves to joke but he does not lie. Richard, what is a jerk? Tell me truly.’

‘It is a little rough to state. But I think it means a man who has never worked at his trade (oficio) truly, and is presumptuous in some annoying way.’

‘I must learn to use the term properly.’

‘Don’t use it,’ the Colonel said.

Then the Colonel asked, ‘When do I get the portrait?’

‘To-night if you wish it. I’ll have someone wrap it and send it from the house. Where will you hang it?’

‘In my quarters.’

‘And no one will come in and make remarks and speak badly of me?’

‘No. They damn well will not. Also I’ll tell them it is a portrait of my daughter.’

‘Did you ever have a daughter?’

‘No. I always wanted one.’

‘I can be your daughter as well as everything else.’

‘That would be incest.’

‘I don’t think that would be so terrible in a city as old as this and that has seen what this city has seen.’

‘Listen, Daughter.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That was fine. I liked it.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said and his voice was thickened a little. ‘I liked it, too.’

‘Do you see now why I lore you when I know better than to do it?’

‘Look, Daughter. Where should we dine?’

‘Wherever you like.’

‘Would you eat at the Gritti?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then call the house and ask for permission.’

‘No. I decided not to ask permission but to send word where I was dining. So they would not worry.’

‘But do you really prefer the Gritti?’

‘I do. Because it is a lovely restaurant and it is where you live and anyone can look at us that wants to.’

‘When did you get like that?’

‘I have always been like that. I have never cared what anyone thought, ever. Nor have I ever done anything that I was ashamed of except tell lies when I was a little girl and be unkind to people.’

‘I wish we could be married and have five sons,’ the Colonel said.

‘So do I,’ the girl said. ‘And send them to the five corners of the world.’

‘Are there five corners to the world?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It sounded as though there were when I said it. And now we are having run again, aren’t we?’

‘Yes, Daughter,’ the Colonel said.

‘Say it again. Just as you said it.’

‘Yes, Daughter.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘People must be very complicated. Please may I take your hand?’

‘It’s so damned ugly and I dislike looking at it.’

‘You don’t know about your hand.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ he said. ‘I’d say you were wrong, Daughter.’

‘Maybe I am wrong. But we’re having fun again and whatever the bad thing was is gone now.’

‘It’s gone the way the mist is burned off the hollows in broken ground when the sun comes out,’ the Colonel said. ‘And you’re the sun.’

‘I want to be the moon, too.’

‘You are,’ the Colonel told her. ‘Also any particular planet that you wish to be and I will give you an accurate location of the planet. Christ, Daughter, you can be a God-damn constellation if you like. Only that’s an airplane.’

‘I’ll be the moon. She has many troubles, too.’

‘Yes. Her sorrows come regularly. But she always fills before she wanes.’

‘She looks so sad to me sometimes across the Canal, that I cannot stand it.’

‘She’s been around a long time,’ the Colonel said.

‘Do you think we should have one more Montgomery?’ the girl asked and the Colonel noticed that the British were gone.

He had been noticing nothing but her lovely face. I’ll get killed sometime that way, he thought. On the other hand it is a form of concentration I suppose. But it is damned careless.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

‘They make me feel very good,’ the girl said.

‘They have a certain effect on me, too, the way Cipriani makes them.’

‘Cipriani is very intelligent.’

‘He’s more than that. He’s able.’

‘Some day he’ll own all Venice.’

‘Not quite all,’ the Colonel disagreed. ‘He’ll never own you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Nor will anyone else unless you want me.’

‘I want you, Daughter. But I don’t want to own you.’

‘I know it,’ the girl said. ‘And that’s one more reason why I love you.’

‘Let’s get Ettore and have him call up your house. You can tell them about the portrait.’

‘You are quite correct. If you want the portrait to-night, I must speak to the butler to have it wrapped and sent. I will also ask to speak to Mummy and tell her where we are dining, and, if you like, I will ask her permission.’

‘No,’ the Colonel said. ‘Ettore, two Montgomerys, super Montgomerys, with garlic olives, not the big ones, and please call the home of this lady and let her know when you have completed the communication. And all of this as rapidly as possible.’

‘Yes, my Colonel.’

‘Now, Daughter, let us resume the having of the fun.’

‘It was resumed when you spoke,’ she said.

Chapter X

They were walking, now, along the right side of the street that led to the Gritti. The wind was at their backs and it blew the girl’s hair forward. The wind parted her hair in the back and blew it forward about her face. They were looking in the shop windows and the girl stopped in front of the lighted window of a jewellery shop.

There were many good pieces of old jewellery in the window and they stood and looked at them and pointed out the best ones to each other, unclasping their hands to do so.

‘Is there anything you really want? I could get it in the morning. Cipriani would loan me the money.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not want anything but I notice that you never give me presents.’

‘You are much richer than I am. I bring you small things from the PX and I buy you drinks and meals.’

‘And take me in gondolas and to lovely places in the country.’

‘I never thought you wanted presents of hard stones.’

‘I don’t. It is just the thought of giving and then one looks at them and thinks about them when they are worn.’

‘I’m learning,’ the Colonel said. ‘But what could I buy you on Army pay that would be like your square emeralds?’

‘But don’t you see. I inherited them. They came from my grandmother, and she had them from her mother who had them from her mother. Do you think it is the same to wear stones that come from dead people?’

‘I never thought about it.’

‘You can have them if you like, if you like stones. To me they are only something to wear like a dress from Paris. You don’t like to wear your dress uniform, do you?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t like to carry a sword, do you?’

‘No, repeat, no.’

‘You are not that kind of a soldier and I am not that sort of girl. But some time give me something lasting that I can wear and be happy each time I wear it.’

‘I see,’ the Colonel said. ‘And I will.’

‘You learn fast about things you do not know,’ the girl said. ‘And you make lovely quick decisions. I would like you to have the emeralds and you could keep them in your pocket like a lucky piece, and feel them if you were lonely.’

‘I don’t put my hands much in my pockets when I’m working. I usually twirl a stick, or something, or point things out with a pencil.’

‘But you could put your hand in your pocket only once in a long time and feel them.’

‘I’m not lonely when I’m working. I have to think too hard to ever be lonely.’

‘But you are not working now.’

‘No. Only preparing the best way to be overrun.’

‘I’m going to give them to you anyway. I’m quite sure Mummy will understand. Also I won’t need to tell her for quite a long time. She keeps no check on my things. I’m sure my maid would never tell her.’

‘I don’t think I should take them.’

‘You should, please, to give me pleasure.’

‘I’m not sure it’s honourable.’

‘That is like not being sure whether you are a virgin. What you do to give pleasure to another whom you love is most honourable.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘I will take them for better or for worse.’

‘Now you say thank you,’ the girl said and slipped them into his pocket as quickly and ably as a jewel thief might. ‘I brought them with me because I have been thinking and deciding about this all week.’

‘I thought you thought about my hand.’

‘Don’t be surly, Richard. And you should never be stupid. It is your hand you touch them with. Didn’t you think of that?’

‘No. And I was stupid. What would you like from that window?’

‘I would like that small Negro with the ebony face and the turban made of chip diamonds with the small ruby on the crown of the turban. I should wear it as a pin. Everyone wore them in the old days in this city and the faces were those of their confidential servants. I have coveted this for a long time, but I wanted you to give it to me.’

‘I’ll send it in the morning.’

‘No. Give it to me when we have lunch before you go.’

‘Right,’ the Colonel said.

‘Now we must walk or we will be too late for dinner.’

They started to walk, arm through arm, and as they went up the first bridge the wind lashed at them.

When the twinge came, the Colonel said to himself, the hell with that.

‘Richard,’ the girl said. ‘Put your hand in your pocket to please me and feel them.’

The Colonel did.

‘They feel wonderful,’ he said.

Chapter XI

They came in, out of the wind and the cold, through the main entrance of the Gritti Palace Hotel, into the light and warmth of the lobby.

‘Good evening, Contessa,’ the concierge said. ‘Good evening, my Colonel. It must be cold outside.’

‘It is,’ the Colonel said, and did not add any of the rough or obscene phrases about the extent of the cold, or the force of the wind, that he could ordinarily have employed, for their mutual pleasure when speaking, alone, with the concierge.

As they entered the long hallway that led to the big stairs and to the elevator, leaving, on your right, the entrance to the bar, the doorway on to the Grand Canal, and the entrance to the dining-room, the Gran Maestro came out of the bar.

He was wearing a formal white jacket, cut long, and he smiled at them and said, ‘Good evening, my Countess. Good evening, my Colonel.’

‘Gran Maestro,’ the Colonel said.

The Gran Maestro smiled and, still bowing, said, ‘We are dining in the bar at the far end. There is no one here now in the winter time and the dining-room is too big. I have saved your table. We have a very fine lobster if you would like him to commence with.’

‘Is he really fresh?’

‘I saw him this morning when he came from the market in a basket. He was alive and a dark green and completely unfriendly.’

‘Would you like lobster, Daughter, to start your dinner?’

The Colonel was conscious of using the word, and so was the Gran Maestro, and so was the girl. But to each one it meant a different thing.

‘I wanted to have him for you in case any pescecani came in. They are down now to gamble at the Lido. I was not trying to sell him.’

‘I would love some lobster,’ the girl said. ‘Cold, and with mayonnaise. The mayonnaise rather stiff.’ She said this in Italian.

‘It isn’t too expensive?’ she said to the Colonel, seriously.

‘Ay hija mia,’ the Colonel said.

‘Feel in your right pocket,’ she said.

‘I’ll see that he is not too expensive,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘Or I’ll buy him myself. I could get him quite easily with a week’s wages.’

‘Sold to TRUST,’ the Colonel said, this being the code designation of the task force occupying Trieste. ‘He only costs me a day’s wages.’

‘Put your hand in your right hand pocket and feel very rich,’ the girl said.

The Gran Maestro had sensed this was a private joke and had gone; silently. He was happy about the girl, whom he respected and admired, and he was happy for his Colonel.

‘I am rich,’ the Colonel said. ‘But if you tease me about them, I will give them back, and on the linen tablecloth, and in public.’

He was teasing rough in his turn; throwing in the counter-attack without even thinking.

‘No, you won’t,’ she said. ‘Because you love them already.’

‘I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ the girl said. ‘You would not throw me off any high cliffs.’

‘No,’ the Colonel agreed. ‘And forgive me for talking badly.’

‘You didn’t talk very badly and I didn’t believe it anyway,’ the girl told him. ‘Now should I go to the women’s room to comb my hair and make myself presentable, or should I come up to your room?’

‘Which do you wish?’

‘To come to your room, of course, and see how you live and how things are there.’

‘What about the hotel?’

‘Everything is known in Venice anyway. But it is also known who my family are and that I am a good girl. Also they know it is you and it is I. We have some credit to exhaust.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘By stairs or elevator?’

‘By elevator,’ she said, and he heard the change in her voice. ‘You can call a boy or we can run it ourselves.’

‘We run it ourselves,’ the Colonel said. ‘I checked out on elevators long ago.’

It was a good ride with a slight bump, and a rectification at the end, and the Colonel thought: Checked out, eh? You better be checked out again.

The corridor was now not simply beautiful, but exciting, and putting the key into the lock was not a simple process, but a rite.

‘Here it is,’ the Colonel said when he swung the door open. ‘What there is of it.’

‘It is charming,’ the girl said. ‘But it is awfully cold with the windows open.’

‘I’ll close them.’

‘No, please. Leave them open if you like it that way.’

The Colonel kissed her and felt her wonderful, long, young, lithe and properly built body against his own body, which was hard and good, but beat-up, and as he kissed her he thought of nothing.

They kissed for a long time, standing straight, and kissing true, in the cold of the open windows that were on to the Grand Canal.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then, ‘Oh.’

‘We owe nothing,’ the Colonel said. ‘Not a thing.’

‘Will you marry me and will we have the five sons?’

‘I will! I will!’

‘The thing is that, would you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Kiss me once again and make the buttons of your uniform hurt me but not too much.’

They stood there and kissed each other true. ‘I have a disappointment for you, Richard,’ she said. ‘I have a disappointment about everything.’

She said it as a flat statement and it came to the Colonel in the same way as a message came from one of the three battalions, when the battalion commander spoke the absolute truth and told you the worst.

‘You are positive?’

‘Yes.’

‘My poor Daughter,’ he said.

Now there was nothing dark about the word and she was his daughter, truly, and he pitied her and loved her.

‘No matter,’ he said. ‘You comb yourself and make a new mouth and all that, and we will have a good dinner.’

‘Say once more, first, that you love me and make the buttons very tight.’

‘I love you,’ the Colonel said quite formally.

Then he whispered into her ear as gently as he knew how to whisper, as his whisper was when they are fifteen feet away and you are a young lieutenant on a patrol, ‘I love you only, my best and last and only and one true love.’

‘Good,’ she said, and kissed him hard so he could feel the sweet salt of the blood inside his lip. And I like that too, he thought.

‘Now I will comb my hair and make my mouth new and you can watch me.’

‘Do you want me to shut the windows?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We will do it all in the cold.’

‘Who do you love?’

‘You,’ she said. ‘And we don’t have too much luck, do we?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Colonel said. ‘Go ahead and comb your hair.’

The Colonel went into the bathroom to wash up for dinner. The bathroom was the only disappointing part of the room. Due to the exigencies of the Gritti having been built as a palace, there had been no site for bathrooms at the time of building, and, later, when they were introduced, they had been built down the corridor and those entitled to use them gave due warning beforehand and water was heated and towels laid out.

This bathroom had been cut, arbitrarily, from a corner of the room and it was a defensive, rather than an attacking bathroom, the Colonel felt. Washing, and forced to look in the mirror to check any traces of lipstick, he regarded his face.

It looks as though it had been cut out of wood by an indifferent craftsman, he thought.

He looked at the different welts and ridges that had come before they had plastic surgery, and at the thin, only to be observed by the initiate, lines of the excellent plastic operations after head wounds.

Well, that is what I have to offer as a gueule or a façade, he thought1 It is a damn poor offer. The only thing is that it is tanned, and that takes some of the curse off of it. But, Christ what an ugly man.

He did not notice the old used steel of his eyes nor the small long extending laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, nor that his broken nose was like a gladiator’s in the oldest statues. Nor did he notice his basically kind mouth which could be truly ruthless.

The hell with you, he said to the mirror. You beat-up, miserable. Should we rejoin the ladles?

He went out from the bathroom into the room, and he was as young as at his first attack. Every worthless thing had been left in the bathroom. As always, he thought. That’s the place for it.

Où sont les neiges d’antan? Où sont les neiges d’autrefois? Dans le pissoir toute la chose comme ça.

The girl, whose first name was Renata, had the doors of the tall armoire open. They were all mirrored inside and she was combing her hair.

She was not combing it for vanity, nor to do to the Colonel what she knew it could and would do. She was combing it with difficulty and without respect, and, since it was very heavy hair and as alive as the hair of peasants, or the hair of the beauties of the great nobility, it was resistant to the comb.

‘The wind made it very tangled,’ she said. ‘Do you love me still?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘May I help you?’

‘No, I’ve done it all my life.’

‘You could stand sidewise.’

‘No. All contours are for our five sons and for your head to rest on.’

‘I was only thinking of the face,’ the Colonel said. ‘But thank you for calling my attention. My attention has been faulty again.’

‘I am over bold.’

‘No,’ the Colonel said. ‘In America, they make such things of wire and of sponge-rubber, such as you use in the seats of tanks. You never know there, whether there is any truth in the matter, unless you are a bad boy, as I am.’

‘Here it is not that way,’ she said, and, with the comb, swung her now parted hair forward so that it came below the line of her cheek and, slanting back, hung over her shoulders.

‘Do you like it neat?’

‘It’s not too neat but it is damn lovely.’

‘I could put it up and all that sort of thing if you value neatness. But I cannot manage hairpins and it seems so silly.’ Her voice was so lovely and it always reminded him of Pablo Casals playing the ‘cello that it made him feel as a wound does that you think you cannot bear. But you can bear anything, he thought.

‘I love you very much the way you are,’ the Colonel said. ‘And you are the most beautiful woman I have ever known, or seen, ever in paintings by good painters.’

‘I wonder why the portrait has not come.’

‘The portrait is lovely to have,’ the Colonel said, and now he was a General again without thinking of it. ‘But it is like skinning a dead horse.’

‘Please don’t be rough,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t feel at all like being rough to-night.’

‘I slipped into the jargon of my sale mètier.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Please put your arms around me, gently and well. Please. It is not a dirty trade. It is the oldest and the best, although most people who practise it are unworthy.’

He held her as tight as he could without hurting and she said, ‘I would not have you be a lawyer nor a priest. Nor sell things. Nor be a great success. I love you to be in your trade and I love you. Please whisper to me if you wish.’

The Colonel whispered; holding her tight, and with his heart broken, honestly and fairly, in his whisper that was as barely audible as a silent dog whistle heard close to the ear, ‘I love you, devil. And you’re my daughter, too. And I don’t care about our losses because the moon is our mother and our father. And now let’s go down to dinner.’

He whispered this last so low that it was inaudible to anyone who did not love you.

‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘Yes. But kiss me once more first.’

Chapter XII

They were at their table in the far corner of the bar, where the Colonel had both his flanks covered, and he rested solidly against the corner of the room. The Gran Maestro knew about this, since he had been an excellent sergeant in a good company of infantry, in a first-rate regiment, and he would no more have seated his Colonel in the middle of a room than he would have taken up a stupid defensive position.

‘The lobster,’ the Gran Maestro said.

The lobster was imposing. He was double the size a lobster should be, and his unfriendliness had gone with the boiling, so that now he looked a monument to his dead self; complete with protruding eyes and his delicate, far-extended antennae that were for knowing what rather stupid eyes could not tell him.

He looks a little bit like Georgie Patton, the Colonel thought. But he probably never cried in his life when he was moved.

‘Do you think that he will be tough?’ he asked the girl in Italian.

‘No,’ the Gran Maestro assured them, still bowing with the lobster. ‘He’s truly not tough. He’s only big. You know the type.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘Serve him.’

‘And what will you drink?’

‘What do you want, Daughter?’

‘What you want?’

‘Capri Bianco,’ the Colonel said. ‘Secco and really cold.’

‘I have it ready,’ said the Gran Maestro.

‘We are having fun,’ the girl said. ‘We are having it again and without sorrow. Isn’t he an imposing lobster?’

‘He is,’ the Colonel answered. ‘And he better damn well be tender.’

‘He will be,’ the girl told him. ‘The Gran Maestro doesn’t lie. Isn’t it wonderful to have people who do not lie?’

‘Very wonderful and quite rare,’ the Colonel said. ‘I was thinking just now of a man named Georgie Patton who possibly never told the truth in his life.’

‘Do you ever lie?’

‘I’ve lied four times. But each time I was very tired. That’s not an excuse,’ he added.

‘I lied a lot when I was a little girl. But mostly it was making up stories. Or I hope so. But I have never lied to my own advantage.’

‘I have,’ said the Colonel. ‘Four times.’

‘Would you have been a general if you had not lied?’

‘If I had lied as others lied, I would have been a three-star general.’

‘Would it make you happier to be a three-star general?’

‘No,’ said the Colonel. ‘It would not.’

‘Put your right hand, your real hand, in your pocket once and tell me how you feel.’

The Colonel did so.

‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘But I have to give them back you know.’

‘No. Please, no.’

‘We won’t go into it now.’

Just then the lobster was served.

It was tender, with the peculiar slippery grace of that kicking muscle which is the tail, and the claws were excellent; neither too thin, nor too fat.

‘A lobster fills with the moon,’ the Colonel told the girl. ‘When the moon is dark he is not worth eating.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I think it may be because, with the full moon, he feeds all night. Or maybe it is that the full moon brings him feed.’

‘They come from the Dalmatian coast do they not?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘That’s your rich coast in fish. Maybe I should say our rich coast.’

‘Say it,’ the girl said. ‘You don’t know how important things that are said are.’

‘They are a damn sight more important when you put them on paper.’

‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t agree. The paper means nothing unless you say them in your heart.’

‘And what if you haven’t a heart, or your heart is worthless?’

‘You have a heart and it is not worthless.’

I would sure as hell like to trade it in on a new one, the Colonel thought. I do not see why that one, of all the muscles, should fail me. But he said nothing of this, and put his hand in his pocket.

‘They feel wonderful,’ he said. ‘And you look wonderful.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I will remember that all week.’

‘You could always just look in the glass.’

‘The mirror bores me,’ she said. ‘Putting on lipstick and moving your lips over each other to get it spread properly and combing your too heavy hair is not a life for a woman, or even a girl alone, who loves someone. When you want to be the moon and various stars and live with your man and have five sons, looking at yourself in the mirror and doing the artifices of a woman is not very exciting.’

‘Then let us be married at once.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I had to make a decision about that, as about the other different things. All week long is my time to make decisions.’

‘I make them, too,’ the Colonel told her. ‘But I am very vulnerable on this.’

‘Let’s not talk about it. It makes a sweet hurt, but I think we would do better to find out what the Gran Maestro has for meat. Please drink your wine. You haven’t touched it.’

‘I’ll touch it now,’ the Colonel said. He did and it was pale and cold like the wines of Greece, but not resinous, and its body was as full and as lovely as that of Renata.

‘It’s very like you.’

‘Yes. I know. That’s why I wanted you to taste it.’

‘I’m tasting it,’ the Colonel said. ‘Now I will drink a full glass.’

‘You’re a good man.’

‘Thank you,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll remember that all week and try to be one.’ Then he said, ‘Gran Maestro.’

When the Gran Maestro came over, happy, conspiratorial, and ignoring his ulcers, the Colonel asked him, ‘What sort of meat have you that is worth our eating?’

‘I’m not quite sure I know,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘But I will check. Your compatriot is over there in hearing distance. He would not let me seat him in the far corner.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘We’ll give him something to write about.’

‘He writes every night, you know. I’ve heard that from one of my colleagues at his hotel.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘That shows that he is industrious even if he has outlived his talents.’

‘We are all industrious,’ the Gran Maestro said.

‘In different ways.’

‘I will go and check on what there actually is among the meats.’

‘Check carefully.’

‘I am industrious.’

‘You are also damn sagacious.’

The Gran Maestro was gone and the girl said, ‘He is a lovely man and I love how fond he is of you.’

‘We are good friends,’ the Colonel said. ‘I hope he has a good steak for you.’

‘There is one very good steak,’ the Gran Maestro said, reappearing.

‘You take it, Daughter. I get them all the time at the mess. Do you want it rare?’

‘Quite rare, please.’

‘Al sangue,’ the Colonel said, ‘as John said when he spoke to the waiter in French. Crudo, bleu, or just make it very rare.’

‘It’s rare,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘And you, my Colonel?’

‘The scaloppine with Marsala, and the cauliflower braised with butter. Plus an artichoke vinaigrette if you can find one. What do you want, Daughter?’

‘Mashed potatoes and a plain salad.’

‘You’re a growing girl.’

‘Yes. But I should not grow too much nor in the wrong directions.’

‘I think that handles it,’ the Colonel said. ‘What about a fiasco of Valpolicella?’

‘We don’t have fiascos. This is a good hotel, you know. It comes in bottles.’

‘I forgot,’ the Colonel said. ‘Do you remember when it cost thirty centesimi the litre?’

‘And we would throw the empty fiascos at the station guards from the troop trains?’

‘And we would throw all the left over grenades away and bounce them down the hillside coming back from the Grappa?’

‘And they would think there was a break-through when they would see the bursts and you never shaved, and we wore the fiamme nere on the grey, open jackets with the grey sweaters?’

‘And I drank grappa and could not even feel the taste?’

‘We must have been tough then,’ the Colonel said.

‘We were tough then,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘We were bad boys then, and you were the worst of the bad boys.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I think we were rather bad boys. You forgive this will you, Daughter?’

‘You haven’t a picture of then, have you?’

‘No. There weren’t any pictures except with Mr. d’Annunzio in them. Also most of the people turned out badly.’

‘Except for us,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘Now I must go and see how the steak marches.’

The Colonel, who was a sub-lieutenant again now, riding in a camion, his face dust, until only his metallic eyes showed, and they were red-rimmed and sore, sat thinking.

The three key points, he thought. The massif of Grappa with Assalone and Pertica and the hill I do not remember the name of on the right. That was where I grew up, he thought, and all the nights I woke sweating, dreaming I would not be able to get them out of the trucks. They should not have gotten out, ever, of course. But what a trade it is.

‘In our army, you know,’ he told the girl, ‘practically no generals have ever fought. It is quite strange and the top organization dislikes those who have fought.’

‘Do generals really fight?’

‘Oh, yes. When they are captains and lieutenants. Later, except in retreats, it is rather stupid.’

‘Did you fight much? I know you did. But tell me.’

‘I fought enough to be classified as a fool by the great thinkers.’

‘Tell me.’

‘When I was a boy, I fought against Erwin Rommel half way from Cortina to the Grappa, where we held. He was a captain then and I was an acting captain; really a sub-lieutenant.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘No. Not until after the war when we could talk together. He was very nice and I liked him. We used to ski together.’

‘Did you like many Germans?’

‘Very many. Ernst Udet I liked the best.’

‘But they were in the wrong.’

‘Of course. But who has not been?’

‘I never could like them or take such a tolerant attitude as you do, since they killed my father and burned our villa on the Brenta and the day I saw a German officer shooting pigeons with a shotgun in the Piazzo San Marco.’

‘I understand,’ the Colonel said. ‘But please, Daughter, you try to understand my attitude too. When we have killed so many we can afford to be kind.’

‘How many have you killed?’

‘One hundred and twenty-two sures. Not counting possibles.’

‘You had no remorse?’

‘Never.’

‘Nor bad dreams about it?’

‘Nor bad dreams. But usually strange ones. Combat dreams, always, for a while after combat. But then strange dreams about places mostly. We live by accidents of terrain, you know. And terrain is what remains in the dreaming part of your mind.’

‘Don’t you ever dream about me?’

‘I try to. But I can’t.’

‘Maybe the portrait will help.’

‘I hope so,’ the Colonel said. ‘Please don’t forget to remind me to give back the stones.’

‘Please don’t be cruel.’

‘I have my small necessities of honour in the same proportions as we have our great and enveloping love. You cannot have the one without the other.’

‘But you could give me privileges.’

‘You have them,’ the Colonel said. ‘The stones are in my pocket.’

The Gran Maestro came then with the steak and the scaloppine and the vegetables. They were brought by a sleek-headed boy who believed in nothing; but was trying hard to be a good second waiter. He was a member of the Order. The Gran Maestro served adroitly and with respect both for the food, and those that were to eat it.

‘Now eat,’ he said.

‘Uncork that Valpolicella,’ he said to the boy who had the eyes of an unbelieving spaniel.

‘What do you have on that character?’ the Colonel asked him, referring to his pitted compatriot, sitting chawing at his food, while the elderly woman with him ate with suburban grace.

‘You should tell me. Not me you.’

‘I never saw him before to-day,’ the Colonel said. ‘He’s hard to take with food.’

‘He condescends to me. He speaks bad Italian assiduously. He goes everywhere in Baedeker, and he has no taste in either food or wine. The woman is nice. I believe she is his aunt. But I have no real information.’

‘He looks like something we could do without.’

‘I believe we could. In a pinch.’

‘Does he speak of us?’

‘He asked me who you were. He was familiar with the Contessa’s name and had book-visited several palaces that had belonged to the family. He was impressed by your name, Madam, which I gave to impress him.’

‘Do you think he will put us in a book?’

‘I’m sure of it. He puts everything in a book.’

‘We ought to be in a book,’ the Colonel said. ‘Would you mind, Daughter?’

‘Of course not,’ the girl said. ‘But I’d rather Dante wrote it.’

‘Dante isn’t around,’ the Colonel said.

‘Can you tell me anything about the war?’ the girl asked. ‘Anything that I should be permitted to know?’

‘Sure. Anything you like.’

‘What was General Eisenhower like?’

‘Strictly the Epworth League. Probably that is unjust too. Also complicated by various other influences. An excellent politician. Political General. Very able at it.’

‘The other leaders?’

‘Let us not name them. They’ve named themselves enough in their memoirs. Mostly extremely plausible out of something called the Rotary Club that you would never have heard of. In this club, they have enamelled buttons with their first names and you are fined if you call them by their proper names. Never fought. Ever.’

‘Were there no good ones?’

‘Yes, many. Bradley, the schoolmaster, and many others. Give you Lightning Joe as a good one. Very good.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Commanded the Seventh Corps when I was there. Very sound. Rapid. Accurate. Now chief of staff.’

‘But what about the great leaders we heard about like the Generals Montgomery and Patton?’

‘Forget them, Daughter. Monty was a character who needed fifteen to one to move, and then moved tardily.’

‘I always supposed he was a great General.’

‘He was not,’ the Colonel said. ‘The worst part was he knew it. I have seen him come into an hotel and change from his proper uniform into a crowd-catching kit to go out in the evening to animate the populace.’

‘Do you dislike him?’

‘No. I simply think he is a British General. Whatever that means. And don’t you use the term.’

‘But he beat General Rommel.’

‘Yes. And you don’t think anyone else had softened him up? And who can’t win with fifteen to one? When we fought here, when we were boys, the Gran Maestro and I, we won for one whole year with three to four against one and we won each one. Three main bad ones. That is why we can make jokes and not be solemn. We had something over one hundred and forty thousand dead that year. That is why we can speak gaily and without pomposity.’

‘It is such a sad science; if it is a science,’ the girl said. ‘I hate the war monuments, though I respect them.’

‘I do not like them either. Nor the process which led to their construction. Have you ever seen that end of the thing?’

‘No. But I would like to know.’

‘Better not know,’ the Colonel said. ‘Eat your steak before it gets cold and forgive me for talking about my trade.’

‘I hate it but I love it.’

‘I believe we share the same emotions,’ the Colonel said. ‘But what is my pitted compatriot thinking three tables down?’

‘About his next book, or about what it says in Baedeker.’

‘Should we go and ride in a gondola in the wind after we have dined?’

‘That would be lovely.’

‘Should we tell the pitted man that we are going? I think he has the same pits on his heart and in his soul and maybe in his curiosity.’

‘We tell him nothing,’ the girl said. ‘The Gran Maestro can convey him any information we wish.’

Then she chewed well and solidly on her steak and said, ‘Do you think it is true that men make their own faces after fifty.’

‘I hope not. Because I would not sign for mine.’

‘You,’ she said. ‘You.’

‘Is the steak good?’ the Colonel asked.

‘It’s wonderful. How are your scaloppine?’

‘Very tender and the sauce is not at all sweet. Do you like the vegetables?’

‘The cauliflower is almost crisp; like celery.’

‘We should have some celery. But I don’t think there is any or the Gran Maestro would have brought it.’

‘Don’t we have fun with food? Imagine if we could eat together always.’

‘I’ve suggested it.’

‘Let’s not talk about that.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ve made a decision too. I’m going to chuck the army and live in this town, very simply, on my retirement pay.’

‘That’s wonderful. How do you look in civilian clothes?’

‘You’ve seen me.’

‘I know it, my dear. I said it for a joke. You make rough jokes sometimes too, you know.’

‘I’ll look all right. That is if you have a tailor here who can cut clothes.’

‘There isn’t one here, but there is in Rome. Can we drive together to Rome to get the clothes?’

‘Yes. And we will live outside the town at Viterbo and only go in for the fittings and for dinner in the evening. Then we’ll drive back in the night.’

‘Will we see cinema people and speak about them with candour and perhaps not have a drink with them?’

‘We’ll see them by the thousands.’

‘Will we see them being married for the second and third time and then being blessed by the Pope?’

‘If you go in for that kind of thing.’

‘I don’t,’ the girl said. ‘That’s one reason that I cannot marry you.’

‘I see,’ the Colonel said. ‘Thank you.’

‘But I will love you, whatever that means, and you and I know what it means very well, as long as either of us is alive and after.’

‘I don’t think you can love very much after you, yourself, are dead,’ the Colonel said.

He started to eat the artichoke taking a leaf at a time, and dipping them, heavy side down, into the deep saucer of sauce vinaigrette.

‘I don’t know whether you can either,’ the girl said. ‘But I will try. Don’t you feel better to be loved?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I feel as though I were out on some bare-assed hill where it was too rocky to dig, and the rocks all solid, but with nothing jutting, and no bulges, and all of a sudden instead of being there naked, I was armoured. Armoured and the eighty-eights not there.’

‘You should tell that to our writer friend with the craters of the moon face so he could write it to-night.’

‘I ought to tell it to Dante if he was around,’ the Colonel, suddenly gone as rough as the sea when a line squall comes up, said. ‘I’d tell him what I’d do if I were shifted, or ascended, into an armoured vehicle under such circumstances.’

Just then the Barone Alvarito came into the dining-room. He was looking for them and, being a hunter, he saw them instantly.

He came over to the table and kissed Renata’s hand, saying, ‘Ciao, Renata.’ He was almost tall, beautifully built in his town clothes, and he was the shyest man the Colonel had ever known. He was not shy from ignorance, nor from being ill at ease, nor from any defect. He was basically shy, as certain animals are, such as the Bongo that you will never see in the jungle, and that must be hunted with dogs.

‘My Colonel,’ he said. He smiled as only the truly shy can smile.

It was not the easy grin of the confident, nor the quick slashing smile of the extremely durable and the wicked. It had no relation with the poised, intently used smile of the courtesan or the politician. It was the strange, rare smile which rises from the deep, dark pit, deeper than a well, deep as a deep mine, that is within them.

‘I can only stay a moment. I came to tell you that it looks quite good for the shoot. The ducks are coming in heavily from the north. There are many big ducks. The ones you like,’ he smiled again.

‘Sit down, Alvarito. Please.’

‘No,’ the Barone Alvarito said. ‘We can meet at the garage at two-thirty if you like? You have your car?’

‘Yes.’

‘That makes it very good. Leaving at that hour, we will have time to see the ducks in the evening.’

‘Splendid,’ the Colonel said.

‘Ciao, then, Renata. Good-bye, my Colonel. Until two-thirty.’

‘We knew each other as children,’ the girl said. ‘But he was about three years older. He was born very old.’

‘Yes. I know. He is a good friend of mine.’

‘Do you think your compatriot has looked him up in Baedeker?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ the Colonel said. ‘Gran Maestro,’ he asked, ‘did my illustrious compatriot look up the Barone in Baedeker?’

‘Truly, my Colonel. I have not seen him pull his Baedeker during the meal.’

‘Give him full marks,’ the Colonel said. ‘Now look. I believe that the Valpolicella is better when it is newer. It is not a grand vin and bottling it and putting years on it only adds sediment. Do you agree?’

‘I agree.’

‘Then what should we do?’

‘My Colonel, you know that in a Great Hotel, wine must cost money. You cannot get Pinard at the Ritz. But I suggest that we get several fiascos of the good. You can say they come from the Contessa Renata’s estates and are a gift. Then I will have them decanted for you. This way, we will have better wine and make an impressive saving. I will explain it to the manager if you like. He is a very good man.’

‘Explain it to him,’ the Colonel said. ‘He’s not a man who drinks labels either.’

‘Agreed.’

‘In the meantime you might as well drink this. It is very good you know.’

‘It is,’ the Colonel said. ‘But it isn’t Chambertin.’

‘What did we use to drink?’

‘Anything,’ the Colonel said. ‘But now I seek perfection. Or, rather, not absolute perfection, but perfection for my money.’

‘I seek it, too,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘But rather vainly.’

‘What do you want for the end of the meal?’

‘Cheese,’ the Colonel said. ‘What do you want, Daughter?’

The girl had been quiet and a little withdrawn, since she had seen Alvarito. Something was going on in her mind, and it was an excellent mind. But, momentarily, she was not with them.

‘Cheese,’ she said. ‘Please.’

‘What cheese?’

‘Bring them all and we’ll look at them,’ the Colonel said.

The Gran Maestro left and the Colonel said, ‘What’s the matter, Daughter?’

‘Nothing. Never anything. Always nothing.’

‘You might as well pull out of it. We haven’t time for such luxuries.’

‘No. I agree. We will devote ourselves to the cheese.’

‘Do I have to take it like a corn cob?’

‘No,’ she said, not understanding the colloquialism, but understanding exactly what was meant, since it was she who had been doing the thinking. ‘Put your right hand in your pocket.’

‘Good,’ the Colonel said. ‘I will.’

He put his right hand in his pocket and felt what was there, first with the tips of his fingers, and then with the insides of his fingers, and then with the palm of his hand; his split hand.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘And now we begin the good part of it again. We will dedicate ourselves to the cheese with happiness.’

‘Excellent,’ the Colonel said. ‘I wonder what cheeses he has?’

‘Tell me about the last war,’ the girl said. ‘Then we will ride in our gondola in the cold wind.’

‘It was not very interesting,’ the Colonel said. ‘To us, of course, such things are always interesting. But there were only three, maybe four, phases that really interested me.’

‘Why?’

‘We were fighting a beaten enemy whose communications had been destroyed. We destroyed many divisions on paper, but they were ghost divisions. Not real ones. They had been destroyed by our tactical aviation before they ever got up. It was only really difficult in Normandy, due to the terrain, and when we made the break for Georgie Patton’s armour to go through and held it open on both sides.’

‘How do you make a break for armour to go through? Tell me, please.’

‘First you fight to take a town that controls all the main roads. Call the town St. Lo. Then you have to open up the roads by taking other towns and villages. The enemy has a main line of resistance, but he cannot bring up his divisions to counter-attack because the fighter-bombers catch them on the roads. Does this bore you? It bores the hell out of me.’

‘It does not bore me. I never heard it said understandably before.’

‘Thank you,’ the Colonel said. ‘Are you sure you want more of the sad science?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I love you, you know, and I would like to share it with you.’

‘Nobody shares this trade with anybody,’ the Colonel told her. ‘I’m just telling you how it works. I can insert anecdotes to make it interesting, or plausible.’

‘Insert some, please.’

‘The taking of Paris was nothing,’ the Colonel said. ‘It was only an emotional experience. Not a military operation. We killed a number of typists and the screen the Germans had left, as they always do, to cover their withdrawal. I suppose they figured they were not going to need a hell of a lot of office workers any more and they left them as soldiers.’

‘Was it not a great thing?’

‘The people of Leclerc, another jerk of the third or fourth water, whose death I celebrated with a magnum of Perrier-Jouet Brut 1942, shot a great number of rounds to make it seem important and because we had given them what they had to shoot with. But it was not important.’

‘Did you take part in it?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I think I could safely say, yes.’

‘Did you have no great impressions of it? After all, it was Paris and not everyone has taken it.’

‘The French, themselves, had taken it four days before. But the grand plan of what we called SHAEF, Supreme, get that word, Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, which included all the military politicians of the rear, and who wore a badge of shame in the form of a flaming something, while we wore a four-leafed clover as a designation, and for luck, had a master plan for the envelopment of the city. So we could not simply take it.

‘Also we had to wait for the possible arrival of General or Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who was unable to close, even, the gap at Falaise and found the going rather sticky and could not quite get there on time.’

‘You must have missed him,’ the girl said.

‘Oh, we did,’ the Colonel said. ‘No end.’

‘But was there nothing noble or truly happy about it?’

‘Surely,’ the Colonel told her. ‘We fought from Bas Meudon, and then the Porte de Saint Cloud, through streets I knew and loved and we had no deads and did as little damage as possible. At the Etoile I took Elsa Maxwell’s butler prisoner. It was a very complicated operation. He had been denounced as a Japanese sniper. A new thing. Several Parisians were alleged to have been killed by him. So we sent three men to the roof where he had taken refuge and he was an Indo-China boy.’

‘I begin to understand a little. But it is disheartening.’

‘It is always disheartening as hell. But you are not supposed to have a heart in this trade.’

‘But do you think it was the same in the time of the Grand Captains?’

‘I am quite sure it was worse.’

‘But you got your hand honourably?’

‘Yes. Very honourably. On a rocky, bare-assed hill.’

‘Please let me feel it,’ she said.

‘Just be careful around the centre,’ the Colonel said. ‘It’s split there and it still cracks open.’

‘You ought to write,’ the girl said. ‘I mean it truly. So someone would know about such things.’

‘No,’ the Colonel disagreed. ‘I have not the talent for it and I know too much. Almost any liar writes more convincingly than a man who was there.’

‘But other soldiers wrote.’

‘Yes. Maurice de Saxe. Frederick the Great. Mr. T’sun Su.’

‘But soldiers of our time.’

‘You use the word our with facility. I like it though.’

‘But didn’t many modern soldiers write?’

‘Many. But did you ever read them?’

‘No. I have read mostly the classics and I read the illustrated papers for the scandals. Also, I read your letters.’

‘Burn them,’ the Colonel said. ‘They are worthless.’

‘Please. Don’t be rough.’

‘I won’t. What can I tell you that won’t bore you?’

‘Tell me about when you were a General.’

‘Oh, that,’ he said and motioned to the Gran Maestro to bring champagne. It was Roederer Brut ‘42 and he loved it.

‘When you are a General you live in a trailer and your Chief of Staff lives in a trailer, and you have bourbon whisky when other people do not have it. Your Gs live in the C.P. I’d tell you what Gs are, but it would bore you. I’d tell you about G1, G2, G3, G4, G5 and on the other side there is always Kraut-6. But it would bore you. On the other hand, you have a map covered with plastic material, and on this you have three regiments composed of three battalions each. It is all marked in coloured pencil.

‘You have boundary lines so that when the battalions cross their boundaries they will not then fight each other. Each battalion is composed of five companies. All should be good, but some are good, and some are not so good. Also you have divisional artillery and a battalion of tanks and many spare parts. You live by co-ordinates.’

He paused while the Gran Maestro poured the Roederer Brut ‘42.

‘From Corps,’ he translated, unlovingly, cuerpo d’Armata, ‘they tell you what you must do, and then you decide how to do it. You dictate the orders or, most often, you give them by telephone. You ream out people you respect, to make them do what you know is fairly impossible, but is ordered. Also, you have to think hard, stay awake late and get up early.’

‘And you won’t write about this? Not even to please me?’

‘No,’ said the Colonel. ‘Boys who were sensitive and cracked and kept all their valid first impressions of their day of battle, or their three days, or even their four, write books. They are good books but can be dull if you have been there. Then others write to profit quickly from the war they never fought in. The ones who ran back to tell the news. The news is hardly exact. But they ran quickly with it. Professional writers who had jobs that prevented them from fighting wrote of combat that they could not understand, as though they had been there. I do not know what category of sin that comes under.

‘Also a nylon-smooth captain of the Navy who could not command a cat-boat wrote about the intimate side of the truly Big Picture. Everybody will write their book sooner or later. We might even draw a good one. But I don’t write, Daughter.’

He motioned for the Gran Maestro to fill the glasses.

‘Gran Maestro,’ he said. ‘Do you like to fight?’

‘No.’

‘But we fought?’

‘Yes. Too much.’

‘How is your health?’

‘Wonderful except for the ulcers and a small cardiac condition.’

‘No,’ the Colonel said, and his heart rose and he felt it choke him. ‘You only told me about the ulcers.’

‘Well, you know now,’ the Gran Maestro said and did not finish the sentence and he smiled his best and clearest smile that came as solid as the sun rises.

‘How many times?’

The Gran Maestro held up two fingers as a man might do giving odds where he had credit, and all the betting was on the nod.

‘I’m ahead of you,’ the Colonel said. ‘But let’s not be macabre. Ask Donna Renata if she wishes more of this excellent wine.’

‘You did not tell me there were more,’ the girl said. ‘You owe it to me to tell me.’

‘There has been nothing since we were together last.’

‘Do you think it breaks for me? If so, I would come and simply be with you and care for you.’

‘It’s just a muscle,’ the Colonel said. ‘Only it is the main muscle. It works as perfectly as a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The trouble is you cannot send it to the Rolex representative when it goes wrong. When it stops, you just do not know the time. You’re dead.’

‘Don’t please talk about it.’

‘You asked me,’ the Colonel said.

‘And that pitted man with the caricature face? He has no such thing?’

‘Of course not,’ the Colonel told her. ‘If he is a mediocre writer he will live for ever.’

‘But you’re not a writer. How do you know this?’

‘No,’ the Colonel said. ‘By the grace of God. But I’ve read several books. We have a lot of time to read when we are unmarried. Not as much as the merchant marine maybe. But plenty. I can tell one writer from another and I tell you that a mediocre writer has a long span of life. They ought to all draw longevity pay.’

‘Could you tell me any anecdotes, and we stop talking about this, which is my true sorrow?’

‘I can tell you hundreds of them. All true.’

‘Tell me just one. Then we will finish this wine and then go in the gondola.’

‘Do you think you will be warm enough?’

‘Oh, I’m sure I will.’

‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ the Colonel said. ‘Everything about war bores those who have not made it. Except the tales of the liars.’

‘I would like to know about the taking of Paris.’

‘Why? Because I told you that you looked like Marie Antoinette in the tumbril?’

‘No. I was complimented by that and I know we are a little alike in profile. But I have never been in any tumbril, and I would like to hear about Paris. When you love someone and he is your hero, you like to hear about the places and the things.’

‘Please turn your head,’ the Colonel said, ‘and I will tell you. Gran Maestro is there any more in that wretched bottle?’

‘No,’ the Gran Maestro answered.

‘Then bring another.’

‘I have one already iced.’

‘Good. Serve it. Now, Daughter, we parted from the column of the General Leclerc at Clamart. They went to Montrouge and the Porte d’Orleans and we went directly to Bas Meudon and secured the bridge of the Porte de Saint Cloud. Is this too technical and does it bore you?’

‘No.’

‘It would be better with a map.’

‘Go on.’

‘We secured the bridge and established a bridgehead on the other side of the river and we threw the Germans, living and dead, who had defended the bridge, into the Seine River,’ he stopped. ‘It was a token defence of course. They should have blown it. We threw all these Germans into the River Seine. They were nearly all office workers, I believe.’

‘Go on.’

‘The next morning, we were informed that the Germans had strong points at various places, and artillery on Mount Valerien, and that tanks were roaming the streets. A portion of this was true. We were also requested not to enter too rapidly as the General Leclerc was to take the city. I complied with this request and entered as slowly as I could.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘You hold up your attack two hours and you drink champagne whenever it is offered to you by patriots, collaborators or enthusiasts.’

‘But was there nothing wonderful nor great, the way it is in books?’

‘Of course. There was the city itself. The people were very happy. Old general officers were walking about in their moth-balled uniforms. We were very happy, too, not to have to fight.’

‘Did you not have to fight at all?’

‘Only three times. Then not seriously.’

‘But was that all you had to fight to take such a city?’

‘Daughter, we fought twelve times from Ranbouillet to enter the city. But only two of them were worth describing as fights. Those at Toussus le Noble and at Le Buc. The rest was the necessary garnishing of a dish. I really did not need to fight at all except at those two places.’

‘Tell me some true things about fighting.’

‘Tell me you love me.’

‘I love you,’ the girl said. ‘You can publish it in the Gazzettina if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.’

‘I better try to tell you something pretty good,’ the Colonel said. ‘First I can tell you that I love you, Period.’

‘Why don’t you buy some good glass?’ the girl asked, suddenly. ‘We could go to Murano together.’

‘I don’t know anything about glass.’

‘I could teach you. It would be fun.’

‘We lead too nomadic a life for good glass.’

‘But when you retire and live here.’

‘We’ll get some then.’

‘I wish that that was now.’

‘So do I, except that I go duck shooting to-morrow and that to-night is to-night.’

‘Can I come duck shooting?’

‘Only if Alvarito asks you.’

‘I can make him ask me.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘It isn’t polite to doubt what your daughter says when she is old enough not to lie.’

‘All right, Daughter. I withdraw the doubt.’

‘Thank you. For that I will not go and be a nuisance. I will stay in Venice and go to Mass with Mother and my aunt and my great-aunt and visit my poors. I am an only child so I have many duties.’

‘I always wondered what you did.’

‘That’s what I do. Also, I’ll have my maid wash my head and give me a manicure and a pedicure.’

‘You can’t do that because the shoot is on Sunday.’

‘Then I’ll do that on Monday. On Sunday, I will read all the illustrated papers including the outrageous ones.’

‘Maybe they’ll have pictures of Miss Bergman. Do you still want to be like her?’

‘Not any more,’ the girl said. ‘I want to be like me only much, much better and I want to have you love me.’

‘Also,’ she said suddenly and un-maskingly, ‘I want to be like you. Can I be like you a little while to-night?’

‘Of course,’ the Colonel said. ‘In what town are we anyway?’

‘Venice,’ she said. ‘The best town, I think.’

‘I quite agree. And thank you for not asking me for more war episodes.’

‘Oh, you are going to have to tell them to me later.’

‘Have to?’ the Colonel said, and the cruelty and resolution showed in his strange eyes as clearly as when the hooded muzzle of the gun of a tank swings towards you.

‘Did you say have to, Daughter?’

‘I said it. But I did not mean it in that way. Or, if I did wrong, I am sorry. I meant will you please tell me more true episodes later? And explain me the things I do not understand?’

‘You can use have to if you want, Daughter. The hell with it.’

He smiled and his eyes were as kind as they ever were, which was not too kind, as he knew. But there was nothing now that he could do about it except to try to be kind to his last and true and only love.

‘I don’t really mind, Daughter. Please believe me. I know about command and, at your age, I used to take considerable pleasure in exercising it.’

‘But I don’t want to command,’ the girl said. In spite of her resolution not to cry, her eyes were wet. ‘I wish to serve you.’

‘I know. But you wish to command, too. There’s nothing wrong in that. All people such as us have it.’

‘Thank you for the such as us.’

‘It wasn’t hard to say,’ the Colonel said. ‘Daughter,’ he added.

Just then the concierge came to the table and said, ‘Excuse me, my Colonel. There is a man outside, I believe he is a servant of yours, my lady, with quite a large package which he says is for the Colonel. Should I keep it in the storeroom or have it sent to your room?’

‘To my room,’ the Colonel said.

‘Please,’ the girl said. ‘Can’t we look at it here? We don’t care about anyone here, do we?’

‘Have it unwrapped and brought in here.’

‘Very good.’

‘Later, you may have it taken with great care to my room and have it wrapped, solidly, for transport at noon to-morrow.’

‘Very good, my Colonel.’

‘Are you excited to see it?’ the girl asked.

‘Very,’ said the Colonel. ‘Gran Maestro, some more of that Roederer, please, and please place a chair in such a position that we may view a portrait. We are devotees of the pictorial arts.’

‘There’s no more Roederer cold,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘But if you would like some Perrier-Jouet — —’

‘Bring it,’ the Colonel said and added, ‘Please.’

‘I don’t talk like Georgie Patton,’ the Colonel told her. ‘I don’t have to. And besides he’s dead.’

‘Poor man.’

‘Yes. Poor man all his life. Although quite rich in money and with a lot of armour.’

‘Do you have anything against armour?’

‘Yes. Most of the people inside of it. It makes men into bullies which is the first step towards cowardice; true cowardice, I mean. Perhaps it is a little complicated by claustrophobia.’

Then he looked at her and smiled and regretted taking her beyond her depth, as you might take a new swimmer on a shallow, shelving beach, into too deep water; and he sought to reassure her.

‘You forgive me, Daughter. Much of what I say is unjust. But it is truer than the things that you will read in Generals’ memoirs. After a man gets one star, or more, the truth becomes as difficult for him to attain as the Holy Grail was in our ancestors’ time.’

‘But you were a general officer.’

‘Not for too damn long,’ the Colonel said. ‘Now captains,’ the General said, ‘they know the exact truth and they can mostly tell it to you. If they can’t, you reclassify them.’

‘Would you reclassify me if I lied?’

‘It would depend on what you lied about.’

‘I’m not going to lie about anything. I don’t want to be reclassified. It sounds horrible.’

‘It is,’ the Colonel said. ‘And you send them back to have it done to them with eleven different copies of why it should be done, every one of which you sign.’

‘Did you reclassify many?’

‘Plenty.’

The concierge came into the room with the portrait, carrying it in its big frame, much as a ship moves when she is carrying too much sail.

‘Get two chairs,’ the Colonel said to the second waiter, ‘and put them there. See that the canvas does not touch the chairs. And hold it so it does not slip.’

Then to the girl he said, ‘We’ll have to change that frame.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was not my choice. Take it unframed with you and we’ll choose a good frame next week. Now look at it. Not at the frame. At what it says, or does not say, of me.’

It was a beautiful portrait; neither cold, nor snobbish, nor stylized, nor modern. It was the way you would want your girl painted if Tintoretto were still around and, if he were not around, you settled for Velasquez. It was not the way either of them painted. It was simply a splendid portrait painted, as they sometimes are, in our time.

‘It’s wonderful,’ the Colonel said. ‘It is truly lovely.’

The concierge and the second waiter were holding it and looking at it around the edges. The Gran Maestro was admiring fully. The American, two tables down, was looking at it with his journalistic eyes, wondering who painted it. The back of the canvas was to the other diners.

‘It is wonderful,’ the Colonel said. ‘But you can’t give me that.’

‘I already have,’ the girl said. ‘I’m sure my hair was never that long over my shoulders.’

‘I think it probably was.’

‘I could try to let it get that long if you want.’

‘Try,’ the Colonel said. ‘You great beauty you. I love you very much. You and you portrayed on canvas.’

‘Tell the waiters if you like. I’m sure it won’t come as a great shock to them.’

‘Take the canvas upstairs to my room,’ the Colonel said to the concierge. ‘Thank you very much for bringing it in. If the price is right, I am going to buy it.’

‘The price is right,’ the girl said to him. ‘Should we have them take it and the chairs down and make a special showing of it for your compatriot? The Gran Maestro could tell him the address of the painter and he could visit the picturesque studio.’

‘It is a very lovely portrait,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘But it should be taken to the room. One should never let Roederer or Perrier-Jouet do the talking.’

‘Take it to the room, please.’

‘You said please without a pause before it.’

‘Thank you,’ the Colonel said. ‘I am very deeply moved by the portrait and I am not entirely responsible for what I say.’

‘Let’s neither of us be responsible.’

‘Agreed,’ the Colonel said. ‘The Gran Maestro is really very responsible. He always was.’

‘No,’ the girl said. ‘I think he did not only from responsibility but from malice. We all have malice, you know, of some kind or another in this town. I think perhaps he did not want the man to have even a journalist’s look into happiness.’

‘Whatever that is.’

‘I learned that phrase from you and now you have re-learned it back from me.’

‘That’s the way it goes,’ the Colonel said. ‘What you win in Boston you lose in Chicago.’

‘I don’t understand that at all.’

‘Too hard to explain,’ the Colonel said. Then, ‘No. Of course it isn’t. Making things clear is my main trade. The hell with being too hard to explain. It is like professional football, calcio. What you win in Milano you lose in Torino.’

‘I don’t care about football.’

‘Neither do I,’ the Colonel said. ‘Especially not about the Army and Navy game and when the very high brass speaks in terms of American football so they can understand, themselves, what they are talking of.’

‘I think we will have a good time to-night. Even under the circumstances, whatever they are.’

‘Should we take this new bottle in the gondola?’

‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘But with deep glasses. I’ll tell the Gran Maestro. Let’s get our coats and go.’

‘Good. I’ll take some of this medicine and sign for the G.M. and we’ll go.’

‘I wish it was me taking the medicine instead of you.’

‘I’m glad as hell it isn’t,’ the Colonel said. ‘Should we pick our gondola or have them bring one to the landing?’

‘Let’s gamble and have them bring one to the landing. What do we have to lose?’

‘Nothing, I guess. Probably nothing.’

Chapter XIII

They went out the side door of the hotel to the imbarcadero and the wind hit them. The light from the hotel shone on the blackness of the gondola and made the water green. She looks as lovely as a good horse or as a racing shell, the Colonel thought. Why have I never seen a gondola before? What hand or eye framed that darked symmetry?

‘Where should we go?’ the girl asked.

Her hair, in the light from the hotel door and window, as she stood on the dock by the black gondola, was blowing back in the wind, so she looked like the figure-head on a ship. The rest of it, too, the Colonel thought.

‘Let’s just ride through the park,’ the Colonel said. ‘Or through the Bois with the top down. Let him take us out to Armenonville.’

‘Will we go to Paris?’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said. ‘Tell him to take us for an hour where the going is easiest. I don’t want to drive him into that wind.’

‘The tide is quite high with this wind,’ the girl said. ‘Some of our places he couldn’t get under the bridges. May I tell him where to go?’

‘Of course, Daughter.’

‘Stow that ice bucket aboard,’ the Colonel said to the second waiter, who had come out with them.

‘The Gran Maestro said to tell you, as you embarked, that this bottle of wine was his present.’

‘Thank him properly and tell him he can’t do that.’

‘He had better go into the wind a little first,’ the girl said. ‘Then I know how he should go.’

‘The Gran Maestro sent this,’ the second waiter said.

It was a folded, old U.S.O.D. blanket. Renata was talking to the gondoliere, her hair blowing. The gondoliere wore a heavy blue navy sweater and he was bare-headed too.

‘Thank him,’ the Colonel said.

He slipped a bill into the second waiter’s hand. The second waiter returned it. ‘You already made the notation on the check. Neither you nor I nor the Gran Maestro are starving.’

‘What about the moglie and the bambini?’

‘I don’t have that. Your mediums smacked our house in Treviso.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You needn’t be,’ the second waiter said. ‘You were a foot soldier as I was.’

‘Permit me to be sorry.’

‘Sure,’ the second waiter said. ‘And what the hell difference does it make? Be happy, my Colonel and be happy, my Lady.’

They got down into the gondola and there was the same magic, as always, of the light hull and the sudden displacement that you made and then the trimming in the dark privacy and then the second trimming, as the gondoliere started to scull, laying her partly on her side so that he would have more control.

‘Now,’ the girl said. ‘We are in our home and I love you. Please kiss me and put all love into it.’

The Colonel held her close, with her head thrown back and kissed her until there was nothing left of the kiss but desperation.

‘I love you.’

‘Whatever that means,’ she interrupted.

‘I love you and I know whatever that means. The picture is lovely. But there is no word for what you are.’

‘Wild,’ she said. ‘Or careless or unkempt?’

‘No.’

‘The last was one of the first words I learned from my governess. It means you do not comb your hair enough. Neglectful is when you do not brush one hundred strokes at night.’

‘I’m going to run my hand through it and make it unkempter still.’

‘Your hurt hand?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re sitting on the wrong sides for that. Change over.’

‘Good. That is a sensible order couched in simple language and easily understood.’

It was fun moving over, trying not to disturb the balance of the gondola, but having to trim again carefully.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘But hold me tightly with the other arm.’

‘You know just what you want?’

‘I do indeed. Is it un-maidenly? I learned that word, too, from my governess.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s lovely. Pull up the blanket good and feel that wind.’

‘It’s from the high mountains.’

‘Yes. And beyond there it’s from somewhere else.’

The Colonel heard the slap of the waves and he felt the wind come sharply and the rough familiarity of the blanket and then he felt the girl cold-warm and lovely and with upraised breasts that his left hand coasted lightly over. Then he ran his bad hand through her hair once, twice and three times and then he kissed her and it was worse than desperation.

‘Please,’ she said, from almost underneath the blanket. ‘Let me kiss now.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Me again.’

The wind was very cold and lashed their faces but under the blanket there was no wind nor nothing; only his ruined hand that searched for the island in the great river with the high steep banks.

‘That’s it,’ she said.

He kissed her then and he searched for the island, finding it and losing it and then finding it for good. For good and for bad, he thought and for good and for all.

‘My darling,’ he said. ‘My well beloved. Please.’

‘No. Just hold me very tight and hold the high ground, too.’

The Colonel said nothing, because he was assisting, or had made an act of presence, at the only mystery that he believed in except the occasional bravery of man.

‘Please don’t move,’ the girl said. ‘Then move a great amount.’

The Colonel, lying under the blanket in the wind, knowing it is only what man does for woman that he retains; except what he does for his fatherland or his motherland, however you get the reading, proceeded.

‘Please, darling,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t think I can stand it.’

‘Don’t think of anything. Don’t think of anything at all.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Don’t think.’

‘Oh please let’s not talk.’

‘Is it right?’

‘You know.’

‘You’re sure.’

‘Oh please not talk. Please.’

Yes, he thought. Please and please again.

She said nothing and neither did he, and when the great bird had flown far out of the closed window of the gondola and was lost and gone, neither of them said anything. He held her head lightly with his good arm and the other arm held the high ground now.

‘Please put it where it should be,’ she said. ‘Your hand.’

‘Should we?’

‘No. Just hold me tight and try to love me true.’

‘I love you true,’ he said and just then the gondola turned to the left, quite sharply and the wind was on his right cheek and he said, with his old eyes catching the outline of the Palace where they turned and noting it, ‘You’re in the lee now, Daughter.’

‘But it is too soon now. Don’t you know how a woman feels?’

‘No. Only what you tell me.’

‘Thank you for the you. But don’t you really know?’

‘No. I never asked, I guess.’

‘Guess now,’ she said. ‘And please wait until after we have gone under the second bridge.’

‘Take a glass of this,’ the Colonel said, reaching accurately and well for the champagne bucket with the ice and uncorking the bottle the Gran Maestro had uncorked and then placed a common wine cork in.

‘This is good for you, Daughter. It is good for all the ills that all of us have and for all sadness and indecision.’

‘I have none of those,’ she said, speaking grammatically as her governess had taught her. ‘I am just a woman, or a girl, or whatever that is, doing whatever it is she should not do. Let’s do it again, please, now I am in the lee.’

‘Where is the island now and in what river?’

‘You are making the discovery. I am only the unknown country.’

‘Not too unknown,’ the Colonel said.

‘Please don’t be rude,’ the girl said. ‘And please attack gently and with the same attack as before.’

‘It’s no attack,’ the Colonel said. ‘It is something else.’

‘Whatever it is, whatever it is, while I’m still in the lee.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘Yes, now if you want, or will accept from kindness.’

‘Please, yes.’

She talks like a gentle cat, though the poor cats cannot speak, the Colonel thought. But then he stopped thinking and he did not think for a long time.

The gondola now was in one of the secondary canals. When it had turned from the Grand Canal, the wind had swung it so the gondoliere had to shift all his weight as ballast and the Colonel and the girl had shifted too, under the blanket, with the wind getting under the edge of the blanket; wildly.

They had not spoken for a long time and the Colonel had noted that the gondola had only inches free in passing under the last bridge.

‘How are you, Daughter?’

‘I’m quite lovely.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Please don’t ask such silly things.’

‘The tide is very high and we only just made that last bridge.’

‘I think I know where we are going. I was born here.’

‘I’ve made mistakes in my home town,’ the Colonel said. ‘Being born there isn’t everything.’

‘It is very much,’ the girl said. ‘You know that. Please hold me very tightly so we can be a part of each other for a little while.’

‘We can try,’ the Colonel said.

‘Couldn’t I be you?’

‘That’s awfully complicated. We could try of course.’

‘I’m you now,’ she said. ‘And I just took the city of Paris.’

‘Jesus, Daughter,’ he said. ‘You’ve got an awful lot of problems on your hands. The next thing, they will parade the twenty-eighth division through.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘I do.’

‘Were they not good?’

‘Sure. They had fine commanders, too. But they were National Guard and hard luck. What you call a T.S. division. Get your T.S. slip from the chaplain.’

‘I understand none of those things.’

‘They aren’t worth explaining,’ the Colonel said.

‘Will you tell me some true things about Paris? I love it so much and when I think of you taking it, then, it is as though I were riding in this gondola with Marechal Ney.’

‘A no good job,’ the Colonel said. ‘Anyway, not after he fought all those rear-guard actions coming back from that big Russian town. He used to fight ten, twelve, fifteen times a day. Maybe more. Afterwards, he couldn’t recognize people. Please don’t get in any gondolas with him.’

‘He was always one of my great heroes.’

‘Yeah. Mine too. Until Quatre Bras. Maybe it wasn’t Quatre Bras. I’m getting rusty. Give it the generic title of Waterloo.’

‘Was he bad there?’

‘Awful,’ the Colonel told her. ‘Forget it. Too many rear-guard actions coming back from Moskova.’

‘But they called him the bravest of the brave.’

‘You can’t eat on that. You have to be that, always, and then be the smartest of the smart. Then you need a lot of stuff coming up.’

‘Tell me about Paris, please. We should not make more love, I know.’

‘I don’t know it. Who says it?’

‘I say it because I love you.’

‘All right. You said it and you love me. So we act on that. The hell with it.’

‘Do you think we could once more if it would not hurt you?’

‘Hurt me?’ the Colonel said. ‘When the hell was I ever hurt?’

Chapter XIV

‘Please don’t be bad,’ she said, pulling the blanket over them both. ‘Please drink a glass of this with me. You know you’ve been hurt.’

‘Exactly,’ the Colonel said. ‘Let’s forget it.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I learned that word, or those two words from you. We have forgotten it.’

‘Why do you like the hand?’ the Colonel asked, placing it where he should.

‘Please don’t pretend to be stupid and please let’s not think of anything, or anything, or anything.’

‘I am stupid,’ the Colonel said. ‘But I won’t think of anything or anything nor of nothing nor of his brother, to-morrow.’

‘Please be good and kind.’

‘I will be. And I will tell you, now, a military secret. Top Secret equals British Most Secret. I love you.’

‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘And you put it nicely.’

‘I’m nice,’ the Colonel said and checked on the bridge that was coming up and saw there was clearance. ‘That’s the first thing people notice about me.’

‘I always use the wrong words,’ the girl said. ‘Please just love me. I wish it was me who could love you.’

‘You do.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘With all my heart.’

They were going with the wind now and they were both tired.

‘Do you think — —’

‘I don’t think,’ the girl said.

‘Well try and think.’

‘I will.’

‘Drink a glass of this.’

‘Why not? It’s very good.’

It was. There was still ice in the bucket and the wine was cold and clear.

‘Can I stay at the Gritti?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It wouldn’t be right. For them. Nor you. The hell with me.’

‘Then I suppose I should go home.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘That is the logical supposition.’

‘That is an awful way to say a sad thing. Can’t we even pretend some things?’

‘No. I’ll take you home and you sleep good and well and to-morrow we will meet where and when you say.’

‘May I call the Gritti?’

‘Of course. I’ll always be awake. Will you call when you are awake?’

‘Yes. But why do you always wake so early?’

‘It is a business habit.’

‘Oh, I wish you were not in that business and that you were not going to die.’

‘So do I,’ said the Colonel. ‘But I’m getting out of the business.’

‘Yes,’ she said, sleepily and comfortably. ‘Then we go to Rome and get the clothes.’

‘And live happily ever after.’

‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘Please, please, don’t. You know I made the resolution not to cry.’

‘You’re crying now,’ the Colonel said. ‘What the hell have you got to lose on that resolution?’

‘Take me home, please.’

‘That’s what I was doing in the first place,’ the Colonel told her.

‘Be kind once first.’

‘I will,’ the Colonel said.

After they, or the Colonel, rather, had paid the gondoliere who was unknowing, yet knowing all; solid, sound, respectful and trustworthy; they walked into the Piazzetta and then across the great, cold, wind-swept square that was hard and old under their feet. They walked holding close and hard in their sorrow and their happiness.

‘This is the place where the German shot the pigeons,’ the girl said.

‘We probably killed him,’ the Colonel said. ‘Or his brother. Maybe we hanged him. I wouldn’t know. I’m not in C.I.D.’

‘Do you love me still on these water-worn, cold and old stones?’

‘Yes. I’d like to spread a bed roll here and prove it.’

‘That would be more barbarous than the pigeon shooter.’

‘I’m barbarous,’ the Colonel said.

‘Not always.’

‘Thank you for the not always.’

‘We turn here.’

‘I think I know that. When are they going to tear that damned Cinema Palace down and put up a real cathedral? That’s what T5 Jackson wants.’

‘When someone brings Saint Mark back another time under a load of pork from Alexandria.’

‘That was a Torcello boy.’

‘You’re a Torcello boy.’

‘Yes. I’m a Basso Piave boy and a Grappa boy straight here from Pertica. I’m a Pasubio boy, too, if you know what that means. It was worse just to live there than to fight anywhere else. In the platoon they used to share anyone’s gonococci brought from Schio and carried in a match-box. They used to share this just so they could leave because it was intolerable.’

‘But you stayed.’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m always the last man to leave the party, fiesta I mean, not as in political party. The truly unpopular guest.’

‘Should we go?’

‘I thought you had made up your mind.’

‘I had. But when you said it about unpopular guest it was unmade.’

‘Keep it made up.’

‘I can hold a decision.’

‘I know. You can hold any damn thing. But, Daughter, sometimes you don’t just hold. That is for stupids. Sometimes you have to switch fast.’

‘I’ll switch if you like.’

‘No. I think the decision was sound.’

‘But won’t it be an awfully long time until morning?’

‘That all depends on whether one has luck or not.’

‘I should sleep well.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘At your age if you can’t sleep they ought to take you out and hang you.’

‘Oh please.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I meant shoot you.’

‘We are nearly home and you could be kind now if you wanted.’

‘I’m so kind I stink. Let somebody else be kind.’

They were in front of the palace now and there it was; the palace. There was nothing to do now but pull the bell cord, or enter with the key. I’ve been lost in this place, the Colonel thought, and I was never lost in my life.

‘Please kiss me good night, kindly.’

The Colonel did and loved her so he could not bear it.

She opened the door with the key, which was in her bag. Then she was gone and the Colonel was alone, with the worn pavement, the wind, which still held in the north and the shadows from where a light went on. He walked home.

Only tourists and lovers take gondolas, he thought. Except to cross the canal in the places where there are no bridges. I ought to go to Harry’s, probably, or some damn place. But I think I’ll go home.

Chapter XV

It was really home, if a hotel room can be so described. His pyjamas were laid on the bed. There was a bottle of Valpolicella by the reading light and by the bed a bottle of mineral water, in an ice bucket with a glass beside it on the silver tray. The portrait had been deframed and was placed on two chairs where he could see it from the bed.

The Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune lay on the bed beside his three pillows. He used three pillows, as Amaldo knew, and his extra bottle of medicine, not the one that he carried in his pocket, was beside the reading light. The inner doors of the armoire, the mirrored ones, were opened in such a way that he could see the portrait from the side. His scuffed slippers were by the bed.

I’ll buy it, the Colonel said, to himself, since there was no one else there except the portrait.

He opened the Valpolicella which had been uncorked, and then re-corked, carefully, precisely and lovingly and poured himself a glass into the glass which was much better than any hotel should use which was faced with breakage.

‘Here’s to you, Daughter,’ he said. ‘You beauty and lovely. Do you know, that, among other things, you smell good always? You smell wonderfully even in a high wind or under a blanket or kissing good night. You know almost no one does and you don’t use scent.’

She looked at him from the portrait and said nothing.

‘The hell with it,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to talk to a picture.’

What do you think went wrong to-night? he thought.

Me, I guess. Well I will try to be a good boy to-morrow all day; starting at first light.

‘Daughter,’ he said, and he was talking to her and not to a picture now. ‘Please know I love you and that I wish to be delicate and good. And please stay with me always now.’

The picture was the same.

The Colonel took out the emeralds from his pocket and looked at them, feeling them slide, cold and yet warm, as they take warmth and as all good stones have warmth, from his bad hand into his good hand.

I should have put these in an envelope and locked them up, he thought. But what the —— security is there better than I can give them? I have to get these back to you fast, Daughter.

It was fun, though. And they’re not worth more than a quarter of a million. What I would make in four hundred years. Have to check that figure.

He put the stones in the pocket of his pyjamas and put a handkerchief over them. Then he buttoned the pocket. The first sound thing you learn, he thought, is to have flaps and buttons on all your pockets. I imagine that I learned it too early.

The stones felt good. They were hard and warm against his flat, hard, old and warm chest, and he noted how the wind was blowing, looked at the portrait, poured another glass of Valpolicella and then started to read the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.

I ought to take the pills, he thought. But the hell with the pills.

Then he took them just the same and went on reading the New York Herald. He was reading Red Smith and he liked him very much.

Chapter XVI

The colonel woke before daylight and checked that there was no one sleeping with him.

The wind was still blowing hard and he went to the open windows to check the weather. There was no light as yet in the east across the Grand Canal, but his eyes could see how rough the water was. Be a hell of a tide to-day, he thought. Probably flood the square. That’s always fun. Except for the pigeons.

He went to the bathroom, taking the Herald Tribune and Red Smith with him, as well as a glass of Valpolicella. Damn I’ll be glad when the Gran Maestro gets those big fiascos, he thought. This wine gets awfully dreggy at the end.

He sat there, with his newspaper, thinking of the things of that day.

There would be the telephone call. But it might be very late because she would be sleeping late. The young sleep late, he thought, and the beautiful sleep half again as late. She certainly would not call early and the shops did not open until nine or a little later.

Hell, he thought, I have these damned stones. How could anyone do a thing like that?

You know how, he said to himself, reading the ads. in the back of the paper. You’ve put it on the line enough times. It isn’t crazy or morbid. She just wanted to put it on the line. It was a good thing it was me, he thought.

That is the only good thing about being me, he considered. Well I’m me, God-damn it. For better or for much worse. How would you like to sit on the can as you have sat almost every morning of your damned life with this in your pocket?

He was addressing no one, except, perhaps, posterity.

How many mornings have you sat in the row with all the others? That’s the worst of it. That and shaving. Or you go off to be alone and think or not think and pick a good piece of cover and there are two riflemen there already, or some boy asleep.

There’s no more privacy in the army than in a professional —— . I’ve never been in a professional —— but I imagine they run it much the same. I could learn to run one, he thought.

Then I’d make all my leading —— characters Ambassadors and the unsuccessful ones could be Corps commanders or command military districts in peace time. Don’t be bitter, boy, he said to himself. It’s too early in the morning and your duty’s not completed yet.

What would you do with their wives, he asked himself? Buy them new hats or shoot them, he said. It’s all part of the same process.

He looked at himself in the mirror, set in the half-closed door. It showed him at a slight angle. It’s a deflexion shot, he said to himself and they didn’t lead me enough. Boy, he said, you certainly are a beat-up, old looking bastard.

Now you have to shave and look at that face while you do it. Then you must get a hair-cut. That’s easy in this town. You’re a Colonel of Infantry, boy. You can’t go around looking like Joan of Arc or General (Breveted) George Armstrong Custer. That beautiful horse-cavalryman. I guess it is fun to be that way and have a loving wife and use sawdust for brains. But it must have seemed like the wrong career to him when they finished up on that hill above the Little Big Horn, with the ponies making the circle around them in all the dust and the sage brush crushed by the hooves of the horses of the other people and nothing left to him for the rest of his life but that old lovely black powder smell and his own people shooting each other and themselves, because they were afraid of what the squaws would do to them.

The body was unspeakably mutilated, they used to put in this same paper. And on that hill to know you’d made one real mistake, finally and for good and complete with true handles. Poor horse-cavalryman, he thought. The end of all his dreams. That’s one good thing about being an Infantryman. You never have any dreams except bad dreams.

Well, he said to himself, we’re finished here and pretty soon there will be good light and I can see the portrait. I’ll be damned if I’ll turn that in. I keep that.

Oh Christ, he said, I wonder what she looks like now sleeping. I know how she looks, he said to himself. Wonderful. She sleeps as though she had not gone to sleep. As though she were just resting. I hope she is, he thought. I hope she’s resting well. Christ Jesus how I love her and I hope I never do her harm.

Chapter XVII

When it started to be light, the Colonel saw the portrait. He, very probably, saw it as quickly as any man who was civilized and had to read and sign the forms he did not believe in, could see an object, as soon as it was visible. Yes, he said to himself, I have eyes and they have fairly fast perception still and once they had ambition. I have led my Ruffians where they were well peppered. There are but three of the two hundred and fifty of them left alive and they are for the town’s end to beg during life.

That’s from Shakespeare, he told the portrait. The winner and still the undisputed champion.

Someone might take him, in a short bout. But I would rather revere him. Did you ever read King Lear, Daughter? Mr. Gene Tunney did and he was the champion of the world. But I read it too. Soldiers care for Mr. Shakespeare too, though it may seem impossible.

You have anything to say in your defence except to put your head back? he asked the portrait. You want some more, Shakespeare?

You don’t have to defend. You just rest and leave it as it is. It’s no good. Your defence and my defence is no damn good. But who could tell you to go out and hang yourself the way we do?

Nobody, he said to himself and to the portrait. And certainly not me.

He put his good hand down and found that the room waiter had left a second bottle of Valpolicella alongside of where the first had been.

If you love a country, the Colonel thought, you might as well admit it. Sure, admit it, boy.

I have loved three and lost them thrice. Give a credit. We’ve re-took two. Retaken, he corrected.

And we will retake the other one, General Fat Ass Franco on his shooting stick with the advice of his doctor and tame ducks and a screen of Moorish cavalry when he shoots.

Yes, he said softly to the girl who looked at him clearly now in the first and best light.

We will retake and they will all be hung upside down outside of filling stations. You have been warned, he added.

‘Portrait,’ he said, ‘why the hell can’t you just get into bed with me instead of being eighteen solid stone blocks away. Maybe more. I’m not as sharp now as I was; whenever.’

‘Portrait,’ he said to the girl and to the portrait and to the girl both; but there wasn’t any girl and the portrait was as it was painted.

‘Portrait, keep your God-damn chin up so you can break my heart easier.’

It certainly was a lovely present, the Colonel thought.

‘Can you manoeuvre?’ he asked the portrait. ‘Good and fast?’

Portrait said nothing and the Colonel answered. You know damn well she can. She’d out-manoeuvre you the best day you were ever born and she would stay and fight where you would —— , discreetly.

‘Portrait,’ he said. ‘Boy or daughter or my one true love or whatever it is; you know what it is, portrait.’

The Portrait, as before, did not answer. But the Colonel, who was a General now again, early in the morning at the only time he really knew, and with Valpolicella, knew as absolutely as though he had just read his third Wassermann that there was no —— in Portrait and he felt shame for having talked to Portrait roughly.

‘I’ll be the best God-damned boy you ever witnessed to-day. And you can tell your principal that.’

Portrait, as was her fashion, was silent.

She probably would speak to a horse-cavalryman, the General, for now he had two stars and they grated on his shoulders and showed white in the vague, scuffed red on the plaque in front of his jeep. He never used command cars, nor semi-armoured vehicles complete with sand-bags.

‘The hell with you, Portrait,’ he said. ‘Or get your T.S. slip from the universal chaplain of us all, with combined religions. You ought to be able to eat on that.’

‘The hell with you,’ the Portrait said, without speaking. ‘You low class soldier.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said, for now he was a Colonel again and had relinquished all his former rank.

‘I love you, Portrait, very much. But don’t get rough with me. I love you very much because you are beautiful. But I love the girl better, a million times better, hear it?’

There was no sign that she heard it, so he tired of it.

‘You are in a fixed position, Portrait,’ he said. ‘Without or with any frame. And I am going to manoeuvre.’

The portrait was as silent as she had been since the concierge had brought her into the room, and aided and abetted by the second waiter, had shown her to the Colonel and to the girl.

The Colonel looked at her and saw she was indefensible, now that the light was good, or almost good.

He saw, too, that she was the portrait of his own true love and so he said, ‘I am sorry for all the stupidnesses I say. I do not wish ever to be brutal. Maybe we could both sleep a little while, with luck, and then, perhaps, your Mistress would call on the telephone?’

Maybe she will even call, he thought.

Chapter XVIII

The hall porter pushed the Gazzettina under the door and the Colonel had it, noiselessly, almost as soon as it had passed through the slit.

He very nearly took it from the hall porter’s hand. He did not like the hall porter since he had found him, one day, going through his bag, when he, the Colonel, had re-entered the room after having left it, presumably for some time. He had to come back to the room to get his bottle of medicine, which he had forgotten, and the hall porter was well through his bag.

‘I guess you don’t say stick them up in this hotel,’ the Colonel had said. ‘But you’re no credit to your town.’

There was silence produced and re-produced, by the striped waistcoated man with the Fascist face and the Colonel said, ‘Go on, boy, look through the rest of it. I don’t carry any military secrets with my toilet articles.’

Since then, there was scant friendship between them and the Colonel enjoyed trying to take the morning paper from the striped waistcoated man’s hand; noiselessly, and when he heard, or saw it first make a move under the door.

‘O.K., you won to-day, jerk,’ he said in the best Venetian dialect he could summon at that hour. ‘Go hang yourself.’

But they don’t hang themselves, he thought. They just have to go on putting papers under other people’s doors that do not even hate them. It must be quite a difficult trade being an ex-Fascist. Maybe he is not an ex-Fascist, too. How do you know.

I can’t hate Fascists, he thought. Nor Krauts, either, since unfortunately, I am a soldier.

‘Listen, Portrait,’ he said. ‘Do I have to hate the Krauts because we kill them? Do I have to hate them as soldiers and as human beings? It seems too easy a solution to me.’

Well, Portrait. Forget it. Forget it. You’re not old enough to know about it. You are two years younger than the girl that you portray and she is younger and older than hell; which is quite an old place.

‘Listen, Portrait,’ he said and, saying it, knew that now, as long as he lived, he would have someone to talk to at the early hours that he woke.

‘As I was saying, Portrait. The hell with that too. That’s too old for you too. That is one of the things you can’t say no matter how true it is. There are lots of things I can never say to you and maybe that will be good for me. It is about time something was. What do you think would be good for me, Portrait?’

‘What’s the matter, Portrait?’ he asked her. ‘You getting hungry? I am.’

So he rang the bell for the waiter who would bring breakfast.

He knew that now, even though the light was so good that every wave showed on the Grand Canal, lead-coloured and solid heavy with the wind and the tide now high over the landing steps of the Palace directly opposite his room, that there would be no telephone call for several hours.

The young sleep good, he thought. They deserve it.

‘Why do we have to get old?’ he asked the waiter who had come in with his glass-eye and the menu.

‘I don’t know, my Colonel. I suppose it is a natural process.’

‘Yes. I guess I imagine that too. The eggs fried with their faces up. Tea and toast.’

‘You don’t want anything American?’

‘The hell with anything American except me. Is the Gran Maestro astir yet?’

‘He has your Valpolicella in the big wicker fiascos of two litres and I have brought this decanter with it.’

‘That one,’ the Colonel said. ‘I wish to Christ I could give him a regiment.’

‘I don’t think he would want one, really.’

‘No,’ the Colonel said. ‘I don’t want one, really, myself.’

Chapter XIX

The colonel breakfasted with the leisure of a fighter who has been clipped badly, hears four and knows how to relax truly for five seconds more.

‘Portrait,’ he said. ‘You ought to relax too. That’s the only thing that is going to be difficult about you. That’s what they call the static element in painting. You know, Portrait that almost no pictures, paintings rather, move at all. A few do, but not many.

‘I wish that your mistress was here and we could have movement. How do girls like you and she know so much so damn young and be so beautiful?

‘With us, if a girl is really beautiful, she comes from Texas and maybe, with luck, she can tell you what month it is. They can all count good though.

‘They teach them how to count and keep their legs together and how to put their hair up in pin curls. Sometime, Portrait, for your sins, if you have any, you ought to have to sleep in a bed with a girl who has put her hair up in pin curls to be beautiful to-morrow. Not to-night. They’d never be beautiful to-night. For to-morrow, when we make the competition.

‘The girl, Renata, that you are, is sleeping now without ever having done anything to her hair. She is sleeping with it spread out on the pillow and all it is to her is a glorious, dark, silky annoyance, that she can hardly remember to comb, except that her governess taught her.

‘I see her in the street with the lovely long-legged stride and the wind doing anything it wants to her hair and her true breasts under the sweater and then I see the nights in Texas with the pin curls; tight and subjected by metallic instruments.

‘Pin me no pin curls, my beloved,’ he said to the portrait, ‘and I will try to lay it on the line in round, heavy, hard silver dollars or with the other.’

I mustn’t get rough, he thought.

Then he said to the portrait, for he did not capitalize her now in his mind, ‘You are so God-damned beautiful you stink. Also you are jail-bait. Renata’s two years older now. You are under seventeen.’

And why can’t I have her and love her and cherish her and never be rude, nor bad and have the five sons that go to the five corners of the world; wherever that is! I don’t know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn’t like to re-deal would you, dealer?

No. They only deal to you once and then you pick them up and play them. I can play them, if I draw any damn thing at all, he told portrait; who was also unimpressed.

‘Portrait,’ he said. ‘You better look the other way so that you will not be un-maidenly. I am going to take a shower now and shave, something you will never have to do, and put on my soldier-suit and go and walk around this town even though it is too early.’

So, he got out of bed, favouring his bad leg, which hurt him always. He pulled the reading light with his bad hand. There was sufficient light and he had been wasting electricity for nearly an hour.

He regretted this as he regretted all his errors. He walked past portrait, only looking casually and looked at himself in the mirror. He had dropped both parts of his pyjamas and he looked at himself critically and truly.

‘You beat-up old bastard,’ he said to the mirror. Portrait was a thing of the past. Mirror was actuality and of this day.

The gut is flat, he said without uttering it. The chest is all right except where it contains the defective muscle. We are hung as we are hung, for better or worse, or something, or something awful.

You are one half a hundred years old, you bastard you. Now go in and take a shower and scrub good and afterwards put on your soldier-suit. To-day is another day.

Chapter XX

The colonel stopped at the reception desk in the lobby, but the concierge was not there yet. There was only the night porter.

‘Can you put something in the safe for me?’

‘No, my Colonel. No one may open the safe until the assistant manager, or the concierge, arrives. But I will guard anything for you that you wish.’

‘Thank you. It’s not worth the trouble,’ and he buttoned the Gritti envelope, with the stones inside, the envelope addressed to himself, into the inside left pocket of his tunic.

‘There’s no real crime here now,’ the night porter said.

It had been a long night and he was happy to speak to someone. ‘There never really was, my Colonel. There are only differences of opinion and politics.’

‘What do you have for politics?’ the Colonel asked; for he was lonely, too.

‘About what you would expect.’

‘I see. And how is your thing going?’

‘I think it goes quite well. Maybe not as well as last year. But still quite well. We were beaten and we have to wait a while now.’

‘Do you work at it?’

‘Not much. It is more the politics of my heart than of my head. I believe in it with my head too, but I have very little political development.’

‘When you get it you won’t have any heart.’

‘Maybe not. Do you have politics in the army?’

‘Plenty,’ the Colonel said. ‘But not what you mean.’

‘Well, we better not discuss it then. I have not meant to be intrusive.’

‘I asked the question; the original question rather. It was only to talk. It was not an interrogation.’

‘I don’t think it was. You do not have the face of an inquisitor, my Colonel, and I know about the Order, although I am not a member.’

‘You may be member material. I’ll take it up with the Gran Maestro.’

‘We come from the same town; but from distinct quarters.’

‘It’s a good town.’

‘My Colonel, I have so little political development that I believe all honourable men are honourable.’

‘Oh you’ll get over that,’ the Colonel assured him. ‘Don’t worry, boy. You’ve got a young party. Naturally you make errors.’

‘Please don’t talk like that.’

‘It was just rough early morning joking.’

‘Tell me, my Colonel, what do you really think about Tito?’

‘I think several things. But he’s my next-door neighbour. I’ve found it better not to talk about my neighbour.’

‘I’d like to learn.’

‘Then learn it the hard way. Don’t you know people don’t give answers to such questions?’

‘I had hoped they did.’

‘They don’t,’ the Colonel said. ‘Not in my position. All I can tell you is that Mr. Tito has plenty problems.’

‘Well, I know that now truly,’ the night porter who was really only a boy said.

‘I hope you do,’ the Colonel said. ‘I wouldn’t call it, as knowledge, any pearl of great price. Now, good day, for I must take a walk for the good of my liver, or something.’

‘Good day, my Colonel. Fa brutto tempo.’

Chapter XXI

The colonel took the ten centesimi gondola across the Canal, paying the usual dirty note and standing with the crowd of those condemned to early rising.

He looked back at the Gritti and saw the windows of his room; still open. There was no promise, nor threat of rain; only the same strong, wild, cold wind from the mountains. Everyone in the gondola looked cold and the Colonel thought, I wish I could issue these wind-proof coats to everyone on board. God, and every officer that ever wore one, knows they are not water-proof and who made the money out of that one?

You can’t get water through a Burberry. But I suppose some able jerk has his boy in Groton now, or maybe Canterbury, where the big contractors’ boys go, because our coats leaked.

And what about some brother officer of mine who split with him? I wonder who the Benny Meyers of the ground forces were? There probably wasn’t only one. Probably, he thought, there must be very many. You must not be awake yet, to talk that simply. They do keep the wind out though. The raincoats. Raincoats my ass.

The gondola pulled up between the stakes on the far bank of the canal and the Colonel watched the black-clad people climb up out of the black-painted vehicle. Is she a vehicle? he thought. Or must a vehicle have wheels or be tracked?

Nobody would give you a penny for your thoughts, he thought. Not this morning. But I’ve seen them worth a certain amount of money when the chips were down.

He penetrated into the far side of the city, the side that finally fronted on the Adriatic and that he liked the best. He was going in by a very narrow street and he was going to not keep track of the number of more or less north and south streets that he crossed, nor count the bridges and then try and orient himself so he would come out at the market without getting up any dead ends.

It was a game you play, as some people used to play double Canfield or any solitary card games. But it had the advantage of you moving while you do it and that you look at the houses, the minor vistas, the shops and the trattorias and at old palaces of the city of Venice while you are walking. If you loved the city of Venice it was an excellent game.

It is a sort of solitaire ambulante and what you win is the happiness of your eye and heart. If you made the market, on this side of town, without ever being stymied, you won the game. But you must not make it too easy and you must not count.

On the other side of the town, game was to leave from the Gritti and make the Rialto by the Fondamente Nuove without a mistake.

Then you could climb the bridge and cross it and go down into the market. He liked the market best. It was the part of any town he always went to first.

Just then he heard the two young men behind him saying the things about him. He knew they were young men by their voices and he did not look back, but listened carefully for distance and waited for the next turn to see them, as he turned.

They are on their way to work, he decided. Maybe they are former Fascists or maybe they are something else, or maybe it is just the line that they are talking. But they are making it pretty personal now. It isn’t just Americans, it is also me, myself, my grey hair, the slightly crooked way I walk, the combat boots (those, of that stripe, disliked the practicability of combat boots. They liked boots that rang on the flag stones and took a high black polish).

It is my uniform which they find to be without grace. Now it is why I am walking at this hour and now it is their absolute security that I can no longer make love.

The Colonel swung sharp to the left at the next corner, seeing what he had to deal with and the exact distance and when the two young men came around the corner which was formed by the apse of the church of Frari there was no Colonel. He was in the dead angle behind the apse of the ancient church and as they passed, he, hearing them come by their talk, stepped out with a hand in each low pocket of his raincoat and turned himself and the raincoat, with the two hands in the pockets, towards them.

They stopped and he looked at them both in the face and smiled his old and worn death smile. Then he looked down at their feet, as you always look at the feet of such people, since they wear their shoes too tight and when you take the shoes off them you see their hammer-toes. The Colonel spat on the pavement and said nothing.

The two of them, they were the first thing he had suspected, looked at him with hatred and with that other thing. Then they were off like marsh-birds, walking with the long strides of herons too, the Colonel thought, and something of the flight of curlews and looking back with hatred, waiting to have the last word if the distance was ever safe.

It is a pity they weren’t ten against one, the Colonel thought. They might have fought. I should not blame them, since they were defeated.

But their manners were not good in respect to a man of my rank and age. Also it was not intelligent to think all fifty-year-old colonels would not understand their language. Nor was it intelligent to think old Infantrymen would not fight this early in the morning against the simple odds of two to one.

I’d hate to fight in this town where I love the people. I would avoid it. But couldn’t those badly educated youths realize what sort of animal they were dealing with? Don’t they know how you get to walk that way? Nor any of the other signs that combat people show as surely as a fisherman’s hands tell you if he is a fisherman from the creases from the cord cuts.

It is true they only saw my back and ass and legs and boots. But you’d think they might have told from the way they must move. Maybe they don’t any more. But when I had a chance to look at them and think. Take the two of them out and hang them, I believe they understood. They understood quite clearly.

What’s a man’s life worth anyway? Ten thousand dollars if his insurance is paid up in our army. What the hell has that got to do with it. Oh yes, that was what I was thinking about before those jerks showed; how much money I had saved my government, in my time when people like Benny Meyers were in the trough.

Yes, he said and how much you lost them at the Chateau that time at ten Gs a head. Well nobody ever really understood it except me, I guess. There’s no reason to tell them now. Your commanding general sometimes puts things down as the Fortunes of War. Back at Army they know such things are bound to happen. You do it, as ordered, with a big butcher bill and you’re a hero.

Christ, I am opposed to the excessive butcher bill, he thought. But you get the orders, and you have to carry them out. It is the mistakes that are no good to sleep with. But why the hell sleep with them anyway. It never did any good. But they can certainly crawl into a sack sometimes. They can crawl in and stay in there with you.

Cheer up, boy, he said. Remember you had a lot of money on you when you picked that one. And you might have been stripped if you lost. You can’t fight a lick any more with your hands and you didn’t have any weapon.

So don’t be gloomy, boy, or man, or Colonel, or busted General. We’re almost to the market now and you made it without hardly noticing.

Hardly noticing is bad, he added.

Chapter XXII

He loved the market. A great part of it was close-packed and crowded into several side streets and it was so concentrated that it was difficult not to jostle people, unintentionally, and each time you stopped to look, to buy, or to admire, you formed an îlot de résistance against the flow of the morning attack of the purchasers.

The Colonel liked to study the spread and high piled cheeses and the great sausages. People at home think mortadella is a sausage, he thought.

Then he said to the woman in the booth, ‘Let me try a little of that sausage, please. Only a sliver.’

She cut a thin, paper thin, slice for him, ferociously and lovingly, and when the Colonel tasted it there was the half smoky, black pepper-corned, true flavour of the meat from the hogs that ate acorns in the mountains.

‘I will take a quarter of a kilo.’

The Barone’s lunches for the shooting blinds were of a Spartan quality, which the Colonel respected, since he knew no one should eat much while shooting. He felt, though, that he might augment the lunch with his sausage and share it with the poler and picker-upper. He might give a slice to Bobby, the retriever, who would be wet through to his hide many times and enthusiastic still, but shaking with cold.

‘Is this the best sausage that you have?’ he asked the woman. ‘Have you nothing that does not show and is reserved for better and steadier customers?’

‘This is the best sausage. There are many other sausages, as you know. But this is the best.’

‘Then give me one-eighth of a kilo of a sausage that is highly fortifying, but is not highly seasoned.’

‘I have it,’ she said. ‘It is a little new but exactly as you describe.’

This sausage was for Bobby.

But you do not say that you buy sausages for a dog in Italy where the worst crime is to be considered a fool and many people go hungry. You may give expensive sausage to a dog before a man who works for his living and knows what a dog goes through in water in cold weather. But you do not buy them, stating your purpose in possessing them, unless you are a fool, or a millionaire from the war and from after.

The Colonel paid for the wrapped-up package and proceeded on through the market inhaling the smell of roasted coffee and looking at the amount of fat on each carcass in the butcher section, as though he were enjoying the Dutch painters, whose names no one remembers, who painted, in perfection of detail, all things you shot, or that were eatable.

A market is the closest thing to a good museum like the Prado or as the Accademia is now, the Colonel thought.

He took a short cut and was at the fish market.

In the market, spread on the slippery stone floor, or in their baskets, or their rope-handled boxes, were the heavy, grey-green lobsters with their magenta overtones that presaged their death in boiling water. They have all been captured by treachery, the Colonel thought, and their claws are pegged.

There were the small soles and there were a few albacore and bonito. These last, the Colonel thought, looked like boat-tailed bullets, dignified in death and with the huge eye of the pelagic fish.

They were not made to be caught except for their voraciousness. The poor sole exists, in shallow water, to feed man. But these other roving bullets, in their great bands, live in blue water and travel through all oceans and all seas.

A nickel for your thoughts now, he thought. Let’s see what else they have.

There were many eels, alive and no longer confident in their eeldom. There were fine prawns that could make a scampi brochetto spitted and broiled on a rapier-like instrument that could be used as a Brooklyn ice-pick. There were medium-sized shrimps, grey and opalescent, awaiting their turn, too, for the boiling water and their immortality, to have their shucked carcasses float out easily on an ebb tide on the Grand Canal.

The speedy shrimp, the Colonel thought, with tentacles longer than the moustaches of that old Japanese admiral, comes here now to die for our benefit. Oh Christian shrimp, he thought, master of retreat, and with your wonderful intelligence service in those two light whips, why did they not teach you about nets and that lights are dangerous?

Must have been some slip-up, he thought.

Now he looked at the many small crustaceans, the razor-edge clams you only should eat raw if you had your typhoid shots up to date, and all the small delectables.

He went past these, stopping to ask one seller where his clams came from. They came from a good place, without sewerage, and the Colonel asked to have six opened. He drank the juice and cut the clam out, cutting close against the shell with the curved knife the man handed him. The man had handed him the knife because he knew from experience the Colonel cut closer to the shell than he had been taught to cut.

The Colonel paid him the pittance that they cost, which must have been much greater than the pittance those received who caught them, and he thought, now I must see the stream and canal fishes and get back to the hotel.

Chapter XXIII

The colonel arrived at the lobby of the Hotel Gritti-Palace. His gondolieres were paid off and, now, inside the hotel, there was no wind.

It had taken two men to bring the gondola up the Grand Canal from the market. They had both worked hard, and he had paid them what it was worth, and some more.

‘Are there any calls for me?’ he asked the concierge, who was now in attendance.

The concierge was light, fast, sharp-faced, intelligent and polite, always, without subservience. He wore the crossed keys of his office on the lapels of his blue uniform without ostentation. He was the concierge. It is a rank very close to that of Captain, the Colonel thought. An officer and not a Gentleman. Make it top sergeant in the old days; except he’s dealing always with the brass.

‘My lady has called twice,’ the concierge said in English. Or whatever that language should be called we all speak, the Colonel thought. Leave it at English. That is about what they have left. They should be allowed to keep the name of the language. Cripps will probably ration it shortly, anyway.

‘Please put me through to her at once,’ he told the concierge.

The concierge commenced to dial numbers.

‘You may talk over there, my Colonel,’ he said. ‘I have made the connection.’

‘You’re fast.’

‘Over there,’ the concierge said.

Inside the booth the Colonel lifted the receiver and said, automatically, ‘Colonel Cantwell speaking.’

‘I called twice, Richard,’ the girl said. ‘But they explained that you were out. Where were you?’

‘At the market. How are you, my lovely?’

‘No one listens on this phone at this hour. I am your lovely. Whoever that is.’

‘You. Did you sleep well?’

‘It was like ski-ing in the dark. Not really ski-ing but really dark.’

‘That’s the way it should be. Why did you wake so early? You’ve frightened my concierge.’

‘If it is not un-maidenly, how soon can we meet, and where?’

‘Where you wish and when you wish.’

‘Do you still have the stones and did Miss Portrait help any?’

‘Yes to both questions. The stones are in my upper left-hand pocket and buttoned down. Miss Portrait and I talked late and early and it made everything much easier.’

‘Do you love her more than me?’

‘I’m not abnormal yet. Perhaps that’s bragging. But she’s lovely.’

‘Where should we meet?’

‘Should we have breakfast at the Florian, on the right-hand side of the square? The square should be flooded and it will be fun to watch.’

‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes if you want me.’

‘I want you,’ the Colonel said and hung up.

Coming out of the telephone booth he, suddenly, did not feel good and then he felt as though the devil had him in an iron cage, built like an iron lung or an iron maiden, and he walked, grey-faced, to the concierge’s desk and said, in Italian, ‘Domenico, Ico, could you get me a glass of water, please?’

The concierge was gone and he leaned on the desk resting. He rested lightly and without illusion. Then the concierge was back with the glass of water, and he took four tablets of the type that you take two, and he continued resting as lightly as a hawk rests.

‘Domenico,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I have something here in an envelope that you can put in the safe. It may be called for either by myself, in person, or in writing, or by the person you have just put that call through to. Would you like that in writing?’

‘No. It would be unnecessary.’

‘But what about you, boy? You’re not immortal, are you?’

‘Fairly so,’ the concierge told him. ‘But I will put it in writing, and after me, comes the Manager and the Assistant Manager.’

‘Both good men,’ the Colonel agreed.

‘Wouldn’t you like to sit down, my Colonel?’

‘No. Who sits down except men and women in change of life hotels? Do you sit down?’

‘No.’

‘I can rest on my feet, or against a God-damned tree. My countrymen sit down, or lie down, or fall down. Give them a few energy crackers to stall their whimpers.’

He was talking too much to regain confidence quickly.

‘Do they really have energy crackers?’

‘Sure. It has something in it that keeps you from getting excited. It’s like the atomic bomb, only played backwards.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘We have the most terrific military secrets that one General’s wife ever told another. Energy crackers is the least of it. Next time we will give all Venice botulism from 56,000 feet. There’s nothing to it,’ the Colonel explained. ‘They give you anthrax, and you give them botulism.’

‘But it will be horrible.’

‘It will be worse than that,’ the Colonel assured him. ‘This isn’t classified. It’s all been published. And while it goes on you can hear Margaret, if you tune in right, singing the Star Spangled Banner on the radio. I think that could be arranged. The voice I would not describe as a big one. Not as we know voices who have heard the good ones in our time. But everything is a trick now. The radio can almost make the voice. And the Star Spangled Banner is fool-proof until towards the last.’

‘Do you think they will drop anything here?’

‘No. They never have.’

The Colonel, who was four star general now, in his wrath and in his agony and in his need for confidence, but secured temporarily through the absorption of the tablets, said, ‘Ciao, Domenico,’ and left the Gritti.

He figured it took twelve and one half minutes to reach the place where his true love would probably arrive a little late. He walked it carefully and at the speed he should walk it. The bridges were all the same.

Chapter XXIV

His true love was at the table at the exact time that she said she would be. She was as beautiful as always In the hard, morning light that came across the flooded square, and she said, ‘Please, Richard. Are you all right? Please?’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said. ‘You wonder beauty.’

‘Did you go to all our places in the market?’

‘Only a few of them. I did not go where they have the wild ducks.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For nothing,’ the Colonel said. ‘I never go there when we are not together.’

‘Don’t you think I should go to the shoot?’

‘No. I am quite sure. Alvarito would have asked you if he wanted you.’

‘He might not have asked me because he wanted me.’

‘That’s true,’ the Colonel said, and pondered that for two seconds. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’

‘Breakfast is worthless here, and I don’t like the square when it is flooded. It is sad and the pigeons have no place to alight. It is only really fun towards the last when the children play. Should we go and have breakfast at the Gritti?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. We’ll have breakfast there. I’ve had mine already.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ll have some coffee and hot rolls, and only feel them with my fingers. Are you awfully hungry?’

‘Awfully,’ she said, truly.

‘We’ll give breakfast the full treatment,’ the Colonel said. ‘You’ll wish you had never heard of breakfast.’

As they walked, with the wind at their back, and her hair blowing better than any banner, she asked him, holding close, ‘Do you still love me in the cold, hard Venice light of morning? It is really cold and hard, isn’t it?’

‘I love you and it is cold and hard.’

‘I loved you all night when I was ski-ing in the dark.’

‘How do you do that?’

‘It is the same runs except that it is dark and the snow is dark instead of light. You ski the same; controlled and good.’

‘Did you ski all night? That would be many runs.’

‘No. Afterwards I slept soundly and well and I woke happy. You were with me and you were asleep like a baby.’

‘I wasn’t with you and I was not asleep.’

‘You’re with me now,’ she said and held close and tight.

‘And we are almost there.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have I told you, yet, properly, that I love you?’

‘You told me. But tell me again.’

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘Take it frontally and formally please.’

‘I take it anyway you want as long as it is true.’

‘That’s the proper attitude,’ he said. ‘You good, brave, lovely girl. Turn your hair sideways once on top of this bridge and let it blow obliquely.’

He had made a concession, with obliquely, instead of saying, correctly, oblique.

‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’

He looked and saw the profile and the wonder early morning colour and her chest upstanding in the black sweater and her eyes in the wind and he said, ‘Yes, I like it.’

‘I’m very glad,’ she said.

Chapter XXV

At the Gritti, the Gran Maestro seated them at the table which was beside the window that looked out on the Grand Canal. There was no one else in the dining-room.

The Gran Maestro was festive and well with the morning. He took his ulcers day by day, and his heart the same way. When they did not hurt he did not hurt either.

‘Your pitted compatriot eats in bed at his hotel, my colleague tells me,’ he confided to the Colonel. ‘We may have a few Belgians. “The bravest of these were the Belgians,”’ he quoted. ‘There is a pair of pescecani from you know where. But they are exhausted and I believe they will eat, as pigs, in their room.’

‘An excellent situation report,’ the Colonel said. ‘Our problem, Gran Maestro, is that I have already eaten in my room as pitted does and as the pescecani will. But this lady — —’

‘Young girl,’ interrupted the Gran Maestro with his whole-face smile. He was feeling very good since it was a completely new day.

‘This very young lady wants a breakfast to end breakfasts.’

‘I understand,’ the Gran Maestro said, and he looked at Renata and his heart rolled over as a porpoise does in the sea. It is a beautiful movement and only a few people in this world can feel it and accomplish it.

‘What do you want to eat, Daughter?’ the Colonel asked, looking at her early morning, un-retouched dark beauty.

‘Everything.’

‘Would you give any suggestions?’

‘Tea instead of coffee and whatever the Gran Maestro can salvage.’

‘It won’t be salvage, Daughter,’ said the Gran Maestro.

‘I’m the one who calls her Daughter.’

‘I said it honestly,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘We can make or fabricar rognons grilled with champignons dug by people I know. Or, raised in damp cellars. There can be an omelet with truffles dug by pigs of distinction. There can be real Canadian bacon from maybe Canada, even.’

‘Wherever that is,’ the girl said happily and unillusioned.

‘Wherever that is,’ said the Colonel seriously. ‘And I know damn well where it is.’

‘I think we should stop the jokes now and get to the breakfast.’

‘If it is not un-maidenly I think so too.’

‘Mine is a decanted flask of the Valpolicella.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Bring me one ration of the alleged Canadian bacon,’ the Colonel said.

He looked at the girl, since they were alone now, and he said, ‘How are you, my dearest?’

‘Quite hungry, I suppose. But thank you for being good for so long a time.’

‘It was easy,’ the Colonel told her in Italian.

Chapter XXVI

They sat there at the table and watched the early stormy light over the Canal. The grey had turned to a yellow-grey now, with the sun, and the waves were working against the outgoing tide.

‘Mummy says she can’t live here too long at any time because there are no trees,’ the girl said. ‘That’s why she goes to the country.’

‘That’s why everyone goes to the country,’ the Colonel said. ‘We could plant a few trees if we found a place with a big enough garden.’

‘I like Lombardy poplars and plane trees the best, but I am still quite uneducated.’

‘I like them, and cypresses and chestnut trees. The real chestnut and the horse-chestnut. But you will never see trees, Daughter, until we go to America. Wait till you see a white pine or a ponderosa pine.’

‘Will we see them when we make the long trip and stop at all the filling stations or comfort stations or whatever they are called?’

‘Lodges and Tourist Camps,’ the Colonel said. ‘Those others we stop at; but not for the night.’

‘I want so much for us to roll up to a comfort station and plank down my money and tell them to fill her up and check the oil, Mac, the way it is in American books or in the films.’

‘That’s a filling station.’

‘Then what is a comfort station?’

‘Where you go, you know — —’

‘Oh,’ the girl said and blushed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I want to learn American so much. But I suppose I shall say barbarous things the way you do sometimes in Italian.’

‘It is an easy language. The further West you go the straighter and the easier it becomes.’

The Gran Maestro brought the breakfast and the odour of it, although it did not spread through the room, due to the silver covers on the dishes, came to them steady and as broiled bacon and kidneys, with the dark lustreless smell of grilled mushrooms added.

‘It looks lovely,’ the girl said. ‘Thank you very much, Gran Maestro. Should I talk American?’ she asked the Colonel. She extended her hand to the Gran Maestro lightly, and fastly, so that it darted as a rapier does, and said, ‘Put it there, Pal. This grub is tops.’

The Gran Maestro said, ‘Thank you, my lady.’

‘Should I have said chow instead of grub?’ the girl asked the Colonel.

‘They are really interchangeable.’

‘Did they talk like that out West when you were a boy? What would you say at breakfast?’

‘Breakfast was served, or offered up, by the cook. He would say, “Come and get it, you sons of bitches, or I’ll throw it away.”’

‘I must learn that for in the country. Sometimes when we have the British Ambassador and his dull wife for dinner I will teach the footman, who will announce dinner, to say, “Come and get it, you sons of bitches, or we will throw it away.”’

‘He’d devaluate,’ the Colonel said. ‘At any rate, it would be an interesting experiment.’

‘Tell me something I can say in true American to the pitted one if he comes in. I will just whisper it in his ear as though I were making a rendezvous, as they did in the old days.’

‘It would depend on how he looks. If he is very dejected looking, you might whisper to him, “Listen, Mac. You hired out to be tough, didn’t you?”’

‘That’s lovely,’ she said, and repeated it in a voice she had learned from Ida Lupino. ‘Can I say it to the Gran Maestro?’

‘Sure. Why not. Gran Maestro!’

The Gran Maestro came over and leaned forward attentively.

‘Listen, Mac. You hired out to be tough, didn’t you?’ the girl hard-worded him.

‘I did indeed,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘Thank you for stating it so exactly.’

‘If that one comes in and you wish to speak to him after he has eaten, just whisper in his ear, “Wipe the egg off your chin, Jack, and straighten up and fly right.”’

‘I’ll remember it and I’ll practise it at home.’

‘What are we going to do after breakfast?’

‘Should we go up and look at the picture and see if it is of any value; I mean any good; in the daylight?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said.

Chapter XXVII

Upstairs the room was already done and the Colonel, who had anticipated a possible messiness of locale, was pleased.

‘Stand by it once,’ he said. Then remembered to add, ‘Please.’

She stood by it, and he looked at it from where he had looked at it last night.

‘There’s no comparison, of course,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean likeness. The likeness is excellent.’

‘Was there supposed to be a comparison?’ the girl asked, and swung her head back and stood there with the black sweater of the portrait.

‘Of course not. But last night, and at first light, I talked to the portrait as though it were you.’

‘That was nice of you and shows it has served some useful purpose.’

They were lying now on the bed and the girl said to him, ‘Don’t you ever close windows?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘Only when it rains.’

‘How much alike are we?’

‘I don’t know. We never had much of a chance to find out.’

‘We’ve never had a fair chance. But we’ve had enough of a chance for me to know.’

‘And when you know what the hell have you got?’ the Colonel asked.

‘I don’t know. Something better than there is, I suppose.’

‘Sure. We ought to try for that. I don’t believe in limited objectives. Sometimes you’re forced to, though.’

‘What is your great sorrow?’

‘Other people’s orders,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

‘You.’

‘I don’t want to be a sorrow. I’ve been a sorry son of a bitch many times. But I never was anybody’s sorrow.’

‘Well you are mine now.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll take it that way.’

‘You’re nice to take it that way. You’re very kind this morning. I’m so ashamed about how things are. Please hold me very close and let’s not talk, or think, about how things might have been different.’

‘Daughter, that’s one of the few things I know how to do.’

‘You know many, many things. Don’t say such a thing.’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said. ‘I know how to fight forwards and how to fight backwards and what else?’

‘About pictures and about books and about life.’

‘That’s easy. You just look at the pictures without prejudice, and you read the books with as open a mind as you have, and you live life.’

‘Don’t take off your tunic, please.’

‘All right.’

‘You do anything when I say please.’

‘I have done things without.’

‘Not very often.’

‘No,’ the Colonel agreed. ‘Please is a pretty word.’

‘Please, please, please.’

‘Per Piacere. It means for pleasure. I wish we always talked Italian.’

‘We could in the dark. Although there are things that say better in English.

‘I love you my last true and only love,’ she quoted. ‘When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed. And out of the cradle endlessly rocking. And come and get it, you sons of bitches, or I’ll throw it away. You don’t want those in other languages, do you, Richard?’

‘No.’

‘Kiss me again, please.’

‘Unnecessary please.’

‘I would probably end up as an unnecessary please myself. That is the good thing about you going to die that you can’t leave me.’

‘That’s a little rough,’ the Colonel said. ‘Watch your beautiful mouth a little on that.’

‘I get rough when you get rough,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t want me to be completely otherwise?’

‘I would not want you to be in any way other than you are and I love you truly, finally and for good.’

‘You say nice things very clearly sometimes. What was it happened with you and your wife, if I may ask?’

‘She was an ambitious woman and I was away too much.’

‘You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty?’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said and remembered, as unbitterly as he could. ‘She had more ambition than Napoleon and about the talent of the average High School Valedictorian.’

‘Whatever that is,’ the girl said. ‘But let’s not speak about her. I’m sorry I asked the question. She must be sad that she is not with you.’

‘No. She is too conceited ever to be sad, and she married me to advance herself in Army circles, and have better contacts for what she considered her profession, or her art. She was a journalist.’

‘But they are dreadful,’ the girl said.

‘I agree.’

‘But you couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that?’

‘I told you I made mistakes,’ the Colonel said.

‘Let’s talk about something nice.’

‘Let’s.’

‘But that was terrible. How could you have done such a thing?’

‘I don’t know. I could tell you in detail but let’s skip it.’

‘Please let’s skip it. But I had no idea it was something as awful as that. You wouldn’t do such a thing now, would you?’

‘I promise you, my sweet.’

‘But you don’t ever write to her?’

‘Of course not.’

‘You wouldn’t tell her about us, so she could write about it?’

‘No. I told her about things once, and she wrote about them. But that was in another country and besides the wench is dead.’

‘Is she really dead?’

‘Deader than Phoebus the Phoenician. But she doesn’t know it yet.’

‘What would you do if we were together in the Piazza and you saw her?’

‘I’d look straight through her to show her how dead she was.’

‘Thank you very much,’ the girl said. ‘You know that another woman, or a woman in memory, is a terrible thing for a young girl to deal with when she is still without experience.’

‘There isn’t any other woman,’ the Colonel told her, and his eyes were bad and remembering. ‘Nor is there any woman of memory.’

‘Thank you, very much,’ the girl said. ‘When I look at you I believe it truly. But please never look at me nor think of me like that.’

‘Should we hunt her down and hang her to a high tree?’ the Colonel said with anticipation.

‘No. Let us forget her.’

‘She is forgotten,’ the Colonel said. And, strangely enough, she was. It was strange because she had been present in the room for a moment, and she had very nearly caused a panic; which is one of the strangest things there is, the Colonel thought. He knew about panics.

But she was gone now, for good and for ever; cauterized; exorcized and with the eleven copies of her re-classification papers, in which was included the formal, notarized act of divorcement, in triplicate.

‘She is forgotten,’ the Colonel said. It was quite true.

‘I’m so pleased,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t know why they ever let her into the hotel.’

‘We’re enough alike,’ the Colonel said. ‘We better not carry it too God-damned far.’

‘You can hang her if you wish because she is why we cannot marry.’

‘She’s forgotten,’ the Colonel told her. ‘Maybe she will take a good look at herself in the mirror sometime and hang herself.’

‘Now that she is out of the room we should wish her no bad luck. But, as a good Venetian, I wish that she were dead.’

‘So do I,’ the Colonel said. ‘And now, since she is not, let us forget her for keeps.’

‘For keeps and for always,’ the girl said. ‘I hope that is the correct diction. Or in Spanish para sempre.’

‘Para sempre and his brother,’ the Colonel said.

Chapter XXVIII

They lay together now and did not speak and the Colonel felt her heart beat. It is easy to feel a heart beat under a black sweater knitted by someone in the family, and her dark hair lay, long and heavy, over his good arm. It isn’t heavy, he thought, it is lighter than anything there is. She lay, quiet and loving, and whatever it was that they possessed was in complete communication. He kissed her on the mouth, gently and hungrily, and then it was as though there was static, suddenly, when communications had been perfect.

‘Richard,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about things.’

‘Never be sorry,’ the Colonel said. ‘Never discuss casualties, Daughter.’

‘Say it again.’

‘Daughter.’

‘Will you tell me some happy things I can have for during the week and some more of war for my education?’

‘Let’s skip war.’

‘No. I need it for my education.’

‘I do too,’ the Colonel said. ‘Not manoeuvres. You know, in our army once, a general officer through chicanery obtained the plan of the manoeuvre. He anticipated every move of the enemy force and comported himself so brilliantly that he was promoted over many better men. And that was why we got smacked one time. That and the prevalence of week-ends.’

‘We’re on a week-end now.’

‘I know,’ the Colonel said. ‘I can still count up to seven.’

‘But are you bitter about everything?’

‘No. It is just that I am half a hundred years old and I know things.’

‘Tell me something more about Paris because I love to think of you and Paris in the week.’

‘Daughter, why don’t you lay off Paris?’

‘But I’ve been in Paris, and I will go back there again, and I want to know. It is the loveliest city in the world, next to our own, and I want to know some things truly to take with me.’

‘We will go together and I will tell you there.’

‘Thank you. But tell me a little now for this week only.’

‘Leclerc was a high-born jerk as I think that I’ve explained. Very brave, very arrogant and extremely ambitious. He is dead, as I said.’

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘They say you should never speak ill of the dead. But I think it is the best time to speak truly of them. I have never said anything of a dead that I would not say to his face,’ and he added, ‘in spades.’

‘Let’s not talk about him. I have re-classified him in my mind.’

‘What do you want then; picturesque?’

‘Yes please. I have bad taste from reading the illustrated papers. But I will read Dante all week while you are gone. I’ll go to mass each morning. That should be enough.’

‘Go to Harry’s before lunch too.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘Please tell me some picturesque.’

‘Don’t you think we might better just go to sleep?’

‘How can we go to sleep now when we have so little time? Feel this,’ she said and pushed her whole head up under his chin until she forced his head back.

‘All right, I’ll talk.’

‘Give me your hand first to hold. I’ll have it in my hand when I read the Dante and do the other things.’

‘Dante was an execrable character. More conceited than Leclerc.’

‘I know. But he did not write execrably.’

‘No. Leclerc could fight too. Excellently.’

‘Now tell me.’

Her head was on his chest now, and the Colonel said, ‘Why did you not want me to take off the tunic?’

‘I like to feel the buttons. Is it wrong?’

‘I’ll be a sad son of a bitch,’ the Colonel said. ‘How many people fought in your family?’

‘Everybody,’ she said. ‘Always. They were traders as well and several of them were Doges of this city as you know.’

‘But they all fought?’

‘All,’ she said. ‘As far as I know.’

‘O.K.,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll tell you any God-damn thing you want to know.’

‘Just something picturesque. As bad or worse than in the illustrated papers.’

‘Domenica Del Corriere or Tribuna Illustrata?’

‘Worse, if possible.’

‘Kiss me first.’

She kissed him kind, and hard, and desperately, and the Colonel could not think about any fights or any picturesque or strange incidents. He only thought of her and how she felt and how close life comes to death when there is ecstasy. And what the hell is ecstasy and what’s ecstasy’s rank and serial number? And how does her black sweater feel? And who made all her smoothness and delight and the strange pride and sacrifice and wisdom of a child? Yes, ecstasy is what you might have had and instead you draw sleep’s other brother.

Death is a lot of —— , he thought. It comes to you in small fragments that hardly show where it has entered. It comes, sometimes, atrociously. It can come from unboiled water; an un-pulled-up mosquito boot, or it can come with the great, white-hot, clanging roar we have lived with. It comes in small cracking whispers that precede the noise of the automatic weapon. It can come with the smoke-emitting arc of the grenade, or the sharp, cracking drop of the mortar.

I have seen it come, loosening itself from the bomb rack, and falling with that strange curve. It comes in the metallic rending crash of a vehicle, or the simple lack of traction on a slippery road.

It comes in bed to most people, I know, like love’s opposite number. I have lived with it nearly all my life and the dispensing of it has been my trade. But what can I tell this girl now on this cold, windy morning in the Gritti Palace Hotel?

‘What would you like to know, Daughter?’ he asked her.

‘Everything.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘Here goes.’

Chapter XXIX

They lay on the pleasantly hard, new-made bed with their legs pressed tight against one another, and her head was on his chest, and her hair spread across his old hard neck; and he told her.

‘We landed without much opposition. They had the true opposition at the other beach. Then we had to link up with the people who had been dropped, and take and secure various towns, and then we took Cherbourg. This was difficult, and had to be done very fast, and the orders were from a General called Lightning Joe that you never would have heard of. Good General.’

‘Go on, please. You spoke about Lightning Joe before.’

‘After Cherbourg we had everything. I took nothing but an admiral’s compass because I had a small boat at that time on Chesapeake Bay. But we had all the Wehrmacht stamped Martell and some people had as much as six million German-printed French francs. They were good until a year ago, and at that time they were worth fifty to the dollar, and many a man has a tractor now instead of simply one mule who knew how to send them home through his Esses, or sometimes his Gs.

‘I never stole anything except the compass because I thought it was bad luck to steal, unnecessarily, in war. But I drank the cognac and I used to try to figure out the different corrections on the compass when I had time. The compass was the only friend I had, and the telephone was my life. We had more wire strung than there are —— in Texas.’

‘Please keep telling me and be as little rough as you can. I don’t know what the word means and I don’t want to know.’

‘Texas is a big state,’ the Colonel said. ‘That is why I used it and its female population as a symbol. You cannot say more —— than Wyoming because there are less than thirty thousand there, perhaps, hell, make it fifty, and there was a lot of wire, and you kept stringing it and rolling it up, and stringing it again.’

‘Go on.’

‘We will cut to the break-through,’ the Colonel said. ‘Please tell me if this bores you.’

‘No.’

‘So we made the mucking break-through,’ the Colonel said, and now his head was turned to her head, and he was not lecturing; he was confessing.

‘The first day most of them came over and dropped the Christmas tree ornaments that confuse the other people’s radar and it was called off. We were ready to go but they called it off. Quite properly I am sure. I love the very high brass like I love the pig’s you know.’

‘Tell it to me and don’t be bad.’

‘Conditions were not propitious,’ the Colonel said. ‘So the second day we were for it, as our British cousins, who could not fight their way out of a wet tissue towel, say, and over came the people of the wild, blue yonder.

‘They were still taking off from the fields where they lived on that green-grassed aircraft carrier that they called England, when we saw the first of them.

‘Shining, bright and beautiful, because they had scraped the invasion paint by then, or maybe they had not. My memory is not exact about this part.

‘Anyway, Daughter, you could see the line of them going back towards the east further than you could see. It was like a great train. They were high in the sky and never more beautiful. I told my S-2 that we should call them the Valhalla Express. Are you tired of it?’

‘No. I can see the Valhalla Express. We never saw it in such numbers. But we saw it. Many times.’

‘We were back two thousand yards from where we were to take off from. You know what two thousand yards is, Daughter, in a war when you are attacking?’

‘No. How could I?’

‘Then the front part of the Valhalla Express dropped coloured smoke and turned and went home. This smoke was dropped accurately, and clearly showed the target which was the Kraut positions. They were good positions and it might have been impossible to move him out of them without something mighty and picturesque such as we were experiencing.

‘Then, Daughter, the next sections of the Valhalla Express dropped everything in the world on the Krauts and where they lived and worked to hold us up. Later it looked as though all of the earth had erupted and the prisoners that we took shook as a man shakes when his malaria hits him. They were very brave boys from the Sixth Parachute Division and they all shook and could not control it though they tried.

‘So you can see it was a good bombing. Just the thing we always need in this life. Make them tremble in the fear of justice and of might.

‘So then, Daughter, not to bore you, the wind was from the east and the smoke began to blow back in our direction. The heavies were bombing on the smoke line and the smoke line was now over us. Therefore they bombed us the same as they had bombed the Krauts. First it was the heavies, and no one need ever worry about hell who was there that day. Then, to really make the break-through good and to leave as few people as possible on either side, the mediums came over and bombed who was left. Then we made the break-through as soon as the Valhalla Express had gone home, stretching in its beauty and its majesty from that part of France to all over England.’

If a man has a conscience, the Colonel thought, he might think about air-power some time.

‘Give me a glass of that Valpolicella,’ the Colonel said, and remembered to add, ‘please.’

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Be comfortable, honey dog, please. You asked me to tell you.’

‘I’m not your honey dog. That must be someone else.’

‘Correct. You’re my last and true and only love. Is that correct? But you asked me to tell you.’

‘Please tell me,’ the girl said. ‘I’d like to be your honey dog if I knew how to do it. But I am only a girl from this town that loves you.’

‘We’ll operate on that,’ the Colonel said. ‘And I love you. I probably picked up that phrase in the Philippines.’

‘Probably,’ the girl said. ‘But I would rather be your straight girl.’

‘You are,’ the Colonel said. ‘Complete with handles and with the flag on top.’

‘Please don’t be rough,’ she said. ‘Please love me true and tell me as true as you can, without hurting yourself in any way.’

‘I’ll tell you true,’ he said. ‘As true as I can tell and let it hurt who it hurts. It is better that you hear it from me if you have curiosity on this subject, than that you read it in some book with stiff covers.’

‘Please don’t be rough. Just tell me true and hold me tight and tell me true until you are purged of it; if that can be.’

‘I don’t need to purge,’ he said. ‘Except heavies being used tactically. I have nothing against them if they use them right even if they kill you. But for ground support give me a man like Pete Quesada. There is a man who will boot them in.’

‘Please.’

‘If you ever want to quit a beat-up character like me that guy could give you ground support.’

‘You are not beat-up, whatever that is, and I love you.’

‘Please give me two tablets from that bottle and pour the glass of Valpolicella that you neglected to pour, and I will tell you some of the rest of it.’

‘You don’t have to. You don’t have to tell me and I know now it is not good for you. Especially not the Valhalla Express day. I am not an inquisitor; or whatever the female of inquisitor is. Let us just lie quietly and look out of the window, and watch and see what happens on our Grand Canal.’

‘Maybe we better. Who gives a damn about the war anyway?’

‘You and me, maybe,’ she said and stroked his head. ‘Here are the two things from the square bottle. Here is the glass of decanted vino. I’ll send you better from our own estates. Please let us sleep a little while. Please be a good boy and we just lie together and love each other. Please put your hand here.’

‘My good or my bad?’

‘Your bad,’ the girl said. ‘The one I love and must think about all week. I cannot keep it like you keep the stones.’

‘They’re in the safe,’ the Colonel said. ‘In your name,’ he added.

‘Let’s just sleep and not talk about any material things nor any sorrows.’

‘The hell with sorrows,’ the Colonel said with his eyes closed and his head resting lightly on the black sweater that was his fatherland. You have to have some damned fatherland, he thought. Here is mine.

‘Why aren’t you President?’ the girl asked. ‘You could be an excellent president.’

‘Me president? I served in the Montana National Guard when I was sixteen. But I never wore a bow tie in my life and I am not, nor ever have been, an unsuccessful haberdasher. I have none of the qualifications for the Presidency. I couldn’t even head the opposition even though I don’t have to sit on telephone books to have my picture taken. Nor am I a no-fight general. Hell, I never even was at SHAEF. I couldn’t even be an elder statesman. I’m not old enough. Now we are governed in some way, by the dregs. We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box.’

‘I don’t understand it because my American is so incomplete. But it sounds awful. But don’t be angry about it. Let me be angry for you.’

‘Do you know what an unsuccessful haberdasher is?’

‘No.’

‘It is not discreditable. There are many of them in our country. There is at least one in every town. No, Daughter, I am only a fighting soldier and that is the lowest thing on earth. In that you run for Arlington, if they return the body. The family has a choice.’

‘Is Arlington nice?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Colonel said. ‘I was never buried there.’

‘Where would you like to be buried?’

‘Up in the hills,’ he said, making a quick decision. ‘On any part of the high ground where we beat them.’

‘I suppose you should be buried on the Grappa.’

‘On the dead angle of any shell-pocked slope if they would graze cattle over me in the summer time.’

‘Do they have cattle there?’

‘Sure. They always have cattle where there is good grass in the summer, and the girls of the highest houses, the strong built ones, the houses and the girls, that resist the snow in winter, trap foxes in the fall after they bring the cattle down. They feed from pole-stacked hay.’

‘And you don’t want Arlington or Père Lachaise or what we have here?’

‘Your miserable boneyard.’

‘I know it is the most unworthy thing about the town. The city rather. I learned to call cities towns from you. But I will see that you go where you wish to go and I will go with you if you like.’

‘I would not like. That is the one thing we do alone. Like going to the bathroom.’

‘Please do not be rough.’

‘I meant that I would love to have you with me. But it is very egotistical and an ugly process.’

He stopped, and thought truly, but off-key, and said, ‘No. You get married and have five sons and call them all Richard.’

‘The lion-hearted,’ the girl said, accepting the situation without even a glance, and playing what there was she held as you put down all the cards, having counted exactly.

‘The louse-hearted,’ the Colonel said. ‘The unjust bitter criticizer who speaks badly of everyone.’

‘Please don’t be rough in talking,’ the girl said. ‘And remember you speak worst of all about yourself. But hold me as close as we can and let’s think about nothing.’

He held her as close as he could and he tried to think about nothing.

Chapter XXX

The colonel and the girl lay quietly on the bed and the Colonel tried to think of nothing; as he had thought of nothing so many times in so many places. But it was no good now. It would not work any more because it was too late.

They were not Othello and Desdemona, thank God, although it was the same town and the girl was certainly better looking than the Shakespearean character, and the Colonel had fought as many, or more times than the garrulous Moor.

They are excellent soldiers, he thought. The damned Moors. But how many of them have we killed in my time? I think we killed more than a generation if you count the final Moroccan campaign against Abdel Krim. And each one you have to kill separately. Nobody ever killed them in mass, as we killed Krauts before they discovered Einheit.

‘Daughter,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to really tell you, so you will know, if I am not rough telling it?’

‘I would rather have you tell me than anything. Then we can share it.’

‘It cuts pretty thin for sharing,’ the Colonel said. ‘It’s all yours, Daughter. And it’s only the high-lights. You wouldn’t understand the campaigns in detail, and few others would. Rommel might. But they always had him under wraps in France and, besides, we had destroyed his communications. The two tactical air-forces had; ours and the R.A.F. But I wish I could talk over certain things with him. I’d like to talk with him and with Ernst Udet.’

‘Just tell me what you wish and take this glass of Valpolicella and stop if it makes you feel badly. Or don’t tell it at all.’

‘I was a spare-parts Colonel at the start,’ the Colonel explained carefully. ‘They are hang-around Colonels, which are given to a Division Commander to replace one that he may have killed, or that is relieved. Almost none are killed; but many are relieved. All the good ones are promoted. Fairly fast when the thing starts to move sort of like a forest fire.’

‘Go on, please. Should you take your medicine?’

‘The hell with my medicine,’ the Colonel said. ‘And the hell with SHAEF.’

‘You explained that to me,’ the girl said.

‘I wish the hell you were a soldier with your straight true brain and your beauty memory.’

‘I would wish to be a soldier if I could fight under you.’

‘Never fight under me,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m cagey. But I’m not lucky. Napoleon wanted them lucky and he was right.’

‘We’ve had some luck.’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘Good and bad.’

‘But it was all luck.’

‘Sure,’ the Colonel said. ‘But you can’t fight on luck. It is just something that you need. The people who fought on luck are all gloriously dead like Napoleon’s horse cavalry.’

‘Why do you hate cavalry? Almost all the good boys I know were in the three good regiments of cavalry, or in the navy.’

‘I don’t hate anything, Daughter,’ the Colonel said, and drank a little of the light, dry, red wine which was as friendly as the house of your brother, if you and your brother are good friends. ‘I only have a point of view, arrived at after careful consideration, and an estimate of their capabilities.’

‘Are they not really good?’

‘They are worthless,’ the Colonel said. Then remembering to be kind, added, ‘In our time.’

‘Every day is a disillusion.’

‘No. Every day is a new and fine illusion. But you can cut out everything phoney about the illusion as though you would cut it with a straight-edge razor.’

‘Please never cut me.’

‘You’re not cut-able.’

‘Would you kiss me and hold me tight, and we both look at the Grand Canal where the light is lovely now, and you tell me more?’

When they were looking out at the Grand Canal where the light was, indeed, lovely, the Colonel went on, ‘I got a regiment because the Commanding General relieved a boy that I had known since he was eighteen years old. He was not a boy any more, of course. It was too much regiment for him and it was all the regiment I ever could have hoped for in this life until I lost it.’ He added, ‘Under orders, of course.’

‘How do you lose a regiment?’

‘When you are working around to get up on the high ground and all you would have to do is send in a flag, and they would talk it over and come out if you were right. The professionals are very intelligent and these Krauts were all professionals; not the fanatics. The phone rings and somebody calls from Corps who has his orders from Army or maybe Army Group or maybe even SHAEF, because they read the name of the town in a newspaper, possibly sent in from Spa, by a correspondent, and the order is to take it by assault. It’s important because it got into the newspapers. You have to take it.

‘So you leave one company dead along a draw. You lose one company complete and you destroy three others. The tanks get smacked even as fast as they could move and they could move fast both ways.

‘They hit them one, two, three, four, five.

‘Three men usually get out of the five (that are inside) and they run like broken-field runners that have been shaken loose in a play when you are in Minnesota and the others are Beloit, Wisconsin.

‘Do I bore you?’

‘No. I do not understand the local allusions. But you can explain them when you care to. Please keep on telling me.’

‘You get into the town, and some handsome jerk puts an air mission on you. This mission might have been ordered and never cancelled. Let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I’m just telling you about things in a general way. It is better not to be specific and a civilian wouldn’t understand it. Not even you.

‘This air mission does not help much, Daughter. Because maybe you cannot stay in the town because you have got too few people in, and by now, you are digging them out of rubble; or leaving them in rubble. There are two schools of thought on that. So they say to take it by assault. They repeat this.

‘This has been rigidly confirmed by some politician in uniform who has never killed in his life, except with his mouth over the telephone, or on paper, nor ever has been hit. Figure him as our next President if you want him. Figure him any way you like. But figure him and his people, the whole great business establishment, so far back that the best way to communicate with them rapidly would be by racing carrier pigeons. Except, with the amount of security they maintained for their proper persons, they would probably have their anti-aircraft shoot the pigeons down. If they could hit them.

‘So you do it again. Then I will tell you what it looks like.’

The Colonel looked up at the play of the light on the ceiling. It was reflected, in part, from the Canal. It made strange, but steady movements, changing, as the current of a trout stream changes, but remaining, still changing as the sun moved.

Then he looked at his great beauty, with her strange, dark, grown-up child’s face that broke his heart, that he would be leaving before 1335 (that was sure) and he said, ‘Let’s not talk about the war, Daughter.’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. Then I will have it all this week.’

‘That’s a short sentence. I mean using the word sentence as a jail sentence.’

‘You don’t know how long a week can be when you are nineteen.’

‘Several times I have known how long an hour can be,’ the Colonel said. ‘I could tell you how long two minutes and a half can be.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘Well, I had two days’ leave in Paris between the Schnee-Eifel fight and this one, and due to my friendship with one or two people I was privileged to be present at some sort of a meeting, where only the accredited and trusted were present, and General Walter Bedell Smith explained to all of us how easy the operation that later took the name of Hurtgen Forest would be. It was not really Hurtgen Forest. That was only a small sector. It was the Stadtswald and it was where the German High Command had figured, exactly, to fight after Aachen had been taken and the road into Germany breached. I hope I am not boring you.’

‘You never bore me. Nothing about fighting bores me except lies.’

‘You’re a strange girl.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve known that for quite a long time.’

‘Would you really like to fight?’

‘I don’t know if I could do it. But I could try if you taught me.’

‘I’ll never teach you. I’ll just tell you anecdotes.’

‘Sad stories of the death of kings.’

‘No. GIs somebody christened them. God how I hate that word and how it was used. Comic book readers. All from some certain place. Most of them there unwillingly. Not all. But they all read a paper called “The Stars and Stripes” and you had to get your unit into it, or you were unsuccessful as a commander. I was mostly unsuccessful. I tried to like the correspondents and there were some very good ones present at this meeting. I will not name names because I might omit some fine ones and that would be unjust. There were good ones that I don’t remember. Then, there were draft dodgers, phonies who claimed that they were wounded if a piece of spent metal ever touched them, people who wore the purple heart from jeep accidents, insiders, cowards, liars, thieves and telephone racers. There were a few deads missing from this briefing. They had deads too. A big percentage. But none of the deads were present as I said. They had women at it though in wonderful uniforms.’

‘But how did you ever marry one?’

‘By mistake as I explained before.’

‘Go on and tell me.’

‘There were more maps in the room than Our Lord could read on his best day,’ the Colonel continued. ‘There were the Big Picture, the Semi-Big Picture and the Super-Big-Picture. All these people pretended to understand them, as did the boys with the pointers, a sort of half-arsed billiard cue that they used for explanation.’

‘Don’t say rough words. I don’t know, even, what half-arsed means.’

‘Shortened, or abbreviated in an inefficient manner,’ the Colonel explained. ‘Or deficient as an instrument, or in character. It’s an old word. You could probably find it in Sanscrit.’

‘Please tell me.’

‘What for? Why should I perpetuate ignominy just with my mouth?’

‘I’ll write it if you want. I can write truly what I hear or think. I would make mistakes of course.’

‘You are a lucky girl if you can write truly what you hear or think. But don’t you ever write one word of this.’

He resumed, ‘The place is full of correspondents dressed according to their taste. Some are cynical and some are extremely eager.

‘To ride herd on them, and to wield the pointers, there is a group of pistol-slappers. We call a pistol-slapper a non-fighting man, disguised in uniform, or you might even call it costume, who gets excited every time the weapon slaps against his thighs. Incidentally, Daughter, the weapon, not the old pistol, the real pistol, has missed more people in combat than probably any weapon in the world. Don’t ever let anyone give you one unless you want to hit people on the head with it in Harry’s Bar.’

‘I never wanted to hit anyone; except perhaps Andrea.’

‘If you ever hit Andrea, hit him with the barrel; not with the butt. The butt is awfully slow, and it misses and if it lands you get blood on your hands when you put the gun away. Also please do not ever hit Andrea because he is my friend. I do not think he would be easy to hit either.’

‘No. I do not think so either. Please tell me some more about the meeting, or the assembly. I think I could recognize a pistol-slapper now. But I would like to be checked out more thoroughly.’

‘Well, the pistol-slappers, in all the pride of their pistol-slappery, were awaiting the arrival of the great General who was to explain the operation.

‘The correspondents were muttering, or twittering, and the intelligent ones were glum or passively cheerful. Everybody sat on folding chairs as for a Chautauqua lecture. I’m sorry about these local terms; but we are a local people.

‘In comes the General. He is no pistol-slapper, but a big business man; an excellent politician, the executive type. The Army is the biggest business, at that moment, in the world. He takes the half-assed pointer, and he shows us, with complete conviction, and without forebodings, exactly what the attack will be, why we are making it, and how facilely it will succeed. There is no problem.’

‘Go on,’ the girl said. ‘Please let me fill your glass and you, please look at the light on the ceiling.’

‘Fill it and I’ll look at the light and I will go on.

‘This high pressure salesman, and I say this with no disrespect, but with admiration for all his talents, or his talent, also told what we would have of the necessary. There would be no lack of anything. The organization called SHAEF was then based on a town named Versailles outside of Paris. We would attack to the east of Aachen a distance of some 380 kilometres from where they were based.

‘An army can get to be huge; but you can close up a little bit. They finally went as far forward as Rheims which was 240 kilometres from the fighting. That was many months later.

‘I understand the necessity of the big executive being removed from contact with his working people. I understand about the size of the army and the various problems. I even understand logistics which is not difficult. But no one ever commanded from that far back in history.’

‘Tell me about the town.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ the Colonel said. ‘But I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘You never hurt me. We are an old town and we had fighting men, always. We respect them more than all others and I hope we understand them a little. We also know they are difficult. Usually, as people, they are very boring to women.’

‘Do I bore you?’

‘What do you think?’ the girl asked.

‘I bore myself, Daughter.’

‘I don’t think you do, Richard, you would not have done something all your life if you were bored by it. Don’t lie to me, please, darling, when we have so little time.

‘I won’t.’

‘Don’t you see you need to tell me things to purge your bitterness?’

‘I know I tell them to you.’

‘Don’t you know I want you to die with the grace of a happy death? Oh, I’m getting all mixed up. Don’t let me get too mixed up.’

‘I won’t, Daughter.’

‘Tell me some more, please, and be just as bitter as you want.’

Chapter XXXI

‘Listen, Daughter,’ the Colonel said. ‘Now we will cut out all references to glamour and to high brass, even from Kansas, where the brass grows higher than osage-orange trees along your own road. It bears a fruit you can’t eat and it is purely Kansan. Nobody but Kansans ever had anything to do with it; except maybe us who fought. We ate them every day. Osage oranges,’ he added. ‘Only we called them K Rations. They weren’t bad. C Rations were bad. Ten in ones were good.

‘So we fought. It is dull but it is informative. This is the way it goes if anyone is ever interested; which I doubt.

‘It goes like this: 1300 Red S-3: White jumped off in time. Red said they were waiting to tie in behind White. 1305 (that is one o’clock and five minutes after in the afternoon, if you can remember that, Daughter) Blue S-3, you know what an S-3 is, I hope, says, “Let us know when you move.” Red said they were waiting to tie in behind White.

‘You can see how easy it is,’ the Colonel told the girl. ‘Everybody ought to do it before breakfast.’

‘We cannot all be combat infantrymen,’ the girl told him softly. ‘I respect it more than anything except good, honest fliers. Please talk, I’m taking care of you.’

‘Good fliers are very good and should be respected as such,’ the Colonel said.

He looked up at the light on the ceiling and he was completely desperate at the remembrance of his loss of his battalions, and of individual people. He could never hope to have such a regiment, ever. He had not built it. He had inherited it. But, for a time, it had been his great joy. Now every second man in it was dead and the others nearly all were wounded. In the belly, the head, the feet or the hands, the neck, the back, the lucky buttocks, the unfortunate chest and the other places. Tree burst wounds hit men where they would never be wounded in open country. And all the wounded were wounded for life.

‘It was a good regiment,’ he said. ‘You might even say it was a beautiful regiment until I destroyed it under other people’s orders.’

‘But why do you have to obey them when you know better?’

‘In our army you obey like a dog,’ the Colonel explained. ‘You always hope you have a good master.’

‘What kind of masters do you get?’

‘I’ve only had two good ones so for. After I reached a certain level of command, many nice people, but only two good masters.’

‘Is that why you are not a General now? I would love it if you were a General.’

‘I’d love it too,’ the Colonel said. ‘But maybe not with the same intensity.’

‘Would you try to sleep, please, to please me?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said.

‘You see, I thought that if you slept you might get rid of them, just being asleep.’

‘Yes. Thank you very much,’ he said.

There was nothing to it, gentlemen. All a man need ever do is obey.

Chapter XXXII

‘You slept quite well for a time,’ the girl told him, lovingly and gently. ‘Is there anything you would like me to do?’

‘Nothing,’ the Colonel said. ‘Thank you.’

Then he turned bad and he said, ‘Daughter, I could sleep good straight up and down in the electric chair with my pants slit and my hair clipped. I sleep as, and when, I need it.’

‘I can never be like that,’ the girl said, sleepily. ‘I sleep when I am sleepy.’

‘You’re lovely,’ the Colonel told her. ‘And you sleep better than anyone ever slept.’

‘I am not proud of it,’ the girl said, very sleepily. ‘It is just something that I do.’

‘Do it, please.’

‘No. Tell me very low and soft and put your bad hand in mine.’

‘The hell with my bad hand,’ the Colonel said. ‘Since when was it so bad?’

‘It’s bad,’ the girl said. ‘Badder, or worse, than you will ever know. Please tell me about combat without being too brutal.’

‘An easy assignment,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’ll skip the times. The weather is cloudy and the place is 986342. What’s the situation? We are smoking the enemy with artillery and mortar. S-3 advises that S-6 wants Red to button up by 1700. S-6 wants you to button up and use plenty of artillery. White reports that they are in fair shape. S-6 informs that A company will swing around and tie in with B.

‘B Company was stopped first by enemy action and stayed there of their own accord. S-6 isn’t doing so good. This is unofficial. He wants more artillery but there isn’t any more artillery.

‘You wanted combat for what? I don’t know really why. Or really know why. Who wants true combat? But here it is, Daughter, on the telephone and later I will put in the sounds and smells and anecdotes about who was killed when and where if you want them.’

‘I only want what you will tell me.’

‘I’ll tell you how it was,’ the Colonel said, ‘and General Walter Bedell Smith doesn’t know how it was yet. Though, probably, I am wrong, as I have been so many times.’

‘I’m glad we don’t have to know him or the nylon-smooth man,’ the girl said.

‘We won’t have to know them this side of hell,’ the Colonel assured her. ‘And I will have a detail guarding the gates of hell so that no such characters enter.’

‘You sound like Dante,’ she said sleepily.

‘I am Mister Dante,’ he said. ‘For the moment.’

And for a while he was and he drew all the circles. They were as unjust as Dante’s but he drew them.

Chapter XXXIII

‘I will skip the detailed part since you are, justifiably, and should be, sleepy,’ the Colonel said. He watched, again, the strange play of the light on the ceiling. Then he looked at the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl that he had ever seen, ever.

He had seen them come and go, and they go faster, when they go, than any other thing that flies. They can go faster from fair beauty to the knocker’s shop than any other animal, he thought. But I believe that this one could hold the pace and stay the course. The dark ones last the best, he thought, and looked at the bony structure in that face. This one has a fine blood line too, and she can go for ever. Most of our own lovely beauties come from soda counters, and they do not know their grandfather’s last name, unless, maybe, it was Schultz. Or Schlitz, he thought.

This is the wrong attitude to take, he said to himself; since he did not wish to express any of these sentiments to the girl, who would not like them anyway, and was soundly sleepy now the way a cat is when it sleeps within itself.

‘Sleep well, my dearest lovely, and I will just tell it for nothing.’

The girl was asleep, still holding his bad hand, that he despised, and he could feel her breathe, as the young breathe when they are easily asleep.

The Colonel told her all about it; but he did not utter it.

So after I had the privilege of hearing General Walter Bedell Smith explain the facility of the attack, we made it. There was the Big Red One, who believed their own publicity. There was the Ninth, which was a better Division than we were. There was us, who had always done it when they asked for you to do it.

We had no time to read comic books, and we had no time for practically nothing, because we always moved before first light. This is difficult and you have to throw away the Big Picture and be a division.

We wore a four-leaf clover, which meant nothing except among ourselves, who all loved it. And every time I ever see it the same thing happens in my inner guts. Some people thought that it was ivy. But it was not. It was a four-leaf clover disguised as ivy.

The orders were that we would attack with the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division of the Army of the United States, and they, and their Calypso singing PRO never let you forget it. He was a nice guy. And it was his job.

But you get fed up with horse-dung unless you like the aroma or the taste. I never liked it. Although I loved to walk through cow-dung when I was a kid and feel it between my toes. But horse-dung bores you. It bores me very rapidly, and I can detect it at over one thousand yards.

So we attacked, the three of us in line, exactly where the Germans wished us to attack. We will not mention General Walter Bedell Smith any further. He is not the villain. He only made the promises and explained how it would go. There are no villains, I presume, in a Democracy. He was only just as wrong as hell. Period, he added in his mind.

The patches had all been removed even as far back as the rear echelon so that no Kraut would know that it was us, the three he knew so well, who were going to attack. We were going to attack with the three of us in line and nothing in reserve. I won’t try to explain what that means, Daughter. But it isn’t any good. And the place we were going to fight in, which I had taken a good look at, was going to be Passchendaele with tree bursts. I say that too much. But I think it too much.

The poor bloody twenty-eighth which was up on our right had been bogged down for some time and so there was pretty accurate information available about what conditions in those woods were going to be like. I think we could conservatively describe them as unfavourable.

Then we were ordered to commit one regiment before the attack started. That means that the enemy will get at least one prisoner which makes all the taking off of the Divisional patches silly. They would be waiting for the old four-leaf clover people who would go straight to hell like a mule and do it for one hundred and five days. Figures of course mean nothing to civilians. Nor to the characters from SHAEF we never saw in those woods. Incidentally, and of course these occurrences are always incidental at the SHAEF level, the regiment was destroyed. It was no one’s bloody fault, especially not the fault of the man who commanded it. He was a man I would be glad to spend half my time in hell with; and may yet.

It certainly would be odd if instead of going to hell, as we always counted on, we should go to one of those Kraut joints like Valhalla and not be able to get along with the people. But maybe we could get a corner table with Rommel and Udet and it would be just like any winter-sports hotel. It will probably be hell though and I don’t even believe in hell.

Well anyway this regiment was rebuilt as American regiments always are by the replacement system. I won’t describe it since you can always read about it in a book by somebody who was a replacement. It boils down, or distils, to the fact you stay in until you are hit badly or killed or go crazy and get section-eighted. But I guess it is logical and as good as any other, given the difficulties of transport. However it leaves a core of certain un-killed characters who know what the score is and no one of these characters liked the look of these woods much.

You could sum up their attitude In this phrase, ‘Don’t —— me, Jack.’

And since I had been an un-killed character for around twenty-eight years I could understand their attitude. But they were soldiers, so most of them got killed in those woods and when we took the three towns that looked so innocent and were really fortresses. They were just built to tempt us and we had no word on them at all. To continue to use the silly parlance of my trade: this could or could not be faulty intelligence.

‘I feel terribly about the regiment,’ the girl said. She had wakened and spoken straight from sleep.

‘Yes,’ said the Colonel. ‘So do I. Let’s drink to it once. Then you go to sleep, Daughter, please. The war is over and forgotten.’

Please don’t think that I am conceited, Daughter, he said, without speaking. His true love was sleeping again. She slept in a different way than his career girl had slept. He did not like to remember how the career girl slept, yet he did. But he wanted to forget it. She did not sleep pretty, he thought. Not like this girl who slept as though she were awake and alive; except she was asleep. Please sleep well, he thought.

Who the hell are you to criticize career girls? he thought. What miserable career did you attempt and have failed at?

I wished to be, and was, a General Officer in the Army of the United States. I have failed and I speak badly of all who have succeeded.

Then his contrition did not last, and he said to himself, ‘Except the brown-nosers, the five and ten and twenty percenters and all the jerks from wherever who never fought and hold commands.’

They killed several men from the Academy at Gettysburg. That was the big kill day of all kill days, when there was a certain amount of opposition by both sides.

Don’t be bitter. They killed General McNair by mistake the day the Valhalla Express came over. Quit being bitter. People from the Academy were killed and there are statistics to prove it.

How can I remember if I am not bitter?

Be as bitter as you want. And tell the girl, now silently, and that will not hurt her, ever, because she is sleeping so lovely. He said lovely to himself since his thinking was often un-grammatical.

Chapter XXXIV

Sleep softly, my true love, and when you wake, this will be over and I will joke you out of trying to learn details of the triste metier of war and we will go to buy the little negro, or moor, carved in ebony with his fine features and his jewelled turban. Then you will pin him on and we will go to have a drink at Harry’s and see whoever or whatever of our friends that will be afoot at that hour.

We will lunch at Harry’s, or we’ll come back here and I will be packed. We will say good-bye and I will get into the motoscafo with Jackson and make some cheerful crack to the Gran Maestro and wave to any other members of the Order and ten to one, the way I feel right now, or two will get you thirty, we will not ever see one another again.

Hell, he said to no one and certainly not aloud, I’ve felt this way before many fights and almost always at some time in the fall of the year and always when leaving Paris. Probably it doesn’t mean a thing.

Who gives a damn anyway except me and the Gran Maestro and this girl; I mean at command level.

I give very much of a damn myself. But I certainly should be trained and adjusted by this time not to give a much for nothing; like the definition of a whore. A woman who does not, etc.

But we won’t think about that boy, lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, general, sir. We will just lay it on the line once more and the hell with it and with its ugly face that old Hieronymus Bosch really painted. But you can sheathe your scythe, old brother death, if you have got a sheath for it. Or, he added, thinking of Hurtgen now, you can take your scythe and stick it.

It was Passchendaele with tree bursts, he told nobody except the wonder light on the ceiling. Then he looked at the girl, to see that she was sleeping well enough so even his thoughts would not hurt her.

Then he looked at the portrait and he thought, I have her in two positions, lying down, turned a little on her side and looking at me straight in front. I’m a lucky son of a bitch and I should never be sad about anything.

Chapter XXXV

The first day there, we lost the three battalion commanders. One killed in the first twenty minutes and the other two hit later. This is only a statistic to a journalist. But good battalion commanders have never yet grown on trees; not even Christmas trees which was the basic tree of that woods. I do not know how many times we lost company commanders how many times over. But I could look it up.

They aren’t made, nor grown, as fast as a crop of potatoes is either. We got a certain amount of replacements but I can remember thinking that it would be simpler and more effective, to shoot them in the area where they de-trucked, than to have to try to bring them back from where they would be killed and bury them. It takes men to bring them back and gasoline and men to bury them. These men might just as well be fighting and get killed too.

There was snow, or something, rain or fog, all the times and the roads had been mined as many as fourteen mines deep in certain stretches, so when the vehicles churned down to a new string deeper, in another part of the mud, you were always losing vehicles and, of course, the people that went with them.

Besides just mortaring it all to hell and having all the fire-lanes taped for machine-gun and automatic weapon fire, they had the whole thing worked out and canalized so however you out-thought them you ran right into it. They also shelled you with heavy artillery fire and with at least one railway gun.

It was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.

Let’s not think about it. The hell with it. Maybe two things I will think about and get rid of them. One was a bare-assed piece of hill that you had to cross to get into Grosshau.

Just before you had to make this run, which was under observation with fires by 88s, there was a little piece of dead ground where they could only hit you with a howitzer, only interdicting fires, or, from the right by mortar. When we cleaned it up we found they had good observation for their mortars there too.

This was a comparatively safe place, I’m really not lying, not me nor anybody eke. You can’t fool those that were in Hurtgen and if you lied they would know it the minute you opened your mouth, Colonel or no Colonel.

We met a truck at this place and slowed up, and he had the usual grey face and he said, ‘Sir, there is a dead G.I. in the middle of the road up ahead and every time any vehicle goes through they have to run over him and I’m afraid it is making a bad impression on the troops.’

‘We’ll get him off the road.’

So we got him off the road.

And I can remember just how he felt, lifting him, and how he had been flattened and the strangeness of his flatness.

Then there was one other thing, I remember. We had put an awful lot of white phosphorus on the town before we got in for good, or whatever you would call it. That was the first time I ever saw a German dog eating a roasted German Kraut. Later on I saw a cat working on him too. It was a hungry cat, quite nice looking, basically. You wouldn’t think a good German cat would eat a good German soldier, would you, Daughter? Or a good German dog eat a good German soldier’s ass which had been roasted by white phosphorus.

How many could you tell like that? Plenty, and what good would they do? You could tell a thousand and they would not prevent war. People would say we are not fighting the Krauts and besides the cat did not eat me nor my brother Gordon, because he was in the Pacific. Maybe land crabs ate Gordon. Or maybe he just deliquesced.

In Hurtgen they just froze up hard; and it was so cold they froze up with ruddy faces. Very strange. They all were grey and yellow like wax-works, in the summer. But once the winter really came they had ruddy faces.

Real soldiers never tell anyone what their own dead looked like, he told the portrait. And I’m through with this whole subject. And what about that company dead up the draw? What about them, professional soldier?

They’re dead, he said. And I can hang and rattle.

Now who would join me in a glass of Valpolicella? What time do you think I should wake your opposite number, you girl? We have to get to that jewellery place. And I look forward to making jokes and to talking of the most cheerful things.

What’s cheerful, portrait? You ought to know. You’re smarter than I am, although you haven’t been around as much.

All right, canvas girl, the Colonel told her, not saying it aloud, we’ll drop the whole thing and in eleven minutes I will wake the live girl up and we will go out on the town and be cheerful and leave you here to be wrapped.

I didn’t mean to be rude. I was just joking roughly. I don’t wish to be rude ever because I will be living with you from now on. I hope, he added, and drank a glass of the wine.

Chapter XXXVI

It was a sharp, cold bright day and they stood outside the window of the jeweller’s shop and studied the two small negro heads and torsos that were carved to ebony and adorned with studded jewels. One was as good as the other, the Colonel thought.

‘Which do you like the best, Daughter?’

‘I think the one on the right. Don’t you think he has the nicer face?’

‘They both have nice faces. But I think I would rather have him attend you if it was the old days.’

‘Good. We’ll take him. Let’s go in and see them. I must ask the price.’

‘I will go in.’

‘No, let me ask the price. They will charge me less than they would charge you. After all you are a rich American.’

‘Et toi, Rimbaud?’

‘You’d make an awfully funny Verlalne,’ the girl told him. ‘We’ll be some other famous characters.’

‘Go on to, Majesty, and we’ll buy the God-damn jewel.’

‘You wouldn’t make a very good Louis XVI either.’

‘I’d get up to that tumbril with you and still be able to spit.’

‘Let’s forget all the tumbrils and everyone’s sorrows and buy the small object and then we can walk to Cipriani’s and be famous people.’

Inside the shop they looked at the two heads and she asked the price and then, there was some very rapid talk and the price was much lower. But still it was more money than the Colonel had.

‘I’ll go to Cipriani’s and get some money.’

‘No,’ the girl said. Then to the clerk, ‘Put it in a box and send it to Cipriani’s and say the Colonel said to pay for it and hold it for him.’

‘Please,’ the clerk said. ‘Exactly as you say.’

They went out into the street and the sunlight and the unremitting wind.

‘By the way,’ the Colonel said. ‘Your stones are in the safe at the Gritti in your name.’

‘Your stones.’

‘No,’ he told her, not rough, but to make her understand truly. ‘There are some things that a person cannot do. You know about that. You cannot marry me and I understand that, although I do not approve it.’

‘Very well,’ the girl said. ‘I understand. But would you take one for a lucky stone?’

‘No. I couldn’t. They are too valuable.’

‘But the portrait has value.’

‘That is different.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I suppose so. I think I begin to understand.’

‘I would accept a horse from you, if I was poor and young and riding very well. But I could not take a motor car.’

‘I understand it now very well. Where can we go now, at this minute, where you can kiss me?’

‘In this side alley, if you know no one who lives in it.’

‘I don’t care who lives in it. I want to feel you hold me tight and kiss me.’

They turned into the side street and walked towards its blind end.

‘Oh, Richard,’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear.’

‘I love you.’

‘Please love me.’

‘I do.’

The wind had blown her hair up and around his neck and he kissed her once more with it beating silkily against both his cheeks.

Then she broke away, suddenly and hard, and looked at him and said, ‘I suppose we had better go to Harry’s.’

‘I suppose so. Do you want to play historical personages?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Let us play that you are you and I am me.’

‘Let’s play,’ the Colonel said.

Chapter XXXVII

There was no one in Harry’s except some early morning drinkers that the Colonel did not know and two men that were doing business at the back of the bar.

There were hours at Harry’s when it filled with the people that you knew, with the same rushing regularity as the tide coming in at Mont St. Michel. Except, the Colonel thought, the hours of the tides change each day with the moon and the hours at Harry’s are as the Greenwich Meridian, or the standard metre in Paris, or the good opinion the French military hold of themselves.

‘Do you know any of these morning drinkers?’ he asked the girl.

‘No. I am not a morning drinker so I have never met them.’

‘They will be swept out when the tide comes in.’

‘No. They will leave, just as it comes, of their own accord.’

‘Do you mind being here out of season?’

‘Did you think I was a snob because I come from an old family? We’re the ones who are not snobs. The snobs are what you call jerks and the people with all the new money. Did you ever see so much new money?’

‘Yes,’ the Colonel said. ‘I saw it in Kansas City when I used to come in from Fort Riley to play polo at the Country Club.’

‘Was it as bad as here?’

‘No, it was quite pleasant. I liked it and that part of Kansas City is very beautiful.’

‘Is it really? I wish that we could go there. Do they have the camps there too? The ones that we are going to stay at?’

‘Surely. But we’ll stay at the Muehlebach hotel which has the biggest beds in the world and we’ll pretend that we are oil millionaires.’

‘Where will we leave the Cadillac?’

‘Is it a Cadillac now?’

‘Yes. Unless you want to take the big Buick Roadmaster, with the Dynaflow drive. I’ve driven it all over Europe. It was in that last Vogue you sent me.’

‘We’d probably better just use one at a time,’ the Colonel said. ‘Whichever one we decide to use we will park in the garage alongside the Muehlebach.’

‘Is the Muehlebach very splendid?’

‘Wonderful. You’ll love it. When we leave town we’ll drive north to St. Joe and have a drink in the bar at the Roubidoux, maybe two drinks and then we will cross the river and go west. You can drive and we can spell each other.’

‘What is that?’

‘Take turns driving.’

‘I’m driving now.’

‘Let’s skip the dull part and get to Chimney Rock and go on to Scott’s Bluff and Torrington and after that you will begin to see it.’

‘I have the road maps and the guides and that man who says where to eat and the A.A.A. guide to the camps and the hotels.’

‘Do you work on this much?’

‘I work at it in the evenings, with the things you sent me. What kind of a licence will we have?’

‘Missouri. We’ll buy the car in Kansas City. We fly to Kansas City, don’t you remember? Or we can go on a really good train.’

‘I thought we flew to Albuquerque.’

‘That was another time.’

‘Will we stop early in the afternoons at the best Hotel in the A.A.A. book and I make you any drinks you want while you read the paper and Life and Time and Newsweek and I will read the new fresh Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar?

‘Yes. But we come back here, too.’

‘Of course. With our car. On an Italian liner; whichever one is best then. We drive straight here from Genoa.’

‘You don’t want to stop anywhere for the night?’

‘Why? We want to get home to our own house.’

‘Where will our house be?’

‘We can decide that any time. There are always plenty of houses in this town. Would you like to live in the country too?’

‘Yes,’ said the Colonel. ‘Why not?’

‘Then we could see the trees when we woke up. What sort of trees will we see on this journey?’

‘Pine mostly and cotton-wood along the creeks and aspen. Wait till you see the aspen turn yellow in the fall.’

‘I’m waiting. Where will we stay in Wyoming?’

‘We’ll go to Sheridan first and then decide.’

‘Is Sheridan nice?’

‘It’s wonderful. In the car we’ll drive to where they had the Wagon-Box Fight and I’ll tell you about it. We will drive up, on the way to Billings, to where they killed that fool George Armstrong Custer and you can see the markers where everybody died and I’ll explain the fight to you.’

‘That will be wonderful. Which is Sheridan more like; Mantova or Verona or Vicenza?’

‘It isn’t like any of those. It is right up against the mountains, almost like Schio.’

‘Is it like Cortina then?’

‘Nothing like. Cortina is in a high valley in the mountains. Sheridan lays right up against them. There aren’t any foothills to the Big Horns. They rise high out of the plateau. You can see Cloud’s Peak.’

‘Will our cars climb them properly?’

‘You’re damn right they will. But I would much rather not have any hydromatic drive.’

‘I can do without it,’ the girl said. Then she held herself straight and hard not to cry. ‘As I can do without everything else.’

‘What are you drinking?’ the Colonel said. ‘We haven’t even ordered yet.’

‘I don’t think I will drink anything.’

‘Two very dry Martinis,’ the Colonel said to the bartender, ‘and a glass of cold water.’

He reached into his pocket and unscrewed the top of the medicine bottle and shook two of the big tablets into his left hand. With them in his hand, he screwed the top back on the bottle. It was no feat for a man with a bad right hand.

‘I said I didn’t want to drink anything.’

‘I know, Daughter. But I thought you might need one. We can leave it on the bar. Or I can drink it myself. Please,’ he said. ‘I did not mean to be brusque.’

‘We haven’t asked for the little negro that will look after me.’

‘No. Because I did not want to ask for him until Cipriani came in and I could pay for him.’

‘Is everything that rigid?’

‘With me, I guess,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m sorry, Daughter.’

‘Say daughter three times straight.’

‘Hija, figlia, Daughter.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I think we should just leave here. I love to have people see us, but I don’t want to see anybody.’

‘The box with the negro in it is on top of the cash register.’

‘I know. I’ve seen it for some time.’

The bar-tender came, with the two drinks, frost cold from the chilled coldness of the glasses and he brought the glass of water.

‘Give me that small packet that came in my name and is on top of the cash register,’ the Colonel said to him. ‘Tell Cipriani I will send him a cheque for it.’

He had made another decision.

‘Do you want your drink, Daughter?’

‘Yes. If you don’t mind me changing my mind too.’

They drank, after touching glasses very lightly, so lightly that the contact was almost imperceptible.

‘You were right,’ she said, feeling its warmth and its momentary destruction of sorrow.

‘You were right too,’ he said, and palmed the two tablets.

He thought taking them with the water now, was in bad taste. So, when the girl turned her head a moment to watch a morning drinker go out to the door, he swallowed them with the Martini.

‘Should we go, Daughter?’

‘Yes. By all means.’

‘Bar-tender,’ the Colonel said. ‘How much are these drinks? And do not forget to tell Cipriani I am sending him a cheque for this nonsense.’

Chapter XXXVIII

They ate lunch at the Gritti and the girl had unwrapped the small ebony negro’s head and torso and pinned it high on her left shoulder. It was about three inches long and was quite lovely to look at if you liked that sort of thing. And if you don’t you are stupid, the Colonel thought.

But do not even think rough, he told himself. You have to be good now in every way until you say good-bye. What a word, he thought, good-bye.

It sounds like a Valentine slogan.

Good-bye and bonne chance and hasta la vista. We always just said merde and let it go at that. Farewell, he thought, that is a nice word. It sings well, he thought. Farewell, a long farewell and take it with you where you go. With handles, he thought.

‘Daughter,’ he said. ‘How long has it been since I told you that I loved you?’

‘Not since we sat at the table.’

‘I tell you now.’

She had combed her hair with patience when they came into the hotel and she had gone into the room for women. She disliked such rooms.

She had used lipstick to make the sort of mouth she knew he most desired and she had said to herself, making the mouth correctly, ‘Don’t think at all. Don’t think. Above all don’t be sad because he is going now.’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘Thank you. I would like to be beautiful for you if I could and if I could be beautiful.’

‘Italian is a lovely language.’

‘Yes. Mister Dante thought so.’

‘Gran Maestro,’ the Colonel said. ‘What is there to eat in this Wirtschaft?’

The Gran Maestro had been observing, without observing, with affection and without envy.

‘Do you want meat, or fish?’

‘It’s Saturday,’ the Colonel said. ‘Fish is not compulsory. So I’ll take it.’

‘It is sole,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘What do you want, my Lady?’

‘Whatever you decide. You know more about food than I do and I like it all.’

‘Make a decision, Daughter.’

‘No. I would rather leave it to someone who knows more than me. I have a boarding-school appetite.’

‘It will come as a surprise,’ the Gran Maestro said with his long and loving face with the grey eyebrows over the softly hooded eyes and the ever happy face of the old soldier who is still alive and appreciates it.

‘Is there any news from the Order?’ the Colonel asked.

‘Only that our leader, Himself, is in trouble. They have confiscated everything he owns. Or at any rate they have intervened.’

‘I hope it is not serious.’

‘We will have confidence in our leader. He has ridden out worse tempests than this.’

‘To our leader,’ the Colonel said.

He raised his glass, which had been filled with the decanted new and true Valpolicella. ‘Drink to him, Daughter.’

‘I can’t drink to that swine,’ the girl said. ‘Besides I do not belong to the Order.’

‘You are a member now,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘Por merito di guerra.’

‘I’ll drink to him then,’ she said. ‘Am I really a member of the Order?’

‘Yes,’ the Gran Maestro said. ‘You have not received your parchment yet but I appoint you Super Honorary Secretary. My Colonel will reveal to you the secrets of the Order. Reveal, please, my Colonel.’

‘I reveal’, the Colonel said. ‘There are no pitted folk about?’

‘No. He is out with his Lady. Miss Baedeker.’

‘O.K. then,’ the Colonel said. ‘I will reveal. There is only the major secret that you must know. Correct me, Gran Maestro, if I fall into error.’

‘Proceed to reveal,’ the Gran Maestro said.

‘I proceed to reveal,’ the Colonel said. ‘Listen carefully, Daughter. This is the Supreme Secret. Listen. ‘Love is love and fun is fun. But it is always so quiet when the gold fish die.’

‘It has been revealed,’ the Gran Maestro said.

‘I am very proud and happy to be a member of the Order,’ the girl said. ‘But it is, in a way, a rather rough Order.’

‘It is indeed,’ the Colonel said. ‘And now, Gran Maestro, what do we actually eat; without mysteries?’

‘Some crab enchillada, in the style of this town, but cold, first. Served in the shell. Then sole for you and for my lady a mixed grill. What vegetables?’

‘Whatever you have,’ the Colonel said.

The Gran Maestro was gone and the Colonel looked at the girl and then at the Grand Canal outside the window and he saw the magic spots and changes of light that were even here, in the end of the bar, which had now by skilful handling been made into a dining-room, and he said, ‘Did I tell you, Daughter, that I love you?’

‘You haven’t told me for quite a long time. But I love you.’

‘What happens to people that love each other?’

‘I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.’

‘I won’t be rough,’ the Colonel said. ‘I could have made a rough response. But please don’t have any emptiness.’

‘I’ll try,’ the girl said. ‘I’ve been trying ever since I woke up. I’ve tried ever since we knew each other.’

‘Keep on trying, Daughter,’ the Colonel said.

Then to the Grand Maestro, who had reappeared, having given his orders, the Colonel said, ‘A bottle of that vino secco, from Vesuvius, for the small soles. We have the Valpolicella for the other things.’

‘Can’t I drink the Vesuvius wine with my mixed grill?’ the girl asked.

‘Renata, Daughter,’ the Colonel said. ‘Of course. You can do anything.’

‘I like to drink the same wines as you if I drink wine.’

‘Good white wine is good with a mixed grill, at your age,’ the Colonel told her.

‘I wish there was not such a difference in ages.’

‘I like it very much,’ the Colonel said. ‘Except,’ he added. Then he did not continue and said, ‘Let’s be fraîche et rose comme au jour de bataille.’

‘Who said that?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I picked it up when I took a course at the Collège des Maréchaux. A rather pretentious title. But I graduated. What I know best I learned from the Krauts, studying them and opposing them. They are the best soldiers. But they always over-reach.’

‘Let’s be like you said and please tell me that you love me.’

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘That’s what you can base on. I tell you truly.’

‘It is Saturday,’ she said. ‘And when is next Saturday?’

‘Next Saturday is a movable feast, Daughter. Find me a man who can tell me about next Saturday.’

‘You could tell me if you would.’

‘I’ll ask the Gran Maestro, maybe he knows. Gran Maestro, when will next Saturday come?’

‘A Pâques ou à la Trinité,’ the Gran Maestro said.

‘Why don’t we have any smells from the kitchen to cheer us up?’

‘Because the wind is from the wrong direction.’

Yes, the Colonel thought. The wind is from the wrong direction and how lucky I would have been to have had this girl instead of the woman that I pay alimony to, who could not even make a child. She hired out for that. But who should criticize whose tubes? I only criticize Goodrich or Firestone or General.

Keep it clean, he said to himself. And love your girl.

She was there beside him, wishing to be loved, if he had any love to give.

It came back, as it always had, when he saw her and he said, ‘How are you with the crow wing hair and the break-heart face?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Gran Maestro,’ the Colonel said. ‘Produce a few smells or something from your off-stage kitchen, even if the wind is against us.’

Chapter XXXIX

The hall porter had telephoned, under the direction of the concierge, and it was the same motor boat that they had ridden in before.

T5 Jackson was in the boat with the luggage and the portrait, which had been well and sturdily wrapped. It was still blowing hard.

The Colonel had paid his bill and made the proper tips. The people of the hotel had put the luggage and the picture in the boat and seen that Jackson was seated properly. Then they had retired.

‘Well, Daughter,’ the Colonel said.

‘Can’t I ride with you to the garage?’

‘It would be just as bad at the garage.’

‘Please let me ride to the garage.’

‘All right,’ the Colonel said. ‘It’s your show, really. Get in.’

They did not talk at all and the wind was a stern wind so that, with what speed the old calamity of a motor made, there seemed almost to be no wind at all.

At the landing place, where Jackson was handing the luggage to a porter and looking after the portrait himself, the Colonel said, ‘Do you want to say good-bye here?’

‘Do I have to?’

‘No.’

‘May I come up to the bar in the garage while they are getting the car down?’

‘That will be worse.’

‘I do not care.’

‘Get that stuff up to the garage and have somebody look after it until you get the car down,’ the Colonel said to Jackson. ‘Check on my guns and pack this stuff in a way to give the maximum space in the rear seat.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jackson said.

‘Am I going then?’ the girl asked.

‘No,’ the Colonel told her.

‘Why can’t I go?’

‘You know very well. You weren’t invited.’

‘Please don’t be bad.’

‘Christ, Daughter, if you knew how hard I am trying not to be. It’s easy if you’re bad. Let’s pay this good man off and go over and sit on the bench there under the tree.’

He paid the owner of the motor boat and told him that he had not forgotten about the jeep engine. He also told him not to count on it, but that there was a good chance that he could get it.

‘It will be a used engine. But it will be better than that coffee pot you have in there now.’

They went up the worn stone steps and walked across the gravel and sat on a bench under the trees.

The trees were black and moved in the wind and there were no leaves on them. The leaves had fallen early that year and been swept up long ago.

A man came over to offer postcards for sale and the Colonel told him, ‘Run along, son. We don’t need you now.’

The girl was crying, finally, although she had made the decision never to cry.

‘Look, Daughter,’ the Colonel said. ‘There isn’t anything to say. They didn’t instal shock-absorbers in this vehicle we ride in now.’

‘I’ve stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m not an hysterical.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were. I’d say you were the loveliest and most beautiful girl that ever lived. Any time. Any place. Anywhere.’

‘If it were true, what difference would it make?’

‘You have me there,’ the Colonel said. ‘But it is true.’

‘So now what?’

‘So now we stand up and kiss each other and say good-bye.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Colonel said. ‘I guess that is one of the things everybody has to figure out for themselves.’

‘I’ll try to figure it.’

‘Just take it as easy as you can, Daughter.’

‘Yes,’ the girl said. ‘In the vehicle without the shock-absorbers.’

‘You were tumbril bait from the start.’

‘Can’t you do anything kindly?’

‘I guess not. But I’ve tried.’

‘Please keep on trying. That’s all the hope we have.’

‘I’ll keep on trying.’

So they held each other close and kissed each other hard and true and the Colonel took the girl across the stretch of gravel and down the stone steps.

‘You ought to take a good one. Not that old displaced engine boat.’

‘I’d rather take the displaced engine boat if you don’t mind.’

‘Mind?’ the Colonel said. ‘Not me. I only give orders and obey orders. I don’t mind. Good-bye, my dear, lovely, beautiful.’

‘Good-bye,’ she said.

Chapter XL

He was in the sunken oak hogshead that they used in the Veneto for blinds. A blind is any artifice you use to hide the shooter from that which he is attempting to shoot, which, in this case, were ducks.

It had been a good trip out with the boys, once they had met in the garage and a good evening with excellent food cooked on the old open-hearth kitchen. Three shooters rode in the rear seat, on the way to the shooting place. Those who did not lie had permitted themselves a certain amount of exaggeration and the liars had never been in fuller flower.

A liar, in full flower, the Colonel had thought, is as beautiful as cherry trees, or apple trees when they are in blossom. Who should ever discourage a liar, he thought, unless he is giving you co-ordinates?

The Colonel had collected liars all his life, as some men gather postage stamps. He did not classify them, except at the moment, nor treasure them truly. He just enjoyed, completely, hearing them lie at the moment, unless, of course, something concerned with duty was involved. Last night there had been a fair amount of good lying after the grappa had been passed around and the Colonel had enjoyed it.

There had been smoke in the room from the open charcoal fire; no, there were logs, he thought. Anyway a liar lies best when there is a little smoke or when the sun has set.

He had come close to lying twice himself and had held it up and merely exaggerated. I hope anyway, he thought.

Now here was the frozen lagoon to ruin everything. But it was not ruined.

A pair of pin-tails came, suddenly, from nowhere, slanting down fast in a dive no aeroplane ever made, and the Colonel heard their feathered trajectory and swung and killed the drake. He lay on the ice, hitting it as solid as a duck can hit ice and, before he was down, the Colonel had killed his mate, who was climbing, long-necked and fast.

She fell alongside the drake.

So it is murder, the Colonel thought. And what isn’t nowadays? But, boy, you can still shoot.

Boy, hell, he thought. You beat-up old bastard. But look at them come now.

They were widgeon and they came in a whisp that coagulated and then stretched to nothing. Then they coagulated again and the treacherous duck on the ice started to talk to them.

Let them turn once more, the Colonel said to himself. Keep your head down and do not move even your eyes. They are going to come in.

They came in well, with treachery speaking to them.

Their wings were suddenly set to alight, as when you lower the flaps. Then they saw it was ice and they rose, climbing.

The shooter, who was not a Colonel now, nor anything but a gun handler, rose in the wooden barrel and got two. They hit the ice almost as solidly as the big ducks.

Two is enough from one family, the Colonel said. Or was it one tribe?

The Colonel heard a shot behind him, where he knew there was no other blind and turned his head to look across the frozen lagoon to the far, sedge-lined shore.

That does it, he thought.

A bunch of mallards, that had been coming in low, were flaring up into the sky, seeming to stand on their tails as they climbed.

He saw one fall, then heard another shot.

It was the sullen boatman shooting at the ducks that would have come to the Colonel.

How, how can he do that? The Colonel thought.

The man had a shot-gun to shoot any cripples that might be escaping where the dog could not get them. For him to fire at ducks that were coming to the Colonel’s blind was, in shooting, as bad a thing as one man could do to another.

The boatman was too far away to hear a shout. So the Colonel fired at him twice.

It is too far for the pellets to reach, he thought, but at least he will know that I know what he is doing. What the hell is this all about? On a beautifully run shoot like this one too? This is the best organized and best run duck shoot I have ever shot at and I have had as much fun shooting here as I ever had in my life. What is the matter with that son of a bitch?

He knew how bad his anger was for him. So he took two of the pills and washed them down with a drink of Gordon’s gin from his flask since there was no water.

He knew the gin was bad for him too and he thought, everything is bad for me except rest and very light exercise. O.K., rest and light exercise, boy. Do you suppose that is light exercise?

You, beauty, he said to himself. I wish you were here now and we were in the double blind and if we could only just feel the backs of our shoulders touch. I’d look around and see you and I would shoot the high ducks well, to show off and try to put one in the blind without having it hit you. I’d try to pull one down like this, he said, hearing the wings in the air. He rose, turned, saw the single drake, long-necked and beautiful, the wings fast moving and travelling to the sea. He saw him sharp and clear and in the sky with the mountains behind him. He met him, covered him and pulled as he swung as far back as he could swing the gun.

The drake came down on the ice, just outside the perimeter of the blind and broke the ice as he fell. It was the ice that had been broken to put out the decoys and it had re-frozen lightly. The calling hen looked at him as he lay and shifted her feet.

‘You never saw him before in your life,’ the Colonel said to the hen. ‘I don’t believe you even saw him coming. Though you may have. But you didn’t say anything.’

The drake had hit with his head down and his head was under the ice. But the Colonel could see the beautiful winter plumage on his breast and wings.

I’d like to give her a vest made of the whole plumage the way the old Mexicans used to ornament their gods, he thought. But I suppose these ducks have to go to the market and no one would know how to skin and cure the skins anyway. It could be beautiful, though, with mallard drake skins for the back and sprig for the front with two longitudinal stripes of teal. One coming down over each breast. Be a hell of a vest. I’m pretty sure she’d like it.

I wish they would fly, the Colonel thought. A few fool ducks might come in. I have to stay ready for them if they do. But none came in and he had to think.

There were no shots from the other blinds and only occasional shots from the sea.

With the good light, the birds could see the ice and they no longer came in and instead went out to the open sea to raft up. So he had no shooting and he thought without intention, trying to find what had made it at the first. He knew he did not deserve it and he accepted it and he lived by it, but he sought, always, to understand it.

One time it had been two sailors when he had been walking with the girl at night. They had whistled at her and, the Colonel thought, that was a harmless enough thing and he should have let it go.

But there was something wrong with it. He sensed it before he knew it. Then he knew it solidly, because he had stopped under a light, in order that they might see what he wore on his shoulders, so that they might take the other side of the street.

What he wore on each shoulder was a small eagle with wings outstretched. It was embroidered on to the coat he wore in silver thread. It was not conspicuous and it had been there a long time. But it was visible.

The two sailors whistled again.

‘Stay over there against the wall if you want to watch it,’ the Colonel had said to the girl. ‘Or look away.’

‘They are very big and young.’

‘They won’t be big for long,’ the Colonel promised her.

The Colonel walked over to the whistlers.

‘Where is your shore patrol?’ he asked.

‘How would I know?’ the biggest whistler said. ‘All I want is a good look at the dame.’

‘Do people like you have names and serial numbers?’

‘How would I know?’ said one.

The other said, ‘I wouldn’t tell a chicken Colonel if I had.’

Old army boy, the Colonel thought, before he hit him. Sea lawyer. Knows all his rights.

But he hit him with a left from nowhere and hit him three times as he started to go.

The other one, the first whistler, had closed fast and well, for a man who had been drinking, and the Colonel gave him the elbow in the mouth and then, under the light, had a good right hand shot at him. When it was in, he glanced at the second whistler and saw that was okay.

Then he threw a left hook. Then he put the right way into the body, coming up. He threw another left hook and then turned away and walked towards the girl because he did not want to hear the head hit the pavement.

He checked on the one that had it first and noted he slept peacefully, chin down, with the blood coming out of his mouth. But it was still the right colour, the Colonel noted.

‘Well, there goes my career,’ he said to the girl. ‘Whatever that was. But those people certainly wear funny pants.’

‘How are you?’ the girl asked.

‘I’m fine. Did you watch it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have bad hands in the morning,’ he said absent mindedly. ‘But I think we can walk away from it all right. But let’s walk slowly.’

‘Please walk slowly.’

‘I did not mean it that way. I mean let’s not be hurried in our departure.’

‘We will walk as slowly as two people can walk.’

So they walked.

‘Do you want to try an experiment?’

‘Of course.’

‘Let’s walk so we make even the backs of our legs look dangerous.’

‘I’ll try. But I don’t think I can.’

‘Well, let’s just walk then.’

‘But didn’t they hit you?’

‘One pretty good right behind the ear. The second boy when he came in.’

‘Is that what fighting’s like?’

‘When you’re lucky.’

‘And when you’re not lucky?’

‘Your knees bend too. Either forward or backward.’

‘Do you still care for me after you have fought?’

‘I love you much more than before if it were possible.’

‘Can’t it be possible? It would be nice. I love you more since I saw that thing. Am I walking slowly enough?’

‘You walk like a deer in the forest and sometimes you walk as well as a wolf, or an old, big coyote when he is not hurried.’

‘I’m not sure I wish to be an old big coyote.’

‘Wait till you see one,’ the Colonel said. ‘You’ll wish. You walk like all the great predators, when they walk softly. And you are not a predator.’

‘That I can promise.’

‘Walk a little ahead so I can see.’

She walked ahead and the Colonel said, ‘You walk like a champion before he is the champion. If you were a horse I would buy you if I had to borrow the money at twenty per cent a month.’

‘You don’t have to buy me.’

‘I know about that. That was not what we were discussing. We were discussing your gait.’

‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What happens to those men? That’s one of the things I don’t know about fighting. Shouldn’t I have stayed and cared for them?’

‘Never,’ the Colonel told her. ‘Remember that; never. I hope they split a good concussion between them. They can rot. They caused the accident. There is no question of civil responsibility. We were all insured. If I can tell you one thing, Renata, about fighting.’

‘Tell me, please.’

‘If you ever fight, then you must win it. That’s all that counts. All the rest is cabbage, as my old friend Dr. Rommel put it.’

‘Did you really like Rommel?’

‘Very much.’

‘But he was your enemy.’

‘I love my enemies, sometimes, more than my friends. And the Navy, you know, wins all their fights always. This I learned in a place called the Pentagon building when I was still permitted to enter that building by the front door. If you like we can stroll back down this street, or walk it fast and ask those two that question.’

‘I tell you truly, Richard. I have seen enough fighting for one night.’

‘Me too, to tell the truth,’ the Colonel said. But he said it in Italian and it started, ‘Anche io. Let’s go to Harry’s for one, and then I will walk you home.’

‘Didn’t you hurt your bad hand?’

‘No,’ he explained. ‘I only threw it once to the head. The other times I punched to the body with it.’

‘May I feel it?’

‘If you will feel very softly.’

‘But it is terribly swollen.’

‘There is nothing broken in it and that sort of swelling always goes down.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes. I love you with two moderately swollen hands and all my heart.’

Chapter XLI

So that was that and maybe it was that day or maybe it was another that made the miracle. You never knew, he thought. There was the great miracle and he had never consciously implemented it. Nor, he thought, you son of a bitch, did you ever oppose it.

It was colder than ever and the broken ice re-froze and the calling duck did not even look up now. She had abandoned treachery for an attempt at security.

You bitch, the Colonel thought. Though that is unjust. It is your trade. But why is it a hen calls better than a drake. You ought to know, he thought. And even that’s not true. What the hell is true? Drakes actually call better.

Now don’t think of her. Don’t think of Renata because it won’t do you any good, boy. It might even be bad for you. Also you said good-bye. What a good-bye that was. Complete with tumbrils. And she would have climbed up in the damned tumbril with you too. Just so long as it was a real tumbril. Very rough trade, he thought. Loving and leaving. People can get hurt at it.

Who gave you a right to know a girl like that?

Nobody, he answered. But Andrea introduced me to her.

But how could she love a sad son of a bitch like you?

I do not know, he thought truly. I truly do not know.

He did not know, among other things, that the girl loved him because he had never been sad one waking morning of his life; attack or no attack. He had experienced anguish and sorrow. But he had never been sad in the morning.

They make almost none like that and the girl, although she was a young girl, knew one when she saw one.

Now she is at home and sleeping, the Colonel thought. That is where she ought to be and not in any god-damn duck blind with the decoys frozen up on us.

I wish to hell she was here though, if this were a double blind and have her looking to the west just in case one string did come in. It would be nice if she were warm enough. Maybe I can trade somebody out of one of these real down jackets that nobody ever sold that had one. The kind they issued to the Air Force once by mistake.

I could find out how they are quilted and make one with duck down from here, he thought. I’d get a good tailor to cut it and we would make it double-breasted with no pocket on the right and lay in a chamois shooting patch so the gun butt would never catch.

I’ll do it, he said to himself. I’ll do it, or I will get one off some joker and have it cut down for her. I’d like to get her a good Purdey 12, not too damn light, or a pair of Boss over and unders. She should have guns as good as she is. I suppose a pair of Purdey’s, he thought.

Just then he heard the light swish of pinions, fast beating in the air, and looked up. But they were too high. He only looked up with his eyes. But they were so high they could see the barrel with him in it and the frozen-in decoys with the dejected hen, who saw them too and quacked hard in her loyal treachery. The ducks, they were pin-tails, continued on their flight out towards the sea.

I never gave her anything, as she pointed out. There was the small moor’s head. But it does not mean anything. She selected it and I bought it. That is no way to give a gift.

What I would like to give her is security, which does not exist any more; all my love, which is worthless; all my worldly goods, which are practically non-existent except for two good shot-guns, my soldier suits, the medals and decorations with the citations and some books. Also a retired Colonel’s pay.

With all my worldly goods I thee endow, he thought.

And she gave me her love, some hard stones, which I returned, and the picture. Well, I can always give her back the picture. I could give her my ring from V.M.I., he thought, but where the hell did I lose that?

She wouldn’t want a D.S.C. with cluster, nor two silver stars, nor the other junk, nor the medals of her own country. Nor those of France. Nor those of Belgium. Nor the trick ones. That would be morbid.

I better just give her my love. But how the hell do you send it? And how do you keep it fresh? They can’t pack it in dry ice.

Maybe they can. I must inquire. But how do I get that condemned jeep engine to that old man?

Figure it out, he thought. Figuring things out has been your trade. Figuring things out when they were shooting at you, he added.

I wish that son of a bitch that is lousing up the duck shooting had a rifle and I had a rifle. We would find out pretty soon who could figure things out. Even in a lousy barrel in a marsh where you can’t manoeuvre. He’d have to come to get me.

Stop that, he said to himself, and think about your girl. You do not want to kill anyone any more; ever.

Who are you feeding that to, he told himself. You going to run as a Christian? You might give it an honest try. She would like you better that way. Or would she? I don’t know, he said frankly. I honest to God don’t know.

Maybe I will get Christian towards the end. Yes, he said, maybe you will. Who wants to make a bet on that?

‘You want to bet on that?’ he asked the calling duck. But she was looking up at the sky behind him and had commenced her small chuckling talk.

They came over too high and never circled. They only looked down and went on towards the open sea.

They must really be rafted up out there, the Colonel thought. There’s probably some punt gunner trying to sneak up on them now. They will be pretty close into the lee with the wind and someone is sneaking on to them now surely. Well, when he makes his shot some may break back this way. But with it frozen-up I suppose I really ought to pull out instead of staying here like a fool.

I have killed enough and I have shot as well or better than I can shoot. Better hell, he thought. Nobody shoots better than you here except Alvarito and he’s a kid and shoots faster. But you kill fewer ducks than many bad and fair shots.

Yes, I know about that. I know about that and why and we don’t go by the numbers any more and we threw away the book too, remember?

He remembered how, by some miracle of chance in a war, he had been with his best friend for a moment in action in the Ardennes and they were pursuing.

It was early fall and it was on a high upland with sandy roads and trails and the trees were scrub oak and pines. The enemy tank and half track prints showed clearly in the moist sand.

It had rained the day before, but now it was clearing and visibility was good and you could see well across all the high, rolling country and he and his friend were glassing it as carefully as though they were hunting game.

The Colonel, who was a General then and an assistant divisional commander, knew the individual print of each tracked vehicle they were pursuing. He also knew when the enemy vehicles had run out of mines and approximately the number of rounds that remained to them. He also had figured where they had to fight before they reached the Siegfried. He was sure they would not fight at either of these two places but would race for where they were going.

‘We’re pretty far up for people of our exalted rank, George,’ he said to his best friend.

‘Ahead of the point, General.’

‘It’s okay,’ the Colonel had said. ‘Now we throw away the book and chase for keeps.’

‘I couldn’t agree more fully, General. Because I wrote the book myself,’ his best friend said. ‘But suppose they had left something there?’

He pointed to the logical place to defend.

‘They didn’t leave anything there,’ the Colonel had said. ‘They haven’t enough stuff left even for a fire-fight.’

‘Everybody’s right until he’s wrong,’ his best friend said, adding, ‘General.’

‘I’m right,’ the Colonel said. He was right, too, although in obtaining his exact knowledge he had not fulfilled the complete spirit of the Geneva Convention which was alleged to govern the operation of war.

‘Let’s really chase,’ his best friend had said.

‘There’s nothing holding us up and I guarantee they won’t stop at either of those two. I didn’t get that from any Kraut either. That’s from my head.’

He looked over the country once more, and heard the wind in the trees and smelled the heather under their boots and looked once more at the tracks in the wet sand and that was the end of that story.

I wonder if she’d like that? he thought. No. It builds me up too much. I’d like to get somebody else to tell it to her though and build me solid. George can’t tell it to her. He’s the only one that could tell it to her and he can’t. He sure as hell can’t.

I’ve been right over ninety-five per cent of the time and that’s a hell of a batting average even in something as simple as war. But that five per cent when you are wrong can certainly be something.

I’ll never tell you about that, Daughter. That’s just a noise heard off stage in my heart. My lousy chicken heart. That bastard heart certainly couldn’t hold the pace.

Maybe he will, he thought, and took two of the tablets and a swallow of gin and looked across the grey ice.

I’m going to get that sullen character in now and pick up and get the hell to the farm house or the lodge, I suppose that I should call it. The shooting’s over.

Chapter XLII

The colonel had signalled the boatman in by standing up, in the sunken barrel, firing two shots towards the empty sky, and then waving him towards the blind.

The boat came in slowly, breaking ice all the way, and the man picked up the wooden decoys, caught the calling hen and put her in her sack, and, with the dog slithering on the ice, picked up the ducks. The boatman’s anger seemed to be gone and to be replaced by a solid satisfaction.

‘You shot very few,’ he said to the Colonel.

‘With your help.’

That was all they said and the boatman placed the ducks carefully, breasts up, on the bow of the boat, and the Colonel handed his guns and the combination cartridge box and shooting stool into the boat.

The Colonel got into the boat and the boatman checked the blind and unhooked the pocketed, apron-like device which had hung on the inside of the blind to hold shells. Then he got into the boat too and they commenced their slow and laborious progress out through the ice to the open water of the brown canal. The Colonel worked as hard with the poling oar as he had worked coming in. But now, in the bright sunlight, with the snow mountains to the north, and the line of the sedge that marked the canal ahead of them, they worked together in complete co-ordination.

Then they were into the canal, slipping breakingly in from the last ice; then, suddenly, light-borne and the Colonel handed the big oar to the boatman and sat down. He was sweating.

The dog, who had been shivering at the Colonel’s feet, pawed his way over the gunwale of the boat and swam to the canal bank. Shaking the water from his white bedraggled coat, he was into the brown sedge and brush, and the Colonel watched his progress towards home by the movement of the brush. He had never received his sausage.

The Colonel, feeling himself sweating, although he knew he was protected from the wind by his field jacket, took two tablets from the bottle and a sip of gin from his flask.

The flask was flat and of silver with a leather cover. Under the leather cover, which was worn and stained, it was engraved, on one side, to Richard From Renata With Love. No one had ever seen this inscription except the girl, the Colonel and the man who had engraved it. It had not been engraved in the same place it was purchased. That was in the earliest days, the Colonel thought. Now who cared?

On the screw-on top of the flask was engraved From R. to R.C.

The Colonel offered the flask to the boatman who looked at him, at the flask, and said, ‘What is it?’

‘English grappa.’

‘I’ll try it.’

He took a long drink of it; the type of drink peasants take from a flask.

‘Thank you.’

‘Did you have good shooting?’

‘I killed four ducks. The dog found three cripples shot by other people.’

‘Why did you shoot?’

‘I’m sorry that I shot. I shot in anger.’

I have done that myself sometimes, the Colonel thought, and did not ask him what the anger was about.

‘I am sorry they did not fly better.’

‘That’s the way things go,’ the Colonel said.

The Colonel was watching the movement the dog made in the high grass and sedge. Suddenly he saw him stop; he was quite still. Then he pounced. It was a high leap and a dive forward and down.

‘He has a crippled,’ he said to the boatman.

‘Bobby,’ the boatman called. ‘Bring. Bring.’

The sedge moved and the dog came out with a mallard drake in his jaws. The grey-white neck and the green head were swaying up and down as a snake’s might move. It was a movement without hope.

The boatman put the boat in sharp for shore.

‘I’ll take him,’ the Colonel said. ‘Bobby!’

He took the duck from the dog’s light-holding mouth and felt him intact and sound and beautiful to hold, and with his heart beating and his captured, hopeless eyes.

He looked at him carefully, gentling him as you might gentle a horse.

‘He’s only wing-tipped,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep him for a caller or to turn loose in the spring. Here, take him and put him in the sack with the hen.’

The boatman took him carefully and put him in the burlap bag that was under the bow. The Colonel heard the hen speak to him. Or, maybe she is protesting, he thought. He could not understand duck-talk through a burlap bag.

‘Take a shot of this,’ he said to the boatman. ‘It’s damned cold to-day.’

The boatman took the flask and drank deeply again.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Your grappa is very, very good.’

Chapter XLIII

At the landing, before the long low stone house by the side of the canal, there were ducks laid out on the ground In rows.

They were laid in groups that were never of the same number. There were a few platoons, no companies, and, the Colonel drought, I barely have a squad.

The head game-keeper was standing on the bank in his high boots, his short jacket and his pushed back old felt hat, and he looked critically at the number of ducks on the bow of the boat as they came alongshore.

‘It was frozen-up at our post,’ the Colonel said.

‘I suspected so,’ the head keeper said. ‘I’m sorry. It was supposed to be the best post.’

‘Who was top gun?’

‘The Barone killed forty-two. There was a little current there that kept it open for a while. You probably did not hear the shooting because it was against the wind.’

‘Where is everyone?’

‘They’re all gone except the Barone who is waiting for you. Your driver is asleep in the house.’

‘He would be,’ the Colonel said.

‘Spread those out properly,’ the head-keeper told the boatman who was a game-keeper too. ‘I want to put them to the game book.’

‘There is one green-head drake in the bag who is only wing-tipped.’

‘Good. I will take good care of him.’

‘I will go inside and see the Barone. I’ll see you later.’

‘You must get warm,’ the head keeper said. ‘It’s been a bitter day, my Colonel.’

The Colonel started to walk towards the door of the house.

‘I’ll see you later,’ he said to the boatman.

‘Yes, my Colonel,’ the boatman said.

Alvarito, the Barone, was standing by the open fire in the middle of the room. He smiled his shy smile and said to his low-pitched voice, ‘I am sorry you did not have better shooting.’

‘We froze up completely. I enjoyed what there was very much.’

‘Are you very cold?’

‘Not too cold.’

‘We can have something to eat.’

‘Thank you. I’m not hungry. Have you eaten?’

‘Yes. The others went on and I let them take my car. Can you give me a lift to Latisana or just above? I can get transportation from there.’

‘Of course.’

‘It was a shame that it should freeze. The prospects were so good.’

‘There must have been a world of ducks outside.’

‘Yes. But now they won’t stay with their feed frozen over. They will be on their way south to-night.’

‘Will they all go?’

‘All except our local ducks that breed here. They’ll stay as long as there is any open water.’

‘I’m sorry for the shoot.’

‘I’m sorry you came so far for so few ducks.’

‘I always love the shoot,’ the Colonel said. ‘And I love Venice.’

The Barone Alvarito looked away and spread his hands towards the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We all love Venice. Perhaps you do the best of all.’

The Colonel made no small talk on this but said, ‘I love Venice as you know.’

‘Yes. I know,’ the Barone said. He looked at nothing. Then he said, ‘We must wake your driver.’

‘Has he eaten?’

‘Eaten and slept and eaten and slept. He has also read a little in some illustrated books he brought with him.’

‘Comic books,’ the Colonel said.

‘I should learn to read them,’ the Barone said. He smiled the shy, dark smile. ‘Could you get me some from Trieste?’

‘Any amount,’ the Colonel told him. ‘From superman on up into the improbable. Read some for me. Look, Alvarito, what was the matter with that game-keeper who poled my boat? He seemed to have a hatred for me at the start. Pretty well through, too.’

‘It was the old battle-jacket. Allied uniform affects him that way. You see he was a bit over-liberated.’

‘Go on.’

‘When the Moroccans came through here they raped both his wife and his daughter.’

‘I think I’d better have a drink,’ the Colonel said.

‘There is grappa there on the table.’

Chapter XLIV

They had dropped the Barone off at a villa with great gates, a gravelled drive and a house, which, since it was over six miles from any military objective, had the good fortune not to have been bombed.

The Colonel had said good-bye and Alvarito had told him to come down and shoot any, or every, week-end.

‘You’re sure you won’t come in?’

‘No. I must get back to Trieste. Will you give my love to Renata?’

‘I will. Is that her portrait that you have wrapped up in the back of the car?’

‘It is.’

‘I’ll tell her that you shot very well and that the portrait was in good condition.’

‘Also my love.’

‘Also your love.’

‘Ciao, Alvarito, and thank you very much.’

‘Ciao, my Colonel. If one can say ciao to a Colonel.’

‘Consider me not a Colonel.’

‘It is very difficult. Good-bye, my Colonel.’

‘In case of any unforeseen contingencies would you ask her to have the portrait picked up at the Gritti?’

‘Yes, my Colonel.’

‘That’s all, I guess.’

‘Good-bye, my Colonel.’

Chapter XLV

They were out on the road now and the early darkness was beginning.

‘Turn left,’ the Colonel said.

‘That’s not the road for Trieste, sir,’ Jackson said.

‘The hell with the road to Trieste. I ordered you to turn left. Do you think there is only one way in the world to get to Trieste?’

‘No, sir. I was only pointing out to the Colonel — —’

‘Don’t you point me out a God-damn thing and until I direct you otherwise, don’t speak to me until you are spoken to.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I’m sorry, Jackson. What I mean is I know where I’m going and I want to think.’

‘Yes, sir.’

They were on the old road that he knew so well and the Colonel thought, well, I sent four of the ducks I promised to those I promised them to at the Gritti. There wasn’t enough shooting to be enough feathers to do that boy’s wife any good with feathers. But they are all big ducks and fat and they will be good eating. I forgot to give Bobby the sausage.

There was no time to write Renata a note. But what could I say, in a note, that we did not say?

He reached into his pocket and found a pad and pencil. He put on the map-reading light, and with his bad hand, printed a short message in block letters.

‘Put that in your pocket, Jackson, and act on it if necessary. If the circumstances described occur, it is an order.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jackson said, and took the folded order blank with one hand and put it in the top left-hand pocket of his tunic.

Now take it easy, the Colonel said to himself. Any further concern you may have is about yourself and that is just a luxury.

You are no longer of any real use to the Army of the United States. That has been made quite clear.

You have said good-bye to your girl and she has said good-bye to you. That is certainly simple.

You shot well and Alvarito understands. That is that.

So what the hell do you have to worry about, boy? I hope you’re not the type of jerk who worries about what happens to him when there’s nothing to be done. Let’s certainly hope not.

Just then it hit him as he had known it would since they had picked up the decoys.

Three strikes is out, he thought, and they gave me four. I’ve always been a lucky son of a bitch.

It hit him again badly.

‘Jackson,’ he said. ‘Do you know what General Thomas J. Jackson said on one occasion? On the occasion of his unfortunate death. I memorized it once. I can’t respond for its accuracy of course. But this is how it was reported: “Order A. P. Hill to prepare for action.” Then some more delirious stuff. Then he said, “No, no, let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”’

‘That’s very interesting, sir,’ Jackson said. ‘That must have been Stonewall Jackson, sir.’

The Colonel started to speak but he stopped while it hit him the third time and gripped bun so he knew he could not live.

‘Jackson,’ the Colonel said. ‘Pull up at the side of the road and cut to your parking lights. Do you know the way to Trieste from here?’

‘Yes, sir, I have my map.’

‘Good. I’m now going to get into the large back seat of this god-damned, over-sized luxurious automobile.’

That was the last thing the Colonel ever said. But he made the back seat all right and he shut the door. He shut it carefully and well.

After a while Jackson drove the car down the ditch and willow lined road with the car’s big lights on, looking for a place to turn. He found one, finally, and turned carefully. When he was on the right-hand side of the road, facing south towards the road junction that would put him on the highway that led to Trieste, the one he was familiar with, he put his map light on and took out the order blank and read:

IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH THE WRAPPED PAINTING AND THE TWO SHOT GUNS IN THIS CAR WILL BE RETURNED TO THE HOTEL GRITTI WHERE THEY WILL BE CLAIMED BY THEIR RIGHTFUL OWNER SIGNED RICHARD CANTWELL, COL., INFANTRY, U.S.A.

‘They’ll return them all right, through channels,’ Jackson thought, and put the car in gear.

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

First appearing on 1 September 1952 in Life magazine, this famous novella was illustrated by Noel Sickles, with photographs of the author in Cuba taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who later claimed that Hemingway was a very unwilling and difficult subject to shoot. The Old Man and the Sea was immediately successful, as Life sold 5.2 million magazines in two days, while the first edition print run of the book was more than fifty thousand copies.

The novella was drafted by the writer during January and February 1951 — more than eighteen months before publication — and during the interim between the composition and release of the text, Hemingway’s long-time publisher, Charlie Scribner Jr, passed away. The book was dedicated to Scribner and the author’s recently deceased editor, Max Perkins, who was also famous for editing the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. The Old Man and the Sea was largely received enthusiastically by critics and was awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, while also playing a significant part in the author receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. In the New York Times review of the book, Orville Prescott wrote that Hemingway has written with ‘sure skill’ and is at ‘the top of his form’, while also stating that the work is good only in a ‘limited way’ due to the poor characterisation of the protagonist.

The Old Man and the Sea centres on an aging fisherman, Santiago, who at the opening of the book has gone for eighty four days without catching anything. His young apprentice, Manolin, has recently been forbidden by his parents to fish with Santiago. They insist that he goes to sea with more productive fisherman and while he complies, he still chooses to visit and help the old man each night. Santiago informs the young man that on the next day — his eighty-fifth without success — he intends to sail far out into the Gulf Stream into the Straits of Florida, in the hope of ending his unlucky streak. The novella then unfolds to relate Santiago’s three day expedition, involving an epic battle with a marlin, which the fisherman comes to greatly respect. The story is the most straightforward of all of the author’s novels and has been interpreted by some critics as a moving parable, and as such, has been criticised for lacking complex characterisation and human depth. Hemingway explores the interplay between the fisherman’s skill and determination, probing the whims of fortune and an indifferent universe. The author examines ideas about what it means to be victorious and the way in which man is able to fight to achieve transcendence. It is a work that chronicles human bravery and endurance, and how the inevitability of destruction does not render a man defeated.

The magazine in which the novel first appeared

The cover of the first edition, 1952

Hemingway and Henry (‘Mike’) Strater with the remaining 500 lbs of an estimated 1000 lb marlin that was half-eaten by sharks before it could be landed in the Bahamas in 1935

The most famous quotation from the book

TO CHARLIE SCRIBNER

AND

TO MAX PERKINS

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

“Santiago,” the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. “I could go with you again. We’ve made some money.”

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

“No,” the old man said. “You’re with a lucky boat. Stay with them.”

“But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks.”

“I remember,” the old man said. “I know you did not leave me because you doubted.”

“It was papa made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him.”

“I know,” the old man said. “It is quite normal.”

“He hasn’t much faith.”

“No,” the old man said. “But we have. Haven’t we?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace and then we’ll take the stuff home.”

“Why not?” the old man said. “Between fishermen.”

They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had seen. The successful fishermen of that day were already in and had butchered their marlin out and carried them laid full length across two planks, with two men staggering at the end of each plank, to the fish house where they waited for the ice truck to carry them to the market in Havana. Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out and their flesh cut into strips for salting.

When the wind was in the east a smell came across the harbour from the shark factory; but today there was only the faint edge of the odour because the wind had backed into the north and then dropped off and it was pleasant and sunny on the Terrace.

“Santiago,” the boy said.

“Yes,” the old man said. He was holding his glass and thinking of many years ago.

“Can I go out to get sardines for you for tomorrow?”

“No. Go and play baseball. I can still row and Rogelio will throw the net.”

“I would like to go. If I cannot fish with you, I would like to serve in some way.”

“You bought me a beer,” the old man said. “You are already a man.”

“How old was I when you first took me in a boat?”

“Five and you nearly were killed when I brought the fish in too green and he nearly tore the boat to pieces. Can you remember?”

“I can remember the tail slapping and banging and the thwart breaking and the noise of the clubbing. I can remember you throwing me into the bow where the wet coiled lines were and feeling the whole boat shiver and the noise of you clubbing him like chopping a tree down and the sweet blood smell all over me.”

“Can you really remember that or did I just tell it to you?”

“I remember everything from when we first went together.”

The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes.

“If you were my boy I’d take you out and gamble,” he said. “But you are your father’s and your mother’s and you are in a lucky boat.”

“May I get the sardines? I know where I can get four baits too.”

“I have mine left from today. I put them in salt in the box.”

“Let me get four fresh ones.”

“One,” the old man said. His hope and his confidence had never gone. But now they were freshening as when the breeze rises.

“Two,” the boy said.

“Two,” the old man agreed. “You didn’t steal them?”

“I would,” the boy said. “But I bought these.”

“Thank you,” the old man said. He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride.

“Tomorrow is going to be a good day with this current,” he said.

“Where are you going?” the boy asked.

“Far out to come in when the wind shifts. I want to be out before it is light.”

“I’ll try to get him to work far out,” the boy said. “Then if you hook something truly big we can come to your aid.”

“He does not like to work too far out.”

“No,” the boy said. “But I will see something that he cannot see such as a bird working and get him to come out after dolphin.”

“Are his eyes that bad?”

“He is almost blind.”

“It is strange,” the old man said. “He never went turtle-ing. That is what kills the eyes.”

“But you went turtle-ing for years off the Mosquito Coast and your eyes are good.”

“I am a strange old man.”

“But are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?”

“I think so. And there are many tricks.”

“Let us take the stuff home,” the boy said. “So I can get the cast net and go after the sardines.”

They picked up the gear from the boat. The old man carried the mast on his shoulder and the boy carried the wooden box with the coiled, hard-braided brown lines, the gaff and the harpoon with its shaft. The box with the baits was under the stern of the skiff along with the club that was used to subdue the big fish when they were brought alongside. No one would steal from the old man but it was better to take the sail and the heavy lines home as the dew was bad for them and, though he was quite sure no local people would steal from him, the old man thought that a gaff and a harpoon were needless temptations to leave in a boat.

They walked up the road together to the old man’s shack and went in through its open door. The old man leaned the mast with its wrapped sail against the wall and the boy put the box and the other gear beside it. The mast was nearly as long as the one room of the shack. The shack was made of the tough bud-shields of the royal palm which are called guano and in it there was a bed, a table, one chair, and a place on the dirt floor to cook with charcoal. On the brown walls of the flattened, overlapping leaves of the sturdy fibered guano there was a picture in color of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of the Virgin of Cobre. These were relics of his wife. Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife on the wall but he had taken it down because it made him too lonely to see it and it was on the shelf in the corner under his clean shirt.

“What do you have to eat?” the boy asked.

“A pot of yellow rice with fish. Do you want some?”

“No. I will eat at home. Do you want me to make the fire?”

“No. I will make it later on. Or I may eat the rice cold.”

“May I take the cast net?”

“Of course.”

There was no cast net and the boy remembered when they had sold it. But they went through this fiction every day. There was no pot of yellow rice and fish and the boy knew this too.

“Eighty-five is a lucky number,” the old man said. “How would you like to see me bring one in that dressed out over a thousand pounds?”

“I’ll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?”

“Yes. I have yesterday’s paper and I will read the baseball.”

The boy did not know whether yesterday’s paper was a fiction too. But the old man brought it out from under the bed.

“Perico gave it to me at the bodega,” he explained.

“I’ll be back when I have the sardines. I’ll keep yours and mine together on ice and we can share them in the morning. When I come back you can tell me about the baseball.”

“The Yankees cannot lose.”

“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”

“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

“I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland.”

“Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago.”

“You study it and tell me when I come back.”

“Do you think we should buy a terminal of the lottery with an eighty-five? Tomorrow is the eighty-fifth day.”

“We can do that,” the boy said. “But what about the eighty-seven of your great record?”

“It could not happen twice. Do you think you can find an eighty-five?”

“I can order one.”

“One sheet. That’s two dollars and a half. Who can we borrow that from?”

“That’s easy. I can always borrow two dollars and a half.”

“I think perhaps I can too. But I try not to borrow. First you borrow. Then you beg.”

“Keep warm old man,” the boy said. “Remember we are in September.”

“The month when the great fish come,” the old man said. “Anyone can be a fisherman in May.”

“I go now for the sardines,” the boy said.

When the boy came back the old man was asleep in the chair and the sun was down. The boy took the old army blanket off the bed and spread it over the back of the chair and over the old man’s shoulders. They were strange shoulders, still powerful although very old, and the neck was still strong too and the creases did not show so much when the old man was asleep and his head fallen forward. His shirt had been patched so many times that it was like the sail and the patches were faded to many different shades by the sun. The old man’s head was very old though and with his eyes closed there was no life in his face. The newspaper lay across his knees and the weight of his arm held it there in the evening breeze. He was barefooted.

The boy left him there and when he came back the old man was still asleep.

“Wake up old man,” the boy said and put his hand on one of the old man’s knees.

The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. Then he smiled.

“What have you got?” he asked.

“Supper,” said the boy. “We’re going to have supper.”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“Come on and eat. You can’t fish and not eat.”

“I have,” the old man said getting up and taking the newspaper and folding it. Then he started to fold the blanket.

“Keep the blanket around you,” the boy said. “You’ll not fish without eating while I’m alive.”

“Then live a long time and take care of yourself,” the old man said. “What are we eating?”

“Black beans and rice, fried bananas, and some stew.”

The boy had brought them in a two-decker metal container from the Terrace. The two sets of knives and forks and spoons were in his pocket with a paper napkin wrapped around each set.

“Who gave this to you?”

“Martin. The owner.”

“I must thank him.”

“I thanked him already,” the boy said. “You don’t need to thank him.”

“I’ll give him the belly meat of a big fish,” the old man said. “Has he done this for us more than once?”

“I think so.”

“I must give him something more than the belly meat then. He is very thoughtful for us.”

“He sent two beers.”

“I like the beer in cans best.”

“I know. But this is in bottles, Hatuey beer, and I take back the bottles.”

“That’s very kind of you,” the old man said. “Should we eat?”

“I’ve been asking you to,” the boy told him gently. “I have not wished to open the container until you were ready.”

“I’m ready now,” the old man said. “I only needed time to wash.”

Where did you wash? the boy thought. The village water supply was two streets down the road. I must have water here for him, the boy thought, and soap and a good towel. Why am I so thoughtless? I must get him another shirt and a jacket for the winter and some sort of shoes and another blanket.

“Your stew is excellent,” the old man said.

“Tell me about the baseball,” the boy asked him.

“In the American League it is the Yankees as I said,” the old man said happily.

“They lost today,” the boy told him.

“That means nothing. The great DiMaggio is himself again.”

“They have other men on the team.”

“Naturally. But he makes the difference. In the other league, between Brooklyn and Philadelphia I must take Brooklyn. But then I think of Dick Sisler and those great drives in the old park.”

“There was nothing ever like them. He hits the longest ball I have ever seen.”

“Do you remember when he used to come to the Terrace? I wanted to take him fishing but I was too timid to ask him. Then I asked you to ask him and you were too timid.”

“I know. It was a great mistake. He might have gone with us. Then we would have that for all of our lives.”

“I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing,” the old man said. “They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand.”

“The great Sisler’s father was never poor and he, the father, was playing in the big leagues when he was my age.”

“When I was your age I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening.”

“I know. You told me.”

“Should we talk about Africa or about baseball?”

“Baseball I think,” the boy said. “Tell me about the great John J. McGraw.” He said Jota for J.

“He used to come to the Terrace sometimes too in the older days. But he was rough and harsh-spoken and difficult when he was drinking. His mind was on horses as well as baseball. At least he carried lists of horses at all times in his pocket and frequently spoke the names of horses on the telephone.”

“He was a great manager,” the boy said. “My father thinks he was the greatest.”

“Because he came here the most times,” the old man said. “If Durocher had continued to come here each year your father would think him the greatest manager.”

“Who is the greatest manager, really, Luque or Mike Gonzalez?”

“I think they are equal.”

“And the best fisherman is you.”

“No. I know others better.”

“Qué va,” the boy said. “There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.”

“Thank you. You make me happy. I hope no fish will come along so great that he will prove us wrong.”

“There is no such fish if you are still strong as you say.”

“I may not be as strong as I think,” the old man said. “But I know many tricks and I have resolution.”

“You ought to go to bed now so that you will be fresh in the morning. I will take the things back to the Terrace.”

“Good night then. I will wake you in the morning.”

“You’re my alarm clock,” the boy said.

“Age is my alarm clock,” the old man said. “Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”

“I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.”

“I can remember it,” the old man said. “I’ll waken you in time.”

“I do not like for him to waken me. It is as though I were inferior.”

“I know.”

“Sleep well, old man.”

The boy went out. They had eaten with no light on the table and the old man took off his trousers and went to bed in the dark. He rolled his trousers up to make a pillow, putting the newspaper inside them. He rolled himself in the blanket and slept on the other old newspapers that covered the springs of the bed.

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning.

Usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up and dressed to go and wake the boy. But tonight the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was too early in his dream and went on dreaming to see the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands.

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on. He urinated outside the shack and then went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold. But he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.

The door of the house where the boy lived was unlocked and he opened it and walked in quietly with his bare feet. The boy was asleep on a cot in the first room and the old man could see him clearly with the light that came in from the dying moon. He took hold of one foot gently and held it until the boy woke and turned and looked at him. The old man nodded and the boy took his trousers from the chair by the bed and, sitting on the bed, pulled them on.

The old man went out the door and the boy came after him. He was sleepy and the old man put his arm across his shoulders and said, “I am sorry.”

“Qué va,” the boy said. “It is what a man must do.”

They walked down the road to the old man’s shack and all along the road, in the dark, barefoot men were moving, carrying the masts of their boats.

When they reached the old man’s shack the boy took the rolls of line in the basket and the harpoon and gaff and the old man carried the mast with the furled sail on his shoulder.

“Do you want coffee?” the boy asked.

“We’ll put the gear in the boat and then get some.”

They had coffee from condensed milk cans at an early morning place that served fishermen.

“How did you sleep old man?” the boy asked. He was waking up now although it was still hard for him to leave his sleep.

“Very well, Manolin,” the old man said. “I feel confident today.”

“So do I,” the boy said. “Now I must get your sardines and mine and your fresh baits. He brings our gear himself. He never wants anyone to carry anything.”

“We’re different,” the old man said. “I let you carry things when you were five years old.”

“I know it,” the boy said. “I’ll be right back. Have another coffee. We have credit here.”

He walked off, bare-footed on the coral rocks, to the ice house where the baits were stored.

The old man drank his coffee slowly. It was all he would have all day and he knew that he should take it. For a long time now eating had bored him and he never carried a lunch. He had a bottle of water in the bow of the skiff and that was all he needed for the day.

The boy was back now with the sardines and the two baits wrapped in a newspaper and they went down the trail to the skiff, feeling the pebbled sand under their feet, and lifted the skiff and slid her into the water.

“Good luck old man.”

“Good luck,” the old man said. He fitted the rope lashings of the oars onto the thole pins and, leaning forward against the thrust of the blades in the water, he began to row out of the harbour in the dark. There were other boats from the other beaches going out to sea and the old man heard the dip and push of their oars even though he could not see them now the moon was below the hills.

Sometimes someone would speak in a boat. But most of the boats were silent except for the dip of the oars. They spread apart after they were out of the mouth of the harbour and each one headed for the part of the ocean where he hoped to find fish. The old man knew he was going far out and he left the smell of the land behind and rowed out into the clean early morning smell of the ocean. He saw the phosphorescence of the Gulf weed in the water as he rowed over the part of the ocean that the fishermen called the great well because there was a sudden deep of seven hundred fathoms where all sorts of fish congregated because of the swirl the current made against the steep walls of the floor of the ocean. Here there were concentrations of shrimp and bait fish and sometimes schools of squid in the deepest holes and these rose close to the surface at night where all the wandering fish fed on them.

In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, “The birds have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.”

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as el mar which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.

He was rowing steadily and it was no effort for him since he kept well within his speed and the surface of the ocean was flat except for the occasional swirls of the current. He was letting the current do a third of the work and as it started to be light he saw he was already further out than he had hoped to be at this hour.

I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing, he thought. Today I’ll work out where the schools of bonita and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.

Before it was really light he had his baits out and was drifting with the current. One bait was down forty fathoms. The second was at seventy-five and the third and fourth were down in the blue water at one hundred and one hundred and twenty-five fathoms. Each bait hung head down with the shank of the hook inside the bait fish, tied and sewed solid and all the projecting part of the hook, the curve and the point, was covered with fresh sardines. Each sardine was hooked through both eyes so that they made a half-garland on the projecting steel. There was no part of the hook that a great fish could feel which was not sweet smelling and good tasting.

The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores, which hung on the two deepest lines like plummets and, on the others, he had a big blue runner and a yellow jack that had been used before; but they were in good condition still and had the excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness. Each line, as thick around as a big pencil, was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coils so that, if it were necessary, a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.

Now the man watched the dip of the three sticks over the side of the skiff and rowed gently to keep the lines straight up and down and at their proper depths. It was quite light and any moment now the sun would rise.

The sun rose thinly from the sea and the old man could see the other boats, low on the water and well in toward the shore, spread out across the current. Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it. He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.

The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east. There were only three boats in sight now and they showed very low and far inshore.

All my life the early sun has hurt my eyes, he thought. Yet they are still good. In the evening I can look straight into it without getting the blackness. It has more force in the evening too. But in the morning it is painful.

Just then he saw a man-of-war bird with his long black wings circling in the sky ahead of him. He made a quick drop, slanting down on his back-swept wings, and then circled again.

“He’s got something,” the old man said aloud. “He’s not just looking.”

He rowed slowly and steadily toward where the bird was circling. He did not hurry and he kept his lines straight up and down. But he crowded the current a little so that he was still fishing correctly though faster than he would have fished if he was not trying to use the bird.

The bird went higher in the air and circled again, his wings motionless. Then he dove suddenly and the old man saw flying fish spurt out of the water and sail desperately over the surface.

“Dolphin,” the old man said aloud. “Big dolphin.”

He shipped his oars and brought a small line from under the bow. It had a wire leader and a medium-sized hook and he baited it with one of the sardines. He let it go over the side and then made it fast to a ring bolt in the stern. Then he baited another line and left it coiled in the shade of the bow. He went back to rowing and to watching the long-winged black bird who was working, now, low over the water.

As he watched the bird dipped again slanting his wings for the dive and then swinging them wildly and ineffectually as he followed the flying fish. The old man could see the slight bulge in the water that the big dolphin raised as they followed the escaping fish. The dolphin were cutting through the water below the flight of the fish and would be in the water, driving at speed, when the fish dropped. It is a big school of dolphin, he thought. They are wide spread and the flying fish have little chance. The bird has no chance. The flying fish are too big for him and they go too fast.

He watched the flying fish burst out again and again and the ineffectual movements of the bird. That school has gotten away from me, he thought. They are moving out too fast and too far. But perhaps I will pick up a stray and perhaps my big fish is around them. My big fish must be somewhere.

The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish. The strange light the sun made in the water, now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land. But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.

“Agua mala,” the man said. “You whore.”

From where he swung lightly against his oars he looked down into the water and saw the tiny fish that were coloured like the trailing filaments and swam between them and under the small shade the bubble made as it drifted. They were immune to its poison. But men were not and when some of the filaments would catch on a line and rest there slimy and purple while the old man was working a fish, he would have welts and sores on his arms and hands of the sort that poison ivy or poison oak can give. But these poisonings from the agua mala came quickly and struck like a whiplash.

The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them pop when he stepped on them with the horny soles of his feet.

He loved green turtles and hawks-bills with their elegance and speed and their great value and he had a friendly contempt for the huge, stupid loggerheads, yellow in their armour-plating, strange in their love-making, and happily eating the Portuguese men-of-war with their eyes shut.

He had no mysticism about turtles although he had gone in turtle boats for many years. He was sorry for them all, even the great trunk backs that were as long as the skiff and weighed a ton. Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too and my feet and hands are like theirs. He ate the white eggs to give himself strength. He ate them all through May to be strong in September and October for the truly big fish.

He also drank a cup of shark liver oil each day from the big drum in the shack where many of the fishermen kept their gear. It was there for all fishermen who wanted it. Most fishermen hated the taste. But it was no worse than getting up at the hours that they rose and it was very good against all colds and grippes and it was good for the eyes.

Now the old man looked up and saw that the bird was circling again.

“He’s found fish,” he said aloud. No flying fish broke the surface and there was no scattering of bait fish. But as the old man watched, a small tuna rose in the air, turned and dropped head first into the water. The tuna shone silver in the sun and after he had dropped back into the water another and another rose and they were jumping in all directions, churning the water and leaping in long jumps after the bait. They were circling it and driving it.

If they don’t travel too fast I will get into them, the old man thought, and he watched the school working the water white and the bird now dropping and dipping into the bait fish that were forced to the surface in their panic.

“The bird is a great help,” the old man said. Just then the stern line came taut under his foot, where he had kept a loop of the line, and he dropped his oars and felt the weight of the small tuna’s shivering pull as he held the line firm and commenced to haul it in. The shivering increased as he pulled in and he could see the blue back of the fish in the water and the gold of his sides before he swung him over the side and into the boat. He lay in the stern in the sun, compact and bullet shaped, his big, unintelligent eyes staring as he thumped his life out against the planking of the boat with the quick shivering strokes of his neat, fast-moving tail. The old man hit him on the head for kindness and kicked him, his body still shuddering, under the shade of the stern.

“Albacore,” he said aloud. “He’ll make a beautiful bait. He’ll weigh ten pounds.”

He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself. He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats. He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone, when the boy had left. But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.

“If the others heard me talking out loud they would think that I am crazy,” he said aloud. “But since I am not crazy, I do not care. And the rich have radios to talk to them in their boats and to bring them the baseball.”

Now is no time to think of baseball, he thought. Now is the time to think of only one thing. That which I was born for. There might be a big one around that school, he thought. I picked up only a straggler from the albacore that were feeding. But they are working far out and fast. Everything that shows on the surface today travels very fast and to the north-east. Can that be the time of day? Or is it some sign of weather that I do not know?

He could not see the green of the shore now but only the tops of the blue hills that showed white as though they were snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high snow mountains above them. The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.

The tuna, the fishermen called all the fish of that species tuna and only distinguished among them by their proper names when they came to sell them or to trade them for baits, were down again. The sun was hot now and the old man felt it on the back of his neck and felt the sweat trickle down his back as he rowed.

I could just drift, he thought, and sleep and put a bight of line around my toe to wake me. But today is eighty-five days and I should fish the day well.

Just then, watching his lines, he saw one of the projecting green sticks dip sharply.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes,” and shipped his oars without bumping the boat. He reached out for the line and held it softly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. He felt no strain nor weight and he held the line lightly. Then it came again. This time it was a tentative pull, not solid nor heavy, and he knew exactly what it was. One hundred fathoms down a marlin was eating the sardines that covered the point and the shank of the hook where the hand-forged hook projected from the head of the small tuna.

The old man held the line delicately, and softly, with his left hand, unleashed it from the stick. Now he could let it run through his fingers without the fish feeling any tension.

This far out, he must be huge in this month, he thought. Eat them, fish. Eat them. Please eat them. How fresh they are and you down there six hundred feet in that cold water in the dark. Make another turn in the dark and come back and eat them.

He felt the light delicate pulling and then a harder pull when a sardine’s head must have been more difficult to break from the hook. Then there was nothing.

“Come on,” the old man said aloud. “Make another turn. Just smell them. Aren’t they lovely? Eat them good now and then there is the tuna. Hard and cold and lovely. Don’t be shy, fish. Eat them.”

He waited with the line between his thumb and his finger, watching it and the other lines at the same time for the fish might have swum up or down. Then came the same delicate pulling touch again.

“He’ll take it,” the old man said aloud. “God help him to take it.”

He did not take it though. He was gone and the old man felt nothing.

“He can’t have gone,” he said. “Christ knows he can’t have gone. He’s making a turn. Maybe he has been hooked before and he remembers something of it.”

Then he felt the gentle touch on the line and he was happy.

“It was only his turn,” he said. “He’ll take it.”

He was happy feeling the gentle pulling and then he felt something hard and unbelievably heavy. It was the weight of the fish and he let the line slip down, down, down, unrolling off the first of the two reserve coils. As it went down, slipping lightly through the old man’s fingers, he still could feel the great weight, though the pressure of his thumb and finger were almost imperceptible.

“What a fish,” he said. “He has it sideways in his mouth now and he is moving off with it.”

Then he will turn and swallow it, he thought. He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen. He knew what a huge fish this was and he thought of him moving away in the darkness with the tuna held crosswise in his mouth. At that moment he felt him stop moving but the weight was still there. Then the weight increased and he gave more line. He tightened the pressure of his thumb and finger for a moment and the weight increased and was going straight down.

“He’s taken it,” he said. “Now I’ll let him eat it well.”

He let the line slip through his fingers while he reached down with his left hand and made fast the free end of the two reserve coils to the loop of the two reserve coils of the next line. Now he was ready. He had three forty-fathom coils of line in reserve now, as well as the coil he was using.

“Eat it a little more,” he said. “Eat it well.”

Eat it so that the point of the hook goes into your heart and kills you, he thought. Come up easy and let me put the harpoon into you. All right. Are you ready? Have you been long enough at table?

“Now!” he said aloud and struck hard with both hands, gained a yard of line and then struck again and again, swinging with each arm alternately on the cord with all the strength of his arms and the pivoted weight of his body.

Nothing happened. The fish just moved away slowly and the old man could not raise him an inch. His line was strong and made for heavy fish and he held it against his back until it was so taut that beads of water were jumping from it. Then it began to make a slow hissing sound in the water and he still held it, bracing himself against the thwart and leaning back against the pull. The boat began to move slowly off toward the North-West.

The fish moved steadily and they travelled slowly on the calm water. The other baits were still in the water but there was nothing to be done.

“I wish I had the boy,” the old man said aloud. “I’m being towed by a fish and I’m the towing bitt. I could make the line fast. But then he could break it. I must hold him all I can and give him line when he must have it. Thank God he is travelling and not going down.”

What I will do if he decides to go down, I don’t know. What I’ll do if he sounds and dies I don’t know. But I’ll do something. There are plenty of things I can do.

He held the line against his back and watched its slant in the water and the skiff moving steadily to the North-West.

This will kill him, the old man thought. He can’t do this forever. But four hours later the fish was still swimming steadily out to sea, towing the skiff, and the old man was still braced solidly with the line across his back.

“It was noon when I hooked him,” he said. “And I have never seen him.”

He had pushed his straw hat hard down on his head before he hooked the fish and it was cutting his forehead. He was thirsty too and he got down on his knees and, being careful not to jerk on the line, moved as far into the bow as he could get and reached the water bottle with one hand. He opened it and drank a little. Then he rested against the bow. He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Then he looked behind him and saw that no land was visible. That makes no difference, he thought. I can always come in on the glow from Havana. There are two more hours before the sun sets and maybe he will come up before that. If he doesn’t maybe he will come up with the moon. If he does not do that maybe he will come up with the sunrise. I have no cramps and I feel strong. It is he that has the hook in his mouth. But what a fish to pull like that. He must have his mouth shut tight on the wire. I wish I could see him. I wish I could see him only once to know what I have against me.

The fish never changed his course nor his direction all that night as far as the man could tell from watching the stars. It was cold after the sun went down and the old man’s sweat dried cold on his back and his arms and his old legs. During the day he had taken the sack that covered the bait box and spread it in the sun to dry. After the sun went down he tied it around his neck so that it hung down over his back and he cautiously worked it down under the line that was across his shoulders now. The sack cushioned the line and he had found a way of leaning forward against the bow so that he was almost comfortable. The position actually was only somewhat less intolerable; but he thought of it as almost comfortable.

I can do nothing with him and he can do nothing with me, he thought. Not as long as he keeps this up.

Once he stood up and urinated over the side of the skiff and looked at the stars and checked his course. The line showed like a phosphorescent streak in the water straight out from his shoulders. They were moving more slowly now and the glow of Havana was not so strong, so that he knew the current must be carrying them to the eastward. If I lose the glare of Havana we must be going more to the eastward, he thought. For if the fish’s course held true I must see it for many more hours. I wonder how the baseball came out in the grand leagues today, he thought. It would be wonderful to do this with a radio. Then he thought, think of it always. Think of what you are doing. You must do nothing stupid.

Then he said aloud, “I wish I had the boy. To help me and to see this.”

No one should be alone in their old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable. I must remember to eat the tuna before he spoils in order to keep strong. Remember, no matter how little you want to, that you must eat him in the morning. Remember, he said to himself.

During the night two porpoise came around the boat and he could hear them rolling and blowing. He could tell the difference between the blowing noise the male made and the sighing blow of the female.

“They are good,” he said. “They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish.”

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never have I had such a strong fish nor one who acted so strangely. Perhaps he is too wise to jump. He could ruin me by jumping or by a wild rush. But perhaps he has been hooked many times before and he knows that this is how he should make his fight. He cannot know that it is only one man against him, nor that it is an old man. But what a great fish he is and what he will bring in the market if the flesh is good. He took the bait like a male and he pulls like a male and his fight has no panic in it. I wonder if he has any plans or if he is just as desperate as I am?

He remembered the time he had hooked one of a pair of marlin. The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male had stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface. He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.

That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.

“I wish the boy was here,” he said aloud and settled himself against the rounded planks of the bow and felt the strength of the great fish through the line he held across his shoulders moving steadily toward whatever he had chosen.

When once, through my treachery, it had been necessary to him to make a choice, the old man thought.

His choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries. My choice was to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either one of us.

Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for. I must surely remember to eat the tuna after it gets light.

Some time before daylight something took one of the baits that were behind him. He heard the stick break and the line begin to rush out over the gunwale of the skiff. In the darkness he loosened his sheath knife and taking all the strain of the fish on his left shoulder he leaned back and cut the line against the wood of the gunwale. Then he cut the other line closest to him and in the dark made the loose ends of the reserve coils fast. He worked skillfully with the one hand and put his foot on the coils to hold them as he drew his knots tight. Now he had six reserve coils of line. There were two from each bait he had severed and the two from the bait the fish had taken and they were all connected.

After it is light, he thought, I will work back to the forty-fathom bait and cut it away too and link up the reserve coils. I will have lost two hundred fathoms of good Catalan cordel and the hooks and leaders. That can be replaced. But who replaces this fish if I hook some fish and it cuts him off? I don’t know what that fish was that took the bait just now. It could have been a marlin or a broadbill or a shark. I never felt him. I had to get rid of him too fast.

Aloud he said, “I wish I had the boy.”

But you haven’t got the boy, he thought. You have only yourself and you had better work back to the last line now, in the dark or not in the dark, and cut it away and hook up the two reserve coils.

So he did it. It was difficult in the dark and once the fish made a surge that pulled him down on his face and made a cut below his eye. The blood ran down his cheek a little way. But it coagulated and dried before it reached his chin and he worked his way back to the bow and rested against the wood. He adjusted the sack and carefully worked the line so that it came across a new part of his shoulders and, holding it anchored with his shoulders, he carefully felt the pull of the fish and then felt with his hand the progress of the skiff through the water.

I wonder what he made that lurch for, he thought. The wire must have slipped on the great hill of his back. Certainly his back cannot feel as badly as mine does. But he cannot pull this skiff forever, no matter how great he is. Now everything is cleared away that might make trouble and I have a big reserve of line; all that a man can ask.

“Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”

He’ll stay with me too, I suppose, the old man thought and he waited for it to be light. It was cold now in the time before daylight and he pushed against the wood to be warm. I can do it as long as he can, he thought. And in the first light the line extended out and down into the water. The boat moved steadily and when the first edge of the sun rose it was on the old man’s right shoulder.

“He’s headed north,” the old man said. The current will have set us far to the eastward, he thought. I wish he would turn with the current. That would show that he was tiring.

When the sun had risen further the old man realized that the fish was not tiring. There was only one favorable sign. The slant of the line showed he was swimming at a lesser depth. That did not necessarily mean that he would jump. But he might.

“God let him jump,” the old man said. “I have enough line to handle him.”

Maybe if I can increase the tension just a little it will hurt him and he will jump, he thought. Now that it is daylight let him jump so that he’ll fill the sacks along his backbone with air and then he cannot go deep to die.

He tried to increase the tension, but the line had been taut up to the very edge of the breaking point since he had hooked the fish and he felt the harshness as he leaned back to pull and knew he could put no more strain on it. I must not jerk it ever, he thought. Each jerk widens the cut the hook makes and then when he does jump he might throw it. Anyway I feel better with the sun and for once I do not have to look into it.

There was yellow weed on the line but the old man knew that only made an added drag and he was pleased. It was the yellow Gulf weed that had made so much phosphorescence in the night.

“Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.”

Let us hope so, he thought.

A small bird came toward the skiff from the north. He was a warbler and flying very low over the water. The old man could see that he was very tired.

The bird made the stern of the boat and rested there. Then he flew around the old man’s head and rested on the line where he was more comfortable.

“How old are you?” the old man asked the bird. “Is this your first trip?”

The bird looked at him when he spoke. He was too tired even to examine the line and he teetered on it as his delicate feet gripped it fast.

“It’s steady,” the old man told him. “It’s too steady. You shouldn’t be that tired after a windless night. What are birds coming to?”

The hawks, he thought, that come out to sea to meet them. But he said nothing of this to the bird who could not understand him anyway and who would learn about the hawks soon enough.

“Take a good rest, small bird,” he said. “Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”

It encouraged him to talk because his back had stiffened in the night and it hurt truly now.

“Stay at my house if you like, bird,” he said. “I am sorry I cannot hoist the sail and take you in with the small breeze that is rising. But I am with a friend.”

Just then the fish gave a sudden lurch that pulled the old man down onto the bow and would have pulled him overboard if he had not braced himself and given some line.

The bird had flown up when the line jerked and the old man had not even seen him go. He felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was bleeding.

“Something hurt him then,” he said aloud and pulled back on the line to see if he could turn the fish. But when he was touching the breaking point he held steady and settled back against the strain of the line.

“You’re feeling it now, fish,” he said. “And so, God knows, am I.”

He looked around for the bird now because he would have liked him for company. The bird was gone.

You did not stay long, the man thought. But it is rougher where you are going until you make the shore. How did I let the fish cut me with that one quick pull he made? I must be getting very stupid. Or perhaps I was looking at the small bird and thinking of him. Now I will pay attention to my work and then I must eat the tuna so that I will not have a failure of strength.

“I wish the boy were here and that I had some salt,” he said aloud.

Shifting the weight of the line to his left shoulder and kneeling carefully he washed his hand in the ocean and held it there, submerged, for more than a minute watching the blood trail away and the steady movement of the water against his hand as the boat moved.

“He has slowed much,” he said.

The old man would have liked to keep his hand in the salt water longer but he was afraid of another sudden lurch by the fish and he stood up and braced himself and held his hand up against the sun. It was only a line burn that had cut his flesh. But it was in the working part of his hand. He knew he would need his hands before this was over and he did not like to be cut before it started.

“Now,” he said, when his hand had dried, “I must eat the small tuna. I can reach him with the gaff and eat him here in comfort.”

He knelt down and found the tuna under the stern with the gaff and drew it toward him keeping it clear of the coiled lines. Holding the line with his left shoulder again, and bracing on his left hand and arm, he took the tuna off the gaff hook and put the gaff back in place. He put one knee on the fish and cut strips of dark red meat longitudinally from the back of the head to the tail. They were wedge-shaped strips and he cut them from next to the back bone down to the edge of the belly. When he had cut six strips he spread them out on the wood of the bow, wiped his knife on his trousers, and lifted the carcass of the bonito by the tail and dropped it overboard.

“I don’t think I can eat an entire one,” he said and drew his knife across one of the strips. He could feel the steady hard pull of the line and his left hand was cramped. It drew up tight on the heavy cord and he looked at it in disgust.

“What kind of a hand is that,” he said. “Cramp then if you want. Make yourself into a claw. It will do you no good.”

Come on, he thought and looked down into the dark water at the slant of the line. Eat it now and it will strengthen the hand. It is not the hand’s fault and you have been many hours with the fish. But you can stay with him forever. Eat the bonito now.

He picked up a piece and put it in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant.

Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.

“How do you feel, hand?” he asked the cramped hand that was almost as stiff as rigor mortis. “I’ll eat some more for you.”

He ate the other part of the piece that he had cut in two. He chewed it carefully and then spat out the skin.

“How does it go, hand? Or is it too early to know?”

He took another full piece and chewed it.

“It is a strong full-blooded fish,” he thought. “I was lucky to get him instead of dolphin. Dolphin is too sweet. This is hardly sweet at all and all the strength is still in it.”

There is no sense in being anything but practical though, he thought. I wish I had some salt. And I do not know whether the sun will rot or dry what is left, so I had better eat it all although I am not hungry. The fish is calm and steady. I will eat it all and then I will be ready.

“Be patient, hand,” he said. “I do this for you.”

I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it. Slowly and conscientiously he ate all of the wedge-shaped strips of fish.

He straightened up, wiping his hand on his trousers.

“Now,” he said. “You can let the cord go, hand, and I will handle him with the right arm alone until you stop that nonsense.” He put his left foot on the heavy line that the left hand had held and lay back against the pull against his back.

“God help me to have the cramp go,” he said. “Because I do not know what the fish is going to do.”

But he seems calm, he thought, and following his plan. But what is his plan, he thought. And what is mine? Mine I must improvise to his because of his great size. If he will jump I can kill him. But he stays down forever. Then I will stay down with him forever.

He rubbed the cramped hand against his trousers and tried to gentle the fingers. But it would not open. Maybe it will open with the sun, he thought. Maybe it will open when the strong raw tuna is digested. If I have to have it, I will open it, cost whatever it costs. But I do not want to open it now by force. Let it open by itself and come back of its own accord. After all I abused it much in the night when it was necessary to free and unite the various lines.

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

He thought of how some men feared being out of sight of land in a small boat and knew they were right in the months of sudden bad weather. But now they were in hurricane months and, when there are no hurricanes, the weather of hurricane months is the best of all the year.

If there is a hurricane you always see the signs of it in the sky for days ahead, if you are at sea. They do not see it ashore because they do not know what to look for, he thought. The land must make a difference too, in the shape of the clouds. But we have no hurricane coming now.

He looked at the sky and saw the white cumulus built like friendly piles of ice cream and high above were the thin feathers of the cirrus against the high September sky.

“Light brisa,” he said. “Better weather for me than for you, fish.”

His left hand was still cramped, but he was unknotting it slowly.

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body. It is humiliating before others to have a diarrhoea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it. But a cramp, he thought of it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone.

If the boy were here he could rub it for me and loosen it down from the forearm, he thought. But it will loosen up.

Then, with his right hand he felt the difference in the pull of the line before he saw the slant change in the water. Then, as he leaned against the line and slapped his left hand hard and fast against his thigh he saw the line slanting slowly upward.

“He’s coming up,” he said. “Come on hand. Please come on.”

The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scythe-blade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out.

“He is two feet longer than the skiff,” the old man said. The line was going out fast but steadily and the fish was not panicked. The old man was trying with both hands to keep the line just inside of breaking strength. He knew that if he could not slow the fish with a steady pressure the fish could take out all the line and break it.

He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run. If I were him I would put in everything now and go until something broke. But, thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

The old man had seen many great fish. He had seen many that weighed more than a thousand pounds and he had caught two of that size in his life, but never alone. Now alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish that he had ever seen and bigger than he had ever heard of, and his left hand was still as tight as the gripped claws of an eagle.

It will uncramp though, he thought. Surely it will uncramp to help my right hand. There are three things that are brothers: the fish and my two hands. It must uncramp. It is unworthy of it to be cramped. The fish had slowed again and was going at his usual pace.

I wonder why he jumped, the old man thought. He jumped almost as though to show me how big he was. I know now, anyway, he thought. I wish I could show him what sort of man I am. But then he would see the cramped hand. Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so. I wish I was the fish, he thought, with everything he has against only my will and my intelligence.

He settled comfortably against the wood and took his suffering as it came and the fish swam steadily and the boat moved slowly through the dark water. There was a small sea rising with the wind coming up from the east and at noon the old man’s left hand was uncramped.

“Bad news for you, fish,” he said and shifted the line over the sacks that covered his shoulders.

He was comfortable but suffering, although he did not admit the suffering at all.

“I am not religious,” he said. “But I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish, and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre if I catch him. That is a promise.”

He commenced to say his prayers mechanically. Sometimes he would be so tired that he could not remember the prayer and then he would say them fast so that they would come automatically. Hail Marys are easier to say than Our Fathers, he thought.

“Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” Then he added, “Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is.”

With his prayers said, and feeling much better, but suffering exactly as much, and perhaps a little more, he leaned against the wood of the bow and began, mechanically, to work the fingers of his left hand.

The sun was hot now although the breeze was rising gently.

“I had better re-bait that little line out over the stern,” he said. “If the fish decides to stay another night I will need to eat again and the water is low in the bottle. I don’t think I can get anything but a dolphin here. But if I eat him fresh enough he won’t be bad. I wish a flying fish would come on board tonight. But I have no light to attract them. A flying fish is excellent to eat raw and I would not have to cut him up. I must save all my strength now. Christ, I did not know he was so big.”

“I’ll kill him though,” he said. “In all his greatness and his glory.”

Although it is unjust, he thought. But I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures.

“I told the boy I was a strange old man,” he said. “Now is when I must prove it.”

The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.

I wish he’d sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions, he thought. Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Don’t think, old man, he said to himself. Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing. He is working. Work as little as you can.

It was getting into the afternoon and the boat still moved slowly and steadily. But there was an added drag now from the easterly breeze and the old man rode gently with the small sea and the hurt of the cord across his back came to him easily and smoothly.

Once in the afternoon the line started to rise again. But the fish only continued to swim at a slightly higher level. The sun was on the old man’s left arm and shoulder and on his back. So he knew the fish had turned east of north.

Now that he had seen him once, he could picture the fish swimming in the water with his purple pectoral fins set wide as wings and the great erect tail slicing through the dark. I wonder how much he sees at that depth, the old man thought. His eye is huge and a horse, with much less eye, can see in the dark. Once I could see quite well in the dark. Not in the absolute dark. But almost as a cat sees.

The sun and his steady movement of his fingers had uncramped his left hand now completely and he began to shift more of the strain to it and he shrugged the muscles of his back to shift the hurt of the cord a little.

“If you’re not tired, fish,” he said aloud, “you must be very strange.”

He felt very tired now and he knew the night would come soon and he tried to think of other things. He thought of the Big Leagues, to him they were the Gran Ligas, and he knew that the Yankees of New York were playing the Tigres of Detroit.

This is the second day now that I do not know the result of the juegos, he thought. But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel. What is a bone spur? he asked himself. Un espuela de hueso. We do not have them. Can it be as painful as the spur of a fighting cock in one’s heel? I do not think I could endure that or the loss of the eye and of both eyes and continue to fight as the fighting cocks do. Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea.

“Unless sharks come,” he said aloud. “If sharks come, God pity him and me.”

Do you believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one? he thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong. Also his father was a fisherman. But would the bone spur hurt him too much?

“I do not know,” he said aloud. “I never had a bone spur.”

As the sun set he remembered, to give himself more confidence, the time in the tavern at Casablanca when he had played the hand game with the great negro from Cienfuegos who was the strongest man on the docks. They had gone one day and one night with their elbows on a chalk line on the table and their forearms straight up and their hands gripped tight. Each one was trying to force the other’s hand down onto the table. There was much betting and people went in and out of the room under the kerosene lights and he had looked at the arm and hand of the negro and at the negro’s face. They changed the referees every four hours after the first eight so that the referees could sleep. Blood came out from under the fingernails of both his and the negro’s hands and they looked each other in the eye and at their hands and forearms and the bettors went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs against the wall and watched. The walls were painted bright blue and were of wood and the lamps threw their shadows against them. The negro’s shadow was huge and it moved on the wall as the breeze moved the lamps.

The odds would change back and forth all night and they fed the negro rum and lighted cigarettes for him. Then the negro, after the rum, would try for a tremendous effort and once he had the old man, who was not an old man then but was Santiago El Campeon, nearly three inches off balance. But the old man had raised his hand up to dead even again. He was sure then that he had the negro, who was a fine man and a great athlete, beaten. And at daylight when the bettors were asking that it be called a draw and the referee was shaking his head, he had unleashed his effort and forced the hand of the negro down and down until it rested on the wood. The match had started on a Sunday morning and ended on a Monday morning. Many of the bettors had asked for a draw because they had to go to work on the docks loading sacks of sugar or at the Havana Coal Company. Otherwise everyone would have wanted it to go to a finish. But he had finished it anyway and before anyone had to go to work.

For a long time after that everyone had called him The Champion and there had been a return match in the spring. But not much money was bet and he had won it quite easily since he had broken the confidence of the negro from Cienfuegos in the first match. After that he had a few matches and then no more. He decided that he could beat anyone if he wanted to badly enough and he decided that it was bad for his right hand for fishing. He had tried a few practice matches with his left hand. But his left hand had always been a traitor and would not do what he called on it to do and he did not trust it.

The sun will bake it out well now, he thought. It should not cramp on me again unless it gets too cold in the night. I wonder what this night will bring.

An airplane passed over head on its course to Miami and he watched its shadow scaring up the schools of flying fish.

“With so much flying fish there should be dolphin,” he said, and leaned back on the line to see if it was possible to gain any on his fish. But he could not and it stayed at the hardness and water-drop shivering that preceded breaking. The boat moved ahead slowly and he watched the airplane until he could no longer see it.

It must be very strange in an airplane, he thought. I wonder what the sea looks like from that height? They should be able to see the fish well if they do not fly too high. I would like to fly very slowly at two hundred fathoms high and see the fish from above. In the turtle boats I was in the cross-trees of the mast-head and even at that height I saw much. The dolphin look greener from there and you can see their stripes and their purple spots and you can see all of the school as they swim. Why is it that all the fast-moving fish of the dark current have purple backs and usually purple stripes or spots? The dolphin looks green of course because he is really golden. But when he comes to feed, truly hungry, purple stripes show on his sides as on a marlin. Can it be anger, or the greater speed he makes that brings them out?

Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again in the acrobatics of its fear and he worked his way back to the stern and crouching and holding the big line with his right hand and arm, he pulled the dolphin in with his left hand, stepping on the gained line each time with his bare left foot. When the fish was at the stern, plunging and cutting from side to side in desperation, the old man leaned over the stern and lifted the burnished gold fish with its purple spots over the stern. Its jaws were working convulsively in quick bites against the hook and it pounded the bottom of the skiff with its long flat body, its tail and its head until he clubbed it across the shining golden head until it shivered and was still.

The old man unhooked the fish, rebaited the line with another sardine and tossed it over. Then he worked his way slowly back to the bow. He washed his left hand and wiped it on his trousers. Then he shifted the heavy line from his right hand to his left and washed his right hand in the sea while he watched the sun go into the ocean and the slant of the big cord.

“He hasn’t changed at all,” he said. But watching the movement of the water against his hand he noted that it was perceptibly slower.

“I’ll lash the two oars together across the stern and that will slow him in the night,” he said. “He’s good for the night and so am I.”

It would be better to gut the dolphin a little later to save the blood in the meat, he thought. I can do that a little later and lash the oars to make a drag at the same time. I had better keep the fish quiet now and not disturb him too much at sunset. The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.

He let his hand dry in the air then grasped the line with it and eased himself as much as he could and allowed himself to be pulled forward against the wood so that the boat took the strain as much, or more, than he did.

I’m learning how to do it, he thought. This part of it anyway. Then too, remember he hasn’t eaten since he took the bait and he is huge and needs much food. I have eaten the whole bonito. Tomorrow I will eat the dolphin. He called it dorado. Perhaps I should eat some of it when I clean it. It will be harder to eat than the bonito. But, then, nothing is easy.

“How do you feel, fish?” he asked aloud. “I feel good and my left hand is better and I have food for a night and a day. Pull the boat, fish.”

He did not truly feel good because the pain from the cord across his back had almost passed pain and gone into a dullness that he mistrusted. But I have had worse things than that, he thought. My hand is only cut a little and the cramp is gone from the other. My legs are all right. Also now I have gained on him in the question of sustenance.

It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends.

“The fish is my friend too,” he said aloud. “I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.”

Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought.

Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity.

I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.

Now, he thought, I must think about the drag. It has its perils and its merits. I may lose so much line that I will lose him, if he makes his effort and the drag made by the oars is in place and the boat loses all her lightness. Her lightness prolongs both our suffering but it is my safety since he has great speed that he has never yet employed. No matter what passes I must gut the dolphin so he does not spoil and eat some of him to be strong.

Now I will rest an hour more and feel that he is solid and steady before I move back to the stern to do the work and make the decision. In the meantime I can see how he acts and if he shows any changes. The oars are a good trick; but it has reached the time to play for safety. He is much fish still and I saw that the hook was in the corner of his mouth and he has kept his mouth tight shut. The punishment of the hook is nothing. The punishment of hunger, and that he is against something that he does not comprehend, is everything. Rest now, old man, and let him work until your next duty comes.

He rested for what he believed to be two hours. The moon did not rise now until late and he had no way of judging the time. Nor was he really resting except comparatively. He was still bearing the pull of the fish across his shoulders but he placed his left hand on the gunwale of the bow and confided more and more of the resistance to the fish to the skiff itself.

How simple it would be if I could make the line fast, he thought. But with one small lurch he could break it. I must cushion the pull of the line with my body and at all times be ready to give line with both hands.

“But you have not slept yet, old man,” he said aloud. “It is half a day and a night and now another day and you have not slept. You must devise a way so that you sleep a little if he is quiet and steady. If you do not sleep you might become unclear in the head.”

I’m clear enough in the head, he thought. Too clear. I am as clear as the stars that are my brothers. Still I must sleep. They sleep and the moon and the sun sleep and even the ocean sleeps sometimes on certain days when there is no current and a flat calm.

But remember to sleep, he thought. Make yourself do it and devise some simple and sure way about the lines. Now go back and prepare the dolphin. It is too dangerous to rig the oars as a drag if you must sleep.

I could go without sleeping, he told himself. But it would be too dangerous.

He started to work his way back to the stern on his hands and knees, being careful not to jerk against the fish. He may be half asleep himself, he thought. But I do not want him to rest. He must pull until he dies.

Back in the stern he turned so that his left hand held the strain of the line across his shoulders and drew his knife from its sheath with his right hand. The stars were bright now and he saw the dolphin clearly and he pushed the blade of his knife into his head and drew him out from under the stern. He put one of his feet on the fish and slit him quickly from the vent up to the tip of his lower jaw. Then he put his knife down and gutted him with his right hand, scooping him clean and pulling the gills clear. He felt the maw heavy and slippery in his hands and he slit it open. There were two flying fish inside. They were fresh and hard and he laid them side by side and dropped the guts and the gills over the stern. They sank leaving a trail of phosphorescence in the water. The dolphin was cold and a leprous gray-white now in the starlight and the old man skinned one side of him while he held his right foot on the fish’s head. Then he turned him over and skinned the other side and cut each side off from the head down to the tail.

He slid the carcass overboard and looked to see if there was any swirl in the water. But there was only the light of its slow descent. He turned then and placed the two flying fish inside the two fillets of fish and putting his knife back in its sheath, he worked his way slowly back to the bow. His back was bent with the weight of the line across it and he carried the fish in his right hand.

Back in the bow he laid the two fillets of fish out on the wood with the flying fish beside them. After that he settled the line across his shoulders in a new place and held it again with his left hand resting on the gunwale. Then he leaned over the side and washed the flying fish in the water, noting the speed of the water against his hand. His hand was phosphorescent from skinning the fish and he watched the flow of the water against it. The flow was less strong and as he rubbed the side of his hand against the planking of the skiff, particles of phosphorus floated off and drifted slowly astern.

“He is tiring or he is resting,” the old man said. “Now let me get through the eating of this dolphin and get some rest and a little sleep.”

Under the stars and with the night colder all the time he ate half of one of the dolphin fillets and one of the flying fish, gutted and with its head cut off.

“What an excellent fish dolphin is to eat cooked,” he said. “And what a miserable fish raw. I will never go in a boat again without salt or limes.”

If I had brains I would have splashed water on the bow all day and drying, it would have made salt, he thought. But then I did not hook the dolphin until almost sunset. Still it was a lack of preparation. But I have chewed it all well and I am not nauseated.

The sky was clouding over to the east and one after another the stars he knew were gone. It looked now as though he were moving into a great canyon of clouds and the wind had dropped.

“There will be bad weather in three or four days,” he said. “But not tonight and not tomorrow. Rig now to get some sleep, old man, while the fish is calm and steady.”

He held the line tight in his right hand and then pushed his thigh against his right hand as he leaned all his weight against the wood of the bow. Then he passed the line a little lower on his shoulders and braced his left hand on it.

My right hand can hold it as long as it is braced, he thought. If it relaxes in sleep my left hand will wake me as the line goes out. It is hard on the right hand. But he is used to punishment. Even if I sleep twenty minutes or a half an hour it is good. He lay forward cramping himself against the line with all of his body, putting all his weight onto his right hand, and he was asleep.

He did not dream of the lions but instead of a vast school of porpoises that stretched for eight or ten miles and it was in the time of their mating and they would leap high into the air and return into the same hole they had made in the water when they leaped.

Then he dreamed that he was in the village on his bed and there was a norther and he was very cold and his right arm was asleep because his head had rested on it instead of a pillow.

After that he began to dream of the long yellow beach and he saw the first of the lions come down onto it in the early dark and then the other lions came and he rested his chin on the wood of the bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening off-shore breeze and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy.

The moon had been up for a long time but he slept on and the fish pulled on steadily and the boat moved into the tunnel of clouds.

He woke with the jerk of his right fist coming up against his face and the line burning out through his right hand. He had no feeling of his left hand but he braked all he could with his right and the line rushed out. Finally his left hand found the line and he leaned back against the line and now it burned his back and his left hand, and his left hand was taking all the strain and cutting badly. He looked back at the coils of line and they were feeding smoothly. Just then the fish jumped making a great bursting of the ocean and then a heavy fall. Then he jumped again and again and the boat was going fast although line was still racing out and the old man was raising the strain to breaking point and raising it to breaking point again and again. He had been pulled down tight onto the bow and his face was in the cut slice of dolphin and he could not move.

This is what we waited for, he thought. So now let us take it.

Make him pay for the line, he thought. Make him pay for it.

He could not see the fish’s jumps but only heard the breaking of the ocean and the heavy splash as he fell. The speed of the line was cutting his hands badly but he had always known this would happen and he tried to keep the cutting across the calloused parts and not let the line slip into the palm nor cut the fingers.

If the boy was here he would wet the coils of line, he thought. Yes. If the boy were here. If the boy were here.

The line went out and out and out but it was slowing now and he was making the fish earn each inch of it. Now he got his head up from the wood and out of the slice of fish that his cheek had crushed. Then he was on his knees and then he rose slowly to his feet. He was ceding line but more slowly all the time. He worked back to where he could feel with his foot the coils of line that he could not see. There was plenty of line still and now the fish had to pull the friction of all that new line through the water.

Yes, he thought. And now he has jumped more than a dozen times and filled the sacks along his back with air and he cannot go down deep to die where I cannot bring him up. He will start circling soon and then I must work on him. I wonder what started him so suddenly? Could it have been hunger that made him desperate, or was he frightened by something in the night? Maybe he suddenly felt fear. But he was such a calm, strong fish and he seemed so fearless and so confident. It is strange.

“You better be fearless and confident yourself, old man,” he said. “You’re holding him again but you cannot get line. But soon he has to circle.”

The old man held him with his left hand and his shoulders now and stooped down and scooped up water in his right hand to get the crushed dolphin flesh off of his face. He was afraid that it might nauseate him and he would vomit and lose his strength. When his face was cleaned he washed his right hand in the water over the side and then let it stay in the salt water while he watched the first light come before the sunrise. He’s headed almost east, he thought. That means he is tired and going with the current. Soon he will have to circle. Then our true work begins.

After he judged that his right hand had been in the water long enough he took it out and looked at it. “It is not bad,” he said. “And pain does not matter to a man.”

He took hold of the line carefully so that it did not fit into any of the fresh line cuts and shifted his weight so that he could put his left hand into the sea on the other side of the skiff.

“You did not do so badly for something worthless,” he said to his left hand. “But there was a moment when I could not find you.”

Why was I not born with two good hands? he thought. Perhaps it was my fault in not training that one properly. But God knows he has had enough chances to learn. He did not do so badly in the night, though, and he has only cramped once. If he cramps again let the line cut him off.

When he thought that he knew that he was not being clear-headed and he thought he should chew some more of the dolphin. But I can’t, he told himself. It is better to be light-headed than to lose your strength from nausea. And I know I cannot keep it if I eat it since my face was in it. I will keep it for an emergency until it goes bad. But it is too late to try for strength now through nourishment. You’re stupid, he told himself. Eat the other flying fish.

It was there, cleaned and ready, and he picked it up with his left hand and ate it chewing the bones carefully and eating all of it down to the tail.

It has more nourishment than almost any fish, he thought. At least the kind of strength that I need. Now I have done what I can, he thought. Let him begin to circle and let the fight come.

The sun was rising for the third time since he had put to sea when the fish started to circle.

He could not see by the slant of the line that the fish was circling. It was too early for that. He just felt a faint slackening of the pressure of the line and he commenced to pull on it gently with his right hand. It tightened, as always, but just when he reached the point where it would break, line began to come in. He slipped his shoulders and head from under the line and began to pull in line steadily and gently. He used both of his hands in a swinging motion and tried to do the pulling as much as he could with his body and his legs. His old legs and shoulders pivoted with the swinging of the pulling.

“It is a very big circle,” he said. “But he is circling.”

Then the line would not come in any more and he held it until he saw the drops jumping from it in the sun. Then it started out and the old man knelt down and let it go grudgingly back into the dark water.

“He is making the far part of his circle now,” he said. I must hold all I can, he thought. The strain will shorten his circle each time. Perhaps in an hour I will see him. Now I must convince him and then I must kill him.

But the fish kept on circling slowly and the old man was wet with sweat and tired deep into his bones two hours later. But the circles were much shorter now and from the way the line slanted he could tell the fish had risen steadily while he swam.

For an hour the old man had been seeing black spots before his eyes and the sweat salted his eyes and salted the cut over his eye and on his forehead. He was not afraid of the black spots. They were normal at the tension that he was pulling on the line. Twice, though, he had felt faint and dizzy and that had worried him.

“I could not fail myself and die on a fish like this,” he said. “Now that I have him coming so beautifully, God help me endure. I’ll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.”

Consider them said, he thought. I’ll say them later.

Just then he felt a sudden banging and jerking on the line he held with his two hands. It was sharp and hard-feeling and heavy.

He is hitting the wire leader with his spear, he thought. That was bound to come. He had to do that. It may make him jump though and I would rather he stayed circling now. The jumps were necessary for him to take air. But after that each one can widen the opening of the hook wound and he can throw the hook.

“Don’t jump, fish,” he said. “Don’t jump.”

The fish hit the wire several times more and each time he shook his head the old man gave up a little line.

I must hold his pain where it is, he thought. Mine does not matter. I can control mine. But his pain could drive him mad.

After a while the fish stopped beating at the wire and started circling slowly again. The old man was gaining line steadily now. But he felt faint again. He lifted some sea water with his left hand and put it on his head. Then he put more on and rubbed the back of his neck.

“I have no cramps,” he said. “He’ll be up soon and I can last. You have to last. Don’t even speak of it.”

He kneeled against the bow and, for a moment, slipped the line over his back again. I’ll rest now while he goes out on the circle and then stand up and work on him when he comes in, he decided.

It was a great temptation to rest in the bow and let the fish make one circle by himself without recovering any line. But when the strain showed the fish had turned to come toward the boat, the old man rose to his feet and started the pivoting and the weaving pulling that brought in all the line he gained.

I’m tireder than I have ever been, he thought, and now the trade wind is rising. But that will be good to take him in with. I need that badly.

“I’ll rest on the next turn as he goes out,” he said. “I feel much better. Then in two or three turns more I will have him.”

His straw hat was far on the back of his head and he sank down into the bow with the pull of the line as he felt the fish turn.

You work now, fish, he thought. I’ll take you at the turn.

The sea had risen considerably. But it was a fair-weather breeze and he had to have it to get home.

“I’ll just steer south and west,” he said. “A man is never lost at sea and it is a long island.”

It was on the third turn that he saw the fish first.

He saw him first as a dark shadow that took so long to pass under the boat that he could not believe its length.

“No,” he said. “He can’t be that big.”

But he was that big and at the end of this circle he came to the surface only thirty yards away and the man saw his tail out of water. It was higher than a big scythe blade and a very pale lavender above the dark blue water. It raked back and as the fish swam just below the surface the old man could see his huge bulk and the purple stripes that banded him. His dorsal fin was down and his huge pectorals were spread wide.

On this circle the old man could see the fish’s eye and the two gray sucking fish that swam around him. Sometimes they attached themselves to him. Sometimes they darted off. Sometimes they would swim easily in his shadow. They were each over three feet long and when they swam fast they lashed their whole bodies like eels.

The old man was sweating now but from something else besides the sun. On each calm placid turn the fish made he was gaining line and he was sure that in two turns more he would have a chance to get the harpoon in.

But I must get him close, close, close, he thought. I mustn’t try for the head. I must get the heart.

“Be calm and strong, old man,” he said.

On the next circle the fish’s back was out but he was a little too far from the boat. On the next circle he was still too far away but he was higher out of water and the old man was sure that by gaining some more line he could have him alongside.

He had rigged his harpoon long before and its coil of light rope was in a round basket and the end was made fast to the bitt in the bow.

The fish was coming in on his circle now calm and beautiful looking and only his great tail moving. The old man pulled on him all that he could to bring him closer. For just a moment the fish turned a little on his side. Then he straightened himself and began another circle.

“I moved him,” the old man said. “I moved him then.”

He felt faint again now but he held on the great fish all the strain that he could. I moved him, he thought. Maybe this time I can get him over. Pull, hands, he thought. Hold up, legs. Last for me, head. Last for me. You never went. This time I’ll pull him over.

But when he put all of his effort on, starting it well out before the fish came alongside and pulling with all his strength, the fish pulled part way over and then righted himself and swam away.

“Fish,” the old man said. “Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?”

That way nothing is accomplished, he thought. His mouth was too dry to speak but he could not reach for the water now. I must get him alongside this time, he thought. I am not good for many more turns. Yes you are, he told himself. You’re good for ever.

On the next turn, he nearly had him. But again the fish righted himself and swam slowly away.

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

Now you are getting confused in the head, he thought. You must keep your head clear. Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.

“Clear up, head,” he said in a voice he could hardly hear. “Clear up.”

Twice more it was the same on the turns.

I do not know, the old man thought. He had been on the point of feeling himself go each time. I do not know. But I will try it once more.

He tried it once more and he felt himself going when he turned the fish. The fish righted himself and swam off again slowly with the great tail weaving in the air.

I’ll try it again, the old man promised, although his hands were mushy now and he could only see well in flashes.

He tried it again and it was the same. So, he thought, and he felt himself going before he started; I will try it once again.

He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish’s agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff and started to pass the boat, long, deep, wide, silver and barred with purple and interminable in the water.

The old man dropped the line and put his foot on it and lifted the harpoon as high as he could and drove it down with all his strength, and more strength he had just summoned, into the fish’s side just behind the great chest fin that rose high in the air to the altitude of the man’s chest. He felt the iron go in and he leaned on it and drove it further and then pushed all his weight after it.

Then the fish came alive, with his death in him, and rose high out of the water showing all his great length and width and all his power and his beauty. He seemed to hang in the air above the old man in the skiff. Then he fell into the water with a crash that sent spray over the old man and over all of the skiff.

The old man felt faint and sick and he could not see well. But he cleared the harpoon line and let it run slowly through his raw hands and, when he could see, he saw the fish was on his back with his silver belly up. The shaft of the harpoon was projecting at an angle from the fish’s shoulder and the sea was discolouring with the red of the blood from his heart. First it was dark as a shoal in the blue water that was more than a mile deep. Then it spread like a cloud. The fish was silvery and still and floated with the waves.

The old man looked carefully in the glimpse of vision that he had. Then he took two turns of the harpoon line around the bitt in the bow and laid his head on his hands.

“Keep my head clear,” he said against the wood of the bow. “I am a tired old man. But I have killed this fish which is my brother and now I must do the slave work.”

Now I must prepare the nooses and the rope to lash him alongside, he thought. Even if we were two and swamped her to load him and bailed her out, this skiff would never hold him. I must prepare everything, then bring him in and lash him well and step the mast and set sail for home.

He started to pull the fish in to have him alongside so that he could pass a line through his gills and out his mouth and make his head fast alongside the bow. I want to see him, he thought, and to touch and to feel him. He is my fortune, he thought. But that is not why I wish to feel him. I think I felt his heart, he thought. When I pushed on the harpoon shaft the second time. Bring him in now and make him fast and get the noose around his tail and another around his middle to bind him to the skiff.

“Get to work, old man,” he said. He took a very small drink of the water. “There is very much slave work to be done now that the fight is over.”

He looked up at the sky and then out to his fish. He looked at the sun carefully. It is not much more than noon, he thought. And the trade wind is rising. The lines all mean nothing now. The boy and I will splice them when we are home.

“Come on, fish,” he said. But the fish did not come. Instead he lay there wallowing now in the seas and the old man pulled the skiff up onto him.

When he was even with him and had the fish’s head against the bow he could not believe his size. But he untied the harpoon rope from the bitt, passed it through the fish’s gills and out his jaws, made a turn around his sword then passed the rope through the other gill, made another turn around the bill and knotted the double rope and made it fast to the bitt in the bow. He cut the rope then and went astern to noose the tail. The fish had turned silver from his original purple and silver, and the stripes showed the same pale violet colour as his tail. They were wider than a man’s hand with his fingers spread and the fish’s eye looked as detached as the mirrors in a periscope or as a saint in a procession.

“It was the only way to kill him,” the old man said. He was feeling better since the water and he knew he would not go away and his head was clear. He’s over fifteen hundred pounds the way he is, he thought. Maybe much more. If he dresses out two-thirds of that at thirty cents a pound?

“I need a pencil for that,” he said. “My head is not that clear. But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly.” I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it.

He made the fish fast to bow and stern and to the middle thwart. He was so big it was like lashing a much bigger skiff alongside. He cut a piece of line and tied the fish’s lower jaw against his bill so his mouth would not open and they would sail as cleanly as possible. Then he stepped the mast and, with the stick that was his gaff and with his boom rigged, the patched sail drew, the boat began to move, and half lying in the stern he sailed south-west.

He did not need a compass to tell him where south-west was. He only needed the feel of the trade wind and the drawing of the sail. I better put a small line out with a spoon on it and try and get something to eat and drink for the moisture. But he could not find a spoon and his sardines were rotten. So he hooked a patch of yellow gulf weed with the gaff as they passed and shook it so that the small shrimps that were in it fell onto the planking of the skiff. There were more than a dozen of them and they jumped and kicked like sand fleas. The old man pinched their heads off with his thumb and forefinger and ate them chewing up the shells and the tails. They were very tiny but he knew they were nourishing and they tasted good.

The old man still had two drinks of water in the bottle and he used half of one after he had eaten the shrimps. The skiff was sailing well considering the handicaps and he steered with the tiller under his arm. He could see the fish and he had only to look at his hands and feel his back against the stern to know that this had truly happened and was not a dream. At one time when he was feeling so badly toward the end, he had thought perhaps it was a dream. Then when he had seen the fish come out of the water and hang motionless in the sky before he fell, he was sure there was some great strangeness and he could not believe it. Then he could not see well, although now he saw as well as ever.

Now he knew there was the fish and his hands and back were no dream. The hands cure quickly, he thought. I bled them clean and the salt water will heal them. The dark water of the true gulf is the greatest healer that there is. All I must do is keep the head clear. The hands have done their work and we sail well. With his mouth shut and his tail straight up and down we sail like brothers. Then his head started to become a little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in? If I were towing him behind there would be no question. Nor if the fish were in the skiff, with all dignity gone, there would be no question either. But they were sailing together lashed side by side and the old man thought, let him bring me in if it pleases him. I am only better than him through trickery and he meant me no harm.

They sailed well and the old man soaked his hands in the salt water and tried to keep his head clear. There were high cumulus clouds and enough cirrus above them so that the old man knew the breeze would last all night. The old man looked at the fish constantly to make sure it was true. It was an hour before the first shark hit him.

The shark was not an accident. He had come up from deep down in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled and dispersed in the mile deep sea. He had come up so fast and absolutely without caution that he broke the surface of the blue water and was in the sun. Then he fell back into the sea and picked up the scent and started swimming on the course the skiff and the fish had taken.

Sometimes he lost the scent. But he would pick it up again, or have just a trace of it, and he swam fast and hard on the course. He was a very big Mako shark built to swim as fast as the fastest fish in the sea and everything about him was beautiful except his jaws.

His back was as blue as a sword fish’s and his belly was silver and his hide was smooth and handsome. He was built as a sword fish except for his huge jaws which were tight shut now as he swam fast, just under the surface with his high dorsal fin knifing through the water without wavering. Inside the closed double lip of his jaws all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man’s fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the fingers of the old man and they had razor-sharp cutting edges on both sides. This was a fish built to feed on all the fishes in the sea, that were so fast and strong and well armed that they had no other enemy. Now he speeded up as he smelled the fresher scent and his blue dorsal fin cut the water.

When the old man saw him coming he knew that this was a shark that had no fear at all and would do exactly what he wished. He prepared the harpoon and made the rope fast while he watched the shark come on. The rope was short as it lacked what he had cut away to lash the fish.

The old man’s head was clear and good now and he was full of resolution but he had little hope. It was too good to last, he thought. He took one look at the great fish as he watched the shark close in. It might as well have been a dream, he thought. I cannot keep him from hitting me but maybe I can get him. Dentuso, he thought. Bad luck to your mother.

The shark closed fast astern and when he hit the fish the old man saw his mouth open and his strange eyes and the clicking chop of the teeth as he drove forward in the meat just above the tail. The shark’s head was out of water and his back was coming out and the old man could hear the noise of skin and flesh ripping on the big fish when he rammed the harpoon down onto the shark’s head at a spot where the line between his eyes intersected with the line that ran straight back from his nose. There were no such lines. There was only the heavy sharp blue head and the big eyes and the clicking, thrusting all-swallowing jaws. But that was the location of the brain and the old man hit it. He hit it with his blood mushed hands driving a good harpoon with all his strength. He hit it without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy.

The shark swung over and the old man saw his eye was not alive and then he swung over once again, wrapping himself in two loops of the rope. The old man knew that he was dead but the shark would not accept it. Then, on his back, with his tail lashing and his jaws clicking, the shark plowed over the water as a speed-boat does. The water was white where his tail beat it and three-quarters of his body was clear above the water when the rope came taut, shivered, and then snapped. The shark lay quietly for a little while on the surface and the old man watched him. Then he went down very slowly.

“He took about forty pounds,” the old man said aloud. He took my harpoon too and all the rope, he thought, and now my fish bleeds again and there will be others.

He did not like to look at the fish anymore since he had been mutilated. When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit.

But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he thought. And he was the biggest dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows that I have seen big ones.

It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers.

“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I am sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent that he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.

“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail on this course and take it when it comes.”

But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything wrong with my heel except the time the sting ray stung it when I stepped on him when swimming and paralyzed the lower leg and made the unbearable pain.

“Think about something cheerful, old man,” he said. “Every minute now you are closer to home. You sail lighter for the loss of forty pounds.”

He knew quite well the pattern of what could happen when he reached the inner part of the current. But there was nothing to be done now.

“Yes there is,” he said aloud. “I can lash my knife to the butt of one of the oars.”

So he did that with the tiller under his arm and the sheet of the sail under his foot.

“Now,” he said. “I am still an old man. But I am not unarmed.”

The breeze was fresh now and he sailed on well. He watched only the forward part of the fish and some of his hope returned.

It is silly not to hope, he thought. Besides I believe it is a sin. Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it. Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people. But then everything is a sin. Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it. You were born to be a fisherman as the fish was born to be a fish. San Pedro was a fisherman as was the father of the great DiMaggio.

But he liked to think about all things that he was involved in and since there was nothing to read and he did not have a radio, he thought much and he kept on thinking about sin. You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. It you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

“You think too much, old man,” he said aloud.

But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not a scavenger nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of anything.

“I killed him in self-defense,” the old man said aloud. “And I killed him well.”

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive. The boy keeps me alive, he thought. I must not deceive myself too much.

He leaned over the side and pulled loose a piece of the meat of the fish where the shark had cut him. He chewed it and noted its quality and its good taste. It was firm and juicy, like meat, but it was not red. There was no stringiness in it and he knew that it would bring the highest price in the market. But there was no way to keep its scent out of the water and the old man knew that a very bad time was coming.

The breeze was steady. It had backed a little further into the north-east and he knew that meant that it would not fall off. The old man looked ahead of him but he could see no sails nor could he see the hull nor the smoke of any ship. There were only the flying fish that went up from his bow sailing away to either side and the yellow patches of gulf-weed. He could not even see a bird.

He had sailed for two hours, resting in the stern and sometimes chewing a bit of the meat from the marlin, trying to rest and to be strong, when he saw the first of the two sharks.

“Ay,” he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

“Galanos,” he said aloud. He had seen the second fin now coming up behind the first and had identified them as shovel-nosed sharks by the brown, triangular fin and the sweeping movements of the tail. They had the scent and were excited and in the stupidity of their great hunger they were losing and finding the scent in their excitement. But they were closing all the time.

The old man made the sheet fast and jammed the tiller. Then he took up the oar with the knife lashed to it. He lifted it as lightly as he could because his hands rebelled at the pain. Then he opened and closed them on it lightly to loosen them. He closed them firmly so they would take the pain now and would not flinch and watched the sharks come. He could see their wide, flattened, shovel-pointed heads now and their white-tipped wide pectoral fins. They were hateful sharks, bad smelling, scavengers as well as killers, and when they were hungry they would bite at an oar or the rudder of a boat. It was these sharks that would cut the turtles’ legs and flippers off when the turtles were asleep on the surface, and they would hit a man in the water, if they were hungry, even if the man had no smell of fish blood nor of fish slime on him.

“Ay,” the old man said. “Galanos. Come on, Galanos.”

They came. But they did not come as the Mako had come. One turned and went out of sight under the skiff and the old man could feel the skiff shake as he jerked and pulled on the fish. The other watched the old man with his slitted yellow eyes and then came in fast with his half circle of jaws wide to hit the fish where he had already been bitten. The line showed clearly on the top of his brown head and back where the brain joined the spinal cord and the old man drove the knife on the oar into the juncture, withdrew it, and drove it in again into the shark’s yellow cat-like eyes. The shark let go of the fish and slid down, swallowing what he had taken as he died.

The skiff was still shaking with the destruction the other shark was doing to the fish and the old man let go the sheet so that the skiff would swing broadside and bring the shark out from under. When he saw the shark he leaned over the side and punched at him. He hit only meat and the hide was set hard and he barely got the knife in. The blow hurt not only his hands but his shoulder too. But the shark came up fast with his head out and the old man hit him squarely in the center of his flat-topped head as his nose came out of water and lay against the fish. The old man withdrew the blade and punched the shark exactly in the same spot again. He still hung to the fish with his jaws hooked and the old man stabbed him in his left eye. The shark still hung there.

“No?” the old man said and he drove the blade between the vertebrae and the brain. It was an easy shot now and he felt the cartilage sever. The old man reversed the oar and put the blade between the shark’s jaws to open them. He twisted the blade and as the shark slid loose he said, “Go on, galano. Slide down a mile deep. Go see your friend, or maybe it’s your mother.”

The old man wiped the blade of his knife and laid down the oar. Then he found the sheet and the sail filled and he brought the skiff onto her course.

“They must have taken a quarter of him and of the best meat,” he said aloud. “I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him. I’m sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong.” He stopped and he did not want to look at the fish now. Drained of blood and awash he looked the colour of the silver backing of a mirror and his stripes still showed.

“I shouldn’t have gone out so far, fish,” he said. “Neither for you nor for me. I’m sorry, fish.”

Now, he said to himself. Look to the lashing on the knife and see if it has been cut. Then get your hand in order because there still is more to come.

“I wish I had a stone for the knife,” the old man said after he had checked the lashing on the oar butt. “I should have brought a stone.” You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them, old man. Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.

“You give me much good counsel,” he said aloud. “I’m tired of it.”

He held the tiller under his arm and soaked both his hands in the water as the skiff drove forward.

“God knows how much that last one took,” he said. “But she’s much lighter now.” He did not want to think of the mutilated under-side of the fish. He knew that each of the jerking bumps of the shark had been meat torn away and that the fish now made a trail for all sharks as wide as a highway through the sea.

He was a fish to keep a man all winter, he thought. Don’t think of that. Just rest and try to get your hands in shape to defend what is left of him. The blood smell from my hands means nothing now with all that scent in the water. Besides they do not bleed much. There is nothing cut that means anything. The bleeding may keep the left from cramping.

What can I think of now? he thought. Nothing. I must think of nothing and wait for the next ones. I wish it had really been a dream, he thought. But who knows? It might have turned out well.

The next shark that came was a single shovel-nose. He came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it. The old man let him hit the fish and then drove the knife on the oar down into his brain. But the shark jerked backwards as he rolled and the knife blade snapped.

The old man settled himself to steer. He did not even watch the big shark sinking slowly in the water, showing first life-size, then small, then tiny. That always fascinated the old man. But he did not even watch it now.

“I have the gaff now,” he said. “But it will do no good. I have the two oars and the tiller and the short club.”

Now they have beaten me, he thought. I am too old to club sharks to death. But I will try it as long as I have the oars and the short club and the tiller.

He put his hands in the water again to soak them. It was getting late in the afternoon and he saw nothing but the sea and the sky. There was more wind in the sky than there had been, and soon he hoped that he would see land.

“You’re tired, old man,” he said. “You’re tired inside.”

The sharks did not hit him again until just before sunset.

The old man saw the brown fins coming along the wide trail the fish must make in the water. They were not even quartering on the scent. They were headed straight for the skiff swimming side by side.

He jammed the tiller, made the sheet fast and reached under the stern for the club. It was an oar handle from a broken oar sawed off to about two and a half feet in length. He could only use it effectively with one hand because of the grip of the handle and he took good hold of it with his right hand, flexing his hand on it, as he watched the sharks come. They were both galanos.

I must let the first one get a good hold and hit him on the point of the nose or straight across the top of the head, he thought.

The two sharks closed together and as he saw the one nearest him open his jaws and sink them into the silver side of the fish, he raised the club high and brought it down heavy and slamming onto the top of the shark’s broad head. He felt the rubbery solidity as the club came down. But he felt the rigidity of bone too and he struck the shark once more hard across the point of the nose as he slid down from the fish.

The other shark had been in and out and now came in again with his jaws wide. The old man could see pieces of the meat of the fish spilling white from the corner of his jaws as he bumped the fish and closed his jaws. He swung at him and hit only the head and the shark looked at him and wrenched the meat loose. The old man swung the club down on him again as he slipped away to swallow and hit only the heavy solid rubberiness.

“Come on, galano,” the old man said. “Come in again.”

The shark came in a rush and the old man hit him as he shut his jaws. He hit him solidly and from as high up as he could raise the club. This time he felt the bone at the base of the brain and he hit him again in the same place while the shark tore the meat loose sluggishly and slid down from the fish.

The old man watched for him to come again but neither shark showed. Then he saw one on the surface swimming in circles. He did not see the fin of the other.

I could not expect to kill them, he thought. I could have in my time. But I have hurt them both badly and neither one can feel very good. If I could have used a bat with two hands I could have killed the first one surely. Even now, he thought.

He did not want to look at the fish. He knew that half of him had been destroyed. The sun had gone down while he had been in the fight with the sharks.

“It will be dark soon,” he said. “Then I should see the glow of Havana. If I am too far to the eastward I will see the lights of one of the new beaches.”

I cannot be too far out now, he thought. I hope no one has been too worried. There is only the boy to worry, of course. But I am sure he would have confidence. Many of the older fishermen will worry. Many others too, he thought. I live in a good town.

He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been ruined too badly. Then something came into his head.

“Half fish,” he said. “Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.”

He liked to think of the fish and what he could do to a shark if he were swimming free. I should have chopped the bill off to fight them with, he thought. But there was no hatchet and then there was no knife.

But if I had, and could have lashed it to an oar butt, what a weapon. Then we might have fought them together. What will you do now if they come in the night? What can you do?

“Fight them,” he said. “I’ll fight them until I die.”

But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead. He put his two hands together and felt the palms. They were not dead and he could bring the pain of life by simply opening and closing them. He leaned his back against the stern and knew he was not dead. His shoulders told him.

I have all those prayers I promised if I caught the fish, he thought. But I am too tired to say them now. I better get the sack and put it over my shoulders.

He lay in the stern and steered and watched for the glow to come in the sky. I have half of him, he thought. Maybe I’ll have the luck to bring the forward half in. I should have some luck. No, he said. You violated your luck when you went too far outside.

“Don’t be silly,” he said aloud. “And keep awake and steer. You may have much luck yet.”

“I’d like to buy some if there’s any place they sell it,” he said.

What could I buy it with? he asked himself. Could I buy it with a lost harpoon and a broken knife and two bad hands?

“You might,” he said. “You tried to buy it with eighty-four days at sea. They nearly sold it to you too.”

I must not think nonsense, he thought. Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her? I would take some though in any form and pay what they asked. I wish I could see the glow from the lights, he thought. I wish too many things. But that is the thing I wish for now. He tried to settle more comfortably to steer and from his pain he knew he was not dead.

He saw the reflected glare of the lights of the city at what must have been around ten o’clock at night. They were only perceptible at first as the light is in the sky before the moon rises. Then they were steady to see across the ocean which was rough now with the increasing breeze. He steered inside of the glow and he thought that now, soon, he must hit the edge of the stream.

Now it is over, he thought. They will probably hit me again. But what can a man do against them in the dark without a weapon?

He was stiff and sore now and his wounds and all of the strained parts of his body hurt with the cold of the night. I hope I do not have to fight again, he thought. I hope so much I do not have to fight again.

But by midnight he fought and this time he knew the fight was useless. They came in a pack and he could only see the lines in the water that their fins made and their phosphorescence as they threw themselves on the fish. He clubbed at heads and heard the jaws chop and the shaking of the skiff as they took hold below. He clubbed desperately at what he could only feel and hear and he felt something seize the club and it was gone.

He jerked the tiller free from the rudder and beat and chopped with it, holding it in both hands and driving it down again and again. But they were up to the bow now and driving in one after the other and together, tearing off the pieces of meat that showed glowing below the sea as they turned to come once more.

One came, finally, against the head itself and he knew that it was over. He swung the tiller across the shark’s head where the jaws were caught in the heaviness of the fish’s head which would not tear. He swung it once and twice and again. He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt. He felt it go in and knowing it was sharp he drove it in again. The shark let go and rolled away. That was the last shark of the pack that came. There was nothing more for them to eat.

The old man could hardly breathe now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth. It was coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment. But there was not much of it.

He spat into the ocean and said, “Eat that, Galanos. And make a dream you’ve killed a man.”

He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well enough for him to steer. He settled the sack around his shoulders and put the skiff on her course. He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind. He was past everything now and he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and as intelligently as he could. In the night sharks hit the carcass as someone might pick up crumbs from the table. The old man paid no attention to them and did not pay any attention to anything except steering. He only noticed how lightly and how well the skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her.

She’s good, he thought. She is sound and not harmed in any way except for the tiller. That is easily replaced.

He could feel he was inside the current now and he could see the lights of the beach colonies along the shore. He knew where he was now and it was nothing to get home.

The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought. Then he added, sometimes. And the great sea with our friends and our enemies. And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, he thought.

“Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”

When he sailed into the little harbour the lights of the Terrace were out and he knew everyone was in bed. The breeze had risen steadily and was blowing strongly now. It was quiet in the harbour though and he sailed up onto the little patch of shingle below the rocks. There was no one to help him so he pulled the boat up as far as he could. Then he stepped out and made her fast to a rock.

He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he shouldered the mast and started to climb. It was then he knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail of the fish standing up well behind the skiff’s stern. He saw the white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head with the projecting bill and all the nakedness between.

He started to climb again and at the top he fell and lay for some time with the mast across his shoulder. He tried to get up. But it was too difficult and he sat there with the mast on his shoulder and looked at the road. A cat passed on the far side going about its business and the old man watched it. Then he just watched the road.

Finally he put the mast down and stood up. He picked the mast up and put it on his shoulder and started up the road. He had to sit down five times before he reached his shack.

Inside the shack he leaned the mast against the wall. In the dark he found a water bottle and took a drink. Then he lay down on the bed. He pulled the blanket over his shoulders and then over his back and legs and he slept face down on the newspapers with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up.

He was asleep when the boy looked in the door in the morning. It was blowing so hard that the drifting-boats would not be going out and the boy had slept late and then come to the old man’s shack as he had come each morning. The boy saw that the old man was breathing and then he saw the old man’s hands and he started to cry. He went out very quietly to go to bring some coffee and all the way down the road he was crying.

Many fishermen were around the skiff looking at what was lashed beside it and one was in the water, his trousers rolled up, measuring the skeleton with a length of line.

The boy did not go down. He had been there before and one of the fishermen was looking after the skiff for him.

“How is he?” one of the fishermen shouted.

“Sleeping,” the boy called. He did not care that they saw him crying. “Let no one disturb him.”

“He was eighteen feet from nose to tail,” the fisherman who was measuring him called.

“I believe it,” the boy said.

He went into the Terrace and asked for a can of coffee.

“Hot and with plenty of milk and sugar in it.”

“Anything more?”

“No. Afterwards I will see what he can eat.”

“What a fish it was,” the proprietor said. “There has never been such a fish. Those were two fine fish you took yesterday too.”

“Damn my fish,” the boy said and he started to cry again.

“Do you want a drink of any kind?” the proprietor asked.

“No,” the boy said. “Tell them not to bother Santiago. I’ll be back.”

“Tell him how sorry I am.”

“Thanks,” the boy said.

The boy carried the hot can of coffee up to the old man’s shack and sat by him until he woke. Once it looked as though he were waking. But he had gone back into heavy sleep and the boy had gone across the road to borrow some wood to heat the coffee.

Finally the old man woke.

“Don’t sit up,” the boy said. “Drink this.” He poured some of the coffee in a glass.

The old man took it and drank it.

“They beat me, Manolin,” he said. “They truly beat me.”

“He didn’t beat you. Not the fish.”

“No. Truly. It was afterwards.”

“Pedrico is looking after the skiff and the gear. What do you want done with the head?”

“Let Pedrico chop it up to use in fish traps.”

“And the spear?”

“You keep it if you want it.”

“I want it,” the boy said. “Now we must make our plans about the other things.”

“Did they search for me?”

“Of course. With coast guard and with planes.”

“The ocean is very big and a skiff is small and hard to see,” the old man said. He noticed how pleasant it was to have someone to talk to instead of speaking only to himself and to the sea. “I missed you,” he said. “What did you catch?”

“One the first day. One the second and two the third.”

“Very good.”

“Now we fish together again.”

“No. I am not lucky. I am not lucky anymore.”

“The hell with luck,” the boy said. “I’ll bring the luck with me.”

“What will your family say?”

“I do not care. I caught two yesterday. But we will fish together now for I still have much to learn.”

“We must get a good killing lance and always have it on board. You can make the blade from a spring leaf from an old Ford. We can grind it in Guanabacoa. It should be sharp and not tempered so it will break. My knife broke.”

“I’ll get another knife and have the spring ground. How many days of heavy brisa have we?”

“Maybe three. Maybe more.”

“I will have everything in order,” the boy said. “You get your hands well old man.”

“I know how to care for them. In the night I spat something strange and felt something in my chest was broken.”

“Get that well too,” the boy said. “Lie down, old man, and I will bring you your clean shirt. And something to eat.”

“Bring any of the papers of the time that I was gone,” the old man said.

“You must get well fast for there is much that I can learn and you can teach me everything. How much did you suffer?”

“Plenty,” the old man said.

“I’ll bring the food and the papers,” the boy said. “Rest well, old man. I will bring stuff from the drug-store for your hands.”

“Don’t forget to tell Pedrico the head is his.”

“No. I will remember.”

As the boy went out the door and down the worn coral rock road he was crying again.

That afternoon there was a party of tourists at the Terrace and looking down in the water among the empty beer cans and dead barracudas a woman saw a great long white spine with a huge tail at the end that lifted and swung with the tide while the east wind blew a heavy steady sea outside the entrance to the harbour.

“What’s that?” she asked a waiter and pointed to the long backbone of the great fish that was now just garbage waiting to go out with the tide.

“Tiburon,” the waiter said, “Eshark.” He was meaning to explain what had happened.

“I didn’t know sharks had such handsome, beautifully formed tails.”

“I didn’t either,” her male companion said.

Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again. He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions.

The Short Story Collections

Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School, in a western suburb of Chicago, from 1913 until 1917.

INTRODUCTION TO HEMINGWAY’S SHORT STORIES

In 1923, Hemingway had three hundred copies of Three Stories and Ten Poems privately published by Robert McAlmon’s ‘Contact Publishing’ in Paris. Two years earlier, the author had been asked by Ezra Pound to contribute some short pieces of fiction to a small volume of modernist work that he was editing, and which Bill Bird’s Three Mountain Press would be publishing. However, in December 1922 Hemingway was leaving Paris for Switzerland when his belongings, containing nearly all of his manuscripts, were stolen at the Gare de Lyon. Only one of his stories ‘Up in Michigan’, which would later feature in his collected works, was saved. In January and February of 1923, he wrote some short pieces of fiction which were included in the October edition of The Little Review magazine. It was in the summer of 1923, after he first become enchanted with bullfighting, that he wrote a series of vignettes which would be printed in 1924 under the title in our time. There were only three hundred copies produced and the entire work was extremely brief as it was little more than thirty pages long. In October 1925, Boni and Liveright published In Our Time: a collection of fourteen short stories interspersed with the previously released vignettes. The collection contains some of Hemingway’s best known stories including, ‘Big Two-Hearted River’, and introduces his most famous, and semi-autobiographical, character from his short fiction, Nick Adams.

The First Forty-Nine Stories was published by Scribner’s in 1938 and it remains the most famous collection of Hemingway’s short stories. The anthology includes the three previously released collections of his short fiction: In Our Time (1925); Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933). It also contains his 1923 story ‘Up in Michigan’, and a few of his later works, such as ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ (1936), and ‘The Capital of the World’ (1936). In 1972, Scribner’s published The Nick Adams Stories, which collected all of Hemingway’s short stories about the aforementioned character into one volume and included tales about Adams that had not previously been published in other collections.

Hemingway’s minimalist writing style, which was influenced by his life as a journalist, is on full display in many of his short stories. He employs his famous ‘Iceberg Theory’, which entails deliberately omitting certain details from the work and concentrating instead on the surface facts, while allowing the underlying themes and meaning to be conveyed implicitly. This notion of the power of omission in fiction, combined with unadorned language, and short and uncomplicated sentences, has had a significant and lasting influence on literature, and can be seen clearly in the works of writers such as Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie and James Salter.

The first edition of ‘in our time’

The first edition of ‘The First Forty-Nine Stories’

THREE STORIES AND TEN POEMS

CONTENTS

UP IN MICHIGAN

OUT OF SEASON

MY OLD MAN

Please note: the poems appear in the poetry section of this collection.

The first edition

UP IN MICHIGAN

JIM GILMORE came to Hortons Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Horton. Jim was short and dark with big mustaches and big hands. He was a good horseshoer and did not look much like a blacksmith even with his leather apron on. He lived upstairs above the blacksmith shop and took his meals at D. J. Smith’s.

Liz Coates worked for Smith’s. Mrs. Smith, who was a very large clean woman, said Liz Coates was the neatest girl she’d ever seen. Liz had good legs and always wore clean gingham aprons and Jim noticed that her hair was always neat behind. He liked her face because it was so jolly but he never thought about her.

Liz liked Jim very much. She liked it the way he walked over from the shop and often went to the kitchen door to watch for him to start down the road. She liked it about his mustache. She liked it about how white his teeth were when he smiled. She liked it very much that he didn’t look like a blacksmith. She liked it how much D. J. Smith and Mrs. Smith liked Jim. One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny.

Hortons Bay, the town, was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix. There was the general store and post office with a high false front and maybe a wagon hitched out in front, Smith’s house, Stroud’s house, Dillworth’s house, Horton’s house and Van Hoosen’s house. The houses were in a big grove of elm trees and the road was very sandy. There was farming country and timber each way up the road. Up the road a ways was the Methodist church and down the road the other direction was the township school. The blacksmith shop was painted red and faced the school.

A steep sandy road ran down the hill to the bay through the timber. From Smith’s back door you could look out across the woods that ran down to the lake and across the bay. It was very beautiful in the spring and summer, the bay blue and bright and usually whitecaps on the lake out beyond the point from the breeze blowing from Charlevoix and Lake Michigan. From Smith’s back door Liz could see ore barges way out in the lake going toward Boyne City. When she looked at them they didn’t seem to be moving at all but if she went in and dried some more dishes and then came out again they would be out of sight beyond the point.

All the time now Liz was thinking about Jim Gilmore. He didn’t seem to notice her much. He talked about the shop to D. J. Smith and about the Republican Party and about James G. Blaine. In the evenings he read The Toledo Blade and the Grand Rapids paper by the lamp in the front room or went out spearing fish in the bay with a jacklight with D. J. Smith. In the fall he and Smith and Charley Wyman took a wagon and tent, grub, axes, their rifles and two dogs and went on a trip to the pine plains beyond Vanderbilt deer hunting. Liz and Mrs. Smith were cooking for four days for them before they started. Liz wanted to make something special for Jim to take but she didn’t finally because she was afraid to ask Mrs. Smith for the eggs and flour and afraid if she bought them Mrs. Smith would catch her cooking. It would have been all right with Mrs. Smith but Liz was afraid.

All the time Jim was gone on the deer hunting trip Liz thought about him. It was awful while he was gone. She couldn’t sleep well from thinking about him but she discovered it was fun to think about him too. If she let herself go it was better. The night before they were to come back she didn’t sleep at all, that is she didn’t think she slept because it was all mixed up in a dream about not sleeping and really not sleeping. When she saw the wagon coming down the road she felt weak and sick sort of inside. She couldn’t wait till she saw Jim and it seemed as though everything would be all right when he came. The wagon stopped outside under the big elm and Mrs. Smith and Liz went out. All the men had beards and there were three deer in the back of the wagon, their thin legs sticking stiff over the edge of the wagon box. Mrs. Smith kissed D. J. and he hugged her. Jim said “Hello, Liz,” and grinned. Liz hadn’t known just what would happen when Jim got back but she was sure it would be something. Nothing had happened. The men were just home, that was all. Jim pulled the burlap sacks off the deer and Liz looked at them. One was a big buck. It was stiff and hard to lift out of the wagon.

“Did you shoot it, Jim?” Liz asked.

“Yeah. Ain’t it a beauty?” Jim got it onto his back to carry to the smokehouse.

That night Charley Wyman stayed to supper at Smith’s. It was too late to get back to Charlevoix. The men washed up and waited in the front room for supper.

“Ain’t there something left in that crock, Jimmy?” D. J. Smith asked, and Jim went out to the wagon in the barn and fetched in the jug of whiskey the men had taken hunting with them. It was a four-gallon jug and there was quite a little slopped back and forth in the bottom. Jim took a long pull on his way back to the house. It was hard to lift such a big jug up to drink out of it. Some of the whiskey ran down on his shirt front. The two men smiled when Jim came in with the jug. D. J. Smith sent for glasses and Liz brought them. D. J. poured out three big shots.

“Well, here’s looking at you, D. J.,” said Charley Wyman.

“That damn big buck, Jimmy,” said D. J.

“Here’s all the ones we missed, D. J.,” said Jim, and downed his liquor.

“Tastes good to a man.”

“Nothing like it this time of year for what ails you.”

“How about another, boys?”

“Here’s how, D. J.”

“Down the creek, boys.”

“Here’s to next year.”

Jim began to feel great. He loved the taste and the feel of whiskey. He was glad to be back to a comfortable bed and warm food and the shop. He had another drink. The men came in to supper feeling hilarious but acting very respectable. Liz sat at the table after she put on the food and ate with the family. It was a good dinner. The men ate seriously. After supper they went into the front room again and Liz cleaned off with Mrs. Smith. Then Mrs. Smith went upstairs and pretty soon Smith came out and went upstairs too. Jim and Charley were still in the front room. Liz was sitting in the kitchen next to the stove pretending to read a book and thinking about Jim. She didn’t want to go to bed yet because she knew Jim would be coming out and she wanted to see him as he went out so she could take the way he looked up to bed with her.

She was thinking about him hard and then Jim came out. His eyes were shining and his hair was a little rumpled. Liz looked down at her book. Jim came over back of her chair and stood there and she could feel him breathing and then he put his arms around her. Her breasts felt plump and firm and the nipples were erect under his hands. Liz was terribly frightened, no one had ever touched her, but she thought, “He’s come to me finally. He’s really come.”

She held herself stiff because she was so frightened and did not know anything else to do and then Jim held her tight against the chair and kissed her. It was such a sharp, aching, hurting feeling that she thought she couldn’t stand it. She felt Jim right through the back of the chair and she couldn’t stand it and then something clicked inside of her and the feeling was warmer and softer. Jim held her tight hard against the chair and she wanted it now and Jim whispered, “Come on for a walk.”

Liz took her coat off the peg on the kitchen wall and they went out the door. Jim had his arm around her and every little way they stopped and pressed against each other and Jim kissed her. There was no moon and they walked ankle-deep in the sandy road through the trees down to the dock and the warehouse on the bay. The water was lapping in the piles and the point was dark across the bay. It was cold but Liz was hot all over from being with Jim. They sat down in the shelter of the warehouse and Jim pulled Liz close to him. She was frightened. One of Jim’s hands went inside her dress and stroked over her breast and the other hand was in her lap. She was very frightened and didn’t know how he was going to go about things but she snuggled close to him. Then the hand that felt so big in her lap went away and was on her leg and started to move up it.

“Don’t, Jim,” Liz said. Jim slid the hand further up.

“You mustn’t, Jim. You mustn’t.” Neither Jim nor Jim’s big hand paid any attention to her.

The boards were hard. Jim had her dress up and was trying to do something to her. She was frightened but she wanted it. She had to have it but it frightened her.

“You mustn’t do it, Jim. You mustn’t.”

“I got to. I’m going to. You know we got to.”

“No we haven’t, Jim. We ain’t got to. Oh, it isn’t right. Oh, it’s so big and it hurts so. You can’t. Oh, Jim. Jim. Oh.”

The hemlock planks of the dock were hard and splintery and cold and Jim was heavy on her and he had hurt her. Liz pushed him, she was so uncomfortable and cramped. Jim was asleep. He wouldn’t move. She worked out from under him and sat up and straightened her skirt and coat and tried to do something with her hair. Jim was sleeping with his mouth a little open. Liz leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. He was still asleep. She lifted his head a little and shook it. He rolled his head over and swallowed. Liz started to cry. She walked over to the edge of the dock and looked down to the water. There was a mist coming up from the bay. She was cold and miserable and everything felt gone. She walked back to where Jim was lying and shook him once more to make sure. She was crying.

“Jim,” she said, “Jim. Please, Jim.”

Jim stirred and curled a little tighter. Liz took off her coat and leaned over and covered him with it. She tucked it around him neatly and carefully. Then she walked across the dock and up the steep sandy road to go to bed. A cold mist was coming up through the woods from the bay.

OUT OF SEASON

ON THE FOUR LIRE PEDUZZI HAD EARNED by spading the hotel garden he got quite drunk. He saw the young gentleman coming down the path and spoke to him mysteriously. The young gentleman said he had not eaten but would be ready to go as soon as lunch was finished. Forty minutes or an hour.

At the cantina near the bridge they trusted him for three more grappas because he was so confident and mysterious about his job for the afternoon. It was a windy day with the sun coming out from behind clouds and then going under in sprinkles of rain. A wonderful day for trout fishing.

The young gentleman came out of the hotel and asked him about the rods. Should his wife come behind with the rods? “Yes,” said Peduzzi, “let her follow us.” The young gentleman went back into the hotel and spoke to his wife. He and Peduzzi started down the road. The young gentleman had a musette over his shoulder. Peduzzi saw the wife, who looked as young as the young gentleman, and was wearing mountain boots and a blue beret, start out to follow them down the road, carrying the fishing rods, unjointed, one in each hand. Peduzzi didn’t like her to be way back there. “Signorina,” he called, winking at the young gentleman, “come up here and walk with us. Signora, come up here. Let us all walk together.” Peduzzi wanted them all three to walk down the street of Cortina together.

The wife stayed behind, following rather sullenly. “Signorina,” Peduzzi called tenderly, “come up here with us.” The young gentleman looked back and shouted something. The wife stopped lagging behind and walked up.

Everyone they met walking through the main street of the town Peduzzi greeted elaborately. Buon dì, Arturo! Tipping his hat. The bank clerk stared at him from the door of the Fascist café. Groups of three and four people standing in front of the shops stared at the three. The workmen in their stone-powdered jackets working on the foundations of the new hotel looked up as they passed. Nobody spoke or gave any sign to them except the town beggar, lean and old, with a spittle-thickened beard, who lifted his hat as they passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of the bianco? One lira.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve got on three sweaters.”

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

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

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

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

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

The girl went into the house as Peduzzi pointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Un’ mezz’ora. Piu d’un’ mezz’ora.”

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

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

Peduzzi was down at the river and did not notice her till she was almost out of sight over the crest. “Frau!” he shouted. “Frau! Fräulein! You’re not going.”

She went on over the crest of the hill.

“She’s gone!” said Peduzzi. It shocked him.

He took off the rubber bands that held the rod segments together and commenced to joint up one of the rods.

“But you said it was half an hour further.”

“Oh, yes. It is good half an hour down. It is good here, too.”

“Really?”

“Of course. It is good here and good there, too.”

The young gentleman sat down on the bank and jointed up a rod, put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He felt uncomfortable and afraid that any minute a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens would come over the bank from the town. He could see the houses of the town and the campanile over the edge of the hill. He opened his leader box. Peduzzi leaned over and dug his flat, hard thumb and forefinger in and tangled the moistened leaders.

“Have you some lead?”

“No.”

“You must have some lead.” Peduzzi was excited. “You must have piombo. Piombo. A little piombo. Just here. Just above the hook or your bait will float on the water. You must have it. Just a little piombo.”

“Have you got some?”

“No.” He looked through his pockets desperately. Sifting through the cloth dirt in the linings of his inside military pockets. “I haven’t any. We must have piombo.”

“We can’t fish then,” said the young gentleman, and unjointed the rod, reeling the line back through the guides. “We’ll get some piombo and fish tomorrow.”

“But listen, caro, you must have piombo. The line will lie flat on the water.” Peduzzi’s day was going to pieces before his eyes. “You must have piombo. A little is enough. Your stuff is all clean and new but you have no lead. I would have brought some. You said you had everything.”

The young gentleman looked at the stream discolored by the melting snow. “I know,” he said, “we’ll get some piombo and fish tomorrow.”

“At what hour in the morning? Tell me that.”

“At seven.”

The sun came out. It was warm and pleasant. The young gentleman felt relieved. He was no longer breaking the law. Sitting on the bank he took the bottle of marsala out of his pocket and passed it to Peduzzi. Peduzzi passed it back. The young gentleman took a drink of it and passed it to Peduzzi again. Peduzzi passed it back again. “Drink,” he said, “drink. It’s your marsala.” After another short drink the young gentleman handed the bottle over. Peduzzi had been watching it closely. He took the bottle very hurriedly and tipped it up. The gray hairs in the folds of his neck oscillated as he drank, his eyes fixed on the end of the narrow brown bottle. He drank it all. The sun shone while he drank. It was wonderful. This was a great day, after all. A wonderful day.

“Senta, caro! In the morning at seven.” He had called the young gentleman caro several times and nothing had happened. It was good marsala. His eyes glistened. Days like this stretched out ahead. It would begin at seven in the morning.

They started to walk up the hill toward the town. The young gentleman went on ahead. He was quite a way up the hill. Peduzzi called to him.

“Listen, caro, can you let me take five lire for a favor?”

“For today?” asked the young gentleman frowning.

“No, not today. Give it to me today for tomorrow. I will provide everything for tomorrow. Pane, salami, formaggio, good stuff for all of us. You and I and the Signora. Bait for fishing, minnows, not worms only. Perhaps I can get some marsala. All for five lire. Five lire for a favor.”

The young gentleman looked through his pocketbook and took out a two-lira note and two ones.

“Thank you, caro. Thank you,” said Peduzzi, in the tone of one member of the Carleton Club accepting the Morning Post from another. This was living. He was through with the hotel garden, breaking up frozen manure with a dung fork. Life was opening out.

“Until seven o’clock then, caro,” he said, slapping the young gentleman on the back. “Promptly at seven.”

“I may not be going,” said the young gentleman putting his purse back in his pocket.

“What,” said Peduzzi, “I will have minnows, Signor. Salami, everything. You and I and the Signora. The three of us.”

“I may not be going,” said the young gentleman, “very probably not. I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel office.”

MY OLD MAN

I GUESS LOOKING AT IT, NOW, MY OLD man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we’d start out.

“Come on, kid,” he’d say, stepping up and down on his toes in front of the jock’s dressing room, “let’s get moving.”

Then we’d start off jogging around the infield once, maybe, with him ahead, running nice, and then turn out the gate and along one of those roads with all the trees along both sides of them that run out from San Siro. I’d go ahead of him when we hit the road and I could run pretty good and I’d look around and he’d be jogging easy just behind me and after a little while I’d look around again and he’d begun to sweat. Sweating heavy and he’d just be dogging it along with his eyes on my back, but when he’d catch me looking at him he’d grin and say, “Sweating plenty?” When my old man grinned, nobody could help but grin too. We’d keep right on running out toward the mountains and then my old man would yell, “Hey, Joe!” and I’d look back and he’d be sitting under a tree with a towel he’d had around his waist wrapped around his neck.

I’d come back and sit down beside him and he’d pull a rope out of his pocket and start skipping rope out in the sun with the sweat pouring off his face and him skipping rope out in the white dust with the rope going cloppetty, cloppetty, clop, clop, clop, and the sun hotter, and him working harder up and down a patch of the road. Say, it was a treat to see my old man skip rope, too. He could whirr it fast or lop it slow and fancy. Say, you ought to have seen wops look at us sometimes, when they’d come by, going into town walking along with big white steers hauling the cart. They sure looked as though they thought the old man was nuts. He’d start the rope whining till they’d stop dead still and watch him, then give the steers a cluck and a poke with the goad and get going again.

When I’d sit watching him working out in the hot sun I sure felt fond of him. He sure was fun and he done his work so hard and he’d finish up with a regular whirring that’d drive the sweat out on his face like water and then sling the rope at the tree and come over and sit down with me and lean back against the tree with the towel and a sweater wrapped around his neck.

“Sure is hell keeping it down, Joe,” he’d say and lean back and shut his eyes and breathe long and deep, “it ain’t like when you’re a kid.” Then he’d get up and before he started to cool we’d jog along back to the stables. That’s the way it was keeping down to weight. He was worried all the time. Most jocks can just about ride off all they want to. A jock loses about a kilo every time he rides, but my old man was sort of dried out and he couldn’t keep down his kilos without all that running.

I remember once at San Siro, Regoli, a little wop, that was riding for Buzoni, came out across the paddock going to the bar for something cool; and flicking his boots with his whip, after he’d just weighed in and my old man had just weighed in too, and came out with the saddle under his arm looking red-faced and tired and too big for his silks and he stood there looking at young Regoli standing up to the outdoors bar, cool and kidlooking, and I said, “What’s the matter, Dad?” cause I thought maybe Regoli had bumped him or something and he just looked at Regoli and said, “Oh, to hell with it,” and went on to the dressing room.

Well, it would have been all right, maybe, if we’d stayed in Milan and ridden at Milan and Torino,’cause if there ever were any easy courses, it’s those two. “Pianola, Joe,” my old man said when he dismounted in the winning stall after what the wops thought was a hell of a steeplechase. I asked him once. “This course rides itself. It’s the pace you’re going at, that makes riding the jumps dangerous, Joe. We ain’t going any pace here, and they ain’t really bad jumps either. But it’s the pace always — not the jumps — that makes the trouble.”

San Siro was the swellest course I’d ever seen but the old man said it was a dog’s life. Going back and forth between Mirafiore and San Siro and riding just about every day in the week with a train ride every other night.

I was nuts about the horses, too. There’s something about it, when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up. Then once they were at the barrier it got me worse than anything. Especially at San Siro with that big green infield and the mountains way off and the fat wop starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out. You know the way a bunch of skins gets off. If you’re up in the stand with a pair of glasses all you see is them plunging off and then that bell goes off and it seems like it rings for a thousand years and then they come sweeping round the turn. There wasn’t ever anything like it for me.

But my old man said one day, in the dressing room, when he was getting into his street clothes, “None of these things are horses, Joe. They’d kill that bunch of skates for their hides and hoofs up at Paris.” That was the day he’d won the Premio Commercio with Lantorna shooting her out of the field the last hundred meters like pulling a cork out of a bottle.

It was right after the Premio Commercio that we pulled out and left Italy. My old man and Holbrook and a fat wop in a straw hat that kept wiping his face with a handkerchief were having an argument at a table in the Galleria. They were all talking French and the two of them was after my old man about something. Finally he didn’t say anything any more but just sat there and looked at Holbrook, and the two of them kept after him, first one talking and then the other, and the fat wop always butting in on Holbrook.

“You go out and buy me a Sportsman, will you, Joe?” my old man said, and handed me a couple of soldi without looking away from Holbrook.

So I went out of the Galleria and walked over to in front of the Scala and bought a paper, and came back and stood a little way away because I didn’t want to butt in and my old man was sitting back in his chair looking down at his coffee and fooling with a spoon and Holbrook and the big wop were standing and the big wop was wiping his face and shaking his head. And I came up and my old man acted just as though the two of them weren’t standing there and said, “Want an ice, Joe?” Holbrook looked down at my old man and said slow and careful, “You son of a bitch,” and he and the fat wop went out through the tables.

My old man sat there and sort of smiled at me, but his face was white and he looked sick as hell and I was scared and felt sick inside because I knew something had happened and I didn’t see how anybody could call my old man a son of a bitch, and get away with it. My old man opened up the Sportsman and studied the handicaps for a while and then he said, “You got to take a lot of things in this world, Joe.” And three days later we left Milan for good on the Turin train for Paris, after an auction sale out in front of Turner’s stables of everything we couldn’t get into a trunk and a suit case.

We got into Paris early in the morning in a long, dirty station the old man told me was the Gare de Lyon. Paris was an awful big town after Milan. Seems like in Milan everybody is going somewhere and all the trams run somewhere and there ain’t any sort of a mix-up, but Paris is all balled up and they never do straighten it out. I got to like it, though, part of it, anyway, and say, it’s got the best race courses in the world. Seems as though that were the thing that keeps it all going and about the only thing you can figure on is that every day the buses will be going out to whatever track they’re running at, going right out through everything to the track. I never really got to know Paris well, because I just came in about once or twice a week with the old man from Maisons and he always sat at the Café de la Paix on the Opera side with the rest of the gang from Maisons and I guess that’s one of the busiest parts of the town. But, say, it is funny that a big town like Paris wouldn’t have a Galleria, isn’t it?

Well, we went out to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I’ve ever seen in all my life. The town ain’t so much, but there’s a lake and a swell forest that we used to go off bumming in all day, a couple of us kids, and my old man made me a sling shot and we got a lot of things with it but the best one was a magpie. Young Dick Atkinson shot a rabbit with it one day and we put it under a tree and were all sitting around and Dick had some cigarettes and all of a sudden the rabbit jumped up and beat it into the brush and we chased it but we couldn’t find it. Gee, we had fun at Maisons. Mrs. Meyers used to give me lunch in the morning and I’d be gone all day. I learned to talk French quick. It’s an easy language.

As soon as we got to Maisons, my old man wrote to Milan for his license and he was pretty worried till it came. He used to sit around the Café de Paris in Maisons with the gang, there were lots of guys he’d known when he rode up at Paris, before the war, lived at Maisons, and there’s a lot of time to sit around because the work around a racing stable, for the jocks, that is, is all cleaned up by nine o’clock in the morning. They take the first bunch of skins out to gallop them at 5:30 in the morning and they work the second lot at 8 o’clock. That means getting up early all right and going to bed early, too. If a jock’s riding for somebody too, he can’t go boozing around because the trainer always has an eye on him if he’s a kid and if he ain’t a kid he’s always got an eye on himself. So mostly if a jock ain’t working he sits around the Café de Paris with the gang and they can all sit around about two or three hours in front of some drink like a vermouth and seltz and they talk and tell stories and shoot pool and it’s sort of like a club or the Galleria in Milan. Only it ain’t really like the Galleria because there everybody is going by all the time and there’s everybody around at the tables.

Well, my old man got his license all right. They sent it through to him without a word and he rode a couple of times. Amiens, up country and that sort of thing, but he didn’t seem to get any engagement. Everybody liked him and whenever I’d come into the Café in the forenoon I’d find somebody drinking with him because my old man wasn’t tight like most of these jockeys that have got the first dollar they made riding at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in nineteen ought four. That’s what my old man would say when he’d kid George Burns. But it seemed like everybody steered clear of giving my old man any mounts.

We went out to wherever they were runnning every day with the car from Maisons and that was the most fun of all. I was glad when the horses came back from Deauville and the summer. Even though it meant no more bumming in the woods,’cause then we’d ride to Enghien or Tremblay or St. Cloud and watch them from the trainers’ and jockeys’ stand. I sure learned about racing from going out with that gang and the fun of it was going every day.

I remember once out at St. Cloud. It was a big two hundred thousand franc race with seven entries and Kzar a big favorite. I went around to the paddock to see the horses with my old man and you never saw such horses. This Kzar is a great big yellow horse that looks like just nothing but run. I never saw such a horse. He was being led around the paddocks with his head down and when he went by me I felt all hollow inside he was so beautiful. There never was such a wonderful, lean, running built horse. And he went around the paddock putting his feet just so and quiet and careful and moving easy like he knew just what he had to do and not jerking and standing up on his legs and getting wild eyed like you see these selling platers with a shot of dope in them. The crowd was so thick I couldn’t see him again except just his legs going by and some yellow and my old man started out through the crowd and I followed him over to the jock’s dressing room back in the trees and there was a big crowd around there, too, but the man at the door in a derby nodded to my old man and we got in and everybody was sitting around and getting dressed and pulling shirts over their heads and pulling boots on and it all smelled hot and sweaty and linimenty and outside was the crowd looking in.

The old man went over and sat down beside George Gardner that was getting into his pants and said, “What’s the dope, George?” just in an ordinary tone of voice ‘cause there ain’t any use him feeling around because George either can tell him or he can’t tell him.

“He won’t win,” George says very low, leaning over and buttoning the bottoms of his breeches.

“Who will?” my old man says, leaning over close so nobody can hear.

“Kircubbin,” George says, “and if he does, save me a couple of tickets.”

My old man says something in a regular voice to George and George says, “Don’t ever bet on anything I tell you,” kidding like, and we beat it out and through all the crowd that was looking in, over to the 100 franc mutuel machine. But I knew something big was up because George is Kzar’s jockey. On the way he gets one of the yellow odds-sheets with the starting prices on and Kzar is only paying 5 for 10, Cefisidote is next at 3 to 1 and fifth down the list this Kircubbin at 8 to 1. My old man bets five thousand on Kircubbin to win and puts on a thousand to place and we went around back of the grandstand to go up the stairs and get a place to watch the race.

We were jammed in tight and first a man in a long coat with a gray tall hat and a whip folded up in his hand came out and then one after another the horses, with the jocks up and a stable boy holding the bridle on each side and walking along, followed the old guy. That big yellow horse Kzar came first. He didn’t look so big when you first looked at him until you saw the length of his legs and the whole way he’s built and the way he moves. Gosh, I never saw such a horse. George Gardner was riding him and they moved along slow, back of the old guy in the gray tall hat that walked along like he was a ring master in a circus. Back of Kzar, moving along smooth and yellow in the sun, was a good looking black with a nice head with Tommy Archibald riding him; and after the black was a string of five more horses all moving along slow in a procession past the grandstand and the pesage. My old man said the black was Kircubbin and I took a good look at him and he was a nice-looking horse, all right, but nothing like Kzar.

Everybody cheered Kzar when he went by and he sure was one swell-looking horse. The procession of them went around on the other side past the pelouse and then back up to the near end of the course and the circus master had the stable boys turn them loose one after another so they could gallop by the stands on their way up to the post and let everybody have a good look at them. They weren’t at the post hardly any time at all when the gong started and you could see them way off across the infield all in a bunch starting on the first swing like a lot of little toy horses. I was watching them through the glasses and Kzar was running well back, with one of the bays making the pace. They swept down and around and came pounding past and Kzar was way back when they passed us and this Kircubbin horse in front and going smooth. Gee, it’s awful when they go by you and then you have to watch them go farther away and get smaller and smaller and then all bunched up on the turns and then come around towards into the stretch and you feel like swearing and god-damming worse and worse. Finally they made the last turn and came into the straightaway with this Kircubbin horse way out in front. Everybody was looking funny and saying “Kzar” in sort of a sick way and them pounding nearer down the stretch, and then something came out of the pack right into my glasses like a horse-headed yellow streak and everybody began to yell “Kzar” as though they were crazy. Kzar came on faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life and pulled up on Kircubbin that was going fast as any black horse could go with the jock flogging hell out of him with the gad and they were right dead neck and neck for a second but Kzar seemed going about twice as fast with those great jumps and that head out — but it was while they were neck and neck that they passed the winning post and when the numbers went up in the slots the first one was 2 and that meant that Kircubbin had won.

I felt all trembly and funny inside, and then we were all jammed in with the people going downstairs to stand in front of the board where they’d post what Kircubbin paid. Honest, watching the race I’d forgot how much my old man had bet on Kircubbin. I’d wanted Kzar to win so damned bad. But now it was all over it was swell to know we had the winner.

“Wasn’t it a swell race, Dad?” I said to him.

He looked at me sort of funny with his derby on the back of his head. “George Gardner’s a swell jockey, all right,” he said. “It sure took a great jock to keep that Kzar horse from winning.”

Of course I knew it was funny all the time. But my old man saying that right out like that sure took the kick all out of it for me and I didn’t get the real kick back again ever, even when they posted the numbers upon the board and the bell rang to pay off and we saw that Kircubbin paid 67.50 for 10. All round people were saying, “Poor Kzar! Poor Kzar!” And I thought, I wish I were a jockey and could have rode him instead of that son of a bitch. And that was funny, thinking of George Gardner as a son of a bitch because I’d always liked him and besides he’d given us the winner, but I guess that’s what he is, all right.

My old man had a big lot of money after that race and he took to coming into Paris oftener. If they raced at Tremblay he’d have them drop him in town on their way back to Maisons and he and I’d sit out in front of the Café de la Paix and watch the people go by. It’s funny sitting there. There’s streams of people going by and all sorts of guys come up and want to sell you things, and I loved to sit there with my old man. That was when we’d have the most fun. Guys would come by selling funny rabbits that jumped if you squeezed a bulb and they’d come up to us and my old man would kid with them. He could talk French just like English and all those kind of guys knew him ‘cause you can always tell a jockey — and then we always sat at the same table and they got used to seeing us there. There were guys selling matrimonial papers and girls selling rubber eggs that when you squeezed them a rooster came out of them and one old wormy-looking guy that went by with post-cards of Paris, showing them to everybody, and, of course, nobody ever bought any, and then he would come back and show the under side of the pack and they would all be smutty postcards and lots of people would dig down and buy them.

Gee, I remember the funny people that used to go by. Girls around supper time looking for somebody to take them out to eat and they’d speak to my old man and he’d make some joke at them in French and they’d pat me on the head and go on. Once there was an American woman sitting with her kid daughter at the next table to us and they were both eating ices and I kept looking at the girl and she was awfully good looking and I smiled at her and she smiled at me but that was all that ever came of it because I looked for her mother and her every day and I made up ways that I was going to speak to her and I wondered if I got to know her if her mother would let me take her out to Auteuil or Tremblay but I never saw either of them again. Anyway, I guess it wouldn’t have been any good, anyway, because looking back on it I remember the way I thought out would be best to speak to her was to say, “Pardon me, but perhaps I can give you a winner at Enghien today?” and, after all, maybe she would have thought I was a tout instead of really trying to give her a winner.

We’d sit at the Café de la Paix, my old man and me, and we had a big drag with the waiter because my old man drank whisky and it cost five francs, and that meant a good tip when the saucers were counted up. My old man was drinking more than I’d ever seen him, but he wasn’t riding at all now and besides he said that whisky kept his weight down. But I noticed he was putting it on, all right, just the same. He’d busted away from his old gang out at Maisons and seemed to like just sitting around on the boulevard with me. But he was dropping money every day at the track. He’d feel sort of doleful after the last race, if he’d lost on the day, until we’d get to our table and he’d have his first whisky and then he’d be fine.

He’d be reading the Paris-Sport and he’d look over at me and say, “Where’s your girl, Joe?” to kid me on account I had told him about the girl that day at the next table. And I’d get red, but I liked being kidded about her. It gave me a good feeling. “Keep your eye peeled for her, Joe,” he’d say, “she’ll be back.”

He’d ask me questions about things and some of the things I’d say he’d laugh. And then he’d get started talking about things. About riding down in Egypt, or at St. Moritz on the ice before my mother died, and about during the war when they had regular races down in the south of France without any purses, or betting or crowd or anything just to keep the breed up. Regular races with the jocks riding hell out of the horses. Gee, I could listen to my old man talk by the hour, especially when he’d had a couple or so of drinks. He’d tell me about when he was a boy in Kentucky and going coon hunting, and the old days in the States before everything went on the bum there. And he’d say, “Joe, when we’ve got a decent stake, you’re going back there to the States and go to school.”

“What’ve I got to go back there to go to school for when everything’s on the bum there?” I’d ask him.

“That’s different,” he’d say and get the waiter over and pay the pile of saucers and we’d get a taxi to the Gare St. Lazare and get on the train out to Maisons.

One day at Auteuil, after a selling steeplechase, my old man bought in the winner for 30,000 francs. He had to bid a little to get him but the stable let the horse go finally and my old man had his permit and his colors in a week. Gee, I felt proud when my old man was an owner. He fixed it up for stable space with Charles Drake and cut out coming in to Paris, and started his running and sweating out again, and him and I were the whole stable gang. Our horse’s name was Gilford, he was Irish bred and a nice, sweet jumper. My old man figured that training him and riding him, himself, he was a good investment. I was proud of everything and I thought Gilford was as good a horse as Kzar. He was a good, solid jumper, a bay, with plenty of speed on the flat, if you asked him for it, and he was a nice-looking horse, too.

Gee, I was fond of him. The first time he started with my old man up, he finished third in a 2500 meter hurdle race and when my old man got off him, all sweating and happy in the place stall, and went in to weigh, I felt as proud of him as though it was the first race he’d ever placed in. You see, when a guy ain’t been riding for a long time, you can’t make yourself really believe that he has ever rode. The whole thing was different now, ‘cause down in Milan, even big races never seemed to make any difference to my old man, if he won he wasn’t ever excited or anything, and now it was so I couldn’t hardly sleep the night before a race and I knew my old man was excited, too, even if he didn’t show it. Riding for yourself makes an awful difference.

Second time Gilford and my old man started, was a rainy Sunday at Auteuil, in the Prix du Marat, a 4500 meter steeplechase. As soon as he’d gone out I beat it up in the stand with the new glasses my old man had bought for me to watch them. They started way over at the far end of the course and there was some trouble at the barrier. Something with goggle blinders on was making a great fuss and rearing around and busted the barrier once, but I could see my old man in our black jacket, with a white cross and a black cap, sitting up on Gilford, and patting him with his hand. Then they were off in a jump and out of sight behind the trees and the gong going for dear life and the pari-mutuel wickets rattling down. Gosh, I was so excited, I was afraid to look at them, but I fixed the glasses on the place where they would come out back of the trees and then out they came with the old black jacket going third and they all sailing over the jump like birds. Then they went out of sight again and then they came pounding out and down the hill and all going nice and sweet and easy and taking the fence smooth in a bunch, and moving away from us all solid. Looked as though you could walk across on their backs they were all so bunched and going so smooth. Then they bellied over the big double Bullfinch and something came down. I couldn’t see who it was, but in a minute the horse was up and galloping free and the field, all bunched still, sweeping around the long left turn into the straightaway. They jumped the stone wall and came jammed down the stretch toward the big water-jump right in front of the stands. I saw them coming and hollered at my old man as he went by, and he was leading by about a length and riding way out, and light as a monkey, and they were racing for the water-jump. They took off over the big hedge of the water-jump in a pack and then there was a crash, and two horses pulled sideways out off it, and kept on going, and three others were piled up. I couldn’t see my old man anywhere. One horse kneed himself up and the jock had hold of the bridle and mounted and went slamming on after the place money. The other horse was up and away by himself, jerking his head and galloping with the bridle rein hanging and the jock staggered over to one side of the track against the fence. Then Gilford rolled over to one side off my old man and got up and started to run on three legs with his front off hoof dangling and there was my old man laying there on the grass flat out with his face up and blood all over the side of his head. I ran down the stand and bumped into a jam of people and got to the rail and a cop grabbed me and held me and two big stretcher-bearers were going out after my old man and around on the other side of the course I saw three horses, strung way out, coming out of the trees and taking the jump.

My old man was dead when they brought him in and while a doctor was listening to his heart with a thing plugged in his ears, I heard a shot up the track that meant they’d killed Gilford. I lay down beside my old man, when they carried the stretcher into the hospital room, and hung onto the stretcher and cried and cried, and he looked so white and gone and so awfully dead, and I couldn’t help feeling that if my old man was dead maybe they didn’t need to have shot Gilford. His hoof might have got well. I don’t know. I loved my old man so much.

Then a couple of guys came in and one of them patted me on the back and then went over and looked at my old man and then pulled a sheet off the cot and spread it over him; and the other was telephoning in French for them to send the ambulance to take him out to Maisons. And I couldn’t stop crying, crying and choking, sort of, and George Gardner came in and sat down beside me on the floor and put his arm around me and says, “Come on, Joe, old boy. Get up and we’ll go out and wait for the ambulance.”

George and I went out to the gate and I was trying to stop bawling and George wiped off my face with his handkerchief and we were standing back a little ways while the crowd was going out of the gate and a couple of guys stopped near us while we were waiting for the crowd to get through the gate and one of them was counting a bunch of mutuel tickets and he said, “Well, Butler got his, all right.”

The other guy said, “I don’t give a good goddam if he did, the crook. He had it coming to him on the stuff he’s pulled.”

“I’ll say he had,” said the other guy, and tore the bunch of tickets in two.

And George Gardner looked at me to see if I’d heard and I had all right and he said, “Don’t you listen to what those bums said, Joe. Your old man was one swell guy.”

But I don’t know. Seems like when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing.

IN OUR TIME

The 1930 edition

CONTENTS

ON THE QUAI AT SMYRNA

CHAPTER I

INDIAN CAMP

CHAPTER II

THE DOCTOR AND THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

CHAPTER III

THE END OF SOMETHING

CHAPTER IV

THE THREE-DAY BLOW

CHAPTER V

THE BATTLER

CHAPTER VI

A VERY SHORT STORY

CHAPTER VII

SOLDIER’S HOME

CHAPTER VIII

THE REVOLUTIONIST

CHAPTER IX

MR. AND MRS. ELLIOT

CHAPTER X

CAT IN THE RAIN

CHAPTER XI

OUT OF SEASON

CHAPTER XII

CROSS-COUNTRY SNOW

CHAPTER XIII

MY OLD MAN

CHAPTER XIV

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART I

CHAPTER XV

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART II

ON THE QUAI AT SMYRNA

THE STRANGE THING WAS, HE SAID, HOW they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We’d run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it. One time I was senior officer on the pier and a Turkish officer came up to me in a frightful rage because one of our sailors had been most insulting to him. So I told him the fellow would be sent on ship and be most severely punished. I asked him to point him out. So he pointed out a gunner’s mate, most inoffensive chap. Said he’d been most frightfully and repeatedly insulting; talking to me through an interpreter. I couldn’t imagine how the gunner’s mate knew enough Turkish to be insulting. I called him over and said, “And just in case you should have spoken to any Turkish officers.”

“I haven’t spoken to any of them, sir.”

“I’m quite sure of it,” I said, “but you’d best go on board ship and not come ashore again for the rest of the day.”

Then I told the Turk the man was being sent on board ship and would be most severely dealt with. Oh most rigorously. He felt topping about it. Great friends we were.

The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Wouldn’t give them up. Nothing you could do about it. Had to take them away finally. Then there was an old lady, most extraordinary case. I told it to a doctor and he said I was lying. We were clearing them off the pier, had to clear off the dead ones, and this old woman was lying on a sort of litter. They said, “Will you have a look at her, sir?” So I had a look at her and just then she died and went absolutely stiff. Her legs drew up and she drew up from the waist and went quite rigid. Exactly as though she had been dead over night. She was quite dead and absolutely rigid. I told a medical chap about it and he told me it was impossible.

They were all out there on the pier and it wasn’t at all like an earthquake or that sort of thing because they never knew about the Turk. They never knew what the old Turk would do. You remember when they ordered us not to come in to take off any more? I had the wind up when we came in that morning. He had any amount of batteries and could have blown us clean out of the water. We were going to come in, run close along the pier, let go the front and rear anchors and then shell the Turkish quarter of the town. They would have blown us out of water but we would have blown the town simply to hell. They just fired a few blank charges at us as we came in. Kemal came down and sacked the Turkish commander. For exceeding his authority or some such thing. He got a bit above himself. It would have been the hell of a mess.

You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around in it. That was the only time in my life I got so I dreamed about things. You didn’t mind the women who were having babies as you did those with the dead ones. They had them all right. Surprising how few of them died. You just covered them over with something and let them go to it. They’d always pick out the darkest place in the hold to have them. None of them minded anything once they got off the pier.

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn’t take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business.

CHAPTER I

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

INDIAN CAMP

AT THE LAKE SHORE THERE WAS ANOTHER rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.

Nick and his father got in the stem of the boat and the Indians shoved it off and one of them got in to row. Uncle George sat in the stern of the camp rowboat. The young Indian shoved the camp boat off and got in to row Uncle George.

The two boats started off in the dark. Nick heard the oarlocks of the other boat quite a way ahead of them in the mist. The Indians rowed with quick choppy strokes. Nick lay back with his father’s arm around him. It was cold on the water. The Indian who was rowing them was working very hard, but the other boat moved further ahead in the mist all the time.

“Where are we going, Dad?” Nick asked.

“Over to the Indian camp. There is an Indian lady very sick.”

“Oh,” said Nick.

Across the bay they found the other boat beached. Uncle George was smoking a cigar in the dark. The young Indian pulled the boat way up on the beach. Uncle George gave both the Indians cigars.

They walked up from the beach through a meadow that was soaking wet with dew, following the young Indian who carried a lantern. Then they went into the woods and followed a trail that led to the logging road that ran back into the hills. It was much lighter on the logging road as the timber was cut away on both sides. The young Indian stopped and blew out his lantern and they all walked on along the road.

They came around a bend and a dog came out barking. Ahead were the lights of the shanties where the Indian bark-peelers lived. More dogs rushed out at them. The two Indians sent them back to the shanties. In the shanty nearest the road there was a light in the window. An old woman stood in the doorway holding a lamp.

Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman. She had been trying to have her baby for two days. All the old women in the camp had been helping her. The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made. She screamed just as Nick and the two Indians followed his father and Uncle George into the shanty. She lay in the lower bunk, very big under a quilt. Her head was turned to one side. In the upper bunk was her husband. He had cut his foot very badly with an ax three days before. He was smoking a pipe. The room smelled very bad.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

“This lady is going to have a baby, Nick,” he said.

“I know,” said Nick.

“You don’t know,” said his father. “Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”

“I see,” Nick said.

Just then the woman cried out.

“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.

“No. I haven’t any anæsthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.”

The husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall.

The woman in the kitchen motioned to the doctor that the water was hot. Nick’s father went into the kitchen and poured about half of the water out of the big kettle into a basin. Into the water left in the kettle he put several things he unwrapped from a handkerchief.

“Those must boil,” he said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp. Nick watched his father’s hands scrubbing each other with the soap. While his father washed his hands very carefully and thoroughly, he talked.

“You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they’re not. When they’re not they make a lot of trouble for everybody. Maybe I’ll have to operate on this lady. We’ll know in a little while.”

When he was satisfied with his hands he went in and went to work.

“Pull back that quilt, will you, George?” he said. “I’d rather not touch it.”

Later when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, “Damn squaw bitch!” and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him. Nick held the basin for his father. It all took a long time. His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman.

“See, it’s a boy, Nick,” he said. “How do you like being an interne?”

Nick said, “All right.” He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.

“There. That gets it,” said his father and put something into the basin.

Nick didn’t look at it.

“Now,” his father said, “there’s some stitches to put in. You can watch this or not, Nick, just as you like. I’m going to sew up the incision I made.”

Nick did not watch. His curiosity had been gone for a long time.

His father finished and stood up. Uncle George and the three Indian men stood up. Nick put the basin out in the kitchen.

Uncle George looked at his arm. The young Indian smiled reminiscently.

“I’ll put some peroxide on that, George,” the doctor said. He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” the doctor said, standing up. “The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.”

He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.

“That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said. “Doing a Cæsarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”

Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.

“Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.

“Ought to have a look at the proud father. They’re usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs,” the doctor said. “I must say he took it all pretty quietly.”

He pulled back the blanket from the Indian’s head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.

“Take Nick out of the shanty, George,” the doctor said.

There was no need of that. Nick, standing in the door of the kitchen, had a good view of the upper bunk when his father, the lamp in one hand, tipped the Indian’s head back.

It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.

“I’m terribly sorry I brought you along, Nickie,” said his father, all his post-operative exhilaration gone. “It was an awful mess to put you through.”

“Do ladies always have such a hard time having babies?” Nick asked.

“No, that was very, very exceptional.”

“Why did he kill himself, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, Nick. He couldn’t stand things, I guess.”

“Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?”

“Not very many, Nick.”

“Do many women?”

“Hardly ever.”

“Don’t they ever?”

“Oh, yes. They do sometimes.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Where did Uncle George go?”

“He’ll turn up all right.”

“Is dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick. It all depends.”

They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

CHAPTER II

Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.

THE DOCTOR AND THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

DICK BOULTON CAME FROM THE INDIAN camp to cut up logs for Nick’s father. He brought his son Eddy and another Indian named Billy Tabeshaw with him. They came in through the back gate out of the woods, Eddy carrying the long cross-cut saw. It flopped over his shoulder and made a musical sound as he walked. Billy Tabeshaw carried two big cant-hooks. Dick had three axes under his arm.

He turned and shut the gate. The others went on ahead of him down to the lake shore where the logs were buried in the sand.

The logs had been lost from the big log booms that were towed down the lake to the mill by the steamer Magic. They had drifted up onto the beach and if nothing were done about them sooner or later the crew of the Magic would come along the shore in a rowboat, spot the logs, drive an iron spike with a ring on it into the end of each one and then tow them out into the lake to make a new boom. But the lumbermen might never come for them because a few logs were not worth the price of a crew to gather them. If no one came for them they would be left to waterlog and rot on the beach.

Nick’s father always assumed that this was what would happen, and hired the Indians to come down from the camp and cut the logs up with the cross-cut saw and split them with a wedge to make cord wood and chunks for the open fireplace. Dick Boulton walked around past the cottage down to the lake. There were four big beech logs lying almost buried in the sand. Eddy hung the saw up by one of its handles in the crotch of a tree. Dick put the three axes down on the little dock. Dick was a halfbreed and many of the farmers around the lake believed he was really a white man. He was very lazy but a great worker once he was started. He took a plug of tobacco out of his pocket, bit off a chew and spoke in Ojibway to Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw.

They sunk the ends of their cant-hooks into one of the logs and swung against it to loosen it in the sand. They swung their weight against the shafts of the cant-hooks. The log moved in the sand. Dick Boulton turned to Nick’s father.

“Well, Doc,” he said, “that’s a nice lot of timber you’ve stolen.”

“Don’t talk that way, Dick,” the doctor said. “It’s driftwood.”

Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw had rocked the log out of the wet sand and rolled it toward the water.

“Put it right in,” Dick Boulton shouted.

“What are you doing that for?” asked the doctor.

“Wash it off. Clean off the sand on account of the saw. I want to see who it belongs to,” Dick said.

The log was just awash in the lake. Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw leaned on their cant-hooks sweating in the sun. Dick kneeled down in the sand and looked at the mark of the scaler’s hammer in the wood at the end of the log.

“It belongs to White and McNally,” he said, standing up and brushing off his trousers knees.

The doctor was very uncomfortable.

“You’d better not saw it up then, Dick,” he said, shortly.

“Don’t get huffy, Doc,” said Dick. “Don’t get huffy. I don’t care who you steal from. It’s none of my business.”

“If you think the logs are stolen, leave them alone and take your tools back to the camp,” the doctor said. His face was red.

“Don’t go off at half cock, Doc,” Dick said. He spat tobacco juice on the log. It slid off, thinning in the water. “You know they’re stolen as well as I do. It don’t make any difference to me.”

“All right. If you think the logs are stolen, take your stuff and get out.”

“Now, Doc — —”

“Take your stuff and get out.”

“Listen, Doc.”

“If you call me Doc once again, I’ll knock your eye teeth down your throat.”

“Oh, no, you won’t, Doc.”

Dick Boulton looked at the doctor. Dick was a big man. He knew how big a man he was. He liked to get into fights. He was happy. Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw leaned on their cant-hooks and looked at the doctor. The doctor chewed the beard on his lower lip and looked at Dick Boulton. Then he turned away and walked up the hill to the cottage. They could see from his back how angry he was. They all watched him walk up the hill and go inside the cottage.

Dick said something in Ojibway. Eddy laughed but Billy Tabeshaw looked very serious. He did not understand English but he had sweat all the time the row was going on. He was fat with only a few hairs of mustache like a Chinaman. He picked up the two cant-hooks. Dick picked up the axes and Eddy took the saw down from the tree. They started off and walked up past the cottage and out the back gate into the woods. Dick left the gate open. Billy Tabeshaw went back and fastened it. They were gone through the woods.

In the cottage the doctor, sitting on the bed in his room, saw a pile of medical journals on the floor by the bureau. They were still in their wrappers unopened. It irritated him.

“Aren’t you going back to work, dear?” asked the doctor’s wife from the room where she was lying with the blinds drawn.

“No!”

“Was anything the matter?”

“I had a row with Dick Boulton.”

“Oh,” said his wife. “I hope you didn’t lose your temper, Henry.”

“No,” said the doctor.

“Remember, that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city,” said his wife. She was a Christian Scientist. Her Bible, her copy of Science and Health and her Quarterly were on a table beside her bed in the darkened room.

Her husband did not answer. He was sitting on his bed now, cleaning a shotgun. He pushed the magazine full of the heavy yellow shells and pumped them out again. They were scattered on the bed.

“Henry,” his wife called. Then paused a moment. “Henry!”

“Yes,” the doctor said.

“You didn’t say anything to Boulton to anger him, did you?”

“No,” said the doctor.

“What was the trouble about, dear?”

“Nothing much.”

“Tell me, Henry. Please don’t try and keep anything from me. What was the trouble about?”

“Well, Dick owes me a lot of money for pulling his squaw through pneumonia and I guess he wanted a row so he wouldn’t have to take it out in work.”

His wife was silent. The doctor wiped his gun carefully with a rag. He pushed the shells back in against the spring of the magazine. He sat with the gun on his knees. He was very fond of it. Then he heard his wife’s voice from the darkened room.

“Dear, I don’t think, I really don’t think that any one would really do a thing like that.”

“No?” the doctor said.

“No. I can’t really believe that any one would do a thing of that sort intentionally.”

The doctor stood up and put the shotgun in the corner behind the dresser.

“Are you going out, dear?” his wife said.

“I think I’ll go for a walk,” the doctor said.

“If you see Nick, dear, will you tell him his mother wants to see him?” his wife said.

The doctor went out on the porch. The screen door slammed behind him. He heard his wife catch her breath when the door slammed.

“Sorry,” he said, outside her window with the blinds drawn.

“It’s all right, dear,” she said.

He walked in the heat out the gate and along the path into the hemlock woods. It was cool in the woods even on such a hot day. He found Nick sitting with his back against a tree, reading.

“Your mother wants you to come and see her,” the doctor said.

“I want to go with you,” Nick said.

His father looked down at him.

“All right. Come on, then,” his father said. “Give me the book, I’ll put it in my pocket.”

“I know where there’s black squirrels, Daddy,” Nick said.

“All right,” said his father. “Let’s go there.”

CHAPTER III

We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.

THE END OF SOMETHING

IN THE OLD DAYS HORTONS BAY WAS A lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. The lumber schooners came into the bay and were loaded with the cut of the mill that stood stacked in the yard. All the piles of lumber were carried away. The big mill building had all its machinery that was removable taken out and hoisted on board one of the schooners by the men who had worked in the mill. The schooner moved out of the bay toward the open lake carrying the two great saws, the travelling carriage that hurled the logs against the revolving, circular saws and all the rollers, wheels, belts and iron piled on a hull-deep load of lumber. Its open hold covered with canvas and lashed tight, the sails of the schooner filled and it moved out into the open lake, carrying with it everything that had made the mill a mill and Hortons Bay a town.

The one-story bunk houses, the eating-house, the company store, the mill offices, and the big mill itself stood deserted in the acres of sawdust that covered the swampy meadow by the shore of the bay.

Ten years later there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations showing through the swampy second growth as Nick and Marjorie rowed along the shore. They were trolling along the edge of the channel-bank where the bottom dropped off suddenly from sandy shallows to twelve feet of dark water. They were trolling on their way to the point to set night lines for rainbow trout.

“There’s our old ruin, Nick,” Marjorie said.

Nick, rowing, looked at the white stone in the green trees.

“There it is,” he said.

“Can you remember when it was a mill?” Marjorie asked.

“I can just remember,” Nick said.

“It seems more like a castle,” Marjorie said.

Nick said nothing. They rowed on out of sight of the mill, following the shore line. Then Nick cut across the bay.

“They aren’t striking,” he said.

“No,” Marjorie said. She was intent on the rod all the time they trolled, even when she talked. She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick.

Close beside the boat a big trout broke the surface of the water. Nick pulled hard on one oar so the boat would turn and the bait spinning far behind would pass where the trout was feeding. As the trout’s back came up out of the water the minnows jumped wildly. They sprinkled the surface like a handful of shot thrown into the water. Another trout broke water, feeding on the other side of the boat.

“They’re feeding,” Marjorie said.

“But they won’t strike,” Nick said.

He rowed the boat around to troll past both the feeding fish, then headed it for the point. Marjorie did not reel in until the boat touched the shore.

They pulled the boat up the beach and Nick lifted out a pail of live perch. The perch swam in the water in the pail. Nick caught three of them with his hands and cut their heads off and skinned them while Marjorie chased with her hands in the bucket, finally caught a perch, cut its head off and skinned it. Nick looked at her fish.

“You don’t want to take the ventral fin out,” he said. “It’ll be all right for bait but it’s better with the ventral fin in.”

He hooked each of the skinned perch through the tail. There were two hooks attached to a leader on each rod. Then Marjorie rowed the boat out over the channel-bank, holding the line in her teeth, and looking toward Nick, who stood on the shore holding the rod and letting the line run out from the reel.

“That’s about right,” he called.

“Should I let it drop?” Marjorie called back, holding the line in her hand.

“Sure. Let it go.” Marjorie dropped the line overboard and watched the baits go down through the water.

She came in with the boat and ran the second line out the same way. Each time Nick set a heavy slab of driftwood across the butt of the rod to hold it solid and propped it up at an angle with a small slab. He reeled in the slack line so the line ran taut out to where the bait rested on the sandy floor of the channel and set the click on the reel. When a trout, feeding on the bottom, took the bait it would run with it, taking line out of the reel in a rush and making the reel sing with the click on.

Marjorie rowed up the point a little way so she would not disturb the line. She pulled hard on the oars and the boat went way up the beach. Little waves came in with it. Marjorie stepped out of the boat and Nick pulled the boat high up the beach.

“What’s the matter, Nick?” Marjorie asked.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, getting wood for a fire.

They made a fire with driftwood. Marjorie went to the boat and brought a blanket. The evening breeze blew the smoke toward the point, so Marjorie spread the blanket out between the fire and the lake.

Marjorie sat on the blanket with her back to the fire and waited for Nick. He came over and sat down beside her on the blanket. In back of them was the close second-growth timber of the point and in front was the bay with the mouth of Hortons Creek. It was not quite dark. The fire-light went as far as the water. They could both see the two steel rods at an angle over the dark water. The fire glinted on the reels.

Marjorie unpacked the basket of supper.

“I don’t feel like eating,” said Nick.

“Come on and eat, Nick.”

“All right.”

They ate without talking, and watched the two rods and the fire-light in the water.

“There’s going to be a moon tonight,” said Nick. He looked across the bay to the hills that were beginning to sharpen against the sky. Beyond the hills he knew the moon was coming up.

“I know it,” Marjorie said happily.

“You know everything,” Nick said.

“Oh, Nick, please cut it out! Please, please don’t be that way!”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “You do. You know everything. That’s the trouble. You know you do.”

Marjorie did not say anything.

“I’ve taught you everything. You know you do. What don’t you know, anyway?”

“Oh, shut up,” Marjorie said. “There comes the moon.”

They sat on the blanket without touching each other and watched the moon rise.

“You don’t have to talk silly,” Marjorie said. “What’s really the matter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you know.”

“No I don’t.”

“Go on and say it.”

Nick looked on at the moon, coming up over the hills.

“It isn’t fun any more.”

He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back. “It isn’t fun any more. Not any of it.”

She didn’t say anything. He went on. “I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside of me. I don’t know, Marge. I don’t know what to say.”

He looked on at her back.

“Isn’t love any fun?” Marjorie said.

“No,” Nick said. Marjorie stood up. Nick sat there his head in his hands.

“I’m going to take the boat,” Marjorie called to him. “You can walk back around the point.”

“All right,” Nick said. “I’ll push the boat off for you.”

“You don’t need to,” she said. She was afloat in the boat on the water with the moonlight on it. Nick went back and lay down with his face in the blanket by the fire. He could hear Marjorie rowing on the water.

He lay there for a long time. He lay there while he heard Bill come into the clearing walking around through the woods. He felt Bill coming up to the fire. Bill didn’t touch him, either.

“Did she go all right?” Bill said.

“Yes,” Nick said, lying, his face on the blanket.

“Have a scene?”

“No, there wasn’t any scene.”

“How do you feel?”

“Oh, go away, Bill! Go away for a while.”

Bill selected a sandwich from the lunch basket and walked over to have a look at the rods.

CHAPTER IV

It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.

THE THREE-DAY BLOW

THE RAIN STOPPED AS NICK TURNED INTO the road that went up through the orchard. The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain. He put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat.

The road came out of the orchard on to the top of the hill. There was the cottage, the porch bare, smoke coming from the chimney. In back was the garage, the chicken coop and the second-growth timber like a hedge against the woods behind. The big trees swayed far over in the wind as he watched. It was the first of the autumn storms.

As Nick crossed the open field above the orchard the door of the cottage opened and Bill came out. He stood on the porch looking out.

“Well, Wemedge,” he said.

“Hey, Bill,” Nick said, coming up the steps.

They stood together, looking out across the country, down over the orchard, beyond the road, across the lower fields and the woods of the point to the lake. The wind was blowing straight down the lake. They could see the surf along Ten Mile point.

“She’s blowing,” Nick said.

“She’ll blow like that for three days,” Bill said.

“Is your dad in?” Nick said.

“No. He’s out with the gun. Come on in.”

Nick went inside the cottage. There was a big fire in the fireplace. The wind made it roar. Bill shut the door.

“Have a drink?” he said.

He went out to the kitchen and came back with two glasses and a pitcher of water. Nick reached the whisky bottle from the shelf above the fireplace.

“All right?” he said.

“Good,” said Bill.

They sat in front of the fire and drank the Irish whisky and water.

“It’s got a swell, smoky taste,” Nick said, and looked at the fire through the glass.

“That’s the peat,” Bill said.

“You can’t get peat into liquor,” Nick said.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” Bill said.

“You ever seen any peat?” Nick asked.

“No,” said Bill.

“Neither have I,” Nick said.

His shoes, stretched out on the hearth, began to steam in front of the fire.

“Better take your shoes off,” Bill said.

“I haven’t got any socks on.”

“Take them off and dry them and I’ll get you some,” Bill said. He went upstairs into the loft and Nick heard him walking about overhead. Upstairs was open under the roof and was where Bill and his father and he, Nick, sometimes slept. In back was a dressing room. They moved the cots back out of the rain and covered them with rubber blankets.

Bill came down with a pair of heavy wool socks.

“It’s getting too late to go around without socks,” he said.

“I hate to start them again,” Nick said. He pulled the socks on and slumped back in the chair, putting his feet up on the screen in front of the fire.

“You’ll dent in the screen,” Bill said. Nick swung his feet over to the side of the fireplace.

“Got anything to read?” he asked.

“Only the paper.”

“What did the Cards do?”

“Dropped a double header to the Giants.”

“That ought to cinch it for them.”

“It’s a gift,” Bill said. “As long as McGraw can buy every good ball player in the league there’s nothing to it.”

“He can’t buy them all,” Nick said.

“He buys all the ones he wants,” Bill said. “Or he makes them discontented so they have to trade them to him.”

“Like Heinie Zim,” Nick agreed.

“That bonehead will do him a lot of good.”

Bill stood up.

“He can hit,” Nick offered. The heat from the fire was baking his legs.

“He’s a sweet fielder, too,” Bill said. “But he loses ball games.”

“Maybe that’s what McGraw wants him for,” Nick suggested.

“Maybe,” Bill agreed.

“There’s always more to it than we know about,” Nick said.

“Of course. But we’ve got pretty good dope for being so far away.”

“Like how much better you can pick them if you don’t see the horses.”

“That’s it.”

Bill reached down the whisky bottle. His big hand went all the way around it. He poured the whisky into the glass Nick held out.

“How much water?”

“Just the same.”

He sat down on the floor beside Nick’s chair.

“It’s good when the fall storms come, isn’t it?” Nick said.

“It’s swell.”

“It’s the best time of year,” Nick said.

“Wouldn’t it be hell to be in town?” Bill said.

“I’d like to see the World Series,” Nick said.

“Well, they’re always in New York or Philadelphia now,” Bill said. “That doesn’t do us any good.”

“I wonder if the Cards will ever win a pennant?”

“Not in our lifetime,” Bill said.

“Gee, they’d go crazy,” Nick said.

“Do you remember when they got going that once before they had the train wreck?”

“Boy!” Nick said, remembering.

Bill reached over to the table under the window for the book that lay there, face down, where he had put it when he went to the door. He held his glass in one hand and the book in the other, leaning back against Nick’s chair.

“What are you reading?”

“Richard Feverel.”

“I couldn’t get into it.”

“It’s all right,” Bill said. “It ain’t a bad book, Wemedge.”

“What else have you got I haven’t read?” Nick asked.

“Did you read the Forest Lovers?”

“Yup. That’s the one where they go to bed every night with the naked sword between them.”

“That’s a good book, Wemedge.”

“It’s a swell book. What I couldn’t ever understand was what good the sword would do. It would have to stay edge up all the time because if it went over flat you could roll right over it and it wouldn’t make any trouble.”

“It’s a symbol,” Bill said.

“Sure,” said Nick, “but it isn’t practical.”

“Did you ever read Fortitude?”

“It’s fine,” Nick said. “That’s a real book. That’s where his old man is after him all the time. Have you got any more by Walpole?”

“The Dark Forest,” Bill said. “It’s about Russia.”

“What does he know about Russia?” Nick asked.

“I don’t know. You can’t ever tell about those guys. Maybe he was there when he was a boy. He’s got a lot of dope on it.”

“I’d like to meet him,” Nick said.

“I’d like to meet Chesterton,” Bill said.

“I wish he was here now,” Nick said. “We’d take him fishing to the ‘Voix tomorrow.”

“I wonder if he’d like to go fishing,” Bill said.

“Sure,” said Nick. “He must be about the best guy there is. Do you remember the Flying Inn?”

“ ‘If an angel out of heaven

Gives you something else to drink,

Thank him for his kind intentions;

Go and pour them down the sink.’”

“That’s right,” said Nick. “I guess he’s a better guy than Walpole.”

“Oh, he’s a better guy, all right,” Bill said.

“But Walpole’s a better writer.”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Chesterton’s a classic.”

“Walpole’s a classic, too,” Bill insisted.

“I wish we had them both here,” Nick said. “We’d take them both fishing to the ‘Voix tomorrow.”

“Let’s get drunk,” Bill said.

“All right,” Nick agreed.

“My old man won’t care,” Bill said.

“Are you sure?” said Nick.

“I know it,” Bill said.

“I’m a little drunk now,” Nick said.

“You aren’t drunk,” Bill said.

He got up from the floor and reached for the whisky bottle. Nick held out his glass. His eyes fixed on it while Bill poured.

Bill poured the glass half full of whisky.

“Put in your own water,” he said. “There’s just one more shot.”

“Got any more?” Nick asked.

“There’s plenty more but dad only likes me to drink what’s open.”

“Sure,” said Nick.

“He says opening bottles is what makes drunkards,” Bill explained.

“That’s right,” said Nick. He was impressed. He had never thought of that before. He had always thought it was solitary drinking that made drunkards.

“How is your dad?” he asked respectfully.

“He’s all right,” Bill said. “He gets a little wild sometimes.”

“He’s a swell guy,” Nick said. He poured water into his glass out of the pitcher. It mixed slowly with the whisky. There was more whisky than water.

“You bet your life he is,” Bill said.

“My old man’s all right,” Nick said.

“You’re damn right he is,” said Bill.

“He claims he’s never taken a drink in his life,” Nick said, as though announcing a scientific fact.

“Well, he’s a doctor. My old man’s a painter. That’s different.”

“He’s missed a lot,” Nick said sadly.

“You can’t tell,” Bill said. “Everything’s got its compensations.”

“He says he’s missed a lot himself,” Nick confessed.

“Well, dad’s had a tough time,” Bill said.

“It all evens up,” Nick said.

They sat looking into the fire and thinking of this profound truth.

“I’ll get a chunk from the back porch,” Nick said. He had noticed while looking into the fire that the fire was dying down. Also he wished to show he could hold his liquor and be practical. Even if his father had never touched a drop Bill was not going to get him drunk before he himself was drunk.

“Bring one of the big beech chunks,” Bill said. He was also being consciously practical.

Nick came in with the log through the kitchen and in passing knocked a pan off the kitchen table. He laid the log down and picked up the pan. It had contained dried apricots, soaking in water. He carefully picked up all the apricots off the floor, some of them had gone under the stove, and put them back in the pan. He dipped some more water onto them from the pail by the table. He felt quite proud of himself. He had been thoroughly practical.

He came in carrying the log and Bill got up from the chair and helped him put it on the fire.

“That’s a swell log,” Nick said.

“I’d been saving it for the bad weather,” Bill said. “A log like that will burn all night.”

“There’ll be coals left to start the fire in the morning,” Nick said.

“That’s right,” Bill agreed. They were conducting the conversation on a high plane.

“Let’s have another drink,” Nick said.

“I think there’s another bottle open in the locker,” Bill said.

He kneeled down in the corner in front of the locker and brought out a square-faced bottle.

“It’s Scotch,” he said.

“I’ll get some more water,” Nick said. He went out into the kitchen again. He filled the pitcher with the dipper dipping cold spring water from the pail. On his way back to the living room he passed a mirror in the dining room and looked in it. His face looked strange. He smiled at the face in the mirror and it grinned back at him. He winked at it and went on. It was not his face but it didn’t make any difference.

Bill had poured out the drinks.

“That’s an awfully big shot,” Nick said.

“Not for us, Wemedge,” Bill said.

“What’ll we drink to?” Nick asked, holding up the glass.

“Let’s drink to fishing,” Bill said.

“All right,” Nick said. “Gentlemen, I give you fishing.”

“All fishing,” Bill said. “Everywhere.”

“Fishing,” Nick said. “That’s what we drink to.”

“It’s better than baseball,” Bill said.

“There isn’t any comparison,” said Nick. “How did we ever get talking about baseball?”

“It was a mistake,” Bill said. “Baseball is a game for louts.”

They drank all that was in their glasses.

“Now let’s drink to Chesterton.”

“And Walpole,” Nick interposed.

Nick poured out the liquor. Bill poured in the water. They looked at each other. They felt very fine.

“Gentlemen,” Bill said, “I give you Chesterton and Walpole.”

“Exactly, gentlemen,” Nick said.

They drank. Bill filled up the glasses. They sat down in the big chairs in front of the fire.

“You were very wise, Wemedge,” Bill said.

“What do you mean?” asked Nick.

“To bust off that Marge business,” Bill said.

“I guess so,” said Nick.

“It was the only thing to do. If you hadn’t, by now you’d be back home working trying to get enough money to get married.”

Nick said nothing.

“Once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched,” Bill went on. “He hasn’t got anything more. Nothing. Not a damn thing. He’s done for. You’ve seen the guys that get married.”

Nick said nothing.

“You can tell them,” Bill said. “They get this sort of fat married look. They’re done for.”

“Sure,” said Nick.

“It was probably bad busting it off,” Bill said. “But you always fall for somebody else and then it’s all right. Fall for them but don’t let them ruin you.”

“Yes,” said Nick.

“If you’d have married her you would have had to marry the whole family. Remember her mother and that guy she married.”

Nick nodded.

“Imagine having them around the house all the time and going to Sunday dinners at their house, and having them over to dinner and her telling Marge all the time what to do and how to act.”

Nick sat quiet.

“You came out of it damned well,” Bill said. “Now she can marry somebody of her own sort and settle down and be happy. You can’t mix oil and water and you can’t mix that sort of thing any more than if I’d marry Ida that works for Strattons. She’d probably like it, too.”

Nick said nothing. The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone. Bill wasn’t there. He wasn’t sitting in front of the fire or going fishing tomorrow with Bill and his dad or anything. He wasn’t drunk. It was all gone. All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had lost her. She was gone and he had sent her away. That was all that mattered. He might never see her again. Probably he never would. It was all gone, finished.

“Let’s have another drink,” Nick said.

Bill poured it out. Nick splashed in a little water.

“If you’d gone on that way we wouldn’t be here now,” Bill said.

That was true. His original plan had been to go down home and get a job. Then he had planned to stay in Charlevoix all winter so he could be near Marge. Now he did not know what he was going to do.

“Probably we wouldn’t even be going fishing tomorrow,” Bill said. “You had the right dope, all right.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Nick said.

“I know. That’s the way it works out,” Bill said.

“All of a sudden everything was over,” Nick said. “I don’t know why it was. I couldn’t help it. Just like when the three-day blows come now and rip all the leaves off the trees.”

“Well, it’s over. That’s the point,” Bill said.

“It was my fault,” Nick said.

“It doesn’t make any difference whose fault it was,” Bill said.

“No, I suppose not,” Nick said.

The big thing was that Marjorie was gone and that probably he would never see her again. He had talked to her about how they would go to Italy together and the fun they would have. Places they would be together. It was all gone now.

“So long as it’s over that’s all that matters,” Bill said. “I tell you, Wemedge, I was worried while it was going on. You played it right. I understand her mother is sore as hell. She told a lot of people you were engaged.”

“We weren’t engaged,” Nick said.

“It was all around that you were.”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “We weren’t.”

“Weren’t you going to get married?” Bill asked.

“Yes. But we weren’t engaged,” Nick said.

“What’s the difference?” Bill asked judicially.

“I don’t know. There’s a difference.”

“I don’t see it,” said Bill.

“All right,” said Nick. “Let’s get drunk.”

“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s get really drunk.”

“Let’s get drunk and then go swimming,” Nick said.

He drank off his glass.

“I’m sorry as hell about her but what could I do?” he said. “You know what her mother was like!”

“She was terrible,” Bill said.

“All of a sudden it was over,” Nick said. “I oughtn’t to talk about it.”

“You aren’t,” Bill said. “I talked about it and now I’m through. We won’t ever speak about it again. You don’t want to think about it. You might get back into it again.”

Nick had not thought about that. It had seemed so absolute. That was a thought. That made him feel better.

“Sure,” he said. “There’s always that danger.”

He felt happy now. There was not anything that was irrevocable. He might go into town Saturday night. Today was Thursday.

“There’s always a chance,” he said.

“You’ll have to watch yourself,” Bill said.

“I’ll watch myself,” he said.

He felt happy. Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost. He would go into town on Saturday. He felt lighter, as he had felt before Bill started to talk about it. There was always a way out.

“Let’s take the guns and go down to the point and look for your dad,” Nick said.

“All right.”

Bill took down the two shotguns from the rack on the wall. He opened a box of shells. Nick put on his Mackinaw coat and his shoes. His shoes were stiff from the drying. He was still quite drunk but his head was clear.

“How do you feel?” Nick asked.

“Swell. I’ve just got a good edge on.” Bill was buttoning up his sweater.

“There’s no use getting drunk.”

“No. We ought to get outdoors.”

They stepped out the door. The wind was blowing a gale.

“The birds will lie right down in the grass with this,” Nick said.

They struck down toward the orchard.

“I saw a woodcock this morning,” Bill said.

“Maybe we’ll jump him,” Nick said.

“You can’t shoot in this wind,” Bill said.

Outside now the Marge business was no longer so tragic. It was not even very important. The wind blew everything like that away.

“It’s coming right off the big lake,” Nick said.

Against the wind they heard the thud of a shotgun.

“That’s dad,” Bill said. “He’s down in the swamp.”

“Let’s cut down that way,” Nick said.

“Let’s cut across the lower meadow and see if we jump anything,” Bill said.

“All right.” Nick said.

None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head. Still he could always go into town Saturday night. It was a good thing to have in reserve.

CHAPTER V

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

THE BATTLER

NICK STOOD UP. HE WAS ALL RIGHT, HE looked up the track at the lights of the caboose going out of sight around the curve. There was water on both sides of the track, then tamarack swamp.

He felt of his knee. The pants were torn and the skin was barked. His hands were scraped and there were sand and cinders driven up under his nails. He went over to the edge of the track down the little slope to the water and washed his hands. He washed them carefully in the cold water, getting the dirt out from the nails. He squatted down and bathed his knee.

That lousy crut of a brakeman. He would get him some day. He would know him again. That was a fine way to act.

“Come here, kid,” he said. “I got something for you.”

He had fallen for it. What a lousy kid thing to have done. They would never suck him in that way again.

“Come here, kid, I got something for you.” Then wham and he lit on his hands and knees beside the track.

Nick rubbed his eye. There was a big bump coming up. He would have a black eye, all right. It ached already. That son of a crutting brakeman.

He touched the bump over his eye with his fingers. Oh, well, it was only a black eye. That was all he had gotten out of it. Cheap at the price. He wished he could see it. Could not see it looking into the water, though. It was dark and he was a long way off from anywhere. He wiped his hands on his trousers and stood up, then climbed the embankment to the rails.

He started up the track. It was well ballasted and made easy walking, sand and gravel packed between the ties, solid walking. The smooth roadbed like a causeway went on ahead through the swamp. Nick walked along. He must get to somewhere.

Nick had swung on to the freight train when it slowed down for the yards outside of Walton Junction. The train, with Nick on it, had passed through Kalkaska as it started to get dark. Now he must be nearly to Mancelona. Three or four miles of swamp. He stepped along the track, walking so he kept on the ballast between the ties, the swamp ghostly in the rising mist. His eye ached and he was hungry. He kept on hiking, putting the miles of track back of him. The swamp was all the same on both sides of the track.

Ahead there was a bridge. Nick crossed it, his boots ringing hollow on the iron. Down below the water showed black between the slits of ties. Nick kicked a loose spike and it dropped into the water. Beyond the bridge were hills. It was high and dark on both sides of the track. Up the track Nick saw a fire.

He came up the track toward the fire carefully. It was off to one side of the track, below the railway embankment. He had only seen the light from it. The track came out through a cut and where the fire was burning the country opened out and fell away into woods. Nick dropped carefully down the embankment and cut into the woods to come up to the fire through the trees. It was a beechwood forest and the fallen beechnut burrs were under his shoes as he walked between the trees. The fire was bright now, just at the edge of the trees. There was a man sitting by it. Nick waited behind the tree and watched. The man looked to be alone. He was sitting there with his head in his hands looking at the fire. Nick stepped out and walked into the firelight.

The man sat there looking into the fire. When Nick stopped quite close to him he did not move.

“Hello!” Nick said.

The man looked up.

“Where did you get the shiner?” he said.

“A brakeman busted me.”

“Off the through freight?”

“Yes.”

“I saw the bastard,” the man said. “He went through here ‘bout an hour and a half ago. He was walking along the top of the cars slapping his arms and singing.”

“The bastard!”

“It must have made him feel good to bust you,” the man said seriously.

“I’ll bust him.”

“Get him with a rock sometime when he’s going through,” the man advised.

“I’ll get him.”

“You’re a tough one, aren’t you?”

“No,” Nick answered.

“All you kids are tough.”

“You got to be tough,” Nick said.

“That’s what I said.”

The man looked at Nick and smiled. In the firelight Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man’s face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight.

“Don’t you like my pan?” the man asked.

Nick was embarrassed.

“Sure,” he said.

“Look here!” the man took off his cap.

He had only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other ear should have been there was a stump.

“Ever see one like that?”

“No,” said Nick. It made him a little sick.

“I could take it,” the man said. “Don’t you think I could take it, kid?”

“You bet!”

“They all bust their hands on me,” the little man said. “They couldn’t hurt me.”

He looked at Nick. “Sit down,” he said. “Want to eat?”

“Don’t bother,” Nick said. “I’m going on to the town.”

“Listen!” the man said. “Call me Ad.”

“Sure!”

“Listen,” the little man said. “I’m not quite right.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m crazy.”

He put on his cap. Nick felt like laughing.

“You’re all right,” he said.

“No, I’m not. I’m crazy. Listen, you ever been crazy?”

“No,” Nick said. “How does it get you?”

“I don’t know,” Ad said. “When you got it you don’t know about it. You know me, don’t you?”

“No.”

“I’m Ad Francis.”

“Honest to God?”

“Don’t you believe it?”

“Yes.”

Nick knew it must be true.

“You know how I beat them?”

“No,” Nick said.

“My heart’s slow. It only beats forty a minute. Feel it.”

Nick hesitated.

“Come on,” the man took hold of his hand. “Take hold of my wrist. Put your fingers there.”

The little man’s wrist was thick and the muscles bulged above the bone. Nick felt the slow pumping under his fingers.

“Got a watch?”

“No.”

“Neither have I,” Ad said. “It ain’t any good if you haven’t got a watch.”

Nick dropped his wrist.

“Listen,” Ad Francis said. “Take ahold again. You count and I’ll count up to sixty.”

Feeling the slow hard throb under his fingers Nick started to count. He heard the little man counting slowly, one, two, three, four, five, and on — aloud.

“Sixty,” Ad finished. “That’s a minute. What did you make it?”

“Forty,” Nick said.

“That’s right,” Ad said happily. “She never speeds up.”

A man dropped down the railroad embankment and came across the clearing to the fire.

“Hello, Bugs!” Ad said.

“Hello!” Bugs answered. It was a negro’s voice. Nick knew from the way he walked that he was a negro. He stood with his back to them, bending over the fire. He straightened up.

“This is my pal Bugs,” Ad said. “He’s crazy, too.”

“Glad to meet you,” Bugs said. “Where you say you’re from?”

“Chicago,” Nick said.

“That’s a fine town,” the negro said. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Adams. Nick Adams.”

“He says he’s never been crazy, Bugs,” Ad said.

“He’s got a lot coming to him,” the negro said. He was unwrapping a package by the fire.

“When are we going to eat, Bugs?” the prizefighter asked.

“Right away.”

“Are you hungry, Nick?”

“Hungry as hell.”

“Hear that, Bugs?”

“I hear most of what goes on.”

“That ain’t what I asked you.”

“Yes. I heard what the gentleman said.”

Into a skillet he was laying slices of ham. As the skillet grew hot the grease sputtered and Bugs, crouching on long nigger legs over the fire, turned the ham and broke eggs into the skillet, tipping it from side to side to baste the eggs with the hot fat.

“Will you cut some bread out of that bag, Mister Adams?” Bugs turned from the fire.

“Sure.”

Nick reached in the bag and brought out a loaf of bread. He cut six slices. Ad watched him and leaned forward.

“Let me take your knife, Nick,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” the negro said. “Hang onto your knife, Mister Adams.”

The prizefighter sat back.

“Will you bring me the bread, Mister Adams?” Bugs asked. Nick brought it over.

“Do you like to dip your bread in the ham fat?” the negro asked.

“You bet!”

“Perhaps we’d better wait until later. It’s better at the finish of the meal. Here.”

The negro picked up a slice of ham and laid it on one of the pieces of bread, then slid an egg on top of it.

“Just close that sandwich, will you, please, and give it to Mister Francis.”

Ad took the sandwich and started eating.

“Watch out how that egg runs,” the negro warned. “This is for you, Mister Adams. The remainder for myself.”

Nick bit into the sandwich. The negro was sitting opposite him beside Ad. The hot fried ham and eggs tasted wonderful.

“Mister Adams is right hungry,” the negro said. The little man whom Nick knew by name as a former champion fighter was silent. He had said nothing since the negro had spoken about the knife.

“May I offer you a slice of bread dipped right in the hot ham fat?” Bugs said.

“Thanks a lot.”

The little white man looked at Nick.

“Will you have some, Mister Adolph Francis?” Bugs offered from the skillet.

Ad did not answer. He was looking at Nick.

“Mister Francis?” came the nigger’s soft voice.

Ad did not answer. He was looking at Nick.

“I spoke to you, Mister Francis,” the nigger said softly. Ad kept on looking at Nick. He had his cap down over his eyes. Nick felt nervous.

“How the hell do you get that way?” came out from under the cap sharply at Nick.

“Who the hell do you think you are? You’re a snotty bastard. You come in here where nobody asks you and eat a man’s food and when he asks to borrow a knife you get snotty.”

He glared at Nick, his face was white and his eyes almost out of sight under the cap.

“You’re a hot sketch. Who the hell asked you to butt in here?”

“Nobody.”

“You’re damn right nobody did. Nobody asked you to stay either. You come in here and act snotty about my face and smoke my cigars and drink my liquor and then talk snotty. Where the hell do you think you get off?”

Nick said nothing. Ad stood up.

“I’ll tell you, you yellow-livered Chicago bastard. You’re going to get your can knocked off. Do you get that?”

Nick stepped back. The little man came toward him slowly, stepping flat-footed forward, his left foot stepping forward, his right dragging up to it.

“Hit me,” he moved his head. “Try and hit me.”

“I don’t want to hit you.”

“You won’t get out of it that way. You’re going to take a beating, see? Come on and lead at me.”

“Cut it out,” Nick said.

“All right, then, you bastard.”

The little man looked down at Nick’s feet. As he looked down the negro, who had followed behind him as he moved away from the fire, set himself and tapped him across the base of the skull. He fell forward and Bugs dropped the cloth-wrapped blackjack on the grass. The little man lay there, his face in the grass. The negro picked him up, his head hanging, and carried him to the fire. His face looked bad, the eyes open. Bugs laid him down gently.

“Will you bring me the water in the bucket, Mister Adams,” he said. “I’m afraid I hit him just a little hard.”

The negro splashed water with his hand on the man’s face and pulled his ears gently. The eyes closed.

Bugs stood up.

“He’s all right,” he said. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m sorry, Mister Adams.”

“It’s all right.” Nick was looking down at the little man. He saw the blackjack on the grass and picked it up. It had a flexible handle and was limber in his hand. It was made of worn black leather with a handkerchief wrapped around the heavy end.

“That’s a whalebone handle,” the negro smiled. “They don’t make them any more. I didn’t know how well you could take care of yourself and, anyway, I didn’t want you to hurt him or mark him up no more than he is.”

The negro smiled again.

“You hurt him yourself.”

“I know how to do it. He won’t remember nothing of it. I have to do it to change him when he gets that way.”

Nick was still looking down at the little man, lying, his eyes closed in the firelight. Bugs put some wood on the fire.

“Don’t you worry about him none, Mister Adams. I seen him like this plenty of times before.”

“What made him crazy?” Nick asked.

“Oh, a lot of things,” the negro answered from the fire. “Would you like a cup of this coffee, Mister Adams?”

He handed Nick the cup and smoothed the coat he had placed under the unconscious man’s head.

“He took too many beatings, for one thing,” the negro sipped the coffee. “But that just made him sort of simple. Then his sister was his manager and they was always being written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness.”

“I remember about it.”

“Sure. Of course they wasn’t brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way and they commenced to have disagreements, and one day she just went off and never come back.”

He drank the coffee and wiped his lips with the pink palm of his hand.

“He just went crazy. Will you have some more coffee, Mister Adams?”

“Thanks.”

“I seen her a couple of times,” the negro went on. “She was an awful good-looking woman. Looked enough like him to be twins. He wouldn’t be bad-looking without his face all busted.”

He stopped. The story seemed to be over.

“I met him in jail,” the negro said. “He was busting people all the time after she went away and they put him in jail. I was in for cuttin’ a man.”

He smiled, and went on soft-voiced:

“Right away I liked him and when I got out I looked him up. He likes to think I’m crazy and I don’t mind. I like to be with him and I like seeing the country and I don’t have to commit no larceny to do it. I like living like a gentleman.”

“What do you all do?” Nick asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just move around. He’s got money.”

“He must have made a lot of money.”

“Sure. He spent all his money, though. Or they took it away from him. She sends him money.”

He poked up the fire.

“She’s a mighty fine woman,” he said. “She looks enough like him to be his own twin.”

The negro looked over at the little man, lying breathing heavily. His blond hair was down over his forehead. His mutilated face looked childish in repose.

“I can wake him up any time now, Mister Adams. If you don’t mind I wish you’d sort of pull out. I don’t like to not be hospitable, but it might disturb him back again to see you. I hate to have to thump him and it’s the only thing to do when he gets started. I have to sort of keep him away from people. You don’t mind, do you, Mister Adams? No, don’t thank me, Mister Adams. I’d have warned you about him but he seemed to have taken such a liking to you and I thought things were going to be all right. You’ll hit a town about two miles up the track. Mancelona they call it. Good-bye. I wish we could ask you to stay the night but it’s just out of the question. Would you like to take some of that ham and some bread with you? No? You better take a sandwich,” all this in a low, smooth, polite nigger voice.

“Good. Well, good-bye, Mister Adams. Good-bye and good luck!”

Nick walked away from the fire across the clearing to the railway tracks. Out of the range of the fire he listened. The low soft voice of the negro was talking. Nick could not hear the words. Then he heard the little man say, “I got an awful headache, Bugs.”

“You’ll feel better, Mister Francis,” the negro’s voice soothed. “Just you drink a cup of this hot coffee.”

Nick climbed the embankment and started up the track. He found he had a ham sandwich in his hand and put it in his pocket. Looking back from the mounting grade before the track curved into the hills he could see the firelight in the clearing.

CHAPTER VI

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine-gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and looked at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “Not patriots.” Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.

A VERY SHORT STORY

ONE HOT EVENING IN PADUA THEY Carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.

Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted every one to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or any one in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordenone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

CHAPTER VII

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.

SOLDIER’S HOME

KREBS WENT TO THE WAR FROM A Methodist college in Kansas. There is a picture which shows him among his fraternity brothers, all of them wearing exactly the same height and style collar. He enlisted in the Marines in 1917 and did not return to the United States until the second division returned from the Rhine in the summer of 1919.

There is a picture which shows him on the Rhine with two German girls and another corporal. Krebs and the corporal look too big for their uniforms. The German girls are not beautiful. The Rhine does not show in the picture.

By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late. The men from the town who had been drafted had all been welcomed elaborately on their return. There had been a great deal of hysteria. Now the reaction had set in. People seemed to think it was rather ridiculous for Krebs to be getting back so late, years after the war was over.

At first Krebs, who had been at Belleau Wood, Soissons, the Champagne, St. Mihiel and in the Argonne did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies he had told. All of the times that had been able to make him feel cool and clear inside himself when he thought of them; the times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves.

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of, and stating as facts certain apocryphal incidents familiar to all soldiers. Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.

During this time, it was late summer, he was sleeping late in bed, getting up to walk down town to the library to get a book, eating lunch at home, reading on the front porch until he became bored and then walking down through the town to spend the hottest hours of the day in the cool dark of the pool room. He loved to play pool.

In the evening he practised on his clarinet, strolled down town, read and went to bed. He was still a hero to his two young sisters. His mother would have given him breakfast in bed if he had wanted it. She often came in when he was in bed and asked him to tell her about the war, but her attention always wandered. His father was non-committal.

Before Krebs went away to the war he had never been allowed to drive the family motor car. His father was in the real estate business and always wanted the car to be at his command when he required it to take clients out into the country to show them a piece of farm property. The car always stood outside the First National Bank building where his father had an office on the second floor. Now, after the war, it was still the same car.

Nothing was changed in the town except that the young girls had grown up. But they lived in such a complicated world of already defined alliances and shifting feuds that Krebs did not feel the energy or the courage to break into it. He liked to look at them, though. There were so many good-looking young girls. Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away only little girls wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to look at them from the front porch as they walked on the other side of the street. He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the trees. He liked the round Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings and flat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked.

When he was in town their appeal to him was not very strong. He did not like them when he saw them in the Greek’s ice cream parlor. He did not want them themselves really. They were too complicated. There was something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to have to work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not want to have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into the intrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn’t worth it.

He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences ever again. He wanted to live along without consequences. Besides he did not really need a girl. The army had taught him that. It was all right to pose as though you had to have a girl. Nearly everybody did that. But it wasn’t true. You did not need a girl. That was the funny thing. First a fellow boasted how girls mean nothing to him, that he never thought of them, that they could not touch him. Then a fellow boasted that he could not get along without girls, that he had to have them all the time, that he could not go to sleep without them.

That was all a lie. It was all a lie both ways. You did not need a girl unless you thought about them. He learned that in the army. Then sooner or later you always got one. When you were really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later it would come. He had learned that in the army.

Now he would have liked a girl if she had come to him and not wanted to talk. But here at home it was all too complicated. He knew he could never get through it all again. It was not worth the trouble. That was the thing about French girls and German girls. There was not all this talking. You couldn’t talk much and you did not need to talk. It was simple and you were friends. He thought about France and then he began to think about Germany. On the whole he had liked Germany better. He did not want to leave Germany. He did not want to come home. Still, he had come home. He sat on the front porch.

He liked the girls that were walking along the other side of the street. He liked the look of them much better than the French girls or the German girls. But the world they were in was not the world he was in. He would like to have one of them. But it was not worth it. They were such a nice pattern. He liked the pattern. It was exciting. But he would not go through all the talking. He did not want one badly enough. He liked to look at them all, though. It was not worth it. Not now when things were getting good again.

He sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was reading about all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading he had ever done. He wished there were more maps. He looked forward with a good feeling to reading all the really good histories when they would come out with good detail maps. Now he was really learning about the war. He had been a good soldier. That made a difference.

One morning after he had been home about a month his mother came into his bedroom and sat on the bed. She smoothed her apron.

“I had a talk with your father last night, Harold,” she said, “and he is willing for you to take the car out in the evenings.”

“Yeah?” said Krebs, who was not fully awake. “Take the car out? Yeah?”

“Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the evenings whenever you wished but we only talked it over last night.”

“I’ll bet you made him,” Krebs said.

“No. It was your father’s suggestion that we talk the matter over.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet you made him,” Krebs sat up in bed.

“Will you come down to breakfast, Harold?” his mother said.

“As soon as I get my clothes on,” Krebs said.

His mother went out of the room and he could hear her frying something downstairs while he washed, shaved and dressed to go down into the dining-room for breakfast. While he was eating breakfast his sister brought in the mail.

“Well, Hare,” she said. “You old sleepy-head. What do you ever get up for?”

Krebs looked at her. He liked her. She was his best sister.

“Have you got the paper?” he asked.

She handed him The Kansas City Star and he shucked off its brown wrapper and opened it to the sporting page. He folded The Star open and propped it against the water pitcher with his cereal dish to steady it, so he could read while he ate.

“Harold,” his mother stood in the kitchen doorway, “Harold, please don’t muss up the paper. Your father can’t read his Star if it’s been mussed.”

“I won’t muss it,” Krebs said.

His sister sat down at the table and watched him while he read.

“We’re playing indoor over at school this afternoon,” she said. “I’m going to pitch.”

“Good,” said Krebs. “How’s the old wing?”

“I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls aren’t much good.”

“Yeah?” said Krebs.

“I tell them all you’re my beau. Aren’t you my beau, Hare?”

“You bet.”

“Couldn’t your brother really be your beau just because he’s your brother?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you know. Couldn’t you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted to?”

“Sure. You’re my girl now.”

“Am I really your girl?”

“Sure.”

“Do you love me?”

“Uh, huh.”

“Will you love me always?”

“Sure.”

“Will you come over and watch me play indoor?”

“Maybe.”

“Aw, Hare, you don’t love me. If you loved me, you’d want to come over and watch me play indoor.”

Krebs’s mother came into the dining-room from the kitchen. She carried a plate with two fried eggs and some crisp bacon on it and a plate of buckwheat cakes.

“You run along, Helen,” she said. “I want to talk to Harold.”

She put the eggs and bacon down in front of him and brought in a jug of maple syrup for the buckwheat cakes. Then she sat down across the table from Krebs.

“I wish you’d put down the paper a minute, Harold,” she said.

Krebs took down the paper and folded it.

“Have you decided what you are going to do yet, Harold?” his mother said, taking off her glasses.

“No,” said Krebs.

“Don’t you think it’s about time?” His mother did not say this in a mean way. She seemed worried.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Krebs said.

“God has some work for every one to do,” his mother said. “There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom.”

“I’m not in His Kingdom,” Krebs said.

“We are all of us in His Kingdom.”

Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful as always.

“I’ve worried about you so much, Harold,” his mother went on. “I know the temptations you must have been exposed to. I know how weak men are. I know what your own dear grandfather, my own father, told us about the Civil War and I have prayed for you. I pray for you all day long, Harold.”

Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.

“Your father is worried, too,” his mother went on. “He thinks you have lost your ambition, that you haven’t got a definite aim in life. Charley Simmons, who is just your age, has a good job and is going to be married. The boys are all settling down; they’re all determined to get somewhere; you can see that boys like Charley Simmons are on their way to being really a credit to the community.”

Krebs said nothing.

“Don’t look that way, Harold,” his mother said. “You know we love you and I want to tell you for your own good how matters stand. Your father does not want to hamper your freedom. He thinks you should be allowed to drive the car. If you want to take some of the nice girls out riding with you, we are only too pleased. We want you to enjoy yourself. But you are going to have to settle down to work, Harold. Your father doesn’t care what you start in at. All work is honorable as he says. But you’ve got to make a start at something. He asked me to speak to you this morning and then you can stop in and see him at his office.”

“Is that all?” Krebs said.

“Yes. Don’t you love your mother, dear boy?”

“No,” Krebs said.

His mother looked at him across the table. Her eyes were shiny. She started crying.

“I don’t love anybody,” Krebs said.

It wasn’t any good. He couldn’t tell her, he couldn’t make her see it. It was silly to have said it. He had only hurt her. He went over and took hold of her arm. She was crying with her head in her hands.

“I didn’t mean it,” he said. “I was just angry at something. I didn’t mean I didn’t love you.”

His mother went on crying. Krebs put his arm on her shoulder.

“Can’t you believe me, mother?”

His mother shook her head.

“Please, please, mother. Please believe me.”

“All right,” his mother said chokily. She looked up at him. “I believe you, Harold.”

Krebs kissed her hair. She put her face up to him.

“I’m your mother,” she said. “I held you next to my heart when you were a tiny baby.”

Krebs felt sick and vaguely nauseated.

“I know, Mummy,” he said. “I’ll try and be a good boy for you.”

“Would you kneel and pray with me, Harold?” his mother asked.

They knelt down beside the dining-room table and Krebs’s mother prayed.

“Now, you pray, Harold,” she said.

“I can’t,” Krebs said.

“Try, Harold.”

“I can’t.”

“Do you want me to pray for you?”

“Yes.”

So his mother prayed for him and then they stood up and Krebs kissed his mother and went out of the house. He had tried so to keep his life from being complicated. Still, none of it had touched him. He had felt sorry for his mother and she had made him lie. He would go to Kansas City and get a job and she would feel all right about it. There would be one more scene maybe before he got away. He would not go down to his father’s office. He would miss that one. He wanted his life to go smoothly. It had just gotten going that way. Well, that was all over now, anyway. He would go over to the schoolyard and watch Helen play indoor baseball.

CHAPTER VIII

At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevitts got frightened when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.

 — They’re crooks, ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops, ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?

 — That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?

Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.

THE REVOLUTIONIST

IN 1919 HE WAS TRAVELLING ON THE railroads in Italy, carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under the Whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way. He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.

He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country, he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked much, and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti. Mantegna he did not like.

He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good trip together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done some bad things to him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Hungary, he believed altogether in the world revolution.

“But how is the movement going in Italy?” he asked.

“Very badly,” I said.

“But it will go better,” he said. “You have everything here. It is the one country that every one is sure of. It will be the starting point of everything.”

I did not say anything.

At Bologna he said good-bye to us to go on the train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland. I spoke to him about the Mantegnas in Milano. “No,” he said, very shyly, he did not like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and the addresses of comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was already looking forward to walking over the pass. He was very eager to walk over the pass while the weather held good. He loved the mountains in the autumn. The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion.

CHAPTER IX

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.

MR. AND MRS. ELLIOT

MR. AND MRS. ELLIOT TRIED VERY HARD to have a baby. They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it. They tried in Boston after they were married and they tried coming over on the boat. They did not try very often on the boat because Mrs. Elliot was quite sick. She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick. That is women from the Southern part of the United States. Like all Southern women Mrs. Elliot disintegrated very quickly under sea sickness, travelling at night, and getting up too early in the morning. Many of the people on the boat took her for Elliot’s mother. Other people who knew they were married believed she was going to have a baby. In reality she was forty years old. Her years had been precipitated suddenly when she started travelling.

She had seemed much younger, in fact she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her after several weeks of making love to her after knowing her for a long time in her tea shop before he had kissed her one evening.

Hubert Elliot was taking postgraduate work in law at Harvard when he was married. He was a poet with an income of nearly ten thousand dollars a year. He wrote very long poems very rapidly. He was twenty-five years old and had never gone to bed with a woman until he married Mrs. Elliot. He wanted to keep himself pure so that he could bring to his wife the same purity of mind and body that he expected of her. He called it to himself living straight. He had been in love with various girls before he kissed Mrs. Elliot and always told them sooner or later that he had led a clean life. Nearly all the girls lost interest in him. He was shocked and really horrified at the way girls would become engaged to and marry men whom they must know had dragged themselves through the gutter. He once tried to warn a girl he knew against a man of whom he had almost proof that he had been a rotter at college and a very unpleasant incident had resulted.

Mrs. Elliot’s name was Cornelia. She had taught him to call her Calutina, which was her family nickname in the South. His mother cried when he brought Cornelia home after their marriage but brightened very much when she learned they were going to live abroad.

Cornelia had said, “You dear sweet boy,” and held him closer than ever when he had told her how he had kept himself clean for her. Cornelia was pure too. “Kiss me again like that,” she said.

Hubert explained to her that he had learned that way of kissing from hearing a fellow tell a story once. He was delighted with his experiment and they developed it as far as possible. Sometimes when they had been kissing together a long time, Cornelia would ask him to tell her again that he had kept himself really straight for her. The declaration always set her off again.

At first Hubert had no idea of marrying Cornelia. He had never thought of her that way. She had been such a good friend of his, and then one day in the little back room of the shop they had been dancing to the gramophone while her girl friend was in the front of the shop and she had looked up into his eyes and he had kissed her. He could never remember just when it was decided that they were to be married. But they were married.

They spent the night of the day they were married in a Boston hotel. They were both disappointed but finally Cornelia went to sleep. Hubert could not sleep and several times went out and walked up and down the corridor of the hotel in his new Jaeger bathrobe that he had bought for his wedding trip. As he walked he saw all the pairs of shoes, small shoes and big shoes, outside the doors of the hotel rooms. This set his heart to pounding and he hurried back to his own room but Cornelia was asleep. He did not like to waken her and soon everything was quite all right and he slept peacefully.

The next day they called on his mother and the next day they sailed for Europe. It was possible to try to have a baby but Cornelia could not attempt it very often although they wanted a baby more than anything else in the world. They landed at Cherbourg and came to Paris. They tried to have a baby in Paris. Then they decided to go to Dijon where there was summer school and where a number of people who crossed on the boat with them had gone. They found there was nothing to do in Dijon. Hubert, however, was writing a great number of poems and Cornelia typed them for him. They were all very long poems. He was very severe about mistakes and would make her re-do an entire page if there was one mistake. She cried a good deal and they tried several times to have a baby before they left Dijon.

They came to Paris and most of their friends from the boat came back too. They were tired of Dijon and anyway would now be able to say that after leaving Harvard or Columbia or Wabash they had studied at the University of Dijon down in the Côte d’Or. Many of them would have preferred to go to Languedoc, Montpellier or Perpignan if there are universities there. But all those places are too far away. Dijon is only four and a half hours from Paris and there is a diner on the train.

So they all sat around the Café du Dome, avoiding the Rotonde across the street because it is always so full of foreigners, for a few days and then the Elliots rented a château in Touraine through an advertisement in the New York Herald. Elliot had a number of friends by now all of whom admired his poetry and Mrs. Elliot had prevailed upon him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been in the tea shop. Mrs. Elliot became much brighter after her girl friend came and they had many good cries together. The girl friend was several years older than Cornelia and called her Honey. She too came from a very old Southern family.

The three of them, with several of Elliot’s friends who called him Hubie, went down to the château in Touraine. They found Touraine to be a very flat hot country very much like Kansas. Elliot had nearly enough poems for a book now. He was going to bring it out in Boston and had already sent his check to, and made a contract with, a publisher.

In a short time the friends began to drift back to Paris. Touraine had not turned out the way it looked when it started. Soon all the friends had gone off with a rich young and unmarried poet to a seaside resort near Trouville. There they were all very happy.

Elliot kept on at the château in Touraine because he had taken it for all summer. He and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby in the big hot bedroom on the big, hard bed. Mrs. Elliot was learning the touch system on the typewriter, but she found that while it increased the speed it made more mistakes. The girl friend was now typing practically all of the manuscripts. She was very neat and efficient and seemed to enjoy it.

Elliot had taken to drinking white wine and lived apart in his own room. He wrote a great deal of poetry during the night and in the morning looked very exhausted. Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend now slept together in the big mediæval bed. They had many a good cry together. In the evening they all sat at dinner together in the garden under a plane tree and the hot evening wind blew and Elliot drank white wine and Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend made conversation and they were all quite happy.

CHAPTER X

They whack-whacked the white horse on the legs and he kneed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled and hauled up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered jerkily along the barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the monos held his bridle and walked him forward. The picador kicked in his spurs, leaned forward and shook his lance at the bull. Blood pumped regularly from between the horse’s front legs. He was nervously wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to charge.

CAT IN THE RAIN

THERE WERE ONLY TWO AMERICANS stopping at the hotel. They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room. Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and the war monument. There were big palms and green benches in the public garden. In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel. Artists liked the way the palms grew and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea. Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. It was made of bronze and glistened in the rain. It was raining. The rain dripped from the palm trees. Water stood in pools on the gravel paths. The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war monument. Across the square in the doorway of the café a waiter stood looking out at the empty square.

The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on.

“I’m going down and get that kitty,” the American wife said.

“I’ll do it,” her husband offered from the bed.

“No, I’ll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.”

The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.

“Don’t get wet,” he said.

The wife went downstairs and the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her as she passed the office. His desk was at the far end of the office. He was an old man and very tall.

“Il piove,” the wife said. She liked the hotel-keeper.

“Sì, sì, Signora, brutto tempo. It’s very bad weather.”

He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity. She liked the way he wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a hotel-keeper. She liked his old, heavy face and big hands.

Liking him she opened the door and looked out. It was raining harder. A man in a rubber cape was crossing the empty square to the café. The cat would be around to the right. Perhaps she could go along under the eaves. As she stood in the doorway an umbrella opened behind her. It was the maid who looked after their room.

“You must not get wet,” she smiled, speaking Italian. Of course, the hotel-keeper had sent her.

With the maid holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path until she was under their window. The table was there, washed bright green in the rain, but the cat was gone. She was suddenly disappointed. The maid looked up at her.

“Ha perduto qualche cosa, Signora?”

“There was a cat,” said the American girl.

“A cat?”

“Si, il gatto.”

“A cat?” the maid laughed. “A cat in the rain?”

“Yes,” she said, “under the table.” Then, “Oh, I wanted it so much. I wanted a kitty.”

When she talked English the maid’s face tightened.

“Come, Signora,” she said. “We must get back inside. You will be wet.”

“I suppose so,” said the American girl.

They went back along the gravel path and passed in the door. The maid stayed outside to close the umbrella. As the American girl passed the office, the padrone bowed from his desk. Something felt very small and tight inside the girl. The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time really important. She had a momentary feeling of being of supreme importance. She went on up the stairs. She opened the door of the room. George was on the bed, reading.

“Did you get the cat?” he asked, putting the book down.

“It was gone.”

“Wonder where it went to,” he said, resting his eyes from reading.

She sat down on the bed.

“I wanted it so much,” she said. “I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I wanted that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.”

George was reading again.

She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing table looking at herself with the hand glass. She studied her profile, first one side and then the other. Then she studied the back of her head and her neck.

“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?” she asked, looking at her profile again.

George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like a boy’s.

“I like it the way it is.”

“I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.” George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her since she started to speak.

“You look pretty darn nice,” he said.

She laid the mirror down on the dresser and went over to the window and looked out. It was getting dark.

“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel,” she said. “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her.”

“Yeah?” George said from the bed.

“And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.”

“Oh, shut up and get something to read,” George said. He was reading again.

His wife was looking out of the window. It was quite dark now and still raining in the palm trees.

“Anyway, I want a cat,” she said, “I want a cat. I want a cat now. If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat.”

George was not listening. He was reading his book. His wife looked out of the window where the light had come on in the square.

Someone knocked at the door.

“Avanti”, George said. He looked up from his book.

In the doorway stood the maid. She held a big tortoise-shell cat pressed tight against her and swung down against her body.

“Excuse me,” she said, “the padrone asked me to bring this for the Signora.”

CHAPTER XI

The crowd shouted all the time and threw pieces of bread down into the ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from so much bad sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla leaned out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo. The crowd came over the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and some one cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away with it. Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull fighter.

OUT OF SEASON

ON THE FOUR LIRE PEDUZZI HAD EARNED by spading the hotel garden he got quite drunk. He saw the young gentleman coming down the path and spoke to him mysteriously. The young gentleman said he had not eaten but would be ready to go as soon as lunch was finished. Forty minutes or an hour.

At the cantina near the bridge they trusted him for three more grappas because he was so confident and mysterious about his job for the afternoon. It was a windy day with the sun coming out from behind clouds and then going under in sprinkles of rain. A wonderful day for trout fishing.

The young gentleman came out of the hotel and asked him about the rods. Should his wife come behind with the rods? “Yes,” said Peduzzi, “let her follow us.” The young gentleman went back into the hotel and spoke to his wife. He and Peduzzi started down the road. The young gentleman had a musette over his shoulder. Peduzzi saw the wife, who looked as young as the young gentleman, and was wearing mountain boots and a blue beret, start out to follow them down the road, carrying the fishing rods, unjointed, one in each hand. Peduzzi didn’t like her to be way back there. “Signorina,” he called, winking at the young gentleman, “come up here and walk with us. Signora, come up here. Let us all walk together.” Peduzzi wanted them all three to walk down the street of Cortina together.

The wife stayed behind, following rather sullenly. “Signorina,” Peduzzi called tenderly, “come up here with us.” The young gentleman looked back and shouted something. The wife stopped lagging behind and walked up.

Everyone they met walking through the main street of the town Peduzzi greeted elaborately. Buon dì, Arturo! Tipping his hat. The bank clerk stared at him from the door of the Fascist café. Groups of three and four people standing in front of the shops stared at the three. The workmen in their stone-powdered jackets working on the foundations of the new hotel looked up as they passed. Nobody spoke or gave any sign to them except the town beggar, lean and old, with a spittle-thickened beard, who lifted his hat as they passed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Of the bianco? One lira.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve got on three sweaters.”

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

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

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

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

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

The girl went into the house as Peduzzi pointed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Un’ mezz’ora. Piu d’un’ mezz’ora.”

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

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

Peduzzi was down at the river and did not notice her till she was almost out of sight over the crest. “Frau!” he shouted. “Frau! Fräulein! You’re not going.”

She went on over the crest of the hill.

“She’s gone!” said Peduzzi. It shocked him.

He took off the rubber bands that held the rod segments together and commenced to joint up one of the rods.

“But you said it was half an hour further.”

“Oh, yes. It is good half an hour down. It is good here, too.”

“Really?”

“Of course. It is good here and good there, too.”

The young gentleman sat down on the bank and jointed up a rod, put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He felt uncomfortable and afraid that any minute a gamekeeper or a posse of citizens would come over the bank from the town. He could see the houses of the town and the campanile over the edge of the hill. He opened his leader box. Peduzzi leaned over and dug his flat, hard thumb and forefinger in and tangled the moistened leaders.

“Have you some lead?”

“No.”

“You must have some lead.” Peduzzi was excited. “You must have piombo. Piombo. A little piombo. Just here. Just above the hook or your bait will float on the water. You must have it. Just a little piombo.”

“Have you got some?”

“No.” He looked through his pockets desperately. Sifting through the cloth dirt in the linings of his inside military pockets. “I haven’t any. We must have piombo.”

“We can’t fish then,” said the young gentleman, and unjointed the rod, reeling the line back through the guides. “We’ll get some piombo and fish tomorrow.”

“But listen, caro, you must have piombo. The line will lie flat on the water.” Peduzzi’s day was going to pieces before his eyes. “You must have piombo. A little is enough. Your stuff is all clean and new but you have no lead. I would have brought some. You said you had everything.”

The young gentleman looked at the stream discolored by the melting snow. “I know,” he said, “we’ll get some piombo and fish tomorrow.”

“At what hour in the morning? Tell me that.”

“At seven.”

The sun came out. It was warm and pleasant. The young gentleman felt relieved. He was no longer breaking the law. Sitting on the bank he took the bottle of marsala out of his pocket and passed it to Peduzzi. Peduzzi passed it back. The young gentleman took a drink of it and passed it to Peduzzi again. Peduzzi passed it back again. “Drink,” he said, “drink. It’s your marsala.” After another short drink the young gentleman handed the bottle over. Peduzzi had been watching it closely. He took the bottle very hurriedly and tipped it up. The gray hairs in the folds of his neck oscillated as he drank, his eyes fixed on the end of the narrow brown bottle. He drank it all. The sun shone while he drank. It was wonderful. This was a great day, after all. A wonderful day.

“Senta, caro! In the morning at seven.” He had called the young gentleman caro several times and nothing had happened. It was good marsala. His eyes glistened. Days like this stretched out ahead. It would begin at seven in the morning.

They started to walk up the hill toward the town. The young gentleman went on ahead. He was quite a way up the hill. Peduzzi called to him.

“Listen, caro, can you let me take five lire for a favor?”

“For today?” asked the young gentleman frowning.

“No, not today. Give it to me today for tomorrow. I will provide everything for tomorrow. Pane, salami, formaggio, good stuff for all of us. You and I and the Signora. Bait for fishing, minnows, not worms only. Perhaps I can get some marsala. All for five lire. Five lire for a favor.”

The young gentleman looked through his pocketbook and took out a two-lira note and two ones.

“Thank you, caro. Thank you,” said Peduzzi, in the tone of one member of the Carleton Club accepting the Morning Post from another. This was living. He was through with the hotel garden, breaking up frozen manure with a dung fork. Life was opening out.

“Until seven o’clock then, caro,” he said, slapping the young gentleman on the back. “Promptly at seven.”

“I may not be going,” said the young gentleman putting his purse back in his pocket.

“What,” said Peduzzi, “I will have minnows, Signor. Salami, everything. You and I and the Signora. The three of us.”

“I may not be going,” said the young gentleman, “very probably not. I will leave word with the padrone at the hotel office.”

CHAPTER XII

If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve behind. Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge his feet firm, the muleta curving and at each swing the crowd roaring.

When he started to kill it was all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. He drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red hilt of the sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.

CROSS-COUNTRY SNOW

THE FUNICULAR CAR BUCKED ONCE MORE and then stopped. It could not go farther, the snow drifted solidly across the track. The gale scouring the exposed surface of the mountain had swept the snow surface into a wind-board crust. Nick, waxing his skis in the baggage car, pushed his boots into the toe irons and shut the clamp tight. He jumped from the car sideways onto the hard wind-board, made a jump turn and crouching and trailing his sticks slipped in a rush down the slope.

On the white below George dipped and rose and dipped out of sight. The rush and the sudden swoop as he dropped down a steep undulation in the mountain side plucked Nick’s mind out and left him only the wonderful flying, dropping sensation in his body. He rose to a slight up-run and then the snow seemed to drop out from under him as he went down, down, faster and faster in a rush down the last, long steep slope. Crouching so he was almost sitting back on his skis, trying to keep the center of gravity low, the snow driving like a sand-storm, he knew the pace was too much. But he held it. He would not let go and spill. Then a patch of soft snow, left in a hollow by the wind, spilled him and he went over and over in a clashing of skis, feeling like a shot rabbit, then stuck, his legs crossed, his skis sticking straight up and his nose and ears jammed full of snow.

George stood a little farther down the slope, knocking the snow from his wind jacket with big slaps.

“You took a beauty, Mike,” he called to Nick. “That’s lousy soft snow. It bagged me the same way.”

“What’s it like over the khud?” Nick kicked his skis around as he lay on his back and stood up.

“You’ve got to keep to your left. It’s a good fast drop with a Christy at the bottom on account of a fence.”

“Wait a sec and we’ll take it together.”

“No, you come on and go first. I like to see you take the khuds.”

Nick Adams came up past George, big back and blond head still faintly snowy, then his skis started slipping at the edge and he swooped down, hissing in the crystalline powder snow and seeming to float up and drop down as he went up and down the billowing khuds. He held to his left and at the end, as he rushed toward the fence, keeping his knees locked tight together and turning his body like tightening a screw brought his skis sharply around to the right in a smother of snow and slowed into a loss of speed parallel to the hillside and the wire fence.

He looked up the hill. George was coming down in telemark position, kneeling; one leg forward and bent, the other trailing; his sticks hanging like some insect’s thin legs, kicking up puffs of snow as they touched the surface and finally the whole kneeling, trailing figure coming around in a beautiful right curve, crouching, the legs shot forward and back, the body leaning out against the swing, the sticks accenting the curve like points of light, all in a wild cloud of snow.

“I was afraid to Christy,” George said, “the snow was too deep. You made a beauty.”

“I can’t telemark with my leg,” Nick said.

Nick held down the top strand of the wire fence with his ski and George slid over. Nick followed him down to the road. They thrust bent-kneed along the road into a pine forest. The road became polished ice, stained orange and a tobacco yellow from the teams hauling logs. The skiers kept to the stretch of snow along the side. The road dipped sharply to a stream and then ran straight up-hill. Through the woods they could see a long, low-eaved, weather-beaten building. Through the trees it was a faded yellow. Closer the window frames were painted green. The paint was peeling. Nick knocked his clamps loose with one of his ski sticks and kicked off the skis.

“We might as well carry them up here,” he said.

He climbed the steep road with the skis on his shoulder, kicking his heel nails into the icy footing. He heard George breathing and kicking in his heels just behind him. They stacked the skis against the side of the inn and slapped the snow off each other’s trousers, stamped their boots clean, and went in.

Inside it was quite dark. A big porcelain stove shone in the corner of the room. There was a low ceiling. Smooth benches back of dark, wine-stained tables were along each side of the rooms. Two Swiss sat over their pipes and two decies of cloudy new wine next to the stove. The boys took off their jackets and sat against the wall on the other side of the stove. A voice in the next room stopped singing and a girl in a blue apron came in through the door to see what they wanted to drink.

“A bottle of Sion,” Nick said. “Is that all right, Gidge?”

“Sure,” said George. “You know more about wine than I do. I like any of it.”

The girl went out.

“There’s nothing really can touch skiing, is there?” Nick said. “The way it feels when you first drop off on a long run.”

“Huh,” said George. “It’s too swell to talk about.”

The girl brought the wine in and they had trouble with the cork. Nick finally opened it. The girl went out and they heard her singing in German in the next room.

“Those specks of cork in it don’t matter,” said Nick.

“I wonder if she’s got any cake.”

“Let’s find out.”

The girl came in and Nick noticed that her apron covered swellingly her pregnancy. I wonder why I didn’t see that when she first came in, he thought.

“What were you singing?” he asked her.

“Opera, German opera.” She did not care to discuss the subject. “We have some apple strudel if you want it.”

“She isn’t so cordial, is she?” said George.

“Oh, well. She doesn’t know us and she thought we were going to kid her about her singing, maybe. She’s from up where they speak German probably and she’s touchy about being here and then she’s got that baby coming without being married and she’s touchy.”

“How do you know she isn’t married?”

“No ring. Hell, no girls get married around here till they’re knocked up.”

The door came open and a gang of woodcutters from up the road came in, stamping their boots and steaming in the room. The waitress brought in three litres of new wine for the gang and they sat at the two tables, smoking and quiet, with their hats off, leaning back against the wall or forward on the table. Outside the horses on the wood sledges made an occasional sharp jangle of bells as they tossed their heads.

George and Nick were happy. They were fond of each other. They knew they had the run back home ahead of them.

“When have you got to go back to school?” Nick asked.

“Tonight,” George answered. “I’ve got to get the ten-forty from Montreux.”

“I wish you could stick over and we could do the Dent du Lys tomorrow.”

“I got to get educated,” George said. “Gee, Mike, don’t you wish we could just bum together? Take our skis and go on the train to where there was good running and then go on and put up at pubs and go right across the Oberland and up the Valais and all through the Engadine and just take repair kit and extra sweaters and pyjamas in our rucksacks and not give a damn about school or anything.”

“Yes, and go through the Schwarzwald that way. Gee, the swell places.”

“That’s where you went fishing last summer, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

They ate the strudel and drank the rest of the wine.

George leaned back against the wall and shut his eyes.

“Wine always makes me feel this way,” he said.

“Feel bad?” Nick asked.

“No. I feel good, but funny.”

“I know,” Nick said.

“Sure,” said George.

“Should we have another bottle?” Nick asked.

“Not for me,” George said.

They sat there, Nick leaning his elbows on the table, George slumped back against the wall.

“Is Helen going to have a baby?” George said, coming down to the table from the wall.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Late next summer.”

“Are you glad?”

“Yes. Now.”

“Will you go back to the States?”

“I guess so.”

“Do you want to?”

“No.”

“Does Helen?”

“No.”

George sat silent. He looked at the empty bottle and the empty glasses.

“It’s hell, isn’t it?” he said.

“No. Not exactly,” Nick said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said.

“Will you ever go skiing together in the States?” George said.

“I don’t know,” said Nick.

“The mountains aren’t much,” George said.

“No,” said Nick. “They’re too rocky. There’s too much timber and they’re too far away.”

“Yes,” said George, “that’s the way it is in California.”

“Yes,” Nick said, “that’s the way it is everywhere I’ve ever been.”

“Yes,” said George, “that’s the way it is.”

The Swiss got up and paid and went out.

“I wish we were Swiss,” George said.

“They’ve all got goiter,” said Nick.

“I don’t believe it,” George said.

“Neither do I,” said Nick.

They laughed.

“Maybe we’ll never go skiing again, Nick,” George said.

“We’ve got to,” said Nick. “It isn’t worth while if you can’t.”

“We’ll go, all right,” George said.

“We’ve got to,” Nick agreed.

“I wish we could make a promise about it,” George said.

Nick stood up. He buckled his wind jacket tight. He leaned over George and picked up the two ski poles from against the wall. He stuck one of the ski poles into the floor.

“There isn’t any good in promising,” he said.

They opened the door and went out. It was very cold. The snow had crusted hard. The road ran up the hill into the pine trees.

They took down their skis from where they leaned against the wall in the inn. Nick put on his gloves. George was already started up the road, his skis on his shoulder. Now they would have the run home together.

CHAPTER XIII

I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street was full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them. He was drunk all right. You go down after him, said Maera, he hates me.

So I went down and caught up with them and grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and said, Come on Luis. For Christ’s sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon. He didn’t listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.

I said, Don’t be a damn fool Luis. Come on back to the hotel.

Then the music started up again and he jumped up and twisted away from me and started dancing. I grabbed his arm and he pulled loose and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.

I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back. He went inside when he saw me and came downstairs disgusted.

Well, I said, after all he’s just an ignorant Mexican savage.

Yes, Maera said, and who will kill his bulls after he gets a cogida?

We, I suppose, I said.

Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the savages’ bulls, and the drunkards’ bulls, and the riau-riau dancers’ bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.

MY OLD MAN

I GUESS LOOKING AT IT, NOW, MY OLD man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he’d pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun. He’d have, maybe, taken a trial trip with one of Razzo’s skins early in the morning after just getting in from Torino at four o’clock in the morning and beating it out to the stables in a cab and then with the dew all over everything and the sun just starting to get going, I’d help him pull off his boots and he’d get into a pair of sneakers and all these sweaters and we’d start out.

“Come on, kid,” he’d say, stepping up and down on his toes in front of the jock’s dressing room, “let’s get moving.”

Then we’d start off jogging around the infield once, maybe, with him ahead, running nice, and then turn out the gate and along one of those roads with all the trees along both sides of them that run out from San Siro. I’d go ahead of him when we hit the road and I could run pretty good and I’d look around and he’d be jogging easy just behind me and after a little while I’d look around again and he’d begun to sweat. Sweating heavy and he’d just be dogging it along with his eyes on my back, but when he’d catch me looking at him he’d grin and say, “Sweating plenty?” When my old man grinned, nobody could help but grin too. We’d keep right on running out toward the mountains and then my old man would yell, “Hey, Joe!” and I’d look back and he’d be sitting under a tree with a towel he’d had around his waist wrapped around his neck.

I’d come back and sit down beside him and he’d pull a rope out of his pocket and start skipping rope out in the sun with the sweat pouring off his face and him skipping rope out in the white dust with the rope going cloppetty, cloppetty, clop, clop, clop, and the sun hotter, and him working harder up and down a patch of the road. Say, it was a treat to see my old man skip rope, too. He could whirr it fast or lop it slow and fancy. Say, you ought to have seen wops look at us sometimes, when they’d come by, going into town walking along with big white steers hauling the cart. They sure looked as though they thought the old man was nuts. He’d start the rope whining till they’d stop dead still and watch him, then give the steers a cluck and a poke with the goad and get going again.

When I’d sit watching him working out in the hot sun I sure felt fond of him. He sure was fun and he done his work so hard and he’d finish up with a regular whirring that’d drive the sweat out on his face like water and then sling the rope at the tree and come over and sit down with me and lean back against the tree with the towel and a sweater wrapped around his neck.

“Sure is hell keeping it down, Joe,” he’d say and lean back and shut his eyes and breathe long and deep, “it ain’t like when you’re a kid.” Then he’d get up and before he started to cool we’d jog along back to the stables. That’s the way it was keeping down to weight. He was worried all the time. Most jocks can just about ride off all they want to. A jock loses about a kilo every time he rides, but my old man was sort of dried out and he couldn’t keep down his kilos without all that running.

I remember once at San Siro, Regoli, a little wop, that was riding for Buzoni, came out across the paddock going to the bar for something cool; and flicking his boots with his whip, after he’d just weighed in and my old man had just weighed in too, and came out with the saddle under his arm looking red-faced and tired and too big for his silks and he stood there looking at young Regoli standing up to the outdoors bar, cool and kidlooking, and I said, “What’s the matter, Dad?” cause I thought maybe Regoli had bumped him or something and he just looked at Regoli and said, “Oh, to hell with it,” and went on to the dressing room.

Well, it would have been all right, maybe, if we’d stayed in Milan and ridden at Milan and Torino,’cause if there ever were any easy courses, it’s those two. “Pianola, Joe,” my old man said when he dismounted in the winning stall after what the wops thought was a hell of a steeplechase. I asked him once. “This course rides itself. It’s the pace you’re going at, that makes riding the jumps dangerous, Joe. We ain’t going any pace here, and they ain’t really bad jumps either. But it’s the pace always — not the jumps — that makes the trouble.”

San Siro was the swellest course I’d ever seen but the old man said it was a dog’s life. Going back and forth between Mirafiore and San Siro and riding just about every day in the week with a train ride every other night.

I was nuts about the horses, too. There’s something about it, when they come out and go up the track to the post. Sort of dancy and tight looking with the jock keeping a tight hold on them and maybe easing off a little and letting them run a little going up. Then once they were at the barrier it got me worse than anything. Especially at San Siro with that big green infield and the mountains way off and the fat wop starter with his big whip and the jocks fiddling them around and then the barrier snapping up and that bell going off and them all getting off in a bunch and then commencing to string out. You know the way a bunch of skins gets off. If you’re up in the stand with a pair of glasses all you see is them plunging off and then that bell goes off and it seems like it rings for a thousand years and then they come sweeping round the turn. There wasn’t ever anything like it for me.

But my old man said one day, in the dressing room, when he was getting into his street clothes, “None of these things are horses, Joe. They’d kill that bunch of skates for their hides and hoofs up at Paris.” That was the day he’d won the Premio Commercio with Lantorna shooting her out of the field the last hundred meters like pulling a cork out of a bottle.

It was right after the Premio Commercio that we pulled out and left Italy. My old man and Holbrook and a fat wop in a straw hat that kept wiping his face with a handkerchief were having an argument at a table in the Galleria. They were all talking French and the two of them was after my old man about something. Finally he didn’t say anything any more but just sat there and looked at Holbrook, and the two of them kept after him, first one talking and then the other, and the fat wop always butting in on Holbrook.

“You go out and buy me a Sportsman, will you, Joe?” my old man said, and handed me a couple of soldi without looking away from Holbrook.

So I went out of the Galleria and walked over to in front of the Scala and bought a paper, and came back and stood a little way away because I didn’t want to butt in and my old man was sitting back in his chair looking down at his coffee and fooling with a spoon and Holbrook and the big wop were standing and the big wop was wiping his face and shaking his head. And I came up and my old man acted just as though the two of them weren’t standing there and said, “Want an ice, Joe?” Holbrook looked down at my old man and said slow and careful, “You son of a bitch,” and he and the fat wop went out through the tables.

My old man sat there and sort of smiled at me, but his face was white and he looked sick as hell and I was scared and felt sick inside because I knew something had happened and I didn’t see how anybody could call my old man a son of a bitch, and get away with it. My old man opened up the Sportsman and studied the handicaps for a while and then he said, “You got to take a lot of things in this world, Joe.” And three days later we left Milan for good on the Turin train for Paris, after an auction sale out in front of Turner’s stables of everything we couldn’t get into a trunk and a suit case.

We got into Paris early in the morning in a long, dirty station the old man told me was the Gare de Lyon. Paris was an awful big town after Milan. Seems like in Milan everybody is going somewhere and all the trams run somewhere and there ain’t any sort of a mix-up, but Paris is all balled up and they never do straighten it out. I got to like it, though, part of it, anyway, and say, it’s got the best race courses in the world. Seems as though that were the thing that keeps it all going and about the only thing you can figure on is that every day the buses will be going out to whatever track they’re running at, going right out through everything to the track. I never really got to know Paris well, because I just came in about once or twice a week with the old man from Maisons and he always sat at the Café de la Paix on the Opera side with the rest of the gang from Maisons and I guess that’s one of the busiest parts of the town. But, say, it is funny that a big town like Paris wouldn’t have a Galleria, isn’t it?

Well, we went out to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I’ve ever seen in all my life. The town ain’t so much, but there’s a lake and a swell forest that we used to go off bumming in all day, a couple of us kids, and my old man made me a sling shot and we got a lot of things with it but the best one was a magpie. Young Dick Atkinson shot a rabbit with it one day and we put it under a tree and were all sitting around and Dick had some cigarettes and all of a sudden the rabbit jumped up and beat it into the brush and we chased it but we couldn’t find it. Gee, we had fun at Maisons. Mrs. Meyers used to give me lunch in the morning and I’d be gone all day. I learned to talk French quick. It’s an easy language.

As soon as we got to Maisons, my old man wrote to Milan for his license and he was pretty worried till it came. He used to sit around the Café de Paris in Maisons with the gang, there were lots of guys he’d known when he rode up at Paris, before the war, lived at Maisons, and there’s a lot of time to sit around because the work around a racing stable, for the jocks, that is, is all cleaned up by nine o’clock in the morning. They take the first bunch of skins out to gallop them at 5:30 in the morning and they work the second lot at 8 o’clock. That means getting up early all right and going to bed early, too. If a jock’s riding for somebody too, he can’t go boozing around because the trainer always has an eye on him if he’s a kid and if he ain’t a kid he’s always got an eye on himself. So mostly if a jock ain’t working he sits around the Café de Paris with the gang and they can all sit around about two or three hours in front of some drink like a vermouth and seltz and they talk and tell stories and shoot pool and it’s sort of like a club or the Galleria in Milan. Only it ain’t really like the Galleria because there everybody is going by all the time and there’s everybody around at the tables.

Well, my old man got his license all right. They sent it through to him without a word and he rode a couple of times. Amiens, up country and that sort of thing, but he didn’t seem to get any engagement. Everybody liked him and whenever I’d come into the Café in the forenoon I’d find somebody drinking with him because my old man wasn’t tight like most of these jockeys that have got the first dollar they made riding at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in nineteen ought four. That’s what my old man would say when he’d kid George Burns. But it seemed like everybody steered clear of giving my old man any mounts.

We went out to wherever they were runnning every day with the car from Maisons and that was the most fun of all. I was glad when the horses came back from Deauville and the summer. Even though it meant no more bumming in the woods,’cause then we’d ride to Enghien or Tremblay or St. Cloud and watch them from the trainers’ and jockeys’ stand. I sure learned about racing from going out with that gang and the fun of it was going every day.

I remember once out at St. Cloud. It was a big two hundred thousand franc race with seven entries and Kzar a big favorite. I went around to the paddock to see the horses with my old man and you never saw such horses. This Kzar is a great big yellow horse that looks like just nothing but run. I never saw such a horse. He was being led around the paddocks with his head down and when he went by me I felt all hollow inside he was so beautiful. There never was such a wonderful, lean, running built horse. And he went around the paddock putting his feet just so and quiet and careful and moving easy like he knew just what he had to do and not jerking and standing up on his legs and getting wild eyed like you see these selling platers with a shot of dope in them. The crowd was so thick I couldn’t see him again except just his legs going by and some yellow and my old man started out through the crowd and I followed him over to the jock’s dressing room back in the trees and there was a big crowd around there, too, but the man at the door in a derby nodded to my old man and we got in and everybody was sitting around and getting dressed and pulling shirts over their heads and pulling boots on and it all smelled hot and sweaty and linimenty and outside was the crowd looking in.

The old man went over and sat down beside George Gardner that was getting into his pants and said, “What’s the dope, George?” just in an ordinary tone of voice ‘cause there ain’t any use him feeling around because George either can tell him or he can’t tell him.

“He won’t win,” George says very low, leaning over and buttoning the bottoms of his breeches.

“Who will?” my old man says, leaning over close so nobody can hear.

“Kircubbin,” George says, “and if he does, save me a couple of tickets.”

My old man says something in a regular voice to George and George says, “Don’t ever bet on anything I tell you,” kidding like, and we beat it out and through all the crowd that was looking in, over to the 100 franc mutuel machine. But I knew something big was up because George is Kzar’s jockey. On the way he gets one of the yellow odds-sheets with the starting prices on and Kzar is only paying 5 for 10, Cefisidote is next at 3 to 1 and fifth down the list this Kircubbin at 8 to 1. My old man bets five thousand on Kircubbin to win and puts on a thousand to place and we went around back of the grandstand to go up the stairs and get a place to watch the race.

We were jammed in tight and first a man in a long coat with a gray tall hat and a whip folded up in his hand came out and then one after another the horses, with the jocks up and a stable boy holding the bridle on each side and walking along, followed the old guy. That big yellow horse Kzar came first. He didn’t look so big when you first looked at him until you saw the length of his legs and the whole way he’s built and the way he moves. Gosh, I never saw such a horse. George Gardner was riding him and they moved along slow, back of the old guy in the gray tall hat that walked along like he was a ring master in a circus. Back of Kzar, moving along smooth and yellow in the sun, was a good looking black with a nice head with Tommy Archibald riding him; and after the black was a string of five more horses all moving along slow in a procession past the grandstand and the pesage. My old man said the black was Kircubbin and I took a good look at him and he was a nice-looking horse, all right, but nothing like Kzar.

Everybody cheered Kzar when he went by and he sure was one swell-looking horse. The procession of them went around on the other side past the pelouse and then back up to the near end of the course and the circus master had the stable boys turn them loose one after another so they could gallop by the stands on their way up to the post and let everybody have a good look at them. They weren’t at the post hardly any time at all when the gong started and you could see them way off across the infield all in a bunch starting on the first swing like a lot of little toy horses. I was watching them through the glasses and Kzar was running well back, with one of the bays making the pace. They swept down and around and came pounding past and Kzar was way back when they passed us and this Kircubbin horse in front and going smooth. Gee, it’s awful when they go by you and then you have to watch them go farther away and get smaller and smaller and then all bunched up on the turns and then come around towards into the stretch and you feel like swearing and god-damming worse and worse. Finally they made the last turn and came into the straightaway with this Kircubbin horse way out in front. Everybody was looking funny and saying “Kzar” in sort of a sick way and them pounding nearer down the stretch, and then something came out of the pack right into my glasses like a horse-headed yellow streak and everybody began to yell “Kzar” as though they were crazy. Kzar came on faster than I’d ever seen anything in my life and pulled up on Kircubbin that was going fast as any black horse could go with the jock flogging hell out of him with the gad and they were right dead neck and neck for a second but Kzar seemed going about twice as fast with those great jumps and that head out — but it was while they were neck and neck that they passed the winning post and when the numbers went up in the slots the first one was 2 and that meant that Kircubbin had won.

I felt all trembly and funny inside, and then we were all jammed in with the people going downstairs to stand in front of the board where they’d post what Kircubbin paid. Honest, watching the race I’d forgot how much my old man had bet on Kircubbin. I’d wanted Kzar to win so damned bad. But now it was all over it was swell to know we had the winner.

“Wasn’t it a swell race, Dad?” I said to him.

He looked at me sort of funny with his derby on the back of his head. “George Gardner’s a swell jockey, all right,” he said. “It sure took a great jock to keep that Kzar horse from winning.”

Of course I knew it was funny all the time. But my old man saying that right out like that sure took the kick all out of it for me and I didn’t get the real kick back again ever, even when they posted the numbers upon the board and the bell rang to pay off and we saw that Kircubbin paid 67.50 for 10. All round people were saying, “Poor Kzar! Poor Kzar!” And I thought, I wish I were a jockey and could have rode him instead of that son of a bitch. And that was funny, thinking of George Gardner as a son of a bitch because I’d always liked him and besides he’d given us the winner, but I guess that’s what he is, all right.

My old man had a big lot of money after that race and he took to coming into Paris oftener. If they raced at Tremblay he’d have them drop him in town on their way back to Maisons and he and I’d sit out in front of the Café de la Paix and watch the people go by. It’s funny sitting there. There’s streams of people going by and all sorts of guys come up and want to sell you things, and I loved to sit there with my old man. That was when we’d have the most fun. Guys would come by selling funny rabbits that jumped if you squeezed a bulb and they’d come up to us and my old man would kid with them. He could talk French just like English and all those kind of guys knew him ‘cause you can always tell a jockey — and then we always sat at the same table and they got used to seeing us there. There were guys selling matrimonial papers and girls selling rubber eggs that when you squeezed them a rooster came out of them and one old wormy-looking guy that went by with post-cards of Paris, showing them to everybody, and, of course, nobody ever bought any, and then he would come back and show the under side of the pack and they would all be smutty postcards and lots of people would dig down and buy them.

Gee, I remember the funny people that used to go by. Girls around supper time looking for somebody to take them out to eat and they’d speak to my old man and he’d make some joke at them in French and they’d pat me on the head and go on. Once there was an American woman sitting with her kid daughter at the next table to us and they were both eating ices and I kept looking at the girl and she was awfully good looking and I smiled at her and she smiled at me but that was all that ever came of it because I looked for her mother and her every day and I made up ways that I was going to speak to her and I wondered if I got to know her if her mother would let me take her out to Auteuil or Tremblay but I never saw either of them again. Anyway, I guess it wouldn’t have been any good, anyway, because looking back on it I remember the way I thought out would be best to speak to her was to say, “Pardon me, but perhaps I can give you a winner at Enghien today?” and, after all, maybe she would have thought I was a tout instead of really trying to give her a winner.

We’d sit at the Café de la Paix, my old man and me, and we had a big drag with the waiter because my old man drank whisky and it cost five francs, and that meant a good tip when the saucers were counted up. My old man was drinking more than I’d ever seen him, but he wasn’t riding at all now and besides he said that whisky kept his weight down. But I noticed he was putting it on, all right, just the same. He’d busted away from his old gang out at Maisons and seemed to like just sitting around on the boulevard with me. But he was dropping money every day at the track. He’d feel sort of doleful after the last race, if he’d lost on the day, until we’d get to our table and he’d have his first whisky and then he’d be fine.

He’d be reading the Paris-Sport and he’d look over at me and say, “Where’s your girl, Joe?” to kid me on account I had told him about the girl that day at the next table. And I’d get red, but I liked being kidded about her. It gave me a good feeling. “Keep your eye peeled for her, Joe,” he’d say, “she’ll be back.”

He’d ask me questions about things and some of the things I’d say he’d laugh. And then he’d get started talking about things. About riding down in Egypt, or at St. Moritz on the ice before my mother died, and about during the war when they had regular races down in the south of France without any purses, or betting or crowd or anything just to keep the breed up. Regular races with the jocks riding hell out of the horses. Gee, I could listen to my old man talk by the hour, especially when he’d had a couple or so of drinks. He’d tell me about when he was a boy in Kentucky and going coon hunting, and the old days in the States before everything went on the bum there. And he’d say, “Joe, when we’ve got a decent stake, you’re going back there to the States and go to school.”

“What’ve I got to go back there to go to school for when everything’s on the bum there?” I’d ask him.

“That’s different,” he’d say and get the waiter over and pay the pile of saucers and we’d get a taxi to the Gare St. Lazare and get on the train out to Maisons.

One day at Auteuil, after a selling steeplechase, my old man bought in the winner for 30,000 francs. He had to bid a little to get him but the stable let the horse go finally and my old man had his permit and his colors in a week. Gee, I felt proud when my old man was an owner. He fixed it up for stable space with Charles Drake and cut out coming in to Paris, and started his running and sweating out again, and him and I were the whole stable gang. Our horse’s name was Gilford, he was Irish bred and a nice, sweet jumper. My old man figured that training him and riding him, himself, he was a good investment. I was proud of everything and I thought Gilford was as good a horse as Kzar. He was a good, solid jumper, a bay, with plenty of speed on the flat, if you asked him for it, and he was a nice-looking horse, too.

Gee, I was fond of him. The first time he started with my old man up, he finished third in a 2500 meter hurdle race and when my old man got off him, all sweating and happy in the place stall, and went in to weigh, I felt as proud of him as though it was the first race he’d ever placed in. You see, when a guy ain’t been riding for a long time, you can’t make yourself really believe that he has ever rode. The whole thing was different now, ‘cause down in Milan, even big races never seemed to make any difference to my old man, if he won he wasn’t ever excited or anything, and now it was so I couldn’t hardly sleep the night before a race and I knew my old man was excited, too, even if he didn’t show it. Riding for yourself makes an awful difference.

Second time Gilford and my old man started, was a rainy Sunday at Auteuil, in the Prix du Marat, a 4500 meter steeplechase. As soon as he’d gone out I beat it up in the stand with the new glasses my old man had bought for me to watch them. They started way over at the far end of the course and there was some trouble at the barrier. Something with goggle blinders on was making a great fuss and rearing around and busted the barrier once, but I could see my old man in our black jacket, with a white cross and a black cap, sitting up on Gilford, and patting him with his hand. Then they were off in a jump and out of sight behind the trees and the gong going for dear life and the pari-mutuel wickets rattling down. Gosh, I was so excited, I was afraid to look at them, but I fixed the glasses on the place where they would come out back of the trees and then out they came with the old black jacket going third and they all sailing over the jump like birds. Then they went out of sight again and then they came pounding out and down the hill and all going nice and sweet and easy and taking the fence smooth in a bunch, and moving away from us all solid. Looked as though you could walk across on their backs they were all so bunched and going so smooth. Then they bellied over the big double Bullfinch and something came down. I couldn’t see who it was, but in a minute the horse was up and galloping free and the field, all bunched still, sweeping around the long left turn into the straightaway. They jumped the stone wall and came jammed down the stretch toward the big water-jump right in front of the stands. I saw them coming and hollered at my old man as he went by, and he was leading by about a length and riding way out, and light as a monkey, and they were racing for the water-jump. They took off over the big hedge of the water-jump in a pack and then there was a crash, and two horses pulled sideways out off it, and kept on going, and three others were piled up. I couldn’t see my old man anywhere. One horse kneed himself up and the jock had hold of the bridle and mounted and went slamming on after the place money. The other horse was up and away by himself, jerking his head and galloping with the bridle rein hanging and the jock staggered over to one side of the track against the fence. Then Gilford rolled over to one side off my old man and got up and started to run on three legs with his front off hoof dangling and there was my old man laying there on the grass flat out with his face up and blood all over the side of his head. I ran down the stand and bumped into a jam of people and got to the rail and a cop grabbed me and held me and two big stretcher-bearers were going out after my old man and around on the other side of the course I saw three horses, strung way out, coming out of the trees and taking the jump.

My old man was dead when they brought him in and while a doctor was listening to his heart with a thing plugged in his ears, I heard a shot up the track that meant they’d killed Gilford. I lay down beside my old man, when they carried the stretcher into the hospital room, and hung onto the stretcher and cried and cried, and he looked so white and gone and so awfully dead, and I couldn’t help feeling that if my old man was dead maybe they didn’t need to have shot Gilford. His hoof might have got well. I don’t know. I loved my old man so much.

Then a couple of guys came in and one of them patted me on the back and then went over and looked at my old man and then pulled a sheet off the cot and spread it over him; and the other was telephoning in French for them to send the ambulance to take him out to Maisons. And I couldn’t stop crying, crying and choking, sort of, and George Gardner came in and sat down beside me on the floor and put his arm around me and says, “Come on, Joe, old boy. Get up and we’ll go out and wait for the ambulance.”

George and I went out to the gate and I was trying to stop bawling and George wiped off my face with his handkerchief and we were standing back a little ways while the crowd was going out of the gate and a couple of guys stopped near us while we were waiting for the crowd to get through the gate and one of them was counting a bunch of mutuel tickets and he said, “Well, Butler got his, all right.”

The other guy said, “I don’t give a good goddam if he did, the crook. He had it coming to him on the stuff he’s pulled.”

“I’ll say he had,” said the other guy, and tore the bunch of tickets in two.

And George Gardner looked at me to see if I’d heard and I had all right and he said, “Don’t you listen to what those bums said, Joe. Your old man was one swell guy.”

But I don’t know. Seems like when they get started they don’t leave a guy nothing.

CHAPTER XIV

Maera lay still his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Some one had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passageway around under the grandstand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART I

THE TRAIN WENT ON UP THE TRACK OUT of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spiles of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current.

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory. As the shadow of the kingfisher moved up the stream, a big trout shot upstream in a long angle, only his shadow marking the angle, then lost his shadow as he came through the surface of the water, caught the sun, and then, as he went back into the stream under the surface, his shadow seemed to float down the stream with the current, unresisting, to his post under the bridge where he tightened facing up into the current.

Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.

He turned and looked down the stream. It stretched away, pebbly-bottomed with shallows and big boulders and a deep pool as it curved away around the foot of a bluff.

Nick walked back up the ties to where his pack lay in the cinders beside the railway track. He was happy. He adjusted the pack harness around the bundle, pulling straps tight, slung the pack on his back, got his arms through the shoulder straps and took some of the pull off his shoulders by leaning his forehead against the wide band of the tump-line. Still, it was too heavy. It was much too heavy. He had his leather rod-case in his hand and leaning forward to keep the weight of the pack high on his shoulders he walked along the road that paralleled the railway track, leaving the burned town behind in the heat, and then turned off around a hill with a high, fire-scarred hill on either side onto a road that went back into the country. He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking up-hill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.

From the time he had gotten down off the train and the baggage man had thrown his pack out of the open car door things had been different. Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed, but it did not matter. It could not all be burned. He knew that. He hiked along the road, sweating in the sun, climbing to cross the range of hills that separated the railway from the pine plains.

The road ran on, dipping occasionally, but always climbing. Nick went on up. Finally the road after going parallel to the burnt hillside reached the top. Nick leaned back against a stump and slipped out of the pack harness. Ahead of him, as far as he could see, was the pine plain. The burned country stopped off at the left with the range of hills. On ahead islands of dark pine trees rose out of the plain. Far off to the left was the line of the river. Nick followed it with his eye and caught glints of the water in the sun.

There was nothing but the pine plain ahead of him, until the far blue hills that marked the Lake Superior height of land. He could hardly see them, faint and far away in the heat-light over the plain. If he looked too steadily they were gone. But if he only half-looked they were there, the far-off hills of the height of land.

Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black. They were not the big grasshoppers with yellow and black or red and black wings whirring out from their black wing sheathing as they fly up. These were just ordinary hoppers, but all a sooty black in color. Nick had wondered about them as he walked, without really thinking about them. Now, as he watched the black hopper that was nibbling at the wool of his sock with its fourway lip, he realized that they had all turned black from living in the burned-over land. He realized that the fire must have come the year before, but the grasshoppers were all black now. He wondered how long they would stay that way.

Carefully he reached his hand down and took hold of the hopper by the wings. He turned him up, all his legs walking in the air, and looked at his jointed belly. Yes, it was black too, iridescent where the back and head were dusty.

“Go on, hopper,” Nick said, speaking out loud for the first time. “Fly away somewhere.”

He tossed the grasshopper up into the air and watched him sail away to a charcoal stump across the road.

Nick stood up. He leaned his back against the weight of his pack where it rested upright on the stump and got his arms through the shoulder straps. He stood with the pack on his back on the brow of the hill looking out across the country toward the distant river and then struck down the hillside away from the road. Underfoot the ground was good walking. Two hundred yards down the hillside the fire line stopped. Then it was sweet fern, growing ankle high, to walk through, and clumps of jack pines; a long undulating country with frequent rises and descents, sandy underfoot and the country alive again.

Nick kept his direction by the sun. He knew where he wanted to strike the river and he kept on through the pine plain, mounting small rises to see other rises ahead of him and sometimes from the top of a rise a great solid island of pines off to his right or his left. He broke off some sprigs of the heathery sweet fern, and put them under his pack straps. The chafing crushed it and he smelled it as he walked.

He was tired and very hot, walking across the uneven, shadeless pine plain. At any time he knew he could strike the river by turning off to his left. It could not be more than a mile away. But he kept on toward the north to hit the river as far upstream as he could go in one day’s walking.

For some time as he walked Nick had been in sight of one of the big islands of pine standing out above the rolling high ground he was crossing.

He dipped down and then as he came slowly up to the crest of the bridge he turned and made toward the pine trees.

There was no underbrush in the island of pine trees. The trunks of the trees went straight up or slanted toward each other. The trunks were straight and brown without branches. The branches were high above. Some interlocked to make a solid shadow on the brown forest floor. Around the grove of trees was a bare space. It was brown and soft underfoot as Nick walked on it. This was the over-lapping of the pine needle floor, extending out beyond the width of the high branches. The trees had grown tall and the branches moved high, leaving in the sun this bare space they had once covered with shadow. Sharp at the edge of this extension of the forest floor commenced the sweet fern.

Nick slipped off his pack and lay down in the shade. He lay on his back and looked up into the pine trees. His neck and back and the small of his back rested as he stretched. The earth felt good against his back. He looked up at the sky, through the branches, and then shut his eyes. He opened them and looked up again. There was a wind high up in the branches. He shut his eyes again and went to sleep.

Nick woke stiff and cramped. The sun was nearly down. His pack was heavy and the straps painful as he lifted it on. He leaned over with the pack on and picked up the leather rod-case and started out from the pine trees across the sweet fern swale, toward the river. He knew it could not be more than a mile.

He came down a hillside covered with stumps into a meadow. At the edge of the meadow flowed the river. Nick was glad to get to the river. He walked upstream through the meadow. His trousers were soaked with the dew as he walked. After the hot day, the dew had come quickly and heavily. The river made no sound. It was too fast and smooth. At the edge of the meadow, before he mounted to a piece of high ground to make camp, Nick looked down the river at the trout rising. They were rising to insects come from the swamp on the other side of the stream when the sun went down. The trout jumped out of water to take them. While Nick walked through the little stretch of meadow alongside the stream, trout had jumped high out of water. Now as he looked down the river, the insects must be settling on the surface, for the trout were feeding steadily all down the stream. As far down the long stretch as he could see, the trout were rising, making circles all down the surface of the water, as though it were starting to rain.

The ground rose, wooded and sandy, to overlook the meadow, the stretch of river and the swamp. Nick dropped his pack and rod-case and looked for a level piece of ground. He was very hungry and he wanted to make his camp before he cooked. Between two jack pines, the ground was quite level. He took the ax out of the pack and chopped out two projecting roots. That leveled a piece of ground large enough to sleep on. He smoothed out the sandy soil with his hand and pulled all the sweet fern bushes by their roots. His hands smelled good from the sweet fern. He smoothed the uprooted earth. He did not want anything making lumps under the blankets. When he had the ground smooth, he spread his three blankets. One he folded double, next to the ground. The other two he spread on top.

With the ax he slit off a bright slab of pine from one of the stumps and split it into pegs for the tent. He wanted them long and solid to hold in the ground. With the tent unpacked and spread on the ground, the pack, leaning against a jackpine, looked much smaller. Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridge-pole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine. The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline. Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides. He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight.

Across the open mouth of the tent Nick fixed cheesecloth to keep out mosquitoes. He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas. Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp. He was there, in the good place. He was in his home where he had made it. Now he was hungry.

He came out, crawling under the cheesecloth. It was quite dark outside. It was lighter in the tent.

Nick went over to the pack and found, with his fingers, a long nail in a paper sack of nails, in the bottom of the pack. He drove it into the pine tree, holding it close and hitting it gently with the flat of the ax. He hung the pack up on the nail. All his supplies were in the pack. They were off the ground and sheltered now.

Nick was hungry. He did not believe he had ever been hungrier. He opened and emptied a can of pork and beans and a can of spaghetti into the frying pan.

“I’ve got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if I’m willing to carry it,” Nick said. His voice sounded strange in the darkening woods. He did not speak again.

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate.

“Chrise,” Nick said, “Geezus Chrise,” he said happily.

He ate the whole plateful before he remembered the bread. Nick finished the second plateful with the bread, mopping the plate shiny. He had not eaten since a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich in the station restaurant at St. Ignace. It had been a very fine experience. He had been that hungry before, but had not been able to satisfy it. He could have made camp hours before if he had wanted to. There were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good.

Nick tucked two big chips of pine under the grill. The fire flared up. He had forgotten to get water for the coffee. Out of the pack he got a folding canvas bucket and walked down the hill, across the edge of the meadow, to the stream. The other bank was in the white mist. The grass was wet and cold as he knelt on the bank and dipped the canvas bucket into the stream. It bellied and pulled hard in the current. The water was ice cold. Nick rinsed the bucket and carried it full up to the camp. Up away from the stream it was not so cold.

Nick drove another big nail and hung up the bucket full of water. He dipped the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and put the pot on. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he had taken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was Hopkins’s way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins. While he waited for the coffee to boil, he opened a small can of apricots. He liked to open cans. He emptied the can of apricots out into a tin cup. While he watched the coffee on the fire, he drank the juice syrup of the apricots, carefully at first to keep from spilling, then meditatively, sucking the apricots down. They were better than fresh apricots.

The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds ran down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph for Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the pot at all. Not the first cup. It should be straight Hopkins all the way. Hop deserved that. He was a very serious coffee drinker. He was the most serious man Nick had ever known. Not heavy, serious. That was a long time ago. Hopkins spoke without moving his lips. He had played polo. He made millions of dollars in Texas. He had borrowed carfare to go to Chicago, when the wire came that his first big well had come in. He could have wired for money. That would have been too slow. They called Hop’s girl the Blonde Venus. Hop did not mind because she was not his real girl. Hopkins said very confidently that none of them would make fun of his real girl. He was right. Hopkins went away when the telegram came. That was on the Black River. It took eight days for the telegram to reach him. Hopkins gave away his .22 caliber Colt automatic pistol to Nick. He gave his camera to Bill. It was to remember him always by. They were all going fishing again next summer. The Hop Head was rich. He would get a yacht and they would all cruise along the north shore of Lake Superior. He was excited but serious. They said good-bye and all felt bad. It broke up the trip. They never saw Hopkins again. That was a long time ago on the Black River.

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.

Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire, when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blanket. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.

CHAPTER XV

They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head.

They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the morning.

While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up both dropped him. They were both disgusted. “How about a chair, Will?” asked one of the guards. “Better get one,” said a man in a derby hat.

When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight, the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped back onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART II

IN THE MORNING THE SUN WAS UP AND the tent was starting to get hot. Nick crawled out under the mosquito netting stretched across the mouth of the tent, to look at the morning. The grass was wet on his hands as he came out. He held his trousers and his shoes in his hands. The sun was just up over the hill. There was the meadow, the river and the swamp. There were birch trees in the green of the swamp on the other side of the river.

The river was clear and smoothly fast in the early morning. Down about two hundred yards were three logs all the way across the stream. They made the water smooth and deep above them. As Nick watched, a mink crossed the river on the logs and went into the swamp. Nick was excited. He was excited by the early morning and the river. He was really too hurried to eat breakfast, but he knew he must. He built a little fire and put on the coffee pot.

While the water was heating in the pot he took an empty bottle and went down over the edge of the high ground to the meadow. The meadow was wet with dew and Nick wanted to catch grasshoppers for bait before the sun dried the grass. He found plenty of good grasshoppers. They were at the base of the grass stems. Sometimes they clung to a grass stem. They were cold and wet with the dew, and could not jump until the sun warmed them. Nick picked them up, taking only the medium-sized brown ones, and put them into the bottle. He turned over a log and just under the shelter of the edge were several hundred hoppers. It was a grasshopper lodging house. Nick put about fifty of the medium browns into the bottle. While he was picking up the hoppers the others warmed in the sun and commenced to hop away. They flew when they hopped. At first they made one flight and stayed stiff when they landed, as though they were dead.

Nick knew that by the time he was through with breakfast they would be as lively as ever. Without dew in the grass it would take him all day to catch a bottle full of good grasshoppers and he would have to crush many of them, slamming at them with his hat. He washed his hands at the stream. He was excited to be near it. Then he walked up to the tent. The hoppers were already jumping stiffly in the grass. In the bottle, warmed by the sun, they were jumping in a mass. Nick put in a pine stick as a cork. It plugged the mouth of the bottle enough, so the hoppers could not get out and left plenty of air passage.

He had rolled the log back and knew he could get grasshoppers there every morning.

Nick laid the bottle full of jumping grasshoppers against a pine trunk. Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat flour with water and stirred it smooth, one cup of flour, one cup of water. He put a handful of coffee in the pot and dipped a lump of grease out of a can and slid it sputtering across the hot skillet. On the smoking skillet he poured smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply. Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to firm, then brown, then crisp. The surface was bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under the browned under surface with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose on the surface. I won’t try and flop it, he thought. He slid the chip of clean wood all the way under the cake, and flopped it over onto its face. It sputtered in the pan.

When it was cooked Nick regreased the skillet. He used all the batter. It made another big flapjack and one smaller one.

Nick ate a big flapjack and a smaller one, covered with apple butter. He put apple butter on the third cake, folded it over twice, wrapped it in oiled paper and put it in his shirt pocket. He put the apple butter jar back in the pack and cut bread for two sandwiches.

In the pack he found a big onion. He sliced it in two and peeled the silky outer skin. Then he cut one half into slices and made onion sandwiches. He wrapped them in oiled paper and buttoned them in the other pocket of his khaki shirt. He turned the skillet upside down on the grill, drank the coffee, sweetened and yellow brown with the condensed milk in it, and tidied up the camp. It was a good camp.

Nick took his fly rod out of the leather rod-case, jointed it, and shoved the rod-case back into the tent. He put on the reel and threaded the line through the guides. He had to hold it from hand to hand, as he threaded it, or it would slip back through its own weight. It was a heavy, double tapered fly line. Nick had paid eight dollars for it a long time ago. It was made heavy to lift back in the air and come forward flat and heavy and straight to make it possible to cast a fly which has no weight. Nick opened the aluminum leader box. The leaders were coiled between the damp flannel pads. Nick had wet the pads at the water cooler on the train up to St. Ignace. In the damp pads the gut leaders had softened and Nick unrolled one and tied it by a loop at the end to the heavy fly line. He fastened a hook on the end of the leader. It was a small hook; very thin and springy.

Nick took it from his hook book, sitting with the rod across his lap. He tested the knot and the spring of the rod by pulling the line taut. It was a good feeling. He was careful not to let the hook bite into his finger.

He started down to the stream, holding his rod, the bottle of grasshoppers hung from his neck by a thong tied in half hitches around the neck of the bottle. His landing net hung by a hook from his belt. Over his shoulder was a long flour sack tied at each corner into an ear. The cord went over his shoulder. The sack flapped against his legs.

Nick felt awkward and professionally happy with all his equipment hanging from him. The grasshopper bottle swung against his chest. In his shirt the breast pockets bulged against him with the lunch and his fly book.

He stepped into the stream. It was a shock. His trousers clung tight to his legs. His shoes felt the gravel. The water was a rising cold shock.

Rushing, the current sucked against his legs. Where he stepped in, the water was over his knees. He waded with the current. The gravel slid under his shoes. He looked down at the swirl of water below each leg and tipped up the bottle to get a grasshopper.

The first grasshopper gave a jump in the neck of the bottle and went out into the water. He was sucked under in the whirl by Nick’s right leg and came to the surface a little way down stream. He floated rapidly, kicking. In a quick circle, breaking the smooth surface of the water, he disappeared. A trout had taken him.

Another hopper poked his face out of the bottle. His antennæ wavered. He was getting his front legs out of the bottle to jump. Nick took him by the head and held him while he threaded the slim hook under his chin, down through his thorax and into the last segments of his abdomen. The grasshopper took hold of the hook with his front feet, spitting tobacco juice on it. Nick dropped him into the water.

Holding the rod in his right hand he let out line against the pull of the grasshopper in the current. He stripped off line from the reel with his left hand and let it run free. He could see the hopper in the little waves of the current. It went out of sight.

There was a tug on the line. Nick pulled against the taut line. It was his first strike. Holding the now living rod across the current, he brought in the line with his left hand. The rod bent in jerks, the trout pumping against the current. Nick knew it was a small one. He lifted the rod straight up in the air. It bowed with the pull.

He saw the trout in the water jerking with his head and body against the shifting tangent of the line in the stream.

Nick took the line in his left hand and pulled the trout, thumping tiredly against the current, to the surface. His back was mottled the clear, water-over-gravel color, his side flashing in the sun. The rod under his right arm, Nick stooped, dipping his right hand into the current. He held the trout, never still, with his moist right hand, while he unhooked the barb from his mouth, then dropped him back into the stream.

He hung unsteadily in the current, then settled to the bottom beside a stone. Nick reached down his hand to touch him, his arm to the elbow under water. The trout was steady in the moving stream, resting on the gravel, beside a stone. As Nick’s fingers touched him, touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream.

He’s all right, Nick thought. He was only tired.

He had wet his hand before he touched the trout, so he would not disturb the delicate mucus that covered him. If a trout was touched with a dry hand, a white fungus attacked the unprotected spot. Years before when he had fished crowded streams, with fly fishermen ahead of him and behind him, Nick had again and again come on dead trout, furry with white fungus, drifted against a rock, or floating belly up in some pool. Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it.

He wallowed down the stream, above his knees in the current, through the fifty yards of shallow water above the pile of logs that crossed the stream. He did not rebait his hook and held it in his hand as he waded. He was certain he could catch small trout in the shallows, but he did not want them. There would be no big trout in the shallows this time of day.

Now the water deepened up his thighs sharply and coldly. Ahead was the smooth dammed-back flood of water above the logs. The water was smooth and dark; on the left, the lower edge of the meadow; on the right the swamp.

Nick leaned back against the current and took a hopper from the bottle. He threaded the hopper on the hook and spat on him for good luck. Then he pulled several yards of line from the reel and tossed the hopper out ahead onto the fast, dark water. It floated down towards the logs, then the weight of the line pulled the bait under the surface. Nick held the rod in his right hand, letting the line run out through his fingers.

There was a long tug. Nick struck and the rod came alive and dangerous, bent double, the line tightening, coming out of water, tightening, all in a heavy, dangerous, steady pull. Nick felt the moment when the leader would break if the strain increased and let the line go.

The reel ratcheted into a mechanical shriek as the line went out in a rush. Too fast. Nick could not check it, the line rushing out, the reel note rising as the line ran out.

With the core of the reel showing, his heart feeling stopped with the excitement, leaning back against the current that mounted icily his thighs, Nick thumbed the reel hard with his left hand. It was awkward getting his thumb inside the fly reel frame.

As he put on pressure the line tightened into sudden hardness and beyond the logs a huge trout went high out of water. As he jumped, Nick lowered the tip of the rod. But he felt, as he dropped the tip to ease the strain, the moment when the strain was too great; the hardness too tight. Of course, the leader had broken. There was no mistaking the feeling when all spring left the line and it became dry and hard. Then it went slack.

His mouth dry, his heart down, Nick reeled in. He had never seen so big a trout. There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped. He looked as broad as a salmon.

Nick’s hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as though it would be better to sit down.

The leader had broken where the hook was tied to it. Nick took it in his hand. He thought of the trout somewhere on the bottom, holding himself steady over the gravel, far down below the light, under the logs, with the hook in his jaw. Nick knew the trout’s teeth would cut through the snell of the hook. The hook would imbed itself in his jaw. He’d bet the trout was angry. Anything that size would be angry. That was a trout. He had been solidly hooked. Solid as a rock. He felt like a rock, too, before he started off. By God, he was a big one. By God, he was the biggest one I ever heard of.

Nick climbed out onto the meadow and stood, water running down his trousers and out of his shoes, his shoes squelchy. He went over and sat on the logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.

He wriggled his toes in the water, in his shoes, and got out a cigarette from his breast pocket. He lit it and tossed the match into the fast water below the logs. A tiny trout rose at the match, as it swung around in the fast current. Nick laughed. He would finish the cigarette.

He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his shoulders ache. It was all right now. His rod lying out on the logs, Nick tied a new hook on the leader, pulling the gut tight until it grimped into itself in a hard knot.

He baited up, then picked up the rod and walked to the far end of the logs to get into the water, where it was not too deep. Under and beyond the logs was a deep pool. Nick walked around the shallow shelf near the swamp shore until he came out on the shallow bed of the stream.

On the left, where the meadow ended and the woods began, a great elm tree was uprooted. Gone over in a storm, it lay back into the woods, its roots clotted with dirt, grass growing in them, rising a solid bank beside the stream. The river cut to the edge of the uprooted tree. From where Nick stood he could see deep channels, like ruts, cut in the shallow bed of the stream by the flow of the current. Pebbly where he stood and pebbly and full of boulders beyond; where it curved near the tree roots, the bed of the stream was marly and between the ruts of deep water green weed fronds swung in the current.

Nick swung the rod back over his shoulder and forward, and the line, curving forward, laid the grasshopper down on one of the deep channels in the weeds. A trout struck and Nick hooked him.

Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the current, Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river. Holding the rod, pumping alive against the current, Nick brought the trout in. He rushed, but always came, the spring of the rod yielding to the rushes, sometimes jerking under water, but always bringing him in. Nick eased downstream with the rushes. The rod above his head he led the trout over the net, then lifted.

The trout hung heavy in the net, mottled trout back and silver sides in the meshes. Nick unhooked him; heavy sides, good to hold, big undershot jaw, and slipped him, heaving and big sliding, into the long sack that hung from his shoulders in the water.

Nick spread the mouth of the sack against the current and it filled, heavy with water. He held it up, the bottom in the stream, and the water poured out through the sides. Inside at the bottom was the big trout, alive in the water.

Nick moved downstream. The sack out ahead of him sunk heavy in the water, pulling from his shoulders.

It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck.

Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each shadow. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.

The very biggest ones would lie up close to the bank. You could always pick them up there on the Black. When the sun was down they all moved out into the current. Just when the sun made the water blinding in the glare before it went down, you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current. It was almost impossible to fish then, the surface of the water was blinding as a mirror in the sun. Of course, you could fish upstream, but in a stream like the Black, or this, you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place, the water piled up on you. It was no fun to fish upstream with this much current.

Nick moved along through the shallow stretch watching the banks for deep holes. A beech tree grew close beside the river, so that the branches hung down into the water. The stream went back in under the leaves. There were always trout in a place like that.

Nick did not care about fishing that hole. He was sure he would get hooked in the branches.

It looked deep though. He dropped the grasshopper so the current took it under water, back in under the overhanging branch. The line pulled hard and Nick struck. The trout threshed heavily, half out of water in the leaves and branches. The line was caught. Nick pulled hard and the trout was off. He reeled in and holding the hook in his hand, walked down the stream.

Ahead, close to the left bank, was a big log. Nick saw it was hollow; pointing up river the current entered it smoothly, only a little ripple spread each side of the log. The water was deepening. The top of the hollow log was gray and dry. It was partly in the shadow.

Nick took the cork out of the grasshopper bottle and a hopper clung to it. He picked him off, hooked him and tossed him out. He held the rod far out so that the hopper on the water moved into the current flowing into the hollow log. Nick lowered the rod and the hopper floated in. There was a heavy strike. Nick swung the rod against the pull. It felt as though he were hooked into the log itself, except for the live feeling.

He tried to force the fish out into the current. It came, heavily.

The line went slack and Nick thought the trout was gone. Then he saw him, very near, in the current, shaking his head, trying to get the hook out. His mouth was clamped shut. He was fighting the hook in the clear flowing current.

Looping in the line with his left hand, Nick swung the rod to make the line taut and tried to lead the trout toward the net, but he was gone, out of sight, the line pumping. Nick fought him against the current, letting him thump in the water against the spring of the rod. He shifted the rod to his left hand, worked the trout upstream, holding his weight, fighting on the rod, and then let him down into the net. He lifted him clear of the water, a heavy half circle in the net, the net dripping, unhooked him and slid him into the sack.

He spread the mouth of the sack and looked down in at the two big trout alive in the water.

Through the deepening water, Nick waded over to the hollow log. He took the sack off, over his head, the trout flopping as it came out of water, and hung it so the trout were deep in the water. Then he pulled himself up on the log and sat, the water from his trouser and boots running down into the stream. He laid his rod down, moved along to the shady end of the log and took the sandwiches out of his pocket. He dipped the sandwiches in the cold water. The current carried away the crumbs. He ate the sandwiches and dipped his hat full of water to drink, the water running out through his hat just ahead of his drinking.

It was cool in the shade, sitting on the log. He took a cigarette out and struck a match to light it. The match sunk into the gray wood, making a tiny furrow. Nick leaned over the side of the log, found a hard place and lit the match. He sat smoking and watching the river.

Ahead the river narrowed and went into a swamp. The river became smooth and deep and the swamp looked solid with cedar trees, their trunks close together, their branches solid. It would not be possible to walk through a swamp like that. The branches grew so low. You would have to keep almost level with the ground to move at all. You could not crash through the branches. That must be why the animals that lived in swamps were built the way they were, Nick thought.

He wished he had brought something to read. He felt like reading. He did not feel like going on into the swamp. He looked down the river. A big cedar slanted all the way across the stream. Beyond that the river went into the swamp.

Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits, to hook big trout in places impossible to land them. In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic. In the swamp fishing was a tragic adventure. Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.

He took out his knife, opened it and stuck it in the log. Then he pulled up the sack, reached into it and brought out one of the trout. Holding him near the tail, hard to hold, alive, in his hand, he whacked him against the log. The trout quivered, rigid. Nick laid him on the log in the shade and broke the neck of the other fish the same way. He laid them side by side on the log. They were fine trout.

Nick cleaned them, slitting them from the vent to the tip of the jaw. All the insides and the gills and tongue came out in one piece. They were both males; long gray-white strips of milt, smooth and clean. All the insides clean and compact, coming out all together. Nick tossed the offal ashore for the minks to find.

He washed the trout in the stream. When he held them back up in the water they looked like live fish. Their color was not gone yet. He washed his hands and dried them on the log. Then he laid the trout on the sack spread out on the log, rolled them up in it, tied the bundle and put it in the landing net. His knife was still standing, blade stuck in the log. He cleaned it on the wood and put it in his pocket.

Nick stood up on the log, holding his rod, the landing net hanging heavy, then stepped into the water and splashed ashore. He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground. He was going back to camp. He looked back. The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.

L’ENVOI

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

CONTENTS

THE UNDEFEATED

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS

THE KILLERS

CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA?

FIFTY GRAND

A SIMPLE ENQUIRY

TEN INDIANS

A CANARY FOR ONE

AN ALPINE IDYLL

A PURSUIT RACE

TODAY IS FRIDAY

BANAL STORY

NOW I LAY ME

The first edition

THE UNDEFEATED

MANUEL GARCIA CLIMBED THE STAIRS to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway, felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.

“Retana,” he said, listening.

There was no answer.

He’s there, all right, Manuel thought.

“Retana,” he said and banged the door.

“Who’s there?” said someone in the office.

“Me, Manolo,” Manuel said.

“What do you want?” asked the voice.

“I want to work,” Manuel said.

Something in the door clicked several times and it swung open. Manuel went in, carrying his suitcase.

A little man sat behind a desk at the far side of the room. Over his head was a bull’s head, stuffed by a Madrid taxidermist; on the walls were framed photographs and bull-fight posters.

The little man sat looking at Manuel.

“I thought they’d killed you,” he said.

Manuel knocked with his knuckles on the desk. The little man sat looking at him across the desk.

“How many corridas you had this year?” Retana asked.

“One,” he answered.

“Just that one?” the little man asked.

“That’s all.”

“I read about it in the papers,” Retana said. He leaned back in the chair and looked at Manuel.

Manuel looked up at the stuffed bull. He had seen it often before. He felt a certain family interest in it. It had killed his brother, the promising one, about nine years ago. Manuel remembered the day. There was a brass plate on the oak shield the bull’s head was mounted on. Manuel could not read it, but he imagined it was in memory of his brother. Well, he had been a good kid.

The plate said: “The Bull ‘Mariposa’ of the Duke of Veragua, which accepted 9 varas for 7 caballos, and caused the death of Antonio Garcia, Novillero, April 27, 1909.”

Retana saw him looking at the stuffed bull’s head.

“The lot the Duke sent me for Sunday will make a scandal,” he said. “They’re all bad in the legs. What do they say about them at the Café?”

“I don’t know,” Manuel said. “I just got in.”

“Yes,” Retana said. “You still have your bag.”

He looked at Manuel, leaning back behind the big desk.

“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your cap.”

Manuel sat down; his cap off, his face was changed. He looked pale, and his coleta pinned forward on his head, so that it would not show under the cap, gave him a strange look.

“You don’t look well,” Retana said.

“I just got out of the hospital,” Manuel said.

“I heard they’d cut your leg off,” Retana said.

“No,” said Manuel. “It got all right.”

Retana leaned forward across the desk and pushed a wooden box of cigarettes toward Manuel.

“Have a cigarette,” he said.

“Thanks.”

Manuel lit it.

“Smoke?” he said, offering the match to Retana.

“No,” Retana waved his hand, “I never smoke.”

Retana watched him smoking.

“Why don’t you get a job and go to work?” he said.

“I don’t want to work,” Manuel said. “I am a bullfighter.”

“There aren’t any bullfighters any more,” Retana said.

“I’m a bullfighter,” Manuel said.

“Yes, while you’re in there,” Retana said.

Manuel laughed.

Retana sat, saying nothing and looking at Manuel.

“I’ll put you in a nocturnal if you want,” Retana offered.

“When?” Manuel asked.

“Tomorrow night.”

“I don’t like to substitute for anybody,” Manuel said. That was the way they all got killed. That was the way Salvador got killed. He tapped with his knuckles on the table.

“It’s all I’ve got,” Retana said.

“Why don’t you put me on next week?” Manuel suggested.

“You wouldn’t draw,” Retana said. “All they want is Litri and Rubito and La Torre. Those kids are good.”

“They’d come to see me get it,” Manuel said, hopefully.

“No, they wouldn’t. They don’t know who you are any more.”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff,” Manuel said.

“I’m offering to put you on tomorrow night,” Retana said. “You can work with young Hernandez and kill two novillos after the Charlots.”

“Whose novillos?” Manuel asked.

“I don’t know. Whatever stuff they’ve got in the corrals. What the veterinaries won’t pass in the daytime.”

“I don’t like to substitute,” Manuel said.

“You can take it or leave it,” Retana said. He leaned forward over the papers. He was no longer interested. The appeal that Manuel had made to him for a moment when he thought of the old days was gone. He would like to get him to substitute for Larita because he could get him cheaply. He could get others cheaply too. He would like to help him though. Still he had given him the chance. It was up to him.

“How much do I get?” Manuel asked. He was still playing with the idea of refusing. But he knew he could not refuse.

“Two hundred and fifty pesetas,” Retana said. He had thought of five hundred, but when he opened his mouth it said two hundred and fifty.

“You pay Villalta seven thousand,” Manuel said.

“You’re not Villalta,” Retana said.

“I know it,” Manuel said.

“He draws it, Manolo,” Retana said in explanation.

“Sure,” said Manuel. He stood up. “Give me three hundred, Retana.”

“All right,” Retana agreed. He reached in the drawer for a paper.

“Can I have fifty now?” Manuel asked.

“Sure,” said Retana. He took a fifty-peseta note out of his pocket-book and laid it, spread out flat, on the table.

Manuel picked it up and put it in his pocket.

“What about a cuadrilla?” he asked.

“There’s the boys that always work for me nights,” Retana said. “They’re all right.”

“How about picadors?” Manuel asked.

“They’re not much,” Retana admitted.

“I’ve got to have one good pic,” Manuel said.

“Get him then,” Retana said. “Go and get him.”

“Not out of this,” Manuel said. “I’m not paying for any cuadrilla out of sixty duros.”

Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel across the big desk.

“You know I’ve got to have one good pic,” Manuel said.

Retana said nothing but looked at Manuel from a long way off.

“It isn’t right,” Manuel said.

Retana was still considering him, leaning back in his chair, considering him from a long way away.

“There’re the regular pics,” he offered.

“I know,” Manuel said. “I know your regular pics.”

Retana did not smile. Manuel knew it was over.

“All I want is an even break,” Manuel said reasoningly. “When I go out there I want to be able to call my shots on the bull. It only takes one good picador.”

He was talking to a man who was no longer listening.

“If you want something extra,” Retana said, “go and get it. There will be a regular cuadrilla out there. Bring as many of your own pics as you want. The charlotada is over by 10.30.”

“All right,” Manuel said. “If that’s the way you feel about it.”

“That’s the way,” Retana said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Manuel said.

“I’ll be out there,” Retana said.

Manuel picked up his suitcase and went out.

“Shut the door,” Retana called.

Manuel looked back. Retana was sitting forward looking at some papers. Manuel pulled the door tight until it clicked.

He went down the stairs and out of the door into the hot brightness of the street. It was very hot in the street and the light on the white buildings was sudden and hard on his eyes. He walked down the shady side of the steep street toward the Puerta del Sol. The shade felt solid and cool as running water. The heat came suddenly as he crossed the intersecting streets. Manuel saw no one he knew in all the people he passed.

Just before the Puerta del Sol he turned into a café.

It was quiet in the café. There were a few men sitting at tables against the wall. At one table four men played cards. Most of the men sat against the wall smoking, empty coffee-cups and liqueur-glasses before them on the tables. Manuel went through the long room to a small room in back. A man sat at a table in the corner asleep. Manuel sat down at one of the tables.

A waiter came in and stood beside Manuel’s table.

“Have you seen Zurito?” Manuel asked him.

“He was in before lunch,” the waiter answered. “He won’t be back before five o’clock.”

“Bring me some coffee and milk and a shot of the ordinary,” Manuel said.

The waiter came back into the room carrying a tray with a big coffee-glass and a liqueur-glass on it. In his left hand he held a bottle of brandy. He swung these down to the table and a boy who had followed him poured coffee and milk into the glass from two shiny, spouted pots with long handles.

Manuel took off his cap and the waiter noticed his pigtail pinned forward on his head. He winked at the coffee-boy as he poured out the brandy into the little glass beside Manuel’s coffee. The coffee-boy looked at Manuel’s pale face curiously.

“You fighting here?” asked the waiter, corking up the bottle.

“Yes,” Manuel said. “Tomorrow.”

The waiter stood there, holding the bottle on one hip.

“You in the Charlie Chaplins?” he asked.

The coffee-boy looked away, embarrassed.

“No. In the ordinary.”

“I thought they were going to have Chaves and Hernandez,” the waiter said.

“No. Me and another.”

“Who? Chaves or Hernandez?”

“Hernandez, I think.”

“What’s the matter with Chaves?”

“He got hurt.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Retana.”

“Hey, Looie,” the waiter called to the next room, “Chaves got cogida.”

Manuel had taken the wrapper off the lumps of sugar and dropped them into his coffee. He stirred it and drank it down, sweet, hot, and warming in his empty stomach. He drank off the brandy.

“Give me another shot of that,” he said to the waiter.

The waiter uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full, slopping another drink into the saucer. Another waiter had come up in front of the table. The coffee-boy was gone.

“Is Chaves hurt bad?” the second waiter asked Manuel.

“I don’t know,” Manuel said, “Retana didn’t say.”

“A hell of a lot he cares,” the tall waiter said. Manuel had not seen him before. He must have just come up.

“If you stand in with Retana in this town, you’re a made man,” the tall waiter said. “If you aren’t in with him, you might just as well go out and shoot yourself.”

“You said it,” the other waiter who had come in said. “You said it then.”

“You’re right I said it,” said the tall waiter. “I know what I’m talking about when I talk about that bird.”

“Look what he’s done for Villalta,” the first waiter said.

“And that ain’t all,” the tall waiter said. “Look what he’s done for Marcial Lalanda. Look what he’s done for Nacional.”

“You said it, kid,” agreed the short waiter.

Manuel looked at them, standing talking in front of his table. He had drunk his second brandy. They had forgotten about him. They were not interested in him.

“Look at that bunch of camels,” the tall waiter went on. “Did you ever see this Nacional II?”

“I seen him last Sunday, didn’t I?” the original waiter said.

“He’s a giraffe,” the short waiter said.

“What did I tell you?” the tall waiter said. “Those are Retana’s boys.”

“Say, give me another shot of that,” Manuel said. He had poured the brandy the waiter had slopped over in the saucer into his glass and drank it while they were talking.

The original waiter poured his glass full mechanically, and the three of them went out of the room talking.

In the far corner the man was still asleep, snoring slightly on the intaking breath, his head back against the wall.

Manuel drank his brandy. He felt sleepy himself. It was too hot to go out into the town. Besides there was nothing to do. He wanted to see Zurito. He would go to sleep while he waited. He kicked his suitcase under the table to be sure it was there. Perhaps it would be better to put it back under the seat, against the wall. He leaned down and shoved it under. Then he leaned forward on the table and went to sleep.

When he woke there was someone sitting across the table from him. It was a big man with a heavy brown face like an Indian. He had been sitting there some time. He had waved the waiter away and sat reading the paper and occasionally looking down at Manuel, asleep, his head on the table. He read the paper laboriously, forming the words with his lips as he read. When it tired him he looked at Manuel. He sat heavily in the chair, his black Cordoba hat tipped forward.

Manuel sat up and looked at him.

“Hello, Zurito,” he said.

“Hello, kid,” the big man said.

“I’ve been asleep.” Manuel rubbed his forehead with the back of his fist.

“I thought maybe you were.”

“How’s everything?”

“Good. How is everything with you?”

“Not so good.”

They were both silent. Zurito, the picador, looked at Manuel’s white face. Manuel looked down at the picador’s enormous hands folding the paper to put away in his pocket.

“I got a favor to ask you, Manos,” Manuel said.

Manosduros was Zurito’s nickname. He never heard it without thinking of his huge hands. He put them forward on the table self-consciously.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said.

“Sure,” said Manuel.

The waiter came and went and came again. He went out of the room looking back at the two men at the table.

“What’s the matter, Manolo?” Zurito set down his glass.

“Would you pic two bulls for me tomorrow night?” Manuel asked, looking up at Zurito across the table.

“No,” said Zurito. “I’m not pic-ing.”

Manuel looked down at his glass. He had expected that answer; now he had it. Well, he had it.

“I’m sorry, Manolo, but I’m not pic-ing.” Zurito looked at his hands.

“That’s all right,” Manuel said.

“I’m too old,” Zurito said.

“I just asked you,” Manuel said.

“Is it the nocturnal tomorrow?”

“That’s it. I figured if I had just one good pic, I could get away with it.”

“How much are you getting?”

“Three hundred pesetas.”

“I get more than that for pic-ing.”

“I know,” said Manuel. “I didn’t have any right to ask you.”

“What do you keep on doing it for?” Zurito asked. “Why don’t you cut off your coleta, Manolo?”

“I don’t know,” Manuel said.

“You’re pretty near as old as I am,” Zurito said.

“I don’t know,” Manuel said. “I got to do it. If I can fix it so that I get an even break, that’s all I want. I got to stick with it, Manos.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do. I’ve tried keeping away from it.”

“I know how you feel. But it isn’t right. You ought to get out and stay out.”

“I can’t do it. Besides, I’ve been going good lately.”

Zurito looked at his face.

“You’ve been in the hospital.”

“But I was going great when I got hurt.”

Zurito said nothing. He tipped the cognac out of his saucer into his glass.

“The papers said they never saw a better faena,” Manuel said.

Zurito looked at him.

“You know when I get going I’m good,” Manuel said.

“You’re too old,” the picador said.

“No,” said Manuel. “You’re ten years older than I am.”

“With me it’s different.”

“I’m not too old,” Manuel said.

They sat silent, Manuel watching the picador’s face.

“I was going great till I got hurt,” Manuel offered.

“You ought to have seen me, Manos,” Manuel said, reproachfully.

“I don’t want to see you,” Zurito said. “It makes me nervous.”

“You haven’t seen me lately.”

“I’ve seen you plenty.”

Zurito looked at Manuel, avoiding his eyes.

“You ought to quit it, Manolo.”

“I can’t,” Manuel said. “I’m going good now, I tell you.”

Zurito leaned forward, his hands on the table.

“Listen. I’ll pic for you and if you don’t go big tomorrow night, you’ll quit. See? Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

Zurito leaned back, relieved.

“You got to quit,” he said. “No monkey business. You got to cut the coleta.”

“I won’t have to quit,” Manuel said. “You watch me. I’ve got the stuff.”

Zurito stood up. He felt tired from arguing.

“You got to quit,” he said. “I’ll cut your coleta myself.”

“No, you won’t,” Manuel said. “You won’t have a chance.”

Zurito called the waiter.

“Come on,” said Zurito. “Come on up to the house.”

Manuel reached under the seat for his suitcase. He was happy. He knew Zurito would pic for him. He was the best picador living. It was all simple now.

“Come on up to the house and we’ll eat,” Zurito said.

Manuel stood in the patio de caballos waiting for the Charlie Chaplins to be over. Zurito stood beside him. Where they stood it was dark. The high door that led into the bull-ring was shut. Above them they heard a shout, then another shout of laughter. Then there was silence. Manuel liked the smell of the stables about the patio de caballos. It smelt good in the dark. There was another roar from the arena and then applause, prolonged applause, going on and on.

“You ever seen these fellows?” Zurito asked, big and looming beside Manuel in the dark.

“No,” Manuel said.

“They’re pretty funny,” Zurito said. He smiled to himself in the dark.

The high, double, tight-fitting door into the bull-ring swung open and Manuel saw the ring in the hard light of the arc-lights, the plaza, dark all the way around, rising high; around the edge of the ring were running and bowing two men dressed like tramps, followed by a third in the uniform of a hotel bell-boy who stooped and picked up the hats and canes thrown down onto the sand and tossed them back up into the darkness.

The electric light went on in the patio.

“I’ll climb onto one of those ponies while you collect the kids,” Zurito said.

Behind them came the jingle of the mules, coming out to go into the arena and be hitched onto the dead bull.

The members of the cuadrilla, who had been watching the burlesque from the runway between the barrera and the seats, came walking back and stood in a group talking, under the electric light in the patio. A good-looking lad in a silver-and-orange suit came up to Manuel and smiled.

“I’m Hernandez,” he said and put out his hand.

Manuel shook it.

“They’re regular elephants we’ve got tonight,” the boy said cheerfully.

“They’re big ones with horns,” Manuel agreed.

“You drew the worst lot,” the boy said.

“That’s all right,” Manuel said. “The bigger they are, the more meat for the poor.”

“Where did you get that one?” Hernandez grinned.

“That’s an old one,” Manuel said. “You line up your cuadrilla, so I can see what I’ve got.”

“You’ve got some good kids,” Hernandez said. He was very cheerful. He had been on twice before in nocturnals and was beginning to get a following in Madrid. He was happy the fight would start in a few minutes.

“Where are the pics?” Manuel asked.

“They’re back in the corrals fighting about who gets the beautiful horses,” Hernandez grinned.

The mules came through the gate in a rush, the whips snapping, bells jangling and the young bull ploughing a furrow of sand.

They formed up for the paseo as soon as the bull had gone through.

Manuel and Hernandez stood in front. The youths of the cuadrillas were behind, their heavy capes furled over their arms. In back, the four picadors, mounted, holding their steel-tipped push-poles erect in the half-dark of the corral.

“It’s a wonder Retana wouldn’t give us enough light to see the horses by,” one picador said.

He knows we’ll be happier if we don’t get too good a look at these skins,” another pic answered.

“This thing I’m on barely keeps me off the ground,” the first picador said.

“Well, they’re horses.”

“Sure, they’re horses.”

They talked, sitting their gaunt horses in the dark.

Zurito said nothing. He had the only steady horse of the lot. He had tried him, wheeling him in the corrals and he responded to the bit and the spurs. He had taken the bandage off his right eye and cut the strings where they had tied his ears tight shut at the base. He was a good, solid horse, solid on his legs. That was all he needed. He intended to ride him all through the corrida. He had already, since he had mounted, sitting in the half-dark in the big, quilted saddle, waiting for the paseo, pic-ed through the whole corrida in his mind. The other picadors went on talking on both sides of him. He did not hear them.

The two matadors stood together in front of their three peones, their capes furled over their left arms in the same fashion. Manuel was thinking about the three lads in back of him. They were all three Madrileños, like Hernandez, boys about nineteen. One of them, a gypsy, serious, aloof, and dark-faced, he liked the look of. He turned.

“What’s your name, kid?” he asked the gypsy.

“Fuentes,” the gypsy said.

“That’s a good name,” Manuel said.

The gypsy smiled, showing his teeth.

“You take the bull and give him a little run when he comes out,” Manuel said.

“All right,” the gypsy said. His face was serious. He began to think about just what he would do.

“Here she goes,” Manuel said to Hernandez.

“All right. We’ll go.”

Heads up, swinging with the music, their right arms swinging free, they stepped out, crossing the sanded arena under the arc-lights, the cuadrillas opening out behind, the picadors riding after, behind came the bull-ring servants and the jingling mules. The crowd applauded Hernandez as they marched across the arena. Arrogant, swinging, they looked straight ahead as they marched.

They bowed before the president, and the procession broke up into its component parts. The bull-fighters went over to the barrera and changed their heavy mantles for the light fighting capes. The mules went out. The picadors galloped jerkily around the ring, and two rode out the gate they had come in by. The servants swept the sand smooth.

Manuel drank a glass of water poured for him by one of Retana’s deputies, who was acting as his manager and sword-handler. Hernandez came over from speaking with his own manager.

“You got a good hand, kid,” Manuel complimented him.

“They like me,” Hernandez said happily.

“How did the paseo go?” Manuel asked Retana’s man.

“Like a wedding,” said the handler. “Fine. You came out like Joselito and Belmonte.”

Zurito rode by, a bulky equestrian statue. He wheeled his horse and faced him toward the toril on the far side of the ring where the bull would come out. It was strange under the arc-light. He pic-ed in the hot afternoon sun for big money. He didn’t like this arc-light business. He wished they would get started.

Manuel went up to him.

“Pic him, Manos,” he said. “Cut him down to size for me.”

“I’ll pic him, kid,” Zurito spat on the sand. “I’ll make him jump out of the ring.”

“Lean on him, Manos,” Manuel said.

“I’ll lean on him,” Zurito said. “What’s holding it up?”

“He’s coming now,” Manuel said.

Zurito sat there, his feet in the box-stirrups, his great legs in the buckskin-covered armor gripping the horse, the reins in his left hand, the long pic held in his right hand, his broad hat well down over his eyes to shade them from the lights, watching the distant door of the toril. His horse’s ears quivered. Zurito patted him with his left hand.

The red door of the toril swung back and for a moment Zurito looked into the empty passageway far across the arena. Then the bull came out in a rush, skidding on his four legs as he came out under the lights, then charging in a gallop, moving softly in a fast gallop, silent except as he woofed through wide nostrils as he charged, glad to be free after the dark pen.

In the first row of seats, slightly bored, leaning forward to write on the cement wall in front of his knees, the substitute bull-fight critic of El Heraldo scribbled: “Campagnero, Negro, 42, came out at 90 miles an hour with plenty of gas — —”

Manuel, leaning against the barrera, watching the bull, waved his hand and the gypsy ran out, trailing his cape. The bull, in full gallop, pivoted and charged the cape, his head down, his tail rising. The gypsy moved in a zigzag, and as he passed, the bull caught sight of him and abandoned the cape to charge the man. The gyp sprinted and vaulted the red fence of the barrera as the bull struck it with his horns. He tossed into it twice with his horns, banging into the wood blindly.

The critic of El Heraldo lit a cigarette and tossed the match at the bull, then wrote in his note-book, “large and with enough horns to satisfy the cash customers, Campagnero showed a tendency to cut into the terrain of the bull-fighters.”

Manuel stepped out on the hard sand as the bull banged into the fence. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Zurito sitting the white horse close to the barrera, about a quarter of the way around the ring to the left. Manuel held the cape close in front of him, a fold in each hand, and shouted at the bull. “Huh! Huh!” The bull turned, seemed to brace against the fence as he charged in a scramble, driving into the cape as Manuel side-stepped, pivoted on his heels with the charge of the bull, and swung the cape just ahead of the horns. At the end of the swing he was facing the bull again and held the cape in the same position close in front of his body, and pivoted again as the bull recharged. Each time, as he swung, the crowd shouted.

Four times he swung with the bull, lifting the cape so it billowed full, and each time bringing the bull around to charge again. Then, at the end of the fifth swing, he held the cape against his hip and pivoted, so the cape swung out like a ballet dancer’s skirt and wound the bull around himself like a belt, to step clear, leaving the bull facing Zurito on the white horse, come up and planted firm, the horse facing the bull, its ears forward, its lips nervous, Zurito, his hat over his eyes, leaning forward, the long pole sticking out before and behind in a sharp angle under his right arm, held half-way down, the triangular iron point facing the bull.

El Heraldo’s second-string critic, drawing on his cigarette, his eyes on the bull, wrote: “The veteran Manolo designed a series of acceptable verónicas, ending in a very Belmontistic recorte that earned applause from the regulars, and we entered the tercio of the cavalry.”

Zurito sat his horse, measuring the distance between the bull and the end of the pic. As he looked, the bull gathered himself together and charged, his eyes on the horse’s chest. As he lowered his head to hook, Zurito sunk the point of the pic in the swelling hump of muscle above the bull’s shoulder, leaned all his weight on the shaft, and with his left hand pulled the white horse into the air, front hoofs pawing, and swung him to the right as he pushed the bull under and through so the horns passed safely under the horse’s belly and the horse came down, quivering, the bull’s tail brushing his chest as he charged the cape Hernandez offered him.

Hernandez ran sideways, taking the bull out and away with the cape, toward the other picador. He fixed him with a swing of the cape, squarely facing the horse and rider, and stepped back. As the bull saw the horse he charged. The picador’s lance slid along his back, and as the shock of the charge lifted the horse, the picador was already half-way out of the saddle, lifting his right leg clear as he missed with the lance and falling to the left side to keep the horse between him and the bull. The horse, lifted and gored, crashed over with the bull driving into him, the picador gave a shove with his boots against the horse and lay clear, waiting to be lifted and hauled away and put on his feet.

Manuel let the bull drive into the fallen horse; he was in no hurry, the picador was safe; besides, it did a picador like that good to worry. He’d stay on longer next time. Lousy pics! He looked across the sand at Zurito a little way out from the barrera, his horse rigid, waiting.

“Huh!” he called to the bull, “Tomar!” holding the cape in both hands so it would catch his eye. The bull detached himself from the horse and charged the cape, and Manuel, running sideways and holding the cape spread wide, stopped, swung on his heels, and brought the bull sharply around facing Zurito.

“Campagnero accepted a pair of varas for the death of one rosinante, with Hernandez and Manolo at the quites,” El Heraldo’s critic wrote. “He pressed on the iron and clearly showed he was no horse-lover. The veteran Zurito resurrected some of his old stuff with the pike-pole, notably the suerte — —”

“Olé! Olé!” the man sitting beside him shouted. The shout was lost in the roar of the crowd, and he slapped the critic on the back. The critic looked up to see Zurito, directly below him, leaning far out over his horse, the length of the pic rising in a sharp angle under his armpit, holding the pic almost by the point, bearing down with all his weight, holding the bull off, the bull pushing and driving to get at the horse, and Zurito, far out, on top of him, holding him, holding him, and slowly pivoting the horse against the pressure, so that at last he was clear. Zurito felt the moment when the horse was clear and the bull could come past, and relaxed the absolute steel lock of his resistance, and the triangular steel point of the pic ripped in the bull’s hump of shoulder muscle as he tore loose to find Hernandez’s cape before his muzzle. He charged blindly into the cape and the boy took him out into the open arena.

Zurito sat patting his horse and looking at the bull charging the cape that Hernandez swung for him out under the bright light while the crowd shouted.

“You see that one?” he said to Manuel.

“It was a wonder,” Manuel said.

“I got him that time,” Zurito said. “Look at him now.”

At the conclusion of a closely turned pass of the cape the bull slid to his knees. He was up at once, but far out across the sand Manuel and Zurito saw the shine of the pumping flow of blood, smooth against the black of the bull’s shoulder.

“I got him that time,” Zurito said.

“He’s a good bull,” Manuel said.

“If they gave me another shot at him, I’d kill him,” Zurito said.

“They’ll change the thirds on us,” Manuel said.

“Look at him now,” Zurito said.

“I got to go over there,” Manuel said, and started on a run for the other side of the ring, where the monos were leading a horse out by the bridle toward the bull, whacking him on the legs with rods and all, in a procession, trying to get him toward the bull, who stood, dropping his head, pawing, unable to make up his mind to charge.

Zurito, sitting his horse, walking him toward the scene, not missing any detail, scowled.

Finally the bull charged, the horse leaders ran for the barrera, the picador hit too far back, and the bull got under the horse, lifted him, threw him onto his back.

Zurito watched. The monos, in their red shirts, running out to drag the picador clear. The picador, now on his feet, swearing and flopping his arms. Manuel and Hernandez standing ready with their capes. And the bull, the great, black bull, with a horse on his back, hooves dangling, the bridle caught in the horns. Black bull with a horse on his back, staggering short-legged, then arching his neck and lifting, thrusting, charging to slide the horse off, horse sliding down. Then the bull into a lunging charge at the cape Manuel spread for him.

The bull was slower now, Manuel felt. He was bleeding badly. There was a sheen of blood all down his flank.

Manuel offered him the cape again. There he came, eyes open, ugly, watching the cape. Manuel stepped to the side and raised his arms, tightening the cape ahead of the bull for the verónica.

Now he was facing the bull. Yes, his head was going down a little. He was carrying it lower. That was Zurito.

Manuel flopped the cape; there he comes; he side-stepped and swung in another verónica. He’s shooting awfully accurately, he thought. He’s had enough fight, so he’s watching now. He’s hunting now. Got his eye on me. But I always give him the cape.

He shook the cape at the bull; there he comes; he side-stepped. Awful close that time. I don’t want to work that close to him.

The edge of the cape was wet with blood where it had swept along the bull’s back as he went by.

All right, here’s the last one.

Manuel, facing the bull, having turned with him each charge, offered the cape with his two hands. The bull looked at him. Eyes watching, horns straight forward, the bull looked at him, watching.

“Huh!” Manuel said, “Toro!” and leaning back, swung the cape forward. Here he comes. He side-stepped, swung the cape in back of him, and pivoted, so the bull followed a swirl of cape and then was left with nothing, fixed by the pass, dominated by the cape. Manuel swung the cape under his muzzle with one hand, to show the bull was fixed, and walked away.

There was no applause.

Manuel walked across the sand toward the barrera, while Zurito rode out of the ring. The trumpet had blown to change the act to the planting of the banderillas while Manuel had been working with the bull. He had not consciously noticed it. The monos were spreading canvas over the two dead horses and sprinkling sawdust around them.

Manuel came up to the barrera for a drink of water. Retana’s man handed him the heavy porous jug.

Fuentes, the tall gypsy, was standing holding a pair of banderillas, holding them together, slim, red sticks, fish-hook points out. He looked at Manuel.

“Go on out there,” Manuel said.

The gypsy trotted out. Manuel set down the jug and watched. He wiped his face with his handkerchief.

The critic of El Heraldo reached for the bottle of warm champagne that stood between his feet, took a drink, and finished his paragraph.

“ — the aged Manolo rated no applause for a vulgar series of lances with the cape and we entered the third of the palings.”

Alone in the center of the ring the bull stood, still fixed. Fuentes, tall, flat-backed, walking toward him arrogantly, his arms spread out, the two slim, red sticks, one in each hand, held by the fingers, points straight forward. Fuentes walked forward. Back of him and to one side was a peon with a cape. The bull looked at him and was no longer fixed.

His eyes watched Fuentes, now standing still. Now he leaned back, calling to him. Fuentes twitched the two banderillas and the light on the steel points caught the bull’s eye.

His tail went up and he charged.

He came straight, his eyes on the man. Fuentes stood still, leaning back, the banderillas pointing forward. As the bull lowered his head to hook, Fuentes leaned backward, his arms came together and rose, his two hands touching, the banderillas two descending red lines, and leaning forward drove the points into the bull’s shoulder, leaning far in over the bull’s horns and pivoting on the two upright sticks, his legs tight together, his body curving to one side to let the bull pass.

“Olé!” from the crowd.

The bull was hooking wildly, jumping like a trout, all four feet off the ground. The red shaft of the banderillas tossed as he jumped.

Manuel, standing at the barrera, noticed that he looked always to the right.

“Tell him to drop the next pair on the right,” he said to the kid who started to run out to Fuentes with the new banderillas.

A heavy hand fell on his shoulder. It was Zurito.

“How do you feel, kid?” he asked.

Manuel was watching the bull.

Zurito leaned forward on the barrera, leaning the weight of his body on his arms. Manuel turned to him.

“You’re going good,” Zurito said.

Manuel shook his head. He had nothing to do now until the next third. The gypsy was very good with the banderillas. The bull would come to him in the next third in good shape. He was a good bull. It had all been easy up to now. The final stuff with the sword was all he worried over. He did not really worry. He did not even think about it. But standing there he had a heavy sense of apprehension. He looked out at the bull, planning his faena, his work with the red cloth that was to reduce the bull, to make him manageable.

The gypsy was walking out toward the bull again, walking heel-and-toe, insultingly, like a ballroom dancer, the red shafts of the banderillas twitching with his walk. The bull watched him, not fixed now, hunting him, but waiting to get close enough so he could be sure of getting him, getting the horns into him.

As Fuentes walked forward the bull charged. Fuentes ran across the quarter of a circle as the bull charged and, as he passed running backward, stopped, swung forward, rose on his toes, arms straight out, and sunk the banderillas straight down into the tight of the big shoulder muscles as the bull missed him.

The crowd were wild about it.

“That kid won’t stay in this night stuff long,” Retana’s man said to Zurito.

“He’s good,” Zurito said.

“Watch him now.”

They watched.

Fuentes was standing with his back against the barrera. Two of the cuadrilla were back of him, with their capes ready to flop over the fence to distract the bull.

The bull, with his tongue out, his barrel heaving, was watching the gypsy. He thought he had him now. Back against the red planks. Only a short charge away. The bull watched him.

The gypsy bent back, drew back his arms, the banderillas pointing at the bull. He called to the bull, stamped one foot. The bull was suspicious. He wanted the man. No more barbs in the shoulder.

Fuentes walked a little closer to the bull. Bent back. Called again. Somebody in the crowd shouted a warning.

“He’s too damn close,” Zurito said.

“Watch him,” Retana’s man said.

Leaning back, inciting the bull with the banderillas, Fuentes jumped, both feet off the ground. As he jumped the bull’s tail rose and he charged. Fuentes came down on his toes, arms straight out, whole body arching forward, and drove the shafts straight down as he swung his body clear of the right horn.

The bull crashed into the barrera where the flopping capes had attracted his eye as he lost the man.

The gypsy came running along the barrera toward Manuel, taking the applause of the crowd. His vest was ripped where he had not quite cleared the point of the horn. He was happy about it, showing it to the spectators. He made the tour of the ring. Zurito saw him go by, smiling, pointing at his vest. He smiled.

Somebody else was planting the last pair of banderillas. Nobody was paying any attention.

Retana’s man tucked a baton inside the red cloth of a muleta, folded the cloth over it, and handed it over the barrera to Manuel. He reached in the leather sword-case, took out a sword, and holding it by its leather scabbard, reached it over the fence to Manuel. Manuel pulled the blade out by the red hilt and the scabbard fell limp.

He looked at Zurito. The big man saw he was sweating.

“Now you get him, kid,” Zurito said.

Manuel nodded.

“He’s in good shape,” Zurito said.

“Just like you want him,” Retana’s man assured him.

Manuel nodded.

The trumpeter, up under the roof, blew for the final act, and Manuel walked across the arena toward where, up in the dark boxes, the president must be.

In the front row of seats the substitute bull-fight critic of El Heraldo took a long drink of the warm champagne. He had decided it was not worth while to write a running story and would write up the corrida back in the office. What the hell was it anyway? Only a nocturnal. If he missed anything he would get it out of the morning papers. He took another drink of the champagne. He had a date at Maxim’s at twelve. Who were these bull-fighters anyway? Kids and bums. A bunch of bums. He put his pad of paper in his pocket and looked over toward Manuel, standing very much alone in the ring, gesturing with his hat in a salute toward a box he could not see high up in the dark plaza. Out in the ring the bull stood quiet, looking at nothing.

“I dedicate this bull to you, Mr. President, and to the public of Madrid, the most intelligent and generous of the world,” was what Manuel was saying. It was a formula. He said it all. It was a little long for nocturnal use.

He bowed at the dark, straightened, tossed his hat over his shoulder, and, carrying the muleta in his left hand and the sword in his right, walked out toward the bull.

Manuel walked toward the bull. The bull looked at him; his eyes were quick. Manuel noticed the way the banderillas hung down on his left shoulder and the steady sheen of blood from Zurito’s pic-ing. He noticed the way the bull’s feet were. As he walked forward, holding the muleta in his left hand and the sword in his right, he watched the bull’s feet. The bull could not charge without gathering his feet together. Now he stood square on them, dully.

Manuel walked toward him, watching his feet. This was all right. He could do this. He must work to get the bull’s head down, so he could go in past the horns and kill him. He did not think about the sword, not about killing the bull. He thought about one thing at a time. The coming things oppressed him, though. Walking forward, watching the bull’s feet, he saw successively his eyes, his wet muzzle, and the wide, forward-pointing spread of his horns. The bull had light circles about his eyes. His eyes watched Manuel. He felt he was going to get this little one with the white face.

Standing still now and spreading the red cloth of the muleta with the sword, pricking the point into the cloth so that the sword, now held in his left hand, spread the red flannel like the jib of a boat, Manuel noticed the points of the bull’s horns. One of them was splintered from banging against the barrera. The other was sharp as a porcupine quill. Manuel noticed while spreading the muleta that the white base of the horn was stained red. While he noticed these things he did not lose sight of the bull’s feet. The bull watched Manuel steadily.

He’s on the defensive now, Manuel thought. He’s reserving himself. I’ve got to bring him out of that and get his head down. Always get his head down. Zurito had his head down once, but he’s come back. He’ll bleed when I start him going and that will bring it down.

Holding the muleta, with the sword in his left hand widening it in front of him, he called to the bull.

The bull looked at him.

He leaned back insultingly and shook the wide-spread flannel.

The bull saw the muleta. It was a bright scarlet under the arc-light. The bull’s legs tightened.

Here he comes. Whoosh! Manuel turned as the bull came and raised the muleta so that it passed over the bull’s horns and swept down his broad back from head to tail. The bull had gone clean up in the air with the charge. Manuel had not moved.

At the end of the pass the bull turned like a cat coming around a corner and faced Manuel.

He was on the offensive again. His heaviness was gone. Manuel noted the fresh blood shining down the black shoulder and dripping down the bull’s leg. He drew the sword out of the muleta and held it in his right hand. The muleta held low down in his left hand, leaning toward the left, he called to the bull. The bull’s legs tightened, his eyes on the muleta. Here he comes, Manuel thought. Yuh!

He swung with the charge, sweeping the muleta ahead of the bull, his feet firm, the sword following the curve, a point of light under the arcs.

The bull recharged as the pase natural finished and Manuel raised the muleta for a pase de pecho. Firmly planted, the bull came by his chest under the raised muleta. Manuel leaned his head back to avoid the clattering banderillo shafts. The hot, black bull body touched his chest as it passed.

Too damn close, Manuel thought. Zurito, leaning on the barrera, spoke rapidly to the gypsy, who trotted out toward Manuel with a cape. Zurito pulled his hat down low and looked out across the arena at Manuel.

Manuel was facing the bull again, the muleta held low and to the left. The bull’s head was down as he watched the muleta.

“If it was Belmonte doing that stuff, they’d go crazy,” Retana’s man said.

Zurito said nothing. He was watching Manuel out in the center of the arena.

“Where did the boss dig this fellow up?” Retana’s man asked.

“Out of the hospital,” Zurito said.

“That’s where he’s going damn quick,” Retana’s man said.

Zurito turned on him.

“Knock on that,” he said, pointing to the barrera.

“I was just kidding, man,” Retana’s man said.

“Knock on the wood.”

Retana’s man leaned forward and knocked three times on the barrera.

“Watch the faena,” Zurito said.

Out in the center of the ring, under the lights, Manuel was kneeling, facing the bull, and as he raised the muleta in both hands the bull charged, tail up.

Manuel swung his body clear and, as the bull recharged, brought around the muleta in a half-circle that pulled the bull to his knees.

“Why, that one’s a great bull-fighter,” Retana’s man said.

“No, he’s not,” said Zurito.

Manuel stood up and, the muleta in his left hand, the sword in his right, acknowledged the applause from the dark plaza.

The bull had humped himself up from his knees and stood waiting, his head hung low.

Zurito spoke to two of the other lads of the cuadrilla and they ran out to stand back of Manuel with their capes. There were four men back of him now. Hernandez had followed him since he first came out with the muleta. Fuentes stood watching, his cape held against his body, tall, in repose, watching lazy-eyed. Now the two came up. Hernandez motioned them to stand one at each side. Manuel stood alone, facing the bull.

Manuel waved back the men with the capes. Stepping back cautiously, they saw his face was white and sweating.

Didn’t they know enough to keep back? Did they want to catch the bull’s eye with the capes after he was fixed and ready? He had enough to worry about without that kind of thing.

The bull was standing, his four feet square, looking at the muleta. Manuel furled the muleta in his left hand. The bull’s eyes watched it. His body was heavy on his feet. He carried his head low, but not too low.

Manuel lifted the muleta at him. The bull did not move. Only his eyes watched.

He’s all lead, Manuel thought. He’s all square. He’s framed right. He’ll take it.

He thought in bull-fight terms. Sometimes he had a thought and the particular piece of slang would not come into his mind and he could not realize the thought. His instincts and his knowledge worked automatically, and his brain worked slowly and in words. He knew all about bulls. He did not have to think about them. He just did the right thing. His eyes noted things and his body performed the necessary measures without thought. If he thought about it, he would be gone.

Now, facing the bull, he was conscious of many things at the same time. There were the horns, the one splintered, the other smoothly sharp, the need to profile himself toward the left horn, lance himself short and straight, lower the muleta so the bull would follow it, and, going in over the horns, put the sword all the way into a little spot about as big as a five-peseta piece straight in back of the neck, between the sharp pitch of the bull’s shoulders. He must do all this and must then come out from between the horns. He was conscious he must do all this, but his only thought was in words: “Corto y derecho.”

“Corto y derecho,” he thought, furling the muleta. Short and straight. Corto y derecho, he drew the sword out of the muleta, profiled on the splintered left horn, dropped the muleta across his body, so his right hand with the sword on the level with his eye made the sign of the cross, and, rising on his toes, sighted along the dipping blade of the sword at the spot high up between the bull’s shoulders.

Corto y derecho he launched himself on the bull.

There was a shock, and he felt himself go up in the air. He pushed on the sword as he went up and over, and it flew out of his hand. He hit the ground and the bull was on him. Manuel, lying on the ground, kicked at the bull’s muzzle with his slippered feet. Kicking, kicking, the bull after him, missing him in his excitement, bumping him with his head, driving the horns into the sand. Kicking like a man keeping a ball in the air, Manuel kept the bull from getting a clean thrust at him.

Manuel felt the wind on his back from the capes flopping at the bull, and then the bull was gone, gone over him in a rush. Dark, as his belly went over. Not even stepped on.

Manuel stood up and picked up the muleta. Fuentes handed him the sword. It was bent where it had struck the shoulder-blade. Manuel straightened it on his knee and ran toward the bull, standing now beside one of the dead horses. As he ran, his jacket flopped where it had been ripped under his armpit.

“Get him out of there,” Manuel shouted to the gypsy. The bull had smelled the blood of the dead horse and ripped into the canvas-cover with his horns. He charged Fuentes’s cape, with the canvas hanging from his splintered horn, and the crowd laughed. Out in the ring, he tossed his head to rid himself of the canvas. Hernandez, running up from behind him, grabbed the end of the canvas and neatly lifted it off the horn.

The bull followed it in a half-charge and stopped still. He was on the defensive again. Manuel was walking toward him with the sword and muleta. Manuel swung the muleta before him. The bull would not charge.

Manuel profiled toward the bull, sighting along the dipping blade of the sword. The bull was motionless, seemingly dead on his feet, incapable of another charge.

Manuel rose to his toes, sighting along the steel, and charged.

Again there was the shock and he felt himself being borne back in a rush, to strike hard on the sand. There was no chance of kicking this time. The bull was on top of him. Manuel lay as though dead, his head on his arms, and the bull bumped him. Bumped his back, bumped his face in the sand. He felt the horn go into the sand between his folded arms. The bull hit him in the small of the back. His face drove into the sand. The horn drove through one of his sleeves and the bull ripped it off. Manuel was tossed clear and the bull followed the capes.

Manuel got up, found the sword and muleta, tried the point of the sword with his thumb, and then ran toward the barrera for a new sword.

Retana’s man handed him the sword over the edge of the barrera.

“Wipe off your face,” he said.

Manuel, running again toward the bull, wiped his bloody face with his handkerchief. He had not seen Zurito. Where was Zurito?

The cuadrilla had stepped away from the bull and waited with their capes. The bull stood, heavy and dull again after the action.

Manuel walked toward him with the muleta. He stopped and shook it. The bull did not respond. He passed it right and left, left and right before the bull’s muzzle. The bull’s eyes watched it and turned with the swing, but he would not charge. He was waiting for Manuel.

Manuel was worried. There was nothing to do but go in. Corto y derecho. He profiled close to the bull, crossed the muleta in front of his body and charged. As he pushed in the sword, he jerked his body to the left to clear the horn. The bull passed him and the sword shot up in the air, twinkling under the arc-lights, to fall red-hilted on the sand.

Manuel ran over and picked it up. It was bent and he straightened it over his knee.

As he came running toward the bull, fixed again now, he passed Hernandez standing with his cape.

“He’s all bone,” the boy said encouragingly.

Manuel nodded, wiping his face. He put the bloody handkerchief in his pocket.

There was the bull. He was close to the barrera now. Damn him. Maybe he was all bone. Maybe there was not any place for the sword to go in. The hell there wasn’t! He’d show them.

He tried a pass with the muleta and the bull did not move. Manuel chopped the muleta back and forth in front of the bull. Nothing doing.

He furled the muleta, drew the sword out, profiled and drove in on the bull. He felt the sword buckle as he shoved it in, leaning his weight on it, and then it shot high in the air, end-over-ending into the crowd. Manuel had jerked clear as the sword jumped.

The first cushions thrown down out of the dark missed him. Then one hit him in the face, his bloody face looking toward the crowd. They were coming down fast. Spotting the sand. Somebody threw an empty champagne-bottle from close range. It hit Manuel on the foot. He stood there watching the dark, where the things were coming from. Then something whished through the air and struck by him. Manuel leaned over and picked it up. It was his sword. He straightened it over his knee and gestured with it to the crowd.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

Oh, the dirty bastards! Dirty bastards! Oh, the lousy, dirty bastards! He kicked into a cushion as he ran.

There was the bull. The same as ever. All right, you dirty, lousy bastard!

Manuel passed the muleta in front of the bull’s black muzzle.

Nothing doing.

You won’t! All right. He stepped close and jammed the sharp peak of the muleta into the bull’s damp muzzle.

The bull was on him as he jumped back and as he tripped on a cushion he felt the horn go into him, into his side. He grabbed the horn with his two hands and rode backward, holding tight onto the place. The bull tossed him and he was clear. He lay still. It was all right. The bull was gone.

He got up coughing and feeling broken and gone. The dirty bastards!

“Give me the sword,” he shouted. “Give me the stuff.”

Fuentes came up with the muleta and the sword.

Hernandez put his arm around him.

“Go on to the infirmary, man,” he said. “Don’t be a damn fool.”

“Get away from me,” Manuel said. “Get to hell away from me.”

He twisted free. Hernandez shrugged his shoulders. Manuel ran toward the bull.

There was the bull standing, heavy, firmly planted.

All right, you bastard! Manuel drew the sword out of the muleta, sighted with the same movement, and flung himself onto the bull. He felt the sword go in all the way. Right up to the guard. Four fingers and his thumb into the bull. The blood was hot on his knuckles, and he was on top of the bull.

The bull lurched with him as he lay on, and seemed to sink; then he was standing clear. He looked at the bull going down slowly over on his side, then suddenly four feet in the air.

Then he gestured at the crowd, his hand warm from the bull blood.

All right, you bastards! He wanted to say something, but he started to cough. It was hot and choking. He looked down for the muleta. He must go over and salute the president. President hell! He was sitting down looking at something. It was the bull. His four feet up. Thick tongue out. Things crawling around on his belly and under his legs. Crawling where the hair was thin. Dead bull. To hell with the bull! To hell with them all! He started to get to his feet and commenced to cough. He sat down again, coughing. Somebody came and pushed him up.

They carried him across the ring to the infirmary, running with him across the sand, standing blocked at the gate as the mules came in, then around under the dark passageway, men grunting as they took him up the stairway, and then laid him down.

The doctor and two men in white were waiting for him. They laid him out on the table. They were cutting away his shirt. Manuel felt tired. His whole chest felt scalding inside. He started to cough and they held something to his mouth. Everybody was very busy.

There was an electric light in his eyes. He shut his eyes.

He heard someone coming very heavily up the stairs. Then he did not hear it. Then he heard a noise far off. That was the crowd. Well, somebody would have to kill his other bull. They had cut away all his shirt. The doctor smiled at him. There was Retana.

“Hello, Retana!” Manuel said. He could not hear his voice.

Retana smiled at him and said something. Manuel could not hear it.

Zurito stood beside the table, bending over where the doctor was working. He was in his picador clothes, without his hat.

Zurito said something to him. Manuel could not hear it.

Zurito was speaking to Retana. One of the men in white smiled and handed Retana a pair of scissors. Retana gave them to Zurito. Zurito said something to Manuel. He could not hear it.

To hell with this operating-table. He’d been on plenty of operating-tables before. He was not going to die. There would be a priest if he was going to die.

Zurito was saying something to him. Holding up the scissors.

That was it. They were going to cut off his coleta. They were going to cut off his pigtail.

Manuel sat up on the operating-table. The doctor stepped back, angry. Someone grabbed him and held him.

“You couldn’t do a thing like that, Manos,” he said.

He heard suddenly, clearly, Zurito’s voice.

“That’s all right,” Zurito said. “I won’t do it. I was joking.”

“I was going good,” Manuel said. “I didn’t have any luck. That was all.”

Manuel lay back. They had put something over his face. It was all familiar. He inhaled deeply. He felt very tired. He was very, very tired. They took the thing away from his face.

“I was going good,” Manuel said weakly. “I was going great.”

Retana looked at Zurito and started for the door.

“I’ll stay here with him,” Zurito said.

Retana shrugged his shoulders.

Manuel opened his eyes and looked at Zurito.

“Wasn’t I going good, Manos?” he asked, for confirmation.

“Sure,” said Zurito. “You were going great.”

The doctor’s assistant put the cone over Manuel’s face and he inhaled deeply. Zurito stood awkwardly, watching.

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

IN THE FALL THE WAR WAS ALWAYS there, but we did not go to it any more. It was cold in the fall in Milan and the dark came very early. Then the electric lights came on, and it was pleasant along the streets looking in the windows. There was much game hanging outside the shops, and the snow powdered in the fur of the foxes and the wind blew their tails. The deer hung stiff and heavy and empty, and small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers. It was a cold fall and the wind came down from the mountains.

We were all at the hospital every afternoon, and there were different ways of walking across the town through the dusk to the hospital. Two of the ways were alongside canals, but they were long. Always, though, you crossed a bridge across a canal to enter the hospital. There was a choice of three bridges. On one of them a woman sold roasted chestnuts. It was warm, standing in front of her charcoal fire, and the chestnuts were warm afterward in your pocket. The hospital was very old and very beautiful, and you entered through a gate and walked across a courtyard and out a gate on the other side. There were usually funerals starting from the courtyard. Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

The doctor came up to the machine where I was sitting and said: “What did you like best to do before the war? Did you practice a sport?”

I said: “Yes, football.”

“Good” he said. “You will be able to play football again better than ever.”

My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: “That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion.”

In the next machine was a major who had a little hand like a baby’s. He winked at me when the doctor examined his hand, which was between two leather straps that bounced up and down and flapped the stiff fingers, and said: “And will I too play football, captain-doctor?” He had been a very great fencer, and before the war the greatest fencer in Italy.

The doctor went to his office in a back room and brought a photograph which showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major’s, before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger. The major held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very carefully. “A wound?” he asked.

“An industrial accident,” the doctor said.

“Very interesting, very interesting,” the major said, and handed it back to the doctor.

“You have confidence?”

“No,” said the major.

There were three boys who came each day who were about the same age I was. They were all three from Milan, and one of them was to be a lawyer, and one was to be a painter, and one had intended to be a soldier, and after we were finished with the machines, sometimes we walked back together to the Café Cova, which was next door to the Scala. We walked the short way through the communist quarter because we were four together. The people hated us because we were officers, and from a wine-shop some one would call out, “A basso gli ufficiali!” as we passed. Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. But this was a long time ago, and then we did not any of us know how it was going to be afterward. We only knew then that there was always the war, but that we were not going to it any more.

We all had the same medals, except the boy with the black silk bandage across his face, and he had not been at the front long enough to get any medals. The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital. Although, as we walked to the Cova through the tough part of town, walking in the dark, with light and singing coming out of the wine-shops, and sometimes having to walk into the street when the men and women would crowd together on the sidewalk so that we would have had to jostle them to get by, we felt held together by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.

We ourselves all understood the Cova, where it was rich and warm and not too brightly lighted, and noisy and smoky at certain hours, and there were always girls at the tables and the illustrated papers on a rack on the wall. The girls at the Cova were very patriotic, and I found that the most patriotic people in Italy were the café girls — and I believe they are still patriotic.

The boys at first were very polite about my medals and asked me what I had done to get them. I showed them the papers, which were written in very beautiful language and full of fratellanza and abnegazione, but which really said, with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American. After that their manner changed a little toward me, although I was their friend against outsiders. I was a friend, but I was never really one of them after they had read the citations, because it had been different with them and they had done very different things to get their medals. I had been wounded, it was true; but we all knew that being wounded, after all, was really an accident. I was never ashamed of the ribbons, though, and sometimes, after the cocktail hour, I would imagine myself having done all the things they had done to get their medals; but walking home at night through the empty streets with the cold wind and all the shops closed, trying to keep near the street lights, I knew that I would never have done such things, and I was very much afraid to die, and often lay in bed at night by myself, afraid to die and wondering how I would be when I went back to the front again.

The three with the medals were like hunting-hawks; and I was not a hawk, although I might seem a hawk to those who had never hunted; they, the three, knew better and so we drifted apart. But I stayed good friends with the boy who had been wounded his first day at the front, because he would never know now how he would have turned out; so he could never be accepted either, and I liked him because I thought perhaps he would not have turned out to be a hawk either.

The major, who had been the great fencer, did not believe in bravery, and spent much time while we sat in the machines correcting my grammar. He had complimented me on how I spoke Italian, and we talked together very easily. One day I had said that Italian seemed such an easy language to me that I could not take a great interest in it; everything was so easy to say. “Ah, yes,” the major said. “Why, then, do you not take up the use of grammar?” So we took up the use of grammar, and soon Italian was such a difficult language that I was afraid to talk to him until I had the grammar straight in my mind.

The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines. There was a time when none of us believed in the machines, and one day the major said it was all nonsense. The machines were new then and it was we who were to prove them. It was an idiotic idea, he said, “a theory, like another.” I had not learned my grammar, and he said I was a stupid impossible disgrace, and he was a fool to have bothered with me. He was a small man and he sat straight up in his chair with his right hand thrust into the machine and looked straight ahead at the wall while the straps thumped up and down with his fingers in them.

“What will you do when the war is over if it is over?” he asked me. “Speak grammatically!”

“I will go to the States.”

“Are you married?”

“No, but I hope to be.”

“The more of a fool you are,” he said. He seemed very angry. “A man must not marry.”

“Why, Signor Maggiore?”

“Don’t call me ‘Signor Maggiore.’”

“Why must not a man marry?”

“He cannot marry. He cannot marry,” he said angrily. “If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.”

He spoke very angrily and bitterly, and looked straight ahead while he talked.

“But why should he necessarily lose it?”

“He’ll lose it,” the major said. He was looking at the wall. Then he looked down at the machine and jerked his little hand out from between the straps and slapped it hard against his thigh. “He’ll lose it,” he almost shouted. “Don’t argue with me!” Then he called to the attendant who ran the machines. “Come and turn this damned thing off.”

He went back into the other room for the light treatment and the massage. Then I heard him ask the doctor if he might use his telephone and he shut the door. When he came back into the room, I was sitting in another machine. He was wearing his cape and had his cap on, and he came directly toward my machine and put his arm on my shoulder.

“I am so sorry,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder with his good hand. “I would not be rude. My wife has just died. You must forgive me.”

“Oh—” I said, feeling sick for him. “I am so sorry.”

He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I cannot resign myself.”

He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. “I am utterly unable to resign myself,” he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.

The doctor told me that the major’s wife, who was very young and whom he had not married until he was definitely invalided out of the war, had died of pneumonia. She had been sick only a few days. No one expected her to die. The major did not come to the hospital for three days. Then he came at the usual hour, wearing a black band on the sleeve of his uniform. When he came back, there were large framed photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been cured by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window.

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS

THE HILLS ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid.

“What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.

“It’s pretty hot,” the man said.

“Let’s drink beer.”

“Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain.

“Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway.

“Yes. Two big ones.”

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

“They look like white elephants,” she said.

“I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer.

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.”

The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said. “What does it say?”

“Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.”

“Could we try it?”

The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar.

“Four reales.”

“We want two Anis del Toro.”

“With water?”

“Do you want it with water?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?”

“It’s all right.”

“You want them with water?” asked the woman.

“Yes, with water.”

“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.

“That’s the way with everything.”

“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.”

“Oh, cut it out.”

“You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.”

“Well, let’s try and have a fine time.”

“All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?”

“That was bright.”

“I wanted to try this new drink: That’s all we do, isn’t it — look at things and try new drinks?”

“I guess so.”

The girl looked across at the hills.

“They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.”

“Should we have another drink?”

“All right.”

The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.

“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.

“It’s lovely,” the girl said.

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.”

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”

The girl did not say anything.

“I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.”

“Then what will we do afterward?”

“We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.”

“What makes you think so?”

“That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.”

The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.

“And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.”

“I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.”

“So have I,” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.”

“Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.”

“And you really want to?”

“I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.”

“And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?”

“I love you now. You know I love you.”

“I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?”

“I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.”

“If I do it you won’t ever worry?”

“I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.”

“Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t care about me.”

“Well, I care about you.”

“Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.”

“I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way.”

The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees.

“And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.”

“What did you say?”

“I said we could have everything.”

“We can have everything.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can have the whole world.”

“No, we can’t.”

“We can go everywhere.”

“No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.”

“It’s ours.”

“No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.”

“But they haven’t taken it away.”

“We’ll wait and see.”

“Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.”

“I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. “I just know things.”

“I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—”

“Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. “I know. Could we have another beer?”

“All right. But you’ve got to realize — —”

“I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?”

They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table.

“You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means anything to you.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.”

“Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.”

“Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.”

“It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.”

“Would you do something for me now?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights.

“But I don’t want you to,” he said, “I don’t care anything about it.”

“I’ll scream,” the girl said.

The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said.

“What did she say?” asked the girl.

“That the train is coming in five minutes.”

The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her.

“I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She smiled at him.

“All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.”

He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him.

“Do you feel better?” he asked.

“I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.”

THE KILLERS

THE DOOR OF HENRY’S LUNCH-ROOM opened and two men came in. They sat down at the counter.

“What’s yours?” George asked them.

“I don’t know,” one of the men said. “What do you want to eat, Al?”

“I don’t know,” said Al. “I don’t know what I want to eat.”

Outside it was getting dark. The street-light came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.

“I’ll have a roast pork tenderloin with apple sauce and mashed potatoes,” the first man said.

“It isn’t ready yet.”

“What the hell do you put it on the card for?”

“That’s the dinner,” George explained. “You can get that at six o’clock.”

George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.

“It’s five o’clock.”

“The clock says twenty minutes past five,” the second man said.

“It’s twenty minutes fast.”

“Oh, to hell with the clock,” the first man said. “What have you got to eat?”

“I can give you any kind of sandwiches,” George said. “You can have ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver and bacon, or a steak.”

“Give me chicken croquettes with green peas and cream sauce and mashed potatoes.”

“That’s the dinner.”

“Everything we want’s the dinner, eh? That’s the way you work it.”

“I can give you ham and eggs, bacon and eggs, liver — —”

“I’ll take ham and eggs,” the man called Al said. He wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves.

“Give me bacon and eggs,” said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter.

“Got anything to drink?” Al asked.

“Silver beer, bevo, ginger-ale,” George said.

“I mean you got anything to drink?”

“Just those I said.”

“This is a hot town,” said the other. “What do they call it?”

“Summit.”

“Ever hear of it?” Al asked his friend.

“No,” said the friend.

“What do you do here nights?” Al asked.

“They eat the dinner,” his friend said. “They all come here and eat the big dinner.”

“That’s right,” George said.

“So you think that’s right?” Al asked George.

“Sure.”

“You’re a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?”

“Sure,” said George.

“Well, you’re not,” said the other little man. “Is he, Al?”

“He’s dumb,” said Al. He turned to Nick. “What’s your name?”

“Adams.”

“Another bright boy,” Al said. “Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?”

“The town’s full of bright boys,” Max said.

George put the two platters, one of ham and eggs, the other of bacon and eggs, on the counter. He set down two side-dishes of fried potatoes and closed the wicket into the kitchen.

“Which is yours?” he asked Al.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Ham and eggs.”

“Just a bright boy,” Max said. He leaned forward and took the ham and eggs. Both men ate with their gloves on. George watched them eat.

“What are you looking it?” Max looked at George.

“Nothing.”

“The hell you were. You were looking at me.”

“Maybe the boy meant it for a joke, Max,” Al said.

George laughed.

“You don’t have to laugh,” Max said to him. “You don’t have to laugh at all, see?”

“All right,” said George.

“So he thinks it’s all right.” Max turned to Al. “He thinks it’s all right. That’s a good one.”

“Oh, he’s a thinker,” Al said. They went on eating.

“What’s the bright boy’s name down the counter?” Al asked Max.

“Hey, bright boy,” Max said to Nick. “You go around on the other side of the counter with your boy friend.”

“What’s the idea?” Nick asked.

“There isn’t any idea.”

“You better go around, bright boy,” Al said. Nick went around behind the counter.

“What’s the idea?” George asked.

“None of your damn business,” Al said. “Who’s out in the kitchen?”

“The nigger.”

“What do you mean the nigger?”

“The nigger that cooks.”

“Tell him to come in.”

“What’s the idea?”

“Tell him to come in.”

“Where do you think you are?”

“We know damn well where we are,” the man called Max said. “Do we look silly?”

“You talk silly,” Al said to him. “What the hell do you argue with this kid for? Listen,” he said to George, “tell the nigger to come out here.”

“What are you going to do to him?”

“Nothing. Use your head, bright boy. What would we do to a nigger?”

George opened the slit that opened back into the kitchen. “Sam,” he called. “Come in here a minute.”

The door to the kitchen opened and the nigger came in. “What was it?” he asked. The two men at the counter took a look at him.

“All right, nigger. You stand right there,” Al said.

Sam, the nigger, standing in his apron, looked at the two men sitting at the counter. “Yes, sir,” he said. Al got down from his stool.

“I’m going back to the kitchen with the nigger and bright boy,” he said. “Go on back to the kitchen, nigger. You go with him, bright boy.” The little man walked after Nick and Sam, the cook, back into the kitchen. The door shut after them. The man called Max sat at the counter opposite George. He didn’t look at George but looked in the mirror that ran along back of the counter. Henry’s had been made over from a saloon into a lunch-counter.

“Well, bright boy,” Max said, looking into the mirror, “why don’t you say something?”

“What’s it all about?”

“Hey, Al,” Max called, “bright boy wants to know what it’s all about.”

“Why don’t you tell him?” Al’s voice came from the kitchen.

“What do you think it’s all about?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think?”

Max looked into the mirror all the time he was talking.

“I wouldn’t say.”

“Hey, Al, bright boy says he wouldn’t say what he thinks it’s all about.”

“I can hear you, all right,” Al said from the kitchen. He had propped open the slit that dishes passed through into the kitchen with a catsup bottle. “Listen, bright boy,” he said from the kitchen to George. “Stand a little further along the bar. You move a little to the left, Max.” He was like a photographer arranging for a group picture.

“Talk to me, bright boy,” Max said. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

George did not say anything.

“I’ll tell you,” Max said. “We’re going to kill a Swede. Do you know a big Swede named Ole Andreson?”

“Yes.”

“He comes here to eat every night, don’t he?”

“Sometimes he comes here.”

“He comes here at six o’clock, don’t he?”

“If he comes.”

“We know all that, bright boy,” Max said. “Talk about something else. Ever go to the movies?”

“Once in a while.”

“You ought to go to the movies more. The movies are fine for a bright boy like you.”

“What are you going to kill Ole Andreson for? What did he ever do to you?”

“He never had a chance to do anything to us. He never even seen us.”

“And he’s only going to see us once,” Al said from the kitchen.

“What are you going to kill him for, then?” George asked.

“We’re killing him for a friend. Just to oblige a friend, bright boy.”

“Shut up,” said Al from the kitchen. “You talk too goddam much.”

“Well, I got to keep bright boy amused. Don’t I, bright boy?”

“You talk too damn much,” Al said. “The nigger and my bright boy are amused by themselves. I got them tied up like a couple of girl friends in the convent.”

“I suppose you were in a convent?”

“You never know.”

“You were in a kosher convent. That’s where you were.”

George looked up at the clock.

“If anybody comes in you tell them the cook is off, and if they keep after it, you tell them you’ll go back and cook yourself. Do you get that, bright boy?”

“All right,” George said. “What you going to do with us afterward?”

“That’ll depend,” Max said. “That’s one of those things you never know at the time.”

George looked up at the clock. It was a quarter past six. The door from the street opened. A street-car motorman came in.

“Hello, George,” he said. “Can I get supper?”

“Sam’s gone out,” George said. “He’ll be back in about half an hour.”

“I’d better go up the street,” the motorman said. George looked at the clock. It was twenty minutes past six.

“That was nice, bright boy,” Max said. “You’re a regular little gentleman.”

“He knew I’d blow his head off,” Al said from the kitchen.

“No,” said Max. “It ain’t that. Bright boy is nice. He’s a nice boy. I like him.”

At six-fifty-five George said: “He’s not coming.”

Two other people had been in the lunch-room. Once George had gone out to the kitchen and made a ham-and-egg sandwich “to go” that a man wanted to take with him. Inside the kitchen he saw Al, his derby hat tipped back, sitting on a stool beside the wicket with the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun resting on the ledge. Nick and the cook were back to back in the corner, a towel tied in each of their mouths. George had cooked the sandwich, wrapped it up in oiled paper, put it in a bag, brought it in, and the man had paid for it and gone out.

“Bright boy can do everything,” Max said. “He can cook and everything. You’d make some girl a nice wife, bright boy.”

“Yes?” George said. “Your friend, Ole Andreson, isn’t going to come.”

“We’ll give him ten minutes,” Max said.

Max watched the mirror and the clock. The hands of the clock marked seven o’clock, and then five minutes past seven.

“Come on, Al,” said Max. “We better go. He’s not coming.”

“Better give him five minutes,” Al said from the kitchen.

In the five minutes a man came in, and George explained that the cook was sick.

“Why the hell don’t you get another cook?” the man asked. “Aren’t you running a lunch-counter?” He went out.

“Come on, Al,” Max said.

“What about the two bright boys and the nigger?”

“They’re all right.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. We’re through with it.”

“I don’t like it,” said Al. “It’s sloppy. You talk too much.”

“Oh, what the hell,” said Max. “We got to keep amused, haven’t we?”

“You talk too much, all the same,” Al said. He came out from the kitchen. The cutoff barrels of the shotgun made a slight bulge under the waist of his too tight-fitting overcoat. He straightened his coat with his gloved hands.

“So long, bright boy,” he said to George. “You got a lot of luck.”

“That’s the truth,” Max said. “You ought to play the races, bright boy.”

The two of them went out the door. George watched them, through the window, pass under the arc-light and cross the street. In their tight overcoats and derby hats they looked like a vaudeville team. George went back through the swinging-door into the kitchen and untied Nick and the cook.

“I don’t want any more of that,” said Sam, the cook. “I don’t want any more of that.”

Nick stood up. He had never had a towel in his mouth before.

“Say,” he said. “What the hell?” He was trying to swagger it off.

“They were going to kill Ole Andreson,” George said. “They were going to shoot him when he came in to eat.”

“Ole Andreson?”

“Sure.”

The cook felt the corners of his mouth with his thumbs.

“They all gone?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said George. “They’re gone now.”

“I don’t like it,” said the cook. “I don’t like any of it at all.”

“Listen,” George said to Nick. “You better go see Ole Andreson.”

“All right.”

“You better not have anything to do with it at all,” Sam, the cook, said. “You better stay way out of it.”

“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” George said.

“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.”

“I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?”

The cook turned away.

“Little boys always know what they want to do,” he said.

“He lives up at Hirsch’s rooming-house,” George said to Nick.

“I’ll go up there.”

Outside the arc-light shone through the bare branches of a tree. Nick walked up the street beside the car-tracks and turned at the next arc-light down a side-street. Three houses up the street was Hirsch’s rooming-house. Nick walked up the two steps and pushed the bell. A woman came to the door.

“Is Ole Andreson here?”

“Do you want to see him?”

“Yes, if he’s in.”

Nick followed the woman up a flight of stairs and back to the end of a corridor. She knocked on the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s somebody to see you, Mr. Andreson,” the woman said.

“It’s Nick Adams.”

“Come in.”

Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.

“What was it?” he asked.

“I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”

It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.

“They put us out in the kitchen,” Nick went on. “They were going to shoot you when you came in to supper.”

Ole Andreson looked at the wall and did not say anything.

“George thought I better come and tell you about it.”

“There isn’t anything I can do about it,” Ole Andreson said.

“I’ll tell you what they were like.”

“I don’t want to know what they were like,” Ole Andreson said. He looked at the wall. “Thanks for coming to tell me about it.”

“That’s all right.”

Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.

“Don’t you want me to go and see the police?”

“No,” Ole Andreson said. “That wouldn’t do any good.”

“Isn’t there something I could do?”

“No. There ain’t anything to do.”

“Maybe it was just a bluff.”

“No. It ain’t just a bluff.”

Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.

“The only thing is,” he said, talking toward the wall, “I just can’t make up my mind to go out. I been in here all day.”

“Couldn’t you get out of town?”

“No,” Ole Andreson said. “I’m through with all that running around.”

He looked at the wall.

“There ain’t anything to do now.”

“Couldn’t you fix it up some way?”

“No. I got in wrong.” He talked in the same flat voice. “There ain’t anything to do. After a while I’ll make up my mind to go out.”

“I better go back and see George,” Nick said.

“So long,” said Ole Andreson. He did not look toward Nick. “Thanks for coming around.”

Nick went out. As he shut the door he saw Ole Andreson with all his clothes on, lying on the bed looking at the wall.

“He’s been in his room all day,” the landlady said down-stairs. “I guess he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Andreson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like it.”

“He doesn’t want to go out.”

“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice man. He was in the ring, you know.”

“I know it.”

“You’d never know it except from the way his face is,” the woman said. They stood talking just inside the street door. “He’s just as gentle.”

“Well, good-night, Mrs. Hirsch,” Nick said.

“I’m not Mrs. Hirsch,” the woman said. “She owns the place. I just look after it for her. I’m Mrs. Bell.”

“Well, good-night, Mrs. Bell,” Nick said.

“Good-night,” the woman said.

Nick walked up the dark street to the corner under the arc-light, and then along the car-tracks to Henry’s eating-house. George was inside, back of the counter.

“Did you see Ole?”

“Yes,” said Nick. “He’s in his room and he won’t go out.”

The cook opened the door from the kitchen when he heard Nick’s voice.

“I don’t even listen to it,” he said and shut the door.

“Did you tell him about it?” George asked.

“Sure. I told him but he knows what it’s all about.”

“What’s he going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“They’ll kill him.”

“I guess they will.”

“He must have got mixed up in something in Chicago.”

“I guess so,” said Nick.

“It’s a hell of a thing.”

“It’s an awful thing,” Nick said.

They did not say anything. George reached down for a towel and wiped the counter.

“I wonder what he did?” Nick said.

“Double-crossed somebody. That’s what they kill them for.”

“I’m going to get out of this town,” Nick said.

“Yes,” said George. “That’s a good thing to do.”

“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful.”

“Well,” said George, “you better not think about it.”

CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA?

THE ROAD OF THE PASS WAS HARD AND smooth and not yet dusty in the early morning. Below were the hills with oak and chestnut trees, and far away below was the sea. On the other side were snowy mountains.

We came down from the pass through wooded country. There were bags of charcoal piled beside the road, and through the trees we saw charcoal-burners’ huts. It was Sunday and the road, rising and falling, but always dropping away from the altitude of the pass, went through the scrub woods and through villages.

Outside the villages there were fields with vines. The fields were brown and the vines coarse and thick. The houses were white, and in the streets the men, in their Sunday clothes, were playing bowls. Against the walls of some of the houses there were pear trees, their branches candelabraed against the white walls. The pear trees had been sprayed, and the walls of the houses were stained a metallic blue-green by the spray vapor. There were small clearings around the villages where the vines grew, and then the woods.

In a village, twenty kilometres above Spezia, there was a crowd in the square, and a young man carrying a suitcase came up to the car and asked us to take him in to Spezia.

“There are only two places, and they are occupied,” I said. We had an old Ford coupé.

“I will ride on the outside.”

“You will be uncomfortable.”

“That makes nothing. I must go to Spezia.”

“Should we take him?” I asked Guy.

“He seems to be going anyway,” Guy said. The young man handed in a parcel through the window.

“Look after this,” he said. Two men tied his suitcase on the back of the car, above our suitcases. He shook hands with every one, explained that to a Fascist and a man as used to travelling as himself there was no discomfort, and climbed up on the running-board on the left-hand side of the car, holding on inside, his right arm through the open window.

“You can start,” he said. The crowd waved. He waved with his free hand.

“What did he say?” Guy asked me.

“That we could start.”

“Isn’t he nice?” Guy said.

The road followed a river. Across the river were mountains. The sun was taking the frost out of the grass. It was bright and cold and the air came through the open wind-shield.

“How do you think he likes it out there?” Guy was looking up the road. His view out of his side of the car was blocked by our guest. The young man projected from the side of the car like the figurehead of a ship. He had turned his coat collar up and pulled his hat down and his nose looked cold in the wind.

“Maybe he’ll get enough of it,” Guy said. “That’s the side our bum tire’s on.”

“Oh, he’d leave us if we blew out,” I said. “He wouldn’t get his travelling-clothes dirty.”

“Well, I don’t mind him,” Guy said— “except the way he leans out on the turns.”

The woods were gone; the road had left the river to climb; the radiator was boiling; the young man looked annoyedly and suspiciously at the steam and rusty water; the engine was grinding, with both Guy’s feet on the first-speed pedal, up and up, back and forth and up, and, finally, out level. The grinding stopped, and in the new quiet there was a great churning bubbling in the radiator. We were at the top of the last range above Spezia and the sea. The road descended with short, barely rounded turns. Our guest hung out on the turns and nearly pulled the top-heavy car over.

“You can’t tell him not to,” I said to Guy. “It’s his sense of self-preservation.”

“The great Italian sense.”

“The greatest Italian sense.”

We came down around curves, through deep dust, the dust powdering the olive trees. Spezia spread below along the sea. The road flattened outside the town. Our guest put his head in the window.

“I want to stop.”

“Stop it,” I said to Guy.

We slowed up, at the side of the road. The young man got down, went to the back of the car and untied the suitcase.

“I stop here, so you won’t get into trouble carrying passengers,” he said. “My package.”

I handed him the package. He reached in his pocket.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Then thanks,” the young man said, not “thank you,” or “thank you very much,” or “thank you a thousand times,” all of which you formerly said in Italy to a man when he handed you a time-table or explained about a direction. The young man uttered the lowest form of the word “thanks” and looked after us suspiciously as Guy started the car. I waved my hand at him. He was too dignified to reply. We went on into Spezia.

“That’s a young man that will go a long way in Italy,” I said to Guy.

“Well,” said Guy, “he went twenty kilometres with us.”

A MEAL IN SPEZIA

We came into Spezia looking for a place to eat. The street was wide and the houses high and yellow. We followed the tram-track into the center of town. On the walls of the houses were stencilled eye-bugging portraits of Mussolini, with hand-painted “vivas”, the double V in black paint with drippings of paint down the wall. Side-streets went down to the harbor. It was bright and the people were all out for Sunday. The stone paving had been sprinkled and there were damp stretches in the dust. We went close to the curb to avoid a tram.

“Let’s eat somewhere simple,” Guy said.

We stopped opposite two restaurant signs. We were standing across the street and I was buying the papers. The two restaurants were side by side. A woman standing in the doorway of one smiled at us and we crossed the street and went in.

It was dark inside and at the back of the room three girls were sitting at a table with an old woman. Across from us, at another table, sat a sailor. He sat there neither eating nor drinking. Further back, a young man in a blue suit was writing at a table. His hair was pomaded and shining and he was very smartly dressed and clean-cut looking.

The light came through the doorway, and through the window where vegetables, fruit, steaks, and chops were arranged in a show-case. A girl came and took our order and another girl stood in the doorway. We noticed that she wore nothing under her house dress. The girl who took our order put her arm around Guy’s neck while we were looking at the menu. There were three girls in all, and they all took turns going and standing in the doorway. The old woman at the table in the back of the room spoke to them and they sat down again with her.

There was no doorway leading from the room except into the kitchen. A curtain hung over it. The girl who had taken our order came in from the kitchen with spaghetti. She put it on the table and brought a bottle of red wine and sat down at the table.

“Well,” I said to Guy, “you wanted to eat some place simple.”

“This isn’t simple. This is complicated.”

“What do you say?” asked the girl. “Are you Germans?”

“South Germans,” I said. “The South Germans are a gentle, lovable people.”

“Don’t understand,” she said.

“What’s the mechanics of this place?” Guy asked. “Do I have to let her put her arm around my neck?”

“Certainly,” I said. “Mussolini has abolished the brothels. This is a restaurant.”

The girl wore a one-piece dress. She leaned forward against the table and put her hands on her breasts and smiled. She smiled better on one side than on the other and turned the good side toward us. The charm of the good side had been enhanced by some event which had smoothed the other side of her nose in, as warm wax can be smoothed. Her nose, however, did not look like warm wax. It was very cold and firmed, only smoothed in. “You like me?” she asked Guy.

“He adores you,” I said. “But he doesn’t speak Italian.”

“Ich spreche Deutsch”, she said, and stroked Guy’s hair.

“Speak to the lady in your native tongue, Guy.”

“Where do you come from?” asked the lady.

“Potsdam.”

“And you will stay here now for a little while?”

“In this so dear Spezia?” I asked.

“Tell her we have to go,” said Guy. “Tell her we are very ill, and have no money.”

“My friend is a misogynist,” I said, “an old German misogynist.”

“Tell him I love him.”

I told him.

“Will you shut your mouth and get us out of here?” Guy said. The lady had placed another arm around his neck. “Tell him he is mine,” she said. I told him.

“Will you get us out of here?”

“You are quarrelling,” the lady said. “You do not love one another.”

“We are Germans,” I said proudly, “old South Germans.”

“Tell him he is a beautiful boy,” the lady said. Guy is thirty-eight and takes some pride in the fact that he is taken for a travelling salesman in France. “You are a beautiful boy,” I said.

“Who says so?” Guy asked, “you or her?”

“She does. I’m just your interpreter. Isn’t that what you got me in on this trip for?”

“I’m glad it’s her,” said Guy. “I didn’t want to have to leave you here too.”

“I don’t know. Spezia’s a lovely place.”

“Spezia,” the lady said. “You are talking about Spezia.”

“Lovely place,” I said.

“It is my country,” she said. “Spezia is my home and Italy is my country.”

“She says that Italy is her country.”

“Tell her it looks like her country,” Guy said.

“What have you for dessert?” I asked.

“Fruit,” she said. “We have bananas.”

“Bananas are all right,” Guy said. “They’ve got skins on.”

“Oh, he takes bananas,” the lady said. She embraced Guy.

“What does she say?” he asked, keeping his face out of the way.

“She is pleased because you take bananas.”

“Tell her I don’t take bananas.”

“The Signor does not take bananas.”

“Ah,” said the lady, crestfallen, “he doesn’t take bananas.”

“Tell her I take a cold bath every morning,” Guy said.

“The Signor takes a cold bath every morning.”

“No understand,” the lady said.

Across from us, the property sailor had not moved. No one in the place paid any attention to him.

“We want the bill,” I said.

“Oh, no. You must stay.”

“Listen,” the clean-cut young man said from the table where he was writing, “let them go. These two are worth nothing.”

The lady took my hand. “You won’t stay? You won’t ask him to stay?”

“We have to go,” I said. “We have to get to Pisa, or if possible, Firenze, tonight. We can amuse ourselves in those cities at the end of the day. It is now the day. In the day we must cover distance.”

“To stay a little while is nice.”

“To travel is necessary during the light of day.”

“Listen,” the clean-cut young man said. “Don’t bother to talk with these two. I tell you they are worth nothing and I know.”

“Bring us the bill,” I said. She brought the bill from the old woman and went back and sat at the table. Another girl came in from the kitchen. She walked the length of the room and stood in the doorway.

“Don’t bother with these two,” the clean-cut young man said in a wearied voice. “Come and eat. They are worth nothing.”

We paid the bill and stood up. All the girls, the old woman, and the clean-cut young man sat down at table together. The property sailor sat with his head in his hands. No one had spoken to him all the time we were at lunch. The girl brought us our change that the old woman counted out for her and went back to her place at the table. We left a tip on the table and went out. When we were seated in the car ready to start, the girl came out and stood in the door. We started and I waved to her. She did not wave, but stood there looking after us.

AFTER THE RAIN

It was raining hard when we passed through the suburbs of Genoa and, even going very slowly behind the tram-cars and the motor trucks, liquid mud splashed on to the sidewalks, so that people stepped into doorways as they saw us coming. In San Pier d’Arena, the industrial suburb outside of Genoa, there is a wide street with two car-tracks and we drove down the center to avoid sending the mud on to the men going home from work. On our left was the Mediterranean. There was a big sea running and waves broke and the wind blew the spray against the car. A river-bed that, when we had passed, going into Italy, had been wide, stony and dry, was running brown, and up to the banks. The brown water discolored the sea and as the waves thinned and cleared in breaking, the light came through the yellow water and the crests, detached by the wind, blew across the road.

A big car passed us, going fast, and a sheet of muddy water rose up and over our wind-shield and radiator. The automatic wind-shield cleaner moved back and forth, spreading the film over the glass. We stopped and ate lunch at Sestri. There was no heat in the restaurant and we kept our hats and coats on. We could see the car outside, through the window. It was covered with mud and was stopped beside some boats that had been pulled up beyond the waves. In the restaurant you could see your breath.

The pasta asciutta was good; the wine tasted of alum, and we poured water in it. Afterward the waiter brought beefsteak and fried potatoes. A man and a woman sat at the far end of the restaurant. He was middleaged and she was young and wore black. All during the meal she would blow out her breath in the cold damp air. The man would look at it and shake his head. They ate without talking and the man held her hand under the table. She was good-looking and they seemed very sad. They had a travelling-bag with them.

We had the papers and I read the account of the Shanghai fighting aloud to Guy. After the meal, he left with the waiter in search for a place which did not exist in the restaurant, and I cleaned off the wind-shield, the lights and the license plates with a rag. Guy came back and we backed the car out and started. The waiter had taken him across the road and into an old house. The people in the house were suspicious and the waiter had remained with Guy to see nothing was stolen.

“Although I don’t know how, me not being a plumber, they expected me to steal anything,” Guy said.

As we came up on a headland beyond the town, the wind struck the car and nearly tipped it over.

“It’s good it blows us away from the sea,” Guy said.

“Well,” I said, “they drowned Shelley somewhere along here.”

“That was down by Viareggio,” Guy said. “Do you remember what we came to this country for?”

“Yes,” I said, “but we didn’t get it.”

“We’ll be out of it tonight.”

“If we can get past Ventimiglia.”

“We’ll see. I don’t like to drive this coast at night.” It was early afternoon and the sun was out. Below, the sea was blue with whitecaps running toward Savona. Back, beyond the cape, the brown and blue water joined. Out ahead of us, a tramp steamer was going up the coast.

“Can you still see Genoa?” Guy asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“That next big cape ought to put it out of sight.”

“We’ll see it a long time yet. I can still see Portofino Cape behind it.”

Finally we could not see Genoa. I looked back as we came out and there was only the sea, and below, in the bay, a line of beach with fishing-boats and above, on the side of the hill, a town and then capes far down the coast.

“It’s gone now,” I said to Guy.

“Oh, it’s been gone a long time now.”

“But we couldn’t be sure till we got way out.”

There was a sign with a picture of an S-turn and Svolta Pericolosa. The road curved around the headland and the wind blew through the crack in the wind-shield. Below the cape was a flat stretch beside the sea. The wind had dried the mud and the wheels were beginning to lift dust. On the flat road we passed a Fascist riding a bicycle, a heavy revolver in a holster on his back. He held the middle of the road on his bicycle and we turned out for him. He looked up at us as we passed. Ahead there was a railway crossing, and as we came toward it the gates went down.

As we waited, the Fascist came up on his bicycle. The train went by and Guy started the engine.

“Wait,” the bicycle man shouted from behind the car. “Your number’s dirty.”

I got out with a rag. The number had been cleaned at lunch.

“You can read it,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Read it.”

“I cannot read it. It is dirty.”

I wiped it off with the rag.

“How’s that?”

“Twenty-five lire.”

“What?” I said. “You could have read it. It’s only dirty from the state of the roads.”

“You don’t like Italian roads?”

“They are dirty.”

“Fifty lire.” He spat in the road. “Your car is dirty and you are dirty too.”

“Good. And give me a receipt with your name.”

He took out a receipt book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer’s ticket said.

“Give me fifty lire.”

He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I read it.

“This is for twenty-five lire.”

“A mistake,” he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty.

“And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep.”

He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt stub, holding it so I could not see.

“Go on,” he said, “before your number gets dirty again.”

We drove for two hours after it was dark and slept in Mentone that night. It seemed very cheerful and clean and sane and lovely. We had driven from Ventimiglia to Pisa and Florence, across the Romagna to Rimini, back through Forli, Imola, Bologna, Parma, Piacenza and Genoa, to Ventimiglia again. The whole trip had taken only ten days. Naturally, in such a short trip, we had no opportunity to see how things were with the country or the people.

FIFTY GRAND

“HOW ARE YOU GOING YOURSELF, Jack?” I asked him.

“You seen this Walcott?” he says.

“Just in the gym.”

“Well,” Jack says, “I’m going to need a lot of luck with that boy.”

“He can’t hit you, Jack,” Soldier said.

“I wish to hell he couldn’t.”

“He couldn’t hit you with a handful of bird-shot.”

“Bird-shot’d be all right,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t mind bird-shot any.”

“He looks easy to hit,” I said.

“Sure,” Jack says, “he ain’t going to last long. He ain’t going to last like you and me, Jerry. But right now he’s got everything.”

“You’ll left-hand him to death.”

“Maybe,” Jack says. “Sure. I got a chance to.”

“Handle him like you handled Kid Lewis.”

“Kid Lewis,” Jack said. “That kike!”

The three of us, Jack Brennan, Soldier Bartlett, and I were in Hanley’s. There were a couple of broads sitting at the next table to us. They had been drinking.

“What do you mean, kike?” one of the broads says. “What do you mean, kike, you big Irish bum?”

“Sure,” Jack says. “That’s it.”

“Kikes,” this broad goes on. “They’re always talking about kikes, these big Irishmen. What do you mean, kikes?”

“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“Kikes,” this broad goes on. “Whoever saw you ever buy a drink? Your wife sews your pockets up every morning. These Irishmen and their kikes! Ted Lewis could lick you too.”

“Sure,” Jack says. “And you give away a lot of things free too, don’t you?”

We went out. That was Jack. He could say what he wanted to when he wanted to say it.

Jack started training out at Danny Hogan’s health farm over in Jersey. It was nice out there but Jack didn’t like it much. He didn’t like being away from his wife and the kids, and he was sore and grouchy most of the time. He liked me and we got along fine together; and he liked Hogan, but after a while Soldier Bartlett commenced to get on his nerves. A kidder gets to be an awful thing around a camp if his stuff goes sort of sour. Soldier was always kidding Jack, just sort of kidding him all the time. It wasn’t very funny and it wasn’t very good, and it began to get to Jack. It was sort of stuff like this. Jack would finish up with the weights and the bag and pull on the gloves.

“You want to work?” he’d say to Soldier.

“Sure. How you want me to work?” Soldier would ask. “Want me to treat you rough like Walcott? Want me to knock you down a few times?”

“That’s it,” Jack would say. He didn’t like it any, though.

One morning we were all out on the road. We’d been out quite a way and now we were coming back. We’d go along fast for three minutes and then walk a minute, and then go fast for three minutes again. Jack wasn’t ever what you would call a sprinter. He’d move around fast enough in the ring if he had to, but he wasn’t any too fast on the road. All the time we were walking Soldier was kidding him. We came up the hill to the farmhouse.

“Well,” says Jack, “you better go back to town, Soldier.”

“What do you mean?”

“You better go back to town and stay there.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m sick of hearing you talk.”

“Yes?” says Soldier.

“Yes,” says Jack.

“You’ll be a damn sight sicker when Walcott gets through with you.”

“Sure,” says Jack, “maybe I will. But I know I’m sick of you.”

So Soldier went off on the train to town that same morning. I went down with him to the train. He was good and sore.

“I was just kidding him,” he said. We were waiting on the platform. “He can’t pull that stuff with me, Jerry.”

“He’s nervous and crabby,” I said. “He’s a good fellow, Soldier.”

“The hell he is. The hell he’s ever been a good fellow.”

“Well,” I said, “so long, Soldier.”

The train had come in. He climbed up with his bag.

“So long, Jerry,” he says. “You be in town before the fight?”

“I don’t think so.”

“See you then.”

He went in and the conductor swung up and the train went out. I rode back to the farm in the cart. Jack was on the porch writing a letter to his wife. The mail had come and I got the papers and went over on the other side of the porch and sat down to read. Hogan came out the door and walked over to me.

“Did he have a jam with Soldier?”

“Not a jam,” I said. “He just told him to go back to town.”

“I could see it coming,” Hogan said. “He never liked Soldier much.”

“No. He don’t like many people.”

“He’s a pretty cold one,” Hogan said.

“Well, he’s always been fine to me.”

“Me too,” Hogan said. “I got no kick on him. He’s a cold one, though.”

Hogan went in through the screen door and I sat there on the porch and read the papers. It was just starting to get fall weather and it’s nice country there in Jersey, up in the hills, and after I read the paper through I sat there and looked out at the country and the road down below against the woods with cars going along it, lifting the dust up. It was fine weather and pretty nice-looking country. Hogan came to the door and I said, “Say, Hogan, haven’t you got anything to shoot out here?”

“No,” Hogan said. “Only sparrows.”

“Seen the paper?” I said to Hogan.

“What’s in it?”

“Sande booted three of them in yesterday.”

“I got that on the telephone last night.”

“You follow them pretty close, Hogan?” I asked.

“Oh, I keep in touch with them,” Hogan said.

“How about Jack?” I says. “Does he still play them?”

“Him?” said Hogan. “Can you see him doing it?”

Just then Jack came around the corner with the letter in his hand. He’s wearing a sweater and an old pair of pants and boxing shoes.

“Got a stamp, Hogan?” he asks.

“Give me the letter,” Hogan said. “I’ll mail it for you.”

“Say, Jack,” I said, “didn’t you used to play the ponies?”

“Sure.”

“I knew you did. I knew I used to see you out at Sheepshead.”

“What did you lay off them for?” Hogan asked.

“Lost money.”

Jack sat down on the porch by me. He leaned back against a post. He shut his eyes in the sun.

“Want a chair?” Hogan asked.

“No,” said Jack. “This is fine.”

“It’s a nice day,” I said. “It’s pretty nice out in the country.”

“I’d a damn sight rather be in town with the wife.”

“Well, you only got another week.”

“Yes,” Jack says. “That’s so.”

We sat there on the porch. Hogan was inside at the office.

“What do you think about the shape I’m in?” Jack asked me.

“Well, you can’t tell,” I said. “You got a week to get around into form.”

“Don’t stall me.”

“Well,” I said, “you’re not right.”

“I’m not sleeping,” Jack said.

“You’ll be all right in a couple of days.”

“No,” says Jack, “I got the insomnia.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“I miss the wife.”

“Have her come out.”

“No. I’m too old for that.”

“We’ll take a long walk before you turn in and get you good and tired.”

“Tired!” Jack says. “I’m tired all the time.”

He was that way all week. He wouldn’t sleep at night and he’d get up in the morning feeling that way, you know, when you can’t shut your hands. “He’s stale as poorhouse cake,” Hogan said. “He’s nothing.”

“I never seen Walcott,” I said.

“He’ll kill him,” said Hogan. “He’ll tear him in two.”

“Well,” I said, “everybody’s got to get it sometime.”

“Not like this, though,” Hogan said. “They’ll think he never trained. It gives the farm a black eye.”

“You hear what the reporters said about him?”

“Didn’t I! They said he was awful. They said they oughtn’t to let him fight.”

“Well,” I said, “they’re always wrong, ain’t they?”

“Yes,” said Hogan. “But this time they’re right.”

“What the hell do they know about whether a man’s right or not?”

“Well,” said Hogan, “they’re not such fools.”

“All they did was pick Willard at Toledo. This Lardner, he’s so wise now, ask him about when he picked Willard at Toledo.”

“Aw, he wasn’t out,” Hogan said. “He only writes the big fights.”

“I don’t care who they are,” I said. “What the hell do they know? They can write maybe, but what the hell do they know?”

“You don’t think Jack’s in any shape, do you?” Hogan asked.

“No. He’s through. All he needs is to have Corbett pick him to win for it to be all over.”

“Well, Corbett’ll pick him,” Hogan says.

“Sure. He’ll pick him.”

That night Jack didn’t sleep any either. The next morning was the last day before the fight. After breakfast we were out on the porch again.

“What do you think about, Jack, when you can’t sleep?” I said.

“Oh, I worry,” Jack says. “I worry about property I got up in the Bronx, I worry about property I got in Florida. I worry about the kids. I worry about the wife. Sometimes I think about fights. I think about that kike Ted Lewis and I get sore. I got some stocks and I worry about them. What the hell don’t I think about?”

“Well,” I said, “tomorrow night it’ll all be over.”

“Sure,” said Jack. “That always helps a lot, don’t it? That just fixes everything all up, I suppose. Sure.”

He was sore all day. We didn’t do any work. Jack just moved around a little to loosen up. He shadow-boxed a few rounds. He didn’t even look good doing that. He skipped the rope a little while. He couldn’t sweat.

“He’d be better not to do any work at all,” Hogan said. We were standing watching him skip rope. “Don’t he ever sweat at all any more?”

“He can’t sweat.”

“Do you suppose he’s got the con? He never had any trouble making weight did he?”

“No, he hasn’t got any con. He just hasn’t got anything inside any more.”

“He ought to sweat,” said Hogan.

Jack came over, skipping the rope. He was skipping up and down in front of us, forward and back, crossing his arms every third time.

“Well,” he says. “What are you buzzards talking about?”

“I don’t think you ought to work any more,” Hogan says. “You’ll be stale.”

“Wouldn’t that be awful?” Jack says and skips away down the floor, slapping the rope hard.

That afternoon John Collins showed up out at the farm. Jack was up in his room. John came out in a car from town. He had a couple of friends with him. The car stopped and they all got out.

“Where’s Jack?” John asked me.

“Up in his room, lying down.”

“Lying down?”

“Yes,” I said.

“How is he?”

I looked at the two fellows that were with John.

“They’re friends of his,” John said.

“He’s pretty bad,” I said.

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He don’t sleep.”

“Hell,” said John. “That Irishman could never sleep.”

“He isn’t right,” I said.

“Hell,” John said. “He’s never right. I’ve had him for ten years and he’s never been right yet.”

The fellows who were with him laughed.

“I want you to shake hands with Mr. Morgan and Mr. Steinfelt,” John said. “This is Mr. Doyle. He’s been training Jack.”

“Glad to meet you,” I said.

“Let’s go up and see the boy,” the fellow called Morgan said.

“Let’s have a look at him,” Steinfelt said.

We all went upstairs.

“Where’s Hogan?” John asked.

“He’s out in the barn with a couple of his customers,” I said.

“He got many people out here now?” John asked.

“Just two.”

“Pretty quiet, ain’t it?” Morgan said.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s pretty quiet.”

We were outside Jack’s room. John knocked on the door. There wasn’t any answer.

“Maybe he’s asleep,” I said.

“What the hell’s he sleeping in the daytime for?”

John turned the handle and we all went in. Jack was lying asleep on the bed. He was face down and his face was in the pillow. Both his arms were around the pillow.

“Hey, Jack!” John said to him.

Jack’s head moved a little on the pillow. “Jack!” John says, leaning over him. Jack just dug a little deeper in the pillow. John touched him on the shoulder. Jack sat up and looked at us. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing an old sweater.

“Christ! Why can’t you let me sleep?” he says to John.

“Don’t be sore,” John says. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“Oh no,” Jack says. “Of course not.”

“You know Morgan and Steinfelt,” John said.

“Glad to see you,” Jack says.

“How do you feel, Jack?” Morgan asks him.

“Fine,” Jack says. “How the hell would I feel?”

“You look fine,” Steinfelt says.

“Yes, don’t I,” says Jack. “Say,” he says to John. “You’re my manager. You get a big enough cut. Why the hell don’t you come out here when the reporters was out! You want Jerry and me to talk to them?”

“I had Lew fighting in Philadelphia,” John said.

“What the hell’s that to me?” Jack says. “You’re my manager. You get a big enough cut, don’t you? You aren’t making me any money in Philadelphia, are you? Why the hell aren’t you out here when I ought to have you?”

“Hogan was here.”

“Hogan,” Jack says. “Hogan’s as dumb as I am.”

“Soldier Bahtlett was out here wukking with you for a while, wasn’t he?” Steinfelt said to change the subject.

“Yes, he was out here,” Jack says. “He was out here all right.”

“Say, Jerry,” John said to me. “Would you go and find Hogan and tell him we want to see him in about half an hour?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Why the hell can’t he stick around?” Jack says. “Stick around, Jerry.” Morgan and Steinfelt looked at each other.

“Quiet down, Jack,” John said to him.

“I better go find Hogan,” I said.

“All right, if you want to go,” Jack says. “None of these guys are going to send you away, though.”

“I’ll go find Hogan,” I said.

Hogan was out in the gym in the barn. He had a couple of his health-farm patients with the gloves on. They neither one wanted to hit the other, for fear the other would come back and hit him.

“That’ll do,” Hogan said when he saw me come in. “You can stop the slaughter. You gentlemen take a shower and Bruce will rub you down.”

They climbed out through the ropes and Hogan came over to me.

“John Collins is out with a couple of friends to see Jack,” I said.

“I saw them come up in the car.”

“Who are the two fellows with John?”

“They’re what you call wise boys,” Hogan said. “Don’t you know them two?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s Happy Steinfelt and Lew Morgan. They got a pool-room.”

“I been away a long time,” I said.

“Sure,” said Hogan. “That Happy Steinfelt’s a big operator.”

“I’ve heard his name,” I said.

“He’s a pretty smooth boy,” Hogan said. “They’re a couple of sharpshooters.”

“Well,” I said. “They want to see us in half an hour.”

“You mean they don’t want to see us until a half an hour?”

“That’s it.”

“Come on in the office,” Hogan said. “To hell with those sharpshooters.”

After about thirty minutes or so Hogan and I went upstairs. We knocked on Jack’s door. They were talking inside the room.

“Wait a minute,” somebody said.

“To hell with that stuff,” Hogan said. “When you want to see me I’m down in the office.”

We heard the door unlock. Steinfelt opened it.

“Come on in, Hogan,” he says. “We’re all going to have a drink.”

“Well,” says Hogan. “That’s something.”

We went in. Jack was sitting on the bed. John and Morgan were sitting on a couple of chairs. Steinfelt was standing up.

“You’re a pretty mysterious lot of boys,” Hogan said.

“Hello, Danny,” John says.

“Hello, Danny,” Morgan says and shakes hands.

Jack doesn’t say anything. He just sits there on the bed. He ain’t with the others. He’s all by himself. He was wearing an old blue jersey and pants and had on boxing shoes. He needed a shave. Steinfelt and Morgan were dressers. John was quite a dresser too. Jack sat there looking Irish and tough.

Steinfelt brought out a bottle and Hogan brought in some glasses and everybody had a drink. Jack and I took one and the rest of them went on and had two or three each.

“Better save some for your ride back,” Hogan said.

“Don’t you worry. We got plenty,” Morgan said.

Jack hadn’t drunk anything since the one drink. He was standing up and looking at them. Morgan was sitting on the bed where Jack had sat.

“Have a drink, Jack,” John said and handed him the glass and the bottle.

“No,” Jack said, “I never liked to go to these wakes.”

They all laughed. Jack didn’t laugh.

They were all feeling pretty good when they left. Jack stood on the porch when they got into the car. They waved to him.

“So long,” Jack said.

We had supper. Jack didn’t say anything all during the meal except, “Will you pass me this?” or “Will you pass me that?” The two health-farm patients ate at the same table with us. They were pretty nice fellows. After we finished eating we went out on the porch. It was dark early.

“Like to take a walk, Jerry?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” I said.

We put on our coats and started out. It was quite a way down to the main road and then we walked along the main road about a mile and a half. Cars kept going by and we would pull out to the side until they were past. Jack didn’t say anything. After we had stepped out into the bushes to let a big car go by Jack said, “To hell with this walking. Come on back to Hogan’s.”

We went along a side road that cut up over the hill and cut across the fields back to Hogan’s. We could see the lights of the house up on the hill. We came around to the front of the house and there standing in the doorway was Hogan.

“Have a good walk?” Hogan asked.

“Oh, fine,” Jack said. “Listen, Hogan. Have you got any liquor?”

“Sure,” says Hogan. “What’s the idea?”

“Send it up to the room,” Jack says. “I’m going to sleep tonight.”

“You’re the doctor,” Hogan says.

“Come on up to the room, Jerry,” Jack says.

Upstairs Jack sat on the bed with his head in his hands.

“Ain’t it a life?” Jack says.

Hogan brought in a quart of liquor and two glasses.

“Want some ginger ale?”

“What do you think I want to do, get sick?”

“I just asked you,” said Hogan.

“Have a drink?” said Jack.

“No, thanks,” said Hogan. He went out.

“How about you, Jerry?”

“I’ll have one with you,” I said.

Jack poured out a couple of drinks. “Now,” he said, “I want to take it slow and easy.”

“Put some water in it,” I said.

“Yes,” Jack said. “I guess that’s better.”

We had a couple of drinks without saying anything. Jack started to pour me another.

“No,” I said, “that’s all I want.”

“All right,” Jack said. He poured himself out another big shot and put water in it. He was lighting up a little.

“That was a fine bunch out here this afternoon,” he said. “They don’t take any chances, those two.”

Then a little later, “Well,” he says, “they’re right. What the hell’s the good in taking chances?”

“Don’t you want another, Jerry?” he said. “Come on, drink along with me.”

“I don’t need it, Jack,” I said. “I feel all right.”

“Just have one more,” Jack said. It was softening him up.

“All right,” I said.

Jack poured one for me and another big one for himself.

“You know,” he said, “I like liquor pretty well. If I hadn’t been boxing I would have drunk quite a lot.”

“Sure,” I said.

“You know,” he said, “I missed a lot, boxing.”

“You made plenty of money.”

“Sure, that’s what I’m after. You know I miss a lot, Jerry.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, “like about the wife. And being away from home so much. It don’t do my girls any good. ‘Who’s your old man?’ some of those society kids’ll say to them. ‘My old man’s Jack Brennan.’ That don’t do them any good.”

“Hell,” I said, “all that makes a difference is if they got dough.”

“Well,” says Jack, “I got the dough for them all right.”

He poured out another drink. The bottle was about empty.

“Put some water in it,” I said. Jack poured in some water.

“You know,” he says, “you ain’t got any idea how I miss the wife.”

“Sure.”

“You ain’t got any idea. You can’t have an idea what it’s like.”

“It ought to be better out in the country than in town.”

“With me now,” Jack said, “it don’t make any difference where I am. You can’t have an idea what it’s like.”

“Have another drink.”

“Am I getting soused? Do I talk funny?”

“You’re coming on all right.”

“You can’t have an idea what it’s like. They ain’t anybody can have an idea what it’s like.”

“Except the wife,” I said.

“She knows,” Jack said. “She knows all right. She knows. You bet she knows.”

“Put some water in that,” I said.

“Jerry,” says Jack, “you can’t have an idea what it gets to be like.”

He was good and drunk. He was looking at me steady. His eyes were sort of too steady.

“You’ll sleep all right,” I said.

“Listen Jerry,” Jack says. “You want to make some money? Get some money down on Walcott.”

“Yes?”

“Listen, Jerry,” Jack put down the glass. “I’m not drunk now, see? You know what I’m betting on him? Fifty grand.”

“That’s a lot of dough.”

“Fifty grand,” Jack says, “at two to one. I’ll get twenty-five thousand bucks. Get some money on him, Jerry.”

“It sounds good,” I said.

“How can I beat him?” Jack says. “It ain’t crooked. How can I beat him? Why not make money on it?”

“Put some water in that,” I said.

“I’m through after this fight,” Jack says. “I’m through with it. I got to take a beating. Why shouldn’t I make money on it?”

“Sure.”

“I ain’t slept for a week,” Jack says. “All night I lay awake and worry my can off. I can’t sleep, Jerry. You ain’t got an idea what it’s like when you can’t sleep.”

“Sure.”

“I can’t sleep. That’s all. I just can’t sleep. What’s the use of taking care of yourself all these years when you can’t sleep?”

“It’s bad.”

“You ain’t got an idea what it’s like, Jerry, when you can’t sleep.”

“Put some water in that,” I said.

Well, about eleven o’clock Jack passes out and I put him to bed. Finally he’s so he can’t keep from sleeping. I helped him get his clothes off and got him into bed.

“You’ll sleep all right, Jack,” I said.

“Sure,” Jack says, “I’ll sleep now.”

“Good night, Jack,” I said.

“Good night, Jerry,” Jack says. “You’re the only friend I got.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.

“You’re the only friend I got,” Jack says, “the only friend I got.”

“Go to sleep,” I said.

“I’ll sleep,” Jack says.

Downstairs Hogan was sitting at the desk in the office reading the papers. He looked up. “Well, you get your boy friend to sleep?” he asks.

“He’s off.”

“It’s better for him than not sleeping,” Hogan said.

“Sure.”

“You’d have a hell of a time explaining that to these sport writers though,” Hogan said.

“Well, I’m going to bed myself,” I said.

“Good night,” said Hogan.

In the morning I came downstairs about eight o’clock and got some breakfast. Hogan had his two customers out in the barn doing exercises. I went out and watched them.

“One! Two! Three! Four!” Hogan was counting for them. “Hello, Jerry,” he said. “Is Jack up yet?”

“No. He’s still sleeping.”

I went back to my room and packed up to go in to town. About nine-thirty I heard Jack getting up in the next room. When I heard him go downstairs I went down after him. Jack was sitting at the breakfast table. Hogan had come in and was standing beside the table.

“How do you feel, Jack?” I asked him.

“Not so bad.”

“Sleep well?” Hogan asked.

“I slept all right,” Jack said. “I got a thick tongue but I ain’t got a head.”

“Good,” said Hogan. “That was good liquor.”

“Put it on the bill,” Jack says.

“What time you want to go into town?” Hogan asked.

“Before lunch,” Jack says. “The eleven o’clock train.”

“Sit down, Jerry,” Jack said. Hogan went out.

I sat down at the table. Jack was eating a grapefruit. When he’d find a seed he’d spit it out in the spoon and dump it on the plate.

“I guess I was pretty stewed last night,” he started.

“You drank some liquor.”

“I guess I said a lot of fool things.”

“You weren’t bad.”

“Where’s Hogan?” he asked. He was through with the grapefruit.

“He’s out in front in the office.”

“What did I say about betting on the fight?” Jack asked. He was holding the spoon and sort of poking at the grapefruit with it.

The girl came in with some ham and eggs and took away the grapefruit.

“Bring me another glass of milk,” Jack said to her. She went out.

“You said you had fifty grand on Walcott,” I said.

“That’s right,” Jack said.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I don’t feel too good about it,” Jack said.

“Something might happen.”

“No,” Jack said. “He wants the title bad. They’ll be shooting with him all right.”

“You can’t ever tell.”

“No. He wants the title. It’s worth a lot of money to him.”

“Fifty grand is a lot of money,” I said.

“It’s business,” said Jack. “I can’t win. You know I can’t win anyway.”

“As long as you’re in there you got a chance.”

“No,” Jack says. “I’m all through. It’s just business.”

“How do you feel?”

“Pretty good,” Jack said. “The sleep was what I needed.”

“You might go good.”

“I’ll give them a good show,” Jack said.

After breakfast Jack called up his wife on the long-distance. He was inside the booth telephoning.

“That’s the first time he’s called her up since he’s out here,” Hogan said.

“He writes her every day.”

“Sure,” Hogan says, “a letter only costs two cents.”

Hogan said good-by to us and Bruce, the nigger rubber, drove us down to the train in the cart.

“Good-by, Mr. Brennan,” Bruce said at the train, “I sure hope you knock his can off.”

“So long,” Jack said. He gave Bruce two dollars. Bruce had worked on him a lot. He looked kind of disappointed. Jack saw me looking at Bruce holding the two dollars.

“It’s all in the bill,” he said. “Hogan charged me for the rubbing.”

On the train going into town Jack didn’t talk. He sat in the corner of the seat with his ticket in his hat-band and looked out of the window. Once he turned and spoke to me.

“I told the wife I’d take a room at the Shelby tonight,” he said. “It’s just around the comer from the Garden. I can go up to the house tomorrow morning.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said. “Your wife ever see you fight, Jack?”

“No,” Jack says. “She never seen me fight.”

I thought he must be figuring on taking an awful beating if he doesn’t want to go home afterward. In town we took a taxi up to the Shelby. A boy came out and took our bags and we went in to the desk.

“How much are the rooms?” Jack asked.

“We only have double rooms,” the clerk says. “I can give you a nice double room for ten dollars.”

“That’s too steep.”

“I can give you a double room for seven dollars.”

“With a bath?”

“Certainly.”

“You might as well bunk with me, Jerry,” Jack says.

“Oh,” I said, “I’ll sleep down at my brother-in-law’s.”

“I don’t mean for you to pay it,” Jack says. “I just want to get my money’s worth.”

“Will you register, please?” the clerk says. He looked at the names. “Number 238, Mr. Brennan.”

We went up in the elevator. It was a nice big room with two beds and a door opening into a bath-room.

“This is pretty good,” Jack says.

The boy who brought us up pulled up the curtains and brought in our bags. Jack didn’t make any move, so I gave the boy a quarter. We washed up and Jack said we better go out and get something to eat.

We ate a lunch at Jimmy Hanley’s place. Quite a lot of the boys were there. When we were about half through eating, John came in and sat down with us. Jack didn’t talk much.

“How are you on the weight, Jack?” John asked him. Jack was putting away a pretty good lunch.

“I could make it with my clothes on,” Jack said. He never had to worry about taking off weight. He was a natural welterweight and he’d never gotten fat. He’d lost weight out at Hogan’s.

“Well, that’s one thing you never had to worry about,” John said.

“That’s one thing,” Jack says.

We went around to the Garden to weigh in after lunch. The match was made at a hundred forty-seven pounds at three o’clock. Jack stepped on the scales with a towel around him. The bar didn’t move. Walcott had just weighed and was standing with a lot of people around him.

“Let’s see what you weigh, Jack,” Freedman, Walcott’s manager said.

“All right, weigh him then,” Jack jerked his head toward Walcott.

“Drop the towel,” Freedman said.

“What do you make it?” Jack asked the fellows who were weighing.

“One hundred and forty-three pounds,” the fat man who was weighing said.

“You’re down fine, Jack,” Freedman says.

“Weigh him,” Jack says.

Walcott came over. He was a blond with wide shoulders and arms like a heavyweight. He didn’t have much legs. Jack stood about half a head taller than he did.

“Hello, Jack,” he said. His face was plenty marked up.

“Hello,” said Jack. “How you feel?”

“Good,” Walcott says. He dropped the towel from around his waist and stood on the scales. He had the widest shoulders and back you ever saw.

“One hundred and forty-six pounds and twelve ounces.”

Walcott stepped off and grinned at Jack.

“Well,” John says to him, “Jack’s spotting you about four pounds.”

“More than that when I come in, kid,” Walcott says. “I’m going to go and eat now.”

We went back and Jack got dressed. “He’s a pretty tough-looking boy,” Jack says to me.

“He looks as though he’d been hit plenty of times.”

“Oh, yes,” Jack says. “He ain’t hard to hit.”

“Where are you going?” John asked when Jack was dressed.

“Back to the hotel,” Jack says. “You looked after everything?”

“Yes,” John says. “It’s all looked after.”

“I’m going to lie down a while,” Jack says.

“I’ll come around for you about a quarter to seven and we’ll go and eat.”

“All right.”

Up at the hotel Jack took off his shoes and his coat and lay down for a while. I wrote a letter. I looked over a couple of times and Jack wasn’t sleeping. He was lying perfectly still but every once in a while his eyes would open. Finally he sits up.

“Want to play some cribbage, Jerry?” he says.

“Sure,” I said.

He went over to his suitcase and got out the cards and the cribbage board. We played cribbage and he won three dollars off me. John knocked at the door and came in.

“Want to play some cribbage, John?” Jack asked him.

John put his hat down on the table. It was all wet. His coat was wet too.

“Is it raining?” Jack asks.

“It’s pouring,” John says. “The taxi I had got tied up in the traffic and I got out and walked.”

“Come on, play some cribbage,” Jack says.

“You ought to go and eat.”

“No,” says Jack. “I don’t want to eat yet.”

So they played cribbage for about half an hour and Jack won a dollar and a half off him.

“Well, I suppose we got to go eat,” Jack says. He went to the window and looked out.

“Is it still raining?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s eat in the hotel,” John says.

“All right,” Jack says, “I’ll play you once more to see who pays for the meal.”

After a little while Jack gets up and says, “You buy the meal, John,” and we went downstairs and ate in the big dining-room.

After we ate we went upstairs and Jack played cribbage with John again and won two dollars and a half off him. Jack was feeling pretty good. John had a bag with him with all his stuff in it. Jack took off his shirt and collar and put on a jersey and a sweater, so he wouldn’t catch cold when he came out, and put his ring clothes and his bathrobe in a bag.

“You all ready?” John asks him. “I’ll call up and have them get a taxi.”

Pretty soon the telephone rang and they said the taxi was waiting.

We rode down in the elevator and went out through the lobby, and got in a taxi and rode around to the Garden. It was raining hard but there was a lot of people outside on the streets. The Garden was sold out. As we came in on our way to the dressing-room I saw how full it was. It looked like half a mile down to the ring. It was all dark. Just the lights over the ring.

“It’s a good thing, with this rain, they didn’t try and pull this fight in the ball park,” John said.

“They got a good crowd,” Jack says.

“This is a fight that would draw a lot more than the Garden could hold.”

“You can’t tell about the weather,” Jack says.

John came to the door of the dressing-room and poked his head in. Jack was sitting there with his bathrobe on, he had his arms folded and was looking at the floor. John had a couple of handlers with him. They looked over his shoulder. Jack looked up.

“Is he in?” he asked.

“He’s just gone down,” John said.

We started down. Walcott was just getting into the ring. The crowd gave him a big hand. He climbed through between the ropes and put his two fists together and smiled, and shook them at the crowd, first at one side of the ring, then at the other, and then sat down. Jack got a good hand coming down through the crowd. Jack is Irish and the Irish always get a pretty good hand. An Irishman don’t draw in New York like a Jew or an Italian but they always get a good hand. Jack climbed up and bent down to go through the ropes and Walcott came over from his corner and pushed the rope down for Jack to go through. The crowd thought that was wonderful. Walcott put his hand on Jack’s shoulder and they stood there just for a second.

“So you’re going to be one of these popular champions,” Jack says to him. “Take your goddam hand off my shoulder.”

“Be yourself,” Walcott says.

This is all great for the crowd. How gentlemanly the boys are before the fight. How they wish each other luck.

Solly Freedman came over to our corner while Jack is bandaging his hands and John is over in Walcott’s corner. Jack puts his thumb through the slit in the bandage and then wrapped his hand nice and smooth. I taped it around the wrist and twice across the knuckles.

“Hey,” Freedman says. “Where do you get all that tape?”

“Feel of it,” Jack says. “It’s soft, ain’t it? Don’t be a hick.”

Freedman stands there all the time while Jack bandages the other hand, and one of the boys that’s going to handle him brings the gloves and I pull them on and work them around.

“Say, Freedman,” Jack asks, “what nationality is this Walcott?”

“I don’t know,” Solly says. “He’s some sort of a Dane.”

“He’s a Bohemian,” the lad who brought the gloves said.

The referee called them out to the center of the ring and Jack walks out. Walcott comes out smiling. They met and the referee put his arm on each of their shoulders.

“Hello, popularity,” Jack says to Walcott.

“Be yourself.”

“What do you call yourself ‘Walcott’ for?” Jack says. “Didn’t you know he was a nigger?”

“Listen—” says the referee, and he gives them the same old line. Once Walcott interrupts him. He grabs Jack’s arm and says, “Can I hit when he’s got me like this?”

“Keep your hands off me,” Jack says. “There ain’t no moving-pictures of this.”

They went back to their comers. I lifted the bathrobe off Jack and he leaned on the ropes and flexed his knees a couple of times and scuffed his shoes in the rosin. The gong rang and Jack turned quick and went out. Walcott came toward him and they touched gloves and as soon as Walcott dropped his hands Jack jumped his left into his face twice. There wasn’t anybody ever boxed better than Jack. Walcott was after him, going forward all the time with his chin on his chest. He’s a hooker and he carries his hands pretty low. All he knows is to get in there and sock. But every time he gets in there close, Jack has the left hand in his face. It’s just as though it’s automatic. Jack just raises the left hand up and it’s in Walcott’s face. Three or four times Jack brings the right over but Walcott gets it on the shoulder or high up on the head. He’s just like all these hookers. The only thing he’s afraid of is another one of the same kind. He’s covered everywhere you can hurt him. He don’t care about a left hand in his face.

After about four rounds Jack has him bleeding bad and his face all cut up, but every time Walcott’s got in close he’s socked so hard he’s got two big red patches on both sides just below Jack’s ribs. Every time he gets in close, Jack ties him up, then gets one hand loose and uppercuts him, but when Walcott gets his hands loose he socks Jack in the body so they can hear it outside in the street. He’s a socker.

It goes along like that for three rounds more. They don’t talk any. They’re working all the time. We worked over Jack plenty too, in between the rounds. He don’t look good at all but he never does much work in the ring. He don’t move around much and that left hand is just automatic. It’s just like it was connected with Walcott’s face and Jack just had to wish it in every time. Jack is always calm in close and he doesn’t waste any juice. He knows everything about working in close too and he’s getting away with a lot of stuff. While they were in our corner I watched him tie Walcott up, get his right hand loose, turn it and come up with an uppercut that got Walcott’s nose with the heel of the glove. Walcott was bleeding bad and leaned his nose on Jack’s shoulder so as to give Jack some of it too, and Jack sort of lifted his shoulder sharp and caught him against the nose, and then brought down the right hand and did the same thing again.

Walcott was sore as hell. By the time they’d gone five rounds he hated Jack’s guts. Jack wasn’t sore; that is, he wasn’t any sorer than he always was. He certainly did used to make the fellows he fought hate boxing. That was why he hated Kid Lewis so. He never got the Kid’s goat. Kid Lewis always had about three new dirty things Jack couldn’t do. Jack was as safe as a church all the time he was in there, as long as he was strong. He certainly was treating Walcott rough. The funny thing was it looked as though Jack was an open classic boxer. That was because he had all that stuff too.

After the seventh round Jack says, “My left’s getting heavy.”

From then he started to take a beating. It didn’t show at first. But instead of him running the fight it was Walcott was running it, instead of being safe all the time now he was in trouble. He couldn’t keep him out with the left hand now. It looked as though it was the same as ever, only now instead of Walcott’s punches just missing him they were just hitting him. He took an awful beating in the body.

“What’s the round?” Jack asked.

“The eleventh.”

“I can’t stay,” Jack says. “My legs are going bad.”

Walcott had been just hitting him for a long time. It was like a baseball catcher pulls the ball and takes some of the shock off. From now on Walcott commenced to land solid. He certainly was a socking-machine. Jack was just trying to block everything now. It didn’t show what an awful beating he was taking. In between the rounds I worked on his legs. The muscles would flutter under my hands all the time I was rubbing them. He was sick as hell.

“How’s it go?” he asked John, turning around, his face all swollen.

“It’s his fight.”

“I think I can last,” Jack says. “I don’t want this bohunk to stop me.”

It was going just the way he thought it would. He knew he couldn’t beat Walcott. He wasn’t strong any more. He was all right though. His money was all right and now he wanted to finish it off right to please himself. He didn’t want to be knocked out.

The gong rang and we pushed him out. He went out slow. Walcott came right out after him. Jack put the left in his face and Walcott took it, came in under it and started working on Jack’s body. Jack tried to tie him up and it was just like trying to hold on to a buzz-saw. Jack broke away from it and missed with the right. Walcott clipped him with a left hook and Jack went down. He went down on his hands and knees and looked at us. The referee started counting. Jack was watching us and shaking his head. At eight John motioned to him. You couldn’t hear on account of the crowd. Jack got up. The referee had been holding Walcott back with one arm while he counted.

When Jack was on his feet Walcott started toward him.

“Watch yourself, Jimmy,” I heard Solly Freedman yell to him.

Walcott came up to Jack looking at him. Jack stuck the left hand at him. Walcott just shook his head. He backed Jack up against the ropes, measured him and then hooked the left very light to the side of Jack’s head and socked the right into the body as hard as he could sock, just as low as he could get it. He must have hit him five inches below the belt. I thought the eyes would come out of Jack’s head. They stuck way out. His mouth come open.

The referee grabbed Walcott. Jack stepped forward. If he went down there went fifty thousand bucks. He walked as though all his insides were going to fall out.

“It wasn’t low,” he said. “It was a accident.”

The crowd were yelling so you couldn’t hear anything.

“I’m all right,” Jack says. They were right in front of us. The referee looks at John and then he shakes his head.

“Come on, you polak son-of-a-bitch,” Jack says to Walcott.

John was hanging onto the ropes. He had the towel ready to chuck in. Jack was standing just a little way out from the ropes. He took a step forward. I saw the sweat come out on his face like somebody had squeezed it and a big drop went down his nose.

“Come on and fight,” Jack says to Walcott.

The referee looked at John and waved Walcott on.

“Go in there, you slob,” he says.

Walcott went in. He didn’t know what to do either. He never thought Jack could have stood it. Jack put the left in his face. There was such a hell of a lot of yelling going on. They were right in front of us. Walcott hit him twice. Jack’s face was the worst thing I ever saw — the look on it! He was holding himself and all his body together and it all showed on his face. All the time he was thinking and holding his body in where it was busted.

Then he started to sock. His face looked awful all the time. He started to sock with his hands low down by his side, swinging at Walcott. Walcott covered up and Jack was swinging wild at Walcott’s head. Then he swung the left and it hit Walcott in the groin and the right hit Walcott right bang where he’d hit Jack. Way low below the belt. Walcott went down and grabbed himself there and rolled and twisted around.

The referee grabbed Jack and pushed him toward his corner. John jumps into the ring. There was all this yelling going on. The referee was talking with the judges and then the announcer got into the ring with the megaphone and says, “Walcott on a foul.”

The referee is talking to John and he says, “What could I do? Jack wouldn’t take the foul. Then when he’s groggy he fouls him.”

“He’d lost it anyway,” John says.

Jack’s sitting on the chair. I’ve got his gloves off and he’s holding himself in down there with both hands. When he’s got something supporting it his face doesn’t look so bad.

“Go over and say you’re sorry,” John says into his ear. “It’ll look good.”

Jack stands up and the sweat comes out all over his face. I put the bathrobe around him and he holds himself in with one hand under the bathrobe and goes across the ring. They’ve picked Walcott up and they’re working on him. There’re a lot of people in Walcott’s corner. Nobody speaks to Jack. He leans over Walcott.

“I’m sorry,” Jack says. “I didn’t mean to foul you.”

Walcott doesn’t say anything. He looks too damned sick.

“Well, you’re the champion now,” Jack says to him. “I hope you get a hell of a lot of fun out of it.”

“Leave the kid alone,” Solly Freedman says.

“Hello, Solly,” Jack says. “I’m sorry I fouled your boy.”

Freedman just looks at him.

Jack went to his corner walking that funny jerky way and we got him down through the ropes and through the reporters’ tables and out down the aisle. A lot of people want to slap Jack on the back. He goes out through all that mob in his bathrobe to the dressing-room. It’s a popular win for Walcott. That’s the way the money was bet in the Garden.

Once we got inside the dressing-room Jack lay down and shut his eyes.

“We want to get to the hotel and get a doctor,” John says.

“I’m all busted inside,” Jack says.

“I’m sorry as hell, Jack,” John says.

“It’s all right,” Jack says.

He lies there with his eyes shut.

“They certainly tried a nice double-cross,” John said.

“Your friends Morgan and Steinfelt,” Jack said. “You got nice friends.”

He lies there, his eyes are open now. His face has still got that awful drawn look.

“It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money,” Jack says.

“You’re some boy, Jack,” John says.

“No,” Jack says. “It was nothing.”

A SIMPLE ENQUIRY

OUTSIDE, THE SNOW WAS HIGHER THAN the window. The sunlight came in through the window and shone on a map on the pineboard wall of the hut. The sun was high and the light came in over the top of the snow. A trench had been cut along the open side of the hut, and each clear day the sun, shining on the wall, reflected heat against the snow and widened the trench. It was late March. The major sat at a table against the wall. His adjutant sat at another table.

Around the major’s eyes were two white circles where his snow-glasses had protected his face from the sun on the snow. The rest of his face had been burned and then tanned and then burned through the tan. His nose was swollen and there were edges of loose skin where blisters had been. While he worked at the papers he put the fingers of his left hand into a saucer of oil and then spread the oil over his face, touching it very gently with the tips of his fingers. He was very careful to drain his fingers on the edge of the saucer so there was only a film of oil on them, and after he had stroked his forehead and his cheeks, he stroked his nose very delicately between his fingers. When he had finished he stood up, took the saucer of oil and went into the small room of the hut where he slept. “I’m going to take a little sleep,” he said to the adjutant. In that army an adjutant is not a commissioned officer. “You will finish up.”

“Yes, signor maggiore,” the adjutant answered. He leaned back in his chair and yawned. He took a paper-covered book out of the pocket of his coat and opened it; then laid it down on the table and lit his pipe. He leaned forward on the table to read and puffed at his pipe. Then he closed the book and put it back in his pocket. He had too much paper-work to get through. He could not enjoy reading until it was done. Outside, the sun went behind a mountain and there was no more light on the wall of the hut. A soldier came in and put some pine branches, chopped into irregular lengths, into the stove. “Be soft, Pinin,” the adjutant said to him. “The major is sleeping.”

Pinin was the major’s orderly. He was a dark-faced boy, and he fixed the stove, putting the pine wood in carefully, shut the door, and went into the back of the hut again. The adjutant went on with his papers.

“Tonani,” the major called.

“Signor maggiore?”

“Send Pinin in to me.”

“Pinin!” the adjutant called. Pinin came into the room. “The major wants you,” the adjutant said.

Pinin walked across the main room of the hut toward the major’s door. He knocked on the half-opened door. “Signor maggiore?”

“Come in,” the adjutant heard the major say, “and shut the door.”

Inside the room the major lay on his bunk. Pinin stood beside the bunk. The major lay with his head on the rucksack that he had stuffed with spare clothing to make a pillow. His long, burned, oiled face looked at Pinin. His hands lay on the blankets.

“You are nineteen?” he asked.

“Yes, signor maggiore.”

“You have ever been in love?”

“How do you mean, signor maggiore?”

“In love — with a girl?”

“I have been with girls.”

“I did not ask that. I asked if you had been in love — with a girl.”

“Yes, signor maggiore.”

“You are in love with this girl now? You don’t write her. I read all your letters.”

“I am in love with her,” Pinin said, “but I do not write her.”

“You are sure of this?”

“I am sure.”

“Tonani,” the major said in the same tone of voice, “can you hear me talking?”

There was no answer from the next room.

“He can not hear,” the major said. “And you are quite sure that you love a girl?”

“I am sure.”

“And,” the major looked at him quickly, “that you are not corrupt?”

“I don’t know what you mean, corrupt.”

“All right,” the major said. “You needn’t be superior.”

Pinin looked at the floor. The major looked at his brown face, down and up him, and at his hands. Then he went on, not smiling, “And you don’t really want—” the major paused. Pinin looked at the floor. “That your great desire isn’t really—” Pinin looked at the floor. The major leaned his head back on the rucksack and smiled. He was really relieved: life in the army was too complicated. “You’re a good boy,” he said. “You’re a good boy, Pinin. But don’t be superior and be careful some one else doesn’t come along and take you.”

Pinin stood still beside the bunk.

“Don’t be afraid,” the major said. His hands were folded on the blankets. “I won’t touch you. You can go back to your platoon if you like. But you had better stay on as my servant. You’ve less chance of being killed.”

“Do you want anything of me, signor maggiore?’

“No,” the major said. “Go on and get on with whatever you were doing. Leave the door open when you go out.”

Pinin went out, leaving the door open. The adjutant looked up at him as he walked awkwardly across the room and out the door. Pinin was flushed and moved differently than he had moved when he brought in the wood for the fire. The adjutant looked after him and smiled. Pinin came in with more wood for the stove. The major, lying on his bunk, looking at his cloth-covered helmet and his snow-glasses that hung from a nail on the wall, heard him walk across the floor. The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me.

TEN INDIANS

AFTER ONE FOURTH OF JULY, NICK, DRIVING home late from town in the big wagon with Joe Garner and his family, passed nine drunken Indians along the road. He remembered there were nine because Joe Garner, driving along in the dusk, pulled up the horses, jumped down into the road and dragged an Indian out of the wheel rut. The Indian had been asleep, face down in the sand. Joe dragged him into bushes and got back up on the wagon-box.

“That makes nine of them,” Joe said, “just between here and the edge of town.”

“Them Indians,” said Mrs. Garner.

Nick was on the back seat with the two Garner boys. He was looking out from the back seat to see the Indian where Joe had dragged him alongside of the road.

“Was it Billy Tabeshaw?” Carl asked.

“No.”

“His pants looked mighty like Billy.”

“All Indians wear the same kind of pants.”

“I didn’t see him at all,” Frank said. “Pa was down into the road and back up again before I seen a thing. I thought he was killing a snake.”

“Plenty of Indians’ll kill snakes tonight, I guess,” Joe Garner said.

“Them Indians,” said Mrs. Garner.

They drove along. The road turned off from the main highway and went up into the hills. It was hard pulling for the horses and the boys got down and walked. The road was sandy. Nick looked back from the top of the hill by the schoolhouse. He saw the lights of Petoskey and, off across Little Traverse Bay, the lights of Harbour Springs. They climbed back in the wagon again.

“They ought to put some gravel on that stretch,” Joe Garner said. The wagon went along the road through the woods. Joe and Mrs. Garner sat close together on the front seat. Nick sat between the two boys. The road came out into a clearing.

“Right here was where Pa ran over the skunk.”

“It was further on.”

“It don’t make no difference where it was,” Joe said without turning his head. “One place is just as good as another to run over a skunk.”

“I saw two skunks last night,” Nick said.

“Where?”

“Down by the lake. They were looking for dead fish along the beach.”

“They were coons probably,” Carl said.

“They were skunks. I guess I know skunks.”

“You ought to,” Carl said. “You got an Indian girl.”

“Stop talking that way, Carl,” said Mrs. Garner.

“Well, they smell about the same.”

Joe Garner laughed.

“You stop laughing, Joe,” Mrs. Garner said. “I won’t have Carl talk that way.”

“Have you got an Indian girl, Nickie?” Joe asked.

“No.”

“He has too, Pa,” Frank said. “Prudence Mitchell’s his girl.”

“She’s not.”

“He goes to see her every day.”

“I don’t.” Nick, sitting between the two boys in the dark, felt hollow and happy inside himself to be teased about Prudence Mitchell. “She ain’t my girl,” he said.

“Listen to him,” said Carl. “I see them together every day.”

“Carl can’t get a girl,” his mother said, “not even a squaw.”

Carl was quiet.

“Carl ain’t no good with girls,” Frank said.

“You shut up.”

“You’re all right, Carl,” Joe Garner said. “Girls never got a man anywhere. Look at your pa.”

“Yes, that’s what you would say,” Mrs. Garner moved close to Joe as the wagon jolted. “Well, you had plenty of girls in your time.”

“I’ll bet Pa wouldn’t ever have had a squaw for a girl.”

“Don’t you think it,” Joe said. “You better watch out to keep Prudie, Nick.”

His wife whispered to him and Joe laughed.

“What you laughing at?” asked Frank.

“Don’t you say it, Garner,” his wife warned. Joe laughed again.

“Nickie can have Prudence,” Joe Garner said. “I got a good girl.”

“That’s the way to talk,” Mrs. Garner said.

The horses were pulling heavily in the sand. Joe reached out in the dark with the whip.

“Come on, pull into it. You’ll have to pull harder than this tomorrow.”

They trotted down the long hill, the wagon jolting. At the farmhouse everybody got down. Mrs. Garner unlocked the door, went inside, and came out with a lamp in her hand. Carl and Nick unloaded the things from the back of the wagon. Frank sat on the front seat to drive to the barn and put up the horses. Nick went up the steps and opened the kitchen door. Mrs. Garner was building a fire in the stove. She turned from pouring kerosene on the wood.

“Good-by, Mrs. Garner,” Nick said. “Thanks for taking me.”

“Oh shucks, Nickie.”

“I had a wonderful time.”

“We like to have you. Won’t you stay and eat some supper?”

“I better go. I think Dad probably waited for me.”

“Well, get along then. Send Carl up to the house, will you?”

“All right.”

“Good-night, Nickie.”

“Good-night, Mrs. Garner.”

Nick went out the farmyard and down to the barn. Joe and Frank were milking.

“Good-night,” Nick said. “I had a swell time.”

“Good-night, Nick,” Joe Garner called. “Aren’t you going to stay and eat?”

“No, I can’t. Will you tell Carl his mother wants him?”

“All right. Good-night, Nickie.”

Nick walked barefoot along the path through the meadow below the barn. The path was smooth and the dew was cool on his bare feet. He climbed a fence at the end of the meadow, went down through a ravine, his feet wet in the swamp mud, and then climbed up through the dry beech woods until he saw the lights of the cottage. He climbed over the fence and walked around to the front porch. Through the window he saw his father sitting by the table, reading in the light from the big lamp. Nick opened the door and went in.

“Well, Nickie,” his father said, “was it a good day?”

“I had a swell time, Dad. It was a swell Fourth of July.”

“Are you hungry?”

“You bet.”

“What did you do with your shoes?”

“I left them in the wagon at Garner’s.”

“Come on out to the kitchen.”

Nick’s father went ahead with the lamp. He stopped and lifted the lid of the ice-box. Nick went on into the kitchen. His father brought in a piece of cold chicken on a plate and a pitcher of milk and put them on the table before Nick. He put down the lamp.

“There’s some pie too,” he said. “Will that hold you?”

“It’s grand.”

His father sat down in a chair beside the oil-cloth-covered table. He made a big shadow on the kitchen wall.

“Who won the ball game?”

“Petoskey. Five to three.”

His father sat watching him eat and filled his glass from the milk-pitcher. Nick drank and wiped his mouth on his napkin. His father reached over to the shelf for the pie. He cut Nick a big piece. It was huckleberry pie.

“What did you do, Dad?”

“I went out fishing in the morning.”

“What did you get?”

“Only perch.”

His father sat watching Nick eat the pie.

“What did you do this afternoon?” Nick asked.

“I went for a walk up by the Indian camp.”

“Did you see anybody?”

“The Indians were all in town getting drunk.”

“Didn’t you see anybody at all?”

“I saw your friend, Prudie.”

“Where was she?”

“She was in the woods with Frank Washburn. I ran onto them. They were having quite a time.”

His father was not looking at him.

“What were they doing?”

“I didn’t stay to find out.”

“Tell me what they were doing.”

“I don’t know,” his father said. “I just heard them threshing around.”

“How did you know it was them?”

“I saw them.”

“I thought you said you didn’t see them.”

“Oh, yes, I saw them.”

“Who was it with her?” Nick asked.

“Frank Washburn.”

“Were they — were they — —”

“Were they what?”

“Were they happy?”

“I guess so.”

His father got up from the table and went out the kitchen screen door. When he came back Nick was looking at his plate. He had been crying.

“Have some more?” His father picked up the knife to cut the pie.

“No,” said Nick.

“You better have another piece.”

“No, I don’t want any.”

His father cleared off the table.

“Where were they in the woods?” Nick asked.

“Up back of the camp.” Nick looked at his plate. His father said, “You better go to bed, Nick.”

“All right.”

Nick went into his room, undressed, and got into bed. He heard his father moving around in the living room. Nick lay in the bed with his face in the pillow.

“My heart’s broken,” he thought. “If I feel this way my heart must be broken.”

After a while he heard his father blow out the lamp and go into his own room. He heard a wind come up in the trees outside and felt it come in cool through the screen. He lay for a long time with his face in the pillow, and after a while he forgot to think about Prudence and finally he went to sleep. When he awoke in the night he heard the wind in the hemlock trees outside the cottage and the waves of the lake coming in on the shore, and he went back to sleep. In the morning there was a big wind blowing and the waves were running high up on the beach and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.

A CANARY FOR ONE

THE TRAIN PASSED VERY QUICKLY A LONG, red stone house with a garden and four thick palm-trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other side was the sea. Then there was a cutting through red stone and clay, and the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks.

“I bought him in Palermo,” the American lady said. “We only had an hour ashore and it was Sunday morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings very beautifully.”

It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the lit salon compartment. There was no breeze came through the open window. The American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea, even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor, then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with gray-stone hills behind them.

There was smoke from many tall chimneys — coming into Marseilles, and the train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the station. The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of The Daily Mail and a half-bottle of Evian water. She walked a little way along the station platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes, where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal of departure and she had gotten on only just in time. The American lady was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure were given and that she did not hear them.

The train left the station in Marseilles and there was not only the switchyards and the factory smoke but, looking back, the town of Marseilles and the harbor with stone hills behind it and the last of the sun on the water. As it was getting dark the train passed a farmhouse burning in a field. Motor-cars were stopped along the road and bedding and things from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field. Many people were watching the house burn. After it was dark the train was in Avignon. People got on and off. At the news-stand Frenchmen, returning to Paris, bought that day’s French papers. On the station platform were negro soldiers. They wore brown uniforms and were tall and their faces shone, close under the electric light. Their faces were very black and they were too tall to stare. The train left Avignon station with the negroes standing there. A short white sergeant was with them.

Inside the lit salon compartment the porter had pulled down the three beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a rapide and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The American lady’s bed was the one next to the window. The canary from Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was out of the draft in the corridor that went into the compartment wash-room. There was a blue light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.

In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had come out from the wash-room, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the restaurant-car for breakfast. When she came back to the lit salon compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.

“He loves the sun,” the American lady said. “He’ll sing now in a little while.”

The canary shook his feathers and pecked into them. “I’ve always loved birds,” the American lady said. “I’m taking him home to my little girl. There — he’s singing now.”

The canary chirped and the feathers on his throats stood out, then he dropped his bill and pecked into his feathers again. The train crossed a river and passed through a very carefully tended forest. The train passed through many outside of Paris towns. There were tram-cars in the towns and big advertisements for the Belle Jardinière and Dubonnet and Pernod on the walls toward the train. All that the train passed through looked as though it were before breakfast. For several minutes I had not listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.

“Is your husband American too?” asked the lady.

“Yes,” said my wife. “We’re both Americans.”

“I thought you were English.”

“Oh, no.”

“Perhaps that was because I wore braces,” I said. I had started to say suspenders and changed it to braces in the mouth, to keep my English character. The American lady did not hear. She was really quite deaf; she read lips, and I had not looked toward her. I had looked out of the window. She went on talking to my wife.

“I’m so glad you’re Americans. American men make the best husbands,” the American lady was saying. “That was why we left the Continent, you know. My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.” She stopped. “They were simply madly in love.” She stopped again. “I took her away, of course.”

“Did she get over it?” asked my wife.

“I don’t think so,” said the American lady. “She wouldn’t eat anything and she wouldn’t sleep at all. I’ve tried so very hard, but she doesn’t seem to take an interest in anything. She doesn’t care about things. I couldn’t have her marrying a foreigner.” She paused. “Some one, a very good friend, told me once, ‘No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband.’”

“No,” said my wife, “I suppose not.”

The American lady admired my wife’s travelling-coat, and it turned out that the American lady had bought her own clothes for twenty years now from the same maison de couture in the Rue Saint Honoré. They had her measurements, and a vendeuse who knew her and her tastes picked the dresses out for her and they were sent to America. They came to the post-office near where she lived up-town in New York, and the duty was never exorbitant because they opened the dresses there in the post-office to appraise them and they were always very simple-looking and with no gold lace nor ornaments that would make the dresses look expensive. Before the present vendeuse, named Thérèse, there had been another vendeuse, named Amélie. Altogether there had only been these two in the twenty years. It had always been the same couturier. Prices, however, had gone up. The exchange, though, equalized that. They had her daughter’s measurements now too. She was grown up and there was not much chance of their changing now.

The train was now coming into Paris. The fortifications were levelled but grass had not grown. There were many cars standing on tracks — brown wooden restaurant-cars and brown wooden sleeping-cars that would go to Italy at five o’clock that night, if that train still left at five; the cars were marked Paris-Rome, and cars, with seats on the roofs, that went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all the seats and on the roofs, if that were the way it were still done, and passing were the white walls and many windows of houses. Nothing had eaten any breakfast.

“Americans make the best husbands,” the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. “American men are the only men in the world to marry.”

“How long ago did you leave Vevey?” asked my wife.

“Two years ago this fall. It’s her, you know, that I’m taking the canary to.”

“Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?”

“Yes,” said the American lady. “He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go on long walks together.”

“I know Vevey,” said my wife. “We were there on our honeymoon.”

“Were you really? That must have been lovely. I had no idea, of course, that she’d fall in love with him.”

“It was a very lovely place,” said my wife.

“Yes,” said the American lady. “Isn’t it lovely? Where did you stop there?”

“We stayed at the Trois Couronnes,” said my wife.

“It’s such a fine old hotel,” said the American lady.

“Yes,” said my wife. “We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely.”

“Were you there in the fall?”

“Yes,” said my wife.

We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered open and the roofs sagged in.

“Look,” I said. “There’s been a wreck.”

The American lady looked and saw the last car. “I was afraid of just that all night,” she said. “I have terrific presentiments about things sometimes. I’ll never travel on a rapide again at night. There must be other comfortable trains that don’t go so fast.”

Then the train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons, and then stopped and porters came up to the windows. I handed bags through the windows, and we were out on the dim longness of the platform, and the American lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook’s who said: “Just a moment, madame, and I’ll look for your name.”

The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage, and my wife said good-by and I said good-by to the American lady, whose name had been found by the man from Cook’s on a typewritten page in a sheaf of typewritten pages which he replaced in his pocket.

We followed the porter with the truck down the long cement platform beside the train. At the end was a gate and a man took the tickets.

We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.

AN ALPINE IDYLL

IT WAS HOT COMING DOWN INTO THE VALLEY even in the early morning. The sun melted the snow from the skis we were carrying and dried the wood. It was spring in the valley but the sun was very hot. We came along the road into Galtur carrying our skis and rucksacks. As we passed the churchyard a burial was just over. I said, “Grüss Gott”, to the priest as he walked past us coming out of the churchyard. The priest bowed.

“It’s funny a priest never speaks to you,” John said.

“You’d think they’d like to say ‘Grüss Gott.’”

“They never answer,” John said.

We stopped in the road and watched the sexton shovelling in the new earth. A peasant with a black beard and high leather boots stood beside the grave. The sexton stopped shovelling and straightened his back. The peasant in the high boots took the spade from the sexton and went on filling in the grave — spreading the earth evenly as a man spreading manure in a garden. In the bright May morning the grave-filling looked unreal. I could not imagine any one being dead.

“Imagine being buried on a day like this,” I said to John.

“I wouldn’t like it.”

“Well,” I said, “we don’t have to do it.”

We went on up the road past the houses of the town to the inn. We had been skiing in the Silvretta for a month, and it was good to be down in the valley. In the Silvretta the skiing had been all right, but it was spring skiing, the snow was good only in the early morning and again in the evening. The rest of the time it was spoiled by the sun. We were both tired of the sun. You could not get away from the sun. The only shadows were made by rocks or by the hut that was built under the protection of a rock beside a glacier, and in the shade the sweat froze in your underclothing. You could not sit outside the hut without dark glasses. It was pleasant to be burned black but the sun had been very tiring. You could not rest in it. I was glad to be down away from snow. It was too late in the spring to be up in the Silvretta. I was a little tired of skiing. We had stayed too long. I could taste the snow water we had been drinking melted off the tin roof of the hut. The taste was a part of the way I felt about skiing. I was glad there were other things beside skiing, and I was glad to be down, away from the unnatural high mountain spring, into this May morning in the valley.

The innkeeper sat on the porch of the inn, his chair tipped back against the wall. Beside him sat the cook.

“Ski-hell!” said the innkeeper.

“Heill” we said and leaned the skis against the wall and took off our packs.

“How was it up above?” asked the innkeeper.

“Schön. A little too much sun.”

“Yes. There’s too much sun this time of year.”

The cook sat on in his chair. The innkeeper went in with us and unlocked his office and brought out our mail. There was a bundle of letters and some papers.

“Let’s get some beer,” John said.

“Good. We’ll drink it inside.”

The proprietor brought two bottles and we drank them while we read the letters.

“We better have some more beer,” John said. A girl brought it this time. She smiled as she opened the bottles.

“Many letters,” she said.

“Yes. Many.”

“Prosit,” she said and went out, taking the empty bottles.

“I’d forgotten what beer tasted like.”

“I hadn’t,” John said. “Up in the hut I used to think about it a lot.”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve got it now.”

“You oughtn’t to ever do anything too long.”

“No. We were up there too long.”

“Too damn long,” John said. “It’s no good doing a thing too long.”

The sun came through the open window and shone through the beer bottles on the table. The bottles were half full. There was a little froth on the beer in the bottles, not much because it was very cold. It collared up when you poured it into the tall glasses. I looked out of the open window at the white road. The trees beside the road were dusty. Beyond was a green field and a stream. There were trees along the stream and a mill with a water wheel. Through the open side of the mill I saw a long log and a saw in it rising and falling. No one seemed to be tending it. There were four crows walking in the green field. One crow sat in a tree watching. Outside on the porch the cook got off his chair and passed into the hall that led back into the kitchen. Inside, the sunlight shone through the empty glasses on the table. John was leaning forward with his head on his arms.

Through the window I saw two men come up the front steps. They came into the drinking room. One was the bearded peasant in the high boots. The other was the sexton. They sat down at the table under the window. The girl came in and stood by their table. The peasant did not seem to see her. He sat with his hands on the table. He wore his old army clothes. There were patches on the elbows.

“What will it be?” asked the sexton. The peasant did not pay any attention.

“What will you drink?”

“Schnapps,” the peasant said.

“And a quarter litre of red wine,” the sexton told the girl.

The girl brought the drinks and the peasant drank the schnapps. He looked out of the window. The sexton watched him. John had his head forward on the table. He was asleep.

The innkeeper came in and went over to the table. He spoke in dialect and the sexton answered him. The peasant looked out of the window. The innkeeper went out of the room. The peasant stood up. He took a folded ten-thousand kronen note out of a leather pocketbook and unfolded it. The girl came up.

“Alles?” she asked.

“Alles,” he said.

“Let me buy the wine,” the sexton said.

“Alles,” the peasant repeated to the girl. She put her hand in the pocket of her apron, brought it out full of coins and counted out the change. The peasant went out the door. As soon as he was gone the innkeeper came into the room again and spoke to the sexton. He sat down at the table. They talked in dialect. The sexton was amused. The innkeeper was disgusted. The sexton stood up from the table. He was a little man with a mustache. He leaned out of the window and looked up the road.

“There he goes in,” he said.

“In the Löwen?”

“Ja.”

They talked again and then the innkeeper came over to our table. The innkeeper was a tall man and old. He looked at John asleep.

“He’s pretty tired.”

“Yes, we were up early.”

“Will you want to eat soon?”

“Any time,” I said. “What is there to eat?”

“Anything you want. The girl will bring the eating-card.”

The girl brought the menu. John woke up. The menu was written in ink on a card and the card slipped into a wooden paddle.

“There’s the Speisekarte,” I said to John. He looked at it. He was still sleepy.

“Won’t you have a drink with us?” I asked the innkeeper. He sat down. “Those peasants are beasts,” said the innkeeper.

“We saw that one at a funeral coming into town.”

“That was his wife.”

“Oh.”

“He’s a beast. All these peasants are beasts.”

“How do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe what just happened about that one.”

“Tell me.”

“You wouldn’t believe it.” The innkeeper spoke to the sexton. “Franz, come over here.” The sexton came, bringing his little bottle of wine and his glass.

“The gentlemen are just come down from the Wiesbadenerhütte,” the innkeeper said. We shook hands.

“What will you drink?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Franz shook his finger.

“Another quarter litre?”

“All right.”

“Do you understand dialect?” the innkeeper asked.

“No.”

“What’s it all about?” John asked.

“He’s going to tell us about the peasant we saw filling the grave, coming into town.”

“I can’t understand it, anyway,” John said. “It goes too fast for me.”

“That peasant,” the innkeeper said, “today he brought his wife in to be buried. She died last November.”

“December,” said the sexton.

“That makes nothing. She died last December then, and he notified the commune.”

“December eighteenth,” said the sexton.

“Anyway, he couldn’t bring her over to be buried until the snow was gone.”

“He lives on the other side of the Paznaun,” said the sexton. “But he belongs to this parish.”

“He couldn’t bring her out at all?” I asked.

“No. He can only come, from where he lives, on skis until the snow melts. So today he brought her in to be buried and the priest, when he looked at her face, didn’t want to bury her. You go on and tell it,” he said to the sexton. “Speak German, not dialect.”

“It was very funny with the priest,” said the sexton. “In the report to the commune she died of heart trouble. We knew she had heart trouble here. She used to faint in church sometimes. She did not come for a long time. She wasn’t strong to climb. When the priest uncovered her face he asked Olz, ‘Did your wife suffer much?’ ‘No,’ said Olz. ‘When I came in the house she was dead across the bed.’

“The priest looked at her again. He didn’t like it.

“‘How did her face get that way?’

“I don’t know,’ Olz said.

“‘You’d better find out,’ the priest said, and put the blanket back. Olz didn’t say anything. The priest looked at him. Olz looked back at the priest. ‘You want to know?’

“‘I must know,’ the priest said.”

“This is where it’s good,” the innkeeper said. “Listen to this. Go on Franz.”

“‘Well,’ said Olz, ‘when she died I made the report to the commune and I put her in the shed across the top of the big wood. When I started to use the big wood she was stiff and I put her up against the wall. Her mouth was open and when I came into the shed at night to cut up the big wood, I hung the lantern from it.’

“‘Why did you do that?’ asked the priest.

“‘I don’t know,’ said Olz.

“‘Did you do that many times?’

“‘Every time I went to work in the shed at night.’

“‘It was very wrong,’ said the priest. ‘Did you love your wife?’

“‘Ja, I loved her,’ Olz said. ‘I loved her fine.’”

“Did you understand it all?” asked the innkeeper. “You understand it all about his wife?”

“I heard it.”

“How about eating?” John asked.

“You order,” I said. “Do you think it’s true?” I asked the innkeeper.

“Sure it’s true,” he said. “These peasants are beasts.”

“Where did he go now?”

“He’s gone to drink at my colleague’s, the Löwen.”

“He didn’t want to drink with me,” said the sexton.

“He didn’t want to drink with me, after he knew about his wife,” said the innkeeper.

“Say,” said John. “How about eating?”

“All right,” I said.

A PURSUIT RACE

WILLIAM CAMPBELL HAD BEEN IN A PURSUIT race with a burlesque show ever since Pittsburgh. In a pursuit race, in bicycle racing, riders start at equal intervals to ride after one another. They ride very fast because the race is usually limited to a short distance and if they slow their riding another rider who maintains his pace will make up the space that separated them equally at the start. As soon as a rider is caught and passed he is out of the race and must get down from his bicycle and leave the track. If none of the riders are caught the winner of the race is the one who has gained the most distance. In most pursuit races, if there are only two riders, one of the riders is caught inside of six miles. The burlesque show caught William Campbell at Kansas City.

William Campbell had hoped to hold a slight lead over the burlesque show until they reached the Pacific coast. As long as he preceded the burlesque show as advance man he was being paid. When the burlesque show caught up with him he was in bed. He was in bed when the manager of the burlesque troupe came into his room and after the manager had gone out he decided that he might as well stay in bed. It was very cold in Kansas City and he was in no hurry to go out. He did not like Kansas City. He reached under the bed for a bottle and drank. It made his stomach feel better. Mr. Turner, the manager of the burlesque show, had refused a drink.

William Campbell’s interview with Mr. Turner had been a little strange. Mr. Turner had knocked on the door. Campbell had said: “Come in!” When Mr. Turner came into the room he saw clothing on a chair, an open suitcase, the bottle on a chair beside the bed, and some one lying in the bed completely covered by the bed-clothes.

“Mister Campbell,” Mr. Turner said.

“You can’t fire me,” William Campbell said from underneath the covers. It was warm and white and close under the covers. “You can’t fire me because I’ve got down off my bicycle.”

“You’re drunk,” Mr. Turner said.

“Oh, yes,” William Campbell said, speaking directly against the sheet and feeling the texture with his lips.

“You’re a fool,” Mr. Turner said. He turned off the electric light. The electric light had been burning all night. It was now ten o’clock in the morning. “You’re a drunken fool. When did you get into this town?”

“I got into this town last night,” William Campbell said, speaking against the sheet. He found he liked to talk through a sheet. “Did you ever talk through a sheet?”

“Don’t try to be funny. You aren’t funny.”

“I’m not being funny. I’m just talking through a sheet.”

“You’re talking through a sheet all right.”

“You can go now, Mr. Turner,” Campbell said. “I don’t work for you any more.”

“You know that anyway.”

“I know a lot,” William Campbell said. He pulled down the sheet and looked at Mr. Turner. “I know enough so I don’t mind looking at you at all. Do you want to hear what I know?”

“No.”

“Good,” said William Campbell. “Because really I don’t know anything at all. I was just talking.” He pulled the sheet up over his face again. “I love it under a sheet,” he said. Mr. Turner stood beside the bed. He was a middle-aged man with a large stomach and a bald head and he had many things to do. “You ought to stop off here, Billy, and take a cure,” he said. “I’ll fix it up if you want to do it.”

“I don’t want to take a cure,” William Campbell said. “I don’t want to take a cure at all. I am perfectly happy. All my life I have been perfectly happy.”

“How long have you been this way?”

“What a question!” William Campbell breathed in and out through the sheet.

“How long have you been stewed, Billy?”

“Haven’t I done my work?”

“Sure. I just asked you how long you’ve been stewed, Billy.”

“I don’t know. But I’ve got my wolf back,” he touched the sheet with his tongue. “I’ve had him for a week.”

“The hell you have.”

“Oh, yes. My dear wolf. Every time I take a drink he goes outside the room. He can’t stand alcohol. The poor little fellow.” He moved his tongue round and round on the sheet. “He’s a lovely wolf. He’s just like he always was.” William Campbell shut his eyes and took a deep breath.

“You got to take a cure, Billy,” Mr. Turner said. “You won’t mind the Keeley. It isn’t bad.”

“The Keeley,” William Campbell said. “It isn’t far from London.” He shut his eyes and opened them, moving the eyelashes against the sheet. “I just love sheets,” he said. He looked at Mr. Turner.

“Listen, you think I’m drunk.”

“You are drunk.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re drunk and you’ve had D.T.’s.”

“No.” William Campbell held the sheet around his head. “Dear sheet,” he said. He breathed against it gently. “Pretty sheet. You love me, don’t you, sheet? It’s all in the price of the room. Just like in Japan. No,” he said. “Listen Billy, dear Sliding Billy, I have a surprise for you. I’m not drunk. I’m hopped to the eyes.”

“No,” said Mr. Turner.

“Take a look.” William Campbell pulled up the right sleeve of his pyjama jacket under the sheet, then shoved the right forearm out. “Look at that.” On the forearm, from just above the wrist to the elbow, were small blue circles around tiny dark blue punctures. The circles almost touched one another. “That’s the new development,” William Campbell said. “I drink a little now once in a while, just to drive the wolf out of the room.”

“They got a cure for that,” “Sliding Billy” Turner said.

“No,” William Campbell said. “They haven’t got a cure for anything.”

“You can’t just quit like that, Billy,” Turner said. He sat on the bed.

“Be careful of my sheet,” William Campbell said.

“You can’t just quit at your age and take to pumping yourself full of that stuff just because you got in a jam.”

“There’s a law against it. If that’s what you mean.”

“No, I mean you got to fight it out.”

Billy Campbell caressed the sheet with his lips and his tongue. “Dear sheet,” he said. “I can kiss this sheet and see right through it at the same time.”

“Cut it out about the sheet. You can’t just take to that stuff, Billy.”

William Campbell shut his eyes. He was beginning to feel a slight nausea. He knew that this nausea would increase steadily, without there ever being the relief of sickness, until something were done against it. It was at this point that he suggested that Mr. Turner have a drink. Mr. Turner declined. William Campbell took a drink from the bottle. It was a temporary measure. Mr. Turner watched him. Mr. Turner had been in this room much longer than he should have been, he had many things to do; although living in daily association with people who used drugs, he had a horror of drugs, and he was very fond of William Campbell; he did not wish to leave him. He was very sorry for him and he felt a cure might help. He knew there were good cures in Kansas City. But he had to go. He stood up.

“Listen, Billy,” William Campbell said, “I want to tell you something. You’re called ‘Sliding Billy.’ That’s because you can slide. I’m called just Billy. That’s because I never could slide at all. I can’t slide, Billy. I can’t slide. It just catches. Every time I try it, it catches.” He shut his eyes. “I can’t slide, Billy. It’s awful when you can’t slide.”

“Yes,” said “Sliding Billy” Turner.

“Yes, what?” William Campbell looked at him.

“You were saying.”

“No,” said William Campbell. “I wasn’t saying. It must have been a mistake.”

“You were saying about sliding.”

“No. It couldn’t have been about sliding. But listen, Billy, and I’ll tell you a secret. Stick to sheets, Billy. Keep away from women and horses and, and—” he stopped “ — eagles, Billy. If you love horses you’ll get horse-shit, and if you love eagles you’ll get eagle-shit.” He stopped and put his head under the sheet.

“I got to go,” said “Sliding Billy” Turner.

“If you love women you’ll get a dose,” William Campbell said. “If you love horses—”

“Yes, you said that.”

“Said what?”

“About horses and eagles.”

“Oh, yes. And if you love sheets.” He breathed on the sheet and stroked his nose against it. “I don’t know about sheets,” he said. “I just started to love this sheet.”

“I have to go,” Mr. Turner said. “I got a lot to do.”

“That’s all right,” William Campbell said. “Everybody’s got to go.”

“I better go.”

“All right, you go.”

“Are you all right, Billy?”

“I was never so happy in my life.”

“And you’re all right?”

“I’m fine. You go along. I’ll just lie here for a little while. Around noon I’ll get up.”

But when Mr. Turner came up to William Campbell’s room at noon William Campbell was sleeping and as Mr. Turner was a man who knew what things in life were very valuable he did not wake him.

TODAY IS FRIDAY

Three Roman soldiers are in a drinking-place at eleven o’clock at night. There are barrels around the wall. Behind the wooden counter is a Hebrew wine-seller. The three Roman soldiers are a little cock-eyed.

1st Roman Soldier — You tried the red?

2d Soldier — No, I ain’t tried it.

1st Soldier — You better try it.

2d Soldier — All right, George, we’ll have a round of the red.

Hebrew Wine-seller — Here you are, gentlemen. You’ll like that. [He sets down an earthenware pitcher that he has filled from one of the casks.] That’s a nice little wine.

1st Soldier — Have a drink of it yourself. [He turns to the third Roman soldier who is leaning on a barrel.] What’s the matter with you?

3d Roman Soldier — I got a gut-ache.

2d Soldier — You’ve been drinking water.

1st Soldier — Try some of the red.

3d Soldier — I can’t drink the damn stuff. It makes my gut sour.

1st Soldier — You been out here too long.

3d Soldier — Hell don’t I know it?

1st Soldier — Say, George, can’t you give this gentleman something to fix up his stomach?

Hebrew Wine-seller — I got it right here.

[The third Roman soldier tastes the cup that the wine-seller has mixed for him.]

3d Soldier — Hey, what you put in that, camel chips?

Wine-seller — You drink that right down, Lootenant. That’ll fix you up right.

3d Soldier — Well, I couldn’t feel any worse.

1st Soldier — Take a chance on it. George fixed me up fine the other day.

Wine-seller — You were in bad shape, Lootenant. I know what fixes up a bad stomach.

[The third Roman soldier drinks the cup down.]

3d Roman Soldier — Jesus Christ. [He makes a face.]

2d Soldier — That false alarm!

1st Soldier — Oh, I don’t know. He was pretty good in there today.

2d Soldier — Why didn’t he come down off the cross?

1st Soldier — He didn’t want to come down off the cross. That’s not his play.

2d Soldier — Show me a guy that doesn’t want to come down off the cross.

1st Soldier — Aw, hell, you don’t know anything about it. Ask George there. Did he want to come down off the cross, George?

Wine-seller — I’ll tell you, gentlemen, I wasn’t out there. It’s a thing I haven’t taken any interest in.

2d Soldier — Listen, I seen a lot of them — here and plenty of other places. Any time you show me one that doesn’t want to get down off the cross when the time comes — when the time comes, I mean — I’ll climb right up with him.

1st Soldier — I thought he was pretty good in there today.

3d Soldier — He was all right.

2d Roman Soldier — You guys don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m not saying whether he was good or not. What I mean is, when the time comes. When they first start nailing him, there isn’t none of them wouldn’t stop it if they could.

1st Soldier — Didn’t you follow it, George?

Wine-seller — No, I didn’t take any interest in it, Lootenant.

1st Soldier — I was surprised how he acted.

3d Soldier — The part I don’t like is the nailing them on. You know, that must get to you pretty bad.

2d Soldier — It isn’t that that’s so bad, as when they first lift ‘em up. [He makes a lifting gesture with his two palms together.] When the weight starts to pull on ‘em. That’s when it gets ‘em.

3d Roman Soldier — It take some of them pretty bad.

1st Soldier — Ain’t I seen ‘em? I seen plenty of them. I tell you, he was pretty good in there today.

[The second Roman soldier smiles at the Hebrew wine-seller.]

2d Soldier — You’re a regular Christer, big boy.

1st Soldier — Sure, go on and kid him. But listen while I tell you something. He was pretty good in there today.

2d Soldier — What about some more wine?

[The wine-seller looks up expectantly. The third Roman soldier is sitting with his head down. He does not look well]

3d Soldier — I don’t want any more.

2d Soldier — Just for two, George.

[The wine-seller puts out a pitcher of wine, a size smaller than the last one.

He leans forward on the wooden counter.]

1st Roman Soldier — You see his girl?

2d Soldier — Wasn’t I standing right by her?

1st Soldier — She’s a nice-looker.

2d Soldier — I knew her before he did. [He winks at the wine-seller.]

1st Soldier — I used to see her around the town.

2d Soldier — She used to have a lot of stuff. He never brought her no good luck.

1st Soldier — Oh, he ain’t lucky. But he looked pretty good to me in there today.

2d Soldier — What become of his gang?

1st Soldier — Oh, they faded out. Just the women stuck by him.

2d Roman Soldier — They were a pretty yellow crowd. When they seen him go up there they didn’t want any of it.

1st Soldier — The women stuck all right.

2d Soldier — Sure, they stuck all right.

1st Roman Soldier — You see me slip the old spear into him?

2d Roman Soldier — You’ll get into trouble doing that some day.

1st Soldier — It was the least I could do for him. I’ll tell you he looked pretty good to me in there today.

Hebrew Wine-seller — Gentlemen, you know I got to close.

1st Roman Soldier — We’ll have one more round.

2d Roman Soldier — What’s the use? This stuff don’t get you anywhere. Come on, let’s go.

1st Soldier — Just another round.

3d Roman Soldier — [Getting up from the barrel.] No, come on. Let’s go. I feel like hell tonight.

1st Soldier — Just one more.

2d Soldier — No, come on. We’re going to go. Good-night, George. Put it on the bill.

Wine-seller — Good-night, gentlemen. [He looks a little worried.] You couldn’t let me have a little something on account, Lootenant?

2d Roman Soldier — What the hell, George! Wednesday’s payday.

Wineseller — It’s all right, Lootenant. Good-night, gentlemen.

[The three Roman soldiers go out the door into the street.]

[Outside in the street.]

2d Roman Soldier — George is a kike just like all the rest of them.

1st Roman Soldier — Oh, George is a nice fella.

2d Soldier — Everybody’s a nice fella to you tonight.

3d Roman Soldier — Come on, let’s go up to the barracks. I feel like hell tonight.

2d Soldier — You been out here too long.

3d Roman Soldier — No, it ain’t just that. I feel like hell.

2d Soldier — You been out here too long. That’s all.

CURTAIN

BANAL STORY

SO HE ATE AN ORANGE, SLOWLY SPITTING out the seeds. Outside, the snow was turning to rain. Inside, the electric stove seemed to give no heat and rising from his writing-table, he sat down upon the stove. How good it felt! Here, at last, was life.

He reached for another orange. Far away in Paris, Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round. Far off in Mesopotamia, twenty-one feet of snow had fallen. Across the world in distant Australia, the English cricketers were sharpening up their wickets. There was Romance.

Patrons of the arts and letters have discovered The Forum, he read. It is the guide, philosopher, and friend of the thinking minority. Prize short-stories — will their authors write our best-sellers of tomorrow?

You will enjoy these warm, homespun, American tales, bits of real life on the open ranch, in crowded tenement or comfortable home, and all with a healthy undercurrent of humor.

I must read them, he thought.

He read on. Our children’s children — what of them? Who of them? New means must be discovered to find room for us under the sun. Shall this be done by war or can it be done by peaceful methods?

Or will we all have to move to Canada?

Our deepest convictions — will Science upset them? Our civilization — is it inferior to older orders of things?

And meanwhile, in the far-off dripping jungles of Yucatan, sounded the chopping of the axes of the gum-choppers.

Do we want big men — or do we want them cultured? Take Joyce. Take President Coolidge. What star must our college students aim at? There is Jack Britton. There is Doctor Henry Van Dyke. Can we reconcile the two? Take the case of Young Stribling.

And what of our daughters who must make their own Soundings? Nancy Hawthorne is obliged to make her own Soundings in the sea of life. Bravely and sensibly she faces the problems which come to every girl of eighteen.

It was a splendid booklet.

Are you a girl of eighteen? Take the case of Joan of Arc. Take the case of Bernard Shaw. Take the case of Betsy Ross.

Think of these things in 1925 — Was there a risqué page in Puritan history? Were there two sides to Pocahontas? Did she have a fourth dimension?

Are modem paintings — and poetry — Art? Yes and No. Take Picasso.

Have tramps codes of conduct? Send your mind adventuring.

There is Romance everywhere. Forum writers talk to the point, are possessed of humor and wit. But they do not try to be smart and are never long-winded.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual. He laid down the booklet.

And meanwhile, stretched flat on a bed in a darkened room in his house in Triana, Manuel Garcia Maera lay with a tube in each lung, drowning with the pneumonia. All the papers in Andalucia devoted special supplements to his death, which had been expected for some days. Men and boys bought full-length colored pictures of him to remember him by, and lost the picture they had of him in their memories by looking at the lithographs. Bull-fighters were very relieved he was dead, because he did always in the bull-ring the things they could only do sometimes. They all marched in the rain behind his coffin and there were one hundred and forty-seven bull-fighters followed him out to the cemetery, where they buried him in the tomb next to Joselito. After the funeral every one sat in the cafés out of the rain, and many colored pictures of Maera were sold to men who rolled them up and put them away in their pockets.

NOW I LAY ME

THAT NIGHT WE LAY ON THE FLOOR IN the room and I listened to the silk-worms eating. The silk-worms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment.

I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; sometimes on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. Often I ran out of bait because I would take only ten worms with me in a tobacco tin when I started. When I had used them all I had to find more worms, and sometimes it was very difficult digging in the bank of the stream where the cedar trees kept out the sun and there was no grass but only the bare moist earth and often I could find no worms. Always though I found some kind of bait, but one time in the swamp I could find no bait at all and had to cut up one of the trout I had caught and use him for bait.

Sometimes I found insects in the swamp meadows, in the grass or under ferns, and used them. There were beetles and insects with legs like grass stems, and grubs in old rotten logs; white grubs with brown pinching heads that would not stay on the hook and emptied into nothing in the cold water, and wood ticks under logs where sometimes I found angle-worms that slipped into the ground as soon as the log was raised. Once I used a salamander from under an old log. The salamander was very small and neat and agile and a lovely color. He had tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook, and after that one time I never used a salamander, although I found them very often. Nor did I use crickets, because of the way they acted about the hook.

Sometimes the stream ran through an open meadow, and in the dry grass I would catch grasshoppers and use them for bait and sometimes I would catch grasshoppers and toss them into the stream and watch them float along swimming on the stream and circling on the surface as the current took them and then disappear as a trout rose. Sometimes I would fish four or five different streams in the night; starting as near as I could get to their source and fishing them down stream. When I had finished too quickly and the time did not go, I would fish the stream over again, starting where it emptied into the lake and fishing back up stream, trying for all the trout I had missed coming down. Some nights too I made up streams, and some of them were very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming. Some of those streams I still remember and think that I have fished in them, and they are confused with streams I really know. I gave them all names and went to them on the train and sometimes walked for miles to get to them.

But some nights I could not fish, and on those nights I was cold-awake and said my prayers over and over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known. That took up a great amount of time, for if you try to remember all the people you have ever known, going back to the earliest thing you remember — which was, with me, the attic of the house where I was born and my mother and father’s wedding-cake in a tin box hanging from one of the rafters, and, in the attic, jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as a boy and preserved in alcohol, the alcohol sunken in the jars so the backs of some of the snakes and specimens were exposed and had turned white — if you thought back that far, you remembered a great many people. If you prayed for all of them, saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light, and then you could go to sleep, if you were in a place where you could sleep in the daylight.

On those nights I tried to remember everything that had ever happened to me, starting with just before I went to the war and remembering back from one thing to another. I found I could only remember back to that attic in my grandfather’s house. Then I would start there and remember this way again, until I reached the war.

I remember, after my grandfather died we moved away from that house and to a new house designed and built by my mother. Many things that were not to be moved were burned in the back-yard and I remember those jars from the attic being thrown in the fire, and how they popped in the heat and the fire flamed up from the alcohol. I remember the snakes burning in the fire in the back-yard. But there were no people in that, only things. I could not remember who burned the things even, and I would go on until I came to people and then stop and pray for them.

About the new house I remember how my mother was always cleaning things out and making a good clearance. One time when my father was away on a hunting trip she made a good thorough cleaning out in the basement and burned everything that should not have been there. When my father came home and got down from his buggy and hitched the horse, the fire was still burning in the road beside the house. I went out to meet him. He handed me his shotgun and looked at the fire. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I’ve been cleaning out the basement, dear,” my mother said from the porch. She was standing there smiling, to meet him. My father looked at the fire and kicked at something. Then he leaned over and picked something out of the ashes. “Get a rake, Nick,” he said to me. I went to the basement and brought a rake and my father raked very carefully in the ashes. He raked out stone axes and stone skinning knives and tools for making arrow-heads and pieces of pottery and many arrow-heads. They had all been blackened and chipped by the fire. My father raked them all out very carefully and spread them on the grass by the road. His shotgun in its leather case and his game-bags were on the grass where he had left them when he stepped down from the buggy.

“Take the gun and the bags in the house, Nick, and bring me a paper,” he said. My mother had gone inside the house. I took the shotgun, which was heavy to carry and banged against my legs, and the two game-bags and started toward the house. “Take them one at a time,” my father said. “Don’t try and carry too much at once.” I put down the game-bags and took in the shotgun and brought out a newspaper from the pile in my father’s office. My father spread all the blackened, chipped stone implements on the paper and then wrapped them up. “The best arrow-heads went all to pieces,” he said. He walked into the house with the paper package and I stayed outside on the grass with the two game-bags. After a while I took them in. In remembering that, there were only two people, so I would pray for them both.

Some nights, though, I could not remember my prayers even. I could only get as far as “On earth as it is in heaven” and then have to start all over and be absolutely unable to get past that. Then I would have to recognize that I could not remember and give up saying my prayers that night and try something else. So on some nights I would try to remember all the animals in the world by name and then the birds and then fishes and then countries and cities and then kinds of food and the names of all the streets I could remember in Chicago, and when I could not remember anything at all any more I would just listen. And I do not remember a night on which you could not hear things. If I could have a light I was not afraid to sleep, because I knew my soul would only go out of me if it were dark. So, of course, many nights I was where I could have a light and then I slept because I was nearly always tired and often very sleepy. And I am sure many times too that I slept without knowing it — but I never slept knowing it, and on this night I listened to the silk-worms. You can hear silk-worms eating very clearly in the night and I lay with my eyes open and listened to them.

There was only one other person in the room and he was awake too. I listened to him being awake, for a long time. He could not lie as quietly as I could because, perhaps, he had not had as much practice being awake. We were lying on blankets spread over straw and when he moved the straw was noisy, but the silk-worms were not frightened by any noise we made and ate on steadily. There were the noises of night seven kilometres behind the lines outside but they were different from the small noises inside the room in the dark. The other man in the room tried lying quietly. Then he moved again. I moved too, so he would know I was awake. He had lived ten years in Chicago. They had taken him for a soldier in nineteen fourteen when he had come back to visit his family, and they had given him me for an orderly because he spoke English. I heard him listening, so I moved again in the blankets.

“Can’t you sleep, Signor Tenente?” he asked.

“No.”

“I can’t sleep, either.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know. I can’t sleep.”

“You feel all right?”

“Sure. I feel good. I just can’t sleep.”

“You want to talk a while?” I asked.

“Sure. What can you talk about in this damn place.”

“This place is pretty good,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s all right.”

“Tell me about out in Chicago,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “I told you all that once.”

“Tell me about how you got married.”

“I told you that.”

“Was the letter you got Monday — from her?”

“Sure. She writes me all the time. She’s making good money with the place.”

“You’ll have a nice place when you go back.”

“Sure. She runs it fine. She’s making a lot of money.”

“Don’t you think we’ll wake them up, talking?” I asked.

“No. They can’t hear. Anyway, they sleep like pigs. I’m different,” he said. “I’m nervous.”

“Talk quiet,” I said. “Want a smoke?”

We smoked skilfully in the dark.

“You don’t smoke much, Signor Tenente.”

“No. I’ve just about cut it out.”

“Well,” he said, “it don’t do you any good and I suppose you get so you don’t miss it. Did you ever hear a blind man won’t smoke because he can’t see the smoke come out?”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I think it’s all bull, myself,” he said. “I just heard it somewhere. You know how you hear things.”

We were both quiet and I listened to the silk-worms.

“You hear those damn silk-worms?” he asked. “You can hear them chew.”

“It’s funny,” I said.

“Say, Signor Tenente, is there something really the matter that you can’t sleep? I never see you sleep. You haven’t slept nights ever since I been with you.”

“I don’t know, John,” I said. “I got in pretty bad shape along early last spring and at night it bothers me.”

“Just like I am,” he said. “I shouldn’t have ever got in this war. I’m too nervous.”

“Maybe it will get better.”

“Say, Signor Tenente, what did you get in this war for, anyway?”

“I don’t know, John. I wanted to, then.”

“Wanted to,” he said. “That’s a hell of a reason.”

“We oughtn’t to talk out loud,” I said.

“They sleep just like pigs,” he said. “They can’t understand the English language, anyway. They don’t know a damn thing. What are you going to do when it’s over and we go back to the States?”

“I’ll get a job on a paper.”

“In Chicago?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you ever read what this fellow Brisbane writes? My wife cuts it out for me and sends it to me.”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No, but I’ve seen him.”

“I’d like to meet that fellow. He’s a fine writer. My wife don’t read English but she takes the paper just like when I was home and she cuts out the editorials and the sport page and sends them to me.”

“How are your kids?”

“They’re fine. One of the girls is in the fourth grade now. You know, Signor Tenente, if I didn’t have the kids I wouldn’t be your orderly now. They’d have made me stay in the line all the time.”

“I’m glad you’ve got them.”

“So am I. They’re fine kids but I want a boy. Three girls and no boy. That’s a hell of a note.”

“Why don’t you try and go to sleep?”

“No, I can’t sleep now. I’m wide awake now, Signor Tenente. Say, I’m worried about you not sleeping though.”

“It’ll be all right, John.”

“Imagine a young fellow like you not to sleep.”

“I’ll get all right. It just takes a while.”

“You got to get all right. A man can’t get along that don’t sleep. Do you worry about anything? You got anything on your mind?”

“No, John, I don’t think so.”

“You ought to get married, Signor Tenente. Then you wouldn’t worry.”

“I don’t know.”

“You ought to get married. Why don’t you pick out some nice Italian girl with plenty of money? You could get any one you want. You’re young and you got good decorations and you look nice. You been wounded a couple of times.”

“I can’t talk the language well enough.”

“You talk it fine. To hell with talking the language. You don’t have to talk to them. Marry them.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You know some girls, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, you marry the one with the most money. Over here, the way they’re brought up, they’ll all make you a good wife.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think about it, Signor Tenente. Do it.”

“All right.”

“A man ought to be married. You’ll never regret it. Every man ought to be married.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s try and sleep a while.”

“All right, Signor Tenente. I’ll try it again. But you remember what I said.”

“I’ll remember it,” I said. “Now let’s sleep a while, John.”

“All right,” he said. “I hope you sleep, Signor Tenente.”

I heard him roll in his blankets on the straw and then he was very quiet and I listened to him breathing regularly. Then he started to snore. I listened to him snore for a long time and then I stopped listening to him snore and listened to the silk-worms eating. They ate steadily, making a dropping in the leaves. I had a new thing to think about and I lay in the dark with my eyes open and thought of all the girls I had ever known and what kind of wives they would make. It was a very interesting thing to think about and for a while it killed off trout-fishing and interfered with my prayers. Finally, though, I went back to trout-fishing, because I found that I could remember all the streams and there was always something new about them, while the girls, after I had thought about them a few times, blurred and I could not call them into my mind and finally they all blurred and all became rather the same and I gave up thinking about them almost altogether. But I kept on with my prayers and I prayed very often for John in the nights and his class was removed from active service before the October offensive. I was glad he was not there, because he would have been a great worry to me. He came to the hospital in Milan to see me several months after and was very disappointed that I had not yet married, and I know he would feel very badly if he knew that, so far, I have never married. He was going back to America and he was very certain about marriage and knew it would fix up everything.

WINNER TAKE NOTHING

CONTENTS

AFTER THE STORM

A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

GOD REST YOU MERRY, GENTLEMEN

THE SEA CHANGE

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

THE MOTHER OF A QUEEN

ONE READER WRITES

HOMAGE TO SWITZERLAND

A DAY’S WAIT

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

WINE OF WYOMING

THE GAMBLER, THE NUN, AND THE RADIO

FATHERS AND SONS

The first edition

AFTER THE STORM

IT WASN’T ABOUT ANYTHING, SOMETHING about making punch, and then we started fighting and I slipped and he had me down kneeling on my chest and choking me with both hands like he was trying to kill me and all the time I was trying to get the knife out of my pocket to cut him loose. Everybody was too drunk to pull him off me. He was choking me and hammering my head on the floor and I got the knife out and opened it up; and I cut the muscle right across his arm and he let go of me. He couldn’t have held on if he wanted to. Then he rolled and hung onto that arm and started to cry and I said:

“What the hell you want to choke me for?”

I’d have killed him. I couldn’t swallow for a week. He hurt my throat bad.

Well, I went out of there and there were plenty of them with him and some came out after me and I made a turn and was down by the docks and I met a fellow and he said somebody killed a man up the street. I said “Who killed him?” and he said “I don’t know who killed him but he’s dead all right,” and it was dark and there was water standing in the street and no lights and windows broke and boats all up in the town and trees blown down and everything all blown and I got a skiff and went out and found my boat where I had her inside of Mango Key and she was all right only she was full of water. So I bailed her out and pumped her out and there was a moon but plenty of clouds and still plenty rough and I took it down along; and when it was daylight I was off Eastern Harbor.

Brother, that was some storm. I was the first boat out and you never saw water like that was. It was just as white as a lye barrel and coming from Eastern Harbor to Sou’west Key you couldn’t recognize the shore. There was a big channel blown right out through the middle of the beach. Trees and all blown out and a channel cut through and all the water white as chalk and everything on it; branches and whole trees and dead birds, and all floating. Inside the keys were all the pelicans in the world and all kinds of birds flying. They must have gone inside there when they knew it was coming.

I lay at Sou’west Key a day and nobody came after me. I was the first boat out and I seen a spar floating and I knew there must be a wreck and I started out to look for her. I found her. She was a three-masted schooner and I could just see the stumps of her spars out of water. She was in too deep water and I didn’t get anything off of her. So I went on looking for something else. I had the start on all of them and I knew I ought to get whatever there was. I went on down over the sand-bars from where I left that three-masted schooner and I didn’t find anything and I went on a long way. I was way out toward the quicksands and I didn’t find anything so I went on. Then when I was in sight of the Rebecca light I saw all kinds of birds making over something and I headed over for them to see what it was and there was a cloud of birds all right.

I could see something looked like a spar up out of the water and when I got over close the birds all went up in the air and stayed all around me. The water was clear out there and there was a spar of some kind sticking out just above the water and when I come up close to it I saw it was all dark under water like a long shadow and I came right over it and there under water was a liner; just lying there all under water as big as the whole world. I drifted over her in the boat. She lay on her side and the stem was deep down. The port holes were all shut tight and I could see the glass shine in the water and the whole of her; the biggest boat I ever saw in my life laying there and I went along the whole length of her and then I went over and anchored and I had the skiff on the deck forward and I shoved it down into the water and sculled over with the birds all around me.

I had a water glass like we use sponging and my hand shook so I could hardly hold it. All the port holes were shut that you could see going along over her but way down below near the bottom something must have been open because there were pieces of things floating out all the time. You couldn’t tell what they were. Just pieces. That’s what the birds were after. You never saw so many birds. They were all around me; crazy yelling.

I could see everything sharp and clear. I could see her rounded over and she looked a mile long under the water. She was lying on a clear white bank of sand and the spar was a sort of foremast or some sort of tackle that slanted out of water the way she was laying on her side. Her bow wasn’t very far under. I could stand on the letters of her name on her bow and my head was just out of water. But the nearest port hole was twelve feet down. I could just reach it with the grains pole and I tried to break it with that but I couldn’t. The glass was too stout. So I sculled back to the boat and got a wrench and lashed it to the end of the grains pole and I couldn’t break it. There I was looking down through the glass at that liner with everything in her and I was the first one to her and I couldn’t get into her. She must have had five million dollars worth in her.

It made me shaky to think how much she must have in her. Inside the port hole that was closest I could see something but I couldn’t make it out through the water glass. I couldn’t do any good with the grains pole and I took off my clothes and stood and took a couple of deep breaths and dove over off the stern with the wrench in my hand and swam down. I could hold on for a second to the edge of the port hole and I could see in and there was a woman inside with her hair floating all out. I could see her floating plain and I hit the glass twice with the wrench hard and I heard the noise clink in my ears but it wouldn’t break and I had to come up.

I hung onto the dinghy and got my breath and then I climbed in and took a couple of breaths and dove again. I swam down and took hold of the edge of the port hole with my fingers and held it and hit the glass as hard as I could with the wrench. I could see the woman floated in the water through the glass. Her hair was tied once close to her head and it floated all out in the water. I could see the rings on one of her hands. She was right up close to the port hole and I hit the glass twice and I didn’t even crack it. When I came up I thought I wouldn’t make it to the top before I’d have to breathe.

I went down once more and I cracked the glass, only cracked it, and when I came up my nose was bleeding and I stood on the bow of the liner with my bare feet on the letters of her name and my head just out and rested there and then I swam over to the skiff and pulled up into it and sat there waiting for my head to stop aching and looking down into the water glass, but I bled so I had to wash out the water glass. Then I lay back in the skiff and held my hand under my nose to stop it and I lay there with my head back looking up and there was a million birds above and all around.

When I quit bleeding I took another look through the glass and then I sculled over to the boat to try and find something heavier than the wrench but I couldn’t find a thing; not even a sponge hook. I went back and the water was clearer all the time and you could see everything that floated out over that white bank of sand. I looked for sharks but there weren’t any. You could have seen a shark a long way away. The water was so clear and the sand white. There was a grapple for an anchor on the skiff and I cut it off and went overboard and down with it. It carried me right down and past the port hole and I grabbed and couldn’t hold anything and went on down and down, sliding along the curved side of her. I had to let go of the grapple. I heard it bump once and it seemed like a year before I came up through to the top of the water. The skiff was floated away with the tide and I swam over to her with my nose bleeding in the water while I swam and I was plenty glad there weren’t sharks; but I was tired.

My head felt cracked open and I lay in the skiff and rested and then I sculled back. It was getting along in the afternoon. I went down once more with the wrench and it didn’t do any good. That wrench was too light. It wasn’t any good diving unless you had a big hammer or something heavy enough to do good. Then I lashed the wrench to the grains pole again and I watched through the water glass and pounded on the glass and hammered until the wrench came off and I saw it in the glass, clear and sharp, go sliding down along her and then off and down to the quicksand and go in. Then I couldn’t do a thing. The wrench was gone and I’d lost the grapple so I sculled back to the boat. I was too tired to get the skiff aboard and the sun was pretty low. The birds were all pulling out and leaving her and I headed for Sou’west Key towing the skiff and the birds going on ahead of me and behind me. I was plenty tired.

That night it came on to blow and it blew for a week. You couldn’t get out to her. They come out from town and told me the fellow I’d had to cut was all right except for his arm and I went back to town and they put me under five hundred dollar bond. It came out all right because some of them, friends of mine, swore he was after me with an ax, but by the time we got back out to her the Greeks had blown her open and cleaned her out. They got the safe out with dynamite. Nobody ever knows how much they got. She carried gold and they got it all. They stripped her clean. I found her and I never got a nickel out of her.

It was a hell of a thing all right. They say she was just outside of Havana harbor when the hurricane hit and she couldn’t get in or the owners wouldn’t let the captain chance coming in; they say he wanted to try; so she had to go with it and in the dark they were running with it trying to go through the gulf between Rebecca and Tortugas when she struck on the quicksands. Maybe her rudder was carried away. Maybe they weren’t even steering. But anyway they couldn’t have known they were quicksands and when she struck the captain must have ordered them to open up the ballast tanks so she’d lay solid. But it was quicksand she’d hit and when they opened the tank she went in stern first and then over on her beam ends. There were four hundred and fifty passengers and the crew on board of her and they must all have been aboard of her when I found her. They must have opened the tanks as soon as she struck and the minute she settled on it the quicksands took her down. Then her boilers must have burst and that must have been what made those pieces that came out. It was funny there weren’t any sharks though. There wasn’t a fish. I could have seen them on that clear white sand.

Plenty of fish now though; jewfish, the biggest kind. The biggest part of her’s under the sand now but they live inside of her; the biggest kind of jewfish. Some weigh three to four hundred pounds. Sometime we’ll go out and get some. You can see the Rebecca light from where she is. They’ve got a buoy on her now. She’s right at the end of the quicksand right at the edge of the gulf. She only missed going through by about a hundred yards. In the dark in the storm they just missed it; raining the way it was they couldn’t have seen the Rebecca. Then they’re not used to that sort of thing. The captain of a liner isn’t used to scudding that way. They have a course and they tell me they set some sort of a compass and it steers itself. They probably didn’t know where they were when they ran with that blow but they come close to making it. Maybe they’d lost the rudder though. Anyway there wasn’t another thing for them to hit till they’d get to Mexico once they were in that gulf. Must have been something though when they struck in that rain and wind and he told them to open her tanks. Nobody could have been on deck in that blow and rain. Everybody must have been below. They couldn’t have lived on deck. There must have been some scenes inside all right because you know she settled fast. I saw that wrench go into the sand. The captain couldn’t have known it was quicksand when she struck unless he knew these waters. He just knew it wasn’t rock. He must have seen it all up in the bridge. He must have known what it was about when she settled. I wonder how fast she made it. I wonder if the mate was there with him. Do you think they stayed inside the bridge or do you think they took it outside? They never found any bodies. Not a one. Nobody floating. They float a long way with life belts too. They must have took it inside. Well, the Greeks got it all. Everything. They must have come fast all right. They picked her clean. First there was the birds, then me, then the Greeks, and even the birds got more out of her than I did.

A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE

IT WAS LATE AND EVERY ONE HAD LEFT the café except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the café knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

“Last week he tried to commit suicide,” one waiter said.

“Why?”

“He was in despair.”

“What about?”

“Nothing.”

“How do you know it was nothing?”

“He has plenty of money.”

They sat together at a table that was close against the wall near the door of the café and looked at the terrace where the tables were all empty except where the old man sat in the shadow of the leaves of the tree that moved slightly in the wind. A girl and a soldier went by in the street. The street light shone on the brass number on his collar. The girl wore no head covering and hurried beside him.

“The guard will pick him up,” one waiter said.

“What does it matter if he gets what he’s after?”

“He had better get off the street now. The guard will get him. They went by five minutes ago.”

The old man sitting in the shadow rapped on his saucer with his glass. The younger waiter went over to him.

“What do you want?”

The old man looked at him. “Another brandy,” he said.

“You’ll be drunk,” the waiter said. The old man looked at him. The waiter went away.

“He’ll stay all night,” he said to his colleague. “I’m sleepy now. I never get into bed before three o’clock. He should have killed himself last week.”

The waiter took the brandy bottle and another saucer from the counter inside the café and marched out to the old man’s table. He put down the saucer and poured the glass full of brandy.

“You should have killed yourself last week,” he said to the deaf man. The old man motioned with his finger. “A little more,” he said. The waiter poured on into the glass so that the brandy slopped over and ran down the stem into the top saucer of the pile. “Thank you,” the old man said. The waiter took the bottle back inside the café. He sat down at the table with his colleague again.

“He’s drunk now,” he said.

“He’s drunk every night.”

“What did he want to kill himself for?”

“How should I know.”

“How did he do it?”

“He hung himself with a rope.”

“Who cut him down?”

“His niece.”

“Why did they do it?”

“Fear for his soul.”

“How much money has he got?”

“He’s got plenty.”

“He must be eighty years old.”

“Anyway I should say he was eighty.”

“I wish he would go home. I never get to bed before three o’clock. What kind of hour is that to go to bed?”

“He stays up because he likes it.”

“He’s lonely. I’m not lonely. I have a wife waiting in bed for me.”

“He had a wife once too.”

“A wife would be no good to him now.”

“You can’t tell. He might be better with a wife.”

“His niece looks after him. You said she cut him down.”

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing.”

“Not always. This old man is clean. He drinks without spilling. Even now, drunk. Look at him.”

“I don’t want to look at him. I wish he would go home. He has no regard for those who must work.”

The old man looked from his glass across the square, then over at the waiters.

“Another brandy,” he said, pointing to his glass. The waiter who was in a hurry came over.

“Finished,” he said, speaking with that omission of syntax stupid people employ when talking to drunken people or foreigners. “No more tonight. Close now.”

“Another,” said the old man.

“No. Finished.” The waiter wiped the edge of the table with a towel and shook his head.

The old man stood up, slowly counted the saucers, took a leather coin purse from his pocket and paid for the drinks, leaving half a peseta tip.

The waiter watched him go down the street, a very old man walking unsteadily but with dignity.

“Why didn’t you let him stay and drink?” the unhurried waiter asked. They were putting up the shutters. “It is not half-past two.”

“I want to go home to bed.”

“What is an hour?”

“More to me than to him.”

“An hour is the same.”

“You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drink at home.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, it is not,” agreed the waiter with a wife. He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.

“And you? You have no fear of going home before your usual hour?”

“Are you trying to insult me?”

“No, hombre, only to make a joke.”

“No,” the waiter who was in a hurry said, rising from pulling down the metal shutters. “I have confidence. I am all confidence.”

“You have youth, confidence, and a job,” the older waiter said. “You have everything.”

“And what do you lack?”

“Everything but work.”

“You have everything I have.”

“No. I have never had confidence and I am not young.”

“Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up.”

“I am of those who like to stay late at the café,” the older waiter said. “With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night.”

“I want to go home and into bed.”

“We are of two different kinds,” the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. “It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café.”

“Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long.”

“You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant café. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves.”

“Good night,” said the younger waiter.

“Good night,” the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

“What’s yours?” asked the barman.

“Nada.”

“Otro loco más,” said the barman and turned away.

“A little cup,” said the waiter.

The barman poured it for him.

“The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished,” the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

“You want another copita?” the barman asked.

“No, thank you,” said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted café was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

WHEN HE SAW US COME IN THE DOOR the bartender looked up and then reached over and put the glass covers on the two free-lunch bowls.

“Give me a beer,” I said. He drew it, cut the top off with the spatula and then held the glass in his hand. I put the nickel on the wood and he slid the beer toward me.

“What’s yours?” he said to Tom.

“Beer.”

He drew that beer and cut it off and when he saw the money he pushed the beer across to Tom.

“What’s the matter?” Tom asked.

The bartender didn’t answer him. He just looked over our heads and said, “What’s yours?” to a man who’d come in.

“Rye,” the man said. The bartender put out the bottle and glass and a glass of water.

Tom reached over and took the glass off the free-lunch bowl. It was a bowl of pickled pig’s feet and there was a wooden thing that worked like a scissors, with two wooden forks at the end to pick them up with.

“No,” said the bartender and put the glass cover back on the bowl. Tom held the wooden scissors fork in his hand. “Put it back,” said the bartender.

“You know where,” said Tom.

The bartender reached a hand forward under the bar, watching us both. I put fifty cents on the wood and he straightened up.

“What was yours?” he said.

“Beer,” I said, and before he drew the beer he uncovered both the bowls.

“Your goddam pig’s feet stink,” Tom said, and spit what he had in his mouth on the floor. The bartender didn’t say anything. The man who had drunk the rye paid and went out without looking back.

“You stink yourself,” the bartender said. “All you punks stink.”

“He says we’re punks,” Tommy said to me.

“Listen,” I said. “Let’s get out.”

“You punks clear the hell out of here,” the bartender said.

“I said we were going out,” I said. “It wasn’t your idea.”

“We’ll be back,” Tommy said.

“No you won’t,” the bartender told him.

“Tell him how wrong he is,” Tom turned to me.

“Come on,” I said.

Outside it was good and dark.

“What the hell kind of place is this?” Tommy said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s go down to the station.”

We’d come in that town at one end and we were going out the other. It smelled of hides and tan bark and the big piles of sawdust. It was getting dark as we came in, and now that it was dark it was cold and the puddles of water in the road were freezing at the edges.

Down at the station there were five whores waiting for the train to come in, and six white men and four Indians. It was crowded and hot from the stove and full of stale smoke. As we came in nobody was talking and the ticket window was down.

“Shut the door, can’t you?” somebody said.

I looked to see who said it. It was one of the white men. He wore stagged trousers and lumbermen’s rubbers and a mackinaw shirt like the others, but he had no cap and his face was white and his hands were white and thin.

“Aren’t you going to shut it?”

“Sure,” I said, and shut it.

“Thank you,” he said. One of the other men snickered.

“Ever interfere with a cook?” he said to me.

“No.”

“You can interfere with this one,” he looked at the cook. “He likes it.”

The cook looked away from him holding his lips tight together.

“He puts lemon juice on his hands,” the man said. “He wouldn’t get them in dishwater for anything. Look how white they are.”

One of the whores laughed out loud. She was the biggest whore I ever saw in my life and the biggest woman. And she had on one of those silk dresses that change colors. There were two other whores that were nearly as big but the big one must have weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. You couldn’t believe she was real when you looked at her. All three had those changeable silk dresses. They sat side by side on the bench. They were huge. The other two were just ordinary looking whores, peroxide blondes.

“Look at his hands,” the man said and nodded his head at the cook. The whore laughed again and shook all over.

The cook turned and said to her quickly, “You big disgusting mountain of flesh.”

She just keep on laughing and shaking.

“Oh, my Christ,” she said. She had a nice voice. “Oh, my sweet Christ.”

The two other whores, the big ones, acted very quiet and placid as though they didn’t have much sense, but they were big, nearly as big as the biggest one. They’d have both gone well over two hundred and fifty pounds. The other two were dignified.

Of the men, besides the cook and the one who talked, there were two other lumberjacks, one that listened, interested but bashful, and the other that seemed getting ready to say something, and two Swedes. Two Indians were sitting down at the end of the bench and one standing up against the wall.

The man who was getting ready to say something spoke to me very low, “Must be like getting on top of a hay mow.”

I laughed and said it to Tommy.

“I swear to Christ I’ve never been anywhere like this,” he said. “Look at the three of them.” Then the cook spoke up.

“How old are you boys?”

“I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine,” Tommy said.

“Ho! Ho! Ho!” the big whore shook with laughing. She had a really pretty voice. The other whores didn’t smile.

“Oh, can’t you be decent?” the cook said. “I asked just to be friendly.”

“We’re seventeen and nineteen,” I said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Tommy turned to me.

“That’s all right.”

“You can call me Alice,” the big whore said and then she began to shake again.

“Is that your name?” Tommy asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Alice. Isn’t it?” she turned to the man who sat by the cook.

“Alice. That’s right.”

“That’s the sort of name you’d have,” the cook said.

“It’s my real name,” Alice said.

“What’s the other girls’ names?” Tom asked.

“Hazel and Ethel,” Alice said. Hazel and Ethel smiled. They weren’t very bright.

“What’s your name?” I said to one of the blondes.

“Frances,” she said.

“Frances what?”

“Frances Wilson. What’s it to you?”

“What’s yours?” I asked the other one.

“Oh, don’t be fresh,” she said.

“He just wants us all to be friends,” the man who talked said. “Don’t you want to be friends?”

“No,” the peroxide one said. “Not with you.”

“She’s just a spitfire,” the man said. “A regular little spitfire.”

The one blonde looked at the other and shook her head.

“Goddamned mossbacks,” she said.

Alice commenced to laugh again and to shake all over.

“There’s nothing funny,” the cook said. “You all laugh but there’s nothing funny. You two young lads; where are you bound for?”

“Where are you going yourself?” Tom asked him.

“I want to go to Cadillac,” the cook said. “Have you ever been there? My sister lives there.”

“He’s a sister himself,” the man in the stagged trousers said.

“Can’t you stop that sort of thing?” the cook asked. “Can’t we speak decently?”

“Cadillac is where Steve Ketchel came from and where Ad Wolgast is from,” the shy man said.

“Steve Ketchel,” one of the blondes said in a high voice as though the name had pulled a trigger in her. “His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father. There aren’t any more men like Steve Ketchel.”

“Wasn’t his name Stanley Ketchel?” asked the cook.

“Oh, shut up,” said the blonde. “What do you know about Steve? Stanley. He was no Stanley. Steve Ketchel was the finest and most beautiful man that ever lived. I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful as Steve Ketchel. There never was a man like that. He moved just like a tiger and he was the finest, free-est spender that ever lived.”

“Did you know him?” one of the men asked.

“Did I know him? Did I know him? Did I love him? You ask me that? I knew him like you know nobody in the world and I loved him like you love God. He was the greatest, finest, whitest, most beautiful man that ever lived, Steve Ketchel, and his own father shot him down like a dog.”

“Were you out on the coast with him?”

“No. I knew him before that. He was the only man I ever loved.”

Every one was very respectful to the peroxide blonde, who said all this in a high stagey way, but Alice was beginning to shake again. I felt it sitting by her.

“You should have married him,” the cook said.

“I wouldn’t hurt his career,” the peroxide blonde said. “I wouldn’t be a drawback to him. A wife wasn’t what he needed. Oh, my God, what a man he was.”

“That was a fine way to look at it,” the cook said. “Didn’t Jack Johnson knock him out though?”

“It was a trick,” Peroxide said. “That big dinge took him by surprise. He’d just knocked Jack Johnson down, the big black bastard. That nigger beat him by a fluke.”

The ticket window went up and the three Indians went over to it.

“Steve knocked him down,” Peroxide said. “He turned to smile at me.”

“I thought you said you weren’t on the coast,” some one said.

“I went out just for that fight. Steve turned to smile at me and that black son of a bitch from hell jumped up and hit him by surprise. Steve could lick a hundred like that black bastard.”

“He was a great fighter,” the lumberjack said.

“I hope to God he was,” Peroxide said. “I hope to God they don’t have fighters like that now. He was like a god, he was. So white and clean and beautiful and smooth and fast and like a tiger or like lightning.”

“I saw him in the moving pictures of the fight,” Tom said. We were all very moved. Alice was shaking all over and I looked and saw she was crying. The Indians had gone outside on the platform.

“He was more than any husband could ever be,” Peroxide said. “We were married in the eyes of God and I belong to him right now and always will and all of me is his. I don’t care about my body. They can take my body. My soul belongs to Steve Ketchel. By God, he was a man.”

Everybody felt terribly. It was sad and embarrassing. Then Alice, who was still shaking, spoke. “You’re a dirty liar,” she said in that low voice. “You never laid Steve Ketchel in your life and you know it.”

“How can you say that?” Peroxide said proudly.

“I say it because it’s true,” Alice said. “I’m the only one here that ever knew Steve Ketchel and I come from Mancelona and I knew him there and it’s true and you know it’s true and God can strike me dead if it isn’t true.”

“He can strike me too,” Peroxide said.

“This is true, true, true, and you know it. Not just made up and I know exactly what he said to me.”

“What did he say?” Peroxide asked, complacently.

Alice was crying so she could hardly speak from shaking so. “He said ‘You’re a lovely piece, Alice.’ That’s exactly what he said.”

“It’s a lie,” Peroxide said.

“It’s true,” Alice said. “That’s truly what he said.”

“It’s a lie,” Peroxide said proudly.

“No, it’s true, true, true, to Jesus and Mary true.”

“Steve couldn’t have said that. It wasn’t the way he talked,” Peroxide said happily.

“It’s true,” said Alice in her nice voice. “And it doesn’t make any difference to me whether you believe it or not.” She wasn’t crying any more and she was calm.

“It would be impossible for Steve to have said that,” Peroxide declared.

“He said it,” Alice said and smiled. “And I remember when he said it and I was a lovely piece then exactly as he said, and right now I’m a better piece than you, you dried up old hot-water bottle.”

“You can’t insult me,” said Peroxide. “You big mountain of pus. I have my memories.”

“No,” Alice said in that sweet lovely voice, “you haven’t got any real memories except having your tubes out and when you started C. and M. Everything else you just read in the papers. I’m clean and you know it and men like me, even though I’m big, and you know it, and I never lie and you know it.”

“Leave me with my memories,” Peroxide said. “With my true, wonderful memories.”

Alice looked at her and then at us and her face lost that hurt look and she smiled and she had about the prettiest face I ever saw. She had a pretty face and a nice smooth skin and a lovely voice and she was nice all right and really friendly. But my God she was big. She was as big as three women. Tom saw me looking at her and he said, “Come on. Let’s go.”

“Good-bye,” said Alice. She certainly had a nice voice.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Which way are you boys going?” asked the cook.

“The other way from you,” Tom told him.

GOD REST YOU MERRY, GENTLEMEN

IN THOSE DAYS THE DISTANCES WERE ALL very different, the dirt blew off the hills that now have been cut down, and Kansas City was very like Constantinople. You may not believe this. No one believes this; but it is true. On this afternoon it was snowing and inside an automobile dealer’s show window, lighted against the early dark, there was a racing motor car finished entirely in silver with Dans Argent lettered on the hood. This I believed to mean the silver dance or the silver dancer, and, slightly puzzled which it meant but happy in the sight of the car and pleased by my knowledge of a foreign language, I went along the street in the snow. I was walking from the Woolf Brothers’ saloon where, on Christmas and Thanksgiving Day, a free turkey dinner was served, toward the city hospital which was on a high hill that overlooked the smoke, the buildings and the streets of the town. In the reception room of the hospital were the two ambulance surgeons Doc Fischer and Doctor Wilcox, sitting, the one before a desk, the other in a chair against the wall.

Doc Fischer was thin, sand-blond, with a thin mouth, amused eyes and gambler’s hands. Doctor Wilcox was short, dark and carried an indexed book, The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, which, being consulted on any given subject, told symptoms and treatment. It was also cross-indexed so that being consulted on symptoms it gave diagnoses. Doc Fischer had suggested that any future editions should be further cross-indexed so that if consulted as to the treatments being given, it would reveal ailments and symptoms. “As an aid to memory,” he said.

Doctor Wilcox was sensitive about this book but could not get along without it. It was bound in limp leather and fitted his coat pocket and he had bought it at the advice of one of his professors who had said, “Wilcox, you have no business being a physician and I have done everything in my power to prevent you from being certified as one. Since you are now a member of this learned profession I advise you, in the name of humanity, to obtain a copy of The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, and use it, Doctor Wilcox. Learn to use it.”

Doctor Wilcox had said nothing but he had bought the leather-bound guide that same day.

“Well, Horace,” Doc Fischer said as I came in the receiving room which smelt of cigarettes, iodoform, carbolic and an overheated radiator.

“Gentlemen,” I said.

“What news along the rialto?” Doc Fischer asked. He affected a certain extravagance of speech which seemed to me to be of the utmost elegance.

“The free turkey at Woolf’s,” I answered.

“You partook?”

“Copiously.”

“Many of the confrères present?”

“All of them. The whole staff.”

“Much Yuletide cheer?”

“Not much.”

“Doctor Wilcox here has partaken slightly,” Doc Fischer said. Doctor Wilcox looked up at him, then at me.

“Want a drink?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“That’s all right,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“Horace,” Doc Fischer said, “you don’t mind me calling you Horace, do you?”

“No.”

“Good old Horace. We’ve had an extremely interesting case.”

“I’ll say,” said Doctor Wilcox.

“You know the lad who was in here yesterday?”

“Which one?”

“The lad who sought eunuch-hood.”

“Yes.” I had been there when he came in. He was a boy about sixteen. He came in with no hat on and was very excited and frightened but determined. He was curly haired and well built and his lips were prominent.

“What’s the matter with you, son?” Doctor Wilcox asked him.

“I want to be castrated,” the boy said.

“Why?” Doc Fischer asked.

“I’ve prayed and I’ve done everything and nothing helps.”

“Helps what?”

“That awful lust.”

“What awful lust?”

“The way I get. The way I can’t stop getting. I pray all night about it.”

“Just what happens?” Doc Fischer asked.

The boy told him. “Listen, boy,” Doc Fischer said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. That’s the way you’re supposed to be. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“It is wrong,” said the boy. “It’s a sin against purity. It’s a sin against our Lord and Saviour.”

“No,” said Doc Fisher. “It’s a natural thing. It’s the way you are supposed to be and later on you will think you are very fortunate.”

“Oh, you don’t understand,” the boy said.

“Listen,” Doc Fischer said and he told the boy certain things.

“No. I won’t listen. You can’t make me listen.”

“Please listen,” Doc Fischer said.

“You’re just a goddamned fool,” Doctor Wilcox said to the boy.

“Then you won’t do it?” the boy asked.

“Do what?”

“Castrate me.”

“Listen,” Doc Fischer said. “No one will castrate you. There is nothing wrong with your body. You have a fine body and you must not think about that. If you are religious remember that what you complain of is no sinful state but the means of consummating a sacrament.”

“I can’t stop it happening,” the boy said. “I pray all night and I pray in the daytime. It is a sin, a constant sin against purity.”

“Oh, go and — —” Doctor Wilcox said.

“When you talk like that I don’t hear you,” the boy said with dignity to Doctor Wilcox. “Won’t you please do it?” he asked Doc Fischer.

“No,” said Doc Fischer. “I’ve told you, boy.”

“Get him out of here,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“I’ll get out,” the boy said. “Don’t touch me. I’ll get out.”

That was about five o’clock on the day before.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“So at one o’clock this morning,” Doc Fischer said, “we receive the youth self-mutilated with a razor.”

“Castrated?”

“No,” said Doc Fisher. “He didn’t know what castrate meant.”

“He may die,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“Why?”

“Loss of blood.”

“The good physician here, Doctor Wilcox, my colleague, was on call and he was unable to find this emergency listed in his book.”

“The hell with you talking that way,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“I only mean it in the friendliest way, Doctor,” Doc Fischer said, looking at his hands, at his hands that had, with his willingness to oblige and his lack of respect for Federal statutes, made him his trouble. “Horace here will bear me out that I only speak of it in the very friendliest way. It was an amputation the young man performed, Horace.”

“Well, I wish you wouldn’t ride me about it,” Doctor Wilcox said. “There isn’t any need to ride me.”

“Ride you, Doctor, on the day, the very anniversary, of our Saviour’s birth?”

“Our Saviour? Ain’t you a Jew?” Doctor Wilcox said.

“So I am. So I am. It always is slipping my mind. I’ve never given it its proper importance. So good of you to remind me. Your Saviour. That’s right. Your Saviour, undoubtedly your Saviour — and the ride for Palm Sunday.”

“You’re too damned smart,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“An excellent diagnosis, Doctor. I was always too damned smart. Too damned smart on the coast certainly. Avoid it, Horace. You haven’t much tendency but sometimes I see a gleam. But what a diagnosis — and without the book.”

“The hell with you,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“All in good time, Doctor,” Doc Fischer said. “All in good time. If there is such a place I shall certainly visit it. I have even had a very small look into it. No more than a peek, really. I looked away almost at once. And do you know what the young man said, Horace, when the good Doctor here brought him in? He said, ‘Oh, I asked you to do it. I asked you so many times to do it.’”

“On Christmas Day, too,” Doctor Wilcox said.

“The significance of the particular day is not important,” Doc Fischer said.

“Maybe not to you,” said Doctor Wilcox.

“You hear him, Horace?” Doc Fischer said. “You hear him? Having discovered my vulnerable point, my achilles tendon so to speak, the doctor pursues his advantage.”

“You’re too damned smart,” Doctor Wilcox said.

THE SEA CHANGE

“ALL RIGHT,” SAID THE MAN. “WHAT about it?”

“No,” said the girl, “I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“I can’t,” said the girl. “That’s all that I mean.”

“You mean that you won’t.”

“All right,” said the girl. “You have it your own way.”

“I don’t have it my own way. I wish to God I did.”

“You did for a long time,” the girl said.

It was early, and there was no one in the café except the barman and these two who sat together at a table in the corner. It was the end of the summer and they were both tanned, so that they looked out of place in Paris. The girl wore a tweed suit, her skin was a smooth golden brown, her blonde hair was cut short and grew beautifully away from her forehead. The man looked at her.

“I’ll kill her,” he said.

“Please don’t,” the girl said. She had very fine hands and the man looked at them. They were slim and brown and very beautiful.

“I will. I swear to God I will.”

“It won’t make you happy.”

“Couldn’t you have gotten into something else? Couldn’t you have gotten into some other jam?”

“It seems not,” the girl said. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you.”

“No; I mean really.”

“I don’t know,” he said. She looked at him and put out her hand. “Poor old Phil.” she said. He looked at her hands, but he did not touch her hand with his.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“It doesn’t do any good to say I’m sorry?”

“No.”

“Nor to tell you how it is?”

“I’d rather not hear.”

“I love you very much.”

“Yes, this proves it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “if you don’t understand.”

“I understand. That’s the trouble. I understand.”

“You do,” she said. “That makes it worse, of course.”

“Sure,” he said, looking at her. “I’ll understand all the time. All day and all night. Especially all night. I’ll understand. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“If it was a man — —”

“Don’t say that. It wouldn’t be a man. You know that. Don’t you trust me?”

“That’s funny,” he said. “Trust you. That’s really funny.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s all I seem to say. But when we do understand each other there’s no use to pretend we don’t.”

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“I’ll come back if you want me.”

“No. I don’t want you.”

Then they did not say anything for a while.

“You don’t believe I love you, do you?” the girl asked.

“Let’s not talk rot,” the man said.

“Don’t you really believe I love you?”

“Why don’t you prove it?”

“You didn’t use to be that way. You never asked me to prove anything. That isn’t polite.”

“You’re a funny girl.”

“You’re not. You’re a fine man and it breaks my heart to go off and leave you—”

“You have to, of course.”

“Yes,” she said. “I have to and you know it.”

He did not say anything and she looked at him and put her hand out again. The barman was at the far end of the bar. His face was white and so was his jacket. He knew these two and thought them a handsome young couple. He had seen many handsome young couples break up and new couples form that were never so handsome long. He was not thinking about this, but about a horse. In half an hour he could send across the street to find if the horse had won.

“Couldn’t you just be good to me and let me go?” the girl asked.

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

Two people came in the door and went up to the bar.

“Yes, sir,” the barman took the orders.

“You can’t forgive me? When you know about it?” the girl asked.

“No.”

“You don’t think things we’ve had and done should make any difference in understanding?”

“ ‘Vice is a monster of such fearful mien,’ “ the young man said bitterly, “that to be something or other needs but to be seen. Then we something, something, then embrace.” He could not remember the words. “I can’t quote,” he said.

“Let’s not say vice,” she said. “That’s not very polite.”

“Perversion,” he said.

“James,” one of the clients addressed the barman, “you’re looking very well.”

“You’re looking very well yourself,” the barman said.

“Old James,” the other client said. “You’re fatter, James.”

“It’s terrible,” the barman said, “the way I put it on.”

“Don’t neglect to insert the brandy, James,” the first client said.

“No, sir,” said the barman. “Trust me.”

The two at the bar looked over at the two at the table, then looked back at the barman again. Towards the barman was the comfortable direction.

“I’d like it better if you didn’t use words like that,” the girl said. “There’s no necessity to use a word like that.”

“What do you want me to call it?”

“You don’t have to call it. You don’t have to put any name to it.”

“That’s the name for it.”

“No,” she said. “We’re made up of all sorts of things. You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough.”

“You don’t have to say that again.”

“Because that explains it to you.”

“All right,” he said. “All right.”

“You mean all wrong. I know. It’s all wrong. But I’ll come back. I told you I’d come back. I’ll come back right away.”

“No, you won’t.”

“I’ll come back.”

“No, you won’t. Not to me.”

“You’ll see.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the hell of it. You probably will.”

“Of course I will.”

“Go on, then.”

“Really?” She could not believe him, but her voice was happy.

“Go on,” his voice sounded strange to him. He was looking at her, at the way her mouth went and the curve of her cheek bones, at her eyes and at the way her hair grew on her forehead and at the edge of her ear and at her neck.

“Not really. Oh, you’re too sweet,” she said. “You’re too good to me.”

“And when you come back tell me all about it.” His voice sounded very strange. He did not recognize it. She looked at him quickly. He was settled into something.

“You want me to go?” she asked seriously.

“Yes,” he said seriously. “Right away.” His voice was not the same, and his mouth was very dry. “Now,” he said.

She stood up and went out quickly. She did not look back at him. He watched her go. He was not the same-looking man as he had been before he had told her to go. He got up from the table, picked up the two checks and went over to the bar with them.

“I’m a different man, James,” he said to the barman. “You see in me quite a different man.”

“Yes, sir?” said James.

“Vice,” said the brown young man, “is a very strange thing, James.” He looked out the door. He saw her going down the street. As he looked in the glass, he saw he was really quite a different-looking man. The other two at the bar moved down to make room for him.

“You’re right there, sir,” James said.

The other two moved down a little more, so that he would be quite comfortable. The young man saw himself in the mirror behind the bar. “I said I was a different man, James,” he said. Looking into the mirror he saw that this was quite true.

“You look very well, sir,” James said. “You must have had a very good summer.”

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

THE ATTACK HAD GONE ACROSS THE field, been held up by machine-gun fire from the sunken road and from the group of farm houses, encountered no resistance in the town, and reached the bank of the river. Coming along the road on a bicycle, getting off to push the machine when the surface of the road became too broken, Nicholas Adams saw what had happened by the position of the dead.

They lay alone or in clumps in the high grass of the field and along the road, their pockets out, and over them were flies and around each body or group of bodies were the scattered papers.

In the grass and the grain, beside the road, and in some places scattered over the road, there was much material: a field kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the calf-skin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, sometimes one butt-up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt, they had dug quite a little at the last; stick bombs, helmets, rifles, intrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask cans, a squat, tripodded machine gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass, more of the typical papers.

There were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit standing in ranked and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college annual; now they were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head. There were many of these inciting cards which had evidently been issued just before the offensive. Now they were scattered with the smutty postcards, photographic; the small photographs of village girls by village photographers, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters, letters, letters. There was always much paper about the dead and the débris of this attack was no exception.

These were new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets. Our own dead, or what he thought of, still, as our own dead, were surprisingly few, Nick noticed. Their coats had been opened too and their pockets were out, and they showed, by their positions, the manner and the skill of the attack. The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.

The town had evidently been defended, at the last, from the line of the sunken road and there had been few or no Austrians to fall back into it. There were only three bodies in the street and they looked to have been killed running. The houses of the town were broken by the shelling and the street had much rubble of plaster and mortar and there were broken beams, broken tiles, and many holes, some of them yellow-edged from the mustard gas. There were many pieces of shell, and shrapnel balls were scattered in the rubble. There was no one in the town at all.

Nick Adams had seen no one since he had left Fornaci, although, riding along the road through the over-foliaged country, he had seen guns hidden under screens of mulberry leaves to the left of the road, noticing them by the heat-waves in the air above the leaves where the sun hit the metal. Now he went on through the town, surprised to find it deserted, and came out on the low road beneath the bank of the river. Leaving the town there was a bare open space where the road slanted down and he could see the placid reach of the river and the low curve of the opposite bank and the whitened, sun-baked mud where the Austrians had dug. It was all very lush and over-green since he had seen it last and becoming historical had made no change in this, the lower river.

The battalion was along the bank to the left. There was a series of holes in the top of the bank with a few men in them. Nick noticed where the machine guns were posted and the signal rockets in their racks. The men in the holes in the side of the bank were sleeping. No one challenged. He went on and as he came around a turn in the mud bank a young second lieutenant with a stubble of beard and red-rimmed, very blood-shot eyes pointed a pistol at him.

“Who are you?”

Nick told him.

“How do I know this?”

Nick showed him the tessera with photograph and identification and the seal of the third army. He took hold of it.

“I will keep this.”

“You will not,” Nick said. “Give me back the card and put your gun away. There. In the holster.”

“How am I to know who you are?”

“The tessera tells you.”

“And if the tessera is false? Give me that card.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Nick said cheerfully. “Take me to your company commander.”

“I should send you to battalion headquarters.”

“All right,” said Nick. “Listen, do you know the Captain Paravicini? The tall one with the small mustache who was an architect and speaks English?”

“You know him?”

“A little.”

“What company does he command?”

“The second.”

“He is commanding the battalion.”

“Good,” said Nick. He was relieved to know that Para was all right. “Let us go to the battalion.”

As Nick had left the edge of the town three shrapnel had burst high and to the right over one of the wrecked houses and since then there had been no shelling. But the face of this officer looked like the face of a man during a bombardment. There was the same tightness and the voice did not sound natural. His pistol made Nick nervous.

“Put it away,” he said. “There’s the whole river between them and you.”

“If I thought you were a spy I would shoot you now,” the second lieutenant said.

“Come on,” said Nick. “Let us go to the battalion.” This officer made him very nervous.

The Captain Paravicini, acting major, thinner and more English-looking than ever, rose when Nick saluted from behind the table in the dugout that was battalion headquarters.

“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t know you. What are you doing in that uniform?”

“They’ve put me in it.”

“I am very glad to see you, Nicolo.”

“Right. You look well. How was the show?”

“We made a very fine attack. Truly. A very fine attack. I will show you. Look.”

He showed on the map how the attack had gone.

“I came from Fornaci,” Nick said. “I could see how it had been. It was very good.”

“It was extraordinary. Altogether extraordinary. Are you attached to the regiment?”

“No. I am supposed to move around and let them see the uniform.”

“How odd.”

“If they see one American uniform that is supposed to make them believe others are coming.”

“But how will they know it is an American uniform?”

“You will tell them.”

“Oh. Yes, I see. I will send a corporal with you to show you about and you will make a tour of the lines.”

“Like a bloody politician,” Nick said.

“You would be much more distinguished in civilian clothes. They are what is really distinguished.”

“With a homburg hat,” said Nick.

“Or with a very furry fedora.”

“I’m supposed to have my pockets full of cigarettes and postal cards and such things,” Nick said. “I should have a musette full of chocolate. These I should distribute with a kind word and a pat on the back. But there weren’t any cigarettes and postcards and no chocolate. So they said to circulate around anyway.”

“I’m sure your appearance will be very heartening to the troops.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Nick said. “I feel badly enough about it as it is. In principle, I would have brought you a bottle of brandy.”

“In principle,” Para said and smiled, for the first time, showing yellowed teeth. “Such a beautiful expression. Would you like some grappa?”

“No, thank you,” Nick said.

“It hasn’t any ether in it.”

“I can taste that still,” Nick remembered suddenly and completely.

“You know I never knew you were drunk until you started talking coming back in the camions.”

“I was stinking in every attack,” Nick said.

“I can’t do it,” Para said. “I took it in the first show, the very first show, and it only made me very upset and then frightfully thirsty.”

“You don’t need it.”

“You’re much braver in an attack than I am.”

“No,” Nick said. “I know how I am and I prefer to get stinking. I’m not ashamed of it.”

“I’ve never seen you drunk.”

“No?” said Nick. “Never? Not when we rode from Mestre to Portogrande that night and I wanted to go to sleep and used the bicycle for a blanket and pulled it up under my chin?”

“That wasn’t in the lines.”

“Let’s not talk about how I am,” Nick said. “It’s a subject I know too much about to want to think about it any more.”

“You might as well stay here a while,” Paravicini said. “You can take a nap if you like. They didn’t do much to this in the bombardment. It’s too hot to go out yet.”

“I suppose there is no hurry.”

“How are you really?”

“I’m fine. I’m perfectly all right.”

“No. I mean really.”

“I’m all right. I can’t sleep without a light of some sort. That’s all I have now.”

“I said it should have been trepanned. I’m no doctor but I know that.”

“Well, they thought it was better to have it absorb, and that’s what I got. What’s the matter? I don’t seem crazy to you, do I?”

“You seem in top-hole shape.”

“It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty,” Nick said. “No one ever has any confidence in you again.”

“I would take a nap, Nicolo,” Paravicini said. “This isn’t battalion headquarters as we used to know it. We’re just waiting to be pulled out. You oughtn’t to go out in the heat now — it’s silly. Use that bunk.”

“I might just lie down,” Nick said.

Nick lay on the bunk. He was very disappointed that he felt this way and more disappointed, even, that it was so obvious to Captain Paravicini. This was not as large a dugout as the one where that platoon of the class of 1899, just out at the front, got hysterics during the bombardment before the attack, and Para had had him walk them two at a time outside to show them nothing would happen, he wearing his own chin strap tight across his mouth to keep his lips quiet. Knowing they could not hold it when they took it. Knowing it was all a bloody balls — if he can’t stop crying, break his nose to give him something else to think about. I’d shoot one but it’s too late now. They’d all be worse. Break his nose. They’ve put it back to five-twenty. We’ve only got four minutes more. Break that other silly bugger’s nose and kick his silly ass out of here. Do you think they’ll go over? If they don’t, shoot two and try to scoop the others out some way. Keep behind them, sergeant. It’s no use to walk ahead and find there’s nothing coming behind you. Bail them out as you go. What a bloody balls. All right. That’s right. Then, looking at the watch, in that quiet tone, that valuable quiet tone, “Savoia.” Making it cold, no time to get it, he couldn’t find his own after the cave-in, one whole end had caved in; it was that started them; making it cold up that slope the only time he hadn’t done it stinking. And after they came back the teleferica house burned, it seemed, and some of the wounded got down four days later and some did not get down, but we went up and we went back and we came down — we always came down. And there was Gaby Delys, oddly enough, with feathers on; you called me baby doll a year ago tadada you said that I was rather nice to know tadada with feathers on, with feathers off, the great Gaby, and my name’s Harry Pilcer, too, we used to step out of the far side of the taxis when it got steep going up the hill and he could see that hill every night when he dreamed with Sacré Coeur, blown white, like a soap bubble. Sometimes his girl was there and sometimes she was with some one else and he could not understand that, but those were the nights the river ran so much wider and stiller than it should and outside of Fossalta there was a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable and there was a canal, and he had been there a thousand times and never seen it, but there it was every night as plain as the hill, only it frightened him. That house meant more than anything and every night he had it. That was what he needed but it frightened him especially when the boat lay there quietly in the willows on the canal, but the banks weren’t like this river. It was all lower, as it was at Portogrande, where they had seen them come wallowing across the flooded ground holding the rifles high until they fell with them in the water. Who ordered that one? If it didn’t get so damned mixed up he could follow it all right. That was why he noticed everything in such detail to keep it all straight so he would know just where he was, but suddenly it confused without reason as now, he lying in a bunk at battalion headquarters, with Para commanding a battalion and he in a bloody American uniform. He sat up and looked around; they all watching him. Para was gone out. He lay down again.

The Paris part came earlier and he was not frightened of it except when she had gone off with some one else and the fear that they might take the same driver twice. That was what frightened about that. Never about the front. He never dreamed about the front now any more but what frightened him so that he could not get rid of it was that long yellow house and the different width of the river. Now he was back here at the river, he had gone through that same town, and there was no house. Nor was the river that way. Then where did he go each night and what was the peril, and why would he wake, soaking wet, more frightened than he had ever been in a bombardment, because of a house and a long stable and a canal?

He sat up; swung his legs carefully down; they stiffened any time they were out straight for long; returned the stares of the adjutant, the signallers and the two runners by the door and put on his cloth-covered trench helmet.

“I regret the absence of the chocolate, the postal cards and cigarettes,” he said. “I am, however, wearing the uniform.”

“The major is coming back at once,” the adjutant said. In that army an adjutant is not a commissioned officer.

“The uniform is not very correct,” Nick told them. “But it gives you the idea. There will be several millions of Americans here shortly.”

“Do you think they will send Americans down here?” asked the adjutant.

“Oh, absolutely. Americans twice as large as myself, healthy, with clean hearts, sleep at night, never been wounded, never been blown up, never had their heads caved in, never been scared, don’t drink, faithful to the girls they left behind them, many of them never had crabs, wonderful chaps. You’ll see.”

“Are you an Italian?” asked the adjutant.

“No, American. Look at the uniform. Spagnolini made it but it’s not quite correct.”

“A North or South American?”

“North,” said Nick. He felt it coming on now. He would quiet down.

“But you speak Italian.”

“Why not? Do you mind if I speak Italian? Haven’t I a right to speak Italian?”

“You have Italian medals.”

“Just the ribbons and the papers. The medals come later. Or you give them to people to keep and the people go away; or they are lost with your baggage. You can purchase others in Milan. It is the papers that are of importance. You must not feel badly about them. You will have some yourself if you stay at the front long enough.”

“I am a veteran of the Eritrea campaign,” said the adjutant stiffly. “I fought in Tripoli.”

“It’s quite something to have met you,” Nick put out his hand. “Those must have been trying days. I noticed the ribbons. Were you, by any chance, on the Carso?”

“I have just been called up for this war. My class was too old.”

“At one time I was under the age limit,” Nick said. “But now I am reformed out of the war.”

“But why are you here now?”

“I am demonstrating the American uniform,” Nick said. “Don’t you think it is very significant? It is a little tight in the collar but soon you will see untold millions wearing this uniform swarming like locusts. The grasshopper, you know, what we call the grasshopper in America, is really a locust. The true grasshopper is small and green and comparatively feeble. You must not, however, make a confusion with the seven-year locust or cicada which emits a peculiar sustained sound which at the moment I cannot recall. I try to recall it but I cannot. I can almost hear it and then it is quite gone. You will pardon me if I break off our conversation?”

“See if you can find the major,” the adjutant said to one of the two runners. “I can see you have been wounded,” he said to Nick.

“In various places,” Nick said. “If you are interested in scars I can show you some very interesting ones but I would rather talk about grasshoppers. What we call grasshoppers that is; and what are, really, locusts. These insects at one time played a very important part in my life. It might interest you and you can look at the uniform while I am talking.”

The adjutant made a motion with his hand to the second runner who went out.

“Fix your eyes on the uniform. Spagnolini made it, you know. You might as well look, too,” Nick said to the signallers. “I really have no rank. We’re under the American consul. It’s perfectly all right for you to look. You can stare, if you like. I will tell you about the American locust. We always preferred one that we called the medium-brown. They last the best in the water and fish prefer them. The larger ones that fly making a noise somewhat similar to that produced by a rattlesnake rattling his rattlers, a very dry sound, have vivid colored wings, some are bright red, others yellow barred with black, but their wings go to pieces in the water and they make a very blowsy bait, while the medium-brown is a plump, compact, succulent hopper that I can recommend as far as one may well recommend something you gentlemen will probably never encounter. But I must insist that you will never gather a sufficient supply of these insects for a day’s fishing by pursuing them with your hands or trying to hit them with a bat. That is sheer nonsense and a useless waste of time. I repeat, gentlemen, that you will get nowhere at it. The correct procedure, and one which should be taught all young officers at every small-arms course if I had anything to say about it, and who knows but what I will have, is the employment of a seine or net made of common mosquito netting. Two officers holding this length of netting at alternate ends, or let us say one at each end, stoop, hold the bottom extremity of the net in one hand and the top extremity in the other and run into the wind. The hoppers, flying with the wind, fly against the length of netting and are imprisoned in its folds. It is no trick at all to catch a very great quantity indeed, and no officer, in my opinion, should be without a length of mosquito netting suitable for the improvisation of one of these grasshopper seines. I hope I have made myself clear, gentlemen. Are there any questions? If there is anything in the course you do not understand please ask questions. Speak up. None? Then I would like to close on this note. In the words of that great soldier and gentleman, Sir Henry Wilson: Gentlemen, either you must govern or you must be governed. Let me repeat it. Gentlemen, there is one thing I would like to have you remember. One thing I would like you to take with you as you leave this room. Gentlemen, either you must govern — or you must be governed. That is all, gentlemen. Good-day.”

He removed his cloth-covered helmet, put it on again and, stooping, went out the low entrance of the dugout. Para, accompanied by the two runners, was coming down the line of the sunken road. It was very hot in the sun and Nick removed the helmet.

“There ought to be a system for wetting these things,” he said. “I shall wet this one in the river.” He started up the bank.

“Nicolo,” Paravicini called. “Nicolo. Where are you going?”

“I don’t really have to go.” Nick came down the slope, holding the helmet in his hands. “They’re a damned nuisance wet or dry. Do you wear yours all the time?”

“All the time,” said Para. “It’s making me bald. Come inside.”

Inside Para told him to sit down.

“You know they’re absolutely no damned good,” Nick said. “I remember when they were a comfort when we first had them, but I’ve seen them full of brains too many times.”

“Nicolo,” Para said. “I think you should go back. I think it would be better if you didn’t come up to the line until you had those supplies. There’s nothing here for you to do. If you move around, even with something worth giving away, the men will group and that invites shelling. I won’t have it.”

“I know it’s silly,” Nick said. “It wasn’t my idea. I heard the brigade was here so I thought I would see you or some one else I knew. I could have gone to Zenzon or to San Dona. I’d like to go to San Dona to see the bridge again.”

“I won’t have you circulating around to no purpose,” Captain Paravicini said.

“All right,” said Nick. He felt it coming on again.

“You understand?”

“Of course,” said Nick. He was trying to hold it in.

“Anything of that sort should be done at night.”

“Naturally,” said Nick. He knew he could not stop it now.

“You see, I am commanding the battalion,” Para said.

“And why shouldn’t you be?” Nick said. Here it came. “You can read and write, can’t you?”

“Yes,” said Para gently.

“The trouble is you have a damned small battalion to command. As soon as it gets to strength again they’ll give you back your company. Why don’t they bury the dead? I’ve seen them now. I don’t care about seeing them again. They can bury them any time as far as I’m concerned and it would be much better for you. You’ll all get bloody sick.”

“Where did you leave your bicycle?”

“Inside the last house.”

“Do you think it will be all right?”

“Don’t worry,” Nick said. “I’ll go in a little while.”

“Lie down a little while, Nicolo.”

“All right.”

He shut his eyes, and in place of the man with the beard who looked at him over the sights of the rifle, quite calmly before squeezing off, the white flash and clublike impact, on his knees, hot-sweet choking, coughing it onto the rock while they went past him, he saw a long, yellow house with a low stable and the river much wider than it was and stiller. “Christ,” he said, “I might as well go.”

He stood up.

“I’m going, Para,” he said. “I’ll ride back now in the afternoon. If any supplies have come I’ll bring them down tonight. If not I’ll come at night when I have something to bring.”

“It is still hot to ride,” Captain Paravicini said.

“You don’t need to worry,” Nick said. “I’m all right now for quite a while. I had one then but it was easy. They’re getting much better. I can tell when I’m going to have one because I talk so much.”

“I’ll send a runner with you.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I know the way.”

“You’ll be back soon?”

“Absolutely.”

“Let me send — —”

“No,” said Nick. “As a mark of confidence.”

“Well, ciao then.”

“Ciao,” said Nick. He started back along the sunken road toward where he had left the bicycle. In the afternoon the road would be shady once he had passed the canal. Beyond that there were trees on both sides that had not been shelled at all. It was on that stretch that, marching, they had once passed the Terza Savoia cavalry regiment riding in the snow with their lances. The horses’ breath made plumes in the cold air. No, that was somewhere else. Where was that?

“I’d better get to that damned bicycle,” Nick said to himself. “I don’t want to lose the way to Fornaci.”

THE MOTHER OF A QUEEN

WHEN HIS FATHER DIED HE WAS ONLY A kid and his manager buried him perpetually. That is, so he would have the plot permanently. But when his mother died his manager thought they might not always be so hot on each other. They were sweethearts; sure he’s a queen, didn’t you know that, of course he is. So he just buried her for five years.

Well, when he came back to Mexico from Spain he got the first notice. It said it was the first notice that the five years were up and would he make arrangements for the continuing of his mother’s grave. It was only twenty dollars for perpetual. I had the cash box then and I said let me attend to it, Paco. But he said no, he would look after it. He’d look after it right away. It was his mother and he wanted to do it himself.

Then in a week he got the second notice. I read it to him and I said I thought he had looked after it.

No, he said, he hadn’t.

“Let me do it,” I said. “It’s right here in the cash box.”

No, he said. Nobody could tell him what to do. He’d do it himself when he got around to it. “What’s the sense in spending money sooner than necessary?”

“All right,” I said, “but see you look after it.” At this time he had a contract for six fights at four thousand pesos a fight besides his benefit fight. He made over fifteen thousand dollars there in the capital alone. He was just tight, that’s all.

The third notice came in another week and I read it to him. It said that if he did not make the payment by the following Saturday his mother’s grave would be opened and her remains dumped on the common boneheap. He said he would go attend to it that afternoon when he went to town.

“Why not have me do it?” I asked him.

“Keep out of my business,” he said. “It’s my business and I’m going to do it.”

“All right, if that’s the way you feel about it,” I said. “Do your own business.”

He got the money out of the cash box, although then he always carried a hundred or more pesos with him all the time, and he said he would look after it. He went out with the money and so of course I thought he had attended to it.

A week later the notice came that they had no response to the final warning and so his mother’s body had been dumped on the boneheap; on the public boneheap.

“Jesus Christ,” I said to him, “you said you’d pay that and you took money out of the cash box to do it and now what’s happened to your mother? My God, think of it! The public boneheap and your own mother. Why didn’t you let me look after it? I would have sent it when the first notice came.”

“It’s none of your business. It’s my mother.”

“It’s none of my business, yes, but it was your business. What kind of blood is it in a man that will let that be done to his mother? You don’t deserve to have a mother.”

“It is my mother,” he said. “Now she is so much dearer to me. Now I don’t have to think of her buried in one place and be sad. Now she is all about me in the air, like the birds and the flowers. Now she will always be with me.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “what kind of blood have you anyway? I don’t want you to even speak to me.”

“She is all around me,” he said. “Now I will never be sad.”

At that time he was spending all kinds of money around women trying to make himself seem a man and fool people, but it didn’t have any effect on people that knew anything about him. He owed me over six hundred pesos and he wouldn’t pay me. “Why do you want it now?” he’d say. “Don’t you trust me? Aren’t we friends?”

“It isn’t friends or trusting you. It’s that I paid the accounts out of my own money while you were away and now I need the money back and you have it to pay me.”

“I haven’t got it.”

“You have it,” I said. “It’s in the cash box now and you can pay me.”

“I need that money for something,” he said. “You don’t know all the needs I have for money.”

“I stayed here all the time you were in Spain and you authorized me to pay these things as they came up, all these things of the house, and you didn’t send any money while you were gone and I paid over six hundred pesos in my own money and now I need it and you can pay me.”

“I’ll pay you soon,” he said. “Right now I need the money badly.”

“For what?”

“For my own business.”

“Why don’t you pay me some on account?”

“I can’t” he said. “I need that money too badly. But I will pay you.”

He had only fought twice in Spain, they couldn’t stand him there, they saw through him quick enough, and he had seven new fighting suits made and this is the kind of thing he was: he had them packed so badly that four of them were ruined by sea water on the trip back and he couldn’t even wear them.

“My God,” I said to him, “you go to Spain. You stay there the whole season and only fight two times. You spend all the money you took with you on suits and then have them spoiled by salt water so you can’t wear them. That is the kind of season you have and then you talk to me about running your own business. Why don’t you pay me the money you owe me so I can leave?”

“I want you here,” he said, “and I will pay you. But now I need the money.”

“You need it too badly to pay for your own mother’s grave to keep your mother buried. Don’t you?” I said.

“I am happy about what has happened to my mother,” he said. “You cannot understand.”

“Thank Christ I can’t,” I said. “You pay me what you owe me or I will take it out of the cash box.”

“I will keep the cash box myself,” he said.

“No, you won’t,” I said.

That very afternoon he came to me with a punk, some fellow from his own town who was broke, and said, “Here is a paisano who needs money to go home because his mother is very sick.” This fellow was just a punk, you understand, a nobody he’d never seen before, but from his home town, and he wanted to be the big, generous matador with a fellow townsman.

“Give him fifty pesos from the cash box,” he told me.

“You just told me you had no money to pay me,” I said. “And now you want to give fifty pesos to this punk.”

“He is a fellow townsman,” he said, “and he is in distress.”

“You bitch,” I said. I gave him the key of the cash box. “Get it yourself. I’m going to town.”

“Don’t be angry,” he said. “I’m going to pay you.”

I got the car out to go to town. It was his car but he knew I drove it better than he did. Everything he did I could do better. He knew it. He couldn’t even read and write. I was going to see somebody and see what I could do about making him pay me. He came out and said, “I’m coming with you and I’m going to pay you. We are good friends. There is no need to quarrel.”

We drove into the city and I was driving. Just before we came into the town he pulled out twenty pesos.

“Here’s the money,” he said.

“You motherless bitch,” I said to him and told him what he could do with the money. “You give fifty pesos to that punk and then offer me twenty when you owe me six hundred. I wouldn’t take a nickel from you. You know what you can do with it.”

I got out of the car without a peso in my pocket and I didn’t know where I was going to sleep that night. Later I went out with a friend and got my things from his place. I never spoke to him again until this year. I met him walking with three friends in the evening on the way to the Callao cinema in the Gran Via in Madrid. He put his hand out to me.

“Hello Roger, old friend,” he said to me. “How are you? People say you are talking against me. That you say all sorts of unjust things about me.”

“All I say is you never had a mother,” I said to him. That’s the worst thing you can say to insult a man in Spanish.

“That’s true,” he said. “My poor mother died when I was so young it seems as though I never had a mother. It’s very sad.”

There’s a queen for you. You can’t touch them. Nothing, nothing can touch them. They spend money on themselves or for vanity, but they never pay. Try to get one to pay. I told him what I thought of him right there on the Gran Via, in front of three friends, but he speaks to me now when I meet him as though we were friends. What kind of blood is it that makes a man like that?

ONE READER WRITES

SHE SAT AT THE TABLE IN HER BEDROOM with a newspaper folded open before her and only stopping to look out of the window at the snow which was falling and melting on the roof as it fell. She wrote this letter, writing it steadily with no necessity to cross out or rewrite anything.

Roanoke, Virginia

February 6, 1933

Dear Doctor —

May I write you for some very important advice — I have a decision to make and don’t know just whom to trust most I dare not ask my parents — and so I come to you — and only because I need not see you, can I confide in you even. Now here is the situation — I married a man in U. S. service in 1929 and that same year he was sent to China, Shanghai — he staid three years — and came home — he was discharged from the service some few months ago — and went to his mother’s home in Helena, Arkansas. He wrote for me to come home — I went, and found he is taking a course of injections and I naturally ask, and found he is being treated for I don’t know how to spell the word but it sound like this “sifilus” — Do you know what I mean — now tell me will it ever be safe for me to live with him again — I did not come in close contact with him at any time since his return from China. He assures me he will be OK after this doctor finishes with him — Do you think it right — I often heard my Father say one could well wish themselves dead if once they became a victim of that malady — I believe my Father but want to believe my Husband most — Please, please tell me what to do — I have a daughter born while her Father was in China —

Thanking you and trusting wholly in your advice I am

and signed her name.

Maybe he can tell me what’s right to do, she said to herself. Maybe he can tell me. In the picture in the paper he looks like he’d know. He looks smart, all right. Every day he tells somebody what to do. He ought to know. I want to do whatever is right. It’s such a long time though. It’s a long time. And it’s been a long time. My Christ, it’s been a long time. He had to go wherever they sent him, I know, but I don’t know what he had to get it for. Oh, I wish to Christ he wouldn’t have got it. I don’t care what he did to get it. But I wish to Christ he hadn’t ever got it. It does seem like he didn’t have to have got it. I don’t know what to do. I wish to Christ he hadn’t got any kind of malady. I don’t know why he had to get a malady.

HOMAGE TO SWITZERLAND

PART I. PORTRAIT OF MR. WHEELER IN MONTREUX

INSIDE THE STATION CAFE IT WAS WARM and light. The wood of the tables shone from wiping and there were baskets of pretzels in glazed paper sacks. The chairs were carved, but the seats were worn and comfortable. There was a carved wooden clock on the wall and a bar at the far end of the room. Outside the window it was snowing.

Two of the station porters sat drinking new wine at the table under the clock. Another porter came in and said the Simplon-Orient Express was an hour late at Saint-Maurice. He went out. The waitress came over to Mr. Wheeler’s table.

“The Express is an hour late, sir,” she said. “Can I bring you some coffee?”

“If you think it won’t keep me awake.”

“Please?” asked the waitress.

“Bring me some,” said Mr. Wheeler.

“Thank you.”

She brought the coffee from the kitchen and Mr. Wheeler looked out the window at the snow falling in the light from the station platform.

“Do you speak other languages besides English?” he asked the waitress.

“Oh, yes, sir. I speak German and French and the dialects.”

“Would you like a drink of something?”

“Oh, no, sir. It is not permitted to drink in the café with the clients.”

“You won’t take a cigar?”

“Oh, no, sir. I don’t smoke, sir.”

“That is all right,” said Mr. Wheeler. He looked out of the window again, drank the coffee, and lit a cigarette.

“Fräulein,” he called. The waitress came over.

“What would you like, sir?”

“You,” he said.

“You must not joke me like that.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Then you must not say it.”

“I haven’t time to argue,” Mr. Wheeler said. “The train comes in forty minutes. If you’ll go upstairs with me I’ll give you a hundred francs.”

“You should not say such things, sir. I will ask the porter to speak with you.”

“I don’t want a porter,” Mr. Wheeler said. “Nor a policeman nor one of those boys that sell cigarettes. I want you.”

“If you talk like that you must go out. You cannot stay here and talk like that.”

“Why don’t you go away, then? If you go away I can’t talk to you.”

The waitress went away. Mr. Wheeler watched to see if she spoke to the porters. She did not.

“Mademoiselle!” he called. The waitress came over. “Bring me a bottle of Sion, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Wheeler watched her go out, then come in with the wine and bring it to his table. He looked toward the clock.

“I’ll give you two hundred francs,” he said.

“Please do not say such things.”

“Two hundred francs is a great deal of money.”

“You will not say such things!” the waitress said. She was losing her English. Mr. Wheeler looked at her interestedly.

“Two hundred francs.”

“You are hateful.”

“Why don’t you go away then? I can’t talk to you if you’re not here.”

The waitress left the table and went over to the bar. Mr. Wheeler drank the wine and smiled to himself for some time.

“Mademoiselle,” he called. The waitress pretended not to hear him. “Mademoiselle,” he called again. The waitress came over.

“You wish something?”

“Very much. I’ll give you three hundred francs.”

“You are hateful.”

“Three hundred francs Swiss.”

She went away and Mr. Wheeler looked after her. A porter opened the door. He was the one who had Mr. Wheeler’s bags in his charge.

“The train is coming, sir,” he said in French. Mr. Wheeler stood up.

“Mademoiselle,” he called. The waitress came toward the table. “How much is the wine?”

“Seven francs.”

Mr. Wheeler counted out eight francs and left them on the table. He put on his coat and followed the porter onto the platform where the snow was falling.

“Au revoir, Mademoiselle,” he said. The waitress watched him go. He’s ugly, she thought, ugly and hateful. Three hundred francs for a thing that is nothing to do. How many times have I done that for nothing. And no place to go here. If he had sense he would know there was no place. No time and no place to go. Three hundred francs to do that. What people those Americans.

Standing on the cement platform beside his bags, looking down the rails toward the headlight of the train coming through the snow, Mr. Wheeler was thinking that it was very inexpensive sport. He had only spent, actually, aside from the dinner, seven francs for a bottle of wine and a franc for the tip. Seventy-five centimes would have been better. He would have felt better now if the tip had been seventy-five centimes. One franc Swiss is five francs French. Mr. Wheeler was headed for Paris. He was very careful about money and did not care for women. He had been in that station before and he knew there was no upstairs to go to. Mr. Wheeler never took chances.

PART II. MR. JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT IT AT VEVEY

Inside the station café it was warm and light; the tables were shiny from wiping and on some there were red and white striped table cloths; and there were blue and white striped table cloths on the others and on all of them baskets with pretzels in glazed paper sacks. The chairs were carved but the wood seats were worn and comfortable. There was a clock on the wall, a zinc bar at the far end of the room, and outside the window it was snowing. Two of the station porters sat drinking new wine at the table under the clock.

Another porter came in and said the Simplon-Orient Express was an hour late at Saint-Maurice. The waitress came over to Mr. Johnson’s table.

“The Express is an hour late, sir,” she said. “Can I bring you some coffee?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Please?” asked the waitress.

“I’ll take some.”

“Thank you.”

She brought the coffee from the kitchen and Mr. Johnson looked out the window at the snow falling in the light from the station platform.

“Do you speak other languages besides English?” he asked the waitress.

“Oh, yes, I speak German and French and the dialects.”

“Would you like a drink of something?”

“Oh, no, sir. It is not permitted to drink in the café with the clients.”

“Have a cigar?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she laughed. “I don’t smoke, sir.”

“Neither do I,” said Johnson. “It’s a dirty habit.”

The waitress went away and Johnson lit a cigarette and drank the coffee. The clock on the wall marked a quarter to ten. His watch was a little fast. The train was due at ten-thirty — an hour late meant eleven-thirty. Johnson called to the waitress.

“Signorina!”

“What would you like, sir?”

“You wouldn’t like to play with me?” Johnson asked. The waitress blushed.

“No, sir.”

“I don’t mean anything violent. You wouldn’t like to make up a party and see the night life of Vevey? Bring a girl friend if you like.”

“I must work,” the waitress said. “I have my duty here.”

“I know,” said Johnson. “But couldn’t you get a substitute? They used to do that in the Civil War.”

“Oh, no, sir. I must be here myself in the person.”

“Where did you learn your English?”

“At the Berlitz school, sir.”

“Tell me about it,” Johnson said. “Were the Berlitz undergraduates a wild lot? What about all this necking and petting? Were there many smoothies? Did you ever run into Scott Fitzgerald?”

“Please?”

“I mean were your college days the happiest days of your life? What sort of team did Berlitz have last fall?”

“You are joking, sir?”

“Only feebly,” said Johnson. “You’re an awfully good girl. And you don’t want to play with me?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said the waitress. “Would you like me to bring you something?”

“Yes,” said Johnson. “Would you bring me the wine list?”

“Yes, sir.”

Johnson walked over with the wine list to the table where the three porters sat. They looked up at him. They were old men.

“Wollen Sie trinken?” he asked. One of them nodded and smiled.

“Oui, monsieur.”

“You speak French?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

“What shall we drink? Connais-vous des champagnes?’

“Non, monsieur.”

“Faut les connaître,” said Johnson. “Fräulein,” he called the waitress. “We will drink champagne.”

“Which champagne would you prefer, sir?”

“The best,” said Johnson. “Laquelle est le best?” he asked the porters.

“Le meilleur?” asked the porter who had spoken first.

“By all means.”

The porter took out a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from his coat pocket and looked over the list. He ran his finger down the four typewritten names and prices.

“Sportsman,” he said. “Sportsman is the best.”

“You agree, gentlemen?” Johnson asked the other porters. The one porter nodded. The other said in French, “I don’t know them personally but I’ve often heard speak of Sportsman. It’s good.”

“A bottle of Sportsman,” Johnson said to the waitress. He looked at the price on the wine card: eleven francs Swiss. “Make it two Sportsmen. Do you mind if I sit here with you?” he asked the porter who had suggested Sportsman.

“Sit down. Put yourself here, please.” The porter smiled at him. He was folding his spectacles and putting them away in their case. “Is it the gentleman’s birthday?”

“No,” said Johnson. “It’s not a fête. My wife has decided to divorce me.”

“So,” said the porter. “I hope not.” The other porter shook his head. The third porter seemed a little deaf.

“It is doubtless a common experience,” said Johnson, “like the first visit to the dentist or the first time a girl is unwell, but I have been upset.”

“It is understandable,” said the oldest porter. “I understand it.”

“None of you gentlemen is divorced?” Johnson asked. He had stopped clowning with the language and was speaking good French now and had been for some time.

“No,” said the porter who had ordered Sportsman. “They don’t divorce much here. There are gentlemen who are divorced but not many.”

“With us,” said Johnson, “it’s different. Practically every one is divorced.”

“That’s true,” the porter confirmed. “I’ve read it in the paper.”

“I myself am somewhat in retard,” Johnson went on. “This is the first time I have been divorced. I am thirty-five.”

“Mais vous êtes encore jeune,” said the porter. He explained to the two others. “Monsieur n ‘a que trente-cinq ans.” The other porters nodded. “He’s very young,” said one.

“And it is really the first time you’ve been divorced?” asked the porter.

“Absolutely,” said Johnson. “Please open the wine, mademoiselle.”

“And is it very expensive?”

“Ten thousand francs.”

“Swiss money?”

“No, French money.”

“Oh, yes. Two thousand francs Swiss. All the same it’s not cheap.”

“No.”

“And why does one do it?”

“One is asked to.”

“But why do they ask that?”

“To marry someone else.”

“But it’s idiotic.”

“I agree with you,” said Johnson. The waitress filled the four glasses. They all raised them.

“Prosit,” said Johnson.

“A votre santé, monsieur,” said the porter. The other two porters said “Salut.” The champagne tasted like sweet pink cider.

“Is it a system always to respond in a different language in Switzerland?” Johnson asked.

“No,” said the porter. “French is more cultivated. Besides, this is La Suisse romande.”

“But you speak German?”

“Yes. Where I come from they speak German.”

“I see,” said Johnson, “and you say you have never been divorced?”

“No. It would be too expensive. Besides I have never married.”

“Ah,” said Johnson. “And these other gentlemen?”

“They are married.”

“You like being married?” Johnson asked one of the porters.

“What?”

“You like the married state?”

“Oui. C’est normale.”

“Exactly,” said Johnson. “Et vous, monsieur?”

“Ça va,” said the other porter.

“Pour moi,” said Johnson, “ça ne va pas.”

“Monsieur is going to divorce,” the first porter explained.

“Oh,” said the second porter.

“Ah ha,” the third porter said.

“Well,” said Johnson, “the subject seems to be exhausted. You’re not interested in my troubles,” he addressed the first porter.

“But, yes,” said the porter.

“Well, let’s talk about something else.”

“As you wish.”

“What can we talk about?”

“You do the sport?”

“No,” said Johnson. “My wife does, though.”

“What do you do for amusement?”

“I am a writer.”

“Does that make much money?”

“No. But later on when you get known it does.”

“It is interesting.”

“No,” said Johnson, “it is not interesting. I am sorry gentlemen, but I have to leave you. Will you please drink the other bottle?”

“But the train does not come for three-quarters of an hour.”

“I know,” said Johnson. The waitress came and he paid for the wine and his dinner. “You’re going out, sir?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Johnson, “just for a little walk. I’ll leave my bags here.”

He put on his muffler, his coat, and his hat. Outside the snow was falling heavily. He looked back through the window at the three porters sitting at the table. The waitress was filling their glasses from the last wine of the opened bottle. She took the unopened bottle back to the bar. That makes them three francs something apiece, Johnson thought. He turned and walked down the platform. Inside the café he had thought that talking about it would blunt it; but it had not blunted it; it had only made him feel nasty.

PART III. THE SON OF A FELLOW MEMBER AT TERRITET

In the station café at Territet it was a little too warm; the lights were bright and the tables shiny from polishing. There were baskets with pretzels in glazed paper sacks on the tables and cardboard pads for beer glasses in order that the moist glasses would not make rings on the wood. The chairs were carved but the wooden seats were worn and quite comfortable. There was a clock on the wall, a bar at the far end of the room, and outside the window it was snowing. There was an old man drinking coffee at a table under the clock and reading the evening paper. A porter came in and said the Simplon-Orient Express was an hour late at Saint-Maurice. The waitress came over to Mr. Harris’s table. Mr. Harris had just finished dinner.

“The Express is an hour late, sir. Can I bring you some coffee?”

“If you like.”

“Please?” asked the waitress.

“All right,” said Mr. Harris.

“Thank you, sir,” said the waitress.

She brought the coffee from the kitchen and Mr. Harris put sugar in it, crunched the lumps with his spoon, and looked out the window at the snow falling in the light from the station platform.

“Do you speak other languages besides English?” he asked the waitress.

“Oh, yes, sir. I speak German and French and the dialects.”

“Which do you like best?”

“They are all very much the same, sir. I can’t say I like one better than another.”

“Would you like a drink of something or a coffee?”

“Oh, no, sir, it is not permitted to drink in the café with the clients.”

“You wouldn’t take a cigar?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she laughed. “I don’t smoke, sir.”

“Neither do I,” said Harris, “I don’t agree with David Belasco.”

“Please?”

“Belasco. David Belasco. You can always tell him because he has his collar on backwards. But I don’t agree with him. Then, too, he’s dead now.”

“Will you excuse me, sir?” asked the waitress.

“Absolutely,” said Harris. He sat forward in the chair and looked out of the window. Across the room the old man had folded his paper. He looked at Mr. Harris and then picked up his coffee cup and saucer and walked to Harris’s table.

“I beg your pardon if I intrude,” he said in English, “but it has just occurred to me that you might be a member of the National Geographic Society.”

“Please sit down,” Harris said. The gentleman sat down.

“Won’t you have another coffee or a liqueur?”

“Thank you,” said the gentleman.

“Won’t you have a kirsch with me?”

“Perhaps. But you must have it with me.”

“No, I insist.” Harris called the waitress. The old gentleman took out from an inside pocket of his coat a leather pocket-book. He took off a wide rubber band and drew out several papers, selected one, and handed it to Harris.

“That is my certificate of membership,” he said. “Do you know Frederick J. Roussel in America?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“I believe he is very prominent.”

“Where does he come from? Do you know what part of the States?”

“From Washington, of course. Isn’t that the headquarters of the Society?”

“I believe it is.”

“You believe it is. Aren’t you sure?”

“I’ve been away a long time,” Harris said.

“You’re not a member, then?”

“No. But my father is. He’s been a member for a great many years.”

“Then he would know Frederick J. Roussel. He is one of the officers of the society. You will observe that it is by Mr. Roussel that I was nominated for membership.”

“I’m awfully glad.”

“I am sorry you are not a member. But you could obtain nomination through your father?”

“I think so,” said Harris. “I must when I go back.”

“I would advise you to,” said the gentleman. “You see the magazine, of course?”

“Absolutely.”

“Have you seen the number with the colored plates of the North American fauna?”

“Yes. I have it in Paris.”

“And the number containing the panorama of the volcanoes of Alaska?”

“That was a wonder.”

“I enjoyed very much, too, the wild animal photographs of George Shiras three.”

“They were damned fine.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They were excellent. That fellow Shiras — —”

“You call him that fellow?”

“We’re old friends,” said Harris.

“I see. You know George Shiras three. He must be very interesting.”

“He is. He’s about the most interesting man I know.”

“And do you know George Shiras two? Is he interesting too?”

“Oh, he’s not so interesting.”

“I should imagine he would be very interesting.”

“You know, a funny thing. He’s not so interesting. I’ve often wondered why.”

“H’m,” said the gentleman. “I should have thought any one in that family would be interesting.”

“Do you remember the panorama of the Sahara Desert?” Harris asked.

“The Sahara Desert? That was nearly fifteen years ago.”

“That’s right. That was one of my father’s favorites.”

“He doesn’t prefer the newer numbers?”

“He probably does. But he was very fond of the Sahara panorama.”

“It was excellent. But to me its artistic value far exceeded its scientific interest.”

“I don’t know,” said Harris. “The wind blowing all that sand and that Arab with his camel kneeling toward Mecca.”

“As I recall, the Arab was standing holding the camel.”

“You’re quite right,” said Harris. “I was thinking of Colonel Lawrence’s book.”

“Lawrence’s book deals with Arabia, I believe.”

“Absolutely,” said Harris. “It was the Arab reminded me of it.”

“He must be a very interesting young man.”

“I believe he is.”

“Do you know what he is doing now?”

“He’s in the Royal Air Force.”

“And why does he do that?”

“He likes it.”

“Do you know if he belongs to the National Geographic Society?”

“I wonder if he does.”

“He would make a very good member. He is the sort of person they want as a member. I would be very happy to nominate him if you think they would like to have him.”

“I think they would.”

“I have nominated a scientist from Vevey and a colleague of mine from Lausanne and they were both elected. I believe they would be very pleased if I nominated Colonel Lawrence.”

“It’s a splendid idea,” said Harris. “Do you come here to the café often?”

“I come here for coffee after dinner.”

“Are you in the University?”

“I am not active any longer.”

“I’m just waiting for the train,” said Harris. “I’m going up to Paris and sail from Havre for the States.”

“I have never been to America. But I would like to go very much. Perhaps I shall attend a meeting of the society some time. I would be very happy to meet your father.”

“I’m sure he would have liked to meet you but he died last year. Shot himself, oddly enough.”

“I am very truly sorry. I am sure his loss was a blow to science as well as to his family.”

“Science took it awfully well.”

“This is my card,” Harris said. “His initials were E. J. instead of E. D. I know he would have liked to know you.”

“It would have been a great pleasure.” The gentleman took out a card from the pocketbook and gave it to Harris. It read:

DR. SIGISMUND WYER, PH.D.

MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

SOCIETY, WASHINGTON, D.C., U. S. A.

“I will keep it very carefully,” Harris said.

A DAY’S WAIT

HE CAME INTO THE ROOM TO SHUT THE windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.

“What’s the matter, Schatz?”

“I’ve got a headache.”

“You better go back to bed.”

“No. I’m all right.”

“You go to bed. I’ll see you when I’m dressed.”

But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years. When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.

“You go up to bed,” I said, “you’re sick.”

“I’m all right,” he said.

When the doctor came he took the boy’s temperature.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“One hundred and two.”

Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.

Back in the room I wrote the boy’s temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.

“Do you want me to read to you?”

“All right. If you want to,” said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in the bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.

I read aloud from Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.

“How do you feel, Schatz?” I asked him.

“Just the same, so far,” he said.

I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.

“Why don’t you try to go to sleep? I’ll wake you up for the medicine.”

“I’d rather stay awake.”

After a while he said to me, “You don’t have to stay in here with me, Papa, if it bothers you.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“No, I mean you don’t have to stay if it’s going to bother you.”

I thought perhaps he was a little lightheaded and after giving him the prescribed capsules at eleven o’clock I went out for a while.

It was a bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice. I took the young Irish setter for a little walk up the road and along a frozen creek, but it was difficult to stand or walk on the glassy surface and the red dog slipped and slithered and I fell twice, hard, once dropping my gun and having it slide away over the ice.

We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and I killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the bank. Some of the covey lit in trees, but most of them scattered into brush piles and it was necessary to jump on the ice-coated mounds of brush several times before they would flush. Coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and I killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.

At the house they said the boy had refused to let any one come into the room.

“You can’t come in,” he said. “You mustn’t get what I have.”

I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed.

I took his temperature.

“What is it?”

“Something like a hundred,” I said. It was one hundred and two and four tenths.

“It was a hundred and two,” he said.

“Who said so?”

“The doctor.”

“Your temperature is all right,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

“I don’t worry,” he said, “but I can’t keep from thinking.”

“Don’t think,” I said. “Just take it easy.”

“I’m taking it easy,” he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.

“Take this with water.”

“Do you think it will do any good?”

“Of course it will.”

I sat down and opened the Pirate book and commenced to read, but I could see he was not following, so I stopped.

“About what time do you think I’m going to die?” he asked.

“What?”

“About how long will it be before I die?”

“You aren’t going to die. What’s the matter with you?”

“Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two.”

“People don’t die with a fever of one hundred and two. That’s a silly way to talk.”

“I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can’t live with forty-four degrees. I’ve got a hundred and two.”

He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o’clock in the morning.

“You poor Schatz,” I said. “Poor old Schatz. It’s like miles and kilometers. You aren’t going to die. That’s a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal. On this kind it’s ninety-eight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s like miles and kilometers. You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy miles in the car?”

“Oh,” he said.

But his gaze at the foot of the bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

IT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME THAT THE war has been omitted as a field for the observations of the naturalist. We have charming and sound accounts of the flora and fauna of Patagonia by the late W. H. Hudson, the Reverend Gilbert White has written most interestingly of the Hoopoe on its occasional and not at all common visits to Selborne, and Bishop Stanley has given us a valuable, although popular, Familiar History of Birds. Can we not hope to furnish the reader with a few rational and interesting facts about the dead? I hope so.

When that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, was at one period of his course fainting in the vast wilderness of an African desert, naked and alone, considering his days as numbered and nothing appearing to remain for him to do but to lie down and die, a small moss-flower of extraordinary beauty caught his eye. “Though the whole plant,” says he, “was no larger than one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsules without admiration. Can that Being who planted, watered and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suffering of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not. Reflections like these would not allow me to despair; I started up and, disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forward, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.”

With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, as Bishop Stanley says, can any branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead.

In war the dead are usually the male of the human species although this does not hold true with animals, and I have frequently seen dead mares among the horses. An interesting aspect of war, too, is that it is only there that the naturalist has an opportunity to observe the dead of mules. In twenty years of observation in civil life I had never seen a dead mule and had begun to entertain doubts as to whether these animals were really mortal. On rare occasions I had seen what I took to be dead mules, but on close approach these always proved to be living creatures who seemed to be dead through their quality of complete repose. But in war these animals succumb in much the same manner as the more common and less hardy horse.

Most of those mules that I saw dead were along mountain roads or lying at the foot of steep declivities whence they had been pushed to rid the road of their encumbrance. They seemed a fitting enough sight in the mountains where one was accustomed to their presence and looked less incongruous there than they did later, at Smyrna, where the Greeks broke the legs of all their baggage animals and pushed them off the quay into the shallow water to drown. The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya since there has only been one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for some one to alleviate their condition.

Regarding the sex of the dead it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking. I first saw inversion of the usual sex of the dead after the explosion of a munition factory which had been situated in the countryside near Milan, Italy. We drove to the scene of the disaster in trucks along poplar-shaded roads, bordered with ditches containing much minute animal life, which I could not clearly observe because of the great clouds of dust raised by the trucks. Arriving where the munition plant had been, some of us were put to patrolling about those large stocks of munitions which for some reason had not exploded, while others were put at extinguishing a fire which had gotten into the grass of an adjacent field; which task being concluded, we were ordered to search the immediate vicinity and surrounding fields for bodies. We found and carried to an improvised mortuary a good number of these and, I must admit, frankly, the shock it was to find that these dead were women rather than men. In those days women had not yet commenced to wear their hair cut short, as they did later for several years in Europe and America, and the most disturbing thing, perhaps because it was the most unaccustomed, was the presence and, even more disturbing, the occasional absence of this long hair. I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire fence which had surrounded the position of the factory and from the still existent portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. Many fragments we found a considerable distance away in the fields, they being carried farther by their own weight.

On our return to Milan I recall one or two of us discussing the occurrence and agreeing that the quality of unreality and the fact that there were no wounded did much to rob the disaster of a horror which might have been much greater. Also the fact that it had been so immediate and that the dead were in consequence still as little unpleasant as possible to carry and deal with made it quite removed from the usual battlefield experience. The pleasant, though dusty, ride through the beautiful Lombard countryside also was a compensation for the unpleasantness of the duty and on our return, while we exchanged impressions, we all agreed that it was indeed fortunate that the fire which broke out just before we arrived had been brought under control as rapidly as it had and before it had attained any of the seemingly huge stocks of unexploded munitions. We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell.

A naturalist, to obtain accuracy of observation, may confine himself in his observations to one limited period and I will take first that following the Austrian offensive of June, 1918, in Italy as one in which the dead were present in their greatest numbers, a withdrawal having been forced and an advance later made to recover the ground lost so that the positions after the battle were the same as before except for the presence of the dead. Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tarlike iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. The surprising thing, next to their progressive corpulence, is the amount of paper that is scattered about the dead. Their ultimate position, before there is any question of burial, depends on the location of the pockets in the uniform. In the Austrian army these pockets were in the back of the breeches and the dead, after a short time, all consequently lay on their faces, the two hip pockets pulled out and, scattered around them in the grass, all those papers their pockets had contained. The heat, the flies, the indicative positions of the bodies in the grass, and the amount of paper scattered are the impressions one retains. The smell of a batttlefield in hot weather one cannot recall. You can remember that there was such a smell, but nothing ever happens to you to bring it back. It is unlike the smell of a regiment, which may come to you suddenly while riding in the street car and you will look across and see the man who has brought it to you. But the other thing is gone as completely as when you have been in love; you remember things that happened, but the sensation cannot be recalled.

One wonders what that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, would have seen on a battlefield in hot weather to restore his confidence. There were always poppies in the wheat in the end of June and in July, and the mulberry trees were in full leaf and one could see the heat waves rise from the barrels of the guns where the sun struck them through the screens of leaves; the earth was turned a bright yellow at the edge of holes where mustard gas shells had been and the average broken house is finer to see than one that has been shelled, but few travellers would take a good full breath of that early summer air and have any such thoughts as Mungo Park about those formed in His own image.

The first thing that you found about the dead was that, hit badly enough, they died like animals. Some quickly from a little wound you would not think would kill a rabbit. They died from little wounds as rabbits die sometimes from three or four small grains of shot that hardly seem to break the skin. Others would die like cats; a skull broken in and iron in the brain, they lie alive two days like cats that crawl into the coal bin with a bullet in the brain and will not die until you cut their heads off. Maybe cats do not die then, they say they have nine lives, I do not know, but most men die like animals, not men. I’d never seen a natural death, so called, and so I blamed it on the war and like the persevering traveller, Mungo Park, knew that there was something else; that always absent something else, and then I saw one.

The only natural death I’ve ever seen, outside of loss of blood, which isn’t bad, was death from Spanish influenza. In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient’s dead is: at the end he turns to be a little child again, though with his manly force, and fills the sheets as full as any diaper with one vast, final, yellow cataract that flows and dribbles on after he’s gone. So now I want to see the death of any self-called Humanist* because a persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will live to see the actual death of members of this literary sect and watch the noble exits that they make. In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that while decorum is an excellent thing some must be indecorous if the race is to be carried on since the position prescribed for procreation is indecorous, highly indecorous, and it occurred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or were: the children of decorous cohabitation. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust and into foot-notes all their lust.

While it is, perhaps, legitimate to deal with these self-designated citizens in a natural history of the dead, even though the designation may mean nothing by the time this work is published, yet it is unfair to the other dead, who were not dead in their youth of choice, who owned no magazines, many of whom had doubtless never even read a review, that one has seen in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where their mouths have been. It was not always hot weather for the dead, much of the time it was the rain that washed them clean when they lay in it and made the earth soft when they were buried in it and sometimes then kept on until the earth was mud and washed them out and you had to bury them again. Or in the winter in the mountains you had to put them in the snow and when the snow melted in the spring some one else had to bury them. They had beautiful burying grounds in the mountains, war in the mountains is the most beautiful of all war, and in one of them, at a place called Pocol, they buried a general who was shot through the head by a sniper. This is where those writers are mistaken who write books called Generals Die in Bed, because this general died in a trench dug in snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpine hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn’t put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there, and much blood in the snow. He was a damned fine general, and so was General von Behr who commanded the Bavarian Alpenkorps troops at the battle of Caporetto and was killed in his staff car by the Italian rearguard as he drove into Udine ahead of his troops, and the titles of all such books should be Generals Usually Die in Bed, if we are to have any sort of accuracy in such things.

In the mountains too, sometimes, the snow fell on the dead outside the dressing station on the side that was protected by the mountain from any shelling. They carried them into a cave that had been dug into the mountainside before the earth froze. It was in this cave that a man whose head was broken as a flower-pot may be broken, although it was all held together by membranes and a skillfully applied bandage now soaked and hardened, with the structure of his brain disturbed by a piece of broken steel in it, lay a day, a night, and a day. The stretcher-bearers asked the doctor to go in and have a look at him. They saw him each time they made a trip and even when they did not look at him they heard him breathing. The doctor’s eyes were red and the lids swollen, almost shut from tear gas. He looked at the man twice; once in daylight, once with a flashlight. That too would have made a good etching for Goya, the visit with the flashlight, I mean. After looking at him the second time the doctor believed the stretcher-bearers when they said the soldier was still alive.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

There was nothing they wanted done. But after a while they asked permission to carry him out and lay him with the badly wounded.

“No. No. No!” said the doctor, who was busy. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of him?”

“We don’t like to hear him in there with the dead.”

“Don’t listen to him. If you take him out of there you will have to carry him right back in.”

“We wouldn’t mind that, Captain Doctor.”

“No,” said the doctor. “No. Didn’t you hear me say no?”

“Why don’t you give him an overdose of morphine?” asked an artillery officer who was waiting to have a wound in his arm dressed.

“Do you think that is the only use I have for morphine? Would you like me to have to operate without morphine? You have a pistol, go out and shoot him yourself.”

“He’s been shot already,” said the officer. “If some of you doctors were shot you’d be different.”

“Thank you very much,” said the doctor waving a forceps in the air. “Thank you a thousand times. What about these eyes?” He pointed the forceps at them. “How would you like these?”

“Tear gas. We call it lucky if it’s tear gas.”

“Because you leave the line,” said the doctor. “Because you come running here with your tear gas to be evacuated. You rub onions in your eyes.”

“You are beside yourself. I do not notice your insults. You are crazy.”

The stretcher-bearers came in.

“Captain Doctor,” one of them said.

“Get out of here!” said the doctor.

They went out.

“I will shoot the poor fellow,” the artillery officer said. “I am a humane man. I will not let him suffer.”

“Shoot him then,” said the doctor. “Shoot him. Assume the responsibility. I will make a report. Wounded shot by lieutenant of artillery in first curing post. Shoot him. Go ahead shoot him.”

“You are not a human being.”

“My business is to care for the wounded, not to kill them. That is for gentlemen of the artillery.”

“Why don’t you care for him then?”

“I have done so. I have done all that can be done.”

“Why don’t you send him down on the cable railway?”

“Who are you to ask me questions? Are you my superior officer? Are you in command of this dressing post? Do me the courtesy to answer.”

The lieutenant of artillery said nothing. The others in the room were all soldiers and there were no other officers present.

“Answer me,” said the doctor holding a needle up in his forceps. “Give me a response.”

“F — yourself,” said the artillery officer.

“So,” said the doctor. “So, you said that. All right. All right. We shall see.”

The lieutenant of artillery stood up and walked toward him.

“F — yourself,” he said. “F — yourself. F — your mother. F — your sister ….”

The doctor tossed the saucer full of iodine in his face. As he came toward him, blinded, the lieutenant fumbled for his pistol. The doctor skipped quickly behind him, tripped him and, as he fell to the floor, kicked him several times and picked up the pistol in his rubber gloves. The lieutenant sat on the floor holding his good hand to his eyes.

“I’ll kill you!” he said. “I’ll kill you as soon as I can see.”

“I am the boss,” said the doctor. “All is forgiven since you know I am the boss. You cannot kill me because I have your pistol. Sergeant! Adjutant! Adjutant!”

“The adjutant is at the cable railway,” said the sergeant.

“Wipe out this officer’s eyes with alcohol and water. He has got iodine in them. Bring me the basin to wash my hands. I will take this officer next.”

“You won’t touch me.”

“Hold him tight. He is a little delirious.”

One of the stretcher-bearers came in.

“Captain Doctor.”

“What do you want?”

“The man in the dead-house — —”

“Get out of here.”

“Is dead, Captain Doctor. I thought you would be glad to know.”

“See, my poor lieutenant? We dispute about nothing. In time of war we dispute about nothing.”

“F — you,” said the lieutenant of artillery. He still could not see. “You’ve blinded me.”

“It is nothing,” said the doctor. “Your eyes will be all right. It is nothing. A dispute about nothing.”

“Ayee! Ayee! Ayee!” suddenly screamed the lieutenant. “You have blinded me! You have blinded me!”

“Hold him tight,” said the doctor. “He is in much pain. Hold him very tight.”

WINE OF WYOMING

IT WAS A HOT AFTERNOON IN WYOMING; the mountains were a long way away and you could see snow on their tops, but they made no shadow, and in the valley the grain-fields were yellow, the road was dusty with cars passing, and all the small wooden houses at the edge of town were baking in the sun. There was a tree made shade over Fontan’s back porch and I sat there at a table and Madame Fontan brought up cold beer from the cellar. A motor-car turned off the main road and came up the side road, and stopped beside the house. Two men got out and came in through the gate. I put the bottles under the table. Madame Fontan stood up.

“Where’s Sam?” one of the men asked at the screen door.

“He ain’t here. He’s at the mines.”

“You got some beer?”

“No. Ain’t got any beer. That’s a last bottle. All gone.”

“What’s he drinking?”

“That’s a last bottle. All gone.”

“Go on, give us some beer. You know me.”

“Ain’t got any beer. That’s a last bottle. All gone.”

“Come on, let’s go some place where we can get some real beer,” one of them said, and they went out to the car. One of them walked unsteadily. The motor-car jerked in starting, whirled on the road, and went on and away.

“Put the beer on the table,” Madame Fontan said. “What’s the matter, yes, all right. What’s the matter? Don’t drink off the floor.”

“I didn’t know who they were,” I said.

“They’re drunk,” she said. “That’s what makes the trouble. Then they go somewhere else and say they got it here. Maybe they don’t even remember.” She spoke French, but it was only French occasionally, and there were many English words and some English constructions.

“Where’s Fontan?”

“Il fait de la vendange. Oh, my God, il est crazy pour le vin.”

“But you like the beer?”

“Oui, j’aime la bière, mais Fontan, il est crazy pour le vin.”

She was a plump old woman with a lovely ruddy complexion and white hair. She was very clean and the house was very clean and neat. She came from Lens.

“Where did you eat?”

“At the hotel.”

“Mangez ici. Il ne faut pas manger à l’hôtel ou au restaurant. Mangez ici!”

“I don’t want to make you trouble. And besides they eat all right at the hotel.”

“I never eat at the hotel. Maybe they eat all right there. Only once in my life I ate at a restaurant in America. You know what they gave me? They gave me pork that was raw!”

“Really?”

“I don’t lie to you. It was pork that wasn’t cooked! Et mon fils il est marié avec une américaine, et tout le temps il a mangé les beans en can.”

“How long has he been married?”

“Oh, my God, I don’t know. His wife weighs two hundred twenty-five pounds. She don’t work. She don’t cook. She gives him beans en can.”

“What does she do?”

“All the time she reads. Rien que des books. Tout le temps elle stay in the bed and read books. Already she can’t have another baby. She’s too fat. There ain’t any room.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She reads books all the time. He’s a good boy. He works hard. He worked in the mines; now he works on a ranch. He never worked on a ranch before, and the man that owns the ranch said to Fontan that he never saw anybody work better on that ranch than that boy. Then he comes home and she feeds him nothing.”

“Why doesn’t he get a divorce?”

“He ain’t got no money to get a divorce. Besides, il est crazy pour elle.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“He thinks so. When he brought her home I thought I would die. He’s such a good boy and works hard all the time and never run around or make any trouble. Then he goes away to work in the oil-fields and brings home this Indienne that weighs right then one hundred eighty-five pounds.”

“Elle est Indienne?”

“She’s Indian all right. My God, yes. All the time she says sonofabitsh goddam. She don’t work.”

“Where is she now?”

“Au show.”

“Where’s that?”

“Au show. Moving pictures. All she does is read and go to the show.”

“Have you got any more beer?”

“My God, yes. Sure. You come and eat with us tonight.”

“All right. What should I bring?”

“Don’t bring anything. Nothing at all. Maybe Fontan will have some of the wine.”

That night I had dinner at Fontan’s. We ate in the dining-room and there was a clean tablecloth. We tried the new wine. It was very light and clear and good, and still tasted of the grapes. At the table there were Fontan and Madame and the little boy, André.

“What did you do today?” Fontan asked. He was an old man with small mine-tired body, a drooping gray mustache, and bright eyes, and was from the Centre near Saint-Etienne.

“I worked on my book.”

“Were your books all right?” asked Madame.

“He means he writes a book like a writer. Un roman,” Fontan explained.

“Pa, can I go to the show?” André asked.

“Sure,” said Fontan. André turned to me.

“How old do you think I am? Do you think I look fourteen years old?” He was a thin little boy, but his face looked sixteen.

“Yes. You look fourteen.”

“When I go to the show I crouch down like this and try to look small.” His voice was very high and breaking. “If I give them a quarter they keep it all but if I give them only fifteen cents they let me in all right.”

“I only give you fifteen cents, then,” said Fontan.

“No. Give me the whole quarter. I’ll get it changed on the way.”

“Il faut revenir tout de suite après le show,” Madame Fontan said.

“I come right back.” André went out the door. The night was cooling outside. He left the door open and a cool breeze came in.

“Mangez!” said Madame Fontan. “You haven’t eaten anything.” I had eaten two helpings of chicken and French fried potatoes, three ears of sweet corn, some sliced cucumbers, and two helpings of salad.

“Perhaps he wants some kek,” Fontan said.

“I should have gotten some kek for him,” Madame Fontan said. “Mangez du fromage. Mangez du crimcheez. Vous n’avez rien mangé. I ought have gotten kek. Americans always eat kek.”

“Mais j’ai rudement bien mangé.”

“Mangez! Vous n’avez rien mangé. Eat it all. We don’t save anything. Eat it all up.”

“Eat some more salad,” Fontan said.

“I’ll get some more beer,” Madame Fontan said. “If you work all day in a book-factory you get hungry.”

“Elle ne comprend pas que vous êtes écrivain,” Fontan said. He was a delicate old man who used the slang and knew the popular songs of his period of military service in the end of the 1890’s. “He writes the books himself,” he explained to Madame.

“You write the books yourself?” Madame asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Oh!” she said. “Oh! You write them yourself. Oh! Well you get hungry if you do that too. Mangez! Je vais chercher de la bière.”

We heard her walking on the stairs to the cellar. Fontan smiled at me. He was very tolerant of people who had not his experience and worldly knowledge.

When André came home from the show we were still sitting in the kitchen and were talking about hunting.

“Labor day we all went to Clear Creek,” Madame said. “Oh, my God, you ought to have been there all right. We all went in the truck. Tout le monde est allé dans le truck. Nous sommes partis le dimanche. C’est le truck de Charley.”

“On a mangé, on a bu du vin, de la bière, et il y avait aussi un français qui a apporté de l’absinthe,” Fontan said. “Un français de la Californie!”

“My God, nous avons chanté. There’s a farmer comes to see what’s the matter, and we give him something to drink, and he stayed with us awhile. There was some Italians come too, and they want to stay with us too. We sung a song about the Italians and they don’t understand it. They didn’t know we didn’t want them, but we didn’t have nothing to do with them, and after a while they went away.”

“How many fish did you catch?”

“Très peu. We went to fish a little while, but then we came back to sing again. Nous avons chanté, vous savez.”

“In the night,” said Madame, “toutes les femmes ont dormi dans le truck. Les hommes à côté du feu. In the night I hear Fontan come to get some more wine, and I tell him, Fontan, my God, leave some for tomorrow. Tomorrow they won’ have anything to drink, and then they’ll be sorry.”

“Mais nous avons tout bu,” Fontan said. “Et le lendemain il ne reste rien.”

“What did you do?”

“Nous avons pêché sérieusement.”

“Good trout, all right, too. My God, yes. All the same; half-pound one ounce.”

“How big?”

“Half-pound one ounce. Just right to eat. All the same size; half-pound one ounce.”

“How do you like America?” Fontan asked me.

“It’s my country, you see. So I like it, because it’s my country. Mais on ne mange pas très bien. D’antan, oui. Mais maintenant, no.”

“No,” said Madame. “On ne mange pas bien.” She shook her head. “Et aussi, il y a trop de Polack. Quand j’étais petite ma mère m’a dit, ‘vous mangez comme les Polacks.’ Je n’ai jamais compris ce que c’est qu’un Polack. Mais maintenant en Amérique je comprends. Il y a trop de Polack. Et, my God, ils sont sales, les Polacks.”

“It is fine for hunting and fishing,” I said.

“Oui. Ça, c’est le meilleur. La chasse et la pêche,” Fontan said. “Qu’est-ce que vous avez comme fusil?”

“A twelve-gauge pump.”

“Il est bon, le pump,” Fontan nodded his head.

“Je veux aller à la chasse moi-même,” André said in his high, little boy’s voice.

“Tu ne peux pas,” Fontan said. He turned to me.

“Ils sont des sauvages, les boys, vous savez. Ils sont des sauvages. Ils veulent shooter les uns les autres.”

“Je veux aller tout seul,” André said, very shrill and excited.

“You can’t go,” Madame Fontan said. “You are too young.”

“Je veux aller tout seul,” André said shrilly. “Je veux shooter les rats d’eau.”

“What are rats d’eau?” I asked.

“You don’t know them? Sure you know them. What they call the musk-rats.”

André had brought the twenty-two-calibre rifle out from the cupboard and was holding it in his hands under the light.

“Ils sont des sauvages,” Fontan explained. “Ils veulent shooter les uns les autres.”

“Je veux aller tout seul,” André shrilled. He looked desperately along the barrel of the gun. “Je veux shooter les rats d’eau. Je connais beaucoup de rats d’eau.”

“Give me the gun,” Fontan said. He explained again to me. “They’re savages. They would shoot one another.”

André held tight on to the gun.

“On peut looker. On ne fait pas de mal. On peut looker.”

“Il est crazy pour le shooting,” Madame Fontan said. “Mais il est trop jeune.”

André put the twenty-two-calibre rifle back in the cupboard.

“When I’m bigger I’ll shoot the muskrats and the jack-rabbits too,” he said in English. “One time I went out with Papa and he shot a jack-rabbit just a little bit and I shot it and hit it.”

“C’est vrai,” Fontan nodded. “Il a tué un jack.”

“But he hit it first,” André said. “I want to go all by myself and shoot all by myself. Next year I can do it.” He went over in a comer and sat down to read a book. I had picked it up when we came into the kitchen to sit after supper. It was a library book — Frank on a Gunboat.

“Il aime les books,” Madame Fontan said. “But it’s better than to run around at night with the other boys and steal things.”

“Books are all right,” Fontan said. “Monsieur il fait les books.”

“Yes, that’s so, all right. But too many books are bad,” Madame Fontan said. “Ici, c’est une maladie, les books. C’est comme les churches. Ici il y a trop de churches. En France il y a seulement les catholiques et les protestants — et très peu de protestants. Mais ici rien que de churches. Quand j’étais venu ici je disais, oh, my God, what are all the churches?”

“C’est vrai,” Fontan said. “Il y a trop de churches.”

“The other day,” Madame Fontan said, “there was a little French girl here with her mother, the cousin of Fontan, and she said to me, ‘En Amérique il ne faut pas être catholique. It’s not good to be catholique. The Americans don’t like you to be catholique. It’s like the dry law.’ I said to her, ‘What you going to be? Heh? It’s better to be catholique if you’re catholique.’ But she said, ‘No, it isn’t any good to be catholique in America.’ But I think it’s better to be catholique if you are. Ce n’est pas bon de changer sa religion. My God, no.”

“You go to the mass here?”

“No. I don’t go in America, only sometimes in a long while. Mais je reste catholique. It’s no good to change the religion.”

“On dit que Schmidt est catholique,” Fontan said.

“On dit, mais on ne sait jamais,” Madame Fontan said. “I don’t think Schmidt is catholique. There’s not many catholique in America.”

“We are catholique,” I said.

“Sure, but you live in France,” Madame Fontan said. “Je ne crois pas que Schmidt est catholique. Did he ever live in France?”

“Les Polacks sont catholiques,” Fontan said.

“That’s true,” Madame Fontan said. “They go to church, then they fight with knives all the way home and kill each other all day Sunday. But they’re not real catholiques. They’re Polack catholiques.”

“All catholiques are the same,” Fontan said. “One catholique is like another.”

“I don’t believe Schmidt is catholique,” Madame Fontan said. “That’s awful funny if he’s catholique. Moi, je ne crois pas.”

“Il est catholique,” I said.

“Schmidt is catholique,” Madame Fontan mused. “I wouldn’t have believed it. My God, il est catholique.”

“Marie va chercher de la bière,” Fontan said. “Monsieur a soif — moi aussi.”

“Yes, all right,” Madame Fontan said from the next room. She went downstairs and we heard the stairs creaking. André sat reading in the corner. Fontan and I sat at the table, and he poured the beer from the last bottle into our two glasses, leaving a little in the bottom.

“C’est un bon pays pour la chasse,” Fontan said. “J’aime beaucoup shooter les canards.”

“Mais il y a très bonne chasse aussi en France,” I said.

“C’est vrai,” Fontan said. “Nous avons beaucoup de gibier là-bas.”

Madame Fontan came up the stairs with the beer bottles in her hands, “Il est catholique,” she said “My God, Schmidt est catholique.”

“You think he’ll be the President?” Fontan asked.

“No,” I said.

The next afternoon I drove out to Fontan’s, through the shade of the town, then along the dusty road, turning up the side road and leaving the car beside the fence. It was another hot day. Madame Fontan came to the back door. She looked like Mrs. Santa Claus, clean and rosy-faced and white-haired, and waddling when she walked.

“My God, hello,” she said. “It’s hot, my God.” She went back into the house to get some beer. I sat on the back porch and looked through the screen and the leaves of the tree at the heat and, away off, the mountains. There were furrowed brown mountains, and above them three peaks and a glacier with snow that you could see through the trees. The snow looked very white and pure and unreal. Madame Fontan came out and put down the bottles on the table.

“What you see out there?”

“The snow.”

“C’est jolie, la neige.”

“Have a glass, too.”

“All right.”

She sat down on a chair beside me. “Schmidt,” she said. “If he’s the President, you think we get the wine and beer all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Trust Schmidt.”

“Already we paid seven hundred fifty-five dollars in fines when they arrested Fontan. Twice the police arrested us and once the government. All the money we made all the time Fontan worked in the mines and I did washing. We paid it all. They put Fontan in jail. Il n’a jamais fait de mal à personne.”

“He’s a good man,” I said. “It’s a crime.”

“We don’t charge too much money. The wine one dollar a litre. The beer ten cents a bottle. We never sell the beer before it’s good. Lots of places they sell the beer right away when they make it, and then it gives everybody a headache. What’s the matter with that? They put Fontan in jail and they take seven hundred fifty-five dollars.”

“It’s wicked,” I said. “Where is Fontan?”

“He stays with the wine. He has to watch it now to catch it just right,” she smiled. She did not think about the money any more. “Vous savez, il est crazy pour le vin. Last night he brought a little bit home with him, what you drank, and a little bit of the new. The last new. It ain’t ready yet, but he drank a little bit, and this morning he put a little bit in his coffee. Dans son café, vous savez! Il est crazy pour le vin! Il est comme ça. Son pays est comme ça. Where I live in the north they don’t drink any wine. Everybody drinks beer. By where we lived there was a big brewery right near us. When I was a little girl I didn’t like the smell of the hops in the carts. Nor in the fields. Je n’aime pas les houblons. No, my God, not a bit. The man that owns the brewery said to me and my sister to go to the brewery and drink the beer, and then we’d like the hops. That’s true. Then we liked them all right. He had them give us the beer. We liked them all right then. But Fontan, il est crazy pour le vin. One time he killed a jack-rabbit and he wanted me to cook it with a sauce with wine, make a black sauce with wine and butter and mushrooms and onion and everything in it, for the jack. My God, I make the sauce all right, and he eat it all and said, ‘La sauce est meilleure que le jack.’ Dans son pays c’est comme ça. Il y a beaucoup de gibier et de vin. Moi, j’aime les pommes de terre, le saucisson, et la bière. C’est bon, la bière. C’est très bon pour la santé.”

“It’s good,” I said. “It and wine too.”

“You’re like Fontan. But there was a thing here that I never saw. I don’t think you’ve ever seen it either. There were Americans came here and they put whiskey in the beer.”

“No,” I said.

“Oui. My God, yes, that’s true. Et aussi une femme qui a vomis sur la table!”

“Comment?”

“C’est vrai. Elle a vomis sur la table. Et après elle a vomis dans ses shoes. And afterward they come back and say they want to come again and have another party the next Saturday, and I say no, my God, no! When they came I locked the door.”

“They’re bad when they’re drunk.”

“In the winter-time when the boys go to the dance they come in the cars and wait outside and say to Fontan, ‘Hey, Sam, sell us a bottle wine,’ or they buy the beer, and then they take the moonshine out of their pockets in a bottle and pour it in the beer and drink it. My God, that’s the first time I ever saw that in my life. They put whiskey in the beer. My God, I don’t understand that!”

“They want to get sick, so they’ll know they’re drunk.”

“One time a fellow comes here came to me and said he wanted me to cook them a big supper and they drink one two bottles of wine, and their girls come too, and then they go to the dance. All right, I said. So I made a big supper, and when they come already they drank a lot. Then they put whiskey in the wine. My God, yes. I said to Fontan, ‘On va être malade!’ ‘Oui,’ il dit. Then these girls were sick, nice girls too, all-right girls. They were sick right at the table. Fontan tried to take them by the arm and show them where they could be sick all right in the cabinet, but the fellows said no, they were all right right there at the table.”

Fontan had come in. “When they come again I locked the door. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not for hundred fifty dollars.’ My God, no.”

“There is a word for such people when they do like that, in French,” Fontan said. He stood looking very old and tired from the heat.

“What?”

“Cochon,” he said delicately, hesitating to use such a strong word. “They were like the cochon. C’est un mot très fort,” he apologized, “mais vomir sur la table—” he shook his head sadly.

“Cochons,” I said. “That’s what they are — cochons. Salauds.”

The grossness of the words was distasteful to Fontan. He was glad to speak of something else.

“Il y a des gens très gentils, très sensibles, qui viennent aussi,” he said. “There are officers from the fort. Very nice men. Good fellas. Everybody that was ever in France they want to come and drink wine. They like wine all right.”

“There was one man,” Madame Fontan said, “and his wife never lets him get out. So he tells her he’s tired, and goes to bed, and when she goes to the show he comes straight down here, sometimes in his pyjamas just with a coat over them. ‘Maria, some beer,’ he says, ‘for God’s sake.’ He sits in his pyjamas and drinks the beer, and then he goes up to the fort and gets back in bed before his wife comes home from the show.”

“C’est un original,” Fontan said, “mais vraiment gentil. He’s a nice fella.”

“My God, yes, nice fella all right,” Madame Fontan said. “He’s always in bed when his wife gets back from the show.”

“I have to go away tomorrow,” I said. “To the Crow Reservation. We go there for the opening of the prairie-chicken season.”

“Yes? You come back here before you go away. You come back here all right?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then the wine will be done,” Fontan said. “We’ll drink a bottle together.”

“Three bottles,” Madame Fontan said.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

“We count on you,” Fontan said.

“Good night,” I said.

We got in early in the afternoon from the shooting-trip. We had been up that morning since five o’clock. The day before we had had good shooting, but that morning we had not seen a prairie-chicken. Riding in the open car, we were very hot and we stopped to eat our lunch out of the sun, under a tree beside the road. The sun was high and the patch of shade was very small. We ate sandwiches and crackers with sandwich filling on them, and were thirsty and tired, and glad when we finally were out and on the main road back to town. We came up behind a prairie-dog town and stopped the car to shoot at the prairie-dogs with the pistol. We shot two, but then stopped, because the bullets that missed glanced off the rocks and the dirt, and sung off across the fields, and beyond the fields there were some trees along a watercourse, with a house, and we did not want to get in trouble from stray bullets going toward the house. So we drove on, and finally were on the road coming down-hill toward the outlying houses of the town. Across the plain we could see the mountains. They were blue that day, and the snow on the high mountains shone like glass. The summer was ending, but the new snow had not yet come to stay on the high mountains; there was only the old sun-melted snow and the ice, and from a long way away it shone very brightly.

We wanted something cool and some shade. We were sun-burned and our lips blistered from the sun and alkali dust. We turned up the side road to Fontan’s, stopped the car outside the house, and went in. It was cool inside the dining-room. Madame Fontan was alone.

“Only two bottles beer,” she said. “It’s all gone. The new is no good yet.”

I gave her some birds. “That’s good,” she said. “All right. Thanks. That’s good.” She went out to put the birds away where it was cooler. When we finished the beer I stood up. “We have to go,” I said.

“You come back tonight all right? Fontan he’s going to have the wine.”

“We’ll come back before we go away.”

“You go away?”

“Yes. We have to leave in the morning.”

“That’s too bad you go away. You come tonight. Fonten will have the wine. We’ll make a fête before you go.”

“We’ll come before we go.”

But that afternoon there were telegrams to send, the car to be gone over — a tire had been cut by a stone and needed vulcanizing — and, without the car, I walked into the town, doing things that had to be done before we could go. When it was supper-time I was too tired to go out. We did not want a foreign language. All we wanted was to go early to bed.

As I lay in bed before I went to sleep, with all the things of the summer piled around ready to be packed, the windows open and the air coming in cool from the mountains, I thought it was a shame not to have gone to Fontan’s — but in a little while I was asleep. The next day we were busy all morning packing and ending the summer. We had lunch and were ready to start by two o’clock.

“We must go and say good-by to the Fontans,” I said.

“Yes, we must.”

“I’m afraid they expected us last night.”

“I suppose we could have gone.”

“I wish we’d gone.”

We said good-by to the man at the desk at the hotel, and to Larry and our other friends in the town, and then drove out to Fontan’s. Both Monsieur and Madame were there. They were glad to see us. Fontan looked old and tired.

“We thought you would come last night,” Madame Fontan said. “Fontan had three bottles of wine. When you did not come he drank it all up.”

“We can only stay a minute,” I said. “We just came to say good-by. We wanted to come last night. We intended to come, but we were too tired after the trip.”

“Go get some wine,” Fontan said.

“There is no wine. You drank it all up.”

Fontan looked very upset.

“I’ll go get some,” he said. “I’ll just be gone a few minutes. I drank it up last night. We had it for you.”

“I knew you were tired. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘they’re too tired all right to come,’” Madame Fontan said. “Go get some wine, Fontan.”

“I’ll take you in the car,” I said.

“All right,” Fontan said. “That way we’ll go faster.”

We drove down the road in the motor-car and turned up a side road about a mile away.

“You’ll like that wine,” Fontan said. “It’s come out well. You can drink it for supper tonight.”

We stopped in front of a frame house. Fontan knocked on the door. There was no answer. We went around to the back. The back door was locked too. There were empty tin cans around the back door. We looked in the window. There was nobody inside. The kitchen was dirty and sloppy, but all the doors and windows were tight shut.”

“That son of a bitch. Where is she gone out?” Fontan said. He was desperate.

“I know where I can get a key,” he said. “You stay here.” I watched him go down to the next house down the road, knock on the door, talk to the woman who came out, and finally come back. He had a key. We tried it on the front door and the back, but it wouldn’t work.

“That son of a bitch,” Fontan said. “She’s gone away somewhere.”

Looking through the window I could see where the wine was stored. Close to the window you could smell the inside of the house. It smelled sweet and sickish like an Indian house. Suddenly Fontan took a loose board and commenced digging at the earth beside the back door.

“I can get in,” he said. “Son of a bitch, I can get in.”

There was a man in the back yard of the next house doing something to one of the front wheels of an old Ford.

“You better not,” I said. “That man will see you. He’s watching.”

Fontan straightened up. “We’ll try the key once more,” he said. We tried the key and it did not work. It turned half-way in either direction.

“We can’t get in,” I said. “We better go back.”

“I’ll dig up the back,” Fontan offered.

“No, I wouldn’t let you take the chance.”

“I’ll do it.”

“No,” I said. “That man would see. Then they would seize it.”

We went out to the car and drove back to Fontan’s, stopping on the way to leave the key. Fontan did not say anything but swear in English. He was incoherent and crushed. We went in the house.

“That son of a bitch!” he said. “We couldn’t get the wine. My own wine that I made.”

All the happiness went from Madame Fontan’s face. Fontan sat down in a corner with his head in his hands.

“We must go,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference about the wine. You drink to us when we’re gone.”

“Where did that crazy go?” Madame Fontan asked.

“I don’t know,” Fontan said. “I don’t know where she go. Now you go away without any wine.”

“That’s all right,” I said.

“That’s no good,” Madame Fontan said. She shook her head.

“We have to go,” I said. “Good-by and good luck. Thank you for the fine times.”

Fontan shook his head. He was disgraced. Madame Fontan looked sad.

“Don’t feel bad about the wine,” I said.

“He wanted you to drink his wine,” Madame Fontan said. “You can come back next year?”

“No. Maybe the year after.”

“You see?” Fontan said to her.

“Good-by,” I said. “Don’t think about the wine. Drink some for us when we’re gone.” Fontan shook his head. He did not smile. He knew when he was ruined.

“That son of a bitch,” Fontan said to himself.

“Last night he had three bottles,” Madame Fontan said to comfort him. He shook his head.

“Good-by,” he said.

Madame Fontan had tears in her eyes.

“Good-by,” she said. She felt badly for Fontan.

“Good-by,” we said. We all felt very badly. They stood in the doorway and we got in, and I started the motor. We waved. They stood together sadly on the porch. Fontan looked very old, and Madame Fontan looked sad. She waved to us and Fontan went in the house. We turned up the road.

“They felt so badly. Fontan felt terribly.”

“We ought to have gone last night.”

“Yes, we ought to have.”

We were through the town and out on the smooth road beyond, with the stubble of grain-fields on each side and the mountains off to the right. It looked like Spain, but it was Wyoming.

“I hope they have a lot of good luck.”

“They won’t,” I said, “and Schmidt won’t be President either.”

The cement road stopped. The road was gravelled now and we left the plain and started up between two foot-hills; the road in a curve and commencing to climb. The soil of the hills was red, the sage grew in gray clumps, and as the road rose we could see across the hills and away across the plain of the valley to the mountains. They were farther away now and they looked more like Spain than ever. The road curved and climbed again, and ahead there were some grouse dusting in the road. They flew as we came toward them, their wings beating fast, then sailing in long slants, and lit on the hillside below.

“They are so big and lovely. They’re bigger than European patridges.”

“It’s a fine country for la chasse, Fontan says.”

“And when the chasse is gone?”

“They’ll be dead then.”

“The boy won’t.”

“There’s nothing to prove he won’t be,” I said.

“We ought to have gone last night.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “We ought to have gone.”

THE GAMBLER, THE NUN, AND THE RADIO

THEY BROUGHT THEM IN AROUND MIDNIGHT and then, all night long, every one along the corridor heard the Russian.

“Where is he shot?” Mr. Frazer asked the night nurse.

“In the thigh, I think.”

“What about the other one?”

“Oh, he’s going to die, I’m afraid.”

“Where is he shot?”

“Twice in the abdomen. They only found one of the bullets.”

They were both beet workers, a Mexican and a Russian, and they were sitting drinking coffee in an all-night restaurant when some one came in the door and started shooting at the Mexican. The Russian crawled under a table and was hit, finally, by a stray shot fired at the Mexican as he lay on the floor with two bullets in his abdomen. That was what the paper said.

The Mexican told the police he had no idea who shot him. He believed it to be an accident.

“An accident that he fired eight shots at you and hit you twice, there?”

“Sí, señor”, said the Mexican, who was named Cayetano Ruiz.

“An accident that he hit me at all, the cabrón”, he said to the interpreter.

“What does he say?” asked the detective sergeant, looking across the bed at the interpreter.

“He says it was an accident.”

“Tell him to tell the truth, that he is going to die,” the detective said.

“Na,” said Cayetano. “But tell him that I feel very sick and would prefer not to talk so much.”

“He says that he is telling the truth,” the interpreter said. Then, speaking confidently, to the detective, “He don’t know who shot him. They shot him in the back.”

“Yes,” said the detective. “I understand that, but why did the bullets all go in the front?”

“Maybe he is spinning around,” said the interpreter.

“Listen,” said the detective, shaking his finger almost at Cayetano’s nose, which projected, waxen yellow, from his dead-man’s face in which his eyes were alive as a hawk’s. “I don’t give a damn who shot you, but I’ve got to clear this thing up. Don’t you want the man who shot you to be punished? Tell him that,” he said to the interpreter.

“He says to tell who shot you.”

“Mandarlo al carajo”, said Cayetano, who was very tired.

“He says he never saw the fellow at all,” the interpreter said. “I tell you straight they shot him in the back.”

“Ask him who shot the Russian.”

“Poor Russian,” said Cayetano. “He was on the floor with his head enveloped in his arms. He started to give cries when they shoot him and he is giving cries ever since. Poor Russian.”

“He says some fellow that he doesn’t know. Maybe the same fellow that shot him.”

“Listen,” the detective said. “This isn’t Chicago. You’re not a gangster. You don’t have to act like a moving picture. It’s all right to tell who shot you. Anybody would tell who shot them. That’s all right to do. Suppose you don’t tell who he is and he shoots somebody else. Suppose he shoots a woman or a child. You can’t let him get away with that. You tell him,” he said to Mr. Frazer. “I don’t trust that damn interpreter.”

“I am very reliable,” the interpreter said. Cayetano looked at Mr. Frazer.

“Listen, amigo,” said Mr. Frazer. “The policeman says that we are not in Chicago but in Hailey, Montana. You are not a bandit and this has nothing to do with the cinema.”

“I believe him,” said Cayetano softly. “Ya lo creo.”

“One can, with honor, denounce one’s assailant. Every one does it here, he says. He says what happens if after shooting you, this man shoots a woman or a child?”

“I am not married,” Cayetano said.

“He says any woman, any child.”

“The man is not crazy,” Cayetano said.

“He says you should denounce him,” Mr. Frazer finished.

“Thank you,” Cayetano said. “You are of the great translators. I speak English, but badly. I understand it all right. How did you break your leg?”

“A fall off a horse.”

“What bad luck. I am very sorry. Does it hurt much?”

“Not now. At first, yes.”

“Listen, amigo,” Cayetano began, “I am very weak. You will pardon me. Also I have much pain; enough pain. It is very possible that I die. Please get this policeman out of here because I am very tired.” He made as though to roll to one side; then held himself still.

“I told him everything exactly as you said and he said to tell you, truly, that he doesn’t know who shot him and that he is very weak and wishes you would question him later on,” Mr. Frazer said.

“He’ll probably be dead later on.”

“That’s quite possible.”

“That’s why I want to question him now.”

“Somebody shot him in the back, I tell you,” the interpreter said.

“Oh, for Chrisake,” the detective sergeant said, and put his notebook in his pocket.

Outside in the corridor the detective sergeant stood with the interpreter beside Mr. Frazer’s wheeled chair.

“I suppose you think somebody shot him in the back too?”

“Yes,” Frazer said. “Somebody shot him in the back. What’s it to you?”

“Don’t get sore,” the sergeant said. “I wish I could talk spick.”

“Why don’t you learn?”

“You don’t have to get sore. I don’t get any fun out of asking that spick questions. If I could talk spick it would be different.”

“You don’t need to talk Spanish,” the interpreter said. “I am a very reliable interpreter.”

“Oh, for Chrisake,” the sergeant said. “Well, so long. I’ll come up and see you.”

“Thanks. I’m always in.”

“I guess you are all right. That was bad luck all right. Plenty bad luck.”

“It’s coming along good now since he spliced the bone.”

“Yes, but it’s a long time. A long, long time.”

“Don’t let anybody shoot you in the back.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. Well, I’m glad you’re not sore.”

“So long,” said Mr. Frazer.

Mr. Frazer did not see Cayetano again for a long time, but each morning Sister Cecilia brought news of him. He was so uncomplaining she said and he was very bad now. He had peritonitis and they thought he could not live. Poor Cayetano, she said. He had such beautiful hands and such a fine face and he never complains. The odor, now, was really terrific. He would point toward his nose with one finger and smile and shake his head, she said. He felt badly about the odor. It embarrassed him, Sister Cecilia said. Oh, he was such a fine patient. He always smiled. He wouldn’t go to confession to Father but he promised to say his prayers, and not a Mexican had been to see him since he had been brought in. The Russian was going out at the end of the week. I could never feel anything about the Russian, Sister Cecilia said. Poor fellow, he suffered too. It was a greased bullet and dirty and the wound infected, but he made so much noise and then I always like the bad ones. That Cayetano, he’s a bad one. Oh, he must really be a bad one, a thoroughly bad one, he’s so fine and delicately made and he’s never done any work with his hands. He’s not a beet worker. I know he’s not a beet worker. His hands are as smooth and not a callous on them. I know he’s a bad one of some sort. I’m going down and pray for him now. Poor Cayetano, he’s having a dreadful time and he doesn’t make a sound. What did they have to shoot him for? Oh, that poor Cayetano! I’m going right down and pray for him.

She went right down and prayed for him.

In that hospital a radio did not work very well until it was dusk. They said it was because there was so much ore in the ground or something about the mountains, but anyway it did not work well at all until it began to get dark outside; but all night it worked beautifully and when one station stopped you could go farther west and pick up another. The last one that you could get was Seattle, Washington, and due to the difference in time, when they signed off at four o’clock in the morning it was five o’clock in the morning in the hospital; and at six o’clock you could get the morning revellers in Minneapolis. That was on account of the difference in time, too, and Mr. Frazer used to like to think of the morning revellers arriving at the studio and picture how they would look getting off a street-car before daylight in the morning carrying their instruments. Maybe that was wrong and they kept their instruments at the place they revelled, but he always pictured them with their instruments. He had never been in Minneapolis and believed he probably would never go there, but he knew what it looked like that early in the morning.

Out of the window of the hospital you could see a field with tumbleweed coming out of the snow, and a bare clay butte. One morning the doctor wanted to show Mr. Frazer two pheasants that were out there in the snow, and pulling the bed toward the window, the reading light fell off the iron bedstead and hit Mr. Frazer on the head. This does not sound so funny now but it was very funny then. Every one was looking out the window, and the doctor, who was a most excellent doctor, was pointing at the pheasants and pulling the bed toward the window, and then, just as in a comic section, Mr. Frazer was knocked out by the leaded base of the lamp hitting the top of his head. It seemed the antithesis of healing or whatever people were in the hospital for, and every one thought it was very funny, as a joke on Mr. Frazer and on the doctor. Everything is much simpler in a hospital, including the jokes.

From the other window, if the bed was turned, you could see the town, with a little smoke above it, and the Dawson mountains looking like real mountains with the winter snow on them. Those were the two views since the wheeled chair had proved to be premature. It is really best to be in bed if you are in a hospital; since two views, with time to observe them, from a room the temperature of which you control, are much better than any number of views seen for a few minutes from hot, empty rooms that are waiting for some one else, or just abandoned, which you are wheeled in and out of. If you stay long enough in a room the view, whatever it is, acquires a great value and becomes very important and you would not change it, not even by a different angle. Just as, with the radio, there are certain things that you become fond of, and you welcome them and resent the new things. The best tunes they had that winter were “Sing Something Simple,” “Singsong Girl,” and “Little White Lies.” No other tunes were as satisfactory, Mr. Frazer felt. “Betty Co-ed” was a good tune too, but the parody of the words which came unavoidably into Mr. Frazer’s mind, grew so steadily and increasingly obscene that there being no one to appreciate it, he finally abandoned it and let the song go back to football.

About nine o’clock in the morning they would start using the X-ray machine, and then the radio, which, by then, was only getting Hailey, became useless. Many people in Hailey who owned radios protested about the hospital’s X-ray machine which ruined their morning reception, but there was never any action taken, although many felt it was a shame the hospital could not use their machine at a time when people were not using their radios.

About the time when it became necessary to turn off the radio Sister Cecilia came in.

“How’s Cayetano, Sister Cecilia?” Mr. Frazer asked.

“Oh, he’s very bad.”

“Is he out of his head?”

“No, but I’m afraid he’s going to die.”

“How are you?”

“I’m very worried about him, and do you know that absolutely no one has come to see him? He could die just like a dog for all those Mexicans care. They’re really dreadful.”

“Do you want to come up and hear the game this afternoon?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’d be too excited. I’ll be in the chapel praying.”

“We ought to be able to hear it pretty well,” Mr. Frazer said. “They’re playing out on the coast and the difference in time will bring it late enough so we can get it all right.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t do it. The world series nearly finished me. When the Athletics were at bat I was praying right out loud: Oh, Lord, direct their batting eyes! Oh, Lord, may he hit one! Oh, Lord, may he hit safely!’ Then when they filled the bases in the third game, you remember, it was too much for me. Oh, Lord, may he hit it out of the lot! Oh, Lord, may he drive it clean over the fence!’ Then you know when the Cardinals would come to bat it was simply dreadful. ‘Oh, Lord, may they not see it! Oh, Lord, don’t let them even catch a glimpse of it! Oh, Lord, may they fan!’ And this game is even worse. It’s Notre Dame. Our Lady. No, I’ll be in the chapel. For Our Lady. They’re playing for Our Lady. I wish you’d write something sometime for Our Lady. You could do it. You know you could do it, Mr. Frazer.”

“I don’t know anything about her that I could write. It’s mostly been written already,” Mr. Frazer said. “You wouldn’t like the way I write. She wouldn’t care for it either.”

“You’ll write about her sometime,” Sister said. “I know you will. You must write about Our Lady.”

“You’d better come up and hear the game.”

“It would be too much for me. No, I’ll be in the chapel doing what I can.”

That afternoon they had been playing about five minutes when a probationer came into the room and said, “Sister Cecilia wants to know how the game is going?”

“Tell her they have a touchdown already.”

In a little while the probationer came into the room again.

“Tell her they’re playing them off their feet,” Mr. Frazer said.

A little later he rang the bell for the nurse who was on floor duty. “Would you mind going down to the chapel or sending word down to Sister Cecilia that Notre Dame has them fourteen to nothing at the end of the first quarter and that it’s all right. She can stop praying.”

In a few minutes Sister Cecilia came into the room. She was very excited. “What does fourteen to nothing mean? I don’t know anything about this game. That’s a nice safe lead in baseball. But I don’t know anything about football. It may not mean a thing. I’m going right back down to the chapel and pray until it’s finished.”

“They have them beaten,” Frazer said. “I promise you. Stay and listen with me.”

“No. No. No. No. No. No. No,” she said. “I’m going right down to the chapel to pray.”

Mr. Frazer sent down word whenever Notre Dame scored, and finally, when it had been dark a long time, the final result.

“How’s Sister Cecilia?”

“They’re all at chapel,” she said.

The next morning Sister Cecilia came in. She was very pleased and confident.

“I knew they couldn’t beat Our Lady,” she said. “They couldn’t. Cayetano’s better too. He’s much better. He’s going to have visitors. He can’t see them yet, but they are going to come and that will make him feel better and know he’s not forgotten by his own people. I went down and saw that O’Brien boy at Police Headquarters and told him that he’s got to send some Mexicans up to see poor Cayetano. He’s going to send some this afternoon. Then that poor man will feel better. It’s wicked the way no one has come to see him.”

That afternoon about five o’clock three Mexicans came into the room.

“Can one?” asked the biggest one, who had very thick lips and was quite fat.

“Why not?” Mr. Frazer answered. “Sit down, gentlemen. Will you take something?”

“Many thanks,” said the big one.

“Thanks,” said the darkest and smallest one.

“Thanks, no,” said the thin one. “It mounts to my head.” He tapped his head.

The nurse brought some glasses. “Please give them the bottle,” Frazer said. “It is from Red Lodge,” he explained.

“That of Red Lodge is the best,” said the big one. “Much better than that of Big Timber.”

“Clearly,” said the smallest one, “and costs more too.”

“In Red Lodge it is of all prices,” said the big one.

“How many tubes has the radio?” asked the one who did not drink.

“Seven.”

“Very beautiful,” he said. “What does it cost?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Frazer said. “It is rented.”

“You gentlemen are friends of Cayetano?”

“No,” said the big one. “We are friends of he who wounded him.”

“We were sent here by the police,” the smallest one said.

“We have a little place,” the big one said. “He and I,” indicating the one who did not drink. “He has a little place too,” indicating the small, dark one. “The police tell us we have to come — so we come.”

“I am very happy you have come.”

“Equally,” said the big one.

“Will you have another little cup?”

“Why not?” said the big one.

“With your permission,” said the smallest one.

“Not me,” said the thin one. “It mounts to my head.”

“It is very good,” said the smallest one.

“Why not try some,” Mr. Frazer asked the thin one. “Let a little mount to your head.”

“Afterwards comes the headache,” said the thin one.

“Could you not send friends of Cayetano to see him?” Frazer asked.

“He has no friends.”

“Every man has friends.”

“This one, no.”

“What does he do?”

“He is a card-player.”

“Is he good?”

“I believe it.”

“From me,” said the smallest one, “he won one hundred and eighty dollars. Now there is no longer one hundred and eighty dollars in the world.”

“From me,” said the thin one, “he won two hundred and eleven dollars. Fix yourself on that figure.”

“I never played with him,” said the fat one.

“He must be very rich,” Mr. Frazer suggested.

“He is poorer than we,” said the little Mexican. “He has no more than the shirt on his back.”

“And that shirt is of little value now,” Mr. Frazer said. “Perforated as it is.”

“Clearly.”

“The one who wounded him was a card-player?”

“No, a beet worker. He has had to leave town.”

“Fix yourself on this,” said the smallest one. “He was the best guitar player ever in this town. The finest.”

“What a shame.”

“I believe it,” said the biggest one. “How he could touch the guitar.”

“There are no good guitar players left?”

“Not the shadow of a guitar player.”

“There is an accordion player who is worth something,” the thin man said.

“There are a few who touch various instruments,” the big one said. “You like music?”

“How would I not?”

“We will come one night with music? You think the sister would allow it? She seems very amiable.”

“I am sure she would permit it when Cayetano is able to hear it.”

“Is she a little crazy?” asked the thin one.

“Who?”

“That sister.”

“No,” Mr. Frazer said. “She is a fine woman of great intelligence and sympathy.”

“I distrust all priests, monks, and sisters,” said the thin one.

“He had bad experiences when a boy,” the smallest one said.

“I was acolyte,” the thin one said proudly. “Now I believe in nothing. Neither do I go to mass.”

“Why? Does it mount to your head?”

“No,” said the thin one. “It is alcohol that mounts to my head. Religion is the opium of the poor.”

“I thought marijuana was the opium of the poor,” Frazer said.

“Did you ever smoke opium?” the big one asked.

“No.”

“Nor I,” he said. “It seems it is very bad. One commences and cannot stop. It is a vice.”

“Like religion,” said the thin one.

“This one,” said the smallest Mexican, “is very strong against religion.”

“It is necessary to be very strong against something,” Mr. Frazer said politely.

“I respect those who have faith even though they are ignorant,” the thin one said.

“Good,” said Mr. Frazer.

“What can we bring you?” asked the big Mexican. “Do you lack for anything?”

“I would be glad to buy some beer if there is good beer.”

“We will bring beer.”

“Another copita before you go?”

“It is very good.”

“We are robbing you.”

“I can’t take it. It goes to my head. Then I have a bad headache and sick at the stomach.”

“Good-by, gentlemen.”

“Good-by and thanks.”

They went out and there was supper and then the radio, turned to be as quiet as possible and still be heard, and the stations finally signing off in this order: Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Mr. Frazer received no picture of Denver from the radio. He could see Denver from the Denver Post, and correa the picture from The Rocky Mountain News. Nor did he ever have any feel of Salt Lake City or Los Angeles from what he heard from those places. All he felt about Salt Lake City was that it was clean, but dull, and there were too many ballrooms mentioned in too many big hotels for him to see Los Angeles. He could not feel it for the ballrooms. But Seattle he came to know very well, the taxicab company with the big white cabs (each cab equipped with radio itself) he rode in every night out to the roadhouse on the Canadian side where he followed the course of parties by the musical selections they phoned for. He lived in Seattle from two o’clock on, each night, hearing the pieces that all the different people asked for, and it was as real as Minneapolis, where the revellers left their beds each morning to make that trip down to the studio. Mr. Frazer grew very fond of Seattle, Washington.

The Mexicans came and brought beer but it was not good beer. Mr. Frazer saw them but he did not feel like talking, and when they went he knew they would not come again. His nerves had become tricky and he disliked seeing people while he was in this condition. His nerves went bad at the end of five weeks, and while he was pleased they lasted that long yet he resented being forced to make the same experiment when he already knew the answer. Mr. Frazer had been through this all before. The only thing which was new to him was the radio. He played it all night long, turned so low he could barely hear it, and he was learning to listen to it without thinking.

Sister Cecilia came into the room about ten o’clock in the morning on that day and brought the mail. She was very handsome, and Mr. Frazer liked to see her and to hear her talk, but the mail, supposedly coming from a different world, was more important. However, there was nothing in the mail of any interest.

“You look so much better,” she said. “You’ll be leaving us soon.”

“Yes,” Mr. Frazer said. “You look very happy this morning.”

“Oh, I am. This morning I feel as though I might be a saint.”

Mr. Frazer was a little taken aback at this.

“Yes,” Sister Cecilia went on. “That’s what I want to be. A saint. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve wanted to be a saint. When I was a girl I thought if I renounced the world and went into the convent I would be a saint. That was what I wanted to be and that was what I thought I had to do to be one. I expected I would be a saint. I was absolutely sure I would be one. For just a moment I thought I was one. I was so happy and it seemed so simple and easy. When I awoke in the morning I expected I would be a saint, but I wasn’t. I’ve never become one. I want so to be one. All I want is to be a saint. That is all I’ve ever wanted. And this morning I feel as though I might be one. Oh, I hope I will get to be one.”

“You’ll be one. Everybody gets what they want. That’s what they always tell me.”

“I don’t know now. When I was a girl it seemed so simple. I knew I would be a saint. Only I believed it took time when I found it did not happen suddenly. Now it seems almost impossible.”

“I’d say you had a good chance.”

“Do you really think so? No, I don’t want just to be encouraged. Don’t just encourage me. I want to be a saint. I want so to be a saint.”

“Of course you’ll be a saint,” Mr. Frazer said.

“No, probably I won’t be. But, oh, if I could only be a saint! I’d be perfectly happy.”

“You’re three to one to be a saint.”

“No, don’t encourage me. But, oh, if I could only be a saint! If I could only be a saint!”

“How’s your friend Cayetano?”

“He’s going to get well but he’s paralyzed. One of the bullets hit the big nerve that goes down through his thigh and that leg is paralyzed. They only found it out when he got well enough so that he could move.”

“Maybe the nerve will regenerate.”

“I’m praying that it will,” Sister Cecilia said. “You ought to see him.”

“I don’t feel like seeing anybody.”

“You know you’d like to see him. They could wheel him in here.”

“All right.”

They wheeled him in, thin, his skin transparent, his hair black and needing to be cut, his eyes very laughing, his teeth bad when he smiled.

“Hola, amigo! Qué tal?”

“As you see,” said Mr. Frazer. “And thou?”

“Alive and with the leg paralyzed.”

“Bad,” Mr. Frazer said. “But the nerve can regenerate and be as good as new.”

“So they tell me.”

“What about the pain?”

“Not now. For a while I was crazy with it in the belly. I thought the pain alone would kill me.”

Sister Cecilia was observing them happily.

“She tells me you never made a sound,” Mr. Frazer said.

“So many people in the ward,” the Mexican said deprecatingly. “What class of pain do you have?”

“Big enough. Clearly not as bad as yours. When the nurse goes out I cry an hour, two hours. It rests me. My nerves are bad now.”

“You have the radio. If I had a private room and a radio I would be crying and yelling all night long.”

“I doubt it.”

“Hombre, sí. It’s very healthy. But you cannot do it with so many people.”

“At least,” Mr. Frazer said, “the hands are still good. They tell me you make your living with the hands.”

“And the head,” he said, tapping his forehead. “But the head isn’t worth as much.”

“Three of your countrymen were here.”

“Sent by the police to see me.”

“They brought some beer.”

“It probably was bad.”

“It was bad.”

“Tonight, sent by the police, they come to serenade me.” He laughed, then tapped his stomach. “I cannot laugh yet. As musicians they are fatal.”

“And the one who shot you?”

“Another fool. I won thirty-eight dollars from him at cards. That is not to kill about.”

“The three told me you win much money.”

“And am poorer than the birds.”

“How?”

“I am a poor idealist. I am the victim of illusions.” He laughed, then grinned and tapped his stomach. “I am a professional gambler but I like to gamble. To really gamble. Little gambling is all crooked. For real gambling you need luck. I have no luck.”

“Never?”

“Never. I am completely without luck. Look, this cabrón who shoots me just now. Can he shoot? No. The first shot he fires into nothing. The second is intercepted by a poor Russian. That would seem to be luck. What happens? He shoots me twice in the belly. He is a lucky man. I have no luck. He could not hit a horse if he were holding the stirrup. All luck.”

“I thought he shot you first and the Russian after.”

“No, the Russian first, me after. The paper was mistaken.”

“Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“I never carry a gun. With my luck, if I carried a gun I would be hanged ten times a year. I am a cheap card player, only that.” He stopped, then continued. “When I make a sum of money I gamble and when I gamble I lose. I have passed at dice for three thousand dollars and crapped out for the six. With good dice. More than once.”

“Why continue?”

“If I live long enough the luck will change. I have bad luck now for fifteen years. If I ever get any good luck I will be rich.” He grinned. “I am a good gambler, really I would enjoy being rich.”

“Do you have bad luck with all games?”

“With everything and with women.” He smiled again, showing his bad teeth.

“Truly?”

“Truly.”

“And what is there to do?”

“Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change.”

“But with women?”

“No gambler has luck with women. He is too concentrated. He works nights. When he should be with the woman. No man who works nights can hold a woman if the woman is worth anything.”

“You are a philosopher.”

“No, hombre. A gambler of the small towns. One small town, then another, another, then a big town, then start over again.”

“Then shot in the belly.”

“The first time,” he said. “That has only happened once.”

“I tire you talking?” Mr. Frazer suggested.

“No,” he said. “I must tire you.”

“And the leg?”

“I have no great use for the leg. I am all right with the leg or not. I will be able to circulate.”

“I wish you luck, truly, and with all my heart,” Mr. Frazer said.

“Equally,” he said. “And that the pain stops.”

“It will not last, certainly. It is passing. It is of no importance.”

“That it passes quickly.”

“Equally.”

That night the Mexicans played the accordion and other instruments in the ward and it was cheerful and the noise of the inhalations and exhalations of the accordion, and of the bells, the traps, and the drum came down the corridor. In that ward there was a rodeo rider who had come out of the chutes on Midnight on a hot dusty afternoon with the big crowd watching, and now, with a broken back, was going to learn to work in leather and to cane chairs when he got well enough to leave the hospital. There was a carpenter who had fallen with a scaffolding and broken both ankles and both wrists. He had lit like a cat but without a cat’s resiliency. They could fix him up so that he could work again but it would take a long time. There was a boy from a farm, about sixteen years old, with a broken leg that had been badly set and was to be rebroken. There was Cayetano Ruiz, a small-town gambler with a paralyzed leg. Down the corridor Mr. Frazer could hear them all laughing and merry with the music made by the Mexicans who had been sent by the police. The Mexicans were having a good time. They came in, very excited, to see Mr. Frazer and wanted to know if there was anything he wanted them to play, and they came twice more to play at night of their own accord.

The last time they played Mr. Frazer lay in his room with the door open and listened to the noisy, bad music and could not keep from thinking. When they wanted to know what he wished played, he asked for the Cucaracha, which has the sinister lightness and deftness of so many of the tunes men have gone to die to. They played noisily and with emotion. The tune was better than most of such tunes, to Mr. Frazer’s mind, but the effect was all the same.

In spite of this introduction of emotion, Mr. Frazer went on thinking. Usually he avoided thinking all he could, except when he was writing, but now he was thinking about those who were playing and what the little one had said.

Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-to-the-head hadn’t thought of that. And now economics is the opium of the people; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany. What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of some of the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer the radio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using. Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever was one, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people, along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed in that although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was the real one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew it very well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of the people. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight? Bread is the opium of the people.

“Listen,” Mr. Frazer said to the nurse when she came. “Get that little thin Mexican in here, will you, please?”

“How do you like it?” the Mexican said at the door.

“Very much.”

“It is a historic tune,” the Mexican said. “It is the tune of the real revolution.”

“Listen,” said Mr. Frazer. “Why should the people be operated on without an anaesthetic?”

“I do not understand.”

“Why are not all the opiums of the people good? What do you want to do with the people?”

“They should be rescued from ignorance.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Education is an opium of the people. You ought to know that. You’ve had a little.”

“You do not believe in education?”

“No,” said Mr. Frazer. “In knowledge, yes.”

“I do not follow you.”

“Many times I do not follow myself with pleasure.”

“You want to hear the Cucaracha another time?” asked the Mexican worriedly.

“Yes,” said Mr. Frazer. “Play the Cucaracha another time. It’s better than the radio.”

Revolution, Mr. Frazer thought, is no opium. Revolution is a catharsis; an ecstasy which can only be prolonged by tyranny. The opiums are for before and for after. He was thinking well, a little too well.

They would go now in a little while, he thought, and they would take the Cucaracha with them. Then he would have a little spot of the giant killer and play the radio, you could play the radio so that you could hardly hear it.

FATHERS AND SONS

THERE HAD BEEN A SIGN TO DETOUR IN the center of the main street of this town, but cars had obviously gone through, so, believing it was some repair which had been completed, Nicholas Adams drove on through the town along the empty, brick-paved street, stopped by traffic lights that flashed on and off on this traffic-less Sunday, and would be gone next year when the payments on the system were not met; on under the heavy trees of the small town that are a part of your heart if it is your town and you have walked under them, but that are only too heavy, that shut out the sun and that dampen the houses for a stranger; out past the last house and onto the highway that rose and fell straight away ahead with banks of red dirt sliced cleanly away and the second-growth timber on both sides. It was not his country but it was the middle of fall and all of this country was good to drive through and to see. The cotton was picked and in the clearings there were patches of corn, some cut with streaks of red sorghum, and, driving easily, his son asleep on the seat by his side, the day’s run made, knowing the town he would reach for the night, Nick noticed which corn fields had soy beans or peas in them, how the thickets and the cut-over land lay, where the cabins and houses were in relation to the fields and the thickets; hunting the country in his mind as he went by; sizing up each clearing as to feed and cover and figuring where you would find a covey and which way they would fly.

In shooting quail you must not get between them and their habitual cover, once the dogs have found them, or when they flush they will come pouring at you, some rising steep, some skimming by your ears, whirring into a size you have never seen them in the air as they pass, the only way being to turn and take them over your shoulder as they go, before they set their wings and angle down into the thicket. Hunting this country for quail as his father had taught him, Nicholas Adams started thinking about his father. When he first thought about him it was always the eyes. The big frame, the quick movements, the wide shoulders, the hooked, hawk nose, the beard that covered the weak chin, you never thought about — it was always the eyes. They were protected in his head by the formation of the brows; set deep as though a special protection had been devised for some very valuable instrument. They saw much farther and much quicker than the human eye sees and they were the great gift his father had. His father saw as a big-horn ram or as an eagle sees, literally.

He would be standing with his father on one shore of the lake, his own eyes were very good then, and his father would say, “They’ve run up the flag.” Nick could not see the flag or the flag pole. “There,” his father would say, “it’s your sister Dorothy. She’s got the flag up and she’s walking out onto the dock.”

Nick would look across the lake and he could see the long wooded shore-line, the higher timber behind, the point that guarded the bay, the clear hills of the farm and the white of their cottage in the trees but he could not see any flag pole, or any dock, only the white of the beach and the curve of the shore.

“Can you see the sheep on the hillside toward the point?”

“Yes.”

They were a whitish patch on the gray-green of the hill.

“I can count them,” his father said.

Like all men with a faculty that surpasses human requirements, his father was very nervous. Then, too, he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused. Also, he had much bad luck, and it was not all of it his own. He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died. All sentimental people are betrayed so many times. Nick could not write about him yet, although he would, later, but the quail country made him remember him as he was when Nick was a boy and he was very grateful to him for two things: fishing and shooting. His father was as sound on those two things as he was unsound on sex, for instance, and Nick was glad that it had been that way; for some one has to give you your first gun or the opportunity to get it and use it, and you have to live where there is game or fish if you are to learn about them, and now, at thirty-eight, he loved to fish and to shoot exactly as much as when he first had gone with his father. It was a passion that had never slackened and he was very grateful to his father for bringing him to know it.

While for the other, that his father was not sound about, all the equipment you will ever have is provided and each man learns all there is for him to know about it without advice; and it makes no difference where you live. He remembered very clearly the only two pieces of information his father had given him about that. Once when they were out shooting together Nick shot a red squirrel out of a hemlock tree. The squirrel fell, wounded, and when Nick picked him up bit the boy clean through the ball of the thumb.

“The dirty little bugger,” Nick said and smacked the squirrel’s head against the tree. “Look how he bit me.”

His father looked and said, “Suck it out clean and put some iodine on when you get home.”

“The little bugger,” Nick said.

“Do you know what a bugger is?” his father asked him.

“We call anything a bugger,” Nick said.

“A bugger is a man who has intercourse with animals.”

“Why?” Nick said.

“I don’t know,” his father said. “But it is a heinous crime.”

Nick’s imagination was both stirred and horrified by this and he thought of various animals but none seemed attractive or practical and that was the sum total of direct sexual knowledge bequeathed him by his father except on one other subject. One morning he read in the paper that Enrico Caruso had been arrested for mashing.

“What is mashing?”

“It is one of the most heinous of crimes,” his father answered. Nick’s imagination pictured the great tenor doing something strange, bizarre, and heinous with a potato masher to a beautiful lady who looked like the pictures of Anna Held on the inside of cigar boxes. He resolved, with considerable horror, that when he was old enough he would try mashing at least once.

His father had summed up the whole matter by stating that masturbation produced blindness, insanity, and death, while a man who went with prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep your hands off of people. On the other hand his father had the finest pair of eyes he had ever seen and Nick had loved him very much and for a long time. Now, knowing how it had all been, even remembering the earliest times before things had gone badly was not good remembering. If he wrote it he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them. But it was still too early for that. There were still too many people. So he decided to think of something else. There was nothing to do about his father and he had thought it all through many times. The handsome job the undertaker had done on his father’s face had not blurred in his mind and all the rest of it was quite clear, including the responsibilities. He had complimented the undertaker. The undertaker had been both proud and smugly pleased. But it was not the undertaker that had given him that last face. The undertaker had only made certain dashingly executed repairs of doubtful artistic merit. The face had been making itself and being made for a long time. It had modelled fast in the last three years. It was a good story but there were still too many people alive for him to write it.

Nick’s own education in those earlier matters had been acquired in the hemlock woods behind the Indian camp. This was reached by a trail which ran from the cottage through the woods to the farm and then by a road which wound through the slashings to the camp. Now if he could still feel all of that trail with bare feet. First there was the pine-needle loam through the hemlock woods behind the cottage where the fallen logs crumbled into wood dust and long splintered pieces of wood hung like javelins in the tree that had been struck by lightning. You crossed the creek on a log and if you stepped off there was the black muck of the swamp. You climbed a fence out of the woods and the trail was hard in the sun across the field with cropped grass and sheep sorrel and mullen growing and to the left the quaky bog of the creek bottom where the killdeer plover fed. The spring house was in that creek. Below the barn there was fresh warm manure and the other older manure that was caked dry on top. Then there was another fence and the hard, hot trail from the barn to the house and the hot sandy road that ran down to the woods, crossing the creek, on a bridge this time, where the cat-tails grew that you soaked in kerosene to make jack-lights with for spearing fish at night.

Then the main road went off to the left, skirting the woods and climbing the hill, while you went into the woods on the wide clay and shale road, cool under the trees, and broadened for them to skid out the hemlock bark the Indians cut. The hemlock bark was piled in long rows of stacks, roofed over with more bark, like houses, and the peeled logs lay huge and yellow where the trees had been felled. They left the logs in the woods to rot, they did not even clear away or burn the tops. It was only the bark they wanted for the tannery at Boyne City; hauling it across the lake on the ice in winter, and each year there was less forest and more open, hot, shadeless, weed-grown slashing.

But there was still much forest then, virgin forest where the trees grew high before there were any branches and you walked on the brown, clean, springy-needled ground with no undergrowth and it was cool on the hottest days and they three lay against the trunk of a hemlock wider than two beds are long, with the breeze high in the tops and the cool light that came in patches, and Billy said:

“You want Trudy again?”

“You want to?”

“Un Huh.”

“Come on.”

“No, here.”

“But Billy — —”

“I no mind Billy. He my brother.”

Then afterwards they sat, the three of them, listening for a black squirrel that was in the top branches where they could not see him. They were waiting for him to bark again because when he barked he would jerk his tail and Nick would shoot where he saw any movement. His father gave him only three cartridges a day to hunt with and he had a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun with a very long barrel.

“Son of a bitch never move,” Billy said.

“You shoot, Nickie. Scare him. We see him jump. Shoot him again,” Trudy said. It was a long speech for her.

“I’ve only got two shells,” Nick said.

“Son of a bitch,” said Billy.

They sat against the tree and were quiet. Nick was feeling hollow and happy.

“Eddie says he going to come some night sleep in bed with you sister Dorothy.”

“What?”

“He said.”

Trudy nodded.

“That’s all he want do,” she said. Eddie was their older half-brother. He was seventeen.

“If Eddie Gilby ever comes at night and even speaks to Dorothy you know what I’d do to him? I’d kill him like this.” Nick cocked the gun and hardly taking aim pulled the trigger, blowing a hole as big as your hand in the head or belly of that half-breed bastard Eddie Gilby. “Like that. I’d kill him like that.”

“He better not come then,” Trudy said. She put her hand in Nick’s pocket.

“He better watch out plenty,” said Billy.

“He’s big bluff,” Trudy was exploring with her hand in Nick’s pocket. “But don’t you kill him. You get plenty trouble.”

“I’d kill him like that,” Nick said. Eddie Gilby lay on the ground with all his chest shot away. Nick put his foot on him proudly.

“I’d scalp him,” he said happily.

“No,” said Trudy. “That’s dirty.”

“I’d scalp him and send it to his mother.”

“His mother dead,” Trudy said. “Don’t you kill him, Nickie. Don’t you kill him for me.”

“After I scalped him I’d throw him to the dogs.”

Billy was very depressed. “He better watch out,” he said gloomily.

“They’d tear him to pieces,” Nick said, pleased with the picture. Then, having scalped that half-breed renegade and standing, watching the dogs tear him, his face unchanging, he fell backward against the tree, held tight around the neck, Trudy holding, choking him, and crying, “No kill him! No kill him! No kill him! No. No. No. Nickie. Nickie. Nickie!”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“No kill him.”

“I got to kill him.”

“He just a big bluff.”

“All right,” Nickie said. “I won’t kill him unless he comes around the house. Let go of me.”

“That’s good,” Trudy said. “You want to do anything now? I feel good now.”

“If Billy goes away.” Nick had killed Eddie Gilby, then pardoned him his life, and he was a man now.

“You go, Billy. You hang around all the time. Go on.”

“Son a bitch,” Billy said. “I get tired this. What we come? Hunt or what?”

“You can take the gun. There’s one shell.”

“All right. I get a big black one all right.”

“I’ll holler,” Nick said.

Then, later, it was a long time after and Billy was still away.

“You think we make a baby?” Trudy folded her brown legs together happily and rubbed against him. Something inside Nick had gone a long way away.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Make plenty baby what the hell.”

They heard Billy shoot.

“I wonder if he got one.”

“Don’t care,” said Trudy.

Billy came through the trees. He had the gun over his shoulder and he held a black squirrel by the front paws.

“Look,” he said. “Bigger than a cat. You all through?”

“Where’d you get him?”

“Over there. Saw him jump first.”

“Got to go home,” Nick said.

“No,” said Trudy.

“I got to get there for supper.”

“All right.”

“Want to hunt tomorrow?”

“All right.”

“You can have the squirrel.”

“All right.”

“Come out after supper?”

“No.”

“How you feel?”

“Good.”

“All right.”

“Give me kiss on the face,” said Trudy.

Now, as he rode along the highway in the car and it was getting dark, Nick was all through thinking about his father. The end of the day never made him think of him. The end of the day had always belonged to Nick alone and he never felt right unless he was alone at it. His father came back to him in the fall of the year, or in the early spring when there had been jacksnipe on the prairie, or when he saw shocks of corn, or when he saw a lake, or if he ever saw a horse and buggy, or when he saw, or heard, wild geese, or in a duck blind; remembering the time an eagle dropped through the whirling snow to strike a canvas-covered decoy, rising, his wings beating, the talons caught in the canvas. His father was with him, suddenly, in deserted orchards and in new-plowed fields, in thickets, on small hills, or when going through dead grass, whenever splitting wood or hauling water, by grist mills, cider mills and dams and always with open fires. The towns he lived in were not towns his father knew. After he was fifteen he had shared nothing with him.

His father had frost in his beard in cold weather and in hot weather he sweated very much. He liked to work in the sun on the farm because he did not have to and he loved manual work, which Nick did not. Nick loved his father but hated the smell of him and once when he had to wear a suit of his father’s underwear that had gotten too small for his father it made him feel sick and he took it off and put it under two stones in the creek and said that he had lost it. He had told his father how it was when his father had made him put it on but his father had said it was freshly washed. It had been, too. When Nick had asked him to smell of it his father sniffed at it indignantly and said that it was clean and fresh. When Nick came home from fishing without it and said he lost it he was whipped for lying.

Afterwards he had sat inside the woodshed with the door open, his shotgun loaded and cocked, looking across at his father sitting on the screen porch reading the paper, and thought, “I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.” Finally he felt his anger go out of him and he felt a little sick about it being the gun that his father had given him. Then he had gone to the Indian camp, walking there in the dark, to get rid of the smell. There was only one person in his family that he liked the smell of; one sister. All the others he avoided all contact with. That sense blunted when he started to smoke. It was a good thing. It was good for a bird dog but it did not help a man.

“What was it like, Papa, when you were a little boy and used to hunt with the Indians?”

“I don’t know,” Nick was startled. He had not even noticed the boy was awake. He looked at him sitting beside him on the seat. He had felt quite alone but this boy had been with him. He wondered for how long. “We used to go all day to hunt black squirrels,” he said. “My father only gave me three shells a day because he said that would teach me to hunt and it wasn’t good for a boy to go banging around. I went with a boy named Billy Gilby and his sister Trudy. We used to go out nearly every day all one summer.”

“Those are funny names for Indians.”

“Yes, aren’t they,” Nick said.

“But tell me what they were like.”

“They were Ojibways,” Nick said. “And they were very nice.”

“But what were they like to be with?”

“It’s hard to say,” Nick Adams said. Could you say she did first what no one has ever done better and mention plump brown legs, flat belly, hard little breasts, well holding arms, quick searching tongue, the flat eyes, the good taste of mouth, then uncomfortably, tightly, sweetly, moistly, lovely, tightly, achingly, fully, finally, unendingly, never-endingly, never-to-endingly, suddenly ended, the great bird flown like an owl in the twilight, only it was daylight in the woods and hemlock needles stuck against your belly. So that when you go in a place where Indians have lived you smell them gone and all the empty pain killer bottles and the flies that buzz do not kill the sweetgrass smell, the smoke smell and that other like a fresh cased marten skin. Nor any jokes about them nor old squaws take that away. Nor the sick sweet smell they get to have. Nor what they did finally. It wasn’t how they ended. They all ended the same. Long time ago good. Now no good.

And about the other. When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first. He could thank his father for that.

“You might not like them,” Nick said to the boy. “But I think you would.”

“And my grandfather lived with them too when he was a boy, didn’t he?”

“Yes. When I asked him what they were like he said that he had many friends among them.”

“Will I ever live with them?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “That’s up to you.”

“How old will I be when I get a shotgun and can hunt by myself?”

“Twelve years old if I see you are careful.”

“‘I wish I was twelve now.”

“You will be, soon enough.”

“What was my grandfather like? I can’t remember him except that he gave me an air rifle and an American flag when I came over from France that time. What was he like?”

“He’s hard to describe. He was a great hunter and fisherman and he had wonderful eyes.”

“ ‘Was he greater than you?”

“He was a much better shot and his father was a great wing shot too.”

“I’ll bet he wasn’t better than you.”

“Oh, yes he was. He shot very quickly and beautifully. I’d rather see him shoot than any man I ever knew. He was always very disappointed in the way I shot.”

“Why do we never go to pray at the tomb of my grandfather?”

“We live in a different part of the country. It’s a long way from here.”

“In France that wouldn’t make any difference. In France we’d go. I think I ought to go to pray at the tomb of my grandfather.”

“Sometime we’ll go.”

“I hope we won’t live somewhere so that I can never go to pray at your tomb when you are dead.”

“We’ll have to arrange it.”

“Don’t you think we might all be buried at a convenient place? We could all be buried in France. That would be fine.”

“I don’t want to be buried in France,” Nick said.

“Well, then, we’ll have to get some convenient place in America. Couldn’t we all be buried out at the ranch?”

“That’s an idea.”

“Then I could stop and pray at the tomb of my grandfather on the way to the ranch.”

“You’re awfully practical.”

“Well, I don’t feel good never to have even visited the tomb of my grandfather.”

“We’ll have to go,” Nick said. “I can see we’ll have to go.”

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND THE FIRST FORTY-NINE STORIES

CONTENTS

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER

THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE

Please note: stories previously published do not appear in the list.

PREFACE.

THE FIRST FOUR stories are the last ones I have written. The others follow in the order in which they were originally published.

The first one I wrote was “Up in Michigan,” written in Paris in 1921. The last was “Old Man at the Bridge,” cabled from Barcelona in April of 1938.

Beside The Fifth Column, I wrote “The Killers,” “Today Is Friday,” “Ten Indians,” part of The Sun Also Rises and the first third of To Have and Have Not in Madrid. It was always a good place for working. So was Paris, and so were Key West, Florida, in the cool months; the ranch, near Cooke City, Montana; Kansas City; Chicago; Toronto, and Havana, Cuba.

Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.

There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope that you will find some that you like. Reading them over, the ones I liked the best, outside of those that have achieved some notoriety so that school teachers include them in story collections that their pupils have to buy in story courses, and you are always faintly embarrassed to read them and wonder whether you really wrote them or did you maybe hear them somewhere, are “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “In Another Country,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Way You’ll Never Be,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and a story called “The Light of the World” which nobody else ever liked. There are some others too. Because if you did not like them you would not publish them.

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Now it is necessary to get to the grindstone again. I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories. I know some pretty good ones.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY 1938

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER

IT was now lunch time and they were all sitting under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had happened.

“Will you have lime juice or lemon squash?” Macomber asked.

“I’ll have a gimlet,” Robert Wilson told him.

“I’ll have a gimlet too. I need something,” Macomber’s wife said.

“I suppose it’s the thing to do,” Macomber agreed. “Tell him to make three gimlets.”

The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents.

“What had I ought to give them?” Macomber asked.

“A quid would be plenty,” Wilson told him. “You don’t want to spoil them.”

“Will the headman distribute it?”

“Absolutely.”

Francis Macomber had, half an hour before, been carried to his tent from the edge of the camp in triumph on the arms and shoulders of the cook, the personal boys, the skinner and the porters. The gun-bearers had taken no part in the demonstration. When the native boys put him down at the door of his tent, he had shaken all their hands, received their congratulations, and then gone into the tent and sat on the bed until his wife came in. She did not speak to him when she came in and he left the tent at once to wash his face and hands in the portable wash basin outside and go over to the dining tent to sit in a comfortable canvas chair in the breeze and the shade.

“You’ve got your lion,” Robert Wilson said to him, “and a damned fine one too.”

Mrs. Macomber looked at Wilson quickly. She was an extremely handsome and well-kept woman of the beauty and social position which had, five years before, commanded five thousand dollars as the price of endorsing, with photographs, a beauty product which she had never used. She had been married to Francis Macomber for eleven years.

“He is a good lion, isn’t he?” Macomber said. His wife looked at him now. She looked at both these men as though she had never seen them before.

One, Wilson, the white hunter, she knew she had never truly seen before. He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the corners that grooved merrily when he smiled. He smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole.

“Well, here’s to the lion,” Robert Wilson said. He smiled at her again and, not smiling, she looked curiously at her husband.

Francis Macomber was very tall, very well built if you did not mind that length of bone, dark, his hair cropped like an oarsman, rather thin-lipped, and was considered handsome. He was dressed in the same sort of safari clothes that Wilson wore except that his were new, he was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big-game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward.

“Here’s to the lion,” he said. “I can’t ever thank you for what you did.”

Margaret, his wife, looked away from him and back to Wilson.

“Let’s not talk about the lion,” she said.

Wilson looked over at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.

“It’s been a very strange day,” she said. “Hadn’t you ought to put your hat on even under the canvas at noon? You told me that, you know.”

“Might put it on,” said Wilson.

“You know you have a very red face, Mr. Wilson,” she told him and smiled again.

“Drink,” said Wilson.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Francis drinks a great deal, but his face is never red.”

“It’s red today,” Macomber tried a joke.

“No,” said Margaret. “It’s mine that’s red today. But Mr. Wilson’s is always red.”

“Must be racial,” said Wilson. “I say, you wouldn’t like to drop my beauty as a topic, would you?”

“I’ve just started on it.”

“Let’s chuck it,” said Wilson.

“Conversation is going to be so difficult,” Margaret said.

“Don’t be silly, Margot,” her husband said.

“No difficulty,” Wilson said. “Got a damn fine lion.”

Margot looked at them both and they both saw that she was going to cry. Wilson had seen it coming for a long time and he dreaded it. Macomber was past dreading it.

“I wish it hadn’t happened. Oh, I wish it hadn’t happened,” she said and started for her tent. She made no noise of crying but they could see that her shoulders were shaking under the rose-colored, sun-proofed shirt she wore.

“Women upset,” said Wilson to the tall man. “Amounts to nothing. Strain on the nerves and one thing’n another.”

“No,” said Macomber. “I suppose that I rate that for the rest of my life now.”

“Nonsense. Let’s have a spot of the giant killer,” said Wilson. “Forget the whole thing. Nothing to it anyway.”

“We might try,” said Macomber. “I won’t forget what you did for me though.”

“Nothing,” said Wilson. “All nonsense.”

So they sat there in the shade where the camp was pitched under some wide-topped acacia trees with a boulder-strewn cliff behind them, and a stretch of grass that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream in front with forest beyond it, and drank their just-cool lime drinks and avoided one another’s eyes while the boys set the table for lunch. Wilson could tell that the boys all knew about it now and when he saw Macomber’s personal boy looking curiously at his master while he was putting dishes on the table he snapped at him in Swahili. The boy turned away with his face blank.

“What were you telling him?” Macomber asked.

“Nothing. Told him to look alive or I’d see he got about fifteen of the best.”

“What’s that? Lashes?”

“It’s quite illegal,” Wilson said. “You’re supposed to fine them.”

“Do you still have them whipped?”

“Oh, yes. They could raise a row if they chose to complain. But they don’t. They prefer it to the fines.”

“How strange!” said Macomber.

“Not strange, really,” Wilson said. “Which would you rather do? Take a good birching or lose your pay?”

Then he felt embarrassed at asking it and before Macomber could answer he went on, “We all take a beating every day, you know, one way or another.”

This was no better. “Good God,” he thought. “I am a diplomat, aren’t I?”

“Yes, we take a beating,” said Macomber, still not looking at him. “I’m awfully sorry about that lion business. It doesn’t have to go any further, does it? I mean no one will hear about it, will they?”

“You mean will I tell it at the Mathaiga Club?” Wilson looked at him now coldly. He had not expected this. So he’s a bloody four-letter man as well as a bloody coward, he thought. I rather liked him too until today. But how is one to know about an American?

“No,” said Wilson. “I’m a professional hunter. We never talk about our clients. You can be quite easy on that. It’s supposed to be bad form to ask us not to talk though.”

He had decided now that to break would be much easier. He would eat, then, by himself and could read a book with his meals. They would eat by themselves. He would see them through the safari on a very formal basis — what was it the French called it? Distinguished consideration — and it would be a damn sight easier than having to go through this emotional trash. He’d insult him and make a good clean break. Then he could read a book with his meals and he’d still be drinking their whisky. That was the phrase for it when a safari went bad. You ran into another white hunter and you asked, “How is everything going?” and he answered, “Oh, I’m still drinking their whisky,” and you knew everything had gone to pot.

“I’m sorry,” Macomber said and looked at him with his American face that would stay adolescent until it became middle-aged, and Wilson noted his crew-cropped hair, fine eyes only faintly shifty, good nose, thin lips and handsome jaw. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that. There are lots of things I don’t know.”

So what could he do, Wilson thought. He was all ready to break it off quickly and neatly and here the beggar was apologizing after he had just insulted him. He made one more attempt. “Don’t worry about me talking,” he said. “I have a living to make. You know in Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.”

“I bolted like a rabbit,” Macomber said.

Now what in hell were you going to do about a man who talked like that, Wilson wondered.

Wilson looked at Macomber with his flat, blue, machine-gunner’s eyes and the other smiled back at him. He had a pleasant smile if you did not notice how his eyes showed when he was hurt.

“Maybe I can fix it up on buffalo,” he said. “We’re after them next, aren’t we?”

“In the morning if you like,” Wilson told him. Perhaps he had been wrong. This was certainly the way to take it. You most certainly could not tell a damned thing about an American. He was all for Macomber again. If you could forget the morning. But, of course, you couldn’t. The morning had been about as bad as they come.

“Here comes the Memsahib,” he said. She was walking over from her tent looking refreshed and cheerful and quite lovely. She had a very perfect oval face, so perfect that you expected her to be stupid. But she wasn’t stupid, Wilson thought, no, not stupid.

“How is the beautiful red-faced Mr. Wilson? Are you feeling better, Francis, my pearl?”

“Oh, much,” said Macomber.

“I’ve dropped the whole thing,” she said, sitting down at the table. “What importance is there to whether Francis is any good at killing lions? That’s not his trade. That’s Mr. Wilson’s trade. Mr. Wilson is really very impressive killing anything. You do kill anything, don’t you?”

“Oh, anything,” said Wilson. “Simply anything.” They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can’t know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

“We’re going after buff in the morning,” he told her.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Oh, yes, I am. Mayn’t I, Francis?”

“Why not stay in camp?”

“Not for anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss something like today for anything.”

When she left, Wilson was thinking, when she went off to cry, she seemed a hell of a fine woman. She seemed to understand, to realize, to be hurt for him and for herself and to know how things really stood. She is away for twenty minutes and now she is back, simply enamelled in that American female cruelty. They are the damnedest women. Really the damnedest.

“We’ll put on another show for you tomorrow,” Francis Macomber said.

“You’re not coming,” Wilson said.

“You’re very mistaken,” she told him. “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.”

“Here’s the lunch,” said Wilson. “You’re very merry, aren’t you?”

“Why not? I didn’t come out here to be dull.”

“Well, it hasn’t been dull,” Wilson said. He could see the boulders in the river and the high bank beyond with the trees and he remembered the morning.

“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s been charming. And tomorrow. You don’t know how I look forward to tomorrow.”

“That’s eland he’s offering you,” Wilson said.

“They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they?”

“I suppose that describes them,” Wilson said.

“It’s very good meat,” Macomber said.

“Did you shoot it, Francis?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“They’re not dangerous, are they?”

“Only if they fall on you,” Wilson told her.

“I’m so glad.”

“Why not let up on the bitchery just a little, Margot,” Macomber said, cutting the eland steak and putting some mashed potato, gravy and carrot on the down-turned fork that tined through the piece of meat.

“I suppose I could,” she said, “since you put it so prettily.”

“Tonight we’ll have champagne for the lion,” Wilson said. “It’s a bit too hot at noon.”

“Oh, the lion,” Margot said. “I’d forgotten the lion!”

So, Robert Wilson thought to himself, she is giving him a ride, isn’t she? Or do you suppose that’s her idea of putting up a good show? How should a woman act when she discovers her husband is a bloody coward? She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism.

“Have some more eland,” he said to her politely.

That afternoon, late, Wilson and Macomber went out in the motor car with the native driver and the two gun-bearers. Mrs. Macomber stayed in the camp. It was too hot to go out, she said, and she was going with them in the early morning. As they drove off Wilson saw her standing under the big tree, looking pretty rather than beautiful in her faintly rosy khaki, her dark hair drawn back off her forehead and gathered in a knot low on her neck, her face as fresh, he thought, as though she were in England. She waved to them as the car went off through the swale of high grass and curved around through the trees into the small hills of orchard bush.

In the orchard bush they found a herd of impala, and leaving the car they stalked one old ram with long, wide-spread horns and Macomber killed it with a very creditable shot that knocked the buck down at a good two hundred yards and sent the herd off bounding wildly and leaping over one another’s backs in long, leg-drawn-up leaps as unbelievable and as floating as those one makes sometimes in dreams.

“That was a good shot,” Wilson said. “They’re a small target.”

“Is it a worth-while head?” Macomber asked.

“It’s excellent,” Wilson told him. “You shoot like that and you’ll have no trouble.”

“Do you think we’ll find buffalo tomorrow?”

“There’s a good chance of it. They feed out early in the morning and with luck we may catch them in the open.”

“I’d like to clear away that lion business,” Macomber said. “It’s not very pleasant to have your wife see you do something like that.”

I should think it would be even more unpleasant to do it, Wilson thought, wife or no wife, or to talk about it having done it. But he said, “I wouldn’t think about that any more. Any one could be upset by his first lion. That’s all over.”

But that night after dinner and a whisky and soda by the fire before going to bed, as Francis Macomber lay on his cot with the mosquito bar over him and listened to the night noises it was not all over. It was neither all over nor was it beginning. It was there exactly as it happened with some parts of it indelibly emphasized and he was miserably ashamed at it. But more than shame he felt cold, hollow fear in him. The fear was still there like a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick. It was still there with him now.

It had started the night before when he had wakened and heard the lion roaring somewhere up along the river. It was a deep sound and at the end there were sort of coughing grunts that made him seem just outside the tent, and when Francis Macomber woke in the night to hear it he was afraid. He could hear his wife breathing quietly, asleep. There was no one to tell he was afraid, nor to be afraid with him, and, lying alone, he did not know the Somali proverb that says a brave man is always frightened three times by a lion; when he first sees his track, when he first hears him roar and when he first confronts him. Then while they were eating breakfast by lantern light out in the dining tent, before the sun was up, the lion roared again and Francis thought he was just at the edge of camp.

“Sounds like an old-timer,” Robert Wilson said, looking up from his kippers and coffee. “Listen to him cough.”

“Is he very close?”

“A mile or so up the stream.”

“Will we see him?”

“We’ll have a look.”

“Does his roaring carry that far? It sounds as though he were right in camp.”

“Carries a hell of a long way,” said Robert Wilson. “It’s strange the way it carries. Hope he’s a shootable cat. The boys said there was a very big one about here.”

“If I get a shot, where should I hit him,” Macomber asked, “to stop him?”

“In the shoulders,” Wilson said. “In the neck if you can make it. Shoot for bone. Break him down.”

“I hope I can place it properly,” Macomber said.

“You shoot very well,” Wilson told him. “Take your time. Make sure of him. The first one in is the one that counts.”

“What range will it be?”

“Can’t tell. Lion has something to say about that. Don’t shoot unless it’s close enough so you can make sure.”

“At under a hundred yards?” Macomber asked.

Wilson looked at him quickly.

“Hundred’s about right. Might have to take him a bit under. Shouldn’t chance a shot at much over that. A hundred’s a decent range. You can hit him wherever you want at that. Here comes the Memsahib.”

“Good morning,” she said. “Are we going after that lion?”

“As soon as you deal with your breakfast,” Wilson said. “How are you feeling?”

“Marvellous,” she said. “I’m very excited.”

“I’ll just go and see that everything is ready.” Wilson went off. As he left the lion roared again.

“Noisy beggar,” Wilson said. “We’ll put a stop to that.”

“What’s the matter, Francis?” his wife asked him.

“Nothing,” Macomber said.

“Yes, there is,” she said. “What are you upset about?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Tell me,” she looked at him. “Don’t you feel well?”

“It’s that damned roaring,” he said. “It’s been going on all night, you know.”

“Why didn’t you wake me,” she said. “I’d love to have heard it.”

“I’ve got to kill the damned thing,” Macomber said, miserably.

“Well, that’s what you’re out here for, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But I’m nervous. Hearing the thing roar gets on my nerves.”

“Well then, as Wilson said, kill him and stop his roaring.”

“Yes, darling,” said Francis Macomber. “It sounds easy, doesn’t it?”

“You’re not afraid, are you?”

“Of course not. But I’m nervous from hearing him roar all night.”

“You’ll kill him marvellously,” she said. “I know you will. I’m awfully anxious to see it.”

“Finish your breakfast and we’ll be starting.”

“It’s not light yet,” she said. “This is a ridiculous hour.”

Just then the lion roared in a deep-chested moaning, suddenly guttural, ascending vibration that seemed to shake the air and ended in a sigh and a heavy, deep-chested grunt.

“He sounds almost here,” Macomber’s wife said.

“My God,” said Macomber. “I hate that damned noise.”

“It’s very impressive.”

“Impressive. It’s frightful.”

Robert Wilson came up then carrying his short, ugly, shockingly bigbored .505 Gibbs and grinning.

“Come on,” he said. “Your gun-bearer has your Springfield and the big gun. Everything’s in the car. Have you solids?”

“Yes.”

“I’m ready,” Mrs. Macomber said.

“Must make him stop that racket,” Wilson said. “You get in front. The Memsahib can sit back here with me.”

They climbed into the motor car and, in the gray first daylight, moved off up the river through the trees. Macomber opened the breech of his rifle and saw he had metal-cased bullets, shut the bolt and put the rifle on safety. He saw his hand was trembling. He felt in his pocket for more cartridges and moved his fingers over the cartridges in the loops of his tunic front. He turned back to where Wilson sat in the rear seat of the doorless, box-bodied motor car beside his wife, them both grinning with excitement, and Wilson leaned forward and whispered,

“See the birds dropping. Means the old boy has left his kill.”

On the far bank of the stream Macomber could see, above the trees, vultures circling and plummeting down.

“Chances are he’ll come to drink along here,” Wilson whispered. “Before he goes to lay up. Keep an eye out.”

They were driving slowly along the high bank of the stream which here cut deeply to its boulder-filled bed, and they wound in and out through big trees as they drove. Macomber was watching the opposite bank when he felt Wilson take hold of his arm. The car stopped.

“There he is,” he heard the whisper. “Ahead and to the right. Get out and take him. He’s a marvellous lion.”

Macomber saw the lion now. He was standing almost broadside, his great head up and turned toward them. The early morning breeze that blew toward them was just stirring his dark mane, and the lion looked huge, silhouetted on the rise of bank in the gray morning light, his shoulders heavy, his barrel of a body bulking smoothly.

“How far is he?” asked Macomber, raising his rifle.

“About seventy-five. Get out and take him.”

“Why not shoot from where I am?”

“You don’t shoot them from cars,” he heard Wilson saying in his ear. “Get out. He’s not going to stay there all day.”

Macomber stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat, onto the step and down onto the ground. The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some super-rhino. There was no man smell carried toward him and he watched the object, moving his great head a little from side to side. Then watching the object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover of the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach. He trotted, heavy, bigfooted, swinging wounded full-bellied, through the trees toward the tall grass and cover, and the crash came again to go past him ripping the air apart. Then it crashed again and he felt the blow as it hit his lower ribs and ripped on through, blood sudden hot and frothy in his mouth, and he galloped toward the high grass where he could crouch and not be seen and make them bring the crashing thing close enough so he could make a rush and get the man that held it.

Macomber had not thought how the lion felt as he got out of the car. He only knew his hands were shaking and as he walked away from the car it was almost impossible for him to make his legs move. They were stiff in the thighs, but he could feel the muscles fluttering. He raised the rifle, sighted on the junction of the lion’s head and shoulders and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened though he pulled until he thought his finger would break. Then he knew he had the safety on and as he lowered the rifle to move the safety over he moved another frozen pace forward, and the lion seeing his silhouette flow clear of the silhouette of the car, turned and started off at a trot, and, as Macomber fired, he heard a whunk that meant that the bullet was home; but the lion kept on going. Macomber shot again and every one saw the bullet throw a spout of dirt beyond the trotting lion. He shot again, remembering to lower his aim, and they all heard the bullet hit, and the lion went into a gallop and was in the tall grass before he had the bolt pushed forward.

Macomber stood there feeling sick at his stomach, his hands that held the Springfield still cocked, shaking, and his wife and Robert Wilson were standing by him. Beside him too were the two gun-bearers chattering in Wakamba.

“I hit him,” Macomber said. “I hit him twice.”

“You gut-shot him and you hit him somewhere forward,” Wilson said without enthusiasm. The gun-bearers looked very grave. They were silent now.

“You may have killed him,” Wilson went on. “We’ll have to wait a while before we go in to find out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let him get sick before we follow him up.”

“Oh,” said Macomber.

“He’s a hell of a fine lion,” Wilson said cheerfully. “He’s gotten into a bad place though.”

“Why is it bad?”

“Can’t see him until you’re on him.”

“Oh,” said Macomber.

“Come on,” said Wilson. “The Memsahib can stay here in the car. We’ll go to have a look at the blood spoor.”

“Stay here, Margot,” Macomber said to his wife. His mouth was very dry and it was hard for him to talk.

“Why?” she asked.

“Wilson says to.”

“We’re going to have a look,” Wilson said. “You stay here. You can see even better from here.”

“All right.”

Wilson spoke in Swahili to the driver. He nodded and said, “Yes, Bwana.”

Then they went down the steep bank and across the stream, climbing over and around the boulders and up the other bank, pulling up by some projecting roots, and along it until they found where the lion had been trotting when Macomber first shot. There was dark blood on the short grass that the gun-bearers pointed out with grass stems, and that ran away behind the river bank trees.

“What do we do?” asked Macomber.

“Not much choice,” said Wilson. “We can’t bring the car over. Bank’s too steep. We’ll let him stiffen up a bit and then you and I’ll go in and have a look for him.”

“Can’t we set the grass on fire?” Macomber asked.

“Too green.”

“Can’t we send beaters?”

Wilson looked at him appraisingly. “Of course we can,” he said. “But it’s just a touch murderous. You see, we know the lion’s wounded. You can drive an unwounded lion — he’ll move on ahead of a noise — but a wounded lion’s going to charge. You can’t see him until you’re right on him. He’ll make himself perfectly flat in cover you wouldn’t think would hide a hare. You can’t very well send boys in there to that sort of a show. Somebody bound to get mauled.”

“What about the gun-bearers?”

“Oh, they’ll go with us. It’s their shauri. You see, they signed on for it. They don’t look too happy though, do they?”

“I don’t want to go in there,” said Macomber. It was out before he knew he’d said it.

“Neither do I,” said Wilson very cheerily. “Really no choice though.” Then, as an afterthought, he glanced at Macomber and saw suddenly how he was trembling and the pitiful look on his face.

“You don’t have to go in, of course,” he said. “That’s what I’m hired for, you know. That’s why I’m so expensive.”

“You mean you’d go in by yourself? Why not leave him there?”

Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful.

“What do you mean?”

“Why not just leave him?”

“You mean pretend to ourselves he hasn’t been hit?”

“No. Just drop it.”

“It isn’t done.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, he’s certain to be suffering. For another, some one else might run onto him.”

“I see.”

“But you don’t have to have anything to do with it.”

“I’d like to,” Macomber said. “I’m just scared, you know.”

“I’ll go ahead when we go in,” Wilson said, “with Kongoni tracking. You keep behind me and a little to one side. Chances are we’ll hear him growl. If we see him we’ll both shoot. Don’t worry about anything. I’ll keep you backed up. As a matter of fact, you know, perhaps you’d better not go. It might be much better. Why don’t you go over and join the Memsahib while I just get it over with?”

“No, I want to go.”

“All right,” said Wilson. “But don’t go in if you don’t want to. This is my shauri now, you know.”

“I want to go,” said Macomber.

They sat under a tree and smoked.

“Want to go back and speak to the Memsahib while we’re waiting?” Wilson asked.

“No.”

“I’ll just step back and tell her to be patient.”

“Good,” said Macomber. He sat there, sweating under his arms, his mouth dry, his stomach hollow feeling, wanting to find courage to tell Wilson to go on and finish off the lion without him. He could not know that Wilson was furious because he had not noticed the state he was in earlier and sent him back to his wife. While he sat there Wilson came up. “I have your big gun,” he said. “Take it. We’ve given him time, I think. Come on.”

Macomber took the big gun and Wilson said:

“Keep behind me and about five yards to the right and do exactly as I tell you.” Then he spoke in Swahili to the two gun-bearers who looked the picture of gloom.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Could I have a drink of water?” Macomber asked. Wilson spoke to the older gun-bearer, who wore a canteen on his belt, and the man unbuckled it, unscrewed the top and handed it to Macomber, who took it noticing how heavy it seemed and how hairy and shoddy the felt covering was in his hand. He raised it to drink and looked ahead at the high grass with the flat-topped trees behind it. A breeze was blowing toward them and the grass rippled gently in the wind. He looked at the gun-bearer and he could see the gun-bearer was suffering too with fear.

Thirty-five yards into the grass the big lion lay flattened out along the ground. His ears were back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his long, black-tufted tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this cover and he was sick with the wound through his full belly, and weakening with the wound through his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little openings the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as he breathed, and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush. He could hear the men talking and he waited, gathering all of himself into this preparation for a charge as soon as the men would come into the grass. As he heard their voices his tail stiffened to twitch up and down, and, as they came into the edge of the grass, he made a coughing grunt and charged.

Kongoni, the old gun-bearer, in the lead watching the blood spoor, Wilson watching the grass for any movement, his big gun ready, the second gun-bearer looking ahead and listening, Macomber close to Wilson, his rifle cocked, they had just moved into the grass when Macomber heard the blood-choked coughing grunt, and saw the swishing rush in the grass. The next thing he knew he was running; running wildly, in panic in the open, running toward the stream.

He heard the ca-ra-wong! of Wilson’s big rifle, and again in a second crashing carawong! and turning saw the lion, horrible-looking now, with half his head seeming to be gone, crawling toward Wilson in the edge of the tall grass while the red-faced man worked the bolt on the short ugly rifle and aimed carefully as another blasting carawong! came from the muzzle, and the crawling, heavy, yellow bulk of the lion stiffened and the huge, mutilated head slid forward and Macomber, standing by himself in the clearing where he had run, holding a loaded rifle, while two black men and a white man looked back at him in contempt, knew the lion was dead. He came toward Wilson, his tallness all seeming a naked reproach, and Wilson looked at him and said:

“Want to take pictures?”

“No,” he said.

That was all any one had said until they reached the motor car. Then Wilson had said:

“Hell of a fine lion. Boys will skin him out. We might as well stay here in the shade.”

Macomber’s wife had not looked at him nor he at her and he had sat by her in the back seat with Wilson sitting in the front seat. Once he had reached over and taken his wife’s hand without looking at her and she had removed her hand from his. Looking across the stream to where the gun-bearers were skinning out the lion he could see that she had been able to see the whole thing. While they sat there his wife had reached forward and put her hand on Wilson’s shoulder. He turned and she had leaned forward over the low seat and kissed him on the mouth.

“Oh, I say,” said Wilson, going redder than his natural baked color.

“Mr. Robert Wilson,” she said. “The beautiful red-faced Mr. Robert Wilson.”

Then she sat down beside Macomber again and looked away across the stream to where the lion lay, with uplifted, white-muscled, tendon-marked naked forearms, and white bloating belly, as the black men fleshed away the skin. Finally the gun-bearers brought the skin over, wet and heavy, and climbed in behind with it, rolling it up before they got in, and the motor car started. No one had said anything more until they were back in camp.

That was the story of the lion. Macomber did not know how the lion had felt before he started his rush, nor during it when the unbelievable smash of the .505 with a muzzle velocity of two tons had hit him in the mouth, nor what kept him coming after that, when the second ripping crash had smashed his hind quarters and he had come crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him. Wilson knew something about it and only expressed it by saying, “Damned fine lion,” but Macomber did not know how Wilson felt about things either. He did not know how his wife felt except that she was through with him.

His wife had been through with him before but it never lasted. He was very wealthy, and would be much wealthier, and he knew she would not leave him ever now. That was one of the few things that he really knew. He knew about that, about motor cycles — that was earliest — about motor cars, about duck-shooting, about fishing, trout, salmon and big-sea, about sex in books, many books, too many books, about all court games, about dogs, not much about horses, about hanging on to his money, about most of the other things his world dealt in, and about his wife not leaving him. His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa, but she was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it. She had missed the chance to leave him and he knew it. If he had been better with women she would probably have started to worry about him getting another new, beautiful wife; but she knew too much about him to worry about him either. Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.

All in all they were known as a comparatively happily married couple, one of those whose disruption is often rumored but never occurs, and as the society columnist put it, they were adding more than a spice of adventure to their much envied and ever-enduring Romance by a Safari in what was known as Darkest Africa until the Martin Johnsons lighted it on so many silver screens where they were pursuing Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the elephant and as well collecting specimens for the Museum of Natural History. This same columnist had reported them on the verge at least three times in the past and they had been. But they always made it up. They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.

It was now about three o’clock in the morning and Francis Macomber, who had been asleep a little while after he had stopped thinking about the lion, wakened and then slept again, woke suddenly, frightened in a dream of the bloody-headed lion standing over him, and listening while his heart pounded, he realized that his wife was not in the other cot in the tent. He lay awake with that knowledge for two hours.

At the end of that time his wife came into the tent, lifted her mosquito bar and crawled cozily into bed.

“Where have you been?” Macomber asked in the darkness.

“Hello,” she said. “Are you awake?”

“Where have you been?”

“I just went out to get a breath of air.”

“You did, like hell.”

“What do you want me to say, darling?”

“Where have you been?”

“Out to get a breath of air.”

“That’s a new name for it. You are a bitch.”

“Well, you’re a coward.”

“All right,” he said. “What of it?”

“Nothing as far as I’m concerned. But please let’s not talk, darling, because I’m very sleepy.”

“You think that I’ll take anything.”

“I know you will, sweet.”

“Well, I won’t.”

“Please, darling, let’s not talk. I’m so very sleepy.”

“There wasn’t going to be any of that. You promised there wouldn’t be.”

“Well, there is now,” she said sweetly.

“You said if we made this trip that there would be none of that. You promised.”

“Yes, darling. That’s the way I meant it to be. But the trip was spoiled yesterday. We don’t have to talk about it, do we?”

“You don’t wait long when you have an advantage, do you?”

“Please let’s not talk. I’m so sleepy, darling.”

“I’m going to talk.”

“Don’t mind me then, because I’m going to sleep.” And she did.

At breakfast they were all three at the table before daylight and Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most.

“Sleep well?” Wilson asked in his throaty voice, filling a pipe.

“Did you?”

“Topping,” the white hunter told him.

You bastard, thought MaComber, you insolent bastard.

So she woke him when she came in, Wilson thought, looking at them both with his flat, cold eyes. Well, why doesn’t he keep his wife where she belongs? What does he think I am, a bloody plaster saint? Let him keep her where she belongs. It’s his own fault.

“Do you think we’ll find buffalo?” Margot asked, pushing away a dish of apricots.

“Chance of it,” Wilson said and smiled at her. “Why don’t you stay in camp?”

“Not for anything,” she told him.

“Why not order her to stay in camp?” Wilson said to Macomber.

“You order her,” said Macomber coldly.

“Let’s not have any ordering, nor,” turning to Macomber, “any silliness, Francis,” Margot said quite pleasantly.

“Are you ready to start?” Macomber asked.

“Any time,” Wilson told him. “Do you want the Memsahib to go?”

“Does it make any difference whether I do or not?”

The hell with it, thought Robert Wilson. The utter complete hell with it. So this is what it’s going to be like. Well, this is what it’s going to be like, then.

“Makes no difference,” he said.

“You’re sure you wouldn’t like to stay in camp with her yourself and let me go out and hunt the buffalo?” Macomber asked.

“Can’t do that,” said Wilson. “Wouldn’t talk rot if I were you.”

“I’m not talking rot. I’m disgusted.”

“Bad word, disgusted.”

“Francis, will you please try to speak sensibly,” his wife said.

“I speak too damned sensibly,” Macomber said. “Did you ever eat such filthy food?”

“Something wrong with the food?” asked Wilson quietly.

“No more than with everything else.”

“I’d pull yourself together, laddybuck,” Wilson said very quietly. “There’s a boy waits at table that understands a little English.”

“The hell with him.”

Wilson stood up and puffing on his pipe strolled away, speaking a few words in Swahili to one of the gun-bearers who was standing waiting for him. Macomber and his wife sat on at the table. He was staring at his coffee cup.

“If you make a scene I’ll leave you, darling,” Margot said quietly.

“No, you won’t.”

“You can try it and see.”

“You won’t leave me.”

“No,” she said. “I won’t leave you and you’ll behave your self.”

“Behave myself? That’s a way to talk. Behave myself.”

“Yes. Behave yourself.”

“Why don’t you try behaving?”

“I’ve tried it so long. So very long.”

“I hate that red-faced swine,” Macomber said. “I loathe the sight of him.”

“He’s really very nice.”

“Oh, shut up,” Macomber almost shouted. Just then the car came up and stopped in front of the dining tent and the driver and the two gunbearers got out. Wilson walked over and looked at the husband and wife sitting there at the table.

“Going shooting?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Macomber, standing up. “Yes.”

“Better bring a woolly. It will be cool in the car,” Wilson said.

“I’ll get my leather jacket,” Margot said.

“The boy has it,” Wilson told her. He climbed into the front with the driver and Francis Macomber and his wife sat, not speaking, in the back seat.

Hope the silly beggar doesn’t take a notion to blow the back of my head off, Wilson thought to himself. Women are a nuisance on safari.

The car was grinding down to cross the river at a pebbly ford in the gray daylight and then climbed, angling up the steep bank, where Wilson had ordered a way shovelled out the day before so they could reach the parklike wooded rolling country on the far side.

It was a good morning, Wilson thought. There was a heavy dew and as the wheels went through the grass and low bushes he could smell the odor of the crushed fronds. It was an odor like verbena and he liked this early morning smell of the dew, the crushed bracken and the look of the tree trunks showing black through the early morning mist, as the car made its way through the untracked, parklike country. He had put the two in the back seat out of his mind now and was thinking about buffalo. The buffalo that he was after stayed in the daytime in a thick swamp where it was impossible to get a shot, but in the night they fed out into an open stretch of country and if he could come between them and their swamp with the car, Macomber would have a good chance at them in the open. He did not want to hunt buff with Macomber in thick cover. He did not want to hunt buff or anything else with Macomber at all, but he was a professional hunter and he had hunted with some rare ones in his time. If they got buff today there would only be rhino to come and the poor man would have gone through his dangerous game and things might pick up. He’d have nothing more to do with the woman and Macomber would get over that too. He must have gone through plenty of that before by the look of things. Poor beggar. He must have a way of getting over it. Well, it was the poor sod’s own bloody fault.

He, Robert Wilson, carried a double size cot on safari to accommodate any windfalls he might receive. He had hunted for a certain clientele, the international, fast, sporting set, where the women did not feel they were getting their money’s worth unless they had shared that cot with the white hunter. He despised them when he was away from them although he liked some of them well enough at the time, but he made his living by them; and their standards were his standards as long as they were hiring him.

They were his standards in all except the shooting. He had his own standards about the killing and they could live up to them or get some one else to hunt them. He knew, too, that they all respected him for this. This Macomber was an odd one though. Damned if he wasn’t. Now the wife. Well, the wife. Yes, the wife. Hm, the wife. Well he’d dropped all that. He looked around at them. Macomber sat grim and furious. Margot smiled at him. She looked younger today, more innocent and fresher and not so professionally beautiful. What’s in her heart God knows, Wilson thought. She hadn’t talked much last night. At that it was a pleasure to see her.

The motor car climbed up a slight rise and went on through the trees and then out into a grassy prairie-like opening and kept in the shelter of the trees along the edge, the driver going slowly and Wilson looking carefully out across the prairie and all along its far side. He stopped the car and studied the opening with his field glasses. Then he motioned to the driver to go on and the car moved slowly along, the driver avoiding warthog holes and driving around the mud castles ants had built. Then, looking across the opening, Wilson suddenly turned and said, “By God, there they are!”

And looking where he pointed, while the car jumped forward and Wilson spoke in rapid Swahili to the driver, Macomber saw three huge, black animals looking almost cylindrical in their long heaviness, like big black tank cars, moving at a gallop across the far edge of the open prairie. They moved at a stiff-necked, stiff bodied gallop and he could see the upswept wide black horns on their heads as they galloped heads out; the heads not moving.

“They’re three old bulls,” Wilson said. “We’ll cut them off before they get to the swamp.”

The car was going a wild forty-five miles an hour across the open and as Macomber watched, the buffalo got bigger and bigger until he could see the gray, hairless, scabby look of one huge bull and how his neck was a part of his shoulders and the shiny black of his horns as he galloped a little behind the others that were strung out in that steady plunging gait; and then, the car swaying as though it had just jumped a road, they drew up close and he could see the plunging hugeness of the bull, and the dust in his sparsely haired hide, the wide boss of horn and his outstretched, wide-nostrilled muzzle, and he was raising his rifle when Wilson shouted, “Not from the car, you fool!” and he had no fear, only hatred of Wilson, while the brakes clamped on and the car skidded, plowing sideways to an almost stop and Wilson was out on one side and he on the other, stumbling as his feet hit the still speeding-by of the earth, and then he was shooting at the bull as he moved away, hearing the bullets whunk into him, emptying his rifle at him as he moved steadily away, finally remembering to get his shots forward into the shoulder, and as he fumbled to re-load, he saw the bull was down. Down on his knees, his big head tossing, and seeing the other two still galloping he shot at the leader and hit him. He shot again and missed and he heard the carawonging roar as Wilson shot and saw the leading bull slide forward onto his nose.

“Get that other,” Wilson said. “Now you’re shooting!”

But the other bull was moving steadily at the same gallop and he missed, throwing a spout of dirt, and Wilson missed and the dust rose in a cloud and Wilson shouted, “Come on. He’s too far!” and grabbed his arm and they were in the car again, Macomber and Wilson hanging on the sides and rocketing swayingly over the uneven ground, drawing up on the steady, plunging, heavy-necked, straight-moving gallop of the bull.

They were behind him and Macomber was filling his rifle, dropping shells onto the ground, jamming it, clearing the jam, then they were almost up with the bull when Wilson yelled “Stop,” and the car skidded so that it almost swung over and Macomber fell forward onto his feet, slammed his bolt forward and fired as far forward as he could aim into the galloping, rounded black back, aimed and shot again, then again, then again, and the bullets, all of them hitting, had no effect on the buffalo that he could see. Then Wilson shot, the roar deafening him, and he could see the bull stagger. Macomber shot again, aiming carefully, and down he came, onto his knees.

“All right,” Wilson said. “Nice work. That’s the three.”

Macomber felt a drunken elation.

“How many times did you shoot?” he asked.

“Just three,” Wilson said. “You killed the first bull. The biggest one. I helped you finish the other two. Afraid they might have got into cover. You had them killed. I was just mopping up a little. You shot damn well.”

“Let’s go to the car,” said Macomber. “I want a drink.”

“Got to finish off that buff first,” Wilson told him. The buffalo was on his knees and he jerked his head furiously and bellowed in pig-eyed, roaring rage as they came toward him.

“Watch he doesn’t get up,” Wilson said. Then, “Get a little broadside and take him in the neck just behind the ear.”

Macomber aimed carefully at the center of the huge, jerking, rage-driven neck and shot. At the shot the head dropped forward.

“That does it,” said Wilson. “Got the spine. They’re a hell of a looking thing, aren’t they?”

“Let’s get the drink,” said Macomber. In his life he had never felt so good.

In the car Macomber’s wife sat very white-faced. “You were marvellous, darling,” she said to Macomber. “What a ride.”

“Was it rough?” Wilson asked.

“It was frightful. I’ve never been more frightened in my life.”

“Let’s all have a drink,” Macomber said.

“By all means,” said Wilson. “Give it to the Memsahib.” She drank the neat whisky from the flask and shuddered a little when she swallowed. She handed the flask to Macomber who handed it to Wilson.

“It was frightfully exciting,” she said. “It’s given me a dreadful headache. I didn’t know you were allowed to shoot them from cars though.

“No one shot from cars,” said Wilson coldly.

“I mean chase them from cars.”

“Wouldn’t ordinarily,” Wilson said. “Seemed sporting enough to me though while we were doing it. Taking more chance driving that way across the plain full of holes and one thing and another than hunting on foot. Buffalo could have charged us each time we shot if he liked. Gave him every chance. Wouldn’t mention it to any one though. It’s illegal if that’s what you mean.”

“It seemed very unfair to me,” Margot said, “chasing those big helpless things in a motor car.”

“Did it?” said Wilson.

“What would happen if they heard about it in Nairobi?”

“I’d lose my licence for one thing. Other unpleasantnesses,” Wilson said, taking a drink from the flask. “I’d be out of business.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Well,” said Macomber, and he smiled for the first time all day. “Now she has something on you.”

“You have such a pretty way of putting things, Francis,” Margot Macomber said. Wilson looked at them both. If a four-letter man marries a five-letter woman, he was thinking, what number of letters would their children be? What he said was, “We lost a gun-bearer. Did you notice it?”

“My God, no,” Macomber said.

“Here he comes,” Wilson said. “He’s all right. He must have fallen off when we left the first bull.”

Approaching them was the middle-aged gun-bearer, limping along in his knitted cap, khaki tunic, shorts and rubber sandals, gloomy-faced and disgusted looking. As he came up he called out to Wilson in Swahili and they all saw the change in the white hunter’s face.

“What does he say?” asked Margot.

“He says the first bull got up and went into the bush,” Wilson said with no expression in his voice.

“Oh,” said Macomber blankly.

“Then it’s going to be just like the lion,” said Margot, rull of anticipation.

“It’s not going to be a damned bit like the lion,” Wilson told her. “Did you want another drink, Macomber?”

“Thanks, yes,” Macomber said. He expected the feeling he had had about the lion to come back but it did not. For the first time in his life he really felt wholly without fear. Instead of fear he had a feeling of definite elation.

“We’ll go and have a look at the second bull,” Wilson said. “I’ll tell the driver to put the car in the shade.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Margaret Macomber.

“Take a look at the buff,” Wilson said.

“I’ll come.”

“Come along.”

The three of them walked over to where the second buffalo bulked blackly in the open, head forward on the grass, the massive horns swung wide.

“He’s a very good head,” Wilson said. “That’s close to a fifty-inch spread.”

Macomber was looking at him with delight.

“He’s hateful looking,” said Margot. “Can’t we go into the shade?”

“Of course,” Wilson said. “Look,” he said to Macomber, and pointed. “See that patch of bush?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where the first bull went in. The gun-bearer said when he fell off the bull was down. He was watching us helling along and the other two buff galloping. When he looked up there was the bull up and looking at him. Gun-bearer ran like hell and the bull went off slowly into that bush.”

“Can we go in after him now?” asked Macomber eagerly.

Wilson looked at him appraisingly. Damned if this isn’t a strange one, he thought. Yesterday he’s scared sick and today he’s a ruddy fire eater.

“No, we’ll give him a while.”

“Let’s please go into the shade,” Margot said. Her face was white and she looked ill.

They made their way to the car where it stood under a single, widespreading tree and all climbed in.

“Chances are he’s dead in there,” Wilson remarked. “After a little we’ll have a look.”

Macomber felt a wild unreasonable happiness that he had never known before.

“By God, that was a chase,” he said. “I’ve never felt any such feeling. Wasn’t it marvellous, Margot?”

“I hated it.”

“Why?”

“I hated it,” she said bitterly. “I loathed it.”

“You know I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again,” Macomber said to Wilson. “Something happened in me after we first saw the buff and started after him. Like a dam bursting. It was pure excitement.”

“Cleans out your liver,” said Wilson. “Damn funny things happen to people.”

Macomber’s face was shining. “You know something did happen to me,” he said. “I feel absolutely different.”

His wife said nothing and eyed him strangely. She was sitting far back in the seat and Macomber was sitting forward talking to Wilson who turned sideways talking over the back of the front seat.

“You know, I’d like to try another lion,” Macomber said. “I’m really not afraid of them now. After all, what can they do to you?”

“That’s it,” said Wilson. “Worst one can do is kill you. How does it go? Shakespeare. Damned good. See if I can remember. Oh, damned good. Used to quote it to myself at one time. Let’s see. ‘By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ Damned fine, eh?”

He was very embarrassed, having brought out this thing he had lived by, but he had seen men come of age before and it always moved him. It was not a matter of their twenty-first birthday.

It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without opportunity for worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber, but regardless of how it had happened it had most certainly happened. Look at the beggar now, Wilson thought. It’s that some of them stay little boys so long, Wilson thought. Sometimes all their lives. Their figures stay boyish when they’re fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow. Probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don’t know what started it. But over now. Hadn’t had time to be afraid with the buff. That and being angry too. Motor car too. Motor cars made it familiar. Be a damn fire eater now. He’d seen it in the war work the same way. More of a change than any loss of virginity. Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.

From the far corner of the seat Margaret Macomber looked at the two of them. There was no change in Wilson. She saw Wilson as she had seen him the day before when she had first realized what his great talent was. But she saw the change in Francis Macomber now.

“Do you have that feeling of happiness about what’s going to happen?” Macomber asked, still exploring his new wealth.

“You’re not supposed to mention it,” Wilson said, looking in the other’s face. “Much more fashionable to say you’re scared. Mind you, you’ll be scared too, plenty of times.”

“But you have a feeling of happiness about action to come?”

“Yes,” said Wilson. “There’s that. Doesn’t do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much.”

“You’re both talking rot,” said Margot. “Just because you’ve chased some helpless animals in a motor car you talk like heroes.”

“Sorry,” said Wilson. “I have been gassing too much.” She’s worried about it already, he thought.

“If you don’t know what we’re talking about why not keep out of it?” Macomber asked his wife.

“You’ve gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly,” his wife said contemptuously, but her contempt was not secure. She was very afraid of something.

Macomber laughed, a very natural hearty laugh. “You know I have,” he said. “I really have.”

“Isn’t it sort of late?” Margot said bitterly. Because she had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person’s fault.

“Not for me,” said Macomber.

Margot said nothing but sat back in the corner of the seat.

“Do you think we’ve given him time enough?” Macomber asked Wilson cheerfully.

“We might have a look,” Wilson said. “Have you any solids left?”

“The gun-bearer has some.”

Wilson called in Swahili and the older gun-bearer, who was skinning out one of the heads, straightened up, pulled a box of solids out of his pocket and brought them over to Macomber, who filled his magazine and put the remaining shells in his pocket.

“You might as well shoot the Springfield,” Wilson said. “You’re used to it. We’ll leave the Mannlicher in the car with the Memsahib. Your gunbearer can carry your heavy gun. I’ve this damned cannon. Now let me tell you about them.” He had saved this until the last because he did not want to worry Macomber. “When a buff comes he comes with his head high and thrust straight out. The boss of the horns covers any sort of a brain shot. The only shot is straight into the nose. The only other shot is into his chest or, if you’re to one side, into the neck or the shoulders. After they’ve been hit once they take a hell of a lot of killing. Don’t try anything fancy. Take the easiest shot there is. They’ve finished skinning out that head now. Should we get started?”

He called to the gun-bearers, who came up wiping their hands, and the older one got into the back.

“I’ll only take Kongoni,” Wilson said. “The other can watch to keep the birds away.”

As the car moved slowly across the open space toward the island of brushy trees that ran in a tongue of foliage along a dry water course that cut the open swale, Macomber felt his heart pounding and his mouth was dry again, but it was excitement, not fear.

“Here’s where he went in,” Wilson said. Then to the gun-bearer in Swahili, “Take the blood spoor.”

The car was parallel to the patch of bush. Macomber, Wilson and the gun-bearer got down. Macomber, looking back, saw his wife, with the rifle by her side, looking at him. He waved to her and she did not wave back.

The brush was very thick ahead and the ground was dry. The middle-aged gun-bearer was sweating heavily and Wilson had his hat down over his eyes and his red neck showed just ahead of Macomber. Suddenly the gun-bearer said something in Swahili to Wilson and ran forward.

“He’s dead in there,” Wilson said. “Good work,” and he turned to grip Macomber’s hand and as they shook hands, grinning at each other, the gun-bearer shouted wildly and they saw him coming out of the bush sideways, fast as a crab, and the bull coming, nose out, mouth tight closed, blood dripping, massive head straight out, coming in a charge, his little pig eyes bloodshot as he looked at them. Wilson, who was ahead, was kneeling shooting, and Macomber, as he fired, unhearing his shot in the roaring of Wilson’s gun, saw fragments like slate burst from the huge boss of the horns, and the head jerked, he shot again at the wide nostrils and saw the horns jolt again and fragments fly, and he did not see Wilson now and, aiming carefully, shot again with the buffalo’s huge bulk almost on him and his rifle almost level with the on-coming head, nose out, and he could see the little wicked eyes and the head started to lower and he felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.

Wilson had ducked to one side to get in a shoulder shot. Macomber had stood solid and shot for the nose, shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof, and Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and had hit her husband about two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull.

Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side and his wife knelt over him with Wilson beside her.

“I wouldn’t turn him over,” Wilson said.

The woman was crying hysterically.

“I’d get back in the car,” Wilson said. “Where’s the rifle?”

She shook her head, her face contorted. The gun-bearer picked up the rifle.

“Leave it as it is,” said Wilson. Then, “Go get Abdulla so that he may witness the manner of the accident.”

He knelt down, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and spread it over Francis Macomber’s crew-cropped head where it lay. The blood sank into the dry, loose earth.

Wilson stood up and saw the buffalo on his side, his legs out, his thinlyhaired belly crawling with ticks. “Hell of a good bull,” his brain registered automatically. “A good fifty inches, or better. Better.” He called to the driver and told him to spread a blanket over the body and stay by it. Then he walked over to the motor car where the woman sat crying in the corner.

“That was a pretty thing to do,” he said in a toneless voice. “He would have left you too.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Of course it’s an accident,” he said. “I know that.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There will be a certain amount of unpleasantness but I will have some photographs taken that will be very useful at the inquest. There’s the testimony of the gun-bearers and the driver too. You’re perfectly all right.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“There’s a hell of a lot to be done,” he said. “And I’ll have to send a truck off to the lake to wireless for a plane to take the three of us into Nairobi. Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.”

“Stop it. Stop it. Stop it,” the woman cried.

Wilson looked at her with his flat blue eyes.

“I’m through now,” he said. “I was a little angry. I’d begun to like your husband.”

“Oh, please stop it,” she said. “Please stop it.”

“That’s better,” Wilson said. “Please is much better. Now I’ll stop.”

THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

MADRID IS FULL OF BOYS NAMED PACO, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement. But this Paco, who waited on table at the Pension Luarca, had no father to forgive him, nor anything for the father to forgive. He had two older sisters who were chambermaids at the Luarca, who had gotten their place through coming from the same small village as a former Luarca chambermaid who had proven hardworking and honest and hence given her village and its products a good name; and these sisters had paid his way on the auto-bus to Madrid and gotten him his job as an apprentice waiter. He came from a village in a part of Extramadura where conditions were incredibly primitive, food scarce, and comforts unknown and he had worked hard ever since he could remember.

He was a well built boy with very black, rather curly hair, good teeth and a skin that his sisters envied, and he had a ready and unpuzzled smile. He was fast on his feet and did his work well and he loved his sisters, who seemed beautiful and sophisticated; he loved Madrid, which was still an unbelievable place, and he loved his work which, done under bright lights, with clean linen, the wearing of evening clothes, and abundant food in the kitchen, seemed romantically beautiful.

There were from eight to a dozen other people who lived at the Luarca and ate in the dining room but for Paco, the youngest of the three waiters who served at table, the only ones who really existed were the bullfighters.

Second-rate matadors lived at that pension because the address in the Calle San Jeronimo was good, the food was excellent and the room and board was cheap. It is necessary for a bull fighter to give the appearance, if not of prosperity, at least of respectability, since decorum and dignity rank above courage as the virtues most highly prized in Spain, and bullfighters stayed at the Luarca until their last pesetas were gone. There is no record of any bullfighter having left the Luarca for a better or more expensive hotel; second-rate bullfighters never became first rate; but the descent from the Luarca was swift since any one could stay there who was making anything at all and a bill was never presented to a guest unasked until the woman who ran the place knew that the case was hopeless.

At this time there were three full matadors living at the Luarca as well as two very good picadors, and one excellent banderillero. The Luarca was luxury for the picadors and the banderilleros who, with their families in Seville, required lodging in Madrid during the Spring season; but they were well paid and in the fixed employ of fighters who were heavily contracted during the coming season and the three of these subalterns would probably make much more apiece than any of the three matadors. Of the three matadors one was ill and trying to conceal it; one had passed his short vogue as a novelty; and the third was a coward.

The coward had at one time, until he had received a peculiarly atrocious horn wound in the lower abdomen at the start of his first season as a full matador, been exceptionally brave and remarkably skillful and he still had many of the hearty mannerisms of his days of success. He was jovial to excess and laughed constantly with and without provocation. He had, when successful, been very addicted to practical jokes but he had given them up now. They took an assurance that he did not feel. This matador had an intelligent, very open face and he carried himself with much style.

The matador who was ill was careful never to show it and was meticulous about eating a little of all the dishes that were presented at the table. He had a great many handkerchiefs which he laundered himself in his room and, lately, he had been selling his fighting suits. He had sold one, cheaply, before Christmas and another in the first week of April. They had been very expensive suits, had always been well kept and he had one more. Before he had become ill he had been a very promising, even a sensational, fighter and, while he himself could not read, he had clippings which said that in his debut in Madrid he had been better than Belmonte. He ate alone at a small table and looked up very little.

The matador who had once been a novelty was very short and brown and very dignified. He also ate alone at a separate table and he smiled very rarely and never laughed. He came from Valladolid, where the people are extremely serious, and he was a capable matador; but his style had become old-fashioned before he had ever succeeded in endearing himself to the public through his virtues, which were courage and a calm capability, and his name on a poster would draw no one to a bull ring. His novelty had been that he was so short that he could barely see over the bull’s withers, but there were other short fighters, and he had never succeeded in imposing himself on the public’s fancy.

Of the picadors one was a thin, hawk-faced, gray-haired man, lightly built but with legs and arms like iron, who always wore cattlemen’s boots under his trousers, drank too much every evening and gazed amorously at any woman in the pension. The other was huge, dark, brown-faced, good-looking, with black hair like an Indian and enormous hands. Both were great picadors although the first was reputed to have lost much of his ability through drink and dissipation, and the second was said to be too headstrong and quarrelsome to stay with any matador more than a single season.

The banderillero was middle-aged, gray, cat-quick in spite of his years and, sitting at the table he looked a moderately prosperous business man. His legs were still good for this season, and when they should go he was intelligent and experienced enough to keep regularly employed for a long time. The difference would be that when his speed of foot would be gone he would always be frightened where now he was assured and calm in the ring and out of it.

On this evening every one had left the dining room except the hawkfaced picador who drank too much, the birthmarked-faced auctioneer of watches at the fairs and festivals of Spain, who also drank too much, and two priests from Galicia who were sitting at a corner table and drinking if not too much certainly enough. At that time wine was included in the price of the room and board at the Luarca and the waiters had just brought fresh bottles of Valdepeñas to the tables of the auctioneer, then to the picador and, finally, to the two priests.

The three waiters stood at the end of the room. It was the rule of the house that they should all remain on duty until the diners whose tables they were responsible for should all have left, but the one who served the table of the two priests had an appointment to go to an Anarcho-Syndicalist meeting and Paco had agreed to take over his table for him.

Upstairs the matador who was ill was lying face down on his bed alone. The matador who was no longer a novelty was sitting looking out of his window preparatory to walking out to the café. The matador who was a coward had the older sister of Paco in his room with him and was trying to get her to do something which she was laughingly refusing to do. This matador was saying “Come on, little savage.”

“No,” said the sister. “Why should I?”

“For a favor.”

“You’ve eaten and now you want me for dessert.”

“Just once. What harm can it do?”

“Leave me alone. Leave me alone, I tell you.”

“It is a very little thing to do.”

“Leave me alone, I tell you.”

Down in the dining room the tallest of the waiters, who was overdue at the meeting, said “Look at those black pigs drink.”

“That’s no way to speak,” said the second waiter. “They are decent clients. They do not drink too much.”

“For me it is a good way to speak,” said the tall one. “There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”

“Certainly not the individual bull and the individual priest,” said the second waiter.

“Yes,” said the tall waiter. “Only through the individual can you attack the class. It is necessary to kill the individual bull and the individual priest. All of them. Then there are no more.”

“Save it for the meeting,” said the other waiter.

“Look at the barbarity of Madrid,” said the tall waiter. “It is now halfpast eleven o’clock and these are still guzzling.”

“They only started to eat at ten,” said the other waiter. “As you know there are many dishes. That wine is cheap and these have paid for it. It is not a strong wine.”

“How can there be solidarity of workers with fools like you?” asked the tall waiter.

“Look,” said the second waiter who was a man of fifty. “I have worked all my life. In all that remains of my life I must work. I have no complaints against work. To work is normal.”

“Yes, but the lack of work kills.”

“I have always worked,” said the older waiter. “Go on to the meeting. There is no necessity to stay.”

“You are a good comrade,” said the tall waiter. “But you lack all ideology.”

“Mejor si me falta eso que el otro”, said the older waiter (meaning it is better to lack that than work). “Go on to the mitin.”

Paco had said nothing. He did not yet understand politics but it always gave him a thrill to hear the tall waiter speak of the necessity for killing the priests and the Guardia Civil. The tall waiter represented to him revolution and revolution also was romantic. He himself would like to be a good Catholic, a revolutionary, and have a steady job like this, while, at the same time, being a bullfighter.

“Go on to the meeting, Ignacio,” he said. “I will respond for your work.”

“The two of us,” said the older waiter.

“There isn’t enough for one,” said Paco. “Go on to the meeting.”

“Pues, me voy,” said the tall waiter. “And thanks.”

In the meantime, upstairs, the sister of Paco had gotten out of the embrace of the matador as skilfully as a wrestler breaking a hold and said, now angry, “These are the hungry people. A failed bullfighter. With your tonload of fear. If you have so much of that, use it in the ring.”

“That is the way a whore talks.”

“A whore is also a woman, but I am not a whore.”

“You’ll be one.”

“Not through you.”

“Leave me,” said the matador who, now, repulsed and refused, felt the nakedness of his cowardice returning.

“Leave you? What hasn’t left you?” said the sister. “Don’t you want me to make up the bed? I’m paid to do that.”

“Leave me,” said the matador, his broad good-looking face wrinkled into a contortion that was like crying. “You whore. You dirty little whore.”

“Matador,” she said, shutting the door. “My matador.”

Inside the room the matador sat on the bed. His face still had the contortion which, in the ring, he made into a constant smile which frightened those people in the first rows of seats who knew what they were watching. “And this,” he was saying aloud. “And this. And this.”

He could remember when he had been good and it had only been three years before. He could remember the weight of the heavy gold-brocaded fighting jacket on his shoulders on that hot afternoon in May when his voice had still been the same in the ring as in the cafe, and how he sighted along the point-dipping blade at the place in the top of the shoulders where it was dusty in the short-haired black hump of muscle above the wide, wood-knocking, splintered-tipped horns that lowered as he went in to kill, and how the sword pushed in as easy as into a mound of stiff butter with the palm of his hand pushing the pommel, his left arm crossed low, his left shoulder forward, his weight on his left leg, and then his weight wasn’t on his leg. His weight was on his lower belly and as the bull raised his head the horn was out of sight in him and he swung over on it twice before they pulled him off it. So now when he went into kill, and it was seldom, he could not look at the horns and what did any whore know about what he went through before he fought? And what had they been through that laughed at him? They were all whores and they knew what they could do with it.

Down in the dining room the picador sat looking at the priests. If there were women in the room he stared at them. If there were no women he would stare with enjoyment at a foreigner, un inglés, but lacking women or strangers, he now stared with enjoyment and insolence at the two priests. While he stared the birth-marked auctioneer rose and folding his napkin went out, leaving over half the wine in the last bottle he had ordered. If his accounts had been paid up at the Luarca he would have finished the bottle.

The two priests did not stare back at the picador. One of them was saying, “It is ten days since I have been here waiting to see him and all day I sit in the ante-chamber and he will not receive me.”

“What is there to do?”

“Nothing. What can one do? One cannot go against authority.”

“I have been here for two weeks and nothing. I wait and they will not see me.”

“We are from the abandoned country. When the money runs out we can return.”

“To the abandoned country. What does Madrid care about Galicia? We are a poor province.”

“One understands the action of our brother Basilio.”

“Still I have no real confidence in the integrity of Basilio Alvarez.”

“Madrid is where one learns to understand. Madrid kills Spain.”

“If they would simply see one and refuse.”

“No. You must be broken and worn out by waiting.”

“Well, we shall see. I can wait as well as another.”

At this moment the picador got to his feet, walked over to the priests’ table and stood, gray-headed and hawk-faced, staring at them and smiling.

“A torero,” said one priest to the other.

“And a good one,” said the picador and walked out of the dining room, gray-jacketed, trim-waisted, bow-legged, in tight breeches over his highheeled cattlemen’s boots that clicked on the floor as he swaggered quite steadily, smiling to himself. He lived in a small, tight, professional world of personal efficiency, nightly alcoholic triumph, and insolence. Now he lit a cigar and tilting his hat at an angle in the hallway went out to the café.

The priests left immediately after the picador, hurriedly conscious of being the last people in the dining room, and there was no one in the room now but Paco and the middle-aged waiter. They cleared the tables and carried the bottles into the kitchen.

In the kitchen was the boy who washed the dishes. He was three years older than Paco and was very cynical and bitter.

“Take this,” the middle-aged waiter said, and poured out a glass of the Valdepeñas and handed it to him.

“Why not?” the boy took the glass.

“Tu, Paco?” the older waiter asked.

“Thank you,” said Paco. The three of them drank.

“I will be going,” said the middle-aged waiter.

“Good night,” they told him.

He went out and they were alone. Paco took a napkin one of the priests had used and standing straight, his heels planted, lowered the napkin and with head following the movement, swung his arms in the motion of a slow sweeping verónica. He turned, and advancing his right foot slightly, made the second pass, gained a little terrain on the imaginary bull and made a third pass, slow, perfectly timed and suave, then gathered the napkin to his waist and swung his hips away from the bull in a media-verónica.

The dishwasher, whose name was Enrique, watched him critically and sneeringly.

“How is the bull?” he said.

“Very brave,” said Paco. “Look.”

Standing slim and straight he made four more perfect passes, smooth, elegant and graceful.

“And the bull?” asked Enrique standing against the sink, holding his wine glass and wearing his apron.

“Still has lots of gas,” said Paco.

“You make me sick,” said Enrique.

“Why?”

“Look.”

Enrique removed his apron and citing the imaginary bull he sculptured four perfect, languid gypsy verónicas and ended up with a rebolera that made the apron swing in a stiff arc past the bull’s nose as he walked away from him.

“Look at that,” he said. “And I wash dishes.”

“Why?”

“Fear,” said Enrique. “Miedo. The same fear you would have in a ring with a bull.”

“No,” said Paco. “I wouldn’t be afraid.”

“Leche!” said Enrique. “Every one is afraid. But a torero can control his fear so that he can work the bull. I went in an amateur fight and I was so afraid I couldn’t keep from running. Every one thought it was very funny. So would you be afraid. If it wasn’t for fear every bootblack in Spain would be a bullfighter. You, a country boy, would be frightened worse than I was.”

“No,” said Paco.

He had done it too many times in his imagination. Too many times he had seen the horns, seen the bull’s wet muzzle, the ear twitching, then the head go down and the charge, the hoofs thudding and the hot bull pass him as he swung the cape, to re-charge as he swung the cape again, then again, and again, and again, to end winding the bull around him in his great media-verónica, and walk swingingly away, with bull hairs caught in the gold ornaments of his jacket from the close passes; the bull standing hypnotized and the crowd applauding. No, he would not be afraid. Others, yes. Not he. He knew he would not be afraid. Even if he ever was afraid he knew that he could do it anyway. He had confidence. “I wouldn’t be afraid,” he said.

Enrique said, “Leche,” again.

Then he said, “If we should try it?”

“How?”

“Look,” said Enrique. “You think of the bull but you do not think of the horns. The bull has such force that the horns rip like a knife, they stab like a bayonet, and they kill like a club. Look,” he opened a table drawer and took out two meat knives. “I will bind these to the legs of a chair. Then I will play bull for you with the chair held before my head. The knives are the horns. If you make those passes then they mean something.”

“Lend me your apron,” said Paco. “We’ll do it in the dining room.”

“No,” said Enrique, suddenly not bitter. “Don’t do it, Paco.”

“Yes,” said Paco. “I’m not afraid.”

“You will be when you see the knives come.”

“We’ll see,” said Paco. “Give me the apron.”

At this time, while Enrique was binding the two heavy-bladed “razorsharp” meat knives fast to the legs of the chair with two soiled napkins holding the half of each knife, wrapping them tight and then knotting them, the two chambermaids, Paco’s sisters, were on their way to the cinema to see Greta Garbo in Anna Christie. Of the two priests, one was sitting in his underwear reading his breviary and the other was wearing a nightshirt and saying the rosary. All the bullfighters except the one who was ill had made their evening appearance at the Café Fornos, where the big, dark-haired picador was playing billiards, the short, serious matador was sitting at a crowded table before a coffee and milk, along with the middle-aged banderillero and other serious workmen.

The drinking, gray-headed picador was sitting with a glass of cazalas brandy before him staring with pleasure at a table where the matador whose courage was gone sat with another matador who had renounced the sword to become a banderillero again, and two very houseworn-looking prostitutes.

The auctioneer stood on the street corner talking with friends. The tall waiter was at the Anarcho-Syndicalist meeting waiting for an opportunity to speak. The middle-aged waiter was seated on the terrace of the Café Alvarez drinking a small beer. The woman who owned the Luarca was already asleep in her bed, where she lay on her back with the bolster between her legs; big, fat, honest, clean, easy-going, very religious and never having ceased to miss or pray daily for her husband, dead, now, twenty years. In his room, alone, the matador who was ill lay face down on his bed with his mouth against a handkerchief.

Now, in the deserted dining room, Enrique tied the last knot in the napkins that bound the knives to the chair legs and lifted the chair. He pointed the legs with the knives on them forward and held the chair over his head with the two knives pointing straight ahead, one on each side of his head.

“It’s heavy,” he said. “Look, Paco. It is very dangerous. Don’t do it.” He was sweating.

Paco stood facing him, holding the apron spread, holding a fold of it bunched in each hand, thumbs up, first finger down, spread to catch the eye of the bull.

“Charge straight,” he said. “Turn like a bull. Charge as many times as you want.”

“How will you know when to cut the pass?” asked Enrique. “It’s better to do three and then a media.”

“All right,” said Paco. “But come straight. Huh, torito! Come on, little bull!”

Running with head down Enrique came toward him and Paco swung the apron just ahead of the knife blade as it passed close in front of his belly and as it went by it was, to him, the real horn, white-tipped, black, smooth, and as Enrique passed him and turned to rush again it was the hot, blood-flanked mass of the bull that thudded by, then turned like a cat and came again as he swung the cape slowly. Then the bull turned and came again and, as he watched the onrushing point, he stepped his left foot two inches too far forward and the knife did not pass, but had slipped in as easily as into a wineskin and there was a hot scalding rush above and around the sudden inner rigidity of steel and Enrique shouting. “Ay! Ay! Let me get it out! Let me get it out!” and Paco slipped forward on the chair, the apron cape still held, Enrique pulling on the chair as the knife turned in him, in him, Paco.

The knife was out now and he sat on the floor in the widening warm pool.

“Put the napkin over it. Hold it!” said Enrique. “Hold it tight. I will run for the doctor. You must hold in the hemorrhage.”

“There should be a rubber cup,” said Paco. He had seen that used in the ring.

“I came straight,” said Enrique, crying. “All I wanted was to show the danger.”

“Don’t worry,” said Paco, his voice sounding far away. “But bring the doctor.”

In the ring they lifted you and carried you, running with you, to the operating room. If the femoral artery emptied itself before you reached there they called the priest.

“Advise one of the priests,” said Paco, holding the napkin tight against his lower abdomen. He could not believe that this had happened to him.

But Enrique was running down the Calle San Jerónimo to the all-night first-aid station and Paco was alone, first sitting up, then huddled over, then slumped on the floor, until it was over, feeling his life go out of him as dirty water empties from a bathtub when the plug is drawn. He was frightened and he felt faint and he tried to say an act of contrition and he remembered how it started but before he had said, as fast as he could, “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee who art worthy of all my love and I firmly resolve . . .,” he felt too faint and he was lying face down on the floor and it was over very quickly. A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.

As the doctor from the first-aid station came up the stairs accompanied by a policeman who held on to Enrique by the arm, the two sisters of Paco were still in the moving-picture palace of the Gran Via, where they were intensely disappointed in the Garbo film, which showed the great star in miserable low surroundings when they had been accustomed to see her surrounded by great luxury and brilliance. The audience disliked the film thoroughly and were protesting by whistling and stamping their feet. All the other people from the hotel were doing almost what they had been doing when the accident happened, except that the two priests had finished their devotions and were preparing for sleep, and the gray-haired picador had moved his drink over to the table with the two houseworn prostitutes. A little later he went out of the café with one of them. It was the one for whom the matador who had lost his nerve had been buying drinks.

The boy Paco had never known about any of this nor about what all these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. He had not even had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.

Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

“THE MARVELLOUS THING IS THAT IT’S painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he looked out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

“They’ve been there since the day the truck broke down,” he said. “Today’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.”

“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.”

“Or until the plane doesn’t come.”

“Please tell me what I can do. There must be something I can do.”

“You can take the leg off and that might stop it, though I doubt it. Or you can shoot me. You’re a good shot now. I taught you to shoot, didn’t I?”

“Please don’t talk that way. Couldn’t I read to you?”

“Read what?”

“Anything in the book bag that we haven’t read.”

“I can’t listen to it,” he said. “Talking is the easiest. We quarrel and that makes the time pass.”

“I don’t quarrel. I never want to quarrel. Let’s not quarrel any more. No matter how nervous we get. Maybe they will be back with another truck today. Maybe the plane will come.”

“I don’t want to move,” the man said. “There is no sense in moving now except to make it easier for you.”

“That’s cowardly.”

“Can’t you let a man die as comfortably as he can without calling him names? What’s the use of slanging me?”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m dying now. Ask those bastards.” He looked over to where the huge, filthy birds sat, their naked heads sunk in the hunched feathers. A fourth planed down, to run quick-legged and then waddle slowly toward the others.

“They are around every camp. You never notice them. You can’t die if you don’t give up.”

“Where did you read that? You’re such a bloody fool.”

“You might think about some one else.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “that’s been my trade.”

He lay then and was quiet for a while and looked across the heat shimmer of the plain to the edge of the bush. There were a few Tommies that showed minute and white against the yellow and, far off, he saw a herd of zebra, white against the green of the bush. This was a pleasant camp under big trees against a hill, with good water, and close by, a nearly dry water hole where sand grouse flighted in the mornings.

“Wouldn’t you like me to read?” she asked. She was sitting on a canvas chair beside his cot. “There’s a breeze coming up.”

“No thanks.”

“Maybe the truck will come.”

“I don’t give a damn about the truck.”

“I do.”

“You give a damn about so many things that I don’t.”

“Not so many, Harry.”

“What about a drink?”

“It’s supposed to be bad for you. It said in Black’s to avoid all alcohol. You shouldn’t drink.”

“Molo!” he shouted.

“Yes Bwana.”

“Bring whiskey-soda.”

“Yes Bwana.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “That’s what I mean by giving up. It says it’s bad for you. I know it’s bad for you.”

“No,” he said. “It’s good for me.”

So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance to finish it. So this was the way it ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain the horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

“I wish we’d never come,” the woman said. She was looking at him, holding the glass and biting her lip. “You never would have gotten anything like this in Paris. You always said you loved Paris. We could have stayed in Paris or gone anywhere. I’d have gone anywhere. I said I’d go anywhere you wanted. If you wanted to shoot we could have gone shooting in Hungary and been comfortable.”

“Your bloody money,” he said.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done what you wanted to do. But I wish we’d never come here.”

“You said you loved it.”

“I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don’t see why that had to happen to your leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?”

“I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn’t pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene.” He looked at her, “What else?”

“I don’t mean that.”

“If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury, Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on — —”

“Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll always love you. Don’t you love me?”

“No,” said the man. “I don’t think so. I never have.”

“Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.”

“No. I haven’t any head to go out of.”

“Don’t drink that,” she said. “Darling, please don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can.”

“You do it,” he said. “I’m tired.”

* * * * *

Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria and Nansen’s Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and saying, No, that’s not snow. It’s too early for snow. And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see. It’s not snow and them all saying, It’s not snow we were mistaken. But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations. And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.

It was snow too that fell all Christmas week that year up in the Gauertal, that year they lived in the woodcutter’s house with the big square porcelain stove that filled half the room, and they slept on mattresses filled with beech leaves, the time the deserter came with his feet bloody in the snow. He said the police were right behind him and they gave him woolen socks and held the gendarmes talking until the tracks had drifted over.

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran that great run down the glacier above the Madlener-haus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.

They were snow-bound a week in the Madlener-haus that time in the blizzard playing cards in the smoke by the lantern light and the stakes were higher all the time as Herr Lent lost more. Finally he lost it all. Everything, the Skischule money and all the season’s profit and then his capital. He could see him with his long nose, picking up the cards and then opening, “Sans Voir.” There was always gambling then. When there was no snow you gambled and when there was too much you gambled. He thought of all the time in his life he had spent gambling.

But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas day with the mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown across the lines to bomb the Austrian officers’ leave train, machine-gunning them as they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker afterwards coming into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and then somebody saying, “You bloody murderous bastard.”

Those were the same Austrians they killed then that he skied with later. No not the same. Hans, that he skied with all that year, had been in the Kaiser-Jägers and when they went hunting hares together up the little valley above the saw-mill they had talked of the fighting on Pasubio and of the attack on Perticara and Asalone and he had never written a word of that. Nor of Monte Corona, nor the Sette Communi, nor of Arsiero.

How many winters had he lived in the Vorarlberg and the Arlberg? It was four and then he remembered the man who had the fox to sell when they had walked into Bludenz, that time to buy presents, and the cherry-pit taste of good kirsch, the fast-slipping rush of running powder-snow on crust, singing “Hi! Ho! said Rolly!” as you ran down the last stretch to the steep drop, taking it straight, then running the orchard in three turns and out across the ditch and onto the icy road behind the inn. Knocking your bindings loose, kicking the skis free and leaning them up against the wooden wall of the inn, the lamplight coming from the window, where inside, in the smoky, new-wine smelling warmth, they were playing the accordion.

“Where did we stay in Paris?” he asked the woman who was sitting by him in a canvas chair, now, in Africa.

“At the Crillon. You know that.”

“Why do I know that?”

“That’s where we always stayed.”

“No. Not always.”

“There and at the Pavillion Henri-Quatre in St. Germain. You said you loved it there.”

“Love is a dunghill,” said Harry. “And I’m the cock that gets on it to crow.”

“If you have to go away,” she said, “is it absolutely necessary to kill off everything you leave behind? I mean do you have to take away everything? Do you have to kill your horse, and your wife and bum your saddle and your armour?”

“Yes,” he said. “Your damned money was my armour. My Swift and my Armour.”

“Don’t.”

“All right. I’ll stop that. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“It’s a little bit late now.”

“All right then. I’ll go on hurting you. It’s more amusing. The only thing I ever really liked to do with you I can’t do now.”

“No, that’s not true. You liked to do many things and everything you wanted to do I did.”

“Oh, for Christ sake stop bragging, will you?”

He looked at her and saw her crying.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you think that it is fun to do this? I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s trying to kill to keep yourself alive, I imagine. I was all right when we started talking. I didn’t mean to start this, and now I’m crazy as a coot and being as cruel to you as I can be. Don’t pay any attention, darling, to what I say. I love you, really. You know I love you. I’ve never loved any one else the way I love you.”

He slipped into the familiar lie he made his bread and butter by.

“You’re sweet to me.”

“You bitch,” he said. “You rich bitch. That’s poetry. I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry.”

“Stop it. Harry, why do you have to turn into a devil now?”

“I don’t like to leave anything,” the man said. “I don’t like to leave things behind.”

* * * * *

It was evening now and he had been asleep. The sun was gone behind the hill and there was a shadow all across the plain and the small animals were feeding close to camp; quick dropping heads and switching tails, he watched them keeping well out away from the bush now. The birds no longer waited on the ground. They were all perched heavily in a tree. There were many more of them. His personal boy was sitting by the bed.

“Memsahib’s gone to shoot,” the boy said. “Does Bwana want?”

“Nothing.”

She had gone to kill a piece of meat and, knowing how he liked to watch the game, she had gone well away so she would not disturb this little pocket of the plain that he could see. She was always thoughtful, he thought. On anything she knew about, or had read, or that she had ever heard.

It was not her fault that when he went to her he was already over. How could a woman know that you meant nothing that you said; that you spoke only from habit and to be comfortable? After he no longer meant what he said, his lies were more successful with women than when he had told them the truth.

It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.

You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it. But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all. The people he knew now were all much more comfortable when he did not work. Africa was where he had been happiest in the good time of his life, so he had come out here to start again. They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to bum it out of his body.

She had liked it. She said she loved it. She loved anything that was exciting, that involved a change of scene, where there were new people and where things were pleasant. And he had felt the illusion of returning strength of will to work. Now if this was how it ended, and he knew it was, he must not turn like some snake biting itself because its back was broken. It wasn’t this woman’s fault. If it had not been she it would have been another. If he lived by a lie he should try to die by it. He heard a shot beyond the hill.

She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was strange, too, wasn’t it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved.

We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing.

Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp. She was wearing jodphurs and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a Tommie slung and they were coming along behind her. She was still a good-looking woman, he thought, and she had a pleasant body. She had a great talent and appreciation for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face, she read enormously, liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank too much. Her husband had died when she was still a comparatively young woman and for a while she had devoted herself to her two just-grown children, who did not need her and were embarrassed at having her about, to her stable of horses, to books, and to bottles. She liked to read in the evening before dinner and she drank Scotch and soda while she read. By dinner she was fairly drunk and after a bottle of wine at dinner she was usually drunk enough to sleep.

That was before the lovers. After she had the lovers she did not drink so much because she did not have to be drunk to sleep. But the lovers bored her. She had been married to a man who had never bored her and these people bored her very much.

Then one of her two children was killed in a plane crash and after that was over she did not want the lovers, and drink being no anæsthetic she had to make another life. Suddenly, she had been acutely frightened of being alone. But she wanted some one that she respected with her.

It had begun very simply. She liked what he wrote and she had always envied the life he led. She thought he did exactly what he wanted to. The steps by which she had acquired him and the way in which she had finally fallen in love with him were all part of a regular progression in which she had built herself a new life and he had traded away what remained of his old life.

He had traded it for security, for comfort too, there was no denying that, and for what else? He did not know. She would have bought him anything he wanted. He knew that. She was a damned nice woman too. He would as soon be in bed with her as any one; rather with her, because she was richer, because she was very pleasant and appreciative and because she never made scenes. And now this life that she had built again was coming to a term because he had not used iodine two weeks ago when a thorn had scratched his knee as they moved forward trying to photograph a herd of waterbuck standing, their heads up, peering while their nostrils searched the air, their ears spread wide to hear the first noise that would send them rushing into the bush. They had bolted, too, before he got the picture.

Here she came now.

He turned his head on the cot to look toward her. “Hello,” he said.

“I shot a Tommy ram,” she told him. “He’ll make you good broth and I’ll have them mash some potatoes with the Klim. How do you feel?”

“Much better.”

“Isn’t that lovely? You know I thought perhaps you would. You were sleeping when I left.”

“I had a good sleep. Did you walk far?”

“No. Just around behind the hill. I made quite a good shot on the Tommy.”

“You shoot marvellously, you know.”

“I love it. I’ve loved Africa. Really. If you’re all right it’s the most fun that I’ve ever had. You don’t know the fun it’s been to shoot with you. I’ve loved the country.”

“I love it too.”

“Darling, you don’t know how marvellous it is to see you feeling better. I couldn’t stand it when you felt that way. You won’t talk to me like that again, will you? Promise me?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember what I said.”

“You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?”

“I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed,” he said.

“Yes. That’s the good destruction. That’s the way we’re made to be destroyed. The plane will be here tomorrow.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sure. It’s bound to come. The boys have the wood all ready and the grass to make the smudge. I went down and looked at it again today. There’s plenty of room to land and we have the smudges ready at both ends.”

“What makes you think it will come tomorrow?”

“I’m sure it will. It’s overdue now. Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we will have some good destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind.”

“Should we have a drink? The sun is down.”

“Do you think you should?”

“I’m having one.”

“We’ll have one together. Molo, letti dui whiskey-soda!” she called.

“You’d better put on your mosquito boots,” he told her.

“I’ll wait till I bathe …”

While it grew dark they drank and just before it was dark and there was no longer enough light to shoot, a hyena crossed the open on his way around the hill.

“That bastard crosses there every night,” the man said. “Every night for two weeks.”

“He’s the one makes the noise at night. I don’t mind it. They’re a filthy animal though.”

Drinking together, with no pain now except the discomfort of lying in the one position, the boys lighting a fire, its shadow jumping on the tents, he could feel the return of acquiescence in this life of pleasant surrender. She was very good to him. He had been cruel and unjust in the afternoon. She was a fine woman, marvellous really. And just then it occurred to him that he was going to die.

It came with a rush; not as a rush of water nor of wind; but of a sudden evil-smelling emptiness and the odd thing was that the hyena slipped lightly along the edge of it.

“What is it, Harry?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “You had better move over to the other side. To windward.”

“Did Molo change the dressing?”

“Yes. I’m just using the boric now.”

“How do you feel?”

“A little wobbly.”

“I’m going in to bathe,” she said. “I’ll be right out. I’ll eat with you and then we’ll put the cot in.”

So, he said to himself, we did well to stop the quarrelling. He had never quarrelled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarrelled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarrelling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.

He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarrelled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it. … How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her. He wrote this letter at the Club, cold sober, and mailed it to New York asking her to write him at the office in Paris. That seemed safe. And that night missing her so much it made him feel hollow sick inside, he wandered up past Maxim’s, picked a girl up and took her out to supper. He had gone to a place to dance with her afterward, she danced badly, and left her for a hot Armenian slut, that swung her belly against him so it almost scalded. He took her away from a British gunner subaltern after a row. The gunner asked him outside and they fought in the street on the cobbles in the dark. He’d hit him twice, hard, on the side of the jaw and when he didn’t go down he knew he was in for a fight. The gunner hit him in the body, then beside his eye. He swung with his left again and landed and the gunner fell on him and grabbed his coat and tore the sleeve off and he clubbed him twice behind the ear and then smashed him with his right as he pushed him away. When the gunner went down his head hit first and he ran with the girl because they heard the M.P.’s coming. They got into a taxi and drove out to Rimmily Hissa along the Bosphorus, and around, and back in the cool night and went to bed and she felt as over-ripe as she looked but smooth, rose-petal, syrupy, smooth-bellied, big-breasted and needed no pillow under her buttocks, and he left her before she was awake looking blousy enough in the first daylight and turned up at the Pera Palace with a black eye, carrying his coat because one sleeve was missing.

That same night he left for Anatolia and he remembered, later on that trip, riding all day through fields of the poppies that they raised for opium and how strange it made you feel, finally, and all the distances seemed wrong, to where they had made the attack with the newly arrived Constantine officers, that did not know a god-damned thing, and the artillery had fired into the troops and the British observer had cried like a child.

That was the day he’d first seen dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them. The Turks had come steadily and lumpily and he had seen the skirted men running and the officers shooting into them and running then themselves and he and the British observer had run too until his lungs ached and his mouth was full of the taste of pennies and they stopped behind some rocks and there were the Turks coming as lumpily as ever. Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse. So when he got back to Paris that time he could not talk about it or stand to have it mentioned. And there in the café as he passed was that American poet with a pile of saucers in front of him and a stupid look on his potato face talking about the Dada movement with a Roumanian who said his name was Tristan Tzara, who always wore a monocle and had a headache, and, back at the apartment with his wife that now he loved again, the quarrel all over, the madness all over, glad to be home, the office sent his mail up to the flat. So then the letter in answer to the one he’d written came in on a platter one morning and when he saw the handwriting he went cold all over and tried to slip the letter underneath another. But his wife said, “Who is that letter from, dear?” and that was the end of the beginning of that.

He remembered the good times with them all, and the quarrels. They always picked the finest places to have the quarrels. And why had they always quarrelled when he was feeling best? He had never written any of that because, at first, he never wanted to hurt any one and then it seemed as though there was enough to write without it. But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so much to write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it; but now he never would.

“How do you feel?” she said. She had come out from the tent now after her bath.

“All right.”

“Could you eat now?” He saw Molo behind her with the folding table and the other boy with the dishes.

“I want to write,” he said.

“You ought to take some broth to keep your strength up.”

“I’m going to die tonight,” he said. “I don’t need my strength up.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Harry, please,” she said.

“Why don’t you use your nose? I’m rotted half way up my thigh now. What the hell should I fool with broth for? Molo bring whiskey-soda.”

“Please take the broth,” she said gently.

“All right.”

The broth was too hot. He had to hold it in the cup until it cooled enough to take it and then he just got it down without gagging.

“You’re a fine woman,” he said. “Don’t pay any attention to me.”

She looked at him with her well-known, well-loved face from Spur and Town & Country, only a little the worse for drink, only a little the worse for bed, but Town & Country never showed those good breasts and those useful thighs and those lightly small-of-back-caressing hands, and as he looked and saw her well-known pleasant smile, he felt death come again.

This time there was no rush. It was a puff, as of a wind that makes a candle flicker and the flame go tall.

“They can bring my net out later and hang it from the tree and build the fire up. I’m not going in the tent tonight. It’s not worth moving. It’s a clear night. There won’t be any rain.”

So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear. Well, there would be no more quarrelling. He could promise that. The one experience that he had never had he was not going to spoil now. He probably would. You spoiled everything. But perhaps he wouldn’t.

“You can’t take dictation, can you?”

“I never learned,” she told him.

“That’s all right.”

There wasn’t time, of course, although it seemed as though it telescoped so that you might put it all into one paragraph if you could get it right.

There was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the lake. There was a bell on a pole by the door to call the people in to meals. Behind the house were fields and behind the fields was the timber. A line of lombardy poplars ran from the house to the dock. Other poplars ran along the point. A road went up to the hills along the edge of the timber and along that road he picked blackberries. Then that log house was burned down and all the guns that had been on deer foot racks above the open fire place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with the lead melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the heap of ashes that were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you asked Grandfather if you could have them to play with, and he said, no. You see they were his guns still and he never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any more. The house was rebuilt in the same place out of lumber now and painted white and from its porch you saw the poplars and the lake beyond; but there were never any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer feet on the wall of the log house lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched them.

In the Black Forest, after the war, we rented a trout stream and there were two ways to walk to it. One was down the valley from Triberg and around the valley road in the shade of the trees that bordered the white road, and then up a side road that went up through the hills past many small farms, with the big Schwarzwald houses, until that road crossed the stream. That was where our fishing began.

The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go across the top of the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and down across this meadow to the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was not big, but narrow, clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the birches. At the Hotel in Triberg the proprietor had a fine season. It was very pleasant and we were all great friends. The next year came the inflation and the money he had made the year before was not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself.

You could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad marc; and the children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and drunkenness at the Café des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived above. The concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge, his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose husband was a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the crémerie when she had opened L’Auto and seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his first big race. She had blushed and laughed and then gone upstairs crying with the yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband of the woman who ran the Bal Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early plane the husband knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of white wine at the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors in that quarter then because they all were poor.

Around that Place there were two kinds; the drunkards and the sportifs. The drunkards killed their poverty that way; the sportifs took it out in exercise. They were the descendants of the Communards and it was no struggle for them to know their politics. They knew who had shot their fathers, their relatives, their brothers, and their friends when the Versailles troops came in and took the town after the Commune and executed any one they could catch with calloused hands, or who wore a cap, or carried any other sign he was a working man. And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard. The street that ran up toward the Pantheon and the other that he always took with the bicycle, the only asphalted street in all that quarter, smooth under the tires, with the high narrow houses and the cheap tall hotel where Paul Verlaine had died. There were only two rooms in the apartments where they lived and he had a room on the top floor of that hotel that cost him sixty francs a month where he did his writing, and from it he could see the roofs and chimney pots and all the hills of Paris.

From the apartment you could only see the wood and coal man’s place. He sold wine too, bad wine. The golden horse’s head outside the Boucherie Chevaline where the carcasses hung yellow gold and red in the open window, and the green painted co-operative where they bought their wine; good wine and cheap. The rest was plaster walls and the windows of the neighbors. The neighbors who, at night, when some one lay drunk in the street, moaning and groaning in that typical French ivresse that you were propaganded to believe did not exist, would open their windows and then the murmur of talk.

“Where is the policeman? When you don’t want him the bugger is always there. He’s sleeping with some concierge. Get the Agent.” Till some one threw a bucket of water from a window and the moaning stopped. “What’s that? Water. Ah, that’s intelligent.” And the windows shutting. Marie, his femme de ménage, protesting against the eight-hour day saying, “If a husband works until six he gets only a little drunk on the way home and does not waste too much. If he works only until five he is drunk every night and one has no money. It is the wife of the working man who suffers from this shortening of hours.”

“Wouldn’t you like some more broth?” the woman asked him now.

“No, thank you very much. It is awfully good.”

“Try just a little.”

“I would like a whiskey-soda.”

“It’s not good for you.”

“No. It’s bad for me. Cole Porter wrote the words and the music. This knowledge that you’re going mad for me.”

“You know I like you to drink.”

“Oh yes. Only it’s bad for me.”

When she goes, he thought, I’ll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is. Ayee he was tired. Too tired. He was going to sleep a little while. He lay still and death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.

No, he had never written about Paris. Not the Paris that he cared about. But what about the rest that he had never written?

What about the ranch and the silvered gray of the sage brush, the quick, clear water in the irrigation ditches, and the heavy green of the alfalfa. The trail went up into the hills and the cattle in the summer were shy as deer. The bawling and the steady noise and slow moving mass raising a dust as you brought them down in the fall. And behind the mountains, the clear sharpness of the peak in the evening light and, riding down along the trail in the moonlight, bright across the valley. Now he remembered coming down through the timber in the dark holding the horse’s tail when you could not see and all the stories that he meant to write.

About the half-wit chore boy who was left at the ranch that time and told not to let any one get any hay, and that old bastard from the Forks who had beaten the boy when he had worked for him stopping to get some feed. The boy refusing and the old man saying he would beat him again. The boy got the rifle from the kitchen and shot him when he tried to come into the barn and when they came back to the ranch he’d been dead a week, frozen in the corral, and the dogs had eaten part of him. But what was left you packed on a sled wrapped in a blanket and roped on and you got the boy to help you haul it, and the two of you took it out over the road on skis, and sixty miles down to town to turn the boy over. He having no idea that he would be arrested. Thinking he had done his duty and that you were his friend and he would be rewarded. He’d helped to haul the old man in so everybody could know how bad the old man had been and how he’d tried to steal some feed that didn’t belong to him, and when the sheriff put the handcuffs on the boy he couldn’t believe it. Then he’d started to cry. That was one story he had saved to write. He knew at least twenty good stories from out there and he had never written one. Why?

“You tell them why,” he said.

“Why what, dear?”

“Why nothing.”

She didn’t drink so much, now, since she had him. But if he lived he would never write about her, he knew that now. Nor about any of them. The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how some one had said to Julian, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Julian. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

He had been contemptuous of those who wrecked. You did not have to like it because you understood it. He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.

He remembered long ago when Williamson, the bombing officer, had been hit by a stick bomb some one in a German patrol had thrown as he was coming in through the wire that night and, screaming, had begged every one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good officer, although addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with a flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry. For Christ sake shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our Lord never sending you anything you could not bear and some one’s theory had been that meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing passed out Williamson until he gave him all his morphine tablets that he had always saved to use himself and then they did not work right away.

Still this now, that he had, was very easy; and if it was no worse as it went on there was nothing to worry about. Except that he would rather be in better company.

He thought a little about the company that he would like to have.

No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can’t expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party’s over and you are with your hostess now.

I’m getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.

“It’s a bore,” he said out loud.

“What is, my dear?”

“Anything you do too bloody long.”

He looked at her face between him and the fire. She was leaning back in the chair and the firelight shone on her pleasantly lined face and he could see that she was sleepy. He heard the hyena make a noise just outside the range of the fire.

“I’ve been writing,” he said. “But I got tired.”

“Do you think you will be able to sleep?”

“Pretty sure. Why don’t you turn in?”

“I like to sit here with you.”

“Do you feel anything strange?” he asked her.

“No. Just a little sleepy.”

“I do,” he said.

He had just felt death come by again.

“You know the only thing I’ve never lost is curiosity,” he said to her.

“You’ve never lost anything. You’re the most complete man I’ve ever known.”

“Christ,” he said. “How little a woman knows. What is that? Your intuition?”

Because, just then, death had come and rested its head on the foot of the cot and he could smell its breath.

“Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull,” he told her. “It can be two bicycle policemen as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena.”

It had moved up on him now, but it had no shape any more. It simply occupied space.

“Tell it to go away.”

It did not go away but moved a little closer.

“You’ve got a hell of a breath,” he told it. “You stinking bastard.”

It moved up closer to him still and now he could not speak to it, and when it saw he could not speak it came a little closer, and now he tried to send it away without speaking, but it moved in on him so its weight was all upon his chest, and while it crouched there and he could not move, or speak, he heard the woman say, “Bwana is asleep now. Take the cot up very gently and carry it into the tent.”

He could not speak to tell her to make it go away and it crouched now, heavier, so he could not breathe. And then, while they lifted the cot, suddenly it was all right and the weight went from his chest.

* * * * *

It was morning and had been morning for some time and he heard the plane. It showed very tiny and then made a wide circle and the boys ran out and lit the fires, using kerosene, and piled on grass so there were two big smudges at each end of the level place and the morning breeze blew them toward the camp and the plane circled twice more, low this time, and then glided down and levelled off and landed smoothly and, coming walking toward him, was old Compton in slacks, a tweed jacket and a brown felt hat.

“What’s the matter, old cock?” Compton said.

“Bad leg,” he told him. “Will you have some breakfast?”

“Thanks. I’ll just have some tea. It’s the Puss Moth you know. I won’t be able to take the Memsahib. There’s only room for one. Your lorry is on the way.”

Helen had taken Compton aside and was speaking to him. Compton came back more cheery than ever.

“We’ll get you right in,” he said. “I’ll be back for the Mem. Now I’m afraid I’ll have to stop at Arusha to refuel. We’d better get going.”

“What about the tea?”

“I don’t really care about it, you know.”

The boys had picked up the cot and carried it around the green tents and down along the rock and out onto the plain and along past the smudges that were burning brightly now, the grass all consumed, and the wind fanning the fire, to the little plane. It was difficult getting him in, but once in he lay back in the leather seat, and the leg was stuck straight out to one side of the seat where Compton sat. Compton started the motor and got in. He waved to Helen and to the boys and, as the clatter moved into the old familiar roar, they swung around with Compie watching for warthog holes and roared, bumping, along the stretch between the fires and with the last bump rose and he saw them all standing below, waving, and the camp beside the hill, flattening now, and the plain spreading, clumps of trees, and the bush flattening, while the game trails ran now smoothly to the dry waterholes, and there was a new water that he had never known of. The zebra, small rounded backs now, and the wildebeeste, big-headed dots seeming to climb as they moved in long fingers across the plain, now scattering as the shadow came toward them, they were tiny now, and the movement had no gallop, and the plain as far as you could see, gray-yellow now and ahead old Compie’s tweed back and the brown felt hat. Then they were over the first hills and the wildebeeste were trailing up them, and then they were over mountains with sudden depths of green-rising forest and the solid bamboo slopes, and then the heavy forest again, sculptured into peaks and hollows until they crossed, and hills sloped down and then another plain, hot now, and purple brown, bumpy with heat and Compie looking back to see how he was riding. Then there were other mountains dark ahead.

And then instead of going on to Arusha they turned left, he evidently figured that they had the gas, and looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.

Just then the hyena stopped whimpering in the night and started to make a strange, human, almost crying sound. The woman heard it and stirred uneasily. She did not wake. In her dream she was at the house on Long Island and it was the night before her daughter’s début. Somehow her father was there and he had been very rude. Then the noise the hyena made was so loud she woke and for a moment she did not know where she was and she was very afraid. Then she took the flashlight and shone it on the other cot that they had carried in after Harry had gone to sleep. She could see his bulk under the mosquito bar but somehow he had gotten his leg out and it hung down alongside the cot. The dressings had all come down and she could not look at it.

“Molo,” she called, “Molo! Molo!”

Then she said, “Harry, Harry!” Then her voice rising, “Harry! Please. Oh Harry!”

There was no answer and she could not hear him breathing.

Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart.

OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE

AN OLD MAN with steel rimmed spectacles and very dusty clothes sat by the side of the road. There was a pontoon bridge across the river and carts, trucks, and men, women and children were crossing it. The mule-drawn carts staggered up the steep bank from the bridge with soldiers helping push against the spokes of the wheels. The trucks ground up and away heading out of it all and the peasants plodded along in the ankle deep dust. But the old man sat there without moving. He was too tired to go any farther.

It was my business to cross the bridge, explore the bridgehead beyond and find out to what point the enemy had advanced. I did this and returned over the bridge. There were not so many carts now and very few people on foot, but the old man was still there.

“Where do you come from?” I asked him.

“From San Carlos,” he said, and smiled.

That was his native town and so it gave him pleasure to mention it and he smiled.

“I was taking care of animals,” he explained.

“Oh,” I said, not quite understanding.

“Yes,” he said, “I stayed, you see, taking care of animals. I was the last one to leave the town of San Carlos.”

He did not look like a shepherd nor a herdsman and I looked at his black dusty clothes and his gray dusty face and his steel rimmed spectacles and said, “What animals were they?”

“Various animals,” he said, and shook his head. “I had to leave them.”

I was watching the bridge and the African looking country of the Ebro Delta and wondering how long now it would be before we would see the enemy, and listening all the while for the first noises that would signal that ever mysterious event called contact, and the old man still sat there.

“What animals were they?” I asked.

“There were three animals altogether,” he explained. “There were two goats and a cat and then there were four pairs of pigeons.”

“And you had to leave them?” I asked.

“Yes. Because of the artillery. The captain told me to go because of the artillery.”

“And you have no family?” I asked, watching the far end of the bridge where a few last carts were hurrying down the slope of the bank.

“No,” he said, “only the animals I stated. The cat, of course, will be all right. A cat can look out for itself, but I cannot think what will become of the others.”

“What politics have you?” I asked.

“I am without politics,” he said. “I am seventy-six years old. I have come twelve kilometers now and I think now I can go no further.”

“This is not a good place to stop,” I said. “If you can make it, there are trucks up the road where it forks for Tortosa.”

“I will wait a while,” he said, “and then I will go. Where do the trucks go?”

“Towards Barcelona,” I told him.

“I know no one in that direction,” he said, “but thank you very much. Thank you again very much.”

He looked at me very blankly and tiredly, then said, having to share his worry with some one, “The cat will be all right, I am sure. There is no need to be unquiet about the cat. But the others. Now what do you think about the others?”

“Why they’ll probably come through it all right.”

“You think so?”

“Why not,” I said, watching the far bank where now there were no carts.

“But what will they do under the artillery when I was told to leave because of the artillery?”

“Did you leave the dove cage unlocked?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then they’ll fly.”

“Yes, certainly they’ll fly. But the others. It’s better not to think about the others,” he said.

“If you are rested I would go,” I urged. “Get up and try to walk now.”

“Thank you,” he said and got to his feet, swayed from side to side and then sat down backwards in the dust.

“I was taking care of animals,” he said dully, but no longer to me. “I was only taking care of animals.”

There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro. It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have.

THE FIFTH COLUMN AND FOUR STORIES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

CONTENTS

THE DENUNCIATION

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TANK

NIGHT BEFORE BATTLE

UNDER THE RIDGE

Please note: ‘The Fifth Column’ appears in the Plays section of this collection.

THE DENUNCIATION

CHICOTE’S IN THE OLD DAYS IN MADRID was a place sort of like The Stork, without the music and the debutantes, or the Waldorf’s men’s bar if they let girls in. You know, they came in, but it was a man’s place and they didn’t have any status. Pedro Chicote was the proprietor and he had one of those personalities that make a place. He was a great bartender and he was always pleasant, always cheerful, and he had a lot of zest. Now zest is a rare enough thing and few people have it for long. It should not be confused with showmanship either. Chicote had it and it was not faked or put on. He was also modest, simple and friendly. He really was as nice and pleasant and still as marvelously efficient as George, the chasseur at the Ritz bar in Paris, which is about the strongest comparison you can make to anyone who has been around, and he ran a fine bar.

In those days the snobs among the rich young men of Madrid hung out at something called the Nuevo Club and the good guys went to Chicote’s. A lot of people went there that I did not like, the same as at The Stork, say, but I was never in Chicote’s that it wasn’t pleasant. One reason was that you did not talk politics there. There were cafés where you went for politics and nothing else but you didn’t talk politics at Chicote’s. You talked plenty of the other five subjects though and in the evening the best looking girls in the town showed up there and it was the place to start an evening from, all right, and we had all started some fine ones from there.

Then it was the place where you dropped in to find out who was in town, or where they had gone to if they were out of town. And if it was summer, and there was no one in town, you could always sit and enjoy a drink because the waiters were all pleasant.

It was a club only you didn’t have to pay any dues and you could pick a girl up there. It was the best bar in Spain, certainly, and I think one of the best bars in the world, and all of us that used to hang out there had a great affection for it.

Another thing was that the drinks were wonderful. If you ordered a martini it was made with the best gin that money could buy, and Chicote had a barrel whisky that came from Scotland that was so much better than the advertised brands that it was pitiful to compare it with ordinary Scotch. Well, when the revolt started, Chicote was up at San Sebastian running the summer place he had there. He is still running it and they say it is the best bar in Franco’s Spain. The waiters took over the Madrid place and they are still running it, but the good liquor is all gone now.

Most of Chicote’s old customers are on Franco’s side; but some of them are on the Government side. Because it was a very cheerful place, and because really cheerful people are usually the bravest, and the bravest get killed quickest, a big part of Chicote’s old customers are now dead. The barrel whisky had all been gone for many months now and we finished the last of the yellow gin in May of 1938. There’s not much there to go for now so I suppose Luis Delgado, if he had come to Madrid a little later, might have stayed away from there and not gotten into that trouble. But when he came to Madrid in the month of November of 1937 they still had the yellow gin and they still had Indian quinine water. They do not seem worth risking your life for, so maybe he just wanted to have a drink in the old place. Knowing him, and knowing the place in the old days, it would be perfectly understandable.

They had butchered a cow at the Embassy that day and the porter had called up at the Hotel Florida to tell us that they had saved us ten pounds of fresh meat. I walked over to get it through the early dusk of a Madrid winter. Two assault guards with rifles sat on chairs outside the Embassy gate and the meat was waiting at the porter’s lodge.

The porter said it was a very good cut but that the cow was lean. I offered him some roasted sunflower seeds and some acorns from the pocket of my mackinaw jacket and we joked a little standing outside the lodge on the gravel of the Embassy driveway.

I walked home across the town with the meat heavy under my arm. They were shelling up the Gran Via and I went into Chicote’s to wait it out. It was noisy and crowded and I sat at a little table in one corner against the sandbagged window with the meat on the bench beside me and drank a gin and tonic water. It was that week that we discovered they still had tonic water. No one had ordered any since the war started and it was still the same price as before the revolt. The evening papers were not yet out so I bought three party tracts from an old woman. They were ten centavos apiece and I told her to keep the change from a peseta. She said God would bless me. I doubted this but read the three leaflets and drank the gin and tonic.

A waiter I had known in the old days came over to the table and said something to me.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Yes,” he insisted, slanting his tray and his head in the same direction. “Don’t look now. There he is.”

“It’s not my business,” I told him.

“Nor mine either.”

He went away and I bought the evening papers which had just come in from another old woman and read them. There was no doubt about the man the waiter had pointed out. We both knew him very well. All I could think was: the fool. The utter bloody fool.

Just then a Greek comrade came over and sat down at the table. He was a company commander in the Fifteenth Brigade who had been buried by an airplane bomb which had killed four other men and he had been sent in to be under observation for a while and then sent to a rest home or something of the sort.

“How are you, John?” I asked him. “Try one of these.”

“What you call that drink, Mr. Emmunds?”

“Gin and tonic.”

“What is that kind of tonic?”

“Quinine. Try one.”

“Listen, I don’t drink very much but is a quinine very good for fever. I try little one.”

“What did the doctor say about you, John?”

“Is a no necessity see doctor. I am all right. Only I have like buzzing noises all the time in the head.”

“You have to go to see him, John.”

“I go all right. But he not understand. He says I have no papers to admit.”

“I’ll call up about it,” I said. “I know the people there. Is the doctor a German?”

“That’s right,” said John. “Is a German. No talk English very good.”

Just then the waiter came over. He was an old man with a bald head and very old-fashioned manners which the war had not changed. He was very worried.

“I have a son at the front,” he said. “I have another son killed. Now about this.”

“It is thy problem.”

“And you? Already I have told you.”

“I came in here to have a drink before eating.”

“And I work here. But tell me.”

“It is thy problem,” I said. “I am not a politician.”

“Do you understand Spanish, John?” I asked the Greek comrade.

“No, I understand few words but I speak Greek, English, Arabic. One time I speak good Arabic. Listen, you know how I get buried?”

“No. I knew you were buried. That’s all.”

He had a dark good-looking face and very dark hands that he moved about when he talked. He came from one of the islands and he spoke with great intensity.

“Well, I tell you now. You see I have very much experience in war. Before I am captain in Greek army too. I am good soldier. So when I see plane come over there when we are in trenches there at Fuentes del Ebro I look at him close. I look at plane come over, bank, turn like this” (he turned and banked with his hands), “look down on us and I say, ‘Ah ha. Is for the General Staff. Is made the observation. Pretty soon come others.’

“So just like I say come others. So I am stand there and watch. I watch close. I look up and I point out to company what happens. Is come three and three. One first and two behind. Is pass one group of three and I say to company, ‘See? Now is pass one formation.’

“Is pass the other three and I say to company, ‘Now is hokay. Now is all right. Now is nothing more to worry.’ That the last thing I remember for two weeks.”

“When did it happen?”

“About one month ago. You see is my helmet forced down over my face when am buried by bomb so I have the air in that helmet to breathe until they dig me out but I know nothing about that. But in that air I breathe is the smoke from the explosion and that make me sick for long time. Now am I hokay, only with the ringing in the head. What you call this drink?”

“Gin and tonic. Schweppes Indian tonic water. This was a very fancy café before the war and this used to cost five pesetas when there were only seven pesetas to the dollar. We just found out they still have the tonic water and they’re charging the same price for it. There’s only a case left.”

“Is a good drink all right. Tell me, how was this city before the war?”

“Fine. Like now only lots to eat.”

The waiter came over and leaned toward the table.

“And if I don’t?” he said. “It is my responsibility.”

“If you wish to, go to the telephone and call this number. Write it down.”

He wrote it down. “Ask for Pepé,” I said.

“I have nothing against him,” the waiter said. “But it is the Causa. Certainly such a man is dangerous to our cause.”

“Don’t the other waiters recognize him?”

“I think so. But no one has said anything. He is an old client.”

“I am an old client, too.”

“Perhaps then he is on our side now, too.”

“No,” I said. “I know he is not.”

“I have never denounced anyone.”

“It is your problem. Maybe one of the other waiters will denounce him.”

“No. Only the old waiters know him and the old waiters do not denounce.”

“Bring another of the yellow gins and some bitters,” I said. “There is tonic water still in the bottle.”

“What’s he talk about?” asked John. “I only understand little bit.”

“There is a man here that we both knew in the old days. He used to be a marvelous pigeon shot and I used to see him at shoots. He is a fascist and for him to come here now, no matter what his reasons, is very foolish. But he was always very brave and very foolish.”

“Show him to me.”

“There at that table with the flyers.”

“Which one?”

“With the very brown face; the cap over one eye. Who is laughing now.”

“He is fascist?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a closest I see fascist since Fuentes del Ebro. Is a many fascist here?”

“Quite a few from time to time.”

“Is drink the same drink as you,” said John. “We drink that other people think we fascists, eh? Listen you ever been South America, West Coast, Magallanes?”

“No.”

“Is all right. Only too many oc-toe-pus.”

“Too many what?”

“Oc-toe-pus.” He pronounced it with the accent on the toe as oc-toe-pus. “You know with the eight arms.”

“Oh,” I said. “Octopus.”

“Oc-toe-pus,” said John. “You see I am diver too. Is a good place to work all right make plenty money only too many oc-toe-pus.”

“Did they bother you?”

“I don’t know about that. First time I go down in Magallanes harbor I see oc-toe-pus. He is stand on his feet like this.” John pointed his fingers on the table and brought his hands up, at the same time bringing up his shoulders and raising his eyebrows. “He is stand up taller than I am and he is look me right in the eye. I jerk cord for them to bring me up.”

“How big was he, John?”

“I cannot say absolutely because the glass in the helmet make distort a little. But the head was big around more than four feet anyway. And he was stand on his feet like on tip-toes and look at me like this.” (He peered in my face.) “So when I get up out of water they take off the helmet and so I say I don’t go down there any more. Then the man of the job says, ‘What a matter with you, John? The oc-toe-pus is more afraid of you than you afraid of oc-toe-pus.’ So I say to him ‘Impossible!’ What you say we drink some more this fascist drink?”

“All right,” I said.

I was watching the man at the table. His name was Luis Delgado and the last time I had seen him had been in 1933 shooting pigeons at Saint Sebastian and I remembered standing with him up on top of the stand watching the final of the big shoot. We had a bet, more than I could afford to bet, and I believed a good deal more than he could afford to lose that year, and when he paid coming down the stairs, I remembered how pleasant he was and how he made it seem a great privilege to pay. Then I remembered our standing at the bar having a martini, and I had that wonderful feeling of relief that comes when you have bet yourself out of a bad hole and I was wondering how badly the bet had hit him. I had shot rottenly all week and he had shot beautifully but drawn almost impossible birds and he had bet on himself steadily.

“Should we match a duro?” he asked.

“You really want to?”

“Yes, if you like.”

“For how much?”

He took out a notecase and looked in it and laughed.

“I’d say for anything you like,” he said. “But suppose we say for eight thousand pesetas. That’s what seems to be there.”

That was close to a thousand dollars then.

“Good,” I said, all the fine inner quiet gone now and the hollow that gambling makes come back again. “Who’s matching who?”

“I’ll match you.”

We shook the heavy five-peseta pieces in our cupped hands; then each man laid his coin on the back of his left hand, each coin covered with the right hand.

“What’s yours?” he asked.

I uncovered the big silver piece with the profile of Alfonso XII as a baby showing.

“Heads,” I said.

“Take these damned things and be a good man and buy me a drink.” He emptied out the notecase. “You wouldn’t like to buy a good Purdey gun would you?”

“No,” I said. “But look, Luis, if you need some money—”

I was holding the stiffly folded, shiny-heavy-paper, green thousand-peseta notes toward him.

“Don’t be silly, Enrique,” he said. “We’ve been gambling, haven’t we?”

“Yes. But we know each other quite well.”

“Not that well.”

“Right,” I said. “You’re the judge of that. Then what will you drink?”

“What about a gin and tonic? That’s a marvelous drink you know.”

So we had a gin and tonic and I felt very badly to have broken him and I felt awfully good to have won the money, and a gin and tonic never tasted better to me in all my life. There is no use to lie about these things or pretend you do not enjoy winning; but this boy Luis Delgado was a very pretty gambler.

“I don’t think if people gambled for what they could afford it would be very interesting. Do you, Enrique?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been able to afford it.”

“Don’t be silly. You have lots of money.”

“No I haven’t,” I said. “Really.”

“Oh, everyone has money,” he said. “It’s just a question of selling something or other to get hold of it.”

“I don’t have much. Really.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I’ve never known an American who wasn’t rich.”

I guess that was the truth all right. He wouldn’t have met them at the Ritz bar or at Chicote’s either in those days. And now he was back in Chicote’s and all the Americans he would meet there now were the kind he would never have met; except me, and I was a mistake. But I would have given plenty not to have seen him in there.

Still, if he wanted to do an absolutely damn fool thing like that it was his own business. But as I looked at the table and remembered the old days I felt badly about him and I felt very badly too that I had given the waiter the number of the counterespionage bureau in Seguridad headquarters. He could have had Seguridad by simply asking on the telephone. But I had given him the shortest cut to having Delgado arrested in one of those excesses of impartiality, righteousness and Pontius Pilatry, and the always-dirty desire to see how people act under an emotional conflict, that makes writers such attractive friends.

The waiter came over.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I would never denounce him myself,” I said, now trying to undo for myself what I had done with the number. “But I am a foreigner and it is your war and your problem.”

“But you are with us.”

“Absolutely and always. But it does not include denouncing old friends.”

“But for me?”

“For you it is different.”

I knew this was true and there was nothing else to say, only I wished I had never heard of any of it.

My curiosity as to how people would act in this case had been long ago, and shamefully, satisfied. I turned to John and did not look at the table where Luis Delgado was sitting. I knew he had been flying with the fascists for over a year, and here he was, in a loyalist uniform, talking to three young loyalist flyers of the last crop that had been trained in France.

None of those new kids would know him and I wondered whether he had come to try to steal a plane or for what. Whatever he was there for, he was a fool to come to Chicote’s now.

“How do you feel, John?” I asked.

“Feel good,” said John. “Is a good drink hokay. Makes me feel little bit drunk maybe. Is a good for the buzzing in the head.”

The waiter came over. He was very excited.

“I have denounced him,” he said.

“Well then,” I said, “now you haven’t any problem.”

“No,” he said proudly. “I have denounced him. They are on their way now to get him.”

“Let’s go,” I said to John. “There is going to be some trouble here.”

“Is best go then,” said John. “Is a plenty trouble always come, even if you do best to avoid. How much we owe?”

“You aren’t going to stay?” the waiter asked.

“No.”

“But you gave me the telephone number.”

“I know it. You get to know too many telephone numbers if you stay around in this town.”

“But it was my duty.”

“Yes. Why not? Duty is a very strong thing.”

“But now?”

“Well, you felt good about it just now, didn’t you? Maybe you will feel good about it again. Maybe you will get to like it.”

“You have forgotten the package,” the waiter said. He handed me the meat which was wrapped in two envelopes which had brought copies of the Spur to the piles of magazines which accumulated in one of the office rooms of the Embassy.

“I understand,” I said to the waiter. “Truly.”

“He was an old client and a good client. Also I have never denounced anyone before. I did not denounce for pleasure.”

“Also I should not speak cynically or brutally. Tell him that I denounced him. He hates me anyway by now for differences in politics. He’d feel badly if he knew it was you.”

“No. Each man must take his responsibility. But you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. Then lied. “I understand and I approve.” You have to lie very often in a war and when you have to lie you should do it quickly and as well as you can.

We shook hands and I went out the door with John. I looked back at the table where Luis Delgado sat as I went out. He had another gin and tonic in front of him and everyone at the table was laughing at something he had said. He had a very gay, brown face, and shooter’s eyes, and I wondered what he was passing himself off as.

He was a fool to go to Chicote’s. But that was exactly the sort of thing that he would do in order to be able to boast of it when he was back with his own people.

As we went out of the door and turned to walk up the street, a big Seguridad car drew up in front of Chicote’s and eight men got out of it. Six with submachine guns took up positions outside the door. Two in plain clothes went inside. A man asked us for our papers and when I said, “Foreigners,” he said to go along; that it was all right.

In the dark going up the Gran Via there was much new broken glass on the sidewalk and much rubble under foot from the shelling. The air was still smoky and all up the street it smelled of high explosive and blasted granite.

“Where you go eat?” asked John.

“I have some meat for all of us, and we can cook it in the room.”

“I cook it,” said John. “I cook good. I remember one time when I cook on ship—”

“It will be pretty tough,” I said. “It’s just been freshly butchered.”

“Oh no,” said John. “Is a no such thing as a touch meat in a war.”

People were hurrying by in the dark on their way home from the cinemas where they had stayed until the shelling was over.

“What’s a matter that fascist he come to that café where they know him?”

“He was crazy to do it.”

“Is a trouble with a war,” John said. “Is a too many people crazy.”

“John,” I said, “I think you’ve got something there.”

Back at the hotel we went in the door past the sandbags piled to protect the porter’s desk and I asked for the key, but the porter said there were two comrades upstairs in the room taking a bath. He had given them the keys.

“Go on up, John,” I said. “I want to telephone.”

I went over to the booth and called the same number I had given the waiter.

“Hello? Pepé?”

A thin-lipped voice came over the phone. “¿Qué tal Enrique?”

“Listen, Pepé, did you pick up a certain Luis Delgado at Chicote’s?”

“Si, hombre, sí. Sin novedad. Without trouble.”

“He doesn’t know anything about the waiter?”

“No, hombre, no.”

“Then don’t tell him. Tell him I denounced him then, will you? Nothing about the waiter.”

“Why when it will make no difference? He is a spy. He will be shot. There is no choice in the matter.”

“I know,” I said. “But it makes a difference.”

“As you want, hombre. As you want. When shall I see thee?”

“Lunch tomorrow. We have some meat.”

“And whisky before. Good, hombre, good.”

“Salud, Pepé, and thank you.”

“Salud, Enrique. It is nothing. Salud.”

It was a strange and very deadly voice and I never got used to hearing it, but as I walked up the stairs now, I felt much better.

All we old clients of Chicote’s had a sort of feeling about the place. I knew that was why Luis Delgado had been such a fool as to go back there. He could have done his business some place else. But if he was in Madrid he had to go there. He had been a good client as the waiter had said and we had been friends. Certainly any small acts of kindness you can do in life are worth doing. So I was glad I had called my friend Pepé at Seguridad headquarters because Luis Delgado was an old client of Chicote’s and I did not wish him to be disillusioned or bitter about the waiters there before he died.

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TANK

ON THIS EVENING I WAS WALKING HOME from the censorship office to the Florida Hotel and it was raining. So about halfway home I got sick of the rain and stopped into Chicote’s for a quick one. It was the second winter of shelling in the siege of Madrid and everything was short including tobacco and people’s tempers and you were a little hungry all the time and would become suddenly and unreasonably irritated at things you could do nothing about such as the weather. I should have gone on home. It was only five blocks more, but when I saw Chicote’s doorway I thought I would get a quick one and then do those six blocks up the Gran Via through the mud and rubble of the streets broken by the bombardment.

The place was crowded. You couldn’t get near the bar and all the tables were full. It was full of smoke, singing, men in uniform, and the smell of wet leather coats, and they were handing drinks over a crowd that was three deep at the bar.

A waiter I knew found a chair from another table and I sat down with a thin, white-faced, Adam’s-appled German I knew who was working at the censorship and two other people I did not know. The table was in the middle of the room a little on your right as you go in.

You couldn’t hear yourself talk for the singing and I ordered a gin and Angostura and put it down against the rain. The place was really packed and everybody was very jolly; maybe getting just a little bit too jolly from the newly made Catalan liquor most of them were drinking. A couple of people I did not know slapped me on the back and when the girl at our table said something to me, I couldn’t hear it and said, “Sure.”

She was pretty terrible looking now I had stopped looking around and was looking at our table; really pretty terrible. But it turned out, when the waiter came, that what she had asked me was to have a drink. The fellow with her was not very forceful looking but she was forceful enough for both of them. She had one of those strong, semi-classical faces and was built like a lion tamer; and the boy with her looked as though he ought to be wearing an old school tie. He wasn’t though. He was wearing a leather coat just like all the rest of us. Only it wasn’t wet because they had been there since before the rain started. She had on a leather coat too and it was becoming to the sort of face she had.

By this time I was wishing I had not stopped into Chicote’s but had gone straight on home where you could change your clothes and be dry and have a drink in comfort on the bed with your feet up, and I was tired of looking at both of these young people. Life is very short and ugly women are very long and sitting there at the table I decided that even though I was a writer and supposed to have an insatiable curiosity about all sorts of people, I did not really care to know whether these two were married, or what they saw in each other, or what their politics were, or whether he had a little money, or she had a little money, or anything about them. I decided they must be in the radio. Any time you saw really strange looking civilians in Madrid they were always in the radio. So to say something I raised my voice above the noise and asked, “You in the radio?”

“We are,” the girl said. So that was that. They were in the radio.

“How are you comrade?” I said to the German.

“Fine. And you?”

“Wet,” I said, and he laughed with his head on one side.

“You haven’t got a cigarette?” he asked. I handed him my next to the last pack of cigarettes and he took two. The forceful girl took two and the young man with the old school tie face took one.

“Take another,” I shouted.

“No thanks,” he answered and the German took it instead.

“Do you mind?” he smiled.

“Of course not,” I said. I really minded and he knew it. But he wanted the cigarettes so badly that it did not matter. The singing had died down momentarily, or there was a break in it as there is sometimes in a storm, and we could all hear what we said.

“You been here long?” the forceful girl asked me. She pronounced it bean as in bean soup.

“Off and on,” I said.

“We must have a serious talk,” the German said. “I want to have a talk with you. When can we have it?”

“I’ll call you up,” I said. This German was a very strange German indeed and none of the good Germans liked him. He lived under the delusion that he could play the piano, but if you kept him away from pianos he was all right unless he was exposed to liquor, or the opportunity to gossip, and nobody had even been able to keep him away from those two things yet.

Gossip was the best thing he did and he always knew something new and highly discreditable about anyone you could mention in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, and other political centers.

Just then the singing really started in again, and you cannot gossip very well shouting, so it looked like a dull afternoon at Chicote’s and I decided to leave as soon as I should have bought a round myself.

Just then it started. A civilian in a brown suit, a white shirt, black tie, his hair brushed straight back from a rather high forehead, who had been clowning around from table to table, squirted one of the waiters with a flit gun. Everybody laughed except the waiter who was carrying a tray full of drinks at the time. He was indignant.

“No hay derecho,” the waiter said. This means, “You have no right to do that,” and is the simplest and the strongest protest in Spain.

The flit gun man, delighted with his success, and not seeming to give any importance to the fact that it was well into the second year of the war, that he was in a city under siege where everyone was under a strain, and that he was one of only four men in civilian clothes in the place, now squirted another waiter.

I looked around for a place to duck to. This waiter, also, was indignant and the flit gun man squirted him twice more, lightheartedly. Some people still thought it was funny, including the forceful girl. But the waiter stood, shaking his head. His lips were trembling. He was an old man and he had worked in Chicote’s for ten years that I knew of.

“No hay derecho,” he said with dignity.

People had laughed, however, and the flit gun man, not noticing how the singing had fallen off, squirted his flit gun at the back of a waiter’s neck. The waiter turned, holding his tray.

“No hay derecho,” he said. This time it was no protest. It was an indictment and I saw three men in uniform start from a table for the flit gun man and the next thing all four of them were going out the revolving door in a rush and you heard a smack when someone hit the flit gun man on the mouth. Somebody else picked up the flit gun and threw it out the door after him.

The three men came back in looking serious, tough and very righteous. Then the door revolved and in came the flit gun man. His hair was down in his eyes, there was blood on his face, his necktie was pulled to one side and his shirt was torn open. He had the flit gun again and as he pushed, wild-eyed and white-faced, into the room he made one general, unaimed, challenging squirt with it, holding it toward the whole company.

I saw one of the three men start for him and I saw this man’s face. There were more men with him now and they forced the flit gun man back between two tables on the left of the room as you go in, the flit gun man struggling wildly now, and when the shot went off I grabbed the forceful girl by the arm and dove for the kitchen door.

The kitchen door was shut and when I put my shoulder against it it did not give.

“Get down here behind the angle of the bar,” I said. She knelt there.

“Flat,” I said and pushed her down. She was furious.

Every man in the room except the German, who lay behind a table, and the public-school-looking boy who stood in a corner drawn up against the wall, had a gun up. On a bench along the wall three over-blonde girls, their hair dark at the roots, were standing on tiptoe to see and screaming steadily.

“I’m not afraid,” the forceful one said. “This is ridiculous.”

“You don’t want to get shot in a café brawl,” I said. “If that flit king has any friends here this can be very bad.”

But he had no friends, evidently, because people began putting their pistols away and somebody lifted down the blonde screamers and everyone who had started over there when the shot came drew back away from the flit man who lay, quietly, on his back on the floor.

“No one is to leave until the police come,” someone shouted from the door.

Two policemen with rifles, who had come in off the street patrol, were standing by the door and at this announcement I saw six men form up just like the line-up of a football team coming out of a huddle and head out through the door. Three of them were the men who had first thrown the flit king out. One of them was the man who shot him. They went right through the policemen with the rifles like good interference taking out an end and a tackle. And as they went out one of the policemen got his rifle across the door and shouted, “No one can leave. Absolutely no one.”

“Why did those men go? Why hold us if anyone’s gone?”

“They were mechanics who had to return to their air field,” someone said.

“But if anyone’s gone it’s silly to hold the others.”

“Everyone must wait for the Seguridad. Things must be done legally and in order.”

“But don’t you see that if any person has gone it is silly to hold the others?”

“No one can leave. Everyone must wait.”

“It’s comic,” I said to the forceful girl.

“No it’s not. It’s simply horrible.”

We were standing up now and she was staring indignantly at where the flit king was lying. His arms were spread wide and he had one leg drawn up.

“I’m going over to help that poor wounded man. Why has no one helped him or done anything for him?”

“I’d leave him alone,” I said. “You want to keep out of this.”

“But it’s simply inhuman. I’ve nurse’s training and I’m going to give him first aid.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Don’t go near him.”

“Why not?” She was very upset and almost hysterical.

“Because he’s dead,” I said.

When the police came they held everybody there for three hours. They commenced by smelling of all the pistols. In this manner they would detect one which had been fired recently. After about forty pistols they seemed to get bored with this and anyway all you could smell was wet leather coats. Then they sat at a table placed directly behind the late flit king, who lay on the floor looking like a grey wax caricature of himself, with grey wax hands and a grey wax face, and examined people’s papers.

With his shirt ripped open you could see the flit king had no undershirt and the soles of his shoes were worn through. He looked very small and pitiful lying there on the floor. You had to step over him to get to the table where two plain clothes policemen sat and examined everyone’s identification papers. The husband lost and found his papers several times with nervousness. He had a safe conduct pass somewhere but he had mislaid it in a pocket and he kept on searching and perspiring until he found it. Then he would put it in a different pocket and have to go searching again. He perspired heavily while doing this and it made his hair very curly and his face red. He now looked as though he should have not only an old school tie but one of those little caps boys in the lower forms wear. You have heard how events age people. Well, this shooting had made him look about ten years younger.

While we were waiting around I told the forceful girl I thought the whole thing was a pretty good story and that I would write it sometime. The way the six had lined up in single file and rushed that door was very impressive. She was shocked and said that I could not write it because it would be prejudicial to the cause of the Spanish Republic. I said that I had been in Spain for a long time and that they used to have a phenomenal number of shootings in the old days around Valencia under the monarchy, and that for hundreds of years before the Republic people had been cutting each other with large knives called navajas in Andalucia, and that if I saw a comic shooting in Chicote’s during the war I could write about it just as though it had been in New York, Chicago, Key West or Marseilles. It did not have anything to do with politics. She said I shouldn’t. Probably a lot of other people will say I shouldn’t too. The German seemed to think it was a pretty good story, however, and I gave him the last of the Camels. Well, anyway, finally, after about three hours the police said we could go.

They were sort of worried about me at the Florida because in those days, with the shelling, if you started for home on foot and didn’t get there after the bars were closed at seven-thirty, people worried. I was glad to get home and I told the story while we were cooking supper on an electric stove and it had quite a success.

Well, it stopped raining during the night, and the next morning it was a fine, bright, cold early winter day and at twelve forty-five I pushed open the revolving doors at Chicote’s to try a little gin and tonic before lunch. There were very few people there at that hour and two waiters and the manager came over to the table. They were all smiling.

“Did they catch the murderer?” I asked.

“Don’t make jokes so early in the day,” the manager said. “Did you see him shot?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“Me too,” he said. “I was just here when it happened.” He pointed to a corner table. “He placed the pistol right against the man’s chest when he fired.”

“How late did they hold people?”

“Oh, until past two this morning.”

“They only came for the fiambre,” using the Spanish slang word for corpse, the same used on menus for cold meat, “at eleven o’clock this morning.”

“But you don’t know about it yet,” the manager said.

“No. He doesn’t know,” a waiter said.

“It is a very rare thing,” another waiter said. “Muy raro.”

“And sad too,” the manager said. He shook his head.

“Yes. Sad and curious,” the waiter said. “Very sad.”

“Tell me.”

“It is a very rare thing,” the manager said.

“Tell me. Come on, tell me.”

The manager leaned over the table in great confidence.

“In the flit gun, you know,” he said. “He had eau de cologne. Poor fellow.”

“It was not a joke in such bad taste, you see?” the waiter said.

“It was really just gaiety. No one should have taken offense,” the manager said. “Poor fellow.”

“I see,” I said. “He just wanted everyone to have a good time.”

“Yes,” said the manager. “It was really just an unfortunate misunderstanding.”

“And what about the flit gun?”

“The police took it. They have sent it around to his family.”

“I imagine they will be glad to have it,” I said.

“Yes,” said the manager. “Certainly. A flit gun is always useful.”

“Who was he?”

“A cabinet maker.”

“Married?”

“Yes, the wife was here with the police this morning.”

“What did she say?”

“She dropped down by him and said, ‘Pedro, what have they done to thee, Pedro? Who has done this to thee? Oh, Pedro.’”

“Then the police had to take her away because she could not control herself,” the waiter said.

“It seems he was feeble of the chest,” the manager said. “He fought in the first days of the movement. They said he fought in the Sierra but he was too weak in the chest to continue.”

“And yesterday afternoon he just went out on the town to cheer things up,” I suggested.

“No,” said the manager. “You see it is very rare. Everything is muy raro. This I learn from the police who are very efficient if given time. They have interrogated comrades from the shop where he worked. This they located from the card of his syndicate which was in his pocket. Yesterday he bought the flit gun and agua de colonia to use for a joke at a wedding. He had announced this intention. He bought them across the street. There was a label on the cologne bottle with the address. The bottle was in the washroom. It was there he filled the flit gun. After buying them he must have come in here when the rain started.”

“I remember when he came in,” a waiter said.

“In the gaiety, with the singing, he became gay too.”

“He was gay all right,” I said. “He was practically floating around.”

The manager kept on with the relentless Spanish logic.

“That is the gaiety of drinking with a weakness of the chest,” he said.

“I don’t like this story very well,” I said.

“Listen,” said the manager. “How rare it is. His gaiety comes in contact with the seriousness of the war like a butterfly—”

“Oh, very like a butterfly,” I said. “Too much like a butterfly.”

“I am not joking,” said the manager. “You see it? Like a butterfly and a tank.”

This pleased him enormously. He was getting into the real Spanish metaphysics.

“Have a drink on the house,” he said. “You must write a story about this.”

I remembered the flit gun man with his grey wax hands and his grey wax face, his arms spread wide and his legs drawn up and he did look a little like a butterfly; not too much, you know. But he did not look very human either. He reminded me more of a dead sparrow.

“I’ll take gin and Schweppes quinine tonic water,” I said.

“You must write a story about it,” the manager said. “Here. Here’s luck.”

“Luck,” I said. “Look, an English girl last night told me I shouldn’t write about it. That it would be very bad for the cause.”

“What nonsense,” the manager said. “It is very interesting and important, the misunderstood gaiety coming in contact with the deadly seriousness that is here always. To me it is the rarest and most interesting thing which I have seen for some time. You must write it.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. Has he any children?”

“No,” he said. “I asked the police. But you must write it and you must call it ‘The Butterfly and the Tank.’”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. But I don’t like the title much.”

“The title is very elegant,” the manager said. “It is pure literature.”

“All right,” I said. “Sure. That’s what we’ll call it. ‘The Butterfly and the Tank.’”

And I sat there on that bright cheerful morning, the place smelling clean and newly aired and swept, with the manager who was an old friend and who was now very pleased with the literature we were making together and I took a sip of the gin and tonic water and looked out the sandbagged window and thought of the wife kneeling there and saying, “Pedro. Pedro, who has done this to thee, Pedro?” And I thought that the police would never be able to tell her that even if they had the name of the man who pulled the trigger.

NIGHT BEFORE BATTLE

AT THIS TIME WE WERE WORKING IN A shell-smashed house that overlooked the Casa del Campo in Madrid. Below us a battle was being fought. You could see it spread out below you and over the hills, could smell it, could taste the dust of it, and the noise of it was one great slithering sheet of rifle and automatic rifle fire rising and dropping, and in it came the crack of the guns and the bubbly rumbling of the outgoing shells fired from the batteries behind us, the thud of their bursts, and then the rolling yellow clouds of dust. But it was just too far to film well. We had tried working closer but they kept sniping at the camera and you could not work.

The big camera was the most expensive thing we had and if it was smashed we were through. We were making the film on almost nothing and all the money was in the cans of film and the cameras. We could not afford to waste film and you had to be awfully careful of the cameras.

The day before we had been sniped out of a good place to film from and I had to crawl back holding the small camera to my belly, trying to keep my head lower than my shoulders, hitching along on my elbows, the bullets whocking into the brick wall over my back and twice spurting dirt over me.

Our heaviest attacks were made in the afternoon, God knows why, as the fascists then had the sun at their backs, and it shone on the camera lenses and made them blink like a helio and the Moors would open up on the flash. They knew all about helios and officers’ glasses from the Riff and if you wanted to be properly sniped, all you had to do was use a pair of glasses without shading them adequately. They could shoot too, and they had kept my mouth dry all day.

In the afternoon we moved up into the house. It was a fine place to work and we made a sort of a blind for the camera on a balcony with the broken latticed curtains; but, as I said, it was too far.

It was not too far to get the pine studded hillside, the lake and the outline of the stone farm buildings that disappeared in the sudden smashes of stone dust from the hits by high explosive shells, nor was it too far to get the clouds of smoke and dirt that thundered up on the hill crest as the bombers droned over. But at eight hundred to a thousand yards the tanks looked like small mud-colored beetles bustling in the trees and spitting tiny flashes and the men behind them were toy men who lay flat, then crouched and ran, and then dropped to run again, or to stay where they lay, spotting the hillside as the tanks moved on. Still we hoped to get the shape of the battle. We had many close shots and would get others with luck and if we could get the sudden fountainings of earth, the puffs of shrapnel, the rolling louds of smoke and dust lit by the yellow flash and white blossoming of grenades that is the very shape of battle we would have something that we needed.

So when the light failed we carried the big camera down the stairs, took off the tripod, made three loads, and then, one at a time, sprinted across the fire-swept corner of the Paseo Rosales into the lee of the stone wall of the stables of the old Montana Barracks. We knew we had a good place to work and we felt cheerful. But we were kidding ourselves plenty that it was not too far.

“Come on, let’s go to Chicote’s,” I said when we had come up the hill to the Hotel Florida.

But they had to repair a camera, to change film and seal up what we had made so I went alone. You were never alone in Spain and it felt good for a change.

As I started to walk down the Gran Via to Chicote’s in the April twilight I felt happy, cheerful and excited. We had worked hard, and I thought well. But walking down the street alone, all my elation died. Now that I was alone and there was no excitement, I knew we had been too far away and any fool could see the offensive was a failure. I had known it all day but you are often deceived by hope and optimism. But remembering how it looked now, I knew this was just another blood bath like the Somme. The people’s army was on the offensive finally. But it was attacking in a way that could do only one thing: destroy itself. And as I put together now what I had seen all day and what I had heard, I felt plenty bad.

I knew in the smoke and din of Chicote’s that the offensive was a failure and I knew it even stronger when I took my first drink at the crowded bar. When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer. Now, in Chicote’s it was so crowded that you had to make room with your elbows to get your drink to your mouth. I had one good long swallow and then someone jostled me so that I spilled part of the glass of whisky and soda. I looked around angrily and the man who had jostled me laughed.

“Hello fish face,” he said.

“Hello you goat.”

“Let’s get a table,” he said. “You certainly looked sore when I bumped you.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked. His leather coat was dirty and greasy, his eyes were hollow and he needed a shave. He had the big Colt automatic that had belonged to three other men that I had known of, and that we were always trying to get shells for, strapped to his leg. He was very tall and his face was smoke-darkened and grease-smudged. He had a leather helment with a heavy leather padded ridge longitudinally over the top and a heavily padded leather rim.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Casa del Campo,” he said, pronouncing it in a sing-song mocking way we had heard a page boy use in calling in the lobby of a hotel in New Orleans one time and still kept as a private joke.

“There’s a table,” I said as two soldiers and two girls got up to go. “Let’s get it.”

We sat at this table in the middle of the room and I watched him raise his glass. His hands were greasy and the forks of both thumbs black as graphite from the back spit of the machine gun. The hand holding the drink was shaking.

“Look at them.” He put out the other hand. It was shaking too. “Both the same,” he said in that same comic lilt. Then, seriously, “You been down there?”

“We’re making a picture of it.”

“Photograph well?”

“Not too.”

“See us?”

“Where?”

“Attack on the farm. Three twenty-five this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Like it?”

“Nope.”

“Me either,” he said. “Listen the whole thing is just as crazy as a bedbug. Why do they want to make a frontal attack against positions like those? Who in hell thought it up?”

“An S.O.B. named Largo Caballero,” said a short man with thick glasses who was sitting at the table when we came over to it. “The first time they let him look through a pair of field glasses he became a general. This is his masterpiece.”

We both looked at the man who spoke. Al Wagner, the tank man, looked at me and raised what had been his eyebrows before they were burnt off. The little man smiled at us.

“If anyone around here speaks English you’re liable to get shot, comrade,” Al said to him.

“No,” said the little short man. “Largo Caballero is liable to be shot. He ought to be shot.”

“Listen, comrade,” said Al. “Just speak a little quieter, will you? somebody might overhear you and think we were with you.”

“I know what I’m talking about,” said the short man with the very thick glasses. I looked at him carefully. He gave you a certain feeling that he did.

“Just the same it isn’t always a good thing to say what you know,” I said. “Have a drink?”

“Certainly,” he said. “It’s all right to talk to you. I know you. You’re all right.”

“I’m not that all right,” I said. “And this is a public bar.”

“A public bar is the only private place there is. Nobody can hear what we say here. What is your unit, comrade?”

“I’ve got some tanks about eight minutes from here on foot,” Al told him. “We are through for the day and I have the early part of this evening off.”

“Why don’t you ever get washed?” I said.

“I plan to,” said Al. “In your room. When we leave here. Have you got any mechanic’s soap?”

“No.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got a little here with me in my pocket that I’ve been saving.”

The little man with the thick-lensed glasses was looking at Al intently.

“Are you a party member, comrade?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Al.

“I know Comrade Henry here is not,” the little man said.

“I wouldn’t trust him then,” Al said. “I never do.”

“You bastid,” I said. “Want to go?”

“No,” Al said. “I need another drink very badly.”

“I know all about Comrade Henry,” the little man said. “Now let me tell you something more about Largo Caballero.”

“Do we have to hear it?” Al asked. “Remember I’m in the people’s army. You don’t think it will discourage me, do you?”

“You know his head is swelled so badly now he’s getting sort of mad. He is Prime Minister and War Minister and nobody can even talk to him any more. You know he’s just a good honest trade union leader somewhere between the late Sam Gompers and John L. Lewis but this man Araquistain who invented him?”

“Take it easy,” said Al. “I don’t follow.”

“Oh, Araquistain invented him! Araquistain who is Ambassador in Paris now. He made him up you know. He called him the Spanish Lenin and then the poor man tried to live up to it and somebody let him look through a pair of field glasses and he thought he was Clausewitz.”

“You said that before,” Al told him coldly. “What do you base it on?”

“Why three days ago in the Cabinet meeting he was talking about military affairs. They were talking about this business we’ve got now and Jesus Hernandez, just ribbing him, you know, asked him what was the difference between tactics and strategy. Do you know what the old boy said?”

“No,” Al said. I could see this new comrade was getting a little on his nerves.

“He said, ‘In tactics you attack the enemy from in front. In strategy you take him from the sides.’ Now isn’t that something?”

“You better run along, comrade,” Al said. “You’re getting so awfully discouraged.”

“But we’ll get rid of Largo Caballero,” the short comrade said. “We’ll get rid of him right after his offensive. This last piece of stupidity will be the end of him.”

“O.K., comrade,” Al told him. “But I’ve got to attack in the morning.”

“Oh, you are going to attack again?”

“Listen, comrade. You can tell me any sort of crap you want because it’s interesting and I’m grown up enough to sort things out. But don’t ask me any questions, see? Because you’ll be in trouble.”

“I just meant it personally. Not as information.”

“We don’t know each other well enough to ask personal questions, comrade,” Al said. “Why don’t you just go to another table and let Comrade Henry and me talk. I want to ask him some things.”

“Salud, comrade,” the little man said, standing up. “We’ll meet another time.”

“Good,” said Al. “Another time.”

We watched him go over to another table. He excused himself, some soldiers made room for him, and as we watched we could see him starting to talk. They all looked interested.

“What do you make of that little guy?” Al asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Me either,” Al said. “He certainly had this offensive sized up.” He took a drink and showed his hand. “See? It’s all right now. I’m not any rummy either. I never take a drink before an attack.”

“How was it today?”

“You saw it. How did it look?”

“Terrible.”

“That’s it. That’s the word for it all right. It was terrible. I guess he’s using strategy and tactics both now because we are attacking from straight in front and from both sides. How’s the rest of it going?”

“Duran took the new race track. The hipódromo. We’ve narrowed down on the corridor that runs up into University City. Up above we crossed the Coruña road. And we’re stopped at the Cerro de Aguilar since yesterday morning. We were up that way this morning. Duran lost over half his brigade, I heard. How is it with you?”

“Tomorrow we’re going to try those farm houses and the church again. The church on the hill, the one they call the hermit, is the objective. The whole hillside is cut by those gullies and it’s all enfiladed at least three ways by machine-gun posts. They’re dug deep all through there and it’s well done. We haven’t got enough artillery to give any kind of real covering fire to keep them down and we haven’t heavy artillery to blow them out. They’ve got anti-tanks in those three houses and an anti-tank battery by the church. It’s going to be murder.”

“When’s it for?”

“Don’t ask me. I’ve got no right to tell you that.”

“If we have to film it, I meant,” I said. “The money from the film all goes for ambulances. We’ve got the Twelfth Brigade in the counter-attack at the Argada Bridge. And we’ve got the Twelfth again in that attack last week by Pingarrón. We got some good tank shots there.”

“The tanks were no good there,” Al said.

“I know,” I said, “but they photographed very well. What about tomorrow?”

“Just get out early and wait,” he said. “Not too early.”

“How you feel now?”

“I’m awfully tired,” he said. “And I’ve got a bad headache. But I feel a lot better. Let’s have another one and then go up to your place and get a bath.”

“Maybe we ought to eat first.”

“I’m too dirty to eat. You can hold a place and I’ll go get a bath and join you at the Gran Via.”

“I’ll go up with you.”

“No. It’s better to hold a place and I’ll join you.” He leaned his head forward on the table. “Boy I got a headache. It’s the noise in those buckets. I never hear it any more but it does something to your ears just the same.”

“Why don’t you go to bed?”

“No. I’d rather stay up with you for a while and then sleep when I got back down there. I don’t want to wake up twice.”

“You haven’t got the horrors, have you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m fine. Listen, Hank. I don’t want to talk a lot of crap but I think I’m going to get killed tomorrow.”

I touched the table three times with my fingertips.

“Everybody feels like that. I’ve felt like that plenty of times.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not natural with me. But where we’ve got to go tomorrow doesn’t make sense. I don’t even know that I can get them up there. You can’t make them move if they won’t go. You can shoot them afterwards. But at the time if they won’t go they won’t go. If you shoot them they still won’t go.”

“Maybe it will be all right.”

“No. We’ve got good infantry tomorrow. They’ll go anyway. Not like those yellow bastids we had the first day.”

“Maybe it will be all right.”

“No,” he said. “It won’t be all right. But it will be just exactly as good as I can make it. I can make them start all right and I can take them up to where they will have to quit one at a time. Maybe they can make it. I’ve got three I can rely on. If only one of the good ones doesn’t get knocked out at the start.”

“Who are your good ones?”

“I’ve got a big Greek from Chicago that will go anywhere. He’s just as good as they come. I’ve got a Frenchman from Marseille that’s got his left shoulder in a cast with two wounds still draining that asked to come out of the hospital in the Palace Hotel for this show and has to be strapped in and I don’t know how he can do it. Just technically I mean. He’d break your bloody heart. He used to be a taxi driver.” He stopped. “I’m talking too much. Stop me if I talk too much.”

“Who’s the third one?” I asked.

“The third one? Did I say I had a third one?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s me.”

“What about the others?”

“They’re mechanics, but they couldn’t learn to soldier. They can’t size up what’s happening. And they’re all afraid to die. I tried to get them over it,” he said. “But it comes back on them every attack. They look like tank men when you see them by the tanks with the helmets on. They look like tank men when they get in. But when they shut the traps down there’s really nothing inside. They aren’t tank men. And so far we haven’t had time to make new ones.”

“Do you want to take the bath?”

“Let’s sit here a little while longer,” he said. “It’s nice here.”

“It’s funny all right, with a war right down the end of the street so you can walk to it, and then leave it and come here.”

“And then walk back to it,” Al said.

“What about a girl? There’s two American girls at the Florida. Newspaper correspondents. Maybe you could make one.”

“I don’t want to have to talk to them. I’m too tired.”

“There’s the two Moor girls from Ceuta at that corner table.”

He looked over at them. They were both dark and bushy-headed. One was large and one was small and they certainly both looked strong and active.

“No,” said Al. “I’m going to see plenty Moors tomorrow without having to fool with them tonight.”

“There’s plenty of girls,” I said. “Manolita’s at the Florida. That Seguridad bird she lives with has gone to Valencia and she’s being true to him with everybody.”

“Listen, Hank, what are you trying to promote me?”

“I just wanted to cheer you up.”

“Grow up,” he said. “What’s one more?”

“One more.”

“I don’t mind dying a bit,” he said. “Dying is just a lot of crap. Only it’s wasteful. The attack is wrong and it’s wasteful. I can handle tanks good now. If I had time I could make good tankists too. And if we had tanks that were a little bit faster the anti-tanks wouldn’t bother them the way it does when you haven’t got the mobility. Listen, Hank, they aren’t what we thought they were though. Do you remember when everybody thought if we only had tanks?”

“They were good at Gaudalajara.”

“Sure. But those were the old boys. They were soldiers. And it was against Italians.”

“But what’s happened?”

“A lot of things. The mercenaries signed up for six months. Most of them were Frenchmen. They soldiered good for five but now all they want to do is live through the last month and go home. They aren’t worth a damn now. The Russians that came out as demonstrators when the government bought the tanks were perfect. But they’re pulling them back now for China they say. The new Spaniards are some of them good and some not. It takes six months to make a good tank man, I mean to know anything. And to be able to size up and work intelligently you have to have a talent. We’ve been having to make them in six weeks and there aren’t so many with a talent.”

“They make fine flyers.”

“They’ll make fine tank guys too. But you have to get the ones with a vocation for it. It’s sort of like being a priest. You have to be cut out for it. Especially now they’ve got so much anti-tank.”

They had pulled down the shutters in Chicote’s and now they were locking the door. No one would be allowed in now. But you had a half an hour more before they closed.

“I like it here,” said Al. “It isn’t so noisy now. Remember that time I met you in New Orleans when I was on a ship and we went in to have a drink in the Monteleone bar and that kid that looked just like Saint Sebastian was paging people with that funny voice like he was singing and I gave him a quarter to page Mr. B. F. Slob?”

“That’s the same way you said ‘Casa del Campo.’”

“Yeah,” he said. “I laugh every time I think of that.” Then he went on, “You see, now, they’re not frightened of tanks any more. Nobody is. We aren’t either. But they’re still useful. Really useful. Only with the anti-tank now they’re so damn vulnerable. Maybe I ought to be in something else. Not really. Because they’re still useful. But the way they are now you’ve got to have a vocation for them. You got to have a lot of political development to be a good tank man now.”

“You’re a good tank man.”

“I’d like to be something else tomorrow,” he said. “I’m talking awfully wet but you have a right to talk wet if it isn’t going to hurt anybody else. You know I like tanks too, only we don’t use them right because the infantry don’t know enough yet. They just want the old tank ahead to give them some cover while they go. That’s no good. Then they get to depending on the tanks and they won’t move without them. Sometimes they won’t even deploy.”

* * * * *

“I know.”

“But you see if you had tankists that knew their stuff they’d go out ahead and develop the machine-gun fire and then drop back behind the infantry and fire on the gun and knock it out and give the infantry covering fire when they attacked. And other tanks could rush the machine-gun posts as though they were cavalry. And they could straddle a trench and enfilade and put flaking fire down it. And they could bring up infantry when it was right to or cover their advance when that was best.”

“But instead?”

“Instead it’s like it will be tomorrow. We have so damned few guns that we’re just used as slightly mobile armored artillery units. And as soon as you are standing still and being light artillery, you’ve lost your mobility and that’s your safety and they start sniping at you with the anti-tanks. And if we’re not that we’re just sort of iron perambulators to push ahead of the infantry. And lately you don’t know whether the perambulator will push or whether the guys inside will push them. And you never know if there’s going to be anybody behind you when you get there.”

“How many are you now to a brigade?”

“Six to a battalion. Thirty to a brigade. That’s in principle.”

“Why don’t you come along now and get the bath and we’ll go and eat?”

“All right. But don’t you start taking care of me or thinking I’m worried or anything because I’m not. I’m just tired and I wanted to talk. And don’t give me any pep talk either because we’ve got a political commissar and I know what I’m fighting for and I’m not worried. But I’d like things to be efficient and used as intelligently as possible.”

“What made you think I was going to give you any pep talk?”

“You started to look like it.”

“All I tried to do was see if you wanted a girl and not to talk too wet about getting killed.”

“Well, I don’t want any girl tonight and I’ll talk just as wet as I please unless it does damage to others. Does it damage you?”

“Come on and get the bath,” I said. “You can talk just as bloody wet as you want.”

“Who do you suppose that little guy was that talked as though he knew so much?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

“He made me gloomy,” said Al. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The old waiter with the bald head unlocked the outside door of Chicote’s and let us out into the street.

“How is the offensive, comrades?” he said at the door.

“It’s O.K., comrade,” said Al. “It’s all right.”

“I am happy,” said the waiter. “My boy is in the One Hundred and Forty-fifth Brigade. Have you seen them?”

“I am of the tanks,” said Al. “This comrade makes a cinema. Have you seen the Hundred and Forty-fifth?”

“No,” I said.

“They are up the Extremadura road,” the old waiter said. “My boy is political commissar of the machine-gun company of his battalion. He is my youngest boy. He is twenty.”

“What party are you comrade?” Al asked him.

“I am of no party,” the waiter said. “But my boy is a Communist.”

“So am I,” said Al. “The offensive, comrade, has not yet reached a decision. It is very difficult. The fascists hold very strong positions. You, in the rear-guard, must be as firm as we will be at the front. We may not take these positions now but we have proved we now have an army capable of going on the offensive and you will see what it will do.”

“And the Extremadura road?” asked the old waiter, still holding on to the door. “Is it very dangerous there?”

“No,” said Al. “It’s fine up there. You don’t need to worry about him up there.”

“God bless you,” said the waiter. “God guard you and keep you.”

Outside in the dark street, Al said, “Jees he’s kind of confused politically, isn’t he?”

“He is a good guy.” I said. “I’ve known him for a long time.”

“He seems like a good guy,” Al said. “But he ought to get wise to himself politically.”

The room at the Florida was crowded. They were playing the gramophone and it was full of smoke and there was a crap game going on the floor. Comrades kept coming in to use the bathtub and the room smelt of smoke, soap, dirty uniforms, and steam from the bathroom.

The Spanish girl called Manolita, very neat, demurely dressed, with a sort of false French chic, with much joviality, much dignity and closely set cold eyes, was sitting on the bed talking with an English newspaper man. Except for the gramophone it wasn’t very noisy.

“It is your room, isn’t it?” the English newspaper man said.

“It’s in my name at the desk,” I said. “I sleep in it sometimes.”

“But whose is the whisky?” he asked.

“Mine,” said Manolita. “They drank that bottle so I got another.”

“You’re a good girl, daughter,” I said. “That’s three I owe you.”

“Two,” she said. “The other was a present.”

There was a huge cooked ham, rosy and white edged in a half-opened tin on the table beside my typewriter and a comrade would reach up, cut himself a slice of ham with his pocket knife, and go back to the crap game. I cut myself a slice of ham.

“You’re next on the tub,” I said to Al. He had been looking around the room.

“It’s nice here,” he said. “Where did the ham come from?”

“We bought it from the intendencia of one of the brigades,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Who’s we?”

“He and I,” she said, turning her head toward the English correspondent. “Don’t you think he’s cute?”

“Manolita has been most kind,” said the Englishman. “I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “Later on I might want to use the bed but that won’t be until much later.”

“We can have a party in my room,” Manolita said. “You aren’t cross are you, Henry?”

“Never,” I said. “Who are the comrades shooting craps?”

“I don’t know,” said Manolita. “They came in for baths and then they stayed to shoot craps. Everyone has been very nice. You know my bad news?”

“No.”

“It’s very bad. You knew my fiancé who was in the police and went to Barcelona?”

“Yes. Sure.”

Al went into the bathroom.

“Well, he was shot in an accident and I haven’t any one I can depend on in police circles and he never got me the papers he had promised me and today I heard I was going to be arrested.”

“Why?”

“Because I have no papers and they say I hang around with you people and with people from the brigades all the time so I am probably a spy. If my fiancé had not gotten himself shot it would have been all right. Will you help me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing will happen to you if you’re all right.”

“I think I’d better stay with you to be sure.”

“And if you’re not all right that would be fine for me, wouldn’t it?”

“Can’t I stay with you?”

“No. If you get in trouble call me up. I never heard you ask anybody any military questions. I think you’re all right.”

“I’m really all right,” she said then, leaning over, away from the Englishman. “You think it’s all right to stay with him? Is he all right?”

“How do I know?” I said. “I never saw him before.”

“You’re being cross,” she said. “Let’s not think about it now but everyone be happy and go out to dinner.”

I went over to the crap game.

“You want to go out to dinner?”

“No, comrade,” said the man handling the dice without looking up. “You want to get in the game?”

“I want to eat.”

“We’ll be here when you get back,” said another crap shooter. “Come on, roll, I’ve got you covered.”

“If you run into any money bring it up here to the game.”

There was one in the room I knew besides Manolita. He was from the Twelfth Brigade and he was playing the gramophone. He was a Hungarian, a sad Hungarian, not one of the cheerful kind.

“Salud camarade”, he said. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Don’t you shoot craps?” I asked him.

“I haven’t that sort of money,” he said. “They are aviators with contracts. Mercenaries . . . They make a thousand dollars a month. They were on the Teruel front and now they have come here.”

“How did they come up here?”

“One of them knows you. But he had to go out to his field. They came for him in a car and the game had already started.”

“I’m glad you came up,” I said. “Come up any time and make yourself at home.”

“I came to play the new discs,” he said. “It does not disturb you?”

“No. It’s fine. Have a drink.”

“A little ham,” he said.

One of the crap shooters reached up and cut a slice of ham.

“You haven’t seen this guy Henry around that owns the place, have you?” he asked me.

“That’s me.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Want to get in the game?”

“Later on,” I said.

“O.K.,” he said. Then his mouth full of ham, “Listen you tar heel bastid. Make your dice hit the wall and bounce.”

“Won’t make no difference to you, comrade,” said the man handling the dice.

Al came out of the bathroom. He looked all clean except for some smudges around his eyes.

“You can take those off with a towel,” I said.

“What?”

“Look at yourself once more in the mirror.”

“It’s too steamy,” he said. “To hell with it, I feel clean.”

“Let’s eat,” I said. “Come on, Manolita. You know each other?”

I watched her eyes run over Al.

“How are you?” Manolita said.

“I say that is a sound idea,” the Englishman said. “Do let’s eat. But where?”

“Is that a crap game?” Al said.

“Didn’t you see it when you came in?”

“No,” he said. “All I saw was the ham.”

“It’s a crap game.”

“You go and eat,” Al said. “I’m staying here.”

As we went out there were six of them on the floor and Al Wagner was reaching up to cut a slice of ham.

“What do you do, comrade?” I heard one of the flyers say to Al.

“Tanks.”

“Tell me they aren’t any good any more,” said the flyer.

“Tell you a lot of things,” Al said. “What you got there? Some dice?”

“Want to look at them?”

“No,” said Al. “I want to handle them.”

We went down the hall, Manolita, me and the tall Englishman, and found the boys had left already for the Gran Via restaurant. The Hungarian had stayed behind to replay the new discs. I was very hungry and the food at the Gran Via was lousy. The two who were making the film had already eaten and gone back to work on the bad camera.

This restaurant was in the basement and you had to pass a guard and go through the kitchen and down a stairs to get to it. It was a racket.

They had a millet and water soup, yellow rice with horse meat in it, and oranges for dessert. There had been another dish of chickpeas with sausage in it that everybody said was terrible but it had run out. The newspaper men all sat at one table and the other tables were filled with officers and girls from Chicote’s, people from the censorship, which was then in the telephone building across the street, and various unknown citizens.

The restaurant was run by an anarchist syndicate and they sold you wine that was all stamped with the label of the royal cellars and the date it had been put in the bins. Most of it was so old that it was either corked or just plain faded out and gone to pieces. You can’t drink labels and I sent three bottles back as bad before we got a drinkable one. There was a row about this.

The waiters didn’t know the different wines. They just brought you a bottle of wine and you took your chances. They were as different from the Chicote’s waiters as black from white. These waiters were all snotty, all over-tipped and they regularly had special dishes such as lobster or chicken that they sold extra for gigantic prices. But these had all been bought up before we got there so we just drew the soup, the rice and the oranges. The place always made me angry because the waiters were a crooked lot of profiteers and it was about as expensive to eat in, if you had one of the special dishes, as 21 or the Colony in New York.

We were sitting at the table with a bottle of wine that just wasn’t bad, you know you could taste it starting to go, but it wouldn’t justify making a row about, when Al Wagner came in. He looked around the room, saw us and came over.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“They broke me,” he said.

“It didn’t take very long.”

“Not with those guys,” he said. “That’s a big game. What have they got to eat?”

I called a waiter over.

“It’s too late,” he said. “We can’t serve anything now.”

“This comrade is in the tanks,” I said. “He has fought all day and he will fight tomorrow and he hasn’t eaten.”

“That’s not my fault,” the waiter said. “It’s too late. There isn’t anything more. Why doesn’t the comrade eat with his unit? The army has plenty of food.”

“I asked him to eat with me.”

“You should have said something about it. It’s too late now. We are not serving anything any more.”

“Get the head waiter.”

The headwaiter said the cook had gone home and there was no fire in the kitchen. He went away. They were angry because we had sent the bad wine back.

“The hell with it,” said Al. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

“There’s no place you can eat at this hour. They’ve got food. I’ll just have to go over and suck up to the headwaiter and give him some more money.”

I went over and did just that and the sullen waiter brought a plate of cold sliced meats, then half a spiny lobster with mayonnaise, and a salad of lettuce and lentils. The headwaiter sold this out of his private stock which he was holding out either to take home, or sell to late comers.

“Cost you much?” Al asked.

“No,” I lied.

“I’ll bet it did,” he said. “I’ll fix up with you when I get paid.”

“What do you get now?”

“I don’t know yet. It was ten pesetas a day but they’ve raised it now I’m an officer. But we haven’t got it yet and I haven’t asked.”

“Comrade,” I called the waiter. He came over, still angry that the head-waiter had gone over his head and served Al. “Bring another bottle of wine, please.”

“What kind?”

“Any that is not too old so that the red is faded.”

“It’s all the same.”

I said the equivalent of like hell it is in Spanish, and the waiter brought over a bottle of Château Mouton-Rothschild 1906 that was just as good as the last claret we had was rotten.

“Boy that’s wine,” Al said. “What did you tell him to get that?”

“Nothing. He just made a lucky draw out of the bin.”

“Most of that stuff from the palace stinks.”

“It’s too old. This is a hell of a climate on wine.”

“There’s that wise comrade,” Al nodded across at another table.

The little man with the thick glasses that had talked to us about Largo Caballero was talking with some people I knew were very big shots indeed.

“I guess he’s a big shot,” I said.

“When they’re high enough up they don’t give a damn what they say. But I wish he would have waited until after tomorrow. It’s kind of spoiled tomorrow for me.”

I filled his glass.

“What he said sounded pretty sensible,” Al went on. “I’ve been thinking it over. But my duty is to do what I’m ordered to do.”

“Don’t worry about it and get some sleep.”

“I’m going to get in that game again if you’ll let me take a thousand pesetas,” Al said. “I’ve got a lot more than that coming to me and I’ll give you an order on my pay.”

“I don’t want any order. You can pay me when you get it.”

“I don’t think I’m going to draw it,” Al said. “I certainly sound wet, don’t I? And I know gambling’s bohemianism too. But in a game like that is the only time I don’t think about tomorrow.”

“Did you like that Manolita girl? She liked you.”

“She’s got eyes like a snake.”

“She’s not a bad girl. She’s friendly and she’s all right.”

“I don’t want any girl. I want to get back in that crap game.”

Down the table Manolita was laughing at something the new Englishman had said in Spanish. Most of the people had left the table.

“Let’s finish the wine and go,” Al said. “Don’t you want to get in that game?”

“I’ll watch you for a while,” I said and called the waiter over to bring us the bill.

“Where you go?” Manolita called down the table.

“To the room.”

“We come by later on,” she said. “This man is very funny.”

“She is making most awful sport of me,” the Englishman said. “She picks up on my errors in Spanish. I say, doesn’t leche mean milk?”

“That’s one interpretation of it.”

“Does it mean something beastly too?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“You know it is a beastly language,” he said. “Now Manolita, stop pulling my leg. I say stop it.”

“I’m not pulling your leg,” Manolita laughed. “I never touched your leg. I am just laughing about the leche.”

“But it does mean milk. Didn’t you just hear Edwin Henry say so?”

Manolita started to laugh again and we got up to go.

“He’s a silly piece of work,” Al said. “I’d almost like to take her away because he’s so silly.”

“You can never tell about an Englishman,” I said. It was such a profound remark that I knew we had ordered too many bottles. Outside, in the street, it was turning cold and in the moonlight the clouds were passing very big and white across the wide, building-sided canyon of the Gran Via and we walked up the sidewalk with the day’s fresh shell holes neatly cut in the cement, their rubble still not swept away, on up the rise of the hill toward the Plaza Callao where the Florida Hotel faced down the other little hill where the wide street ran that ended at the front.

We went past the two guards in the dark outside the door of the hotel and listened a minute in the doorway as the shooting down the street strengthened into a roll of firing, then dropped off.

“If it keeps up I guess I ought to go down,” Al said listening.

“That wasn’t anything,” I said. “Anyway that was off to the left by Carabanchel.”

“It sounded straight down in the Campo.”

“That’s the way the sound throws here at night. It always fools you.”

“They aren’t going to counterattack us tonight,” Al said. “When they’ve got those positions and we are up that creek they aren’t going to leave their positions to try to kick us out of that creek.”

“What creek?”

“You know the name of that creek.”

“Oh. That creek.”

“Yeah. Up that creek without a paddle.”

“Come on inside. You didn’t have to listen to that firing. That’s the way it is every night.”

We went inside, crossed the lobby, passing the night watchman at the concierge’s desk and the night watchman got up and went with us to the elevator. He pushed a button and the elevator came down. In it was a man with a white curly sheep’s wool jacket, the wool worn inside, a pink bald head, and a pink, angry face. He had six bottles of champagne under his arms and in his hands and he said, “What the hell’s the idea of bringing the elevator down?”

“You’ve been riding in the elevator for an hour,” the night watchman said.

“I can’t help it,” said the wooly jacket man. Then to me, “Where’s Frank?”

“Frank who?”

“You know Frank,” he said. “Come on, help me with this elevator.”

“You’re drunk,” I said to him. “Come on, skip it and let us get upstairs.”

“So would you be drunk,” said the white woolly jacket man. “So would you be drunk comrade old comrade. Listen, where’s Frank?”

“Where do you think he is?”

“In this fellow Henry’s room where the crap game is.”

“Come on with us,” I said. “Don’t fool with those buttons. That’s why you stop it all the time.”

“I can fly anything,” said the woolly jacket man. “And I can fly this old elevator. Want me to stunt it?”

“Skip it,” Al said to him. “You’re drunk. We want to get to the crap game.”

“Who are you? I’ll hit you with a bottle full of champagne wine.”

“Try it,” said Al. “I’d like to cool you, you rummy fake Santa Claus.”

“A rummy fake Santa Claus,” said the bald man. “A rummy fake Santa Claus. And that’s the thanks of the Republic.”

We had gotten the elevator stopped at my floor and were walking down the hall. “Take some bottles,” said the bald man. Then, “Do you know why I’m drunk?”

“No.”

“Well, I won’t tell you. But you’d be surprised. A rummy fake Santa Claus. Well well well. What are you in, comrade?”

“Tanks.”

“And you, comrade?”

“Making a picture.”

“And I’m a rummy fake Santa Claus. Well. Well. Well. I repeat. Well. Well. Well.”

“Go and drown in it,” said Al. “You rummy fake Santa Claus.”

We were outside the room now. The man in the white woolly coat took hold of Al’s arm with his thumb and forefinger.

“You amuse me, comrade,” he said. “You truly amuse me.”

I opened the door. The room was full of smoke and the game looked just as when we had left it except the ham was all gone off the table and the whisky all gone out of the bottle.

“It’s Baldy,” said one of the crap shooters.

“How do you do, comrades,” said Baldy, bowing. “How do you do? How do you do? How do you do?”

The game broke up and they all started to shoot questions at him.

“I have made my report, comrades,” Baldy said. “And here is a little champagne wine. I am no longer interested in any but the picturesque aspects of the whole affair.”

“Where did your wingmen muck off to?”

“It wasn’t their fault,” said Baldy. “I was engaged in contemplating a terrific spectacle and I was ob-livious of the fact that I had any wingmen until all of those Fiats started coming down over, past and under me and I realized that my trusty little air-o-plane no longer had any tail.”

“Jees I wish you weren’t drunk,” said one of the flyers.

“But I am drunk,” said Baldy. “And I hope all you gentlemen and comrades will join me because I am very happy tonight even though I have been insulted by an ignorant tank man who has called me a rummy fake Santa Claus.”

“I wish you were sober,” the other flyer said. “How’d you get back to the field?”

“Don’t ask me any questions,” Baldy said with great dignity. “I returned in a staff car of the Twelfth Brigade. When I alighted with my trusty par-a-chute there was a tendency to regard me as a criminal fascist due to my inability to master the Lanish Spanguage. But all difficulties were smoothed away when I convinced them of my identity and I was treated with rare consideration. Oh boy you ought to have seen that Junker when she started to burn. That’s what I was watching when the Fiats dove on me. Oh boy I wish I could tell you.”

“He shot a tri-moter Junker down today over the Jarama and his wing men mucked off on him and he got shot down and bailed out,” one of the flyers said. “You know him. Baldy Jackson.”

“How far did you drop before you pulled your rip cord, Baldy?” asked another flyer.

“All of six thousand feet and I think my diaphragm is busted loose in front from when she came taut. I thought it would cut me in two. There must have been fifteen Fiats and I wanted to get completely clear. I had to fool with the chute plenty to get down on the right side of the river. I had to slip her plenty and I hit pretty hard. The wind was good.”

“Frank had to go back to Alcalá,” another flyer said. “We started a crap game. We got to get back there before daylight.”

“I am in no mood to toy with the dice,” said Baldy. “I am in a mood to drink champagne wine out of glasses with cigarette butts in them.”

“I’ll wash them,” said Al.

“For Comrade Fake Santa Claus,” said Baldy. “For old Comrade Claus.”

“Skip it,” said Al. He picked up the glasses and took them to the bathroom.

“Is he in the tanks?” asked one of the flyers.

“Yes. He’s been there since the start.”

“They tell me the tanks aren’t any good any more,” a flyer said.

“You told him that once,” I said. “Why don’t you lay off? He’s been working all day.”

“So have we. But I mean really they aren’t any good, are they?”

“Not so good. But he’s good.”

“I guess he’s all right. He looks like a nice fellow. What kind of money do they make?”

“They got ten pesetas a day,” I said. “Now he gets a lieutenant’s pay.”

“Spanish lieutenant?”

“Yes.”

“I guess he’s nuts all right. Or has he got politics?”

“He’s got politics.”

“Oh, well,” he said. “That explains it. Say Baldy, you must have had a hell of a time bailing out with that wind pressure with the tail gone.”

“Yes, comrade,” said Baldy.

“How did you feel?”

“I was thinking all the time, comrade.”

“Baldy, how many bailed out of the Junker?”

“Four,” said Baldy, “out of a crew of six. I was sure I’d killed the pilot. I noticed when he quit firing. There’s a co-pilot that’s a gunner too and I’m pretty sure I got him too. I must have because he quit firing too. But maybe it was the heat. Anyhow four came out. Would you like me to describe the scene? I can describe the scene very well.”

He was sitting on the bed now with a large water glass of champagne in his hand and his pink head and pink face were moist with sweat.

“Why doesn’t anyone drink to me?” asked Baldy. “I would like all comrades to drink to me and then I will describe the scene in all its horror and its beauty.”

We all drank.

“Where was I?” asked Baldy.

“Just coming out of the McAlester Hotel,” a flyer said. “In all your horror and your beauty — don’t clown, Baldy. Oddly enough we’re interested.”

“I will describe it,” said Baldy. “But first I must have more champagne wine.” He had drained the glass when we drank to him.

“If he drinks like that he’ll go to sleep,” another flyer said. “Only give him half a glass.”

Baldy drank it off.

“I will describe it,” he said. “After another little drink.”

“Listen, Baldy, take it easy will you? This is something we want to get straight. You got no ship now for a few days but we’re flying tomorrow and this is important as well as interesting.”

“I made my report,” said Baldy. “You can read it out at the field. They’ll have a copy.”

“Come on, Baldy, snap out of it.”

“I will describe it eventually,” said Baldy. He shut and opened his eyes several times, then said, “Hello Comrade Santa Claus” to Al. “I will describe it eventually. All you comrades have to do is listen.”

And he described it.

“It was very strange and very beautiful,” Baldy said and drank off the glass of champagne.

“Cut it out, Baldy,” a flyer said.

“I have experienced profound emotions,” Baldy said. “Highly profound emotions. Emotions of the deepest dye.”

“Let’s get back to Alcalá,” one flyer said. “That pink head isn’t going to make sense. What about the game?”

“He’s going to make sense,” another flyer said. “He’s just winding up.”

“Are you criticizing me?” asked Baldy. “Is that the thanks of the Republic?”

“Listen, Santa Claus,” Al said. “What was it like?”

“Are you asking me?” Baldy stared at him. “Are you putting questions to me? Have you ever been in action, comrade?”

“No,” said Al. “I got these eyebrows burnt off when I was shaving.”

“Keep your drawers on, comrade,” said Baldy. “I will describe the strange and beautiful scene. I’m a writer, you know, as well as a flyer.”

He nodded his head in confirmation of his own statement.

“He writes for the Meridian, Mississippi, Argus”, said a flyer. “All the time. They can’t stop him.”

“I have talent as a writer,” said Baldy. “I have a fresh and original talent for description. I have a newspaper clipping which I have lost which says so. Now I will launch myself on the description.”

“O.K. What did it look like?”

“Comrades,” said Baldy. “You can’t describe it.” He held out his glass.

“What did I tell you?” said a flyer. “He couldn’t make sense in a month. He never could make sense.”

“You,” said Baldy, “you unfortunate little fellow. All right. When I banked out of it I looked down and of course she had been pouring back smoke but she was holding right on her course to get over the mountains. She was losing altitude fast and I came up and over and dove on her again. There were still wingmen then and she’d lurched and started to smoke twice as much and then the door of the cockpit came open and it was just like looking into a blast furnace, and then they started to come out. I’d half rolled, dove, and then pulled up out of it and I was looking back and down and they were coming out of her, out through the blast furnace door, dropping out trying to get clear, and the chutes opened up and they looked like great big beautiful morning glories opening up and she was just one big thing of flame now like you never saw and going round and round and there were four chutes just as beautiful as anything you could see just pulling slow against the sky and then one started to burn at the edge and as it burned the man started to drop fast and I was watching him when the bullets started to come by and the Fiats right behind them and the bullets and the Fiats.”

“You’re a writer all right,” said one flyer. “You ought to write for War Aces. Do you mind telling me in plain language what happened?”

“No,” said Baldy. “I’ll tell you. But you know, no kidding, it was something to see. And I never shot down any big tri-motor Junkers before and I’m happy.”

“Everybody’s happy, Baldy. Tell us what happened, really.”

“O.K.,” said Baldy. “I’ll just drink a little wine and then I’ll tell you.”

“How were you when you sighted them?”

“We were in a left echelon of V’s. Then we went into a left echelon of echelons and dove onto them with all four guns until you could have touched them before we rolled out of it. We crippled three others. The Fiats were hanging up in the sun. They didn’t come down until I was sightseeing all by myself.”

“Did your wingmen muck off?”

“No. It was my fault. I started watching the spectacle and they were gone. There isn’t any formation for watching spectacles. I guess they went on and picked up the echelon. I don’t know. Don’t ask me. And I’m tired. I was elated. But now I’m tired.”

“You’re sleepy you mean. You’re rum-dumb and sleepy.”

“I am simply tired,” said Baldy. “A man in my position has the right to be tired. And if I become sleepy I have the right to be sleepy. Don’t I Santa Claus?” he said to Al.

“Yeah,” said Al. “I guess you have the right to be sleepy. I’m even sleepy myself. Isn’t there going to be any crap game?”

“We got to get him out to Alcalá and we’ve got to get out there too,” a flyer said. “Why? You lost money in the game?”

“A little,” said Al.

“You want to try to pass for it once?” the flyer asked him.

“I’ll shoot a thousand,” Al said.

“I’ll fade you,” the flyer said. “You guys don’t make much, do you?”

“No,” said Al. “We don’t make much.”

He laid the thousand-peseta note down on the floor, rolled the dice between his palms so they clicked over and over, and shot them out on the floor with a snap. Two ones showed.

“They’re still your dice,” the flyer said, picking up the bill and looking at Al.

“I don’t need them,” said Al. He stood up.

“Need any dough?” the flyer asked him. Looking at him curiously.

“Got no use for it,” Al said.

“We’ve got to get the hell out to Alcalá,” the flyer said. “We’ll have a game some night soon. We’ll get hold of Frank and the rest of them. We could get up a pretty good game. Can we give you a lift?”

“Yes. Want a ride?”

“No,” Al said. “I’m walking. It’s just down the street.”

“Well, we’re going out to Alcalá. Does anybody know the password for tonight?”

“Oh, the chauffeur will have it. He’ll have gone by and picked it up before dark.”

“Come on, Baldy. You drunken sleepy bum.”

“Not me,” said Baldy. “I am a potential ace of the people’s army.”

“Takes ten to be an ace. Even if you count Italians. You’ve only got one, Baldy.”

“It wasn’t Italians,” said Baldy. “It was Germans. And you didn’t see her when she was all hot like that inside. She was a raging inferno.”

“Carry him out,” said a flyer. “He’s writing for that Meridian, Mississippi, paper again. Well, so long. Thanks for having us up in the room.”

They all shook hands and they were gone. I went to the head of the stairs with them. The elevator was no longer running and I watched them go down the stairs. One was on each side of Baldy and he was nodding his head slowly. He was really sleepy now.

In their room the two I was working on the picture with were still working over the bad camera. It was delicate, eye-straining work and when I asked, “Do you think you’ll get her?” the tall one said, “Yes. Sure. We have to. I make a piece now which was broken.”

“What was the party?” asked the other. “We work always on this damn camera.”

“American flyers,” I said. “And a fellow I used to know who’s in tanks.”

“Goot fun? I am sorry not to be there.”

“All right,” I said. “Kind of funny.”

“You must get sleep. We must all be up early. We must be fresh for tomorrow.”

“How much more have you got on that camera?”

“There it goes again. Damn such shape springs.”

“Leave him alone. We finish it. Then we all sleep. What time you call us?”

“Five?”

“All right. As soon as is light.”

“Good night.”

“Salud. Get some sleep.”

“Salud,” I said. “We’ve got to be closer tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said. “I have thought so too. Much closer. I am glad you know.”

Al was asleep in the big chair in the room with the light on his face. I put a blanket over him but he woke.

“I’m going down.”

“Sleep here. I’ll set the alarm and call you.”

“Something might happen with the alarm,” he said. “I better go down. I don’t want to get there late.”

“I’m sorry about the game.”

“They’d have broke me anyway,” he said. “Those guys are poisonous with dice.”

“You had the dice there on that last play.”

“They’re poisonous fading you too. They’re strange guys too. I guess they don’t get overpaid. I guess if you are doing it for dough there isn’t enough dough to pay for doing it.”

“Want me to walk down with you?”

“No,” he said, standing up, and buckling on the big web-belted Colt he had taken off when he came back after dinner to the game. “No, I feel fine now. I’ve got my perspective back again. All you need is a perspective.”

“I’d like to walk down.”

“No. Get some sleep. I’ll go down and I’ll get a good five hours’ sleep before it starts.”

“That early?”

“Yeah. You won’t have any light to film by. You might as well stay in bed.” He took an envelope out of his leather coat and laid it on the table. “Take this stuff, will you, and send it to my brother in N.Y. His address is on the back of the envelope.”

“Sure. But I won’t have to send it.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think you will now. But there’s some pictures and stuff they’ll like to have. He’s got a nice wife. Want to see her picture?”

He took it out of his pocket. It was inside his identity book.

It showed a pretty, dark girl standing by a rowboat on the shore of a lake.

“Up in the Catskills,” said Al. “Yeah. He’s got a nice wife. She’s a Jewish girl. Yes,” he said. “Don’t let me get wet again. So long, kid. Take it easy. I tell you truly I feel O.K. now. And I didn’t feel good when I came out this afternoon.”

“Let me walk down.”

“No. You might have trouble coming back through the Plaza de España. Some of those guys are nervous at night. Good night. See you tomorrow night.”

“That’s the way to talk.”

Upstairs in the room above mine, Manolita and the Englishman were making quite a lot of noise. So she evidently hadn’t been arrested.

“That’s right. That’s the way to talk,” Al said. “Takes you sometimes three or four hours to get so you can do it though.”

He’d put the leather helmet on now with the raised padded ridge and his face looked dark and I noticed the dark hollows under his eyes.

“See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s,” I said.

“That’s right,” he said, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s.”

“What time?”

“Listen, that’s enough,” he said. “Tomorrow night at Chicote’s. We don’t have to go into the time.” And he went out.

If you hadn’t known him pretty well and if you hadn’t seen the terrain where he was going to attack tomorrow, you would have thought he was very angry about something. I guess somewhere inside of himself he was angry, very angry. You get angry about a lot of things and you, yourself, dying uselessly is one of them. But then I guess angry is about the best way that you can be when you attack.

UNDER THE RIDGE

IN THE HEAT OF THE DAY with the dust blowing, we came back, dry-mouthed, nose-clogged and heavy-loaded, down out of the battle to the long ridge above the river where the Spanish troops lay in reserve.

I sat down with my back against the shallow trench, my shoulders and the back of my head against the earth, clear now from even stray bullets, and looked at what lay below us in the hollow. There was the tank reserve, the tanks covered with branches chopped from olive trees. To their left were the staff cars, mud-daubed and branch-covered, and between the two a long line of men carrying stretchers wound down through the gap to where, on the flat at the foot of the ridge, ambulances were loading. Commissary mules loaded with sacks of bread and kegs of wine, and a train of ammunition mules, led by their drivers, were coming up the gap in the ridge, and men with empty stretchers were walking slowly up the trail with the mules.

To the right, below the curve of the ridge, I could see the entrance to the cave where the brigade staff was working, and their signaling wires ran out of the top of the cave and curved on over the ridge in the shelter of which we lay.

Motorcyclists in leather suits and helmets came up and down the cut on their cycles or, where it was too steep, walking them, and leaving them beside the cut, walked over to the entrance to the cave and ducked inside. As I watched, a big Hungarian cyclist that I knew came out of the cave, tucked some papers in his leather wallet, walked over to his motorcycle and, pushing it up through the stream of mules and stretcher-bearers, threw a leg over the saddle and roared on over the ridge, his machine churning a storm of dust.

Below, across the flat where the ambulances were coming and going, was the green foliage that marked the line of the river. There was a large house with a red tile roof and there was a gray stone mill, and from the trees around the big house beyond the river came the flashes of our guns. They were firing straight at us and there were the twin flashes, then the throaty, short bung-bung of the three-inch pieces and then the rising cry of the shells coming toward us and going on over our heads. As always, we were short of artillery. There were only four batteries down there, when there should have been forty, and they were firing only two guns at a time. The attack had failed before we came down.

“Are you Russians?” a Spanish soldier asked me.

“No, Americans,” I said. “Have you any water?”

“Yes, comrade.” He handed over a pigskin bag. These troops in reserve were soldiers only in name and from the fact that they were in uniform. They were not intended to be used in the attack, and they sprawled along this line under the crest of the ridge, huddled in groups, eating, drinking and talking, or simply sitting dumbly, waiting. The attack was being made by an International Brigade.

We both drank. The water tasted of asphalt and pig bristles.

“Wine is better,” the soldier said. “I will get wine.”

“Yes. But for the thirst, water.”

“There is no thirst like the thirst of battle. Even here, in reserve, I have much thirst.”

“That is fear,” said another soldier. “Thirst is fear.”

“No,” said another. “With fear there is thirst, always. But in battle there is much thirst even when there is no fear.”

“There is always fear in battle,” said the first soldier.

“For you,” said the second soldier.

“It is normal,” the first soldier said.

“For you.”

“Shut your dirty mouth,” said the first soldier. “I am simply a man who tells the truth.”

It was a bright April day and the wind was blowing wildly so that each mule that came up the gap raised a cloud of dust, and the two men at the ends of a stretcher each raised a cloud of dust that blew together and made one, and below, across the flat, long streams of dust moved out from the ambulances and blew away in the wind.

I felt quite sure I was not going to be killed on that day now, since we had done our work well in the morning, and twice during the early part of the attack we should have been killed and were not; and this had given me confidence. The first time had been when we had gone up with the tanks and picked a place from which to film the attack. Later I had a sudden distrust for the place and we had moved the cameras about two hundred yards to the left. Just before leaving, I had marked the place in quite the oldest way there is of marking a place, and within ten minutes a six-inch shell had lit on the exact place where I had been and there was no trace of any human being ever having been there. Instead, there was a large and clearly blasted hole in the earth.

Then, two hours later, a Polish officer, recently detached from the bat talion and attached to the staff, had offered to show us the positions the Poles had just captured and, coming from under the lee of a fold of hill, we had walked into machine-gun fire that we had to crawl out from under with our chins tight to the ground and dust in our noses, and at the same time made the sad discovery that the Poles had captured no positions at all that day but were a little further back than the place they had started from. And now, lying in the shelter of the trench, I was wet with sweat, hungry and thirsty and hollow inside from the now-finished danger of the attack.

“You are sure you are not Russians?” asked a soldier. “There are Russians here today.”

“Yes. But we are not Russians.”

“You have the face of a Russian.”

“No,” I said. “You are wrong, comrade. I have quite a funny face but it is not the face of a Russian.”

“He has the face of a Russian,” pointing at the other one of us who was working on a camera.

“Perhaps. But still he is not Russian. Where you from?”

“Extremadura,” he said proudly.

“Are there any Russians in Extremadura?” I asked.

“No,” he told me, even more proudly. “There are no Russians in Extremadura, and there are no Extremadurans in Russia.”

“What are your politics?”

“I hate all foreigners,” he said.

“That’s a broad political program.”

“I hate the Moors, the English, the French, the Italians, the Germans, the North Americans and the Russians.”

“You hate them in that order?”

“Yes. But perhaps I hate the Russians the most.”

“Man, you have very interesting ideas,” I said. “Are you a fascist?”

“No. I am an Extremaduran and I hate foreigners.”

“He has very rare ideas,” said another soldier. “Do not give him too much importance. Me, I like foreigners. I am from Valencia. Take another cup of wine, please.”

I reached up and took the cup, the other wine still brassy in my mouth. I looked at the Extremaduran. He was tall and thin. His face was haggard and unshaven, and his cheeks were sunken. He stood straight up in his rage, his blanket cape around his shoulders.

“Keep your head down,” I told him. “There are many lost bullets coming over.”

“I have no fear of bullets and I hate all foreigners,” he said fiercely.

“You don’t have to fear bullets,” I said, “but you should avoid them when you are in reserve. It is not intelligent to be wounded when it can be avoided.”

“I am not afraid of anything,” the Extremaduran said.

“You are very lucky, comrade.”

“It’s true,” the other, with the wine cup, said. “He has no fear, not even of the aviones.”

“He is crazy,” another soldier said. “Everyone fears planes. They kill little but make much fear.”

“I have no fear. Neither of planes nor of nothing,” the Extremaduran said. “And I hate every foreigner alive.”

Down the gap, walking beside two stretcher-bearers and seeming to pay no attention at all to where he was, came a tall man in International Brigade uniform with a blanket rolled over his shoulder and tied at his waist. His head was held high and he looked like a man walking in his sleep. He was middle-aged. He was not carrying a rifle and, from where I lay, he did not look wounded.

I watched him walking alone down out of the war. Before he came to the staff cars he turned to the left and his head still held high in that strange way, he walked over the edge of the ridge and out of sight.

The one who was with me, busy changing film in the hand cameras, had not noticed him.

A single shell came in over the ridge and fountained in the dirt and black smoke just short of the tank reserve.

Someone put his head out of the cave where brigade headquarters was and then disappeared inside. I thought it looked like a good place to go, but knew they would all be furious in there because the attack was a failure, and I did not want to face them. If an operation was successful they were happy to have motion pictures of it. But if it was a failure everyone was in such a rage there was always a chance of being sent back under arrest.

“They may shell us now,” I said.

“That makes no difference to me,” said the Extremaduran. I was beginning to be a little tired of the Extremaduran.

“Have you any more wine to spare?” I asked. My mouth was still dry.

“Yes, man. There are gallons of it,” the friendly soldier said. He was short, big-fisted and very dirty, with a stubble of beard about the same length as the hair on his cropped head. “Do you think they will shell us now?”

“They should,” I said. “But in this war you can never tell.”

“What is the matter with this war?” asked the Extremaduran angrily. “Don’t you like this war?”

“Shut up!” said the friendly soldier. “I command here, and these comrades are our guests.”

“Then let him not talk against our war,” said the Extremaduran. “No foreigners shall come here and talk against our war.”

“What town are you from, comrade?” I asked the Extremaduran.

“Badajoz,” he said. “I am from Badajoz. In Badajoz, we have been sacked and pillaged and our women violated by the English, the French and now the Moors. What the Moors have done now is no worse than what the English did under Wellington. You should read history. My great-grandmother was killed by the English. The house where my family lived was burned by the English.”

“I regret it,” I said. “Why do you hate the North Americans?”

“My father was killed by the North Americans in Cuba while he was there as a conscript.”

“I am sorry for that, too. Truly sorry. Believe me. And why do you hate the Russians?”

“Because they are the representatives of tyranny and I hate their faces. You have the face of a Russian.”

“Maybe we better get out of here,” I said to the one who was with me and who did not speak Spanish. “It seems I have the face of a Russian and it’s getting me into trouble.”

“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “This is a good place. Don’t talk so much and you won’t get into trouble.”

“There’s a comrade here that doesn’t like me. I think he’s an anarchist.”

“Well, watch out he doesn’t shoot you, then. I’m going to sleep.”

Just then two men in leather coats, one short and stocky, the other of medium height, both with civilian caps, flat, high-cheekboned faces, wooden-holstered Mauser pistols strapped to their legs, came out of the gap and headed toward us.

The taller of them spoke to me in French. “Have you seen a French comrade pass through here?” he asked. “A comrade with a blanket tied around his shoulders in the form of a bandoleer? A comrade of about forty-five or fifty years old? Have you seen such a comrade going in the direction away from the front?”

“No,” I said. “I have not seen such a comrade.”

He looked at me a moment and I noticed his eyes were a grayish-yellow and that they did not blink at all.

“Thank you, comrade,” he said, in his odd French, and then spoke rapidly to the other man with him in a language I did not understand. They went off and climbed the highest part of the ridge, from where they could see down all the gullies.

“There is the true face of Russians,” the Extremaduran said.

“Shut up!” I said. I was watching the two men in the leather coats. They were standing there, under considerable fire, looking carefully over all the broken country below the ridge and toward the river.

Suddenly one of them saw what he was looking for, and pointed. Then the two started to run like hunting dogs, one straight down over the ridge, the other at an angle as though to cut someone off. Before the second one went over the crest I could see him drawing his pistol and holding it ahead of him as he ran.

“And how do you like that?” asked the Extremaduran.

“No better than you,” I said.

Over the crest of the parallel ridge I heard the Mausers’ jerky barking. They kept it up for more than a dozen shots. They must have opened fire at too long a range. After all the burst of shooting there was a pause and then a single shot.

The Extremaduran looked at me sullenly and said nothing. I thought it would be simpler if the shelling started. But it did not start.

The two in the leather coats and civilian caps came back over the ridge, walking together, and then down to the gap, walking downhill with that odd bent-kneed way of the two-legged animal coming down a steep slope. They turned up the gap as a tank came whirring and clanking down and moved to one side to let it pass.

The tanks had failed again that day, and the drivers coming down from the lines in their leather helmets, the tank turrets open now as they came into the shelter of the ridge, had the straight-ahead stare of football players who have been removed from a game for yellowness.

The two flat-faced men in the leather coats stood by us on the ridge to let the tank pass.

“Did you find the comrade you were looking for?” I asked the taller one of them in French.

“Yes, comrade. Thank you,” he said and looked me over very carefully.

“What does he say?” the Extremaduran asked.

“He says they found the comrade they were looking for,” I told him. The Extremaduran said nothing.

We had been all that morning in the place the middle-aged Frenchman had walked out of. We had been there in the dust, the smoke, the noise, the receiving of wounds, the death, the fear of death, the bravery, the cowardice, the insanity and failure of an unsuccessful attack. We had been there on that plowed field men could not cross and live. You dropped and lay flat; making a mound to shield your head; working your chin into the dirt; waiting for the order to go up that slope no man could go up and live.

We had been with those who lay there waiting for the tanks that did not come; waiting under the inrushing shriek and roaring crash of the shelling; the metal and the earth thrown like clods from a dirt fountain; and overhead the cracking, whispering fire like a curtain. We knew how those felt, waiting. They were as far forward as they could get. And men could not move further and live, when the order came to move ahead.

We had been there all morning in the place the middle-aged Frenchman had come walking away from. I understood how a man might suddenly, seeing clearly the stupidity of dying in an unsuccessful attack; or suddenly seeing it clearly, as you can see clearly and justly before you die; seeing its hopelessness, seeing its idiocy, seeing how it really was, simply get back and walk away from it as the Frenchman had done. He could walk out of it not from cowardice, but simply from seeing too clearly; knowing suddenly that he had to leave it; knowing there was no other thing to do.

The Frenchman had come walking out of the attack with great dignity and I understood him as a man. But, as a soldier, these other men who policed the battle had hunted him down, and the death he had walked away from had found him when he was just over the ridge, clear of the bullets and the shelling, and walking toward the river.

“And that,” the Extremaduran said to me, nodding toward the battle police.

“Is war,” I said. “In war, it is necessary to have discipline.”

“And to live under that sort of discipline we should die?”

“Without discipline everyone will die anyway.”

“There is one kind of discipline and another kind of discipline,” the Extremaduran said. “Listen to me. In February we were here where we are now and the fascists attacked. They drove us from the hills that you Internationals tried to take today and that you could not take. We fell back to here; to this ridge. Internationals came up and took the line ahead of us.”

“I know that,” I said.

“But you do not know this,” he went on angrily. “There was a boy from my province who became frightened during the bombardment, and he shot himself in the hand so that he could leave the line because he was afraid.”

The other soldiers were all listening now. Several nodded.

“Such people have their wounds dressed and are returned at once to the line,” the Extremaduran went on. “It is just.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is as it should be.”

“That is as it should be,” said the Extremaduran. “But this boy shot himself so badly that the bone was all smashed and there surged up an infection and his hand was amputated.”

Several soldiers nodded.

“Go on, tell him the rest,” said one.

“It might be better not to speak of it,” said the cropped-headed, bristly-faced man who said he was in command.

“It is my duty to speak,” the Extremaduran said.

The one in command shrugged his shoulders. “I did not like it either,” he said. “Go on, then. But I do not like to hear it spoken of either.”

“This boy remained in the hospital in the valley since February,” the Extremaduran said. “Some of us have seen him in the hospital. All say he was well liked in the hospital and made himself as useful as a man with one hand can be useful. Never was he under arrest. Never was there anything to prepare him.”

The man in command handed me the cup of wine again without saying anything. They were all listening; as men who cannot read or write listen to a story.

“Yesterday, at the close of day, before we knew there was to be an attack. Yesterday, before the sun set, when we thought today was to be as any other day, they brought him up the trail in the gap there from the flat. We were cooking the evening meal and they brought him up. There were only four of them. Him, the boy Paco, those two you have just seen in the leather coats and the caps, and an officer from the brigade. We saw the four of them climbing together up the gap, and we saw Paco’s hands were not tied, nor was he bound in any way.

“When we saw him we all crowded around and said, ‘Hello, Paco. How are you, Paco? How is everything, Paco, old boy, old Paco?’

“Then he said, ‘Everything’s all right. Everything is good except this’ — and showed us the stump.

“Paco said, That was a cowardly and foolish thing. I am sorry that I did that thing. But I try to be useful with one hand. I will do what I can with one hand for the Cause.’”

“Yes,” interrupted a soldier. “He said that. I heard him say that.”

“We spoke with him,” the Extremaduran said. “And he spoke with us. When such people with the leather coats and the pistols come it is always a bad omen in a war, as is the arrival of people with map cases and field glasses. Still we thought they had brought him for a visit, and all of us who had not been to the hospital were happy to see him, and as I say, it was the hour of the evening meal and the evening was clear and warm.”

“This wind only rose during the night,” a soldier said.

“Then,” the Extremaduran went on somberly, “one of them said to the officer in Spanish, ‘Where is the place?’

“‘Where is the place this Paco was wounded?’ asked the officer.”

“I answered him,” said the man in command. “I showed the place. It is a little further down than where you are.”

“Here is the place,” said a soldier. He pointed, and I could see it was the place. It showed clearly that it was the place.

“Then one of them led Paco by the arm to the place and held him there by the arm while the other spoke in Spanish. He spoke in Spanish, making many mistakes in the language. At first we wanted to laugh, and Paco started to smile. I could not understand all the speech, but it was that Paco must be punished as an example, in order that there would be no more self-inflicted wounds, and that all others would be punished in the same way.

“Then, while the one held Paco by the arm; Paco, looking very ashamed to be spoken of this way when he was already ashamed and sorry; the other took his pistol out and shot Paco in the back of the head without any word to Paco. Nor any word more.”

The soldiers all nodded.

“It was thus,” said one. “You can see the place. He fell with his mouth there. You can see it.”

I had seen the place clearly enough from where I lay.

“He had no warning and no chance to prepare himself,” the one in command said. “It was very brutal.”

“It is for this that I now hate Russians as well as all other foreigners,” said the Extremaduran. “We can give ourselves no illusions about foreigners. If you are a foreigner, I am sorry. But for myself, now, I can make no exceptions. You have eaten bread and drunk wine with us. Now I think you should go.”

“Do not speak in that way,” the man in command said to the Extremaduran. “It is necessary to be formal.”

“I think we had better go,” I said.

“You are not angry?” the man in command said. “You can stay in this shelter as long as you wish. Are you thirsty? Do you wish more wine?”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “I think we had better go.”

“You understand my hatred?” asked the Extremaduran.

“I understand your hatred,” I said.

“Good,” he said and put out his hand. “I do not refuse to shake hands. And that you, personally, have much luck.”

“Equally to you,” I said. “Personally, and as a Spaniard.”

I woke the one who took the pictures and we started down the ridge toward brigade headquarters. The tanks were all coming back now and you could hardly hear yourself talk for the noise.

“Were you talking all that time?”

“Listening.”

“Hear anything interesting?”

“Plenty.”

“What do you want to do now?”

“Get back to Madrid.”

“We should see the general.”

“Yes,” I said. “We must.”

The general was coldly furious. He had been ordered to make the attack as a surprise with one brigade only, bringing everything up before daylight. It should have been made by at least a division. He had used three battalions and held one in reserve. The French tank commander had got drunk to be brave for the attack and finally was too drunk to function. He was to be shot when he sobered up.

The tanks had not come up in time and finally had refused to advance, and two of the battalions had failed to attain their objectives. The third had taken theirs, but it formed an untenable salient. The only real result had been a few prisoners, and these had been confided to the tank men to bring back and the tank men had killed them. The general had only failure to show, and they had killed his prisoners.

“What can I write on it?” I asked.

“Nothing that is not in the official communiqué. Have you any whisky in that long flask?”

“Yes.”

He took a drink and licked his lips carefully. He had once been a captain of Hungarian Hussars, and he had once captured a gold train in Siberia when he was a leader of irregular cavalry with the Red Army and held it all one winter when the thermometer went down to forty below zero. We were good friends and he loved whisky, and he is now dead.

“Get out of here now,” he said. “Have you transport?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get any pictures?”

“Some. The tanks.”

“The tanks,” he said bitterly. “The swine. The cowards. Watch out you don’t get killed,” he said. “You are supposed to be a writer.”

“I can’t write now.”

“Write it afterwards. You can write it all afterwards. And don’t get killed. Especially, don’t get killed. Now, get out of here.”

He could not take his own advice because he was killed two months later. But the oddest thing about that day was how marvelously the pictures we took of the tanks came out. On the screen they advanced over the hill irresistibly, mounting the crests like great ships, to crawl clanking on toward the illusion of victory we screened.

The nearest any man was to victory that day was probably the Frenchman who came, with his head held high, walking out of the battle. But his victory only lasted until he had walked halfway down the ridge. We saw him lying stretched out there on the slope of the ridge, still wearing his blanket, as we came walking down the cut to get into the staff car that would take us to Madrid.

MISCELLANEOUS SHORT STORIES

Short stories published in various magazines and periodicals

CONTENTS

ONE TRIP ACROSS

THE TRADESMAN’S RETURN

NOBODY EVER DIES

THE GOOD LION

THE FAITHFUL BULL

GET A SEEING-EYED DOG

A MAN OF THE WORLD

SUMMER PEOPLE

THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY

AN AFRICAN STORY

THREE SHOTS

THE INDIANS MOVED AWAY

CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI

NIGHT BEFORE LANDING

NICK SAT AGAINST THE WALL…

WEDDING DAY

ON WRITING

ONE TRIP ACROSS

YOU KNOW HOW IT IS THERE EARLY IN the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? Well, we came across the square from the dock to the Pearl of San Francisco Café to get coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of the fountain. But when we got inside the café and sat down, there were the three of them waiting for us.

We sat down and one of them came over.

“Well,” he said.

“I can’t do it,” I told him. “I’d like to do it as a favor. But I told you last night I couldn’t.”

“You can name your own price.”

“It isn’t that. I can’t do it. That’s all.”

The two others had come over and they stood there looking sad. They were nice-looking fellows all right and I would have liked to have done them the favor.

“A thousand apiece,” said the one who spoke good English.

“Don’t make me feel bad,” I told him. “I tell you true I can’t do it.”

“Afterwards, when things are changed, it would mean a good deal to you.”

“I know it. I’m all for you. But I can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I make my living with the boat. If I lose her I lose my living.”

“With the money you buy another boat.”

“Not in jail.”

They must have thought I just needed to be argued into it because the one kept on.

“You would have three thousand dollars and it could mean a great deal to you later. All this will not last, you know.”

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t care who is President here. But I don’t carry anything to the States that can talk.”

“You mean we would talk?” one of them who hadn’t spoken said. He was angry.

“I said anything that can talk.”

“Do you think we are lenguas largas?”

“No.”

“Do you know what a lengua larga is?”

“Yes. One with a long tongue.”

“Do you know what we do with them?”

“Don’t be tough with me,” I said. “You propositioned me. I didn’t offer you anything.”

“Shut up, Pancho,” the one who had done the talking before said to the angry one.

“He said we would talk,” Pancho said.

“Listen,” I said. “I told you I didn’t carry anything that can talk. Sacked liquor can’t talk. Demijohns can’t talk. There’s other things that can’t talk. Men can talk.”

“Can Chinamen talk?” Pancho said, pretty nasty.

“They can talk, but I can’t understand them,” I told him.

“So you won’t?”

“It’s just like I told you last night. I can’t.”

“But you won’t talk?” Pancho said.

The one thing that he hadn’t understood right had made him nasty. I guess it was disappointment, too. I didn’t even answer him.

“You’re not a lengua larga, are you?” he asked, still nasty.

“I don’t think so.”

“What’s that? A threat?”

“Listen,” I told him. “Don’t be so tough so early in the morning. I’m sure you’ve cut plenty people’s throats. I haven’t even had my coffee yet.”

“So you’re sure I’ve cut people’s throats?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t give a damn. Can’t you do business without getting angry?”

“I am angry now,” he said. “I would like to kill you.”

“Oh, hell,” I told him, “don’t talk so much.”

“Come on, Pancho, the first one said. Then, to me, “I am very sorry. I wish you would take us.”

“I’m sorry, too. But I can’t.”

The three of them started for the door, and I watched them go. They were good-looking young fellows, wore good clothes; none of them wore hats, and they looked like they had plenty of money. They talked plenty of money, anyway, and they spoke the kind of English Cubans with money speak.

Two of them looked like brothers and the other one, Pancho, was a little taller but the same sort of looking kid. You know, slim, good clothes, and shiny hair. I didn’t figure he was as mean as he talked. I figured he was plenty nervous.

As they turned out of the door to the right, I saw a closed car come across the square toward them. The first thing a pane of glass went and the bullet smashed into the row of bottles on the show-case wall to the right. I heard the gun going and, bop, bop, bop, there were bottles smashing all along the wall.

I jumped behind the bar on the left side and could see looking over the edge. The car was stopped and there were two fellows crouched down by it. One had a Thompson gun and the other had a sawed-off automatic shotgun. The one with the Thompson gun was a nigger. The other had a chauffeur’s white duster on.

One of the boys was spread out on the sidewalk, face down, just outside the big window that was smashed. The other two were behind one of the Tropical beer ice wagons that was stopped in front of the Cunard bar next door. One of the ice-wagon horses was down in the harness, kicking, and the other was plunging his head off.

One of the boys shot from the rear corner of the wagon and it ricocheted off the sidewalk. The nigger with the tommy gun got his face almost into the street and gave the back of the wagon a burst from underneath and sure enough one came down, falling toward the sidewalk with his head above the curb. He flopped there, putting his hands over his head, and the chauffeur shot at him with the shotgun while the nigger put in a fresh pan, but it was a long shot. You could see the buckshot marks all over the sidewalk like silver splatters.

The other fellow pulled the one who was hit back by the legs to behind the wagon, and I saw the nigger getting his face down on the paving to give them another burst. Then I saw old Pancho come around the corner of the wagon and step into the lee of the horse that was still up. He stepped clear of the horse, his face white as a dirty sheet, and got the chauffeur with the big Luger he had, holding it in both hands to keep it steady. He shot twice over the nigger’s head, coming on, and once low.

He hit a tire on the car because I saw dust blowing in a spurt on the street as the air came out, and at ten feet the nigger shot him in the belly with his tommy gun, with what must have been the last shot in it because I saw him throw it down, and old Pancho sat down hard and went over forward. He was trying to come up, still holding onto the Luger, only he couldn’t get his head up, when the nigger took the shotgun that was lying against the wheel of the car by the chauffeur and blew the side of his head off. Some nigger.

I took a quick one out of the first bottle I saw open and I couldn’t tell you yet what it was. The whole thing made me feel pretty bad. I slipped along behind the bar and out through the kitchen in back and all the way out. I went clean around the outside of the square and never even looked over toward the crowd there was coming fast in front of the café and went in through the gate and out onto the dock and got on board.

The fellow who had her chartered was on board waiting. I told him what had happened.

“Where’s Eddy?” this fellow Johnson that had her chartered asked me.

“I never saw him after the shooting started.”

“Do you suppose he was hit?”

“Hell no. I tell you the only shots that came in the café were into the show case. That was when the car was coming behind them. That was when they shot the first fellow right in front of the window. They came at an angle like this—”

“You seem awfully sure about it,” he said.

“I was watching,” I told him.

Then, as I looked up, I saw Eddy coming along the dock looking taller and sloppier than ever. He walked with his joints all slung wrong.

“There he is.”

Eddy looked pretty bad. He never looked too good early in the morning but he looked plenty bad now.

“Where were you?” I asked him.

“On the floor.”

“Did you see it?” Johnson asked him.

“Don’t talk about it, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said to him. “It makes me sick to even think about it.”

“You better have a drink,” Johnson told him. Then he said to me, “Well, are we going out?”

“That’s up to you.”

“What sort of a day will it be?”

“Just about like yesterday. Maybe better.”

“Let’s get out then.”

“All right, as soon as the bait comes.”

We’d had this bird out three weeks fishing the stream and I hadn’t seen any of his money yet except one hundred dollars he gave me to pay the consul and clear and get some grub and put gas in her before we came across. I was furnishing all the tackle and he had her chartered at thirty-five dollars a day. He slept at a hotel and came aboard every morning. Eddy got me the charter so I had to carry him. I was giving him four dollars a day.

“I’ve got to put gas in her,” I told Johnson.

“All right.”

“I’ll need some money for that.”

“How much?”

“It’s twenty-eight cents a gallon. I ought to put in forty gallons anyway. That’s eleven-twenty.”

He got out fifteen dollars.

“Do you want to put the rest on the beer and the ice?” I asked him.

“That’s fine,” he said. “Just put it down against what I owe you.”

I was thinking three weeks was a long time to let him go but if he was good for it what difference was there? He should have paid every week anyway. But I’ve let them run a month and got the money. It was my fault but I was glad to see it run at first. It was only the last few days he made me nervous but I didn’t want to say anything for fear of getting him plugged at me. If he was good for it, the longer he went the better.

“Have a bottle of beer?” he asked me, opening the box.

“No thanks.”

Just then this nigger we had getting bait comes down the dock and I told Eddy to get ready to cast her off.

The nigger came on board with the bait and we cast off and started out of the harbor, the nigger fixing on a couple of mackerel; passing the hook through their mouth, out the gills, slitting the side and then putting the hook through the other side and out, tying the mouth shut on the wire leader and tying the hook good so it couldn’t slip and so the bait would troll smooth without spinning.

He’s a real black nigger, smart and gloomy, with blue voodoo beads around his neck under his shirt and an old straw hat. What he liked to do on board was sleep and read the papers. But he put on a nice bait and he was fast.

“Can’t you put on a bait like that, Captain?” Johnson asked me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you carry a nigger to do it?”

“When the big fish run you’ll see,” I told him.

“What’s the idea?”

“The nigger can do it faster than I can.”

“Can’t Eddy do it?”

“No, sir.”

“It seems an unnecessary expense to me.” He’d been giving the nigger a dollar a day and the nigger had been on a rumba every night. I could see him getting sleepy already.

“He’s necessary,” I said.

By then we had passed the smacks with their fish cars anchored in front of Cabañas and the skiffs anchored fishing for mutton fish on the rock bottom by the Morro, and I headed her out where the gulf made a dark line. Eddy put the two big teasers out and the nigger had baits on three rods.

The stream was in nearly to soundings and as we came toward the edge you could see her running nearly purple with regular whirlpools. There was a light east breeze corning up and we put up plenty of flying fish, those big ones that look like the picture of Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic when they sail off.

Those big flying fish are the best sign there is. As far as you could see, there was that faded yellow gulfweed in small patches that means the main stream is well in and there were birds ahead working over a school of little tuna. You could see them jumping; just little ones weighing a couple of pounds apiece.

“Put out any time you want,” I told Johnson.

He put on his belt and his harness and put out the big rod with the Hardy reel with six hundred yards of thirty-six thread. I looked back and his bait was trolling nice, just bouncing along on the swell and the two teasers were diving and jumping. We were going just about the right speed and I headed her into the stream.

“Keep the rod butt in the socket on the chair,” I told him. “Then the rod won’t be as heavy. Keep the drag off so you can slack to him when he hits. If one ever hits with the drag on he’ll jerk you overboard.”

Every day I’d have to tell him the same thing but I didn’t mind that. One out of fifty parties you get know how to fish. Then when they do know, half the time they’re goofy and want to use line that isn’t strong enough to hold anything big.

“How does the day look?” he asked me.

“It couldn’t be better,” I told him. It was a pretty day all right.

I gave the nigger the wheel and told him to work along the edge of the stream to the eastward and went back to where Johnson was sitting watching his bait bouncing along.

“Want me to put out another rod?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I want to hook, fight, and land my fish myself.”

“Good,” I said. “Do you want Eddy to put it out and hand it to you if one strikes so you can hook him?”

“No,” he said. “I prefer to have only one rod out.”

“All right.”

The nigger was still taking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead and up the stream a little. Looking back, I could see Havana looking fine in the sun and a ship just coming out of the harbor past the Morro.

“I think you’re going to have a chance to fight one today, Mr. Johnson,” I told him.

“It’s about time,” he said. “How long have we been out?”

“Three weeks today.”

“That’s a long time to fish.”

“They’re a funny fish,” I told him. “They aren’t here until they come. But when they come there’s plenty of them. And they’ve always come. If they don’t come now they’re never coming. The moon is right. There’s a good stream and we’re going to have a good breeze.”

“There were some small ones when we first came.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like I told you. The small ones thin out and stop before the big ones come.”

“You party-boat captains always have the same line. Either it’s too early or too late or the wind isn’t right or the moon is wrong. But you take the money just the same.”

“Well,” I told him, “the hell of it is that it usually is too early or too late and plenty of time the wind is wrong. Then when you get a day that’s perfect you’re ashore without a party.”

“But you think today’s a good day?”

“Well,” I told him, “I’ve had action enough for me already today. But I’d like to bet you’re going to have plenty.”

“I hope so,” he said.

We settled down to troll. Eddy went forward and lay down. I was standing up watching for a tail to show. Every once in a while the nigger would doze off and I was watching him, too. I bet he had some nights.

“Would you mind getting me a bottle of beer, Captain?” Johnson asked me.

“No, sir,” I said, and I dug down in the ice to get him a cold one.

“Won’t you have one?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said. “I’ll wait till tonight.”

I opened the bottle and was reaching it toward him when I saw this big brown bugger with a spear on him longer than your arm burst head and shoulders out of the water and smash at that mackerel. He looked as big around as a saw log.

“Slack it to him!” I yelled.

“He hasn’t got it,” Johnson said.

“Hold it, then.”

He’d come up from deep down and missed it. I knew he’d turn and come for it again.

“Get ready to turn it loose to him the minute he grabs it.”

Then I saw him coming from behind under water. You could see his fins out wide like purple wings and the purple stripes across the brown. He came on like a submarine and his top fin came out and you could see it slice the water. Then he came right behind the bait and his spear came out too, sort of wagging clean out of water.

“Let it go into his mouth,” I said. Johnson took his hand off the reel spool and it started to whiz and the old marlin turned and went down and I could see the whole length of him shine bright silver as he turned broadside and headed off fast toward shore.

“Put on a little drag,” I said. “Not much.”

He screwed down on the drag.

“Not too much,” I said. I could see the line slant up. “Shut her down hard and sock him,” I said. “You’ve got to sock him. He’s going to jump anyway.”

Johnson screwed the drag down and came back on the rod.

“Sock him,” I told him. “Stick it into him. Hit him half a dozen times.”

He hit him pretty hard a couple of times more, and then the rod bent double and the reel commenced to screech and out he came, boom, in a long straight jump, shining silver in the sun and making a splash like throwing a horse off a cliff.

“Ease up on the drag,” I told him.

“He’s gone,” said Johnson.

“The hell he is,” I told him. “Ease up on the drag quick.”

I could see the curve in the line and the next time he jumped he was astern and headed out to sea. Then he came out again and smashed the water white and I could see he was hooked in the side of his mouth. The stripes showed clear on him. He was a fine fish, bright silver now, barred with purple and as big around as a log.

“He’s gone,” Johnson said. The line was slack.

“Reel on him,” I said. “He’s hooked good. Put her ahead with all the machine!” I yelled to the nigger.

Then once, twice, he came out stiff as a post, the whole length of him jumping straight toward us, throwing the water high each time he landed. The line came taut and I saw he was headed inshore again and I could see he was turning.

“Now he’ll make his run,” I said. “If he hooks up I’ll chase him. Keep your drag light. There’s plenty of line.”

The old marlin headed out to the nor’west like all the big ones go, and brother, did he hook up. He started jumping in those long lopes and every splash would be like a speed boat in a sea. We went after him, keeping him on the quarter once I’d made the turn. I had the wheel and I kept yelling to Johnson to keep his drag light and reel fast. All of a sudden I see his rod jerk and the line go slack. It wouldn’t look slack unless you knew about it because of the pull of the belly of the line in the water. But I knew.

“He’s gone,” I told him. The fish was still jumping and he went on jumping until he was out of sight. He was a fine fish all right.

“I can still feel him pull,” Johnson said.

“That’s the weight of the line.”

“I can hardly reel it. Maybe he’s dead.”

“Look at him,” I said. “He’s still jumping.” You could see him out a half a mile, still throwing spouts of water.

I felt his drag. He had it screwed down tight. You couldn’t pull out any line. It had to break.

“Didn’t I tell you to keep your drag light?”

“But he kept taking out line.”

“So what?”

“So I tightened it.”

“Listen,” I told him. “If you don’t give them line when they hook up like that they break it. There isn’t any line will hold them. When they want it you’ve got to give it to them. You have to keep a light drag. The market fishermen can’t hold them tight when they do that even with a harpoon line. What we have to do is use the boat to chase them so they don’t take it all when they make their run. After they make their run they’ll sound and you can tighten up the drag and get it back.”

“Then if it hadn’t broken I would have caught him?”

“You’d have had a chance.”

“He couldn’t have kept that up, could he?”

“He can do plenty of other things. It isn’t until after he’s made his run that the fight starts.”

“Well, let’s catch one,” he said.

“You have to reel that line in first,” I told him.

We’d hooked that fish and lost him without waking Eddy up. Now old Eddy came back astern.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

Eddy was a good man on a boat once, before he got to be a rummy, but he isn’t any good now. I looked at him standing there tall and hollow-cheeked with his mouth loose and that white stuff in the corners of his eyes and his hair all faded in the sun. I knew he woke up dead for a drink.

“You’d better drink a bottle of beer,” I told him. He took one out of the box and drank it.

“Well, Mr. Johnson,” he said, “I guess I better finish my nap. Much obliged for the beer, sir.” Some Eddy. The fish didn’t make any difference to him.

Well, we hooked another one around noon and he jumped off. You could see the hook go thirty feet in the air when he threw it.

“What did I do wrong then?” Johnson asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “He just threw it.”

“Mr. Johnson,” said Eddy, who’d waked up to have another bottle of beer— “Mr. Johnson, you’re just unlucky. Now maybe you’re lucky with women. Mr. Johnson, what do you say we go out tonight?” Then he went back and lay down again.

About four o’clock when we’re coming back close in to shore against the stream, it going like a mill race, us with the sun at our backs, the biggest black marlin I ever saw in my life hit Johnson’s bait. We’d put out a feather squid and caught four of those little tuna and the nigger put one on his hook for bait. It trolled pretty heavy but it made a big splash in the wake.

Johnson took the harness off the reel so he could put the rod across his knees because his arms got tired holding it in position all the time. Because his hands got tired holding the spool of the reel against the drag of the big bait, he screwed the drag down when I wasn’t looking. I never knew he had it down. I didn’t like to see him hold the rod that way but I hated to be crabbing at him all the time. Besides, with the drag off, line would go out so there wasn’t any danger. But it was a sloppy way to fish.

I was at the wheel and was working the edge of the stream opposite that old cement factory where it makes deep so close in to shore and where it makes a sort of eddy where there is always lots of bait. Then I saw a splash like a depth bomb and the sword and eye and open lower jaw and huge purple-black head of a black marlin. The whole top fin was up out of water looking as high as a full-rigged ship, and the whole scythe tall was out as he smashed at that tuna. The bill was as big around as a baseball bat and slanted up, and as he grabbed the bait he sliced the ocean wide open. He was solid purple-black and he had an eye as big as a soup bowl. He was huge. I bet he’d go a thousand pounds.

I yelled to Johnson to let him have line but before I could say a word I saw Johnson rise up in the air off the chair as though he was being derricked, and him holding just for a second onto that rod and the rod bending like a bow, and then the butt caught him in the belly and the whole works went overboard.

He’d screwed the drag tight, and when the fish struck, it lifted Johnson right out of the chair and he couldn’t hold it. He’d had the butt under one leg and the rod across his lap. If he’d had the harness on it would have taken him along, too.

I cut out the engine and went back to the stem. He was sitting there holding onto his belly where the rod butt had hit him.

“I guess that’s enough for today,” I said.

“What was it?” he said to me.

“Black marlin,” I said.

“How did it happen?”

“You figure it out,” I said. “The reel cost two hundred and fifty dollars. It costs more now. The rod cost me forty-five. There was a little under six hundred yards of thirty-six thread.”

Just then Eddy slaps him on the back. “Mr. Johnson,” he says, “you’re just unlucky. You know I never saw that happen before in my life.”

“Shut up, you rummy,” I said to him.

“I tell you, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said, “that’s the rarest occurrence I ever saw in my life.”

“What would I do if I was hooked to a fish like that?” Johnson said.

“That’s what you wanted to fight all by yourself,” I told him. I was plenty sore.

“They’re too big,” Johnson said. “Why, it would just be punishment.”

“Listen,” I said. “A fish like that would kill you.”

“They catch them.”

“People who know how to fish catch them. But don’t think they don’t take punishment.”

“I saw a picture of a girl who caught one.”

“Sure,” I said. “Still fishing. He swallowed the bait and they pulled his stomach out and he came to the top and died. I’m talking about trolling them when they’re hooked in the mouth.”

“Well,” said Johnson, “they’re too big. If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it?”

“That’s right, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “If it isn’t enjoyable, why do it? Listen, Mr. Johnson. You hit the nail on the head there. If it isn’t enjoyable — why do it?”

I was still shaky from seeing that fish and feeling plenty sick about the tackle and I couldn’t listen to them. I told the nigger to head her for the Morro. I didn’t say anything to them and there they sat, Eddy in one of the chairs with a bottle of beer and Johnson with another.

“Captain,” he said to me after a while, “could you make me a highball?”

I made him one without saying anything, and then I made myself a real one. I was thinking to myself that this Johnson had fished fifteen days, finally he hooks into a fish a fisherman would give a year to tie into, he loses him, he loses my heavy tackle, he makes a fool of himself and he sits there perfectly content drinking with a rummy.

When we got in to the dock and the nigger was standing there waiting, I said, “What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so,” Johnson said. “I’m about fed up with this kind of fishing.”

“You want to pay off the nigger?”

“How much do I owe him?”

“A dollar. You can give him a tip if you want.”

So Johnson gave the nigger a dollar and two Cuban twenty-cent pieces.

“What’s this for?” the nigger asks me, showing the coins.

“A tip,” I told him in Spanish. “You’re through. He gives you that.”

“Don’t come tomorrow?”

“No.”

The nigger gets his ball of twine he used for tying baits and his dark glasses, puts on his straw hat and goes without saying good-bye. He was a nigger that never thought much of any of us.

“When do you want to settle up, Mr. Johnson?” I asked him.

“I’ll go to the bank in the morning,” Johnson said. “We can settle up in the afternoon.”

“Do you know how many days there are?”

“Fifteen.”

“No. There’s sixteen with today and a day each way makes eighteen. Then there’s the rod and reel and the line from today.”

“The tackle’s your risk.”

“No, sir. Not when you lose it that way.”

“I’ve paid every day for the rent of it. It’s your risk.”

“No, sir,” I said. “If a fish broke it and it wasn’t your fault, that would be something else. You lost that whole outfit by carelessness.”

“The fish pulled it out of my hands.”

“Because you had the drag on and didn’t have the rod in the socket.”

“You have no business to charge for that.”

“If you hired a car and ran it off a cliff, don’t you think you’d have to pay for it?”

“Not if I was in it,” Johnson said.

“That’s pretty good, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “You see it, don’t you, Cap? If he was in it he’d be killed. So he wouldn’t have to pay. That’s a good one.”

I didn’t pay any attention to the rummy. “You owe two hundred and ninety five dollars for that rod and reel and line,” I told Johnson.

“Well, it’s not right,” he said. “But if that’s the way you feel about it why not split the difference?”

“I can’t replace it for under three hundred and sixty. I’m not charging you for the line. A fish like that could get all your line and it not be your fault. If there was anyone here but a rummy they’d tell you how square I’m being with you. I know it seems like a lot of money but it was a lot of money when I bought the tackle, too. You can’t fish like that without the best tackle you can buy.”

“Mr. Johnson, he says I’m a rummy. Maybe I am. But I tell you he’s right. He’s right and he’s reasonable,” Eddy told him.

“I don’t want to make any difficulties,” Johnson said finally. “I’ll pay for it, even though I don’t see it. That’s eighteen days at thirty-five dollars and two ninety-five extra.”

“You gave me a hundred,” I told him. “I’ll give you a list of what I spent and I’ll deduct what grub there is left. What you bought for provisions going over and back.”

“That’s reasonable,” Johnson said.

“Listen, Mr. Johnson,” Eddy said. “If you knew the way they usually charge a stranger you’d know it was more than reasonable. Do you know what it is? It’s exceptional. The cap is treating you like you were his own mother.”

“I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and come down in the afternoon. Then I’ll get the boat day after tomorrow.”

“You can go back with us and save the boat fare.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll save time with the boat.”

“Well,” I said. “What about a drink?”

“Fine,” said Johnson. “No hard feelings now, are there?”

“No, sir,” I told him. So the three of us sat there in the stern and drank a highball together.

The next day I worked around her all morning, changing the oil in her base and one thing and another. At noon I went uptown and ate at a Chink place where you get a good meal for forty cents, and then I bought some things to take home to my wife and our three girls. You know, perfume, a couple of fans and two of those high combs. When I finished I stopped in at Donovan’s and had a beer and talked with the old man and then walked back to the San Francisco docks, stopping in at three or four places for a beer on the way. I bought Frankie a couple at the Cunard bar and I came on board feeling pretty good. When I came on board I had just forty cents left. Frankie came on board with me, and while we sat and waited for Johnson I drank a couple of cold ones out of the ice box with Frankie.

Eddy hadn’t shown up all night or all day but I knew he would be around sooner or later, as soon as his credit ran out. Donovan told me he’d been in there the night before a little while with Johnson, and Eddy had been setting them up on credit. We waited and I began to wonder about Johnson not showing up. I’d left word at the dock for them to tell him to go on board and wait for me but they said he hadn’t come. Still I figured he had been out late and probably didn’t get up till around noon. The banks were open until three-thirty. We saw the plane go out, and about five-thirty I was all over feeling good and was getting plenty worried.

At six o’clock I sent Frankie up to the hotel to see if Johnson was there. I still thought he might be out on a time or he might be there at the hotel feeling too bad to get up. I kept waiting and waiting until it was late. But I was getting plenty worried because he owed me eight hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Frankie was gone about a little over half an hour. When I saw him coming he was walking fast and shaking his head.

“He went on the plane,” he said.

All right. There it was. The consulate was closed. I had forty cents, and anyhow the plane was in Miami by now. I couldn’t even send a wire. Some Mr. Johnson, all right. It was my fault. I should have known better.

“Well,” I said to Frankie, “we might as well have a cold one. Mr. Johnson bought them.” There were three bottles of Tropical left.

Frankie felt as bad as I did. I don’t know how he could but he seemed to. He just kept slapping me on the back and shaking his head.

So there it was. I was broke. I’d lost five hundred and thirty dollars of the charter, and tackle I couldn’t replace for three hundred and fifty more. How some of that gang that hangs around the dock would be pleased at that, I thought. It certainly would make some conchs happy. And the day before I turned down three thousand dollars to land three aliens on the Keys. Anywhere, just to get them out of the country.

All right, what was I going to do now? I couldn’t bring in a load because you have to have money to buy the booze and besides there’s no money in it any more. The town is flooded with it and there’s nobody to buy it. But I was damned if I was going home broke and starve a summer in that town. Besides I’ve got a family. The clearance was paid when we came in. You usually pay the broker in advance and he enters you and clears you. Hell, I didn’t even have enough money to put in gas. It was a hell of a note, all right. Some Mr. Johnson.

“I’ve got to carry something, Frankie,” I said. “I’ve got to make some money.”

“I’ll see,” said Frankie. He hangs around the water front and does odd jobs and is pretty deaf and drinks too much every night. But you never saw a fellow more loyal nor with a better heart. I’ve known him since I first started to run over there. He used to help me load plenty of times. Then when I got handling stuff and went party-boating and broke out this swordfishing in Cuba I used to see him a lot around the dock and around the café. He seems dumb and he usually smiles instead of talking but that’s because he’s deaf.

“You carry anything?” Frankie asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I can’t choose now.”

“Anything?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll see,” Frankie said. “Where will you be?”

“I’ll be at the Perla,” I told him. “I have to eat.”

You can get a good meal at the Perla for twenty-five cents. Everything on the menu is a dime except soup, and that is a nickel. I walked as far as there with Frankie, and I went in and he went on. Before he went he shook me by the hand and clapped me on the back again.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Me Frankie much politics. Much business. Much drinking. No money. But big friend. Don’t worry.”

“So long, Frankie,” I said. “Don’t you worry either, boy.”

I went in the Perla and sat down at a table. They had a new pane of glass in the window that had been shot up and the show case was all fixed up. There were a lot of gallegos drinking at the bar and some eating. One table was playing dominoes already. I had black bean soup and a beef stew with boiled potatoes for fifteen cents. A bottle of Hatuey beer brought it up to a quarter. When I spoke to the waiter about the shooting he wouldn’t say anything. They were all plenty scared.

I finished the meal and sat back and smoked a cigarette and worried my head off. Then I saw Frankie coming in the door with someone behind him. Yellow stuff, I thought to myself. So it’s yellow stuff.

“This is Mr. Sing,” Frankie said, and he smiled. He’d been pretty fast all right and he knew it.

“How do you do?” said Mr. Sing.

Mr. Sing was about the smoothest-looking thing I’d ever seen. He was a Chink all right, but he talked like an Englishman and he was dressed in a white suit with a silk shirt and black tie and one of those hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar Panama hats.

“You will have some coffee?” he asked me.

“If you do.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Sing. “We are quite alone here?”

“Except for everybody in the café,” I told him.

“That is all right,” Mr. Sing said. “You have a boat?”

“Thirty-eight feet,” I said. “Hundred horse Kermath.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Sing. “I had imagined it was a lugger.”

“It can carry two hundred and sixty-five cases without being loaded.”

“Would you care to charter it to me?”

“On what terms?”

“You need not go. I will provide a captain and a crew.”

“No,” I said. “I go on her wherever she goes.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “Would you mind leaving us?” he said to Frankie. Frankie looked as interested as ever and smiled at him.

“He’s deaf,” I said. “He doesn’t understand much English.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “You speak Spanish. Tell him to rejoin us later.”

I motioned to Frankie with my thumb. He got up and went over to the bar.

“You don’t speak Spanish?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Sing. “Now what are the circumstances that would — that have made you consider . . .”

“I’m broke.”

“I see,” said Mr. Sing. “Does the boat owe any money? Can she be libeled?”

“No.”

“Quite so,” Mr. Sing said. “How many of my unfortunate compatriots could your boat accommodate?”

“You mean carry?”

“That’s it.”

“How far?”

“A day’s voyage.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She can take a dozen if they didn’t have any baggage.”

“They would not have baggage.”

“Where do you want to carry them?”

“I’d leave that to you,” Mr. Sing said.

“You mean where to land them?”

“You would embark them for the Tortugas where a schooner would pick them up.”

“Listen,” I said. “There’s a lighthouse at the Tortugas on Loggerhead Key with a radio that works both ways.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Sing. “It would certainly be very silly to land them there.”

“Then what?”

“I said you would embark them for there. That is what their passage calls for.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You would land them wherever your best judgment dictated.”

“Will the schooner come to Tortugas to get them?”

“Of course not,” said Mr. Sing. “How silly.”

“How much are they worth a head?”

“Fifty dollars,” said Mr. Sing.

“No.”

“How would seventy-five do?”

“What do you get a head?”

“Oh, that’s quite beside the point. You see, there are a great many facets, or shall we say angles, to my issuing the tickets. It doesn’t stop there.”

“Yes,” I said. “And what I’m supposed to do doesn’t have to be paid for, either. Eh?”

“I see your point absolutely,” said Mr. Sing. “Should we say a hundred dollars apiece?”

“Listen,” I said. “Do you know how long I would go to jail if they pick me up on this?”

“Ten years,” said Mr. Sing. “Ten years at least. But there is no reason to go to jail, my dear Captain. You run only one risk — when you load your passengers. Everything else is left to your discretion.”

“And if they come back on your hands?”

“That’s quite simple. I would accuse you to them of having betrayed me. I will make a partial refund and ship them out again. They realize, of course, that it is a difficult voyage.”

“What about me?”

“I suppose I should send some word to the consulate.”

“I see.”

“Twelve hundred dollars, Captain, is not to be despised at present.”

“When would I get the money?”

“Two hundred when you agree and a thousand when you load.”

“If I would go off with the two hundred?”

“I could do nothing, of course,” he smiled. “But I know you wouldn’t do such a thing, Captain.”

“Have you got the two hundred with you?”

“Of course.”

“Put it under the plate.” He did. “All right,” I said. “I’ll clear in the morning and pull out at dark. Now, where do we load?”

“How would Bacuranao be?”

“All right. Have you got it fixed?”

“Of course.”

“Now, about the loading,” I said. “You show two lights, one above the other, at the point. I’ll come in when I see them. You come out in a boat and load from the boat. You come yourself and you bring the money. I won’t take one on board until I have it.”

“No,” he said; “one-half when you start to load and the other when you are finished.”

“All right,” I said. “That’s reasonable.”

“So everything is understood?”

“I guess so,” I said. “There’s no baggage and no arms. No guns, knives, or razors; nothing. I have to know about that.”

“Captain,” said Mr. Sing, “have you no trust in me? Don’t you see our interests are identical?”

“You’ll make sure?”

“Please do not embarrass me,” he said. “Do you not see how our interests coincide?”

“All right,” I told him. “What time will you be there?”

“Before midnight.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess that’s all.”

“How do you want the money?”

“In hundreds is all right.”

He stood up and I watched him go out. Frankie smiled at him as he went. He was a smooth-looking Chink all right. Some Chink.

Frankie came over to the table. “Well?” he said.

“Where did you know Mr. Sing?”

“He ships Chinamen,” Frankie said. “Big business.”

“How long you know him?”

“He’s here about two years,” Frankie said. “Another one ship them before him. Somebody kill him.”

“Somebody will kill Mr. Sing, too.”

“Sure,” said Frankie. “Why not? Plenty big business.”

“Some business,” I said.

“Big business,” said Frankie. “Ship Chinamen never come back. Other Chinamen write letters say everything fine.”

“Wonderful,” I said.

“This kind of Chinamen no understand write. Chinamen can write all rich. Eat nothing. Live on rice. Hundred thousand Chinamen here. Only three Chinese women.”

“Why?”

“Government no let.”

“Hell of a situation,” I said.

“You do business him?”

“Maybe.”

“Good business,” said Frankie. “Better than politics. Much money. Plenty big business.”

“Have a bottle of beer,” I told him.

“You not worry any more?”

“Hell no,” I said. “Plenty big business. Much obliged.”

“Good,” said Frankie and patted me on the back. “Make me happier than nothing. All I want is you happy. Chinamen good business, eh?”

“Wonderful.”

“Make me happy,” said Frankie. I saw he was about ready to cry because he was so pleased everything was all right, so I patted him on the back. Some Frankie.

First thing in the morning I got hold of the broker and told him to clear us. He wanted the crew list and I told him nobody.

“You’re going to cross alone, Captain?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s become of your mate?”

“He’s on a drunk,” I told him.

“It’s very dangerous to go alone.”

“It’s only ninety miles,” I said. “Do you think having a rummy on board makes any difference?”

* * * * *

I ran her over to the Standard Oil dock across the harbor and filled up both the tanks. She held nearly two hundred gallons when I had her full. I hated to buy it at twenty-eight cents a gallon but I didn’t know where we might go.

Ever since I’d seen the Chink and taken the money I’d been worrying about the business. I don’t think I slept all night. I brought her back to the San Francisco dock, and there was Eddy waiting on the dock for me.

“Hello, Harry,” he said to me and waved. I threw him the stern line and he made her fast, and then came aboard; longer, blearier, drunker than ever. I didn’t say anything to him.

“What do you think about that fellow Johnson going off like that, Harry?” he asked me. “What do you know about that?”

“Get out of here,” I told him. “You’re poison to me.”

“Brother, don’t I feel as bad about it as you do?”

“Get off of her,” I told him.

He just settled back in the chair and stretched his legs out. “I hear we’re going across today,” he said. “Well, I guess there isn’t any use to stay around.”

“You’re not going.”

“What’s the matter, Harry? There’s no sense to get plugged with me.”

“No? Get off her.”

“Oh, take it easy.”

I hit him in the face and he stood up and then climbed up onto the dock.

“I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, Harry,” he said.

“I’m not going to carry you,” I told him. “That’s all.”

“Well, what did you have to hit me for?”

“So you’d believe it.”

“What do you want me to do? Stay here and starve?”

“Starve, hell,” I said. “You can get work on the ferry. You can work your way back.”

“You aren’t treating me square,” he said.

“Who did you treat square, you rummy?” I told him. “You’d doublecross your own mother.”

That was true, too. But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. But I wouldn’t carry him the way things were now, not even if I wanted to.

He started to walk off down the dock looking longer than a day without breakfast. Then he turned and came back.

“How’s to let me take a couple of dollars, Harry?”

I gave him a five-dollar bill of the Chink’s.

“I always knew you were my pal. Harry, why don’t you carry me?”

“You’re bad luck.”

“You’re just plugged,” he said. “Never mind, old pal. You’ll be glad to see me yet.”

Now he had money he went off a good deal faster but I tell you it was poison to see him walk, even. He walked just like his joints were backwards.

I went up to the Perla and met the broker and he gave me the papers and I bought him a drink. Then I had lunch and Frankie came in.

“Fellow gave me this for you,” he said and handed me a rolled-up sort of tube wrapped in paper and tied with a piece of red string. It looked like a photograph when I unwrapped it and I unrolled it thinking it was maybe a picture someone around the dock had taken of the boat.

All right. It was a close-up picture of the head and chest of a dead nigger with his throat cut clear across from ear to ear and then stitched up neat and a card on his chest saying in Spanish: “This is what we do to lenguas largas.”

“Who gave it to you?” I asked Frankie.

He pointed out a Spanish boy that works around the docks who is just about gone with the con. This kid was standing at the lunch counter.

“Ask him to come over.”

The kid came over. He said two young fellows gave it to him about eleven o’clock. They asked him if he knew me and he said yes. Then he gave it to Frankie for me. They gave him a dollar to see that I got it. They were well dressed, he said.

“Politics,” Frankie said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“They think you told the police you were meeting those boys here that morning.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Good thing you go.”

“Did they leave any message?” I asked the Spanish boy.

“No,” he said. “Just to give you that.”

“I’m going to have to leave now,” I said to Frankie.

“Bad politics,” Frankie said. “Very bad politics.”

I had all the papers in a bunch that the broker had given me and I paid the bill and walked out of that café and across the square and through the gate and I was plenty glad to come through the warehouse and get out on the dock. Those kids had me spooked all right. They were just dumb enough to think I’d tipped somebody off about that other bunch. Those kids were like Pancho. When they were scared they got excited, and when they got excited they wanted to kill somebody.

I got on board and warmed up the engine. Frankie stood on the dock watching. He was smiling that funny deaf smile. I went back to him.

“Listen,” I said. “Don’t you get in any trouble about this.”

He couldn’t hear me. I had to yell it at him.

“Me good politics,” Frankie said. He cast her off.

I waved to Frankie, who’d thrown the bowline on board, and I headed her out of the slip and dropped down the channel with her. A British freighter was going out and I ran along beside her and passed her. I went out the harbor and past the Morro and put her on the course for Key West; due north. I left the wheel and went forward and coiled up the bowline and then came back and held her on her course, spreading Havana out astern and then dropping it off behind us as we brought the mountains up.

I dropped the Morro out of sight after a while and then the National Hotel and finally I could just see the dome of the Capitol. There wasn’t much current compared to the last day we had fished and there was only a light breeze. I saw a couple of smacks headed in toward Havana and they were coming from the westward so I knew the current was light.

I cut the switch and killed the motor. There wasn’t any sense in wasting gas. I’d let her drift. When it got dark I could always pick up the light of the Morro or, if she drifted up too far, the lights of Cojimar, and steer in and run along to Bacuranao. I figured the way the current looked she would drift the twelve miles up to Bacuranao by dark and I’d see the lights of Baracóa.

Well, I killed the engine and climbed up forward to have a look around. All there was to see was the two smacks off to the westward headed in, and way back the dome of the Capitol standing up white out of the edge of the sea. There was some gulfweed on the stream and a few birds working, but not many. I sat up there awhile on top of the house and watched, but the only fish I saw were those little brown ones that rise around the gulfweed. Brother, don’t let anybody tell you there isn’t plenty of water between Havana and Key West. I was just on the edge of it.

After a while I went down into the cockpit again and there was Eddy!

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter with the engine?”

“She broke down.”

“Why haven’t you got the hatch up?”

“Oh, hell!” I said.

Do you know what he’d done? He’d come back again and slipped the forward hatch and gone down into the cabin and gone to sleep. He had two quarts with him. He’d gone into the first bodega he’d seen and bought it and come aboard. When I started out he woke up and went back to sleep again. When I stopped her out in the gulf and she began to roll a little with the swell it woke him up.

“I knew you’d carry me, Harry,” he said.

“Carry you to hell,” I said. “You aren’t even on the crew list. I’ve got a good mind to make you jump overboard now.”

“You’re an old joker, Harry,” he said. “Us conchs ought to stick together when we’re in trouble.”

“You,” I said, “with your mouth. Who’s going to trust your mouth when you’re hot?”

“I’m a good man, Harry. You put me to the test and see what a good man I am.”

“Get me the two quarts,” I told him. I was thinking of something else.

He brought them out and I took a drink from the open one and put them forward by the wheel. He stood there and I looked at him. I was sorry for him and for what I knew I’d have to do. Hell, I knew him when he was a good man.

“What’s the matter with her, Harry?”

“She’s all right.”

“What’s the matter, then? What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Brother,” I told him, and I was sorry for him, “you’re in plenty of trouble.”

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t got it all figured out yet.”

We sat there awhile and I didn’t feel like talking to him any more. Once I knew it, it was hard to talk to him. Then I went below and got out the pump-gun and the Winchester thirty-thirty that I always had below in the cabin and hung them up in their cases from the top of the house where we hung the rods usually, right over the wheel where I could reach them. I keep them in those full-length clipped sheep’s-wool cases soaked in oil. That’s the only way you can keep them from rusting on a boat.

I loosened up the pump and worked her a few times, and then filled her up and pumped one into the barrel. I put a shell in the chamber of the Winchester and filled up the magazine. I got out the Smith and Wesson thirty-eight special I had when I was on the police force up in Miami from under the mattress and cleaned and oiled it and filled it up and put it on my belt.

“What’s the matter?” Eddy said. “What the hell’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I told him.

“What’s all the damn guns for?”

“I always carry them on board,” I said. “To shoot birds that bother the baits or to shoot sharks cruising along the keys.”

“What’s the matter, damn it?” said Eddy. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I told him. I sat there with the old thirty-eight flopping against my leg when she rolled, and I looked at him. I thought, there’s no sense to do it now. I’m going to need him now.

“We’re going to do a little job,” I said. “In at Bacuranao. I’ll tell you what to do when it’s time.”

I didn’t want to tell him too far ahead because he would get to worrying and get so spooked he wouldn’t be any use.

“You couldn’t have anybody better than me, Harry,” he said. “I’m the man for you. I’m with you on anything.”

I looked at him, tall and bleary and shaky, and I didn’t say anything.

“Listen, Harry. Would you give me just one?” he asked me. “I don’t want to get the shakes.”

I gave him one and we sat and waited for it to get dark. It was a fine sunset and there was a nice light breeze, and when the sun got pretty well down I started the engine and headed her in slow toward land.

We lay offshore about a mile in the dark. The current had freshened up with the sun down and I noticed it running in. I could see the Morro light way down to the westward and the glow of Havana, and the lights opposite us were Rincón and Baracóa. I headed her up against the current until I was past Bacuranao and nearly to Cojimar. Then I let her drift down. It was plenty dark but I could tell good where we were. I had all the lights out.

“What’s it going to be, Harry?” Eddy asked me. He was beginning to be spooked again.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve got me worried.” He was pretty close to the shakes and when he came near me he had a breath like a buzzard.

“What time is it?”

“I’ll go down and see,” he said. He came back up and said it was half past nine.

“Are you hungry?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. “You know I couldn’t eat, Harry.”

“All right,” I told him. “You can have one.”

After he had it I asked him how he felt. He said he felt fine.

“I’m going to give you a couple more in a little while,” I told him. “I know you haven’t got any guts unless you’ve got rum and there isn’t much on board. So you’d better go easy.”

“Tell me what’s up,” said Eddy.

“Listen,” I said, talking to him in the dark. “We’re going in to Bacuranao and pick up twelve Chinks. You take the wheel when I tell you to and do what I tell you to. We’ll take the twelve Chinks on board and we’ll lock them below forward. Go on forward now and fasten the hatch from the outside.”

He went up and I saw him shadowed against the dark. He came back and he said, “Harry, can I have one of those now?”

“No,” I said. “I want you rum-brave. I don’t want you useless.”

“I’m a good man, Harry. You’ll see.”

“You’re a rummy,” I said. “Listen. One Chink is going to bring those twelve out. He’s going to give me some money at the start. When they’re all on board he’s going to give me some more money. When you see him start to hand me money the second time you put her ahead and hook her up and head her out to sea. Don’t you pay any attention to what happens. You keep her going out no matter what happens. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“If any Chink starts bursting out of the cabin or corning through the hatch, once we’re out and under way, you take that pump-gun and blow them back as fast as they come out. Do you know how to use the pump-gun?”

“No. But you can show me.”

“You’d never remember. Do you know how to use the Winchester?”

“Just pump the lever and shoot it.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Only don’t shoot any holes in the hull.”

“You’d better give me that other drink,” Eddy said.

“All right. I’ll give you a little one.”

I gave him a real one. I knew they wouldn’t make him drunk now; not pouring into all that fear. But each one would work for a little while. After he drank this Eddy said, just as though he was happy, “So we’re going to run Chinks. Well, by God, I always said I’d run Chinamen if I was ever broke.”

“But you never got broke before, eh?” I said to him. He was funny all right.

I gave him three more drinks to keep him brave before it was half past ten. It was funny watching him and it kept me from thinking about it myself. I hadn’t figured on all this wait. I’d planned to leave after dark, run out, just out of the glare, and coast along to Cojimar.

At a little before eleven I saw the two lights show on the point. I waited a little while and then I took her in slow. Bacuranao is a cove where there used to be a big dock for loading sand. There is a little river that comes in when the rains open the bar across the mouth. The northers, in the winter, pile the sand up and close it.

They used to go in with schooners and load guavas from the river and there used to be a town. But the hurricane took it and it is all gone now except one house that some gallegos built out of the shacks the hurricane blew down and that they use for a clubhouse on Sundays when they come out to swim and picnic from Havana. There is one other house where the delegate lives but it is back from the beach.

Each little place like that all down the coast has a government delegate, but I figured the Chink must use his own boat and have him fixed. As we came in I could smell the sea grape and that sweet smell from the brush you get off the land.

“Get up forward,” I said to Eddy.

“You can’t hit anything on that side,” he said. “The reef’s on the other side as you go in.” You see, he’d been a good man once.

“Watch her,” I said, and I took her in to where I knew they could see us. With no surf they could hear the engine. I didn’t want to wait around, not knowing whether they saw us or not, so I flashed the running lights on once, just the green and red, and turned them off. Then I turned her and headed her out and let her lay there, just outside, with the engine just ticking. There was quite a little swell that close in.

“Come on back here,” I said to Eddy and I gave him a real drink.

“Do you cock it first with your thumb?” he whispered to me. He was sitting at the wheel now, and I had reached up and had both the cases open and the butts pulled out about six inches.

“That’s right.”

“Oh boy,” he said.

It certainly was wonderful what a drink would do to him and how quick. We lay there and I could see a light from the delegate’s house back through the bush. I saw the two lights on the point go down, and one of them moving off around the point. They must have blown the other one out.

Then, in a little while, coming out of the cove, I see a boat come toward us with a man sculling. I could tell by the way he swung back and forth. I knew he had a big oar. I was pretty pleased. If they were sculling that meant one man.

They came alongside.

“Good evening, Captain,” said Mr. Sing.

“Come astern and put her broadside,” I said to him.

He said something to the man who was sculling but he couldn’t scull her backwards, so I took hold of the gunwale and passed her astern. There were eight men in the boat. The six Chinks, Mr. Sing, and the kid sculling. While I was pulling her astern I was waiting for something to hit me on top of the head but nothing did. I straightened up and let Mr. Sing hold onto the stem.

“Let’s see what it looks like,” I said.

He handed it to me and I took it up to where Eddy was at the wheel and put on the binnacle light. I looked at it carefully. It looked all right to me and I turned off the light. Eddy was trembling.

“Pour one yourself,” I said. I saw him reach for the bottle and tip it up.

I went back to the stem.

“All right,” I said. “Let six come on board.”

Mr. Sing and the Cuban that sculled were having a job holding their boat from knocking in what little swell there was. I heard Mr. Sing say something in Chink and all the Chinks in the boat started to climb onto the stem.

“One at a time,” I said.

He said something again, and then one after another six Chinks came over the stem. They were all lengths and sizes.

“Show them forward,” I said to Eddy.

“Right this way, gentlemen,” said Eddy. By God, I knew he had taken a big one.

“Lock the cabin,” I said, when they were all in.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

“I will return with the others,” said Mr. Sing.

“O.K.,” I told him.

I pushed them clear and the boy with him started sculling off.

“Listen,” I said to Eddy. “You lay off that bottle. You’re brave enough now.”

“O.K., chief,” said Eddy.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“This is what I like to do,” said Eddy. “You say you just pull it backward with your thumb?”

“You lousy rummy,” I told him. “Give me a drink out of that.”

“All gone,” said Eddy. “Sorry, chief.”

“Listen. What you have to do now is watch her when he hands me the money and put her ahead.”

“O.K., chief,” said Eddy.

I reached up and took the other bottle and got the corkscrew and drew the cork. I took a good drink and went back to the stern, putting the cork in tight and laying the bottle behind two wicker jugs full of water.

“Here comes Mr. Sing,” I said to Eddy.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

The boat came out sculling toward us.

He brought her astern and I let them do the holding in. Mr. Sing had hold of the roller we had across the stern to slide a big fish on board.

“Let them come aboard,” I said, “one at a time.”

Six more assorted Chinks came on board over the stern.

“Open up and show them forward,” I told Eddy.

“Yes, sir,” said Eddy.

“Lock the cabin.”

“Yes, sir.”

I saw he was at the wheel.

“All right, Mr. Sing,” I said. “Let’s see the rest of it.”

He put his hand in his pocket and reached the money out toward me. I reached for it and grabbed his wrist with the money in his hand, and as he came forward on the stern I grabbed his throat with the other hand. I felt her start and then churn ahead as she hooked up and I was plenty busy with Mr. Sing but I could see the Cuban standing in the stern of the boat holding the sculling oar through all the flopping and bouncing Mr. Sing was doing. He was flopping and bouncing worse than any dolphin on a gaff.

I got his arm around behind him and came up on it but I brought it too far because I felt it go. When it went he made a funny little noise and came forward, me holding him throat and all, and bit me on the shoulder. But when I felt the arm go I dropped it. It wasn’t any good to him any more and I took him by the throat with both hands, and brother, that Mr. Sing would flop just like a fish, true, his loose arm flailing, but I got him forward onto his knees and had both thumbs well in behind his talk box and I bent the whole thing back until she cracked. Don’t think you can’t hear it crack, either.

I held him quiet just a second, and then I laid him down across the stern. He lay there, face up, quiet, in his good clothes, with his feet in the cockpit, and I left him.

I picked up the money off the cockpit floor and took it up and put it on the binnacle and counted it. Then I took the wheel and told Eddy to look under the stern for some pieces of iron that I used for anchoring whenever we fished bottom fishing on patches or rocky bottom where you wouldn’t want to risk an anchor.

“I can’t find anything,” he said. He was scared being down there by Mr. Sing.

“Take the wheel,” I said. “Keep her out.”

There was a certain amount of moving around going on below but I wasn’t spooked about them.

I found a couple of pieces of what I wanted — iron from the old coaling dock at Tortugas — and I took some snapper line and made a couple of good big pieces fast to Mr. Sing’s ankles. Then when we were about two miles offshore I slid him over. He slid over smooth off the roller. I never even looked in his pockets. I didn’t feel like fooling with him.

He’d bled a little on the stern from his nose and his mouth, and I dipped a bucket of water that nearly pulled me overboard the way we were going, and cleaned her off good with a scrub brush from under the stern.

“Slow her down,” I said to Eddy.

“What if he floats up?” Eddy said.

“I dropped him in about seven hundred fathoms,” I said. “He’s going down all that way. That’s a long way, brother. He won’t float till the gas brings him up and all the time he’s going with the current and baiting up fish. Hell,” I said, “you don’t have to worry about Mr. Sing.”

“What did you have against him?” Eddy asked me.

“Nothing,” I said. “He was the easiest man to do business with I ever met. I thought there must be something wrong all the time.”

“What did you kill him for?”

“To keep from killing twelve other Chinks,” I told him.

“Harry,” he said, “you’ve got to give me one because I can feel them coming on. It made me sick to see his head all loose like that.”

So I gave him one.

“What about the Chinks?” Eddy said.

“I want to get them out as quick as I can,” I told him. “Before they smell up the cabin.”

“Where are you going to put them?”

“We’ll run them right in to the long beach,” I told him.

“Take her in now?”

“Sure,” I said. “Take her in slow.”

We came in slow over the reef and to where I could see the beach shine. There is plenty of water over the reef and inside it’s all sandy bottom and slopes right in to shore.

“Get up forward and give me the depth.”

He kept sounding with a grains pole, motioning me on with the pole. He came back and motioned me to stop. I came astern on her.

“You’ve got about five feet.”

“We’ve got to anchor,” I said. “If anything happens so we haven’t time to get her up, we can cut loose or break her off.”

Eddy paid out rope and when finally she didn’t drag he made her fast. She swung stem in.

“It’s sandy bottom, you know,” he said.

“How much water have we got at the stem?”

“Not over five feet.”

“You take the rifle,” I said. “And be careful.”

“Let me have one,” he said. He was plenty nervous.

I gave him one and took down the pump-gun. I unlocked the cabin door, opened it, and said: “Come on out.”

Nothing happened.

Then one Chink put his head out and saw Eddy standing there with a rifle and ducked back.

“Come on out. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” I said.

Nothing doing. Only lots of talk in Chink.

“Come on out, you!” Eddy said. My God, I knew he’d had the bottle.

“Put that bottle away,” I said to him, “or I’ll blow you out of the boat.”

“Come on out,” I said to them, “or I’ll shoot in at you.”

I saw one of them looking at the corner of the door and he saw the beach evidently because he begins to chatter.

“Come on,” I said, “or I’ll shoot.”

Out they came.

Now I tell you it would take a hell of a mean man to butcher a bunch of Chinks like that and I’ll bet there would be plenty of trouble, too, let alone mess.

They came out and they were scared and they didn’t have any guns but there were twelve of them. I walked backwards down to the stern holding the pump gun. “Get overboard,” I said. “It’s not over your heads.”

Nobody moved.

“Over you go.”

Nobody moved.

“You yellow rat-eating aliens,” Eddy said, “get overboard.”

“Shut your drunken mouth,” I told him.

“No swim,” one Chink said.

“No need swim,” I said. “No deep.”

“Come on, get overboard,” Eddy said.

“Come astern here,” I said. “Take your gun in one hand and your grains pole in the other and show them how deep it is.”

He showed them.

“No need swim?” the one asked me.

“No.”

“True?”

“Yes.”

“Where we?”

“Cuba.”

“You damn crook,” he said and went over the side, hanging on and then letting go. His head went under but he came up and his chin was out of water. “Damn crook,” he said. “Damn crook.”

He was mad and he was plenty brave. He said something in Chink and the others started going into the water off the stern.

“All right,” I said to Eddy. “Get the anchor up.”

As we headed her out, the moon started to come up and you could see the Chinks with just their heads out of water walking ashore, and the shine of the beach and the brush behind.

We got out past the reef and I looked back once and saw the beach and the mountains starting to show up; then I put her on her course for Key West.

“Now you can take a sleep,” I said to Eddy. “No, wait, go below and open up all the ports to get the stink out and bring me the iodine.”

“What’s the matter?” he said when he brought it.

“I cut my finger.”

“Do you want me to steer?”

“Get a sleep,” I said. “I’ll wake you up.”

He lay down on the built-in bunk in the cockpit, over the gas tank, and in a little while he was asleep.

I held the wheel with my knee and opened up my shirt and saw where Mr. Sing bit me. It was quite a bite and I put iodine on it, and then I sat there steering and wondering whether a bite from a Chinaman was poisonous and listened to her running nice and smooth and the water washing along her and I figured, Hell no, that bite wasn’t poisonous. A man like that Mr. Sing probably scrubbed his teeth two or three times a day. Some Mr. Sing. He certainly wasn’t much of a business man. Maybe he was. Maybe he just trusted me. I tell you I couldn’t figure him.

Well, now it was all simple except for Eddy. Because he’s a rummy he’ll talk when he gets hot. I sat there steering and I looked at him and I thought, Hell, he’s as well off dead as the way he is, and then I’m all clear. When I found he was on board I decided I’d have to do away with him but then when everything had come out so nice I didn’t have the heart. But looking at him lying there it certainly was a temptation. But then I thought there’s no sense spoiling it by doing something you’d be sorry for afterwards. Then I started to think he wasn’t even on the crew list and I’d have a fine to pay for bringing him in and I didn’t know how to consider him.

Well, I had plenty of time to think about it and I held her on her course and every once in a while I’d take a drink out of the bottle he’d brought on board. There wasn’t much in it, and when I’d finished it, I opened up the only one I had left, and I tell you I felt pretty good steering, and it was a pretty night to cross. It had turned out a good trip all right, finally, even though it had looked plenty bad plenty of times.

When it got daylight Eddy woke up. He said he felt terrible.

“Take the wheel a minute,” I told him. “I want to look around.”

I went back to the stern and threw a little water on her. But she was perfectly clean. I scrubbed the brush over the side. I unloaded the guns and stowed them below. But I still kept the gun on my belt. It was fresh and nice as you want it below, no smell at all. A little water had come in through the starboard port onto one of the bunks was all; so I shut the ports. There wasn’t a customhouse officer in the world could smell Chink in her now.

I saw the clearance papers in the net bag hanging up under her framed license where I’d shoved them when I came on board and I took them out to look them over. Then I went up to the cockpit.

“Listen,” I said. “How did you get on the crew list?”

“I met the broker when he was leaving for the consulate and told him I was going.”

“God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below.

I made some coffee down below and then I came up and took the wheel. “There’s coffee below,” I told him.

“Brother, coffee wouldn’t do me any good.” You knew you had to be sorry for him. He certainly looked bad.

About nine o’clock we saw the Sand Key light just about dead ahead. We’d seen tankers going up the gulf for quite a while.

“We’ll be in now,” I said to him. “I’m going to give you the same four dollars a day just as if Johnson had paid.”

“How much did you get out of last night?” he asked me.

“Only six hundred,” I told him.

I don’t know whether he believed me or not.

“Don’t I share in it?”

“That’s your share,” I told him. “What I just told you, and if you ever open your mouth about last night I’ll hear of it and I’ll do away with you.”

“You know I’m no squealer, Harry.”

“You’re a rummy. But no matter how rum dumb you get, if you ever talk about that, I promise you.”

“I’m a good man,” he said. “You oughtn’t to talk to me like that.”

“They can’t make it fast enough to keep you a good man,” I told him. But I didn’t worry about him any more, because who was going to believe him? Mr. Sing wouldn’t make any complaints. The Chinks weren’t going to. You know the boy that sculled them out wasn’t. Eddy would mouth about it sooner or later, maybe, but who believes a rummy?

Why, who could prove anything? Naturally it would have made plenty more talk when they saw his name on the crew list. That was luck for me, all right. I could have said he fell overboard, but it makes plenty talk. Plenty of luck for Eddy, too. Plenty of luck, all right.

Then we came to the edge of the stream and the water quit being blue and was light and greenish and inside I could see the stakes on the Long Reef and on the Western Dry Rocks and the wireless masts at Key West and the La Concha hotel up high out of all the low houses and plenty smoke from out where they’re burning garbage. Sand Key light was plenty close now and you could see the boathouse and the little dock alongside the light and I knew we were only forty minutes away now and I felt good to be getting back and I had a good stake now for the summertime.

“What do you say about a drink, Eddy?” I said to him.

“Ah, Harry,” he said, “I always knew you were my pal.”

THE TRADESMAN’S RETURN

THEY CAME ON ACROSS IN THE NIGHT AND it blew a big breeze from the northwest. When the sun was up he sighted a tanker coming down the gulf and she stood up so high and white with the sun on her in that cold air that it looked like tall buildings rising out of the sea and he said to the nigger, “Where the hell are we?”

The nigger raised himself up to look.

“Ain’t nothing like that this side of Miami.”

“You know damn well we ain’t been carried up to no Miami,” he told the nigger.

“All I say ain’t no buildings like that on no Florida keys.”

“We’ve been steering for Sand Key.”

“We’ve got to see it then. It or American shoals.”

Then in a little while he saw it was a tanker and not buildings and then in less than an hour he saw Sand Key light, straight, thin and brown, rising out of the sea right where it ought to be.

“You got to have confidence steering,” he told the nigger.

“I got confidence,” the nigger said. “But the way this trip gone I ain’t got confidence no more.”

“How’s your leg?”

“It hurts me all the time.”

“It ain’t nothing,” the man said. “You keep it clean and wrapped up and it’ll heal by itself.”

He was steering to the westward now to go in to lay up for the day in the mangroves by Woman Key where he would not see anybody and where the boat was to come out to meet them.

“You’re going to be all right,” he told the Negro.

“I don’t know,” the nigger said. “I hurt bad.”

“I’m going to fix you up good when we get in to the place,” he told him. “You aren’t shot bad. Quit worrying.”

“I’m shot,” he said. “I ain’t never been shot before. Anyway I’m shot is bad.”

“You’re just scared.”

“No sir. I’m shot. And I’m hurting bad. I’ve been throbbing all night.”

The nigger went on grumbling like that and he could not keep from taking the bandage off to look at it.

“Leave it alone,” the man who was steering told him. The nigger lay on the floor of the cockpit and there were sacks of liquor, shaped like hams, piled everywhere. He had made himself a place in them to lie down in. Every time he moved there was the noise of broken glass in the sacks and there was the odor of spilled liquor. The liquor had run all over everything. The man was steering in for Woman Key now. He could see it now plainly.

“I hurt,” the nigger said. “I hurt worse all the time.”

“I’m sorry, Wesley,” the man said. “But I got to steer.”

“You treat a man no better than a dog,” the nigger said. He was getting ugly now, but the man was still sorry for him.

“I’m going to make you comfortable, Wesley,” he said. “You lay quiet now.”

“You don’t care what happens to a man,” the nigger said. “You ain’t hardly human.”

“I’m going to fix you up good,” the man said. “You just lay quiet.”

“You ain’t going to fix me up,” the nigger said. The man, whose name was Harry, said nothing then because he liked the nigger and there was nothing to do now but hit him, and he couldn’t hit him. The nigger kept on talking.

“Why we didn’t stop when they started shooting?”

The man did not answer.

“Ain’t a man’s life worth more than a load of liquor?”

The man was intent on his steering.

“All we have to do is stop and let them take the liquor.”

“No,” the man said. “They take the liquor and the boat and you go to jail.”

“I don’t mind jail,” the nigger said. “But I never wanted to get shot.”

He was getting on the man’s nerves now and the man was becoming tired of hearing him talk.

“Who the hell’s shot worse?” he asked him. “You or me?”

“You’re shot worse,” the nigger said. “But I ain’t never been shot. I didn’t figure to get shot. I ain’t paid to get shot. I don’t want to be shot.”

“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him. “It don’t do you any good to talk like that.”

They were coming up on the key now. They were inside the shoals and as he headed her into the channel it was hard to see with the sun on the water. The nigger was going out of his head, or becoming religious because he was hurt; anyway he was talking all the time.

“Why they run liquor now?” he said. “Prohibition’s over. Why they keep up a traffic like that? Whyn’t they bring the liquor in on the ferry?”

The man steering was watching the channel closely.

“Why don’t people be honest and decent and make a decent honest living?”

The man saw where the water was rippling smooth off the bank even when he could not see the bank in the sun and he turned her off. He swung her around, spinning the wheel with one arm, and then the channel opened out and he took her slowly right up to the edge of the mangroves. He came astern on the engines and threw out the two clutches.

“I can put a anchor down,” he said. “But I can’t get no anchor up.”

“I can’t even move,” the nigger said.

“You’re certainly in a hell of a shape,” the man told him.

He had a difficult time breaking out, lifting and dropping the small anchor but he got it over, and paid out quite a lot of rope and the boat swung in against the mangroves so they came right into the cockpit. Then he went back and down into the cockpit. He thought the cockpit was a hell of a sight, all right.

All night after he had dressed the nigger’s wound and the nigger had bandaged his arm he had been watching the compass, steering, and when it came daylight he had seen the nigger lying there in the sacks in the middle of the cockpit, but then he was watching the seas and the compass and looking for the Sand Key light and he had never observed carefully how things were. Things were bad.

The nigger was lying in the middle of the load of sacked liquor with his leg up. There were eight bullet holes through the cockpit splintered wide. The glass was broken in the windshield. He did not know how much stuff was smashed and wherever the nigger had not bled he himself had bled. But the worst thing, the way he felt at the moment, was the smell of booze. Everything was soaked in it. Now the boat was lying quietly against the mangroves but he could not stop feeling the motion of the big sea they had been in all night in the gulf.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” he told the nigger. “Then I’ll fix you up again.”

“I don’t want no coffee.”

“I do,” the man told him. But down below he began to feel dizzy so he came out on deck again.

“I guess we won’t have coffee,” he said.

“I want some water.”

“All right.”

He gave the Negro a cup of water out of a demijohn.

“Why you want to keep on running for when they started to shoot?”

“Why they want to shoot?” the man answered.

“I want a doctor,” the nigger told him.

“What’s a doctor going to do that I ain’t done for you?”

“Doctor going to cure me.”

“You’ll have a doctor tonight when the boat comes out.”

“I don’t want to wait for no boat.”

“All right,” the man said. “We’re going to dump this liquor now.”

He started to dump it and it was hard work one-handed. A sack of liquor only weighs about forty pounds but he had not dumped very many of them before he became dizzy again. He sat down in the cockpit and then he lay down.

“You going to kill yourself,” the nigger said.

The man lay quietly in the cockpit with his head against one of the sacks.

The branches of the mangroves had come into the cockpit and they made a shadow over him where he lay. He could hear the wind above the mangroves and looking out at the high, cold sky see the thin brown clouds of the norther.

“Nobody going to come out with this breeze,” he thought. “They won’t look for us to have started with this blowing.”

“You think they’ll come out?” the nigger asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Why not?”

“It’s blowing too hard.”

“They’re looking for us.”

“Not with it like this. What you want to lie to me for?” The nigger was talking with his mouth almost against a sack.

“Take it easy, Wesley,” the man told him.

“Take it easy, the man says,” the nigger went on. “Take it easy. Take what easy? Take dyin’ like a dog easy? You got me here. Get me out.”

“Take it easy,” the man said, kindly.

“They ain’t coming,” the nigger said. “I know they ain’t corning. I’m cold I tell you. I can’t stand this pain and cold I tell you.”

The man sat up feeling hollow and unsteady. The nigger’s eyes watched him as he rose on one knee, his right arm dangling, took the hand of his right arm in his left hand and placed it between his knees and then pulled himself up by the plank nailed above the gunwale until he stood, looking down at the nigger, his right hand still held between his thighs. He was thinking that he had never really felt pain before.

“If I keep it out straight, pulled out straight, it don’t hurt so bad,” he said.

“Let me tie it up in a sling,” the nigger said.

“I can’t make a bend in the elbow,” the man said. “It stiffened that way.”

“What we goin’ to do?”

“Dump this liquor,” the man told him. “Can’t you put over what you can reach, Wesley?”

The nigger tried to move to reach a sack, then groaned and lay back.

“Do you hurt that bad, Wesley?”

“Oh God,” the nigger said.

“You don’t think once you moved it it wouldn’t hurt so bad?”

“I’m shot,” the nigger said. “I ain’t going to move. The man wants me to go to dumpin’ liquor when I’m shot.”

“Take it easy.”

“You say that once more I go crazy.”

“Take it easy,” the man said quietly.

The nigger made a howling noise and shuffling with his hands on the deck picked up the whetstone from under the coaming.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll cut your heart out.”

“Not with no whetstone,” the man said. “Take it easy, Wesley.”

The nigger blubbered with his face against a sack. The man went on slowly lifting the sacked packages of liquor and dropping them over the side.

While he was dumping the liquor he heard the sound of a motor and looking he saw a boat headed toward them coming down the channel around the end of the key. It was a white boat with a buff painted house and a windshield.

“Boat coming,” he said. “Come on Wesley.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m remembering from now on,” the man said. “Before was different.”

“Go ahead an’ remember,” The nigger told him. “I ain’t forgot nothing either.”

Working fast now, the sweat running down his face, not stopping to watch the boat coming slowly down the channel, the man picked up the sacked packages of liquor with his good arm and dropped them over the side.

“Roll over.” He reached for the package under the nigger’s head and swung it over the side. The nigger raised himself up and looked.

“Here they are,” he said. The boat was almost abeam of them.

“It’s Captain Willie,” the nigger said. “With a party.”

In the stern of the white boat two men in flannels and white cloth hats sat in fishing chairs trolling and an old man in a felt hat and a windbreaker held the tiller and steered the boat close past the mangroves where the booze boat lay.

“What you say, Harry?” the old man called as he passed. The man called Harry waved his good arm in reply. The boat went on past, the two men who were fishing looking toward the booze boat and talking to the old man. Harry could not hear what they were saying.

“He’ll make a turn at the mouth and come back,” Harry said to the Negro. He went below and came up with a blanket. “Let me cover you up.”

“‘Bout time you cover me up. They couldn’t help but see that liquor. What we goin’ to do?”

“Willie’s a good skate,” the man said. “He’ll tell them in town we’re out here. Those fellows fishing ain’t going to bother us. What they care about us?”

He felt very shaky now and he sat down on the steering seat and held his right arm tight between his thighs. His knees were shaking and with the shaking he could feel the ends of the bone in his upper arm grate. He opened his knees, lifted his arm out, and let it hang by his side. He was sitting there, his arm hanging, when the boat passed them coming back up the channel. The two men in the fishing chairs were talking. They had put up their rods and one of them was looking at them through a pair of glasses. They were too far out for him to hear what they were saying. It would not have helped him if he had heard it.

On board the charter boat South Florida, trolling down the Woman Key channel because it was too rough to go out to the reef, Captain Willie Adams was thinking, So Harry crossed last night. That boy’s got cojones. He must have got that whole blow. She’s a sea boat all right. How you suppose he smashed his windshield? Damned if I’d cross a night like last night. Damned if I’d ever run liquor from Cuba. They bring it all from Mariel now! Just go in and out. It’s supposed to be wide open. “What’s that you say, Cap?”

“What boat is that?” asked one of the men in the fishing chairs.

“That boat?”

“Yes, that boat.”

“Oh that’s a Key West boat.”

“What I said was, whose boat is it?”

“I wouldn’t know that, Cap.”

“Is the owner a fisherman?”

“Well, some say he is.”

“What do you mean?”

“He does a little of everything.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No sir.”

“You called him Harry.”

“Not me.”

“I heard you call him Harry.”

Captain Willie Adams took a good look at the man who was speaking to him. He saw a high-cheekboned, thin-lipped, slightly pudgy face with deep set grey eyes and a contemptuous mouth looking at him from under a canvas hat. There was no way that Captain Willie Adams could know that this man was regarded as irresistibly handsome by a great many women in Washington.

“I must have called him that by mistake,” Captain Willie said.

“You can see that the man is wounded, Doctor,” the other man said, handing the glasses to his companion.

“I can see that without glasses,” the man addressed as Doctor said. “Who is that man?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Captain Willie.

“Well, you will know,” the man with the contemptuous mouth said. “Write down the numbers on the bow.”

“I have them, Doctor.”

“We’ll go over and have a look,” the Doctor said.

“Are you a doctor?” Captain Willie asked.

“Not of medicine,” the grey-eyed man told him.

“If you’re not a medical doctor I wouldn’t go over there.”

“Why not?”

“If he wanted us he would have signaled us. If he don’t want us it’s none of our business. Down here everybody aims to mind their own business.”

“All right. Suppose you mind yours then. Take us over to that boat.”

Captain Willie continued on his way up the channel, the two-cylinder Palmer coughing steadily.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes sir.”

“Why don’t you obey my order?”

“Who the hell you think you are?” asked Captain Willie.

“That’s not the question. Do as I tell you.”

“Who do you think you are?” Captain Willie asked again.

“All right. For your information I’m one of the three most important men in the United States today.”

“What the hell you doing in Key West then?”

The other man leaned forward. “He’s ——  — ,” he said impressively.

“I never heard of him,” said Captain Willie.

“Well, you will,” said the man called Doctor. “And so will everyone in this stinking jerkwater little town if I have to grub it out by the roots.”

“You’re a nice fellow,” said Captain Willie. “How did you get so important?”

“He’s the most intimate friend and closest adviser of ——  — ,” said the other man.

“Nuts,” said Captain Willie. “If he’s all that what’s he doing in Key West?”

“He’s just here for a rest,” the secretary explained. “He’s going to be ——  — .”

“That’s enough, Harris,” the man called Doctor said. “Now will you take us over to that boat,” he said smiling. He had a smile which was reserved for such occasions.

“No sir.”

“Listen you half-witted fisherman. I’ll make life so miserable for you—”

“Yes,” said Captain Willie.

“You don’t know who I am.”

“None of it don’t mean anything to me,” said Captain Willie. “And you don’t know where you are.”

“That man is a bootlegger, isn’t he?”

“What do you think?”

“There’s probably a reward for him.”

“I doubt that.”

“He’s a lawbreaker.”

“He’s got a family and he’s got to eat and feed them. Who the hell do you eat off of with people working here in Key West for the Government for six dollars and a half a week?”

“He’s wounded. That means he’s been in trouble.”

“Unless he shot hisself for fun.”

“You can save that sarcasm. You’re going over to that boat and we’re going to take that man and that boat into custody.”

“Into where?”

“Into Key West.”

“Are you an officer?”

“I’ve told you who he is,” the secretary said.

“All right,” said Captain Willie. He pushed the tiller hard over and turned the boat, coming so close to the edge of the channel that the propeller threw up a circling cloud of marl.

He chugged down the channel toward where the other boat lay against the mangroves.

“Have you a gun aboard?” the man called the Doctor asked Captain Willie.

“No sir.”

The two men in flannels were standing up now watching the booze boat.

“This is better fun than fishing, eh Doctor?” the secretary said.

“Fishing is nonsense,” said the Doctor. “If you catch a sailfish what do you do with it? You can’t eat it. This is really interesting. I’m glad to see this at first hand. Wounded as he is that man cannot escape. It’s too rough at sea. We know his boat.”

“You’re really capturing him single-handed,” said the secretary admiringly.

“And unarmed too,” said the Doctor.

“With no G-men nonsense,” said the secretary.

“Edgar Hoover exaggerates his publicity,” said the Doctor. “I feel we’ve given him about enough rope.” Then, “Pull alongside,” he said to Captain Willie.

Captain Willie threw out his clutch and the boat drifted.

“Hey,” Captain Willie called to the other boat. “Keep your heads down.”

“What’s that?” the Doctor said angrily.

“Shut up,” said Captain Willie. “Hey,” he called over to the other boat. “Listen. Get on into town and take it easy. Never mind the boat. They’ll take the boat. Dump your load and get into town. I got a guy here on board, some kind of a stool from Washington. Not a G-man. Just a stool. One of the heads of the alphabet. More important than the President, he says. He wants to pinch you. He thinks you’re a bootlegger. He’s got the numbers of the boat. I ain’t never seen you so I don’t know who you are. I couldn’t identify you—”

The boats had drifted apart. Captain Willie went on shouting, “I don’t know where this place is where I seen you. I wouldn’t know how to get back here.”

“O.K.,” came a shout from the booze boat.

“I’m taking this big alphabet man fishing until dark,” Captain Willie shouted.

“O.K.”

“He loves to fish,” Captain Willie yelled, his voice almost breaking. “But the son of a bitch claims you can’t eat ‘em.”

“Thanks brother,” came the voice of Harry.

“That chap your brother?” asked the Doctor, his face very red but his love for information still unappeased.

“No sir,” said Captain Willie. “Most everybody goes in boats calls each other brother.”

“We’ll go into Key West,” the Doctor said; but he said it without great conviction.

“No sir,” said Captain Willie. “You gentlemen chartered me for a day. I’m going to see you get your money’s worth. You called me a halfwit but I’ll see you get a full day’s charter.”

“He’s an old man,” said the Doctor to his secretary. “Should we rush him?”

“Don’t you try it,” said Captain Willie. “I’d hit you right over the head with this.”

He showed them a length of iron pipe that he used for clubbing shark.

“Why don’t you gentlemen just put your lines out and enjoy yourselves? You didn’t come down here to get in no trouble. You come down here for a rest. You say you can’t eat sailfish but you won’t catch no sailfish in these channels. You’d be lucky to catch a grouper.”

“What do you think?” asked the Doctor.

“Better leave him alone.” The secretary eyed the iron pipe.

“Besides you made another mistake,” Captain Willie went on. “Sailfish is just as good eating as kingfish. When we used to sell them to Rios for the Havana market we got ten cents a pound same as kings.”

“Oh shut up,” said the Doctor.

“I thought you’d be interested in these things as a Government man. Ain’t you mixed up in the prices of things that we eat or something? Ain’t that it? Making them more costly or something. Making the grits dearer and the grunts cheapter. Fish goin’ down in price all the time.”

“Oh shut up,” said the Doctor.

On the booze boat Harry had the last sack over.

“Get me the fish knife,” he said to the nigger.

“It’s gone.”

Harry pressed the self-starters and started the engines. He got the hatchet and with his left hand chopped the anchor rope through against the bit. It’ll sink and they’ll grapple it when they pick up the load, he thought. I’ll run her up into the Garrison Bight and if they’re going to take her they’ll take her. I got to get to a doctor. I don’t want to lose my arm and the boat both. The load is worth as much as the boat. There wasn’t too much of it smashed. A little smashed can smell plenty.

He shoved the port clutch in and swung out away from the mangroves with the tide. The engines ran smoothly. Captain Willie’s boat was two miles away now headed for Boca Grande. I guess the tide’s high enough to go through the lakes now, Harry thought. He shoved in his starboard clutch and the engines roared as he pushed up the throttle. He could feel her bow rise and the green mangroves coasted swiftly alongside as the boat sucked the water away from their roots. I hope they don’t take her, he thought. I hope they can fix my arm. How was we to know they’d shoot at us in Mariel after we could go and come there open for six months? That’s Cubans for you. Somebody didn’t pay somebody so we got the shooting. That’s Cubans all right.

“Hey Wesley,” he said, looking back into the cockpit where the nigger lay with the blanket over him. “How you feeling, Boogie?”

“God,” said Wesley. “I couldn’t feel no worse.”

“You’ll feel worse when the old doctor probes for it,” Harry told him.

“You ain’t human,” the nigger said. “You ain’t got human feelings.”

That old Willie is a good skate, Harry was thinking. There’s a good skate, that old Willie. We done better to come in than to wait. It was foolish to wait. I felt so dizzy and sicklike I lost my judgment.

Ahead now he could see the white of the La Concha hotel, the wireless masts, and the houses of town. He could see the car ferries lying at the Trumbo dock where he would go around to head up for the Garrison Bight. That old Willie, he thought. He was giving them hell. Wonder who those buzzards was? Damn if I don’t feel plenty bad right now. I feel plenty dizzy. We done right to come in. We done right not to wait.

“Mr. Harry,” said the nigger. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help dump that stuff.”

“Hell,” said Harry. “Ain’t no nigger any good when he’s shot. You’re a all right nigger, Wesley.”

Above the roar of the motors and the high, slapping rush of the boat through the water he felt a strange hollow singing in his heart. He always felt this way coming home at the end of a trip. I hope they can fix that arm, he thought. I got a lot of use for that arm.

NOBODY EVER DIES

THE HOUSE WAS BUILT OF ROSE-COLORED plaster that had peeled and faded with the dampness and from its porch you could see the sea, very blue, at the end of the street. There were laurel trees along the sidewalk that grew high enough to shade the upper porch and in the shade it was cool. A mockingbird hung in a wicker cage at a corner of the porch, and it was not singing now, nor even chirping, because a young man of about twenty-eight, thin, dark, with bluish circles under his eyes and a stubble of beard, had just taken off a sweater that he wore and spread it over the cage. The young man was standing now, his mouth slightly open, listening. Someone was trying the locked and bolted front door.

As he listened he heard the wind in the laurels close beside the porch, the horn of a taxi coming along the street and the voices of the children playing in a vacant lot. Then he heard a key turn again in the lock of the front door, he heard it unlock the door, heard the door pulled against the bolt, and then the lock being turned again. At the same time he heard the sound of a bat against a baseball and shrill shouting in Spanish from the vacant lot. He stood there, moistening his lips, and listened while someone tried the back door.

The young man, who was named Enrique, took off his shoes and, putting them down carefully, moved softly along the tiling of the porch until he could look down at the back door. There was no one there. He slipped back to the front of the house and, keeping out of sight, looked down the street.

A Negro in a narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat and a gray alpaca coat and black trousers was walking along the sidewalk under the laurel trees. Enrique watched, but there was no one else. He stood there for some time watching and listening, then he took his sweater off the bird cage and put it on.

He had been sweating heavily while he had been listening and now he was cold in the shade and the cool northeast wind. The sweater covered a leather shoulder holster, the leather ringed and salt-whitened with perspiration, that he wore with a forty-five-caliber Colt pistol which, by its constant pressure, had given him a boil a little below his armpit. He lay down on a canvas cot now close to the wall of the house. He was still listening.

The bird chirped and hopped about the cage and the young man looked up at it. Then he got up and unhooked the door of the cage and opened it. The bird cocked his head at the open door and drew it back, then jerked his head forward again, his bill pointing at an angle.

“Go on,” the young man said softly. “It’s not a trick.”

He put his hand into the cage and the bird flew against the back, fluttering against the withes.

“You’re silly,” the young man said. He took his hand out of the cage. “I’ll leave it open.”

He lay face down on the cot, his chin on his folded arms, and he was still listening. He heard the bird fly out of the cage and then he heard him sing in one of the laurel trees.

“It was foolish to keep the bird if the house is supposed to be empty,” he thought. “It is just such foolishness that makes all the trouble. How can I blame others when I am that stupid?”

In the vacant lot the boys were still playing baseball and it was quite cool now. The young man unbuckled the leather shoulder holster and laid the big pistol by his leg. Then he went to sleep.

When he woke it was dark and the street light on the corner shone through the leaves of the laurels. He stood up and walked to the front of the house and, keeping in the shadow and the shelter of the wall, looked up and down the street. A man in a narrow-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat stood under a tree on the corner. Enrique could not see the color of his coat or trousers, but he was a Negro.

Enrique went quickly to the back of the porch but there was no light there except that which shone on the weedy field from the back windows of the next two houses. There could be any number of people in the back. He knew that, since he could no longer really hear as he had in the afternoon, because a radio was going in the second house away.

Suddenly there came the mechanical crescendo of a siren and the young man felt a prickling wave go over his scalp. It came as suddenly as a person blushes, it felt like prickly heat, and it was gone as quickly as it came. The siren was on the radio; it was part of an advertisement, and the announcer’s voice followed, “Gavis tooth paste. Unaltering, insuperable, the best.”

Enrique smiled in the dark. It was time someone should be coming now.

After the siren on the recorded announcements came a crying baby which the announcer said would be satisfied with Malta-Malta, and then there was a motor horn and a customer who demanded green gas. “Don’t tell me any stories. I asked for green gas. More economical, more mileage. The best.”

Enrique knew all the advertisements by heart. They had not changed in the fifteen months that he had been away at war; they must still be using the same discs in the broadcasting station, and still the siren had deceived him and given him that thin, quick prickle across the scalp that was as definite a reaction to danger as a bird dog stiffening to the warm scent of quail.

He had not had that prickle when he started. Danger and the fear of it had once made him feel empty in his stomach. They had made him feel weak as you are weak with a fever, and he had known the inability to move; when you must force movement forward by legs that feel as dead as though they were asleep. That was all gone now, and he did without difficulty whatever he should do. The prickling was all that remained of the vast capacity for fear some brave men start with. It was his only remaining reaction to danger except for the perspiring which, he knew, he would always have, and now it served as a warning and nothing more.

As he stood, looking out at the tree where the man with the straw hat sat now, on the curb, a stone fell on the tiled floor of the porch. Enrique looked for it against the wall but did not find it. He passed his hands under the cot but it was not there. As he knelt, another pebble fell on the tiled floor, bounced and rolled into the corner toward the side of the house and into the street. Enrique picked it up. It was a smooth-feeling ordinary pebble and he put it in his pocket and went inside the house and down the stairs to the back door.

He stood to one side of the door and took the Colt out of the holster and held it, heavy in his right hand.

“The victory,” he said very quietly in Spanish, his mouth disdaining the word, and shifted softly on his bare feet to the other side of the door.

“To those who earn it,” someone said outside the door. It was a woman’s voice, giving the second half of the password, and it spoke quickly and unsteadily.

Enrique drew back the double bolt on the door and opened it with his left hand, the Colt still in his right.

There was a girl there in the dark, holding a basket. She wore a handkerchief over her head.

“Hello,” he said and shut the door and bolted it. He could hear her breathing in the dark. He took the basket from her and patted her shoulder.

“Enrique,” she said, and he could not see the way her eyes were shining nor the look on her face.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “There is someone watching the front of the house. Did he see you?”

“No,” she said. “I came across the vacant lot.”

“I will show him to you. Come up to the porch.”

They went up the stairs, Enrique carrying the basket. He put it down by the bed and walked to the edge of the porch and looked. The Negro who wore the narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat was gone.

“So,” Enrique said quietly.

“So what?” asked the girl, holding his arm now and looking out.

“So he is gone. What is there to eat?”

“I am sorry you were here alone all day,” she said. “It was so stupid that I had to wait until it was dark to come. I have wanted to come all day.”

“It was stupid to be here at all. They brought me here from the boat before daylight and left me, with a password and nothing to eat, in a house that is watched. You cannot eat a password. I should not be put in a house that is being watched for other reasons. It is very Cuban. But at least, in the old days we ate. How are you, Maria?”

In the dark she kissed him, hard, on the mouth. He felt the tight-pressed fullness of her lips and the way her body shivered against his and then came the stab of white pain in the small of his back.

“Ayee! Be careful.”

“What is it?”

“The back.”

“What of the back? Is it a wound?”

“You should see it,” he said.

“Can I see it now?”

“Afterwards. We must eat and get out of here. What have they stored here?”

“Too many things. Things left over from the failure of April. Things kept for the future.”

“The long-distant future,” he said. “Did they know it was watched?”

“I am sure not.”

“What is there?”

“There are some rifles in cases. There are boxes of ammunition.”

“Everything should be moved tonight.” His mouth was full. “There will be years of work before we will need this again.”

“Do you like the escabeche?”

“It’s very good; sit here close.”

“Enrique,” she said, sitting tight against him. She put a hand on his thigh and with the other she stroked the back of his neck. “My Enrique.”

“Touch me carefully,” he said, eating. “The back is bad.”

“Are you happy to be back from the war?”

“I have not thought about it,” he said.

“Enrique, how is Chucho?”

“Dead at Lérida.”

“Felipe?”

“Dead. Also at Lérida.”

“And Arturo?”

“Dead at Teruel.”

“And Vicente?” she asked in a flat voice, her two hands folded on his thigh now.

“Dead. At the attack across the road at Celadas.”

“Vicente is my brother.” She sat stiff and alone now, her hands away from him.

“I know,” said Enrique. He went on eating.

“He is my only brother.”

“I thought you knew,” said Enrique.

“I did not know and he is my brother.”

“I am sorry, Maria. I should have said it another way.”

“And he is dead? You know he is dead? It is not just a report?”

“Listen. Rogello, Basilio, Esteban, Felo and I are alive. The others are dead.”

“All?”

“All,” said Enrique.

“I cannot stand it,” said Maria. “Please, I cannot stand it.”

“It does no good to discuss it. They are dead.”

“But it is not only that Vicente is my brother. I can give up my brother. It is the flower of our party.”

“Yes. The flower of the party.”

“It is not worth it. It has destroyed the best.”

“Yes. It is worth it.”

“How can you say that? That is criminal.”

“No. It is worth it.”

She was crying now and Enrique went on eating. “Don’t cry,” he said. “The thing to do is to think how we can work to take their places.”

“But he is my brother. Don’t you understand? My brother.”

“We are all brothers. Some are dead and others still live. They send us home now, so there will be some left. Otherwise there would be none. Now we must work.”

“But why were they all killed?”

“We were with an attack division. You are either killed or wounded. We others have been wounded.”

“How was Vicente killed?”

“He was crossing the road when he was struck by machine-gun fire from a farmhouse on the right. The road was enfiladed from that house.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes. I had the first company. We were on his right. We took the house but it took some time. They had three machine guns there. Two in the house, one in the stable. It was difficult to approach. We had to get a tank up to put fire on the window before we could rush the last gun. I lost eight men. It was too many.”

“And where was that?”

“Celadas.”

“I never heard of it.”

“No,” said Enrique. “The operation was not a success. No one will ever hear of it. That was where Vicente and Ignacio were killed.”

“And you say such things are justified? That men like that should die in failures in a foreign country?”

“There are no foreign countries, Maria, where people speak Spanish. Where you die does not matter, if you die for liberty. Anyway, the thing to do is live and not to die.”

“But think of who have died — away from here — and in failures.”

“They did not go to die. They went to fight. The dying is an accident.”

“But the failures. My brother is dead in a failure. Chucho in a failure. Ignacio in a failure.”

“They are just a part. Some things we had to do were impossible. Many that looked impossible we did. But sometimes the people on your flank would not attack. Sometimes there was not enough artillery. Sometimes we were ordered to do things not in sufficient force — as at Celadas. Those make the failures. But in the end, it was not a failure.”

She did not answer and he finished eating.

The wind was fresh now in the trees and it was cold on the porch. He put the dishes back in the basket and wiped his mouth on the napkin. He wiped his hands carefully and then put his arm around the girl. She was crying.

“Don’t cry, Maria,” he said. “What has happened has happened. We must think of what there is to do. There is much to do.”

She said nothing and he could see her face in the light from the street lamp looking straight ahead.

“We must check all romanticism. This place is an example of that romanticism. We must stop terrorism. We must proceed so that we will never again fall into revolutionary adventurism.”

The girl still said nothing and he looked at her face that he had thought of all the months when he had thought of anything except his work.

“You talk like a book,” she said. “Not like a human being.”

“I am sorry,” he said. “It is only lessons I have learned. It is things I know must be done. To me it is more real than anything.”

“All that is real to me are the dead,” she said.

“We honor them. But they are not important.”

“You talk like a book again,” she said angrily. “Your heart is a book.”

“I am sorry, Maria. I thought you would understand.”

“All I understand is the dead,” she said.

He knew this was not true because she had not seen them dead as he had in the rain in the olive groves of the Jarama, in the heat in the smashed houses of Quijoma, and in the snow at Teruel. But he knew that she blamed him for being alive when Vicente was dead and suddenly — in the small and unconditioned human part of him which was left, and which he did not realize was still there — he was hurt deeply.

“There was a bird,” he said. “A mockingbird in a cage.”

“Yes.”

“I let it go.”

“Aren’t you kind!” she said scornfully. “Are soldiers all sentimental?”

“I am a good soldier.”

“I believe it. You talk like one. What kind of soldier was my brother?”

“Very good. Gayer than me. I was not gay. It is a lack.”

“But you practice self-criticism and you talk like a book.”

“It would be better if I were gayer,” he said. “I could never learn it.”

“And the gay ones are all dead.”

“No,” he said. “Basilio is gay.”

“Then he’ll die,” she said.

“Maria? Do not talk like that. You talk like a defeatist.”

“You talk like a book,” she told him. “Please do not touch me. You have a dry heart and I hate you.”

Now he was hurt again, he who had thought that his heart was dry, and that nothing could hurt ever again except the pain, and sitting on the bed he leaned forward.

“Pull up my sweater,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

He pulled up the back and leaned over. “Maria, look there,” he said. “That is not from a book.”

“I cannot see,” she said. “I do not want to see.”

“Put your hand across the lower back.”

He felt her fingers touch that huge sunken place a baseball could have been pushed through, that grotesque scar from the wound the surgeon had pushed his rubber-gloved fist through in cleaning, which had run from one side of the small of his back through to the other. He felt her touch it and he shrank quickly inside. Then she was holding him tight and kissing him, her lips an island in the sudden white sea of pain that came in a shining, unbearable, rising, blinding wave and swept him clean. The lips there, still there; then overwhelmed, and the pain gone as he sat, alone, wet with sweat and Maria crying and saying, “Oh, Enrique. Forgive me. Please forgive me.”

“It is all right,” Enrique said. “There is nothing to forgive. But it was not out of any book.”

“But does it hurt always?”

“Only when I am touched or jarred.”

“And the spinal cord?”

“It was touched a very little. Also the kidneys, but they are all right. The shell fragment went in one side and out the other. There are other wounds lower down and on my legs.”

“Enrique, please forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive. But it is not nice that I cannot make love and I am sorry that I am not gay.”

“We can make love after it is well.”

“Yes.”

“And it will be well.”

“Yes.”

“And I will take care of you.”

“No. I will take care of you. I do not mind this thing at all. Only the pain of touching or jarring. It does not bother me. Now we must work. We must leave this place now. Everything that is here must be moved tonight. It must be stored in a new and unsuspected place and in one where it will not deteriorate. It will be a long time before we will need it. There is much to be done before we will ever reach that stage again. Many must be educated. These cartridges may no longer serve by then. This climate ruins the primers. And we must go now. I am a fool to have stayed here this long and the fool who put me here will answer to the committee.”

“I am to take you there tonight. They thought this house was safe for you to stay today.”

“This house is a folly.”

“We will go now.”

“We should have gone before.”

“Kiss me, Enrique.”

“We’ll do it very carefully,” he said.

Then, in the dark on the bed, holding himself carefully, his eyes closed, their lips against each other, the happiness there with no pain, the being home suddenly there with no pain, the being alive returning and no pain, the comfort of being loved and still no pain; so there was a hollowness of loving, now no longer hollow, and the two sets of lips in the dark, pressing so that they were happily and kindly, darkly and warmly at home and without pain in the darkness, there came the siren cutting, suddenly, to rise like all the pain in the world. It was the real siren, not the one of the radio. It was not one siren. It was two. They were coming both ways up the street.

He turned his head and then stood up. He thought that coming home had not lasted very long.

“Go out the door and across the lot,” he said. “Go. I can shoot from up here and make a diversion.”

“No, you go,” she said. “Please, I will stay here to shoot and they will think you’re inside.”

“Come on,” he said. “We’ll both go. There’s nothing to defend here. This stuff is useless. It’s better to get away.”

“I want to stay,” she said. “I want to protect you.”

She reached for the pistol in the holster under his arm and he slapped her face. “Come on. Don’t be a silly girl. Come on!”

They were going down the stairs now and he felt her close beside him. He swung the door open and together they stepped out the door and were clear of the building. He turned and locked the door. “Run, Maria,” he said. “Across the lot in that direction. Go!”

“I want to go with you.”

He slapped her again quickly. “Run. Then dive in the weeds and crawl. Forgive me, Maria. But go. I go the other way. Go,” he said. “Damn you. Go.”

They started into the weeds at the same time. He ran twenty paces and then, as the police cars stopped in front of the house, the sirens dying, he dropped flat and started to crawl.

The weed pollen was dusty in his face and as he wriggled steadily along, the sand-burrs stabbing his hands and knees sharply and minutely, he heard them coming around the house. They had surrounded it.

He crawled steadily, thinking hard, giving no importance to the pain.

“But why the sirens?” he thought. “Why no third car from the rear? Why no spotlight or a searchlight on this field? Cubans,” he thought. “Can they be this stupid and theatrical? They must have thought there was no one in the house. They must have come only to seize the stuff. But why the sirens?”

Behind him he heard them breaking in the door. They were all around the house. He heard two blasts on a whistle from close to the house and he wriggled steadily on.

“The fools,” he thought. “But they must have found the basket and the dishes by now. What people! What a way to raid a house!”

He was almost to the edge of the lot now and he knew that he must rise and make a dash across the road for the far houses. He had found a way of crawling that hurt little. He could adjust himself to almost any movement. It was the brusque changes that hurt, and he dreaded rising to his feet.

In the weeds he rose on one knee, took the shock of the pain, held through it, and then brought it on again as he drew the other foot alongside his knee in order to rise.

He started to run toward the house across the street, at the back of the next lot, when the clicking on of the searchlight caught him so that he was full in the beam, looking toward it, the blackness a sharp line on either side.

The searchlight was from the police car that had come silently, without siren, and posted itself at one back comer of the lot.

As Enrique rose to his feet, thin, gaunt, sharply outlined in the beam, pulling at the big pistol in the holster under his armpit, the submachine guns opened on him from the darkened car.

The feeling is that of being clubbed across the chest and he only felt the first one. The other clubbing thuds that came were echoes.

He went forward onto his face in the weeds and as he fell, or perhaps it was between the time the searchlight went on and the first bullet reached him, he had one thought. “They are not so stupid. Perhaps something can be done with them.”

If he had had time for another thought it would have been to hope there was no car at the other corner. But there was a car at the other comer and its searchlight was going over the field. Its wide beam was playing over the weeds, where the girl, Maria, lay hidden. In the dark car the machine gunners, their guns poised, followed the sweep of the beam with the fluted, efficient ugliness of the Thompson muzzles.

In the shadow of the tree, behind the darkened car from which the searchlight played, there was a Negro standing. He wore a flat-topped, narrow-brimmed straw hat and an alpaca coat. Under his shirt he wore a string of blue voodoo beads. He was standing quietly watching the lights working.

The searchlights played on over the weedfield where the girl lay flat against the ground, her chin in the earth. She had not moved since she heard the burst of firing. She could feel her heart beating against the ground.

“Do you see her?” asked one of the men in the car.

“Let them beat through the weeds for the other side,” the lieutenant in the front seat said. “Hola,” he called to the Negro under the tree. “Go to the house and tell them to beat toward us through the weeds in extended order. Are there only the two?”

“Only two,” the Negro said in a quiet voice. “We have the other one.”

“Go.”

“Yes sir, Lieutenant,” the Negro said.

Holding his straw hat in both hands he started to run along the edge of the field toward the house where, now, lights shone from all the windows.

In the field the girl lay, her hands clasped across the top of her head. “Help me to bear this,” she said into the weeds, speaking to no one, for there was no one there. Then, suddenly, personally, sobbing, “Help me, Vicente. Help me, Felipe. Help me, Chucho. Help me, Arturo. Help me now, Enrique. Help me.”

At one time she would have prayed, but she had lost that and now she needed something.

“Help me not to talk if they take me,” she said, her mouth against the weeds. “Keep me from talking, Enrique. Keep me from ever talking, Vicente.”

Behind her she could hear them going through the weeds like beaters in a rabbit drive. They were spread wide and advancing like skirmishers, flashing their electric torches in the weeds.

“Oh, Enrique,” she said, “help me.”

She brought her hands down from her head and clenched them by her sides. “It is better so,” she thought. “If I run they will shoot. It will be simpler.”

Slowly she got up and ran toward the car. The searchlight was full on her and she ran seeing only it, into its white, blinding eye. She thought this was the best way to do it.

Behind her they were shouting. But there was no shooting. Someone tackled her heavily and she went down. She heard him breathing as he held her.

Someone else took her under the arm and lifted her. Holding her by the two arms they walked her toward the car. They were not rough with her, but they walked her steadily toward the car.

“No,” she said. “No. No.”

“It’s the sister of Vicente Irtube,” said the lieutenant. “She should be useful.”

“She’s been questioned before,” said another.

“Never seriously.”

“No,” she said. “No. No.” She cried aloud, “Help me, Vicente! Help me, help me, Enrique!”

“They’re dead,” said someone. “They won’t help you. Don’t be silly.”

“Yes,” she said. “They will help me. It is the dead that will help me. Oh, yes, yes, yes! It is our dead that will help me!”

“Take a look at Enrique then,” said the lieutenant. “See if he will help you. He’s in the back of that car.”

“He’s helping me now,” the girl, Maria, said. “Can’t you see he’s helping me now? Thank you, Enrique. Oh, thank you!”

“Come on,” said the lieutenant. “She’s crazy. Leave four men to guard the stuff and we will send a truck for it. We’ll take this crazy up to headquarters. She can talk up there.”

“No,” said Maria, taking hold of his sleeve. “Can’t you see everyone is helping me now?”

“No,” said the lieutenant. “You are crazy.”

“No one dies for nothing,” said Maria. “Everyone is helping me now.”

“Get them to help you in about an hour,” said the lieutenant.

“They will,” said Maria. “Please don’t worry. Many, many people are helping me now.”

She sat there holding herself very still against the back of the seat. She seemed now to have a strange confidence. It was the same confidence another girl her age had felt a little more than five hundred years before in the market place of a town called Rouen.

Maria did not think of this. Nor did anyone in the car think of it. The two girls named Jeanne and Maria had nothing in common except this sudden strange confidence which came when they needed it. But all of the policemen in the car felt uncomfortable about Maria now as she sat very straight with her face shining in the arc light.

The cars started and in the back seat of the front car men were putting the machine guns back into the heavy canvas cases, slipping the stocks out and putting them in their diagonal pockets, the barrels with the handgrips in the big flapped pouch, the magazines in the narrow webbed pockets.

The Negro with the flat straw hat came out from the shadow of the house and hailed the first car. He got up into the front seat, making two who rode there beside the driver, and the four cars turned onto the main road that led toward the sea-drive into La Havana.

Sitting crowded on the front seat of the car, the Negro reached under his shirt and put his fingers on the string of blue voodoo beads. He sat without speaking, his fingers holding the beads. He had been a dock worker before he got a job as a stool pigeon for the Havana police and he would get fifty dollars for this night’s work. Fifty dollars is a lot of money now in La Havana, but the Negro could no longer think about the money. He turned his head a little, very slowly, as they came onto the lighted driveway of the Malecon and, looking back, saw the girl’s face, shining proudly, and her head held high.

The Negro was frightened and he put his fingers all the way around the string of blue voodoo beads and held them tight. But they could not help his fear because he was up against an older magic now.

THE GOOD LION

ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A LION that lived in Africa with all the other lions. The other lions were all bad lions and every day they ate zebras and wildebeests and every kind of antelope. Sometimes the bad lions ate people too. They ate Swahilis, Umbulus and Wandorobos and they especially liked to eat Hindu traders. All Hindu traders are very fat and delicious to a lion.

But this lion, that we love because he was so good, had wings on his back. Because he had wings on his back the other lions all made fun of him.

“Look at him with the wings on his back,” they would say and then they would all roar with laughter.

“Look at what he eats,” they would say because the good lion only ate pasta and scampi because he was so good.

The bad lions would roar with laughter and eat another Hindu trader and their wives would drink his blood, going lap, lap, lap with their tongues like big cats. They only stopped to growl with laughter or to roar with laughter at the good lion and to snarl at his wings. They were very bad and wicked lions indeed.

But the good lion would sit and fold his wings back and ask politely if he might have a Negroni or an Americano and he always drank that instead of the blood of the Hindu traders. One day he refused to eat eight Masai cattle and only ate some tagliatelli and drank a glass of pomodoro.

This made the wicked lions very angry and one of the lionesses, who was the wickedest of them all and could never get the blood of Hindu traders off her whiskers even when she rubbed her face in the grass, said, “Who are you that you think you are so much better than we are? Where do you come from, you pasta-eating lion? What are you doing here anyway?” She growled at him and they all roared without laughter.

“My father lives in a city where he stands under the clock tower and looks down on a thousand pigeons, all of whom are his subjects. When they fly they make a noise like a rushing river. There are more palaces in my father’s city than in all of Africa and there are four great bronze horses that face him and they all have one foot in the air because they fear him.

“In my father’s city men go on foot or in boats and no real horse would enter the city for fear of my father.”

“Your father was a griffon,” the wicked lioness said, licking her whiskers.

“You are a liar,” one of the wicked lions said. “There is no such city.”

“Pass me a piece of Hindu trader,” another very wicked lion said. “This Masai cattle is too newly killed.”

“You are a worthless liar and the son of a griffon,” the wickedest of all the lionesses said. “And now I think I shall kill you and eat you, wings and all.”

This frightened the good lion very much because he could see her yellow eyes and her tail going up and down and the blood caked on her whiskers and he smelled her breath which was very bad because she never brushed her teeth ever. Also she had old pieces of Hindu trader under her claws.

“Don’t kill me,” the good lion said. “My father is a noble lion and always has been respected and everything is true as I said.”

Just then the wicked lioness sprang at him. But he rose into the air on his wings and circled the group of wicked lions once, with them all roaring and looking at him. He looked down and thought, “What savages these lions are.”

He circled them once more to make them roar more loudly. Then he swooped low so he could look at the eyes of the wicked lioness who rose on her hind legs to try and catch him. But she missed him with her claws. “Adios,” he said, for he spoke beautiful Spanish, being a lion of culture. “Au revoir,” he called to them in his exemplary French.

They all roared and growled in African lion dialect.

Then the good lion circled higher and higher and set his course for Venice. He alighted in the Piazza and everyone was delighted to see him. He flew up for a moment and kissed his father on both cheeks and saw the horses still had their feeet up and the Basilica looked more beautiful than a soap bubble. The Campanile was in place and the pigeons were going to their nests for the evening.

“How was Africa?” his father said.

“Very savage, father,” the good lion replied.

“We have night lighting here now,” his father said.

“So I see,” the good lion answered like a dutiful son.

“It bothers my eyes a little,” his father confided to him. “Where are you going now, my son?”

“To Harry’s Bar,” the good lion said.

“Remember me to Cipriani and tell him I will be in some day soon to see about my bill,” said his father.

“Yes, father,” said the good lion and he flew down lightly and walked to Harry’s Bar on his own four paws.

In Cipriani’s nothing was changed. All of his friends were there. But he was a little changed himself from being in Africa.

“A Negroni, Signor Barone?” asked Mr. Cipriani.

But the good lion had flown all the way from Africa and Africa had changed him.

“Do you have any Hindu trader sandwiches?” he asked Cipriani.

“No, but I can get some.”

“While you are sending for them, make me a very dry martini.” He added, “With Gordon’s gin.”

“Very good,” said Cipriani. “Very good indeed.”

Now the lion looked about him at the faces of all the nice people and he knew that he was at home but that he had also traveled. He was very happy.

THE FAITHFUL BULL

ONE TIME THERE WAS A BULL AND HIS name was not Ferdinand and he cared nothing for flowers. He loved to fight and he fought with all the other bulls of his own age, or any age, and he was a champion.

His horns were as solid as wood and they were as sharply pointed as the quill of a porcupine. They hurt him, at the base, when he fought and he did not care at all. His neck muscles lifted in a great lump that is called in Spanish the morillo and this morillo lifted like a hill when he was ready to fight. He was always ready to fight and his coat was black and shining and his eyes were clear.

Anything made him want to fight and he would fight with deadly seriousness exactly as some people eat or read or go to church. Each time he fought he fought to kill and the other bulls were not afraid of him because they came of good blood and were not afraid. But they had no wish to provoke him. Nor did they wish to fight him.

He was not a bully nor was he wicked, but he liked to fight as men might like to sing or to be the King or the President. He never thought at all. Fighting was his obligation and his duty and his joy.

He fought on the stony, high ground. He fought under the cork-oak trees and he fought in the good pasture by the river. He walked fifteen miles each day from the river to the high, stony ground and he would fight any bull that looked at him. Still he was never angry.

That is not really true, for he was angry inside himself. But he did not know why, because he could not think. He was very noble and he loved to fight.

So what happened to him? The man who owned him, if anyone can own such an animal, knew what a great bull he was and still he was worried because this bull cost him so much money by fighting with other bulls. Each bull was worth over one thousand dollars and after they had fought the great bull they were worth less than two hundred dollars and sometimes less than that.

So the man, who was a good man, decided that he would keep the blood of this bull in all of his stock rather than send him to the ring to be killed. So he selected him for breeding.

But this bull was a strange bull. When they first turned him into the pasture with the breeding cows, he saw one who was young and beautiful and slimmer and better muscled and shinier and more lovely than all the others. So, since he could not fight, he fell in love with her and he paid no attention to any of the others. He only wanted to be with her, and the others meant nothing to him at all.

The man who owned the bull ranch hoped that the bull would change, or learn, or be different than he was. But the bull was the same and he loved whom he loved and no one else. He only wanted to be with her, and the others meant nothing to him at all.

So the man sent him away with five other bulls to be killed in the ring, and at least the bull could fight, even though he was faithful. He fought wonderfully and everyone admired him and the man who killed him admired him the most. But the fighting jacket of the man who killed him and who is called the matador was wet through by the end, and his mouth was very dry.

“Que toro más bravo,” the matador said as he handed his sword to his sword handler. He handed it with the hilt up and the blade dripping with the blood from the heart of the brave bull who no longer had any problems of any kind and was being dragged out of the ring by four horses.

“Yes. He was the one the Marqués of Villamayor had to get rid of because he was faithful,” the sword handler, who knew everything, said.

“Perhaps we should all be faithful,” the matador said.

GET A SEEING-EYED DOG

“AND WHAT DID WE DO THEN?” HE asked her. She told him.

“That part is very strange. I can’t remember that at all.”

“Can you remember the safari leaving?”

“I should. But I don’t. I remember the women going down the trail to the beach for the water with the pots on their heads and I remember the flock of geese the toto drove back and forth to the water. I remember how slowly they all went and they were always going down or coming up. There was a very big tide too and the flats were yellow and the channel ran by the far island. The wind blew all the time and there were no flies and no mosquitoes. There was a roof and a cement floor and the poles that held the roof up, and the wind blew through them all the time. It was cool all day and lovely and cool at night.”

“Do you remember when the big dhow came in and careened on the low tide?”

“Yes, I remember her and the crew coming ashore in her boats and coming up the path from the beach, and the geese were afraid of them and so were the women.”

“That was the day we caught so many fish but had to come in because it was rough.”

“I remember that.”

“You’re remembering well today,” she said. “Don’t do it too much.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to fly to Zanzibar,” he said. “That upper beach from where we were was a fine place to land. You could have landed and taken off from there quite easily.”

“We can always go to Zanzibar. Don’t try to remember too much today. Would you like me to read to you? There’s always something in the old New Yorkers that we missed.”

“No, please don’t read,” he said. “Just talk. Talk about the good days.”

“Do you want to hear about what it’s like outside?”

“It’s raining,” he said. “I know that.”

“It’s raining a big rain,” she told him. “There won’t be any tourists out with this weather. The wind is very wild and we can go down and sit by the fire.”

“We could anyway. I don’t care about them any more. I like to hear them talk.”

“Some of them are awful,” she said. “But some of them are quite nice. I think it’s really the nicest ones that go out to Torcello.”

“That’s quite true,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. There’s really nothing for them to see unless they are a bit too nice.”

“Can I make you a drink?” she asked. “You know how worthless a nurse I am. I wasn’t trained for it and I haven’t any talent. But I can make drinks.”

“Let’s have a drink.”

“What do you want?”

“Anything,” he said.

“I’ll make a surprise. I’ll make it downstairs.”

He heard the door open and close and her feet on the stairs and he thought, I must get her to go on a trip. I must figure out some way to do it. I have to think up something practical. I’ve got this now for the rest of my life and I must figure out ways not to destroy her life and ruin her with it. She has been so good and she was not built to be good. I mean this sort of good. I mean good every day and dull good.

He heard her coming up the stairs and noticed the difference in her tread when she was carrying two glasses and when she had walked down bare-handed. He heard the rain on the windowpane and he smelled the beech logs burning in the fireplace. As she came into the room he put his hand out for the drink and closed his hand on it and felt her touch the glass with her own.

“It’s our old drink for out here,” she said. “Campari and Gordon’s with ice.”

“I’m certainly glad you’re not a girl who would say ‘on the rocks.’”

“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever say that. We’ve been on the rocks.”

“On our own two feet when the chips were down and for keeps,” he remembered. “Do you remember when we barred those phrases?”

“That was in the time of my lion. Wasn’t he a wonderful lion? I can’t wait till we see him.”

“I can’t either,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you remember when we barred that phrase?”

“I nearly said it again.”

“You know,” he told her, “we’re awfully lucky to have come here. I remember it so well that it is palpable. That’s a new word and we’ll bar it soon. But it really is wonderful. When I hear the rain I can see it on the stones and on the canal and on the lagoon, and I know the way the trees bend in every wind and how the church and the tower are in every sort of light. We couldn’t have come to a better place for me. It’s really perfect. We’ve got the good radio and a fine tape recorder and I’m going to write better than I ever could. If you take your time with the tape recorder you can get the words right. I can work slow and I can see the words when I say them. If they’re wrong I hear them wrong and I can do them over and work on them until I get them right. Honey, in lots of ways we couldn’t have it better.”

“Oh, Philip—”

“Shit,” he said. “The dark is just the dark. This isn’t like the real dark. I can see very well inside and now my head is better all the time and I can remember and I can make up well. You wait and see. Didn’t I remember better today?”

“You remember better all the time. And you’re getting strong.”

“I am strong,” he said. “Now if you—”

“If me what?”

“If you’d go away for a while and get a rest and a change from this.”

“Don’t you want me?”

“Of course I want you, darling.”

“Then why do we have to talk about me going away? I know I’m not good at looking after you but I can do things other people can’t do and we do love each other. You love me and you know it and we know things nobody else knows.”

“We do wonderful things in the dark,” he said.

“And we did wonderful things in the daytime too.”

“You know I rather like the dark. In some ways it is an improvement.”

“Don’t lie too much,” she said. “You don’t have to be so bloody noble.”

“Listen to it rain,” he said. “How is the tide now?”

“It’s way out and the wind has driven the water even further out. You could almost walk to Burano.”

“All except one place,” he said. “Are there many birds?”

“Mostly gulls and terns. They are down on the flats and when they get up the wind catches them.”

“Aren’t there any shore birds?”

“There are a few working on the part of the flats that only comes out when we have this wind and this tide.”

“Do you think it will ever be spring?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It certainly doesn’t act like it.”

“Have you drunk all your drink?”

“Just about. Why don’t you drink yours?”

“I was saving it.”

“Drink it up,” she said. “Wasn’t it awful when you couldn’t drink at all?”

“No, you see,” he said. “What I was thinking about when you went downstairs was that you could go to Paris and then to London and you’d see people and could have some fun and then you’d come back and it would have to be spring by then and you could tell me all about everything.”

“No,” she said.

“I think it would be intelligent to do,” he said. “You know this is a long sort of stupid business and we have to learn to pace ourselves. And I don’t want to wear you out. You know—”

“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘you know’ so much.”

“You see? That’s one of the things. I could learn to talk in a non-irritating way. You might be mad about me when you came back.”

“What would you do nights?”

“Nights are easy.”

“I’ll bet they are. I suppose you’ve learned how to sleep too.”

“I’m going to,” he told her and drank half the drink. “That’s part of The Plan. You know this is how it works. If you go away and have some fun then I have a good conscience. Then for the first time in my life with a good conscience I sleep automatically. I take a pillow which represents my good conscience and I put my arms around it and off I go to sleep. If I wake up by any odd chance I just think beautiful happy dirty thoughts. Or I make wonderful fine good resolutions. Or I remember things. You know I want you to have fun—”

“Please don’t say ‘you know.’”

“I’ll concentrate on not saying it. It’s barred but I forget and let the bars down. Anyway I don’t want you just to be a seeing-eyed dog.”

“I’m not and you know it. Anyway it’s seeing-eye not seeing-eyed.”

“I knew that,” he told her. “Come and sit here, would you mind very much?”

She came and sat by him on the bed and they both heard the rain hard against the pane of the window and he tried not to feel her head and her lovely face the way a blind man feels and there was no other way that he could touch her face except that way. He held her close and kissed the top of her head. I will have to try it another day, he thought. I must not be so stupid about it. She feels so lovely and I love her so much and have done her so much damage and I must learn to take good care of her in every way I can. If I think of her and of her only, everything will be all right.

“I won’t say ‘you know’ all the time any more,” he told her. “We can start with that.”

She shook her head and he could feel her tremble.

“You say it all you want,” she said and kissed him.

“Please don’t cry, my blessed,” he said.

“I don’t want you to sleep with any lousy pillow,” she said.

“I won’t. Not any lousy pillow.”

Stop it, he said to himself. Stop it right now.

“Look, tu,” he said. “We’ll go down now and have lunch in our old fine place by the fire and I’ll tell you what a wonderful kitten you are and what lucky kittens we are.”

“We really are.”

“We’ll work everything out fine.”

“I just don’t want to be sent away.”

“Nobody is ever going to send you away.”

But walking down the stairs feeling each stair carefully and holding to the banister he thought, I must get her away and get her away as soon as I can without hurting her. Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There’s nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it.

A MAN OF THE WORLD

THE BLIND MAN KNEW THE SOUNDS OF all the different machines in the Saloon. I don’t know how long it took him to learn the sounds of the machines but it must have taken him quite a time because he only worked one saloon at a time. He worked two towns though and he would start out of The Flats along after it was good and dark on his way up to Jessup. He’d stop by the side of the road when he heard a car coming and their lights would pick him up and either they would stop and give him a ride or they wouldn’t and would go on by on the icy road. It would depend on how they were loaded and whether there were women in the car because the blind man smelled plenty strong and especially in winter. But someone would always stop for him because he was a blind man.

Everybody knew him and they called him Blindy which is a good name for a blind man in that part of the country, and the name of the saloon that he threw his trade to was The Pilot. Right next to it was another saloon, also with gambling and a dining room, that was called The Index. Both of these were the names of mountains and they were both good saloons with old-days bars and the gambling was about the same in one as in the other except you ate better in The Pilot probably, although you got a better sizzling steak at The Index. Then The Index was open all night long and got the early morning trade and from daylight until ten o’clock in the morning the drinks were on the house. They were the only saloons in Jessup and they did not have to do that kind of thing. But that was the way they were.

Blindy probably preferred The Pilot because the machines were right along the left-hand wall as you came in and faced the bar. This gave him better control over them than he would have had at The Index where they were scattered on account it was a bigger place with more room. On this night it was really cold outside and he came in with icicles on his mustache and small pus icicles out of both eyes and he didn’t look really very good. Even his smell was froze but that wasn’t for very long and he started to put out almost as soon as the door was shut. It was always hard for me to look at him but I was looking at him carefully because I knew he always rode and I didn’t see how he would be frozen up so bad. Finally I asked him.

“Where you walk from, Blindy?”

“Willie Sawyer put me out of his car down below the railway bridge. There weren’t no more cars come and I walked in.”

“What did he put you afoot for?” somebody asked.

“Said I smelled too bad.”

Someone had pulled the handle on a machine and Blindy started listening to the whirr. It came up nothing. “Any dudes playing?” he asked me.

“Can’t you hear?”

“Not yet.”

“No dudes, Blindy, and it’s a Wednesday.”

“I know what night it is. Don’t start telling me what night it is.”

Blindy went down the line of machines feeling in all of them to see if anything had been left in the cups by mistake. Naturally there wasn’t anything, but that was the first part of his pitch. He came back to the bar where we were and Al Chaney asked him to have a drink.

“No,” Blindy said. “I got to be careful on those roads.”

“What you mean those roads?” somebody asked him. “You only go on one road. Between here and The Flats.”

“I been on lots of roads,” Blindy said. “And any time I may have to take off and go on more.”

Somebody hit on a machine but it wasn’t any heavy hit. Blindy moved on it just the same. It was a quarter machine and the young fellow who was playing it gave him a quarter sort of reluctantly. Blindy felt it before he put it in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ll never miss it.”

The young fellow said, “Nice to know that,” and put a quarter back in the machine and pulled down again.

“He hit again but this time pretty good and he scooped in the quarters and gave a quarter to Blindy.”

“Thanks,” Blindy said. “You’re doing fine.”

“Tonight’s my night,” the young fellow who was playing said.

“Your night is my night,” Blindy said and the young fellow went on playing but he wasn’t doing any good any more and Blindy was so strong standing by him and he looked so awful and finally the fellow quit playing and came over to the bar. Blindy had run him out but he had no way of noticing it because the fellow didn’t say anything, so Blindy just checked the machines again with his hand and stood there waiting for someone else to come in and make a play.

There wasn’t any play at the wheel nor at the crap table and at the poker game there were just gamblers sitting there and cutting each other up. It was a quiet evening on a week night in town and there wasn’t any excitement. The place was not making a nickel except at the bar. But at the bar it was pleasant and the place had been nice until Blindy had come in. Now everybody was figuring they might as well go next door to The Index or else cut out and go home.

“What will yours be, Tom?” Frank the bartender asked me. “This is on the house.”

“I was figuring on shoving.”

“Have one first then.”

“The same with ditch,” I said. Frank asked the young fellow, who was wearing heavy Oregon Cities and a black hat and was shaved clean and had a snow-burned face, what he would drink and the young fellow took the same. The whisky was Old Forester.

I nodded to him and raised my drink and we both sipped at the drinks. Blindy was down at the far end of the machines. I think he figured maybe no one would come in if they saw him at the door. Not that he was self-conscious.

“How did that man lose his sight?” the young fellow asked me.

“In a fight,” Frank told him.

“I wouldn’t know,” I told him.

“Him fight?” the stranger said. He shook his head.

“Yeah,” Frank said. “He got that high voice out of the same fight. Tell him, Tom.”

“I never heard of it.”

“No. You wouldn’t of,” Frank said. “Of course not. You wasn’t here, I suppose. Mister, it was a night about as cold as tonight. Maybe colder. It was a quick fight too. I didn’t see the start of it. Then they come fighting out of the door of The Index. Blackie, him that’s Blindy now, and this other boy Willie Sawyer, and they were slugging and kneeing and gouging and biting and I see one of Blackie’s eyes hanging down on his cheek. They were fighting on the ice of the road with the snow all banked up and the light from this door and The Index door, and Hollis Sands was right behind Willie Sawyer who was gouging for the eye and Hollis kept hollering, ‘Bite it off! Bite it off just like it was a grape!” Blackie was biting onto Willie Sawyer’s face and he had a good holt and it give way with a jerk and then he had another good holt and they were down on the ice now and Willie Sawyer was gouging him to make him let go and then Blackie gave a yell like you’ve never heard. Worse than when they cut a boar.”

Blindy had come up opposite us and we smelled him and turned around.

“‘Bite it off just like it was a grape,’” he said in his high-pitched voice and looked at us, moving his head up and down. “That was the left eye. He got the other one without no advice. Then he stomped me when I couldn’t see. That was the bad part.” He patted himself.

“I could fight good then,” he said. “But he got the eye before I knew even what was happening. He got it with a lucky gouge. Well,” Blindy said without any rancor, “that put a stop to my fighting days.”

“Give Blackie a drink,” I said to Frank.

“Blindy’s the name, Tom. I earned that name. You seen me earn it. That’s the same fellow who put me adrift down the road tonight. Fellow bit the eye. We ain’t never made friends.”

“What did you do to him?” the stranger asked.

“Oh, you’ll see him around,” Blindy said. “You’ll recognize him any time you see him. I’ll let it come as a surprise.”

“You don’t want to see him,” I told the stranger.

“You know that’s one of the reasons I’d like to see sometimes,” Blindy said. “I’d like to just have one good look at him.”

“You know what he looks like,” Frank told him. “You went up and put your hands on his face once.”

“Did it again tonight too,” Blindy said happily. “That’s why he put me out of the car. He ain’t got no sense of humor at all. I told him on a cold night like this he’d ought to bundle up so the whole inside of his face wouldn’t catch cold. He didn’t even think that was funny. You know that Willie Sawyer he’ll never be a man of the world.”

“Blackie, you have one on the house,” Frank said. “I can’t drive you home because I only live just down the road. But you can sleep in the back of the place.”

“That’s mighty good of you, Frank. Only just don’t call me Blackie. I’m not Blackie any more. Blindy’s my name.”

“Have a drink, Blindy.”

“Yes, sir,” Blindy said. His hand reached out and found the glass and he raised it accurately to the three of us.

“That Willis Sawyer,” he said. “Probably alone home by himself. That Willie Sawyer he don’t know how to have any fun at all.”

SUMMER PEOPLE

HALFWAY DOWN THE GRAVEL ROAD FROM Hortons Bay, the town, to the lake there was a spring. The water came up in a tile sunk beside the road, lipping over the cracked edge of the tile and flowing away through the close growing mint into the swamp. In the dark Nick put his arm down into the spring but could not hold it there because of the cold. He felt the featherings of the sand spouting up from the spring cones at the bottom against his fingers. Nick thought, I wish I could put all of myself in there. I bet that would fix me. He pulled his arm out and sat down at the edge of the road. It was a hot night.

Down the road through the trees he could see the white of the Bean house on its piles over the water. He did not want to go down to the dock. Everybody was down there swimming. He did not want Kate with Odgar around. He could see the car on the road beside the warehouse. Odgar and Kate were down there. Odgar with that fried-fish look in his eye every time he looked at Kate. Didn’t Odgar know anything? Kate wouldn’t ever marry him. She wouldn’t ever marry anybody that didn’t make her. And if they tried to make her she would curl up inside of herself and be hard and slip away. He could make her do it all right. Instead of curling up hard and slipping away she would open out smoothly, relaxing, untightening, easy to hold. Odgar thought it was love that did it. His eyes got walleyed and red at the edges of the lids. She couldn’t bear to have him touch her. It was all in his eyes. Then Odgar would want them to be just the same friends as ever. Play in the sand. Make mud images. Take all-day trips in the boat together. Kate always in her bathing suit. Odgar looking at her.

Odgar was thirty-two and had been twice operated on for varicocele. He was ugly to look at and everybody liked his face. Odgar could never get it and it meant everything in the world to him. Every summer he was worse about it. It was pitiful. Odgar was awfully nice. He had been nicer to Nick than anybody ever had. Now Nick could get it if he wanted it. Odgar would kill himself, Nick thought, if he knew it. I wonder how he’d kill himself. He couldn’t think of Odgar dead. He probably wouldn’t do it. Still people did. It wasn’t just love. Odgar thought just love would do it. Odgar loved her enough, God knows. It was liking, and liking the body, and introducing the body, and persuading, and taking chances, and never frightening, and assuming about the other person, and always taking never asking, and gentleness and liking, and making liking and happiness, and joking and making people not afraid. And making it all right afterwards. It wasn’t loving. Loving was frightening. He, Nicholas Adams, could have what he wanted because of something in him. Maybe it did not last. Maybe he would lose it. He wished he could give it to Odgar, or tell Odgar about it. You couldn’t ever tell anybody about anything. Especially Odgar. No, not especially Odgar. Anybody, anywhere. That had always been his first mistake, talking. He had talked himself out of too many things. There ought to be something you could do for the Princeton, Yale and Harvard virgins, though. Why weren’t there any virgins in state universities? Coeducation maybe. They met girls who were out to marry and the girls helped them along and married them. What would become of fellows like Odgar and Harvey and Mike and all the rest? He didn’t know. He hadn’t lived long enough. They were the best people in the world. What became of them? How the hell could he know. How could he write like Hardy and Hamsun when he only knew ten years of life. He couldn’t. Wait till he was fifty.

In the dark he kneeled down and took a drink from the spring. He felt all right. He knew he was going to be a great writer. He knew things and they couldn’t touch him. Nobody could. Only he did not know enough things. That would come all right. He knew. The water was cold and made his eyes ache. He had swallowed too big a gulp. Like ice cream. That’s the way with drinking with your nose underwater. He’d better go swimming. Thinking was no good. It started and went on so. He walked down the road, past the car and the big warehouse on the left where apples and potatoes were loaded onto the boats in the fall, past the white-painted Bean house where they danced by lantern light sometimes on the hardwood floor, out on the dock to where they were swimming.

They were all swimming off the end of the dock. As Nick walked along the rough boards high above the water he heard the double protest of the long springboard and a splash. The water lapped below in the piles. That must be the Ghee, he thought. Kate came up out of the water like a seal and pulled herself up the ladder.

“It’s Wemedge,” she shouted to the others. “Come on in, Wemedge. It’s wonderful.”

“Hi, Wemedge,” said Odgar. “Boy it’s great.”

“Where’s Wemedge?” It was the Ghee, swimming far out.

“Is this man Wemedge a nonswimmer?” Bill’s voice very deep and bass over the water.

Nick felt good. It was fun to have people yell at you like that. He scuffed off his canvas shoes, pulled his shirt over his head and stepped out of his trousers. His bare feet felt the sandy planks of the dock. He ran very quickly out the yielding plank of the springboard, his toes shoved against the end of the board, he tightened and he was in the water, smoothly and deeply, with no consciousness of the dive. He had breathed in deeply as he took off and now went on and on through the water, holding his back arched, feet straight and trailing. Then he was on the surface, floating face down. He rolled over and opened his eyes. He did not care anything about swimming, only to dive and be underwater.

“How is it, Wemedge?” The Ghee was just behind him.

“Warm as piss,” Nick said.

He took a deep breath, took hold of his ankles with his hands, his knees under his chin, and sank slowly down into the water. It was warm at the top but he dropped quickly into cool, then cold. As he neared the bottom it was quite cold. Nick floated down gently against the bottom. It was marly and his toes hated it as he uncurled and shoved hard against it to come up to the air. It was strange coming up from underwater into the dark. Nick rested in the water, barely paddling and comfortable. Odgar and Kate were talking together up on the dock.

“Have you ever swum in a sea where it was phosphorescent, Carl?”

“No.” Odgar’s voice was unnatural talking to Kate.

We might rub ourselves all over with matches, Nick thought. He took a deep breath, drew his knees up, clasped tight and sank, this time with his eyes open. He sank gently, first going off to one side, then sinking head first. It was no good. He could not see underwater in the dark. He was right to keep his eyes shut when he first dove in. It was funny about reactions like that. They weren’t always right, though. He did not go all the way down but straightened out and swam along and up through the cool, keeping just below the warm surface water. It was funny how much fun it was to swim underwater and how little fun there was in plain swimming. It was fun to swim on the surface in the ocean. That was the buoyancy. But there was the taste of the brine and the way it made you thirsty. Fresh water was better. Just like this on a hot night. He came up for air just under the projecting edge of the dock and climbed up the ladder.

“Oh, dive, Wemedge, will you?” Kate said. “Do a good dive.” They were sitting together on the dock leaning back against one of the big piles.

“Do a noiseless one, Wemedge,” Odgar said.

“All right.”

Nick, dripping, walked out on the springboard, remembering how to do the dive. Odgar and Kate watched him, black in the dark, standing at the end of the board, poise and dive as he had learned from watching a sea otter. In the water as he turned to come up to the air Nick thought, Gosh, if I could only have Kate down here. He came up in a rush to the surface, feeling water in his eyes and ears. He must have started to take a breath.

“It was perfect. Absolutely perfect,” Kate shouted from the dock.

Nick came up the ladder.

“Where are the men?” he asked.

“They’re swimming way out in the bay,” Odgar said.

Nick lay down on the dock beside Kate and Odgar. He could hear the Ghee and Bill swimming way out in the dark.

“You’re the most wonderful diver, Wemedge,” Kate said, touching his back with her foot. Nick tightened under the contact.

“No,” he said.

“You’re a wonder, Wemedge,” Odgar said.

“Nope,” Nick said. He was thinking, thinking if it was possible to be with somebody underwater, he could hold his breath three minutes, against the sand on the bottom, they could float up together, take a breath and go down, it was easy to sink if you knew how. He had once drunk a bottle of milk and peeled and eaten a banana underwater to show off, had to have weights, though, to hold him down, if there was a ring at the bottom, something he could get his arm through, he could do it all right. Gee, how it would be, you couldn’t ever get a girl though, a girl couldn’t go through with it, she’d swallow water, it would drown Kate, Kate wasn’t really any good underwater, he wished there was a girl like that, maybe he’d get a girl like that, probably never, there wasn’t anybody but him that was that way underwater. Swimmers, hell, swimmers were slobs, nobody knew about the water but him, there was a fellow up at Evanston that could hold his breath six minutes but he was crazy. He wished he was a fish, no he didn’t. He laughed.

“What’s the joke, Wemedge?” Odgar said in his husky, near-to-Kate voice.

“I wished I was a fish,” Nick said.

“That’s a good joke,” said Odgar.

“Sure,” said Nick.

“Don’t be an ass, Wemedge,” said Kate.

“Would you like to be a fish, Butstein?” he said, lying with his head on the planks, facing away from them.

“No,” said Kate. “Not tonight.”

Nick pressed his back hard against her foot.

“What animal would you like to be, Odgar?” Nick said.

“J. P. Morgan,” Odgar said.

“You’re nice, Odgar,” Kate said. Nick felt Odgar glow.

“I’d like to be Wemedge,” Kate said.

“You could always be Mrs. Wemedge,” Odgar said.

“There isn’t going to be any Mrs. Wemedge,” Nick said. He tightened his back muscles. Kate had both her legs stretched out against his back as though she were resting them on a log in front of a fire.

“Don’t be too sure,” Odgar said.

“I’m awful sure,” Nick said. “I’m going to marry a mermaid.”

“She’d be Mrs. Wemedge,” Kate said.

“No she wouldn’t,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t let her.”

“How would you stop her?”

“I’d stop her all right. Just let her try it.”

“Mermaids don’t marry,” Kate said.

“That’d be all right with me,” Nick said.

“The Mann Act would get you,” said Odgar.

“We’d stay outside the four-mile limit,” Nick said. “We’d get food from the rumrunners. You could get a diving suit and come and visit us, Odgar. Bring Butstein if she wants to come. We’ll be at home every Thursday afternoon.”

“What are we going to do tomorrow?” Odgar said, his voice becoming husky, near to Kate again.

“Oh, hell, let’s not talk about tomorrow,” Nick said. “Let’s talk about my mermaid.”

“We’re through with your mermaid.”

“All right,” Nick said. “You and Odgar go and talk. I’m going to think about her.”

“You’re immoral, Wemedge. You’re disgustingly immoral.”

“No, I’m not. I’m honest.” Then, lying with his eyes shut, he said, “Don’t bother me. I’m thinking about her.”

He lay there thinking of his mermaid while Kate’s insteps pressed against his back and she and Odgar talked.

Odgar and Kate talked but he did not hear them. He lay, no longer thinking, quite happy.

Bill and the Ghee had come out of the water farther down the shore, walked down the beach up to the car and then backed it out onto the dock. Nick stood up and put on his clothes. Bill and the Ghee were in the front seat, tired from the long swim. Nick got in behind with Kate and Odgar. They leaned back. Bill drove roaring up the hill and turned onto the main road. On the main highway Nick could see the lights of other cars up ahead, going out of sight, then blinding as they mounted a hill, blinking as they came near, then dimmed as Bill passed. The road was high along the shore of the lake. Big cars out from Charlevoix, rich slobs riding behind their chauffeurs, came up and passed, hogging the road and not dimming their lights. They passed like railway trains. Bill flashed the spotlights on cars alongside the road in the trees, making the occupants change their positions. Nobody passed Bill from behind, although a spotlight played on the back of their heads for some time until Bill drew away. Bill slowed, then turned abruptly onto the sandy road that ran up through the orchard to the farmhouse. The car, in low gear, moved steadily up through the orchard. Kate put her lips to Nick’s ear.

“In about an hour, Wemedge,” she said. Nick pressed his thigh hard against hers. The car circled at the top of the hill above the orchard and stopped in front of the house.

“Aunty’s asleep. We’ve got to be quiet,” Kate said.

“Good night, men,” Bill whispered. “We’ll stop by in the morning.”

“Good night, Smith,” whispered the Ghee. “Good night, Butstein.”

“Good night, Ghee,” Kate said.

Odgar was staying at the house.

“Good night, men,” Nick said. “See you, Morgen.”

“Night, Wemedge,” Odgar said from the porch.

Nick and the Ghee walked down the road into the orchard. Nick reached up and took an apple from one of the Duchess trees. It was still green but he sucked the acid juice from the bite and spat out the pulp.

“You and the Bird took a long swim, Ghee,” he said.

“Not so long, Wemedge,” the Ghee answered.

They came out from the orchard past the mailbox onto the hard state highway. There was a cold mist in the hollow where the road crossed the creek. Nick stopped on the bridge.

“Come on, Wemedge,” the Ghee said.

“All right,” Nick agreed.

They went on up the hill to where the road turned into the grove of trees around the church. There were no lights in any of the houses they passed. Hortons Bay was asleep. No motor cars had passed them.

“I don’t feel like turning in yet,” Nick said.

“Want me to walk with you?”

“No, Ghee. Don’t bother.”

“All right.”

“I’ll walk up as far as the cottage with you,” Nick said. They unhooked the screen door and went into the kitchen. Nick opened the meat safe and looked around.

“Want some of this, Ghee?” he said.

“I want a piece of pie,” the Ghee said.

“So do I,” Nick said. He wrapped up some fried chicken and two pieces of cherry pie in oiled paper from the top of the icebox.

“I’ll take this with me,” he said. The Ghee washed down his pie with a dipper full of water from the bucket.

“If you want anything to read, Ghee, get it out of my room,” Nick said. The Ghee had been looking at the lunch Nick had wrapped up.

“Don’t be a damn fool, Wemedge,” he said.

“That’s all right, Ghee.”

“All right. Only don’t be a damn fool,” the Ghee said. He opened the screen door and went out across the grass to the cottage. Nick turned off the light and went out, hooking the screen door shut. He had the lunch wrapped up in a newspaper and crossed the wet grass, climbed the fence and went up the road through the town under the big elm trees, past the last cluster of R.F.D. mailboxes at the crossroads and out onto the Charlevoix highway. After crossing the creek he cut across a field, skirted the edge of the orchard, keeping to the edge of the clearing, and climbed the rail fence into the wood lot. In the center of the wood lot four hemlock trees grew close together. The ground was soft with pine needles and there was no dew. The wood lot had never been cut over and the forest floor was dry and warm without underbrush. Nick put the package of lunch by the base of one of the hemlocks and lay down to wait. He saw Kate coming through the trees in the dark but did not move. She did not see him and stood a moment, holding the two blankets in her arms. In the dark it looked like some enormous pregnancy. Nick was shocked. Then it was funny.

“Hello, Butstein,” he said. She dropped the blankets.

“Oh, Wemedge. You shouldn’t have frightened me like that. I was afraid you hadn’t come.”

“Dear Butstein,” Nick said. He held her close against him, feeling her body against his, all the sweet body against his body. She pressed close against him.

“I love you so, Wemedge.”

“Dear, dear old Butstein,” Nick said.

They spread the blankets, Kate smoothing them flat.

“It was awfully dangerous to bring the blankets,” Kate said.

“I know,” Nick said. “Let’s undress.”

“Oh, Wemedge.”

“It’s more fun.” They undressed sitting on the blankets. Nick was a little embarrassed to sit there like that.

“Do you like me with my clothes off, Wemedge?”

“Gee, let’s get under,” Nick said. They lay between the rough blankets. He was hot against her cool body, hunting for it, then it was all right.

“Is it all right?”

Kate pressed all the way up for answer.

“Is it fun?”

“Oh, Wemedge. I’ve wanted it so. I’ve needed it so.”

They lay together in the blankets. Wemedge slid his head down, his nose touching along the line of the neck, down between her breasts. It was like piano keys.

“You smell so cool,” he said.

He touched one of her small breasts with his lips gently. It came alive between his lips, his tongue pressing against it. He felt the whole feeling coming back again and, sliding his hands down, moved Kate over. He slid down and she fitted close in against him. She pressed tight in against the curve of his abdomen. She felt wonderful there. He searched, a little awkwardly, then found it. He put both hands over her breasts and held her to him. Nick kissed hard against her back. Kate’s head dropped forward.

“Is it good this way?” he said.

“I love it. I love it. I love it. Oh, come, Wemedge. Please come. Come, come. Please, Wemedge. Please, please, Wemedge.”

“There it is,” Nick said.

He was suddenly conscious of the blanket rough against his bare body.

“Was I bad, Wemedge?” Kate said.

“No, you were good,” Nick said. His mind was working very hard and clear. He saw everything very sharp and clear. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“I wish we could sleep here all night.” Kate cuddled against him.

“It would be swell,” Nick said. “But we can’t. You’ve got to get back to the house.”

“I don’t want to go,” Kate said.

Nick stood up, a little wind blowing on his body. He pulled on his shirt and was glad to have it on. He put on his trousers and shoes.

“You’ve got to get dressed, Suit,” he said. She lay there, the blankets pulled over her head.

“Just a minute,” she said. Nick got the lunch from over the hemlock. He opened it up.

“Come on, get dressed, Suit,” he said.

“I don’t want to,” Kate said. “I’m going to sleep here all night.” She sat up in the blankets. “Hand me those things, Wemedge.”

Nick gave her the clothes.

“I’ve just thought of it,” Kate said. “If I sleep out here they’ll just think that I’m an idiot and came out here with the blankets and it will be all right.”

“You won’t be comfortable,” Nick said.

“If I’m uncomfortable I’ll go in.”

“Let’s eat before I have to go,” Nick said.

“I’ll put something on,” Kate said.

They sat together and ate the fried chicken and each ate a piece of cherry pie.

Nick stood up, then kneeled down and kissed Kate.

He came through the wet grass to the cottage and upstairs to his room, walking carefully not to creak. It was good to be in bed, sheets, stretching out full length, dipping his head in the pillow. Good in bed, comfortable, happy, fishing tomorrow, he prayed as he always prayed when he remembered it, for the family, himself, to be a great writer, Kate, the men, Odgar, for good fishing, poor old Odgar, poor old Odgar, sleeping up there at the cottage, maybe not fishing, maybe not sleeping all night. Still there wasn’t anything you could do, not a thing.

Originally published in The Nick Adams Stories, this short story was left uncompleted by Hemingway.

THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY

“NICKIE,” HIS SISTER SAID TO HIM. “Listen to me, Nickie.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

He was watching the bottom of the spring where the sand rose in small spurts with the bubbling water. There was a tin cup on a forked stick that was stuck in the gravel by the spring and Nick Adams looked at it and at the water rising and then flowing clear in its gravel bed beside the road.

He could see both ways on the road and he looked up the hill and then down to the dock and the lake, the wooded point across the bay and the open lake beyond where there were white caps running. His back was against a big cedar tree and behind him there was a thick cedar swamp. His sister was sitting on the moss beside him and she had her arm around his shoulders.

“The’re waiting for you to come home to supper,” his sister said. “There’s two of them. They came in a buggy and they asked where you were.”

“Did anybody tell them?”

“Nobody knew where you were but me. Did you get many, Nickie?”

“I got twenty-six.”

“Are they good ones?”

“Just the size they want for the dinners.”

“Oh, Nickie, I wish you wouldn’t sell them.”

“She gives me a dollar a pound,” Nick Adams said.

His sister was tanned brown and she had dark brown eyes and dark brown hair with yellow streaks in it from the sun. She and Nick loved each other and they did not love the others. They always thought of everyone else in the family as the others.

“They know about everything, Nickie,” his sister said hopelessly. “They said they were going to make an example of you and send you to the reform school.”

“They’ve only got proof on one thing,” Nick told her. “But I guess I have to go away for a while.”

“Can I go?”

“No. I’m sorry, Littless. How much money have we got?”

“Fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents. I brought it.”

“Did they say anything else?”

“No. Only that they were going to stay till you came home.”

“Our mother will get tired of feeding them.”

“She gave them lunch already.”

“What were they doing?”

“Just sitting around on the screen porch. They asked our mother for your rifle but I’d hid it in the woodshed when I saw them by the fence.”

“Were you expecting them?”

“Yes. Weren’t you?”

“I guess so. Goddam them.”

“Goddam them for me, too,” his sister said. “Aren’t I old enough to go now? I hid the rifle. I brought the money.”

“I’d worry about you,” Nick Adams told her. “I don’t even know where I’m going.”

“Sure you do.”

“If there’s two of us they’d look harder. A boy and a girl show up.”

“I’d go like a boy,” she said. “I always wanted to be a boy anyway. They couldn’t tell anything about me if my hair was cut.”

“No,” Nick Adams said. “That’s true.”

“Let’s think something out good,” she said. “Please, Nick, please. I could be lots of use and you’d be lonely without me. Wouldn’t you be?”

“I’m lonely now thinking about going away from you.”

“See? And we may have to be away for years. Who can tell? Take me, Nickie. Please take me.” She kissed him and held onto him with both her arms. Nick Adams looked at her and tried to think straight. It was difficult. But there was no choice.

“I shouldn’t take you. But then I shouldn’t have done any of it,” he said. “I’ll take you. Maybe only for a couple of days, though.”

“That’s all right,” she told him. “When you don’t want me I’ll go straight home. I’ll go home anyway if I’m a bother or a nuisance or an expense.”

“Let’s think it out,” Nick Adams told her. He looked up and down the road and up at the sky where the big high afternoon clouds were riding and at the white caps on the lake out beyond the point.

“I’d go through the woods down to the inn beyond the point and sell her the trout,” he told his sister. “She ordered them for dinners tonight. Right now they want more trout dinners than chicken dinners. I don’t know why. The trout are in good shape. I gutted them and they’re wrapped in cheesecloth and they’ll be cool and fresh. I’ll tell her I’m in some trouble with the game wardens and that they’re looking for me and I have to get out of the country for a while. I’ll get her to give me a small skillet and some salt and pepper and some bacon and some shortening and some commeal. I’ll get her to give me a sack to put everything in and I’ll get some dried apricots and some prunes and some tea and plenty of matches and a hatchet. But I can only get one blanket. She’ll help me because buying trout is just as bad as selling them.”

“I can get a blanket,” his sister said. “I’ll wrap it around the rifle and I’ll bring your moccasins and my moccasins and I’ll change to different overalls and a shirt and hide these so they’ll think I’m wearing them and I’ll bring soap and a comb and a pair of scissors and something to sew with and Lorna Doone and Swiss Family Robinson.”

“Bring all the .22’s you can find,” Nick Adams said. Then quickly, “Come on back. Get out of sight.” He had seen a buggy coming down the road.

Behind the cedars they lay flat against the springy moss with their faces down and heard the soft noise of the horses’ hooves in the sand and the small noise of the wheels. Neither of the men in the buggy was talking but Nick Adams smelled them as they went past and he smelled the sweated horses. He sweated himself until they were well past on their way to the dock because he thought they might stop to water at the spring or to get a drink.

“Is that them, Littless?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Crawl way back in,” Nick Adams said. He crawled back into the swamp, pulling his sack of fish. The swamp was mossy and not muddy there. Then he stood up and hid the sack behind the trunk of a cedar and motioned the girl to come further in. They went into the cedar swamp, moving as softly as deer.

“I know the one,” Nick Adams said. “He’s a no good son of a bitch.”

“He said he’d been after you for four years.”

“I know.”

“The other one, the big one with the spit tobacco face and the blue suit, is the one from down state.”

“Good,” Nick said. “Now we’ve had a look at them I better get going. Can you get home all right?”

“Sure. I’ll cut up to the top of the hill and keep off the road. Where will I meet you tonight, Nickie?”

“I don’t think you ought to come, Littless.”

“I’ve got to come. You don’t know how it is. I can leave a note for our mother and say I went with you and you’ll take good care of me.”

“All right,” Nick Adams said. “I’ll be where the big hemlock is that was struck by lightning. The one that’s down. Straight up from the cove. Do you know the one? On the short cut to the road.”

“That’s awfully close to the house.”

“I don’t want you to have to carry the stuff too far.”

“I’ll do what you say. But don’t take chances, Nickie.”

“I’d like to have the rifle and go down now to the edge of the timber and kill both of those bastards while they’re on the dock and wire a piece of iron on them from the old mill and sink them in the channel.”

“And then what would you do?” his sister asked. “Somebody sent them.”

“Nobody sent that first son of a bitch.”

“But you killed the moose and you sold the trout and you killed what they took from your boat.”

“That was all right to kill that.”

He did not like to mention what that was, because that was the proof they had.

“I know. But you’re not going to kill people and that’s why I’m going with you.”

“Let’s stop talking about it. But I’d like to kill those two sons of bitches.”

“I know,” she said. “So would I. But we’re not going to kill people, Nickie. Will you promise me?”

“No. Now I don’t know whether it’s safe to take her the trout.”

“I’ll take them to her.”

“No. They’re too heavy. I’ll take them through the swamp and to the woods in back of the hotel. You go straight to the hotel and see if she’s there and if everything’s all right. And if it is you’ll find me there by the big basswood tree.”

“It’s a long way there through the swamp, Nicky.”

“It’s a long way back from reform school, too.”

“Can’t I come with you through the swamp? I’ll go in then and see her while you stay out and come back out with you and take them in.”

“All right,” Nick said. “But I wish you’d do it the other way.”

“Why, Nickie?”

“Because you’ll see them maybe on the road and you can tell me where they’ve gone. I’ll see you in the second-growth wood lot in back of the hotel where the big basswood is.”

Nick waited more than an hour in the second-growth timber and his sister had not come. When she came she was excited and he knew she was tired.

“They’re at our house,” she said. “They’re sitting out on the screen porch and drinking whiskey and ginger ale and they’ve unhitched and put their horses up. They say they’re going to wait till you come back. It was our mother told them you’d gone fishing at the creek. I don’t think she meant to. Anyway I hope not.”

“What about Mrs. Packard?”

“I saw her in the kitchen of the hotel and she asked me if I’d seen you and I said no. She said she was waiting for you to bring her some fish for tonight. She was worried. You might as well take them in.”

“Good,” he said. “They’re nice and fresh. I repacked them in ferns.”

“Can I come in with you?”

“Sure,” Nick said.

The hotel was a long wooden building with a porch that fronted on the lake. There were wide wooden steps that led down to the pier that ran far out into the water and there were natural cedar railings alongside the steps and natural cedar railings around the porch. There were chairs made of natural cedar on the porch and in them sat middle-aged people wearing white clothes. There were three pipes set on the lawn with spring water bubbling out of them, and little paths led to them. The water tasted like rotten eggs because these were mineral springs and Nick and his sister used to drink from them as a matter of discipline. Now coming toward the rear of the hotel, where the kitchen was, they crossed a plank bridge over a small brook running into the lake beside the hotel, and slipped into the back door of the kitchen.

“Wash them and put them in the ice box, Nickie,” Mrs. Packard said. “I’ll weigh them later.”

“Mrs. Packard,” Nick said. “Could I speak to you a minute?”

“Speak up,” she said. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“If I could have the money now.”

Mrs. Packard was a handsome woman in a gingham apron. She had a beautiful complexion and she was very busy and her kitchen help were there as well.

“You don’t mean you want to sell trout. Don’t you know that’s against the law?”

“I know,” Nick said. “I brought you the fish for a present. I mean my time for the wood I split and corded.”

“I’ll get it,” she said. “I have to go to the annex.”

Nick and his sister followed her outside. On the board sidewalk that led to the icehouse from the kitchen she stopped and put her hands in her apron pocket and took out a pocketbook.

“You get out of here,” she said quickly and kindly. “And get out of here fast. How much do you need?”

“I’ve got sixteen dollars,” Nick said.

“Take twenty,” she told him. “And keep that tyke out of trouble. Let her go home and keep an eye on them until you’re clear.”

“When did you hear about them?”

She shook her head at him.

“Buying is as bad or worse than selling,” she said. “You stay away until things quiet down. Nickie, you’re a good boy no matter what anybody says. You see Packard if things get bad. Come here nights if you need anything. I sleep light. Just knock on the window.”

“You aren’t going to serve them tonight are you, Mrs. Packard? You’re not going to serve them for the dinners?”

“No,” she said. “But I’m not going to waste them. Packard can eat half a dozen and I know other people that can. Be careful, Nickie, and let it blow over. Keep out of sight.”

“Littless wants to go with me.”

“Don’t you dare take her,” Mrs. Packard said. “You come by tonight and I’ll have some stuff made up for you.”

“Could you let me take a skillet?”

“I’ll have what you need. Packard knows what you need. I don’t give you any more money so you’ll keep out of trouble.”

“I’d like to see Mr. Packard about getting a few things.”

“He’ll get you anything you need. But don’t you go near the store, Nick.”

“I’ll get Littless to take him a note.”

“Anytime you need anything,” Mrs. Packard said. “Don’t you worry. Packard will be studying things out.”

“Good-bye, Aunt Halley.”

“Good-bye,” she said and kissed him. She smelt wonderful when she kissed him. It was the way the kitchen smelled when they were baking. Mrs. Packard smelled like her kitchen and her kitchen always smelled good.

“Don’t worry and don’t do anything bad.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“Of course,” she said. “And Packard will figure out something.”

They were in the big hemlocks on the hill behind the house now. It was evening and the sun was down beyond the hills on the other side of the lake.

“I’ve found everything,” his sister said. “It’s going to make a pretty big pack, Nickie.”

“I know it. What are they doing?”

“They ate a big supper and now they’re sitting out on the porch and drinking. They’re telling each other stories about how smart they are.”

“They aren’t very smart so far.”

“They’re going to starve you out,” his sister said. “A couple of nights in the woods and you’ll be back. You hear a loon holler a couple of times when you got an empty stomach and you’ll be back.”

“What did our mother give them for supper?”

“Awful,” his sister said.

“Good.”

“I’ve located everything on the list. Our mother’s gone to bed with a sick headache. She wrote our father.”

“Did you see the letter?”

“No. It’s in her room with the list of stuff to get from the store tomorrow. She’s going to have to make a new list when she finds everything is gone in the morning.”

“How much are they drinking?”

“They’ve drunk about a bottle, I guess.”

“I wish we could put knockout drops in it.”

“I could put them in if you’ll tell me how. Do you put them in the bottle?”

“No. In the glass. But we haven’t got any.”

“Would there be any in the medicine cabinet?”

“No.”

“I could put paregoric in the bottle. They have another bottle. Or calomel. I know we’ve got those.”

“No,” said Nick. “You try to get me about half the other bottle when they’re asleep. Put it in any old medicine bottle.”

“I better go and watch them,” his sister said. “My, I wish we had knockout drops. I never even heard of them.”

“They aren’t really drops,” Nick told her. “It’s chloral hydrate. Whores give it to lumberjacks in their drinks when they’re going to jack roll them.”

“It sounds pretty bad,” his sister said. “But we probably ought to have some for in emergencies.”

“Let me kiss you,” her brother said. “Just for in an emergency. Let’s go down and watch them drinking. I’d like to hear them talk sitting in our own house.”

“Will you promise not to get angry and do anything bad?”

“Sure.”

“Nor to the horses. It’s not the horses’ fault.”

“Not the horses either.”

“I wish we had knockout drops,” his sister said loyally.

“Well, we haven’t,” Nick told her. “I guess there aren’t any this side of Boyne City.”

They sat in the woodshed and they watched the two men sitting at the table on the screen porch. The moon had not risen and it was dark, but the outlines of the men showed against the lightness that the lake made behind them. They were not talking now but were both leaning forward on the table. Then Nick heard the clink of ice against a bucket.

“The ginger ale’s gone,” one of the men said.

“I said it wouldn’t last,” the other said. “But you were the one said we had plenty.”

“Get some water. There’s a pail and a dipper in the kitchen.”

“I’ve drunk enough. I’m going to turn in.”

“Aren’t you going to stay up for that kid?”

“No. I’m going to get some sleep. You stay up.”

“Do you think he’ll come in tonight?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to get some sleep. You wake me when you get sleepy.”

“I can stay up all night,” the local warden said. “Many’s the night I’ve stayed up all night for jack lighters and never shut an eye.”

“Me, too,” the down-state man said. “But now I’m going to get a little sleep.”

Nick and his sister watched him go in the door. Their mother had told the two men they could sleep in the bedroom next to the living room. They saw when he struck a match. Then the window was dark again. They watched the other warden sitting at the table until he put his head on his arms. Then they heard him snoring.

“We’ll give him a little while to make sure he’s solid asleep. Then we’ll get the stuff,” Nick said.

“You get over outside the fence,” his sister said. “It doesn’t matter if I’m moving around. But he might wake up and see you.”

“All right,” Nick agreed. “I’ll get everything out of here. Most of it’s here.”

“Can you find everything without a light?”

“Sure. Where’s the rifle?”

“Flat on the back upper rafter. Don’t slip or make the wood fall down, Nick.”

“Don’t you worry.”

She came out to the fence at the far comer where Nick was making up his pack beyond the big hemlock that had been struck by lightning the summer before and had fallen in a storm that autumn. The moon was just rising now behind the far hills and enough moonlight came through the trees for Nick to see clearly what he was packing. His sister put down the sack she was carrying and said, “They’re sleeping like pigs, Nickie.”

“Good.”

“The down-state one was snoring just like the one outside. I think I got everything.”

“You good old Littless.”

“I wrote a note to our mother and told her I was going with you to keep you out of trouble and not to tell anybody and that you’d take good care of me. I put it under her door. It’s locked.”

“Oh, shit,” Nick said. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Littless.”

“Now it’s not your fault and I can’t make it worse for you.”

“You’re awful.”

“Can’t we be happy now?”

“Sure.”

“I brought the whiskey,” she said hopefully. “I left some in the bottle. One of them can’t be sure the other didn’t drink it. Anyway they have another bottle.”

“Did you bring a blanket for you?”

“Of course.”

“We better get going.”

“We’re all right if we’re going where I think. The only thing that makes the pack bigger is my blanket. I’ll carry the rifle.”

“All right. What kind of shoes have you?”

“I’ve got my work-moccasins.”

“What did you bring to read?”

“Lorna Doone and Kidnapped and Wuthering Heights.”

“They’re all too old for you but Kidnapped.”

“Lorna Doone isn’t.”

“We’ll read it out loud,” Nick said. “That way it lasts longer. But, Littless, you’ve made things sort of hard now and we better go. Those bastards can’t be as stupid as they act. Maybe it was just because they were drinking.”

Nick had rolled the pack now and tightened the straps and he sat back and put his moccasins on. He put his arm around his sister. “You sure you want to go?”

“I have to go, Nickie. Don’t be weak and indecisive now. I left the note.”

“All right,” Nick said. “Let’s go. You can take the rifle until you get tired of it.”

“I’m all ready to go,” his sister said. “Let me help you strap the pack.”

“You know you haven’t had any sleep at all and that we have to travel?”

“I know. I’m really like the snoring one at the table says he was.”

“Maybe he was that way once, too,” Nick said. “But what you have to do is keep your feet in good shape. Do the moccasins chafe?”

“No. And my feet are tough from going barefoot all summer.”

“Mine are good, too,” said Nick. “Come on. Let’s go.”

They started off walking on the soft hemlock needles and the trees were high and there was no brush between the tree trunks. They walked uphill and the moon came through the trees and showed Nick with the very big pack and his sister carrying the .22 rifle. When they were at the top of the hill they looked back and saw the lake in the moonlight. It was clear enough so they could see the dark point, and beyond were the high hills of the far shore.

“We might as well say good-bye to it,” Nick Adams said.

“Good-bye, lake,” Littless said. “I love you, too.”

They went down the hill and across the long field and through the orchard and then through a rail fence and into a field of stubble. Going through the stubble field they looked to the right and saw the slaughterhouse and the big barn in the hollow and the old log farmhouse on the other high land that overlooked the lake. The long road of Lombardy poplars that ran to the lake was in the moonlight.

“Does it hurt your feet, Littless?” Nick asked.

“No,” his sister said.

“I came this way on account of the dogs,” Nick said. “They’d shut up as soon as they knew it was us. But somebody might hear them bark.”

“I know,” she said. “And as soon as they shut up afterwards they’d know it was us.”

Ahead they could see the dark of the rising line of hills beyond the road. They came to the end of one cut field of grain and crossed the little sunken creek that ran down to the springhouse. Then they climbed across the rise of another stubble field and there was another rail fence and the sandy road with the second-growth timber solid beyond it.

“Wait till I climb over and I’ll help you,” Nick said. “I want to look all the road.”

From the top of the fence he saw the roll of the country and the dark timber by their own house and the brightness of the lake in the moonlight. Then he was looking at the road.

“They can’t track us the way we’ve come and I don’t think they would notice tracks in this deep sand,” he said to his sister. “We can keep to the two sides of the road if it isn’t too scratchy.”

“Nickie, honestly I don’t think they’re intelligent enough to track anybody. Look how they just waited for you to come back and then practically got drunk before supper and afterwards.”

“They came down to the dock,” Nick said. “That was where I was. If you hadn’t told me they would have picked me up.”

“They didn’t have to be so intelligent to figure you would be on the big creek when our mother let them know you might have gone fishing. After I left they must have found all the boats were there and that would make them think you were fishing the creek. Everybody knows you usually fish below the grist mill and the cider mill. They were just slow thinking it out.”

“All right,” Nick said. “But they were awfully close then.”

His sister handed him the rifle through the fence, butt toward him, and then crawled between the rails. She stood beside him on the road and he put his hand on her head and stroked it.

“Are you awfully tired, Littless?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m too happy to be tired.”

“Until you’re too tired you walk in the sandy part of the road where their horses made holes in the sand. It’s so soft and dry tracks won’t show and I’ll walk on the side where it’s hard.”

“I can walk on the side, too.”

“No. I don’t want you to get scratched.”

They climbed, but with constant small descents, toward the height of land that separated the two lakes. There was close, heavy, second-growth timber on both sides of the road and blackberry and raspberry bushes grew from the edge of the road to the timber. Ahead they could see the top of each hill as a notch in the timber. The moon was well on its way down now.

“How do you feel, Littless?” Nick asked his sister.

“I feel wonderful. Nickie, is it always this nice when you run away from home?”

“No. Usually it’s lonesome.”

“How lonesome have you ever been?”

“Bad black lonesome. Awful.”

“Do you think you’ll get lonesome with me?”

“No.”

“You don’t mind you’re with me instead of going to Trudy?”

“What do you talk about her for all the time?”

“I haven’t been. Maybe you were thinking about her and you thought I was talking.”

“You’re too smart,” Nick said. “I thought about her because you told me where she was and when I knew where she was I wondered what she would be doing and all that.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have come.”

“I told you that you shouldn’t have come.”

“Oh, hell,” his sister said. “Are we going to be like the others and have fights? I’ll go back now. You don’t have to have me.”

“Shut up,” Nick said.

“Please don’t say that, Nickie. I’ll go back or I’ll stay just as you want. I’ll go back whenever you tell me to. But I won’t have fights. Haven’t we seen enough fights in families?”

“Yes,” said Nick.

“I know I forced you to take me. But I fixed it so you wouldn’t get in trouble about it. And I did keep them from catching you.”

They had reached the height of land and from here they could see the lake again although from here it looked narrow now and almost like a big river.

“We cut across country here,” Nick said. “Then we’ll hit that old logging road. Here’s where you go back from if you want to go back.”

He took off his pack and put it back into the timber and his sister leaned the rifle on it.

“Sit down, Littless, and take a rest,” he said. “We’re both tired.”

Nick lay with his head on the pack and his sister lay by him with her head on his shoulder.

“I’m not going back, Nickie, unless you tell me to,” she said. “I just don’t want fights. Promise me we won’t have fights?”

“Promise.”

“I won’t talk about Trudy.”

“The hell with Trudy.”

“I want to be useful and a good partner.”

“You are. You won’t mind if I get restless and mix it up with being lonesome?”

“No. We’ll take good care of each other and have fun. We can have a lovely time.”

“All right. We’ll start to have it now.”

“I’ve been having it all the time.”

“We just have one pretty hard stretch and then a really hard stretch and then we’ll be there. We might as well wait until it gets light to start. You go to sleep, Littless. Are you warm enough?”

“Oh, yes, Nickie. I’ve got my sweater.”

She curled up beside him and was asleep. In a little while Nick was sleeping, too. He slept for two hours until the morning light woke him.

Nick had circled around through the second-growth timber until they had come onto the old logging road.

“We couldn’t leave tracks going into it from the main road,” he told his sister.

The old road was so overgrown that he had to stoop many times to avoid hitting branches.

“It’s like a tunnel,” his sister said.

“It opens up after a while.”

“Have I ever been here before?”

“No. This goes up way beyond where I ever took you hunting.” “Does it come out on the secret place?”

“No, Littless. We have to go through some long bad slashings. Nobody gets in where we’re going.”

They kept on along the road and then took another road that was even more overgrown. Then they came out into a clearing. There was fireweed and brush in the clearing and the old cabins of the logging camp. They were very old and some of the roofs had fallen in. But there was a spring by the road and they both drank at it. The sun wasn’t up yet and they both felt hollow and empty in the early morning after the night of walking.

“All this beyond was hemlock forest,” Nick said. “They only cut it for the bark and they never used the logs.”

“But what happens to the road?”

“They must have cut up at the far end first and hauled and piled the bark by the road to snake it out. Then finally they cut everything right to the road and piled the bark here and then pulled out.”

“Is the secret place beyond all this slashing?”

“Yes. We go through the slashing and then some more road and then another slashing and then we come to virgin timber.”

“How did they leave it when they cut all this?”

“I don’t know. It belonged to somebody that wouldn’t sell, I guess. They stole a lot from the edges and paid stumpage on it. But the good part’s still there and there isn’t any passable road into it.”

“But why can’t people go down the creek? The creek has to come from somewhere?”

They were resting before they started the bad traveling through the slashing and Nick wanted to explain.

“Look, Littless. The creek crosses the main road we were on and it goes through a farmer’s land. The farmer has it fenced for a pasture and he runs people off that want to fish. So they stop at the bridge on his land. On the section of the creek where they would hit if they cut across his pasture on the other side from his house he runs a bull. The bull is mean and he really runs everybody off. He’s the meanest bull I ever saw and he just stays there, mean all the time, and hunts for people. Then after him the farmer’s land ends and there’s a section of cedar swamp with sink holes and you’d have to know it to get through. And then, even if you know it, it’s bad. Below that is the secret place. We’re going in over the hills and sort of in the back way. Then below the secret place there’s real swamp. Bad swamp that you can’t get through. Now we better start the bad part.”

The bad part and the part that was worse were behind them now. Nick had climbed over many logs that were higher than his head and others that were up to his waist. He would take the rifle and lay it down on the top of the log and pull his sister up and then she would slide down on the far side or he would lower himself down and take the rifle and help the girl down. They went over and around piles of brush and it was hot in the slashing, and the pollen from the ragweed and the fireweed dusted the girl’s hair and made her sneeze.

“Damn slashings,” she said to Nick. They were resting on top of a big log ringed where they sat by the cutting of the barkpeelers. The ring was gray in the rotting gray log and all around were other long gray trunks and gray brush and branches with the brilliant and worthless seeds growing.

“This is the last one,” Nick said.

“I hate them,” his sister said. “And the damn weeds are like flowers in a tree cemetery if nobody took care of it.”

“You see why I didn’t want to try to make it in the dark.”

“We couldn’t.”

“No. And nobody’s going to chase us through here. Now we come into the good part.”

They came from the hot sun of the slashings into the shade of the great trees. The slashings had run up to the top of a ridge and over and then the forest began. They were walking on the brown forest floor now and it was springy and cool under their feet. There was no underbrush and the trunks of the trees rose sixty feet high before there were any branches. It was cool in the shade of the trees and high up in them Nick could hear the breeze that was rising. No sun came through as they walked and Nick knew there would be no sun through the high top branches until nearly noon. His sister put her hand in his and walked close to him.

“I’m not scared, Nickie. But it makes me feel very strange.”

“Me, too,” Nick said. “Always.”

“I never was in woods like these.”

“This is all the virgin timber left around here.”

“Do we go through it very long?”

“Quite a way.”

“I’d be afraid if I were alone.”

“It makes me feel strange. But I’m not afraid.”

“I said that first.”

“I know. Maybe we say it because we are afraid.”

“No. I’m not afraid because I’m with you. But I know I’d be afraid alone. Did you ever come here with anyone else?”

“No. Only by myself.”

“And you weren’t afraid?”

“No. But I always feel strange. Like the way I ought to feel in church.”

“Nickie, where we’re going to live isn’t as solemn as this, is it?”

“No. Don’t you worry. There it’s cheerful. You just enjoy this, Littless. This is good for you. This is the way forests were in the olden days. This is about the last good country there is left. Nobody gets in here ever.”

“I love the olden days. But I wouldn’t want it all this solemn.”

“It wasn’t all solemn. But the hemlock forests were.”

“It’s wonderful walking. I thought behind our house was wonderful. But this is better. Nickie, do you believe in God? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. You don’t have to say it. But you don’t mind if I say my prayers at night?”

“No. I’ll remind you if you forget.”

“Thank you. Because this kind of woods makes me feel awfully religious.”

“That’s why they build cathedrals to be like this.”

“You’ve never seen a cathedral, have you?”

“No. But I’ve read about them and I can imagine them. This is the best one we have around here.”

“Do you think we can go to Europe some time and see cathedrals?”

“Sure we will. But first I have to get out of this trouble and learn how to make some money.”

“Do you think you’ll ever make money writing?”

“If I get good enough.”

“Couldn’t you maybe make it if you wrote cheerfuller things? That isn’t my opinion. Our mother said everything you write is morbid.”

“It’s too morbid for the St. Nicholas,” Nick said. “They didn’t say it. But they didn’t like it.”

“But the St. Nicholas is our favorite magazine.”

“I know,” said Nick. “But I’m too morbid for it already. And I’m not even grown-up.”

“When is a man grown-up? When he’s married?”

“No. Until you’re grown-up they send you to reform school. After you’re grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.”

“I’m glad you’re not grown-up then.”

“They’re not going to send me anywhere,” Nick said. “And let’s not talk morbid even if I write morbid.”

“I didn’t say it was morbid.”

“I know. Everybody else does, though.”

“Let’s be cheerful, Nickie,” his sister said. “These woods make us too solemn.”

“We’ll be out of them pretty soon,” Nick told her. “Then you’ll see where we’re going to live. Are you hungry, Littless?”

“A little.”

“I’ll bet,” Nick said. “We’ll eat a couple of apples.”

They were coming down a long hill when they saw sunlight ahead through the tree trunks. Now, at the edge of the timber, there was wintergreen growing and some partridgeberries and the forest floor began to be alive with growing things. Through the tree trunks they saw an open meadow that sloped to where white birches grew along the stream. Below the meadow and the line of the birches there was the dark green of a cedar swamp and far beyond the swamp there were dark blue hills. There was an arm of the lake between the swamp and the hills. But from here they could not see it. They only felt from the distances that it was there.

“Here’s the spring,” Nick said to his sister. “And here’s the stones where I camped before.”

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful place, Nickie,” his sister said. “Can we see the lake, too?”

“There’s a place where we can see it. But it’s better to camp here. I’ll get some wood and we’ll make breakfast.”

“The firestones are very old.”

“It’s a very old place,” Nick said. “The firestones are Indian.”

“How did you come to it straight through the woods with no trail and no blazes?”

“Didn’t you see the direction sticks on the three ridges?”

“No.”

“I’ll show them to you sometime.”

“Are they yours?”

“No. They’re from the old days.”

“Why didn’t you show them to me?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “I was showing off I guess.”

“Nickie, they’ll never find us here.”

“I hope not,” Nick said.

At about the time that Nick and his sister were entering the first of the slashings the warden who was sleeping on the screen porch of the house that stood in the shade of the trees above the lake was wakened by the sun that, rising above the slope of open land behind the house, shone full on his face.

During the night the warden had gotten up for a drink of water and when he had come back from the kitchen he had lain down on the floor with a cushion from one of the chairs for a pillow. Now he waked, realized where he was, and got to his feet. He had slept on his right side because he had a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in a shoulder holster under his left armpit. Now, awake, he felt for the gun, looked away from the sun, which hurt his eyes, and went into the kitchen where he dipped up a drink of water from the pail beside the kitchen table. The hired girl was building a fire in the stove and the warden said to her, “What about some breakfast?”

“No breakfast,” she said. She slept in a cabin out behind the house and had come into the kitchen a half an hour before. The sight of the warden lying on the floor of the screen porch and the nearly empty bottle of whiskey on the table had frightened and disgusted her. Then it had made her angry.

“What do you mean, no breakfast?” the warden said, still holding the dipper.

“Just that.”

“Why?”

“Nothing to eat.”

“What about coffee?”

“No coffee.”

“Tea?”

“No tea. No bacon. No corn meal. No salt. No pepper. No coffee. No Borden’s canned cream. No Aunt Jemima buckwheat flour. No nothing.”

“What are you talking about? There was plenty to eat last night.”

“There isn’t now. Chipmunks must have carried it away.”

The warden from down state had gotten up when he heard them talking and had come into the kitchen.

“How do you feel this morning?” the hired girl asked him.

The warden ignored the hired girl and said, “What is it, Evans?”

“That son of a bitch came in here last night and got himself a pack load of grub.”

“Don’t you swear in my kitchen,” the hired girl said.

“Come out here,” The down-state warden said. They both went out on the screen porch and shut the kitchen door.

“What does that mean, Evans?” The down-state man pointed at the quart of Old Green River which had less than a quarter left in it. “How skunk-drunk were you?”

“I drank the same as you. I sat up by the table—”

“Doing what?”

“Waiting for the goddam Adams boy if he showed.”

“And drinking.”

“Not drinking. Then I got up and went in the kitchen and got a drink of water about half past four and I lay down here in front of the door to take it easier.”

“Why didn’t you lie down in front of the kitchen door?”

“I could see him better from here if he came.”

“So what happened?”

“He must have come in the kitchen, through a window maybe, and loaded that stuff.”

“Bullshit.”

“What were you doing?” the local warden asked.

“I was sleeping the same as you.”

“Okay. Let’s quit fighting about it. That doesn’t do any good.”

“Tell that hired girl to come out here.”

The hired girl came out and the down-state man said to her, “You tell Mrs. Adams we want to speak to her.”

The hired girl did not say anything but went into the main part of the house, shutting the door after her.

“You better pick up the full and the empty bottles,” the down-state man said. “There isn’t enough of this to do any good. You want a drink of it?”

“No thanks. I’ve got to work today.”

“I’ll take one,” the down-state man said. “It hasn’t been shared right.”

“I didn’t drink any of it after you left,” the local warden said doggedly.

“Why do you keep on with that bullshit?”

“It isn’t bullshit.”

The down-state man put the bottle down. “All right,” he said to the hired girl, who had opened and shut the door behind her. “What did she say?”

“She has a sick headache and she can’t see you. She says you have a warrant. She says for you to search the place if you want to and then go.”

“What did she say about the boy?”

“She hasn’t seen the boy and she doesn’t know anything about him.”

“Where are the other kids?”

“They’re visiting at Charlevoix.”

“Who are they visiting?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t know. They went to the dance and they were going to stay over Sunday with friends.”

“Who was that kid that was around here yesterday?”

“I didn’t see any kid around here yesterday.”

“There was.”

“Maybe some friend of the children asking for them. Maybe some resorter’s kid. Was it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl about eleven or twelve. Brown hair and brown eyes. Freckles. Very tanned. Wearing overalls and a boy’s shirt. Barefooted.”

“Sounds like anybody,” the girl said. “Did you say eleven or twelve years old?”

“Oh, shit,” said the man from down state. “You can’t get anything out of these mossbacks.”

“If I’m a mossback what’s he?” The hired girl looked at the local warden. “What’s Mr. Evans? His kids and me went to the same schoolhouse.”

“Who was the girl?” Evans asked her. “Come on, Suzy. I can find out anyway.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Suzy, the hired girl, said. “It seems like all kinds of people come by here now. I just feel like I’m in a big city.”

“You don’t want to get in any trouble, do you, Suzy?” Evans said.

“No, sir.”

“I mean it.”

“You don’t want to get in any trouble either, do you?” Suzy asked him.

Out at the bam after they were hitched up the down-state man said, “We didn’t do so good, did we?”

“He’s loose now,” Evans said. “He’s got grub and he must have his rifle. But he’s still in the area. I can get him. Can you track?”

“No. Not really. Can you?”

“In snow,” the other warden laughed.

“But we don’t have to track. We have to think out where he’ll be.”

“He didn’t load up with all that stuff to go south. He’d just take a little something and head for the railway.”

“I couldn’t tell what was missing from the woodshed. But he had a big pack load from the kitchen. He’s heading in somewhere. I got to check on all his habits and his friends and where he used to go. You block him off at Charlevoix and Petoskey and St. Ignace and Sheboygan. Where would you go if you were him?”

“I’d go to the Upper Peninsula.”

“Me, too. He’s been up there, too. The ferry is the easiest place to pick him up. But there’s an awful big country between here and Sheboygan and he knows that country, too.”

“We better go down and see Packard. We were going to check that today.”

“What’s to prevent him going down by East Jordan and Grand Traverse?”

“Nothing. But that isn’t his country. He’ll go some place that he knows.”

Suzy came out when they were opening the gate in the fence.

“Can I ride down to the store with you? I”ve got to get some groceries.”

“What makes you think we’re going to the store?”

“Yesterday you were talking about going to see Mr. Packard.”

“How are you going to get your groceries back?”

“I guess I can get a lift with somebody on the road or coming up the lake. This is Saturday.”

“All right. Climb up,” the local warden said.

“Thank you, Mr. Evans,” Suzy said.

At the general store and post office Evans hitched the team at the rack and he and the down-state man stood and talked before they went in.

“I couldn’t say anything with that damned Suzy.”

“Sure.”

“Packard’s a fine man. There isn’t anybody better-liked in this country. You’d never get a conviction on that trout business against him. Nobody’s going to scare him and we don’t want to antagonize him.”

“Do you think he’ll cooperate?”

“Not if you act rough.”

“We’ll go see him.”

Inside the store Suzy had gone straight through past the glass showcases, the opened barrels, the boxes, the shelves of canned goods, seeing nothing nor anyone until she came to the post office with its lockboxes and its general delivery and stamp window. The window was down and she went straight on to the back of the store. Mr. Packard was opening a packing box with a crowbar. He looked at her and smiled.

“Mr. John,” the hired girl said, speaking very fast. “There’s two wardens coming in that’s after Nickie. He cleared out last night and his kid sister’s gone with him. Don’t let on about that. His mother knows it and it’s all right. Anyhow she isn’t going to say anything.”

“Did he take all your groceries?”

“Most of them.”

“You pick out what you need and make a list and I’ll check it over with you.”

“They’re coming in now.”

“You go out the back and come in the front again. I’ll go and talk to them.”

Suzy walked around the long frame building and climbed the front steps again. This time she noticed everything as she came in. She knew the Indians who had brought in the baskets and she knew the two Indian boys who were looking at the fishing tackle in the first showcases on the left. She knew all the patent medicines in the next case and who usually bought them. She had clerked one summer in the store and she knew what the penciled code letters and numbers meant that were on the cardboard boxes that held shoes, winter overshoes, wool socks, mittens, caps and sweaters. She knew what the baskets were worth that the Indians had brought in and that it was too late in the season for them to bring a good price.

“Why did you bring them in so late, Mrs. Tabeshaw?” she asked.

“Too much fun Fourth of July,” the Indian woman laughed.

“How’s Billy?” Suzy asked.

“I don’t know, Suzy. I no see him four weeks now.”

“Why don’t you take them down to the hotel and try to sell them to the resorters?” Suzy said.

“Maybe,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said. “I took once.”

“You ought to take them every day.”

“Long walk,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said.

While Suzy was talking to the people she knew and making a list of what she needed for the house the two wardens were in the back of the store with Mr. John Packard.

Mr. John had gray-blue eyes and dark hair and a dark mustache and he always looked as though he had wandered into a general store by mistake. He had been away from northern Michigan once for eighteen years when he was a young man and he looked more like a peace officer or an honest gambler than a storekeeper. He had owned good saloons in his time and run them well. But when the country had been lumbered off he had stayed and bought farming land. Finally when the county had gone local option he had bought this store. He already owned the hotel. But he said he didn’t like a hotel without a bar and so he almost never went near it. Mrs. Packard ran the hotel. She was more ambitious than Mr. John and Mr. John said he didn’t want to waste time with people who had enough money to take a vacation anywhere in the country they wanted and then came to a hotel without a bar and spent their time sitting on the porch in rocking chairs. He called the resorters “change-of-lifers” and he made fun of them to Mrs. Packard but she loved him and never minded when he teased her.

“I don’t mind if you call them change-of-lifers,” she told him one night in bed. “I had the damn thing but I’m still all the woman you can handle, aren’t I?”

She liked the resorters because some of them brought culture and Mr. John said she loved culture like a lumberjack loved Peerless, the great chewing tobacco. He really respected her love of culture because she said she loved it just like he loved good bonded whiskey and she said, “Packard, you don’t have to care about culture. I won’t bother you with it. But it makes me feel wonderful.”

Mr. John said she could have culture until hell wouldn’t hold it just so long as he never had to go to a Chautauqua or a Self-Betterment Course. He had been to camp meetings and a revival but he had never been to a Chautauqua. He said a camp meeting or a revival was bad enough but at least there was some sexual intercourse afterwards by those who got really aroused although he never knew anyone to pay their bills after a camp meeting or a revival. Mrs. Packard, he told Nick Adams, would get worried about the salvation of his immortal soul after she had been to a big revival by somebody like Gypsy Smith, that great evangelist, but finally it would turn out that he, Packard, looked like Gypsy Smith and everything would be fine finally. But a Chautauqua was something strange. Culture maybe was better than religion, Mr. John thought. But it was a cold proposition. Still they were crazy for it. He could see it was more than a fad, though.

“It’s sure got a hold on them,” he had told Nick Adams. “It must be sort of like the Holy Rollers only in the brain. You study it sometime and tell me what you think. You going to be a writer you ought to get in on it early. Don’t let them get too far ahead of you.”

Mr. John liked Nick Adams because he said he had original sin. Nick did not understand this but he was proud.

“You’re going to have things to repent, boy,” Mr. John had told Nick. “That’s one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them.”

“I don’t want to do anything bad,” Nick had said.

“I don’t want you to,” Mr. John had said. “But you’re alive and you’re going to do things. Don’t you lie and don’t you steal. Everybody has to lie. But you pick out somebody you never lie to.”

“I’ll pick out you.”

“That’s right. Don’t you ever lie to me no matter what and I won’t lie to you.”

“I’ll try,” Nick had said.

“That isn’t it,” Mr. John said. “It has to be absolute.”

“All right,” Nick said. “I’ll never lie to you.”

“What became of your girl?”

“Somebody said she was working up at the Soo.”

“She was a beautiful girl and I always liked her,” Mr. John had said.

“So did I,” Nick said.

“Try and not feel too bad about it.”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “None of it was her fault. She’s just built that way. If I ran into her again I guess I’d get mixed up with her again.”

“Maybe not.”

“Maybe too. I’d try not to.”

Mr. John was thinking about Nick when he went out to the back counter where the two men were waiting for him. He looked them over as he stood there and he didn’t like either of them. He had always disliked the local man Evans and had no respect for him but he sensed that the down-state man was dangerous. He had not analyzed it yet but he saw the man had very flat eyes and a mouth that was tighter than a simple tobacco chewer’s mouth needed to be. He had a real elk’s tooth too on his watch chain. It was a really fine tusk from about a five-year-old bull. It was a beautiful tusk and Mr. John looked at it again and at the over-large bulge the man’s shoulder holster made under his coat.

“Did you kill that bull with that cannon you’re carrying around under your arm?” Mr. John asked the down-state man.

The down-state man looked at Mr. John unappreciatively.

“No,” he said. “I killed that bull out in the thoroughfare country in Wyoming with a Winchester 45-70.”

“You’re a big-gun man, eh?” Mr. John said. He looked under the counter. “Have big feet, too. Do you need that big a cannon when you go out hunting kids?”

“What do you mean, kids,” the down-state man said. He was one ahead.

“I mean the kid you’re looking for.”

“You said kids,” the down-state man said.

Mr. John moved in. It was necessary. “What’s Evans carry when he goes after a boy who’s licked his own boy twice? You must be heavily armed, Evans. That boy could lick you, too.”

“Why don’t you produce him and we could try it,” Evans said.

“You said kids, Mr. Jackson,” the down-state man said. “What made you say that?”

“Looking at you, you cock-sucker,” Mr. John said. “You splayfooted bastard.”

“Why don’t you come out from behind that counter if you want to talk like that?” the down-state man said.

“You’re talking to the United States Postmaster,” Mr. John said. “You’re talking without witnesses except for Turd-Face Evans. I suppose you know why they call him Turd-Face. You can figure it out. You’re a detective.”

He was happy now. He had drawn the attack and he felt now as he used to feel in the old days before he made a living from feeding and bedding resorters who rocked in rustic chairs on the front porch of his hotel while they looked out over the lake.

“Listen, Splayfoot, I remember you very well now. Don’t you remember me, Splayzey?”

The down-state man looked at him. But he did not remember him.

“I remember you in Cheyenne the day Tom Horn was hanged,” Mr. John told him. “You were one of the ones that framed him with promises from the association. Do you remember now? Who owned the saloon in Medicine Bow when you worked for the people that gave it to Tom? Is that why you ended up doing what you’re doing? Haven’t you got any memory?”

“When did you come back here?”

“Two years after they dropped Tom.”

“I’ll be goddamned.”

“Do you remember when I gave you that bull tusk when we were packing out from Greybull?”

“Sure. Listen, Jim, I got to get this kid.”

“My name’s John,” Mr. John said. “John Packard. Come on in back and have a drink. You want to get to know this other character. His name is Crut-Face Evans. We used to call him Turd-Face. I just changed it now out of kindness.”

“Mr. John,” said Mr. Evans. “Why don’t you be friendly and cooperative.”

“I just changed your name, didn’t I?” said Mr. John. “What kind of cooperation do you boys want?”

In the back of the store Mr. John took a bottle off a low shelf in the comer and handed it to the down-state man.

“Drink up, Splayzey,” he said. “You look like you need it.”

They each took a drink and then Mr. John asked, “What are you after this kid for?”

“Violation of the game laws,” the down-state man said.

“What particular violation?”

“He killed a buck deer the twelfth of last month.”

“Two men with guns out after a boy because he killed a deer the twelfth of last month,” Mr. John said.

“There’ve been other violations.”

“But this is the one you’ve got proof of.”

“That’s about it.”

“What were the other violations?”

“Plenty.”

“But you haven’t got proof.”

“I didn’t say that,” Evans said. “But we’ve got proof on this.”

“And the date was the twelfth?”

“That’s right,” said Evans.

“Why don’t you ask some questions instead of answering them?” the down-state man said to his partner. Mr. John laughed. “Let him alone, Splayzey,” he said. “I like to see that great brain work.”

“How well do you know the boy?” the down-state man asked.

“Pretty well.”

“Ever do any business with him?”

“He buys a little stuff here once in a while. Pays cash.”

“Do you have any idea where he’d head for?”

“He’s got folks in Oklahoma.”

“When did you see him last?” Evans asked.

“Come on, Evans,” the down-state man said. “You’re wasting our time. Thanks for the drink, Jim.”

“John,” Mr. John said. “What’s your name, Splayzey?”

“Porter. Henry J. Porter.”

“Splayzey, you’re not going to do any shooting at that boy.”

“I’m going to bring him in.”

“You always were a murderous bastard.”

“Come on, Evans,” the down-state man said. “We’re wasting time in here.”

“You remember what I said about the shooting,” Mr. John said very quietly.

“I heard you,” the down-state man said.

The two men went out through the store and unhitched their light wagon and drove off. Mr. John watched them go up the road. Evans was driving and the down-state man was talking to him.

“Henry J. Porter,” Mr. John thought. “The only name I can remember for him is Splayzey. He had such big feet he had to have made-to-order boots. Splayfoot they called him. Then Splayzey. It was his tracks by the spring where that Nester’s boy was shot that they hung Tom for. Splayzey. Splayzey what? Maybe I never did know. Splayfoot Splayzey. Splayfoot Porter? No, it wasn’t Porter.”

“I’m sorry about those baskets, Mrs. Tabeshaw,” he said. “It’s too late in the season now and they don’t carry over. But if you’d be patient with them down at the hotel you’d get rid of them.”

“You buy them, sell at the hotel,” Mrs. Tabeshaw suggested.

“No. They’d buy them better from you,” Mr. John told her. “You’re a fine looking woman.”

“Long time ago,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said.

“Suzy, I’d like to see you,” Mr. John said.

In the back of the store he said, “Tell me about it.”

“I told you already. They came for Nickie and they waited for him to come home. His youngest sister let him know they were waiting for him. When they were sleeping drunk Nickie got his stuff and pulled out. He’s got grub for two weeks easy and he’s got his rifle and young Littless went with him.”

“Why did she go?”

“I don’t know, Mr. John. I guess she wanted to look after him and keep him from doing anything bad. You know him.”

“You live up by Evans’s. How much do you think he knows about the country Nick uses?”

“All he can. But I don’t know how much.”

“Where do you think they went?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mr. John. Nickie knows a lot of country.”

“That man with Evans is no good. He’s really bad.”

“He isn’t very smart.”

“He’s smarter than he acts. The booze has him down. But he’s smart and he’s bad. I used to know him.”

“What do you want me to do.”

“Nothing, Suzy. Let me know about anything.”

“I’ll add up my stuff, Mr. John, and you can check it.”

“How are you going home?”

“I can get the boat up to Henry’s Dock and then get a rowboat from the cottage and row down and get the stuff. Mr. John, what will they do with Nickie?”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“They were talking about getting him put in the reform school.”

“I wish he hadn’t killed that buck.”

“So does he. He told me he was reading in a book about how you could crease something with a bullet and it wouldn’t do any harm. It would just stun it and Nickie wanted to try it. He said it was a damn fool thing to do. But he wanted to try it. Then he hit the buck and broke its neck. He felt awful about it. He felt awful about trying to crease it in the first place.”

“I know.”

“Then it must have been Evans found the meat where he had it hung up in the old springhouse. Anyway somebody took it.”

“Who could have told Evans?”

“I think it was just that boy of his found it. He trails around after Nick all the time. You never see him. He could have seen Nickie kill the buck. That boy’s no good, Mr. John. But he sure can trail around after anybody. He’s liable to be in this room right now.”

“No,” said Mr. John. “But he could be listening outside.”

“I think he’s after Nick by now,” the girl said.

“Did you hear them say anything about him at the house?”

“They never mentioned him,” Suzy said.

“Evans must have left him home to do the chores. I don’t think we have to worry about him till they get home to Evans’s.”

“I can row up the lake to home this afternoon and get one of our kids to let me know if Evans hires anyone to do the chores. That will mean he’s turned that boy loose.”

“Both the men are too old to trail anybody.”

“But that boy’s terrible, Mr. John, and he knows too much about Nickie and where he would go. He’d find them and then bring the men up to them.”

“Come in back of the post office,” Mr. John said.

Back of the filing slits and the lockboxes and the registry book and the flat stamp books in place along with the cancellation stamps and their pads, with the General Delivery window down, so that Suzy felt again the glory of office that had been hers when she had helped out in the store, Mr. John said, “Where do you think they went, Suzy?”

“I wouldn’t know, true. Somewhere not too far or he wouldn’t take Littless. Somewhere that’s really good or he wouldn’t take her. They know about the trout for trout dinners, too, Mr. John.”

“That boy?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe we better do something about the Evans boy.”

“I’d kill him. I’m pretty sure that’s why Littless went along. So Nickie wouldn’t kill him.”

“You fix it up so we keep track of them.”

“I will. But you have to think out something, Mr. John. Mrs. Adams, she’s just broke down. She just gets a sick headache like always. Here. You better take this letter.”

“You drop it in the box,” Mr. John said. “That’s United States mail.”

“I wanted to kill them both last night when they were asleep.”

“No,” Mr. John told her. “Don’t talk that way and don’t think that way.”

“Didn’t you ever want to kill anybody, Mr. John?”

“Yes. But it’s wrong and it doesn’t work out.”

“My father killed a man.”

“It didn’t do him any good.”

“He couldn’t help it.”

“You have to learn to help it,” Mr. John said. “You get along now, Suzy.”

“I’ll see you tonight or in the morning,” Suzy said. “I wish I still worked here, Mr. John.”

“So do I, Suzy. But Mrs. Packard doesn’t see it that way.”

“I know,” said Suzy. “That’s the way everything is.”

Nick and his sister were lying on a browse bed under a lean-to that they had built together on the edge of the hemlock forest looking out over the slope of the hill to the cedar swamp and the blue hills beyond.

“If it isn’t comfortable, Littless, we can feather in some more balsam on that hemlock. We’ll be tired tonight and this will do. But we can fix it up really good tomorrow.”

“It feels lovely,” his sister said. “Lie loose and really feel it, Nickie.”

“It’s a pretty good camp,” Nick said. “And it doesn’t show. We’ll only use little fires.”

“Would a fire show across to the hills?”

“It might,” Nick said. “A fire shows a long way at night. But I’ll stake out a blanket behind it. That way it won’t show.”

“Nickie, wouldn’t it be nice if there wasn’t anyone after us and we were just here for fun?”

“Don’t start thinking that way so soon,” Nick said. “We just started. Anyway if we were just here for fun we wouldn’t be here.”

“I’m sorry, Nickie.”

“You don’t need to be,” Nick told her. “Look, Littless, I’m going down to get a few trout for supper.”

“Can I come?”

“No. You stay here and rest. You had a tough day. You read a while or just be quiet.”

“It was tough in the slashings, wasn’t it? I thought it was really hard. Did I do all right?”

“You did wonderfully and you were wonderful making camp. But you take it easy now.”

“Have we got a name for this camp?”

“Let’s call it Camp Number One,” Nick said.

He went down the hill toward the creek and when he had come almost to the bank he stopped and cut himself a willow stick about four feet long and trimmed it, leaving the bark on. He could see the clear fast water of the stream. It was narrow and deep and the banks were mossy here before the stream entered the swamp. The dark clear water flowed fast and its rushing made bulges on the surface. Nick did not go close to it as he knew it flowed under the banks and he did not want to frighten a fish by walking on the bank.

There must be quite a few up here in the open now, he thought. It’s pretty late in the summer.

He took a coil of silk line out of a tobacco pouch he carried in the left breast pocket of his shirt and cut a length that was not quite as long as the willow stick and fastened it to the tip where he had notched it lightly. Then he fastened on a hook that he took from the pouch; then holding the shank of the hook he tested the pull of the line and the bend of the willow. He laid his rod down now and went back to where the trunk of a small birch tree, dead for several years, lay on its side in the grove of birches that bordered the cedars by the stream. He rolled the log over and found several earthworms under it. They were not big. But they were red and lively and he put them in a flat round tin with holes punched in the top that had once held Copenhagen snuff. He put some dirt over them and rolled the log back. This was the third year he had found bait at this same place and he had always replaced the log so that it was as he had found it.

Nobody knows how big this creek is, he thought. It picks up an awful volume of water in that bad swamp up above. Now he looked up the creek and down it and up the hill to the hemlock forest where the camp was. Then he walked to where he had left the pole with the line and the hook and baited the hook carefully and spat on it for good luck. Holding the pole and the line with the baited hook in his right hand he walked very carefully and gently toward the bank of the narrow, heavy-flowing stream.

It was so narrow here that his willow pole would have spanned it and as he came close to the bank he heard the turbulent rush of the water. He stopped by the bank, out of sight of anything in the stream, and took two lead shot, split down one side, out of the tobacco pouch and bent them on the line about a foot above the hook, clinching them with his teeth.

He swung the hook on which the two worms curled out over the water and dropped it gently in so that it sank, swirling in the fast water, and he lowered the tip of the willow pole to let the current take the line and the baited hook under the bank. He felt the line straighten and a sudden heavy firmness. He swung up on the pole and it bent almost double in his hand. He felt the throbbing, jerking pull that did not yield as he pulled. Then it yielded, rising in the water with the line. There was a heavy wildness of movement in the narrow, deep current, and the trout was torn out of the water and, flopping in the air, sailed over Nick’s shoulder and onto the bank behind him. Nick saw him shine in the sun and then he found him where he was tumbling in the ferns. He was strong and heavy in Nick’s hands and he had a pleasant smell and Nick saw how dark his back was and how brilliant his spots were colored and how bright the edges of his fins were. They were white on the edge with a black line behind and then there was the lovely golden sunset color of his belly. Nick held him in his right hand and he could just reach around him.

He’s pretty big for the skillet, he thought. But I’ve hurt him and I have to kill him.

He knocked the trout’s head sharply against the handle of his hunting knife and laid him against the trunk of a birch tree.

“Damn,” he said. “He’s a perfect size for Mrs. Packard and her trout dinners. But he’s pretty big for Littless and me.”

I better go upstream and find a shallow and try to get a couple of small ones, he thought. Damn, didn’t he feel like something when I horsed him out though? They can talk all they want about playing them but people that have never horsed them out don’t know what they can make you feel. What if it only lasts that long? It’s the time when there’s no give at all and then they start to come and what they do to you on the way up and into the air.

This is a strange creek, he thought. It’s funny when you have to hunt for small ones.

He found his pole where he had thrown it. The hook was bent and he straightened it. Then he picked up the heavy fish and started up the stream.

There’s one shallow, pebbly part just after she comes out of the upper swamp, he thought. I can get a couple of small ones there. Littless might not like this big one. If she gets homesick I’ll have to take her back. I wonder what those old boys are doing now? I don’t think that goddam Evans kid knows about this place. That son of a bitch. I don’t think anybody fished in here but Indians. You should have been an Indian, he thought. It would have saved you a lot of trouble.

He made his way up the creek, keeping back from the stream but once stepping onto a piece of bank where the stream flowed underground. A big trout broke out in a violence that made a slashing wake in the water. He was a trout so big that it hardly seemed he could turn in the stream.

“When did you come up?” Nick said when the fish had gone under the bank again further upstream. “Boy, what a trout.”

At the pebbly shallow stretch he caught two small trout. They were beautiful fish, too, firm and hard and he gutted the three fish and tossed the guts into the stream, then washed the trout carefully in the cold water and then wrapped them in a small faded sugar sack from his pocket.

It’s a good thing that girl likes fish, he thought. I wish we could have picked some berries. I know where I can always get some, though. He started back up the hill slope toward their camp. The sun was down behind the hill and the weather was good. He looked out across the swamp and up in the sky, above where the arm of the lake would be, he saw a fish hawk flying.

He came up to the lean-to very quietly and his sister did not hear him. She was lying on her side, reading. Seeing her, he spoke softly not to startle her.

“What did you do, you monkey?”

She turned and looked at him and smiled and shook her head.

“I cut it off,” she said.

“How?”

“With a scissors. How did you think?”

“How did you see to do it?”

“I just held it out and cut it. It’s easy. Do I look like a boy?”

“Like a wild boy of Borneo.”

“I couldn’t cut it like a Sunday-school boy. Does it look too wild?”

“No.”

“It’s very exciting,” she said. “Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?”

“No.”

“I wish it would.”

“You’re crazy, Littless.”

“Maybe I am. Do I look like an idiot boy?”

“A little.”

“You can make it neater. You can see to cut it with a comb.”

“I’ll have to make it a little better but not much. Are you hungry, idiot brother?”

“Can’t I just be an un-idiot brother?”

“I don’t want to trade you for a brother.”

“You have to now, Nickie, don’t you see? It was something we had to do. I should have asked you but I knew it was something we had to do so I did it for a surprise.”

“I like it,” Nick said. “The hell with everything. I like it very much.”

“Thank you, Nickie, so much. I was laying trying to rest like you said. But all I could do was imagine things to do for you. I was going to get you a chewing tobacco can full of knockout drops from some big saloon in some place like Sheboygan.”

“Who did you get them from?”

Nick was sitting down now and his sister sat on his lap and held her arms around his neck and rubbed her cropped head against his cheek.

“I got them from the Queen of the Whores,” she said. “And you know the name of the saloon?”

“No.”

“The Royal Ten Dollar Gold Piece Inn and Emporium.”

“What did you do there?”

“I was a whore’s assistant.”

“What’s a whore’s assistant do?”

“Oh, she carries the whore’s train when she walks and opens her carriage door and shows her to the right room. It’s like a lady in waiting I guess.”

“What’s she say to the whore?”

“She’ll say anything that comes into her mind as long as it’s polite.”

“Like what, brother?”

“Like, ‘Well ma’am, it must be pretty tiring on a hot day like today to be just a bird in a gilded cage.’ Things like that.”

“What’s the whore say?”

“She says, ‘Yes, indeedy. It sure is sweetness.’ Because this whore I was whore’s assistant to is of humble origin.”

“What kind of origin are you?”

“I’m the sister or the brother of a morbid writer and I’m delicately brought up. This makes me intensely desirable to the main whore and to all of her circle.”

“Did you get the knockout drops?”

“Of course. She said, ‘Hon, take these little old drops.’ Thank you,’ I said! ‘Give my regards to your morbid brother and ask him to stop by the Emporium anytime he is at Sheboygan.’”

“Get off my lap,” Nick said.

“That’s just the way they talk in the Emporium,” Littless said.

“I have to get supper. Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’ll get supper.”

“No,” Nick said. “You keep on talking.”

“Don’t you think we’re going to have fun, Nickie?”

“We’re having fun now.”

“Do you want me to tell you about the other thing I did for you?”

“You mean before you decided to do something practical and cut off your hair?”

“This was practical enough. Wait till you hear it. Can I kiss you while you’re making supper?”

“Wait a while and I’ll tell you. What was it you were going to do?”

“Well, I guess I was ruined morally last night when I stole the whiskey. Do you think you can be ruined morally by just one thing like that?”

“No. Anyway the bottle was open.”

“Yes. But I took the empty pint bottle and the quart bottle with the whiskey in it out to the kitchen and I poured the pint bottle full and some spilled on my hand and I licked it off and I thought that probably ruined me morally.”

“How’d it taste?”

“Awfully strong and funny and a little sick-making.”

“That wouldn’t ruin you morally.”

“Well, I’m glad because if I was ruined morally how could I exercise a good influence on you?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “What was it you were going to do?”

He had his fire made and the skillet resting on it and he was laying strips of bacon in the skillet. His sister was watching and she had her hands folded across her knees and he watched her unclasp her hands and put one arm down and lean on it and put her legs out straight. She was practicing being a boy.

“I’ve got to learn to put my hands right.”

“Keep them away from your head.”

“I know. It would be easy if there was some boy my own age to copy.”

“Copy me.”

“That would be natural, wouldn’t it? You won’t laugh, though?”

“Maybe.”

“Gee, I hope I won’t start to be a girl while we’re on the trip.”

“Don’t worry.”

“We have the same shoulders and the same kind of legs.”

“What was the other thing you were going to do?”

Nick was cooking the trout now. The bacon was curled brown on a fresh-cut chip of wood from the piece of fallen timber they were using for the fire and they both smelled the trout cooking in the bacon fat. Nick basted them and then turned them and basted them again. It was getting dark and he had rigged a piece of canvas behind the little fire so that it would not be seen.

“What were you going to do?” he asked again. Littless leaned forward and spat toward the fire.

“How was that?”

“You missed the skillet anyway.”

“Oh, it’s pretty bad. I got it out of the Bible. I was going to take three spikes, one for each of them, and drive them into the temples of those two and that boy while they slept.”

“What were you going to drive them in with?”

“A muffled hammer.”

“How do you muffle a hammer?”

“I’d muffle it all right.”

“That nail thing’s pretty rough to try.”

“Well, that girl did it in the Bible and since I’ve seen armed men drunk and asleep and circulated among them at night and stolen their whiskey why shouldn’t I go the whole way, especially if I learned it in the Bible?”

“They didn’t have a muffled hammer in the Bible.”

“I guess I mixed it up with muffled oars.”

“Maybe. And we don’t want to kill anybody. That’s why you came along.”

“I know. But crime comes easy for you and me, Nickie. We’re different from the others. Then I thought if I was ruined morally I might as well be useful.”

“You’re crazy, Littless,” he said. “Listen, does tea keep you awake?”

“I don’t know. I never had it at night. Only peppermint tea.”

“I’ll make it very weak and put canned cream in it.”

“I don’t need it, Nickie, if we’re short.” “It will just give the milk a little taste.”

They were eating now. Nick had cut them each two slices of rye bread and he soaked one slice for each in the bacon fat in the skillet. They ate that and the trout that were crisp outside and cooked well and very tender inside. Then they put the trout skeletons in the fire and ate the bacon made in a sandwich with the other piece of bread, and then Littless drank the weak tea with the condensed milk in it and Nick tapped two slivers of wood into the holes he had punched in the can.

“Did you have enough?”

“Plenty. The trout was wonderful and the bacon, too. Weren’t we lucky they had rye bread?”

“Eat an apple,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have something good tomorrow. Maybe I should have made a bigger supper, Littless.”

“No. I had plenty.”

“You’re sure you’re not hungry?”

“No. I’m full. I’ve got some chocolate if you’d like some.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“From my savior.”

“Where?”

“My savior. Where I save everything.”

“Oh.”

“This is fresh. Some is the hard kind from the kitchen. We can start on that and save the other for sometime special. Look, my savior’s got a drawstring like a tobacco pouch. We can use it for nuggets and things like that. Do you think we’ll get out west, Nickie, on this trip?”

“I haven’t got it figured yet.”

“I’d like to get my savior packed full of nuggets worth sixteen dollars an ounce.”

Nick cleaned up the skillet and put the pack in at the head of the leanto. One blanket was spread over the browse bed and he put the other one on it and tucked it under on Littless’s side. He cleaned out the two-quart tin pail he’d made tea in and filled it with cold water from the spring. When he came back from the spring his sister was in the bed asleep, her head on the pillow she had made by rolling her blue jeans around her moccasins. He kissed her but she did not wake and he put on his old Mackinaw coat and felt in the packsack until he found the pint bottle of whiskey.

He opened it and smelled it and it smelled very good. He dipped a half a cup of water out of the small pail he had brought from the spring and poured a little of the whiskey in it. Then he sat and sipped this very slowly, letting it stay under his tongue before he brought it slowly back over his tongue and swallowed it.

He watched the small coals of the fire brighten with the light evening breeze and he tasted the whiskey and cold water and looked at the coals and thought. Then he finished the cup, dipped up some cold water and drank it and went to bed. The rifle was under his left leg and his head was on the good hard pillow his moccasins and the rolled trousers made and he pulled his side of the blanket tight around him and said his prayers and went to sleep.

In the night he was cold and he spread his Mackinaw coat over his sister and rolled his back over closer to her so that there was more of his side of the blanket under him. He felt for the gun and tucked it under his leg again. The air was cold and sharp to breathe and he smelled the cut hemlock and balsam boughs. He had not realized how tired he was until the cold had waked him. Now he lay comfortable again feeling the warmth of his sister’s body against his back and he thought, I must take good care of her and keep her happy and get her back safely. He listened to her breathing and to the quiet of the night and then he was asleep again.

It was just light enough to see the far hills beyond the swamp when he woke. He lay quietly and stretched the stiffness from his body. Then he sat up and pulled on his khaki trousers and put on his moccasins. He watched his sister sleeping with the collar of the warm Mackinaw coat under her chin and her high cheekbones and brown freckled skin light rose under the brown, her chopped-off hair showing the beautiful line of her head and emphasizing her straight nose and her close-set ears. He wished he could draw her face and he watched the way her long lashes lay on her cheeks.

She looks like a small wild animal, he thought, and she sleeps like one. How would you say her head looks, he thought. I guess the nearest is that it looks as though someone had cut her hair off on a wooden block with an ax. It has a sort of a carved look. He loved his sister very much and she loved him too much. But, he thought, I guess those things straighten out. At least I hope so.

There’s no sense waking anyone up, he thought. She must have been really tired if I’m as tired as I am. If we are all right here we are doing just what we should do: staying out of sight until things quiet down and that down-state man pulls out. I’ve got to feed her better, though. It’s a shame I couldn’t have outfitted really good.

We’ve got a lot of things, though. The pack was heavy enough. But what we want to get today is berries. I better get a partridge or a couple if I can. We can get good mushrooms, too. We’ll have to be careful about the bacon but we won’t need it with the shortening. Maybe I fed her too light last night. She’s used to lots of milk, too, and sweet things. Don’t worry about it. We’ll feed good. It’s a good thing she likes trout. They were really good. Don’t worry about her. She’ll eat wonderfully. But, Nick, boy, you certainly didn’t feed her too much yesterday. Better to let her sleep than to wake her up now. There’s plenty for you to do.

He started to get some things out of the pack very carefully and his sister smiled in her sleep. The brown skin came taut over her cheekbones when she smiled and the undercolor showed. She did not wake and he started to prepare to make breakfast and get the fire ready. There was plenty of wood cut and he built a very small fire and made tea while he waited to start breakfast. He drank his tea straight and ate three dried apricots and he tried to read in Loma Doone. But he had read it and it did not have magic any more and he knew it was a loss on this trip.

Late in the afternoon, when they had made camp, he had put some prunes in a tin pail to soak and he put them on the fire now to stew. In the pack he found the prepared buckwheat flour and he put it out with an enameled saucepan and a tin cup to mix the flour with water to make a batter. He had the tin of vegetable shortening and he cut a piece off the top of an empty flour sack and wrapped it around a cut stick and tied it tight with a piece of fish line. Littless had brought four old flour sacks and he was proud of her.

He mixed the batter and put the skillet on the fire, greasing it with the shortening which he spread with the cloth on the stick. First it made the skillet shine darkly, then it sizzled and spat and he greased again and poured the batter smoothly and watched it bubble and then start to firm around the edges. He watched the rising and the forming of the texture and the gray color of the cake. He loosened it from the pan with a fresh clean chip and flipped it and caught it, the beautiful browned side up, the other sizzling. He could feel its weight but see it growing in buoyancy in the skillet.

“Good morning,” his sister said. “Did I sleep awfully late?”

“No, devil.”

She stood up with her shirt hanging down over her brown legs.

“You’ve done everything.”

“No. I just started the cakes.”

“Doesn’t that one smell wonderful? I’ll go to the spring and wash and come and help.”

“Don’t wash in the spring.”

“I’m not white man,” she said. She was gone behind the lean-to.

“Where did you leave the soap?” she asked.

“It’s by the spring. There’s an empty lard bucket. Bring the butter, will you. It’s in the spring.”

“I’ll be right back.”

There was a half a pound of butter and she brought it wrapped in the oiled paper in the empty lard bucket.

They ate the buckwheat cakes with butter and Log Cabin syrup out of a tin Log Cabin can. The top of the chimney unscrewed and the syrup poured from the chimney. They were both very hungry and the cakes were delicious with the butter melting on them and running down into the cut places with the syrup. They ate the prunes out of the tin cups and drank the juice. Then they drank tea from the same cups.

“Prunes taste like a celebration,” Littless said. “Think of that. How did you sleep, Nickie?”

“Good.”

“Thank you for putting the Mackinaw on me. Wasn’t it a lovely night, though?”

“Yes. Did you sleep all night?”

“I’m still asleep. Nickie, can we stay here always?”

“I don’t think so. You’d grow up and have to get married.”

“I’m going to get married to you anyway. I want to be your commonlaw wife. I read about it in the paper.”

“That’s where you read about the Unwritten Law.”

“Sure. I’m going to be your common-law wife under the Unwritten Law. Can’t I, Nickie?”

“No.”

“I will. I’ll surprise you. All you have to do is live a certain time as man and wife. I’ll get them to count this time now. It’s just like homesteading.”

“I won’t let you file.”

“You can’t help yourself. That’s the Unwritten Law. I’ve thought it out lots of times. I’ll get cards printed Mrs. Nick Adams, Cross Village, Michigan — common-law wife. I’ll hand these out to a few people openly each year until the time’s up.”

“I don’t think it would work.”

“I’ve got another scheme. We’ll have a couple of children while I’m a minor. Then you have to marry me under the Unwritten Law.”

“That’s not the Unwritten Law.”

“I get mixed up on it.”

“Anyway, nobody knows yet if it works.”

“It must,” she said. “Mr. Thaw is counting on it.”

“Mr. Thaw might make a mistake.”

“Why Nickie, Mr. Thaw practically invented the Unwritten Law.”

“I thought it was his lawyer.”

“Well, Mr. Thaw put in the action anyway.”

“I don’t like Mr. Thaw,” Nick Adams said.

“That’s good. There’s things about him I don’t like either. But he certainly made the paper more interesting reading, didn’t he?”

“He gives the others something new to hate.”

“They hate Mr. Stanford White, too.”

“I think they’re jealous of both of them.”

“I believe that’s true, Nickie. Just like they’re jealous of us.”

“Think anybody is jealous of us now?”

“Not right now maybe. Our mother will think we’re fugitives from justice steeped in sin and iniquity. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know I got you that whiskey.”

“I tried it last night. It’s very good.”

“Oh, I’m glad. That’s the first whiskey I ever stole anywhere. Isn’t it wonderful that it’s good? I didn’t think anything about those people could be good.”

“I’ve got to think about them too much. Let’s not talk about them,” Nick said.

“All right. What are we going to do today?”

“What would you like to do?”

“I’d like to go to Mr. John’s store and get everything we need.”

“We can’t do that.”

“I know it. What do you plan to really do?”

“We ought to get some berries and I ought to get a partridge or some partridges. We’ve always got trout. But I don’t want you to get tired of trout.”

“Were you ever tired of trout?”

“No. But they say people get tired of them.”

“I wouldn’t get tired of them,” Littless said. “You get tired of pike right away. But you never get tired of trout nor of perch. I know, Nickie. True.”

“You don’t get tired of walleyed pike either,” Nick said. “Only of shovelnose. Boy, you sure get tired of them.”

“I don’t like the pitchfork bones,” his sister said. “It’s a fish that surfeits you.”

“We’ll clean up here and I’ll find a place to cache the shells and we’ll make a trip for berries and try to get some birds.”

“I’ll bring two lard pails and a couple of the sacks,” his sister said.

“Littless,” Nick said. “You remember about going to the bathroom, will you please?”

“Of course.”

“That’s important.”

“I know it. You remember, too.”

“I will.”

Nick went back into the timber and buried the carton of .22 long-rifles and the loose boxes of .22 shorts under the brown-needled floor at the base of a big hemlock. He put back the packed needles he had cut with his knife and made a small cut as far up as he could reach on the heavy bark of the tree. He took a bearing on the tree and then came out onto the hillside and walked down to the lean-to.

It was a lovely morning now. The sky was high and clear blue and no clouds had come yet. Nick was happy with his sister and he thought, no matter how this thing comes out we might as well have a good happy time. He had already learned there was only one day at a time and that it was always the day you were in. It would be today until it was tonight and tomorrow would be today again. This was the main thing he had learned so far.

Today was a good day and coming down to the camp with his rifle he was happy although their trouble was like a fishhook caught in his pocket that pricked him occasionally as he walked. They left the pack inside the lean-to. There were great odds against a bear bothering it in the daytime because any bear would be down below feeding on berries around the swamp. But Nick buried the bottle of whiskey up behind the spring. Littless was not back yet and Nick sat down on the log of the fallen tree they were using for firewood and checked his rifle. They were going after partridges so he pulled out the tube of the magazine and poured the long-rifle cartridges into his hand and then put them into a chamois pouch and filled the magazine with .22 shorts. They made less noise and would not tear the meat up if he could not get head shots.

He was all ready now and wanted to start. Where’s that girl anyway, he thought. Then he thought, don’t get excited. You told her to take her time. Don’t get nervous. But he was nervous and it made him angry at himself.

“Here I am,” his sister said. “I’m sorry that I took so long. I went too far away, I guess.”

“You’re fine,” Nick said. “Let’s go. You have the pails?”

“Uh huh, and covers, too.”

They started down across the hill to the creek. Nick looked carefully up the stream and along the hillside. His sister watched him. She had the pails in one of the sacks and carried it slung over her shoulder by the other sack.

“Aren’t you taking a pole, Nickie?” she asked him.

“No. I’ll cut one if we fish.”

He moved ahead of his sister, holding the rifle in one hand, keeping a little way away from the stream. He was hunting now.

“It’s a strange creek,” his sister said.

“It’s the biggest small stream I’ve ever known,” Nick told her.

“It’s deep and scary for a little stream.”

“It keeps having new springs,” Nick said. “And it digs under the bank and it digs down. It’s awful cold water, Littless. Feel it.”

“Gee,” she said. It was numbing cold.

“The sun warms it a little,” Nick said. “But not much. We’ll hunt along easy. There’s a berry patch down below.”

They went along down the creek. Nick was studying the banks. He had seen a mink’s track and shown it to his sister and they had seen tiny ruby-crowned kinglets that were hunting insects and let the boy and girl come close as they moved sharply and delicately in the cedars. They had seen cedar waxwings so calm and gentle and distinguished moving in their lovely elegance with the magic wax touches on their wing coverts and their tails, and Littless had said, “They’re the most beautiful, Nickie. There couldn’t be more simply beautiful birds.”

“They’re built like your face,” he said.

“No, Nickie. Don’t make fun. Cedar waxwings make me so proud and happy that I cry.”

“When they wheel and light and then move so proud and friendly and gently,” Nick said.

They had gone on and suddenly Nick had raised the rifle and shot before his sister could see what he was looking at. Then she heard the sound of a big bird tossing and beating its wings on the ground. She saw Nick pumping the gun and shoot twice more and each time she heard another pounding of wings in the willow brush. Then there was the whirring noise of wings as large brown birds burst out of the willows and one bird flew only a little way and lit in the willows and with its crested head on one side looked down, bending the collar of feathers on his neck where the other birds were still thumping. The bird looking down from the red willow brush was beautiful, plump, heavy and looked so stupid with his head turned down and as Nick raised his rifle slowly, his sister whispered, “No, Nickie. Please no. We’ve got plenty.”

“All right,” Nick said. “You want to take him?”

“No, Nickie. No.”

Nick went forward into the willows and picked up the three grouse and batted their heads against the butt of the rifle stock and laid them out on the moss. His sister felt them, warm and full-breasted and beautifully feathered.

“Wait till we eat them,” Nick said. He was very happy.

“I’m sorry for them now,” his sister said. “They were enjoying the morning just like we were.”

She looked up at the grouse still in the tree.

“It does look a little silly still staring down,” she said.

“This time of year the Indians call them fool hens. After they’ve been hunted they get smart. They’re not the real fool hens. Those never get smart. They’re willow grouse. These are ruffled grouse.”

“I hope we’ll get smart,” his sister said. “Tell him to go away, Nickie.”

“You tell him.”

“Go away, partridge.”

The grouse did not move.

Nick raised the rifle and the grouse looked at him. Nick knew he could not shoot the bird without making his sister sad and he made a noise blowing out so his tongue rattled and lips shook like a grouse bursting from cover and the bird looked at him fascinated.

“We better not annoy him,” Nick said.

“I’m sorry, Nickie,” his sister said. “He is stupid.”

“Wait till we eat them,” Nick told her. “You’ll see why we hunt them.”

“Are they out of season, too?”

“Sure. But they are full grown and nobody but us would ever hunt them. I kill plenty of great horned owls and a great horned owl will kill a partridge every day if he can. They hunt all the time and they kill all the good birds.”

“He certainly could kill that one easy,” his sister said. “I don’t feel bad any more. Do you want a bag to carry them in?”

“I’ll draw them and then pack them in the bag with some ferns. It isn’t so far to the berries now.”

They sat against one of the cedars and Nick opened the birds and took out their warm entrails and feeling the inside of the birds hot on his right hand he found the edible parts of the giblets and cleaned them and then washed them in the stream. When the birds were cleaned he smoothed their feathers and wrapped them in ferns and put them in the flour sack. He tied the mouth of the flour sack and two corners with a piece of fish line and slung it over his shoulder and then went back to the stream and dropped the entrails in and tossed some bright pieces of lung in to see the trout rise in the rapid heavy flow of the water.

“They’d make good bait but we don’t need bait now,” he said. “Our trout are all in the stream and we’ll take them when we need them.”

“This stream would make us rich if it was near home,” his sister said.

“It would be fished out then. This is the last really wild stream there is except in another awful country to get to beyond the foot of the lake. I never brought anybody here to fish.”

“Who ever fishes it?”

“Nobody I know.”

“Is it a virgin stream?”

“No. Indians fish it. But they’re gone now since they quit cutting hemlock bark and the camps closed down.”

“Does the Evans boy know?”

“Not him,” Nick said. But then he thought about it and it made him feel sick. He could see the Evans boy.

“What’re you thinking, Nickie?”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“You were thinking. You tell me. We’re partners.”

“He might know,” Nick said. “Goddam it. He might know.”

“But you don’t know that he knows?”

“No. That’s the trouble. If I did I’d get out.”

“Maybe he’s back at camp now,” his sister said.

“Don’t talk that way. Do you want to bring him?”

“No,” she said. “Please, Nickie, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

“I’m not,” Nick said. “I’m grateful. I knew it anyway. Only I’d stopped thinking about it. I have to think about things now the rest of my life.”

“You always thought about things.”

“Not like this.”

“Let’s go down and get the berries anyway,” Littless said. “There isn’t anything we can do now to help, is there?”

“No,” Nick said. “We’ll pick the berries and get back to camp.”

But Nick was trying to accept it now and think his way all the way through it. He must not get in a panic about it. Nothing had changed. Things were just as they were when he had decided to come here and let things blow over. The Evans boy could have followed him here before. But it was very unlikely. He could have followed him one time when he had gone in from the road through the Hodges’ place, but it was doubtful. Nobody had been fishing the stream. He could be sure of that. But the Evans boy did not care about fishing.

“All that bastard cares about is trailing me,” he said.

“I know it, Nickie.”

“This is three times he’s made trouble.”

“I know it, Nickie. But don’t you kill him.”

That’s why she came along, Nick thought. That’s why she’s here. I can’t do it while she’s along.

“I know I mustn’t kill him,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do now. Let’s not talk about it.”

“As long as you don’t kill him,” his sister said. “There’s nothing we can’t get out of and nothing that won’t blow over.”

“Let’s get back to camp,” Nick said.

“Without the berries?”

“We’ll get the berries another day.”

“Are you nervous, Nickie?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“But what good will we be back at camp?”

“We’ll know quicker.”

“Can’t we just go along the way we were going?”

“Not now. I’m not scared, Littless. And don’t you be scared. But something’s made me nervous.”

Nick had cut up away from the stream into the edge of the timber and they were walking in the shade of the trees. They would come onto the camp now from above.

From the timber they approached the camp carefully. Nick went ahead with the rifle. The camp had not been visited.

“You stay here,” Nick told his sister. “I’m going to have a look beyond.” He left the sack with the birds and the berry pails with Littless and went well upstream. As soon as he was out of sight of his sister he changed the .22 shorts in the rifle for the long-rifles. I won’t kill him, he thought, but anyway it’s the right thing to do. He made a careful search of the country. He saw no sign of anyone and he went down to the stream and then downstream and back up to the camp.

“I’m sorry I was nervous, Littless,” he said. “We might as well have a good lunch and then we won’t have to worry about a fire showing at night.”

“I’m worried now, too,” she said.

“Don’t you be worried. It’s just like it was before.”

“But he drove us back from getting the berries without him even being here.”

“I know. But he’s not been here. Maybe he’s never even been to this creek ever. Maybe we’ll never see him again.”

“He makes me scared, Nickie, worse when he’s not here than when he’s here.”

“I know. But there isn’t any use being scared.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, we better wait to cook until night.”

“Why did you change?”

“He won’t be around here at night. He can’t come through the swamp in the dark. We don’t have to worry about him early in the mornings and late in the evening nor in the dark. We’ll have to be like the deer and only be out then. We’ll lay up in the daytime.”

“Maybe he’ll never come.”

“Sure. Maybe.”

“But I can stay though, can’t I?”

“I ought to get you home.”

“No. Please, Nickie. Who’s going to keep you from killing him then?”

“Listen, Littless, don’t ever talk about killing and remember I never talked about killing. There isn’t any killing nor ever going to be any.”

“True?”

“True.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Don’t even be that. Nobody ever talked about it.”

“All right. I never thought about it nor spoke about it.”

“Me either.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“I never even thought about it.”

No, he thought. You never even thought about it. Only all day and all night. But you mustn’t think about it in front of her because she can feel it because she is your sister and you love each other.

“Are you hungry, Littless?”

“Not really.”

“Eat some of the hard chocolate and I’ll get some fresh water from the spring.”

“I don’t have to have anything.”

They looked across to where the big white clouds of the eleven o’clock breeze were coming up over the blue hills beyond the swamp. The sky was a high clear blue and the clouds came up white and detached themselves from behind the hills and moved high in the sky as the breeze freshened and the shadows of the clouds moved over the swamp and across the hillside. The wind blew in the trees now and was cool as they lay in the shade. The water from the spring was cold and fresh in the tin pail and the chocolate was not quite bitter but was hard and crunched as they chewed it.

“It’s as good as the water in the spring where we were when we first saw them,” his sister said. “It tastes even better after the chocolate.”

“We can cook if you’re hungry.”

“I’m not if you’re not.”

“I’m always hungry. I was a fool not to go on and get the berries.”

“No. You came back to find out.”

“Look, Littless. I know a good place back by the slashing we came through where we can get berries. I’ll cache everything and we can go in there through the timber all the way and pick a couple of pails full and then we’ll have them ahead for tomorrow. It isn’t a bad walk.”

“All right. But I’m fine.”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“No. Not at all now after the chocolate. I’d love to just stay and read. We had a nice walk when we were hunting.”

“All right,” Nick said. “Are you tired from yesterday?”

“Maybe a little.”

“We’ll take it easy. I’ll read Wuthering Heights.”

“Is it too old to read out loud to me?”

“No.”

“Will you read it?”

“Sure.”

AN AFRICAN STORY

HE WAS WAITING FOR THE MOON TO RISE and he felt Kibo’s hair rise under his hand as he stroked him to be quiet and they both watched and listened as the moon came up and gave them shadows. His arm was around the dog’s neck now and he could feel him shivering. All of the night sounds had stopped. They did not hear the elephant and David did not see him until the dog turned his head and seemed to settle into David. Then the elephant’s shadow covered them and he moved past making no noise at all and they smelled him in the light wind that came down from the mountain. He smelled strong but old and sour and when he was past David saw that the left tusk was so long it seemed to reach the ground.

They waited but no other elephants came by and then David and the dog started off running in the moonlight. The dog kept close behind him and when David stopped the dog pressed his muzzle into the back of his knee.

David had to see the bull again and they came up on him at the edge of the forest. He was traveling toward the mountain and slowly moving into the steady night breeze. David came close enough to see him cut off the moon again and to smell the sour oldness but he could not see the right tusk. He was afraid to work closer with the dog and he took him back with the wind and pushed him down against the base of a tree and tried to make him understand. He thought the dog would stay and he did but when David moved up toward the bulk of the elephant again he felt the wet muzzle against the hollow of his knee.

The two of them followed the elephant until he came to an opening in the trees. He stood there moving his huge ears. His bulk was in the shadow but the moonlight would be on his head. David reached behind him and closed the dog’s jaws gently with his hand and then moved softly and unbreathing to his right along the edge of the night breeze, feeling it on his cheek, edging with it, never letting it get between him and the bulk until he could see the elephant’s head and the great ears slowly moving. The right tusk was as thick as his own thigh and it curved down almost to the ground.

He and Kibo moved back, the wind on his neck now, and they backtracked out of the forest and into the open park country. The dog was ahead of him now and he stopped where David had left the two hunting spears by the trail when they had followed the elephant. He swung them over his shoulder in their thong and leather cup harness and, with his best spear that he had kept with him all the time in his hand, they started on the trail for the shamba. The moon was high now and he wondered why there was no drumming from the shamba. Something was strange if his father was there and there was no drumming.

David had felt the tiredness as soon as they had picked up the trail again.

For a long time he had been fresher and in better shape than the two men and impatient with their slow trailing and the regular halts his father made each hour on the hour. He could have moved ahead much faster than Juma and his father but when he started to tire they were the same as ever and at noon they took only the usual five-minute rest and he had seen that Juma was increasing the pace a little. Perhaps he wasn’t. Perhaps it had only seemed faster but the elephant dung was fresher now although it was not warm yet to the touch. Juma gave him the rifle to carry after they came upon the last pile of dung but after an hour he looked at him and took it back. They had been climbing steadily across a slope of the mountain but now the trail went down and from a gap in the forest he saw broken country ahead. “Here’s where the tough part starts, Davey,” his father said.

It was then he knew that he should have been sent back to the shamba once he had put them on the trail. Juma had known it for a long time. His father knew it now and there was nothing to be done. It was another of his mistakes and there was nothing to do now except gamble.

David looked down at the big flattened circle of the print of the elephant’s foot and saw where the bracken had been pressed down and where a broken stem of a weed was drying. Juma picked it up and looked at the sun. Juma handed the broken weed to David’s father and his father rolled it in his fingers. David noticed the white flowers that were drooped and dying. But they still had not dried in the sun nor shed their petals.

“It’s going to be a bitch,” his father said. “Let’s get going.”

Late in the afternoon they were still tracking through the broken country. He had been sleepy now for a long time and as he watched the two men he knew that sleepiness was his real enemy and he followed their pace and tried to move through and out of the sleep that deadened him. The two men relieved each other tracking on the hour and the one who was in second place looked back at him at regular intervals to check if he was with them. When they made a dry camp at dark in the forest he went to sleep as soon as he sat down and woke with Juma holding his moccasins and feeling his bare feet for blisters. His father had spread his coat over him and was sitting by him with a piece of cold cooked meat and two biscuits. He offered him a water bottle with cold tea.

“He’ll have to feed, Davey,” his father said. “Your feet are in good shape. They’re as sound as Juma’s. Eat this slowly and drink some tea and go to sleep again. We haven’t any problems.”

“I’m sorry I was so sleepy.”

“You and Kibo hunted and traveled all last night. Why shouldn’t you be sleepy? You can have a little more meat if you want it.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Good. We’re good for three days. We’ll hit water again tomorrow. Plenty of creeks come off the mountain.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Juma thinks he knows.”

“Isn’t it bad?”

“Not too bad, Davey.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” David had said. “I don’t need your coat.”

“Juma and I are all right,” his father said. “I always sleep warm you know.”

David was asleep even before his father said good night. Then he woke once with the moonlight on his face and he thought of the elephant with his great ears moving as he stood in the forest, his head hung down with the weight of the tusks. David thought then in the night that the hollow way he felt as he remembered him was from waking hungry. But it was not and he found that out in the next three days.

The next day was very bad because long before noon he knew that it was not just the need for sleep that made the difference between a boy and men. For the first three hours he was fresher than they were and he asked Juma for the .303 rifle to carry but Juma shook his head. He did not smile and he had always been David’s best friend and had taught him to hunt. He offered it to me yesterday, David thought, and I’m in better shape today than I was then. He was, too, but by ten o’clock he knew the day would be as bad or worse than the day before.

It was as silly for him to think that he could trail with his father as to think he could fight with him. He knew too that it was not just that they were men. They were professional hunters and he knew now that was why Juma would not even waste a smile. They knew everything the elephant had done, pointed out the signs of it to each other without speaking, and when the tracking became difficult his father always yielded to Juma. When they stopped to fill the water bottles at a stream his father said, “Just last the day out, Davey.” Then when they were past the broken country and climbing toward the forest the tracks of the elephant turned off to the right onto an old elephant trail. He saw his father and Juma talking and when he got up to them Juma was looking back over the way they had come and then at a far distant stony island of hills in the dry country and seemed to be taking a bearing of this against the peaks of three far blue hills on the horizon.

“Juma knows where he’s going now,” his father explained. “He thought he knew before but then he dropped down into this stuff.” He looked back at the country they had come through all day. “Where he’s headed now is pretty good going but we’ll have to climb.”

They climbed until it was dark and then made another dry camp. David killed two spur fowl with his slingshot out of a small flock that had walked across the trail just before the sunset. The birds had come into the old elephant trail to dust, walking neatly and plumply, and when the pebble broke the back of one and the bird began to jerk and toss with its wings thumping, another bird ran forward to peck at it and David pouched another pebble and pulled it back and sent it against the ribs of the second bird. As he ran forward to put his hand on it the other birds whirred off. Juma had looked back and smiled this time and David picked up the two birds, warm and plump and smoothly feathered, and knocked their heads against the handle of his hunting knife.

Now where they were camped for the night his father said, “I’ve never seen that type of francolin quite so high. You did very well to get a double on them.”

Juma cooked the birds spitted on a stick over the coals of a very small fire. His father drank a whiskey and water from the cup top on his flask as they lay and watched Juma cook. Afterward Juma gave them each a breast with the heart in it and ate the two necks and backs and the legs himself.

“It makes a great difference, Davey,” his father said. “We’re very well off on rations now.”

“How far are we behind him?” David asked.

“We’re quite close,” his father said. “It depends on whether he travels when the moon comes up. It’s an hour later tonight and two hours later than when you found him.”

“Why does Juma think he knows where he’s going?”

“He wounded him and killed his askari not too far from here.”

“When?”

“Five years ago, he says. That may mean anytime. When you were still a toto he says.”

“Has he been alone since then?”

“He says so. He hasn’t seen him. Only heard of him.”

“How big does he say he is?”

“Close to two hundred. Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen. He says there’s only been one greater elephant and he came from near here too.”

“I’d better get to sleep,” David said. “I hope I’ll be better tomorrow.”

“You were splendid today,” his father said. “I was very proud of you. So was Juma.”

In the night when he woke after the moon was up he was sure they were not proud of him except perhaps for his dexterity in killing the two birds. He had found the elephant at night and followed him to see that he had both of his tusks and then returned to find the two men and put them on the trail. David knew they were proud of that. But once the deadly following started he was useless to them and a danger to their success just as Kibo had been to him when he had gone up close to the elephant in the night, and he knew they must each have hated themselves for not having sent him back when there was time. The tusks of the elephant weighed two hundred pounds apiece. Ever since these tusks had grown beyond their normal size the elephant had been hunted for them and now the three of them would kill him for them.

David was sure that they would kill him now because he, David, had lasted through the day and kept up after the pace had destroyed him by noon. So they probably were proud of him doing that. But he had brought nothing useful to the hunt and they would have been far better off without him. Many times during the day he had wished that he had never betrayed the elephant and in the afternoon he remembered wishing that he had never seen him. Awake in the moonlight he knew that was not true.

The next morning they were following the spoor of the elephant on an old elephant trail that was a hard-packed worn road through the forest. It looked as though elephants had traveled it ever since the lava had cooled from the mountain and the trees had first grown tall and close.

Juma was very confident and they moved fast. Both his father and Juma seemed very sure of themselves and the going on the elephant road was so easy that Juma gave him the .303 to carry as they went on through the broken light of the forest. Then they lost the trail in smoking piles of fresh dung and the flat round prints of a herd of elephants that had come onto the elephant road from the heavy forest on the left of the trail. Juma had taken the .303 from David angrily. It was afternoon before they worked up to the herd and around it, seeing the gray bulks through the trees and the movement of the big ears and the searching trunks coiling and uncoiling, hearing the crash of branches broken, the crash of trees pushed over, the rumbling in the bellies of the elephants and the slap and thud of the dung falling.

They had found the trail of the old bull finally and when it turned off onto a smaller elephant road Juma had looked at David’s father and grinned showing his filed teeth and his father had nodded his head. They looked as though they had a dirty secret, just as they had looked when he had found them that night at the shamba.

It was not very long before they came on the secret. It was off to the right in the forest and the tracks of the old bull led to it. It was a skull as high as David’s chest and white from the sun and the rain. There was a deep depression in the forehead and a ridge ran from between the bare white eye sockets and flared out in empty broken holes where the tusks had been chopped away.

Juma pointed out where the great elephant they were trailing had stood while he looked down at the skull and where his trunk had moved it a little way from the place it had rested on the ground and where the points of his tusks had touched the ground beside it. He showed David the single hole in the big depression in the white bone of the forehead and then the four holes close together in the bone around the earhole. He grinned at David and at his father and took a .303 solid from his pocket and fitted the nose into the hole in the bone of the forehead.

“Here is where Juma wounded the big bull,” his father said. “This was his askari. His friend, really, because he was a big bull too. He charged and Juma knocked him down and finished him in the ear.”

Juma was pointing out the scattered bones and how the big bull had walked among them. Juma and David’s father were both very pleased with what they had found.

“How long do you suppose he and his friend had been together?” David asked his father.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” his father said. “Ask Juma.”

“You ask him, please.”

His father and Juma spoke together and Juma had looked at David and laughed.

“Probably four or five times your life, he says,” David’s father told him. “He doesn’t know or care really.”

I care, David thought. I saw him in the moonlight and he was alone but I had Kibo. Kibo has me too. The bull wasn’t doing any harm and now we’ve tracked him to where he came to see his dead friend and now we’re going to kill him. It’s my fault. I betrayed him.

Now Juma had worked out the trail and motioned to his father and they started on.

My father doesn’t need to kill elephants to live, David thought. Juma would not have found him if I had not seen him. He had his chance at him and all he did was wound him and kill his friend. Kibo and I found him and I never should have told them and I should have kept him secret and had him always and let them stay drunk at the beer shamba. Juma was so drunk we could not wake him. I’m going to keep everything a secret always. I’ll never tell them anything again. If they kill him Juma will drink his share of the ivory or just buy himself another goddamn wife. Why didn’t you help the elephant when you could? All you had to do was not go on the second day. No, that wouldn’t have stopped them. Juma would have gone on. You never should have told them. Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.

His father waited for him to come up and said very gently, “He rested here. He’s not traveling as he was. We’ll be up on him anytime now.”

“Fuck elephant hunting,” David had said very quietly.

“What’s that?” his father asked.

“Fuck elephant hunting,” David said softly.

“Be careful you don’t fuck it up,” his father had said to him and looked at him flatly.

That’s one thing, David had thought. He’s not stupid. He knows all about it now and he will never trust me again. That’s good. I don’t want him to because I’ll never ever tell him or anybody anything again, never anything again. Never ever never.

In the morning he was on the far slope of the mountain again. The elephant was no longer traveling as he had been but was moving aimlessly now, feeding occasionally and David had known they were getting close to him.

He tried to remember how he had felt. He had no love for the elephant yet. He must remember that. He had only a sorrow that had come from his own tiredness that had brought an understanding of age. Through being too young, he had learned how it must be to be too old.

He was lonesome for Kibo and thinking of how Juma killing the elephant’s friend had turned him against Juma and made the elephant his brother. He knew then how much it meant to him to have seen the elephant in the moonlight and to have followed him and come close to him in the clearing so that he had seen the great tusks. But he did not know that nothing would ever be as good as that again. Now he knew they would kill the elephant and there was nothing he could do about it. He had betrayed the elephant when he had gone back to tell them at the shamba. They would kill me and they would kill Kibo if we had ivory, he had thought, and known it was untrue.

Probably the elephant is going to find where he was born and they’ll kill him there. That’s all they’d need to make it perfect. They’d like to have killed him where they killed his friend. That would be a big joke. That would have pleased them. The goddamned friend killers.

They had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead. David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David’s shoulder to move him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of sight. He could not hear them move.

David had stood still and listened to the elephant feeding. He could smell him as strongly as he had the night in the moonlight when he had worked up close to him and had seen his wonderful tusks. Then as he stood there it was silent and he could not smell the elephant. Then there had been a high squealing and smashing and a shot by the .303, then the heavy rocking double report of his father’s .450, then the smashing and crashing had gone on going steadily away and he had gone into the heavy growth and found Juma shaken and bleeding from his forehead all down over his face and his father white and angry.

“He went for Juma and knocked him over,” his father had said. “Juma hit him in the head.”

“Where did you hit him?”

“Where I fucking well could,” his father had said. “Get on the blood spoor.”

There was plenty of blood. One stream as high as David’s head that had squirted bright on trunks and leaves and vines and another much lower that was dark and foul with stomach content.

“Lung and gut shot,” his father said. “We’ll find him down or anchored — I hope the hell,” he added.

They found him anchored, in such suffering and despair that he could no longer move. He had crashed through the heavy cover where he had been feeding and crossed a path of open forest and David and his father ran along the heavily splashed blood trail. Then the elephant had gone on into thick forest and David had seen him ahead standing gray and huge against the trunk of a tree. David could only see his stern and then his father moved ahead and he followed and they came alongside the elephant as though he was a ship and David saw the blood coming from his flanks and running down his sides and then his father raised his rifle and fired and the elephant turned his head with the great tusks moving heavy and slow and looked at them and when his father fired the second barrel the elephant seemed to sway like a felled tree and came smashing down toward them. But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was down with his shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever seen.

“Shoot him in the earhole with the three oh three,” his father said. “Go on.”

“You shoot him,” David had said.

Juma had come up limping and bloody, the skin of his forehead hanging down over his left eye, the bone of his nose showing and one ear torn and had taken the rifle from David without speaking and pushed the muzzle almost into the earhole and fired twice, jerking the bolt and driving it forward angrily. The eye of the elephant had opened wide on the first shot and then started to glaze and blood came out of the ear and ran in two bright streams down the wrinkled gray hide. It was different colored blood and David had thought I must remember that and he had but it had never been of any use to him. Now all the dignity and majesty and all the beauty were gone from the elephant and he was a huge wrinkled pile.

“Well, we got him, Davey, thanks to you,” his father had said. “Now we’d better get a fire going so I can put Juma back together again. Come here, you bloody Humpty Dumpty. Those tusks will keep.”

Juma had come to him grinning, bringing the tail of the elephant that had no hairs on it at all. They had made a dirty joke and then his father had begun to speak rapidly in Swahili. How far to water? How far will you have to go to get people to get those tusks out of here? How are you, you worthless old pig fucker? What have you broken?

With the answers known his father had said, “You and I will go back to get the packs where we dropped them. Juma can get wood and have the fire ready. The medical kit is in my pack. We have to get the packs before it’s dark. He won’t infect. It’s not like claw wounds. Let’s go.”

That evening as David had sat by the fire he had looked at Juma with his stitched-up face and his broken ribs and wondered if the elephant had recognized him when he had tried to kill him. He hoped he had. The elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time and he had thought, I didn’t believe he could do it when he was so old and tired. He would have killed Juma, too. But he didn’t look at me as though he wanted to kill me. He only looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on the day he died.

David remembered how the elephant lost all dignity as soon as his eye had ceased to be alive and how when his father and he had returned with the packs the elephant had already started to swell, even in the cool evening. There was no more true elephant; only the gray wrinkled swelling dead body and the huge mottled brown and yellow tusks that they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with dried blood and he scraped some off with his thumbnail like a dried piece of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness.

After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the fire.

“He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says nobody knows how many people he has killed.”

“They were all trying to kill him, weren’t they?”

“Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”

“How could he be a murderer then?”

“Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him.”

“I wish he’d killed Juma,” David said.

“I think that’s carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s your friend, you know.”

“Not any more.”

“No need to tell him so.”

“He knows it,” David had said.

“I think you misjudge him,” his father said and they had left it there. Then when they were finally back safely with the tusks after all the things that had happened and the tusks were propped against the wall of the stick and mud house, leaning there with their points touching, the tusks so tall and thick that no one could believe them even when they touched them and no one, not even his father, could reach to the top of the bend where they curved in for the points to meet, there when Juma and his father and he were heroes and Kibo was a hero’s dog and the men who had carried the tusks were heroes, already slightly drunk heroes and to be drunker, his father had said, “Do you want to make peace, Davey?”

“All right,” he said because he knew this was the start of the never telling that he had decided on.

“I’m so glad,” his father said. “It’s so much simpler and better.”

Then they sat on old men’s stools under the shade of the fig tree with the tusks against the wall of the hut and drank beer from gourd cups that were brought by a young girl and her younger brother, the servant of heroes, sitting in the dust by the heroic dog of a hero who held an old cockerel, newly promoted to the standing of the heroes’ favorite rooster. They sat there and drank beer while the big drum started and the ngoma began to build.

THREE SHOTS

Nick was undressing in the tent. He saw the shadows of his father and Uncle George cast by the fire on the canvas wall. He felt very uncomfortable and ashamed and undressed as fast as he could, piling his clothes neatly. He was ashamed because undressing reminded him of the night before. He had kept it out of his mind all day.

His father and uncle had gone off across the lake after supper to fish with a jack light. Before they shoved the boat out his father told him that if any emergency came up while they were gone he was to fire three shots with the rifle and they would come right back. Nick went back from the edge of the lake through the woods to the camp. He could hear the oars of the boat in the dark. His father was rowing and his uncle was sitting in the stern trolling. He had taken his seat with his rod ready when his father shoved the boat out. Nick listened to them on the lake until he could no longer hear the oars.

Walking back through the woods Nick began to be frightened. He was always a little frightened of the woods at night. He opened the flap of the tent and undressed and lay very quietly between the blankets in the dark. The fire was burned down to a bed of coals outside. Nick lay still and tried to go to sleep. There was no noise anywhere. Nick felt if he could only hear a fox bark or an owl or anything he would be all right. He was not afraid of anything definite as yet. But he was getting very afraid. Then suddenly he was afraid of dying. Just a few weeks before at home, in church, they had sung a hymn, “Some day the silver cord will break.” While they were singing the hymn Nick had realized that some day he must die. it made him feel quite sick, it was the first time he had ever realized that he himself would have to die sometime.

That night he sat out in the hall under the night light trying to read Robinson Crusoe to keep his mind off the fact that some day the silver cord must break. The nurse found him there and threatened to tell his father on him if he did not go to bed. He went in to bed and as soon as the nurse was in her room came out again and read under the hall light until morning.

Last night in the tent he had had the same fear. He never had it except at night. It was more a realization than a fear at first. But it was always on the edge of fear and became fear very quickly when it started. As soon as he began to be really frightened he took the rifle and poked the muzzle out the front of the tent and shot three times. The rifle kicked badly. He heard the shots rip off through the trees. As soon as he had fired the shots it was all right.

He lay down to wait for his father’s return and was asleep before his father and uncle had put out their jack light on the other side of the lake.

“Damn that kid,” Uncle George said as they rowed back. “What did you tell him to call us in for? He’s probably got the heebie-jeebies about something.”

Uncle George was an enthusiastic fisherman and his father’s younger brother.

“Oh, well. He’s pretty small,” his father said.

“That’s no reason to bring him into the woods with us.”

“I know he’s an awful coward,” his father said, “but we’re all yellow at that age.”

“I can’t stand him,” George said. “He’s such an awful liar.”

“Oh, well, forget it. You’ll get plenty of fishing anyway.”

They came into the tent and Uncle George shone his flashlight into Nick’s eyes.

“What was it, Nickie?” said his father. Nick sat up in bed.

“it sounded like a cross between a fox and a wolf and it was fooling around the tent,” Nick said, “it was a little like a fox but more like a wolf.” He had learned the phrase “cross between” that same day from his uncle.

“He probably heard a screech owl,” Uncle George said.

In the morning his father found two big basswood trees that leaned across each other so that they rubbed together in the wind.

“Do you think that was what it was, Nick?” his father asked.

“Maybe,” Nick said. He didn’t want to think about it.

“You don’t want to ever be frightened in the woods, Nick. There is nothing that can hurt you.”

“Not even lightning?” Nick asked.

“No, not even lightning. If there is a thunder storm get out into the open. Or get under a beech tree. They’re never struck.”

“Never?” Nick asked.

“I never heard of one,” said his father.

“Gee, I’m glad to know that about beech trees,” Nick said.

Now he was undressing again in the tent. He was conscious of the two shadows on the wall although he was not watching them. Then he heard a boat being pulled up on the beach and the two shadows were gone. He heard his father talking with someone.

Then his father shouted, “Get your clothes on, Nick.”

He dressed as fast as he could. His father came in and rummaged through the duffel bags.

“Put your coat on, Nick,” his father said.

THE INDIANS MOVED AWAY

The Petoskey road ran straight uphill from Grandpa Bacon’s farm. His farm was at the end of the road, it always seemed, though, that the road started at his farm and ran to Petoskey, going along the edge of the trees up the long hill, steep and sandy, to disappear into the woods where the long slope of fields stopped short against the hardwood timber.

After the road went into the woods it was cool and the sand firm underfoot from the moisture. It went up and down hills through the woods with berry bushes and beech saplings on either side that had to be periodically cut back to keep them from effacing the road altogether. In the summer the Indians picked the berries along the road and brought them down to the cottage to sell them, packed in the buckets, wild red raspberries crushing with their own weight, covered with basswood leaves to keep them cool; later blackberries, firm and fresh shining, pails of them. The Indians brought them, coming through the woods to the cottage by the lake. You never heard them come but there they were, standing by the kitchen door with the tin buckets full of berries. Sometimes Nick, lying reading in the hammock, smelt the Indians coming through the gate past the woodpile and around the house. Indians all smelled alike. It was a sweetish smell that all Indians had. He had smelled it first when Grandpa Bacon rented the shack by the point to Indians and after they had left he went inside the shack and it all smelled that way. Grandpa Bacon could never rent the shack to white people after that and no more Indians rented it because the Indian who had lived there had gone into Petoskey to get drunk on the Fourth of July and, coming back, had lain down to go to sleep on the Pere Marquette railway tracks and been run over by the midnight train. He was a very tall Indian and had made Nick an ash canoe paddle. He had lived alone in the shack and drank pain killer and walked through the woods alone at night. Many Indians were that way.

There were no successful Indians. Formerly there had been — old Indians who owned farms and worked them and grew old and fat with many children and grandchildren. Indians like Simon Green who lived on Hortons Creek and had a big farm. Simon Green was dead, though, and his children had sold the farm to divide the money and gone off somewhere.

Nick remembered Simon Green sitting in a chair in front of the blacksmith shop at Hortons Bay, perspiring in the sun while his horses were being shod inside. Nick spading up the cool moist dirt under the caves of the shed for worms dug with his fingers in the dirt and heard the quick clang of the iron being hammered. He sifted dirt into his can of worms and filled back the earth he had spaded, patting it smooth with the spade. Outside in the sun Simon Green sat in the chair.

“Hello, Nick,” he said as Nick came out.

“Hello, Mr. Green.”

“Going fishing?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty hot day,” Simon smiled. “Tell your dad we’re going to have lots of birds this fall.”

Nick went on across the field back of the shop to the house to get his cane pole and creel. On his way down to the creek Simon Green passed along the road in his buggy. Nick was just going into the brush and Simon did not see him. That was the last he had seen of Simon Green. He died that winter and the next summer his farm was sold. He left nothing besides his farm. Everything had been put back into the farm. One of the boys wanted to go on farming but the others overruled him and the farm was sold. It did not bring one half as much as everyone expected.

The Green boy, Eddy, who had wanted to go on farming, bought a piece of land over back of Spring Brook. The other two boys bought a poolroom in Pellston. They lost money and were sold out. That was the way the Indians went.

CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI

The Kansas City train stopped at a siding just east of the Mississippi River and Nick looked out at the road that was half a foot deep with dust. There was nothing in sight but the road and a few dust-grayed trees. A wagon lurched along through the ruts, the driver slouching with the jolts of his spring seat and letting the reins hang slack on the horses’ backs.

Nick looked at the wagon and wondered where it was going, whether the driver lived near the Mississippi and whether he ever went fishing. The wagon lurched out of sight up the road and Nick thought of the World Series game going on in New York. He thought of Happy Felsch’s home run in the first game he had watched at the White Sox Park, Slim Solee swinging far forward, his knee nearly touching the ground and the white dot of the ball on its far trajectory toward the green fence at center field, Felsch, his head down, tearing for the stuffed white square at first base and then the exulting roar from the spectators as the ball landed in a knot of scrambling fans in the open bleachers.

As the train started and the dusty trees and brown road commenced to move past, the magazine vendor came swaying down the aisle.

“Got any dope on the Series?” Nick asked him.

“White Sox won the final game,” the news butcher answered, making his way down the aisle of the chair car with the sea-legs roll of a sailor. His answer gave Nick a comfortable glow. The White Sox had licked them. It was a fine feeling. Nick opened his Saturday Evening Post and commenced reading, occasionally looking out of the window to watch for any glimpse of the Mississippi. Crossing the Mississippi would be a big event he thought, and he wanted to enjoy every minute of it.

The scenery seemed to flow past in a stream of road, telegraph poles, occasional houses and flat brown fields. Nick had expected bluffs for the Mississippi shore but finally, after an endless seeming bayou had poured past the window, he could see out of the window the engine of the train curving out onto a long bridge above a broad, muddy brown stretch of water. Desolate hills were on the far side that Nick could now see and on the near side a flat mud bank. The river seemed to move solidly downstream, not to flow but to move like a solid, shifting lake, swirling a little where the abutments of the bridge jutted out. Mark Twain, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and LaSalle crowded each other in Nick’s mind as he looked up the flat, brown plain of slow-moving water. Anyhow I’ve seen the Mississippi, he thought happily to himself.

NIGHT BEFORE LANDING

Walking around the deck in the dark Nick passed the Polish officers sitting in a row of deck chairs. Someone was playing the mandolin. Leon Chocianowicz put out his foot in the dark.

“Hey, Nick,” he said, “where you going?”

“Nowhere. Just walking.”

“Sit here. There’s a chair.”

Nick sat in the empty chair and looked out at the men passing against the light from the sea. It was a warm night in June. Nick leaned back in the chair.

“Tomorrow we get in,” Leon said. “I heard it from the wireless man.”

“I heard it from the barber,” Nick said.

Leon laughed and spoke in Polish to the man in the next deck chair. He leaned forward and smiled at Nick.

“He doesn’t speak English,” Leon said. “He says he heard it from Gaby.”

“Where’s Gaby?”

“Up in a lifeboat with somebody.”

“Where’s Galinski?”

“Maybe with Gaby.”

“No,” said Nick. “She told me she couldn’t stand him.”

Gaby was the only girl on the boat. She had blonde hair which was always coming down, a loud laugh, a good body, and a bad odor of some sort. An aunt, who had not left her cabin since the boat sailed, was taking her back to her family in Paris. Her father had something to do with the French Line and she dined at the captain’s table.

“Why doesn’t she like Galinski?” Leon asked.

“She said he looked like a porpoise,’

Leon laughed again. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go find him and tell him.”

They stood up and walked over to the rail. Overhead the lifeboats were swung out ready to be lowered. The ship was listed, the decks slanted and the lifeboats hung slanted and widely swinging. The water slipped softly, great patches of phosphorescent kelp churned out and sucked and bubbled under.

“She makes good time,” Nick said, looking down at the water.

“We’re in the Bay of Biscay,” Leon said. “Tomorrow we ought to see the land.”

They walked around the deck and down a ladder back to the stern to watch the wake phosphorescent and turning like plowed land in perspective. Above them was the gun platform with two sailors walking up and down beside the gun black against the faint glow from the water.

“They’re zigzagging,” Leon watched the wake.

“All day.”

“They say these boats carry the German mails and that’s why they’re never sunk.”

“Maybe,” said Nick. “I don’t believe it.”

“I don’t either. But it’s a nice idea. Let’s go find Galinski.”

They found Galinski in his cabin with a bottle of cognac. He was drinking out of a tooth mug.

“Hello, Anton.”

“Hello, Nick. Hello, Leon. Haff a drink.”

“You tell him, Nick.”

“Listen, Anton. We’ve got a message for you from a beautiful lady.”

“I know your beautiful lady. You take that beautiful lady and stick her up a funnel.”

Lying on his back he put his feet against the springs and mattress of the upper berth and pushed.

“Carper!” he shouted. “Hey, Carper! Wake up and drink.”

Over the edge of the upper bunk looked a face, it was a round face with steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Don’t ask me to drink when I’m drunk.”

“Come on down and drink,” Galinski bellowed.

“No,” from the upper berth. “Give me the liquor up here.”

He had rolled over against the wall again.

“He’s been drunk for two weeks,” Galinski said.

“I’m sorry,” came the voice from the upper berth. “That can’t be an accurate statement because I only met you ten days ago.”

“Haven’t you been drunk for two weeks, Carper,” Nick said.

“Of course,” the Carper said, talking to the wall. “But Galinski has no right to say so.”

Galinski jogged him up and down by pushing with his feet.

“I take it back, Carper,” he said. “I don’t think you’re drunk.”

“Don’t make ridiculous statements,” the Carper said faintly.

“What are you doing, Anton,” Leon asked.

“Thinking about my girl in Niagara. Falls.”

“Come on, Nick,” said Leon. “We’ll leave this porpoise.”

“Did she tell you I was a porpoise?” Galinski asked. “She told me I was a porpoise. You know what I said to her in French. ‘Mademoiselle Gaby, you have got nothing that has any interest for me.’ Take a drink, Nick.”

He reached out the bottle and Nick swallowed some of the brandy.

“Leon?”

“No. Come on, Nick. We’ll leave him.”

“I go on duty with the men at midnight,” Galinski said.

“Don’t get drunk,” Nick said.

“I have never been drunk.”

In the upper bunk the Carper muttered something.

“What you say, Carper?”

“I was calling on God to strike him.”

“I have neffer been drunk,” Galinski repeated and poured the tooth mug half full of cognac.

“Go on, God,” the Carper said. “Strike him.”

“I have neffer been drunk. I have neffer slept with a woman.”

“Come on. Do your stuff, God. Strike him.”

“Come on, Nick. Let’s get out.”

Galinski handed the bottle to Nick. He took a swallow and followed the tall Pole out.

Outside the door they heard Galinski’s voice shouting, “I have neffer been drunk. I have neffer slept with a woman. I have neffer told a lie.”

“Strike him,” came the Carper’s thin voice. “Don’t take that stuff from him, God. Strike him.”

“They’re a fine pair,” Nick said.

“What about this Carper? Where does he come from?”

“He was two years in the ambulance before. They sent him home. He got fired out of college and now he’s going back.”

“He drinks too much.”

“He isn’t happy.”

“Let’s get a bottle of wine and sleep out in a lifeboat.”

“Come on.”

They stopped at the smoking room bar and Nick bought a bottle of red wine. Leon stood at the bar, tall in his French uniform, inside the smoking room two big poker games were going on. Nick would have liked to play but not on the last night. Everybody was playing. It was smoky and hot with all the portholes closed and shuttered. Nick looked at Leon. “Want to play?”

“No. Let’s drink the wine and talk.”

“Let’s get two bottles then.”

They went out of the hot room onto the deck carrying the bottles. It was not hard to climb out onto one of the lifeboats although it scared Nick to look down at the water as he climbed out on the davits. Inside the boat they made themselves comfortable with life belts to lie back against the thwarts. There was a feeling of being between the sea and the sky. It was not like being on the throbbing of the big boat.

“This is good,” said Nick.

“I sleep in one of these every night.”

“I’d be afraid I’d walk in my sleep,” Nick said. He was uncorking the wine. “I sleep on the deck.”

He handed the bottle to Leon. “Keep this and open the other bottle for me,” the Pole said.

“You take it,” Nick said. He drew the cork from the second bottle and clinked it across the dark with Leon. They drank.

“You’ll get better wine than this in France,” Leon said.

“I won’t be in France.”

“I forgot. I wish we were going to soldier together.”

“I wouldn’t be any good,” Nick said. He looked over the gunwale of the boat at the dark water below. He had been frightened coming out on the davits.

“I wonder if I’ll be scared,” he said.

“No,” Leon said. “I don’t think so.”

“It will be fun to see all the planes and that stuff.”

“Yes,” said Leon. “I am going to fly as soon as I can transfer.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

“You mustn’t think about being scared.”

“I don’t. Really I don’t. I never worry about it. I just thought because it made me feel funny coming out onto the boat just now.”

Leon lay on his side, the bottle straight up beside his head.

“We don’t have to think about being scared,” he said. “We’re not that kind.”

“The Carper’s scared,” Nick said.

“Yes. Galinski told me.”

“That’s what he was sent back for. That’s why he’s drunk all the time.”

“He’s not like us,” Leon said. “Listen, Nick. You and me, we’ve got something in us.”

“I know. Ífeel that way. Other people can get killed but not me. I feel that absolutely.”

“That’s it. That’s what we’ve got.”

“I wanted to get into the Canadian army but they wouldn’t take me.”

“I know. You told me.”

They both drank. Nick lay back and looked at the cloud of smoke from the funnel against the sky. The sky was beginning to lighten. Maybe the moon was going to come up.

“Have you got a girl, Leon?”

“No.”

“None at all?”

“No.”

“I got one,” Nick said.

“You live with her?”

“We’re engaged.”

“I never slept with a girl.”

“I’ve been with them in houses.”

Leon took a drink. The bottle angled blackly from his mouth against the sky.

“That isn’t what I mean. I done that. I don’t like it. I mean sleep all night with one you love.”

“My girl would have slept with me.”

“Sure. If she loved you she’d sleep with you.”

“We’re going to get married.”

NICK SAT AGAINST THE WALL…

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine-gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big-backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcherbearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head and looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta, Rinaldi, senta. You and me, we’ve made a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun, breathing with difficulty. “We’re not patriots.” Nick turned his head away, smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.

WEDDING DAY

He had been in swimming and was washing his feet in the wash bowl after having walked up the hill. The room was hot and Dutch and Luman were both standing around looking nervous. Nick got a clean suit of underwear, clean silk socks, new garters, a white shirt and collar out from the drawer of the bureau and put them on. He stood in front of the mirror and tied his tie. Dutch and Luman reminded him of dressing rooms before fights and football games. He enjoyed their nervousness. He wondered if it would be this way if he were going to be hanged. Probably. He could never realize anything until it happened. Dutch went out for a corkscrew and came in and opened the bottle.

“Take a good shot, Dutch.”

“After you, Stein.”

“No. What the hell. Go on and drink.”

Dutch took a good long pull. Nick resented the length of it. After all, that was the only bottle of whiskey there was. Dutch passed the bottle to him. He handed it to Luman. Luman took a shot not quite as long as Dutch’s.

“All right, Stein, old kid.” He handed the bottle to Nick.

Nick took a couple of swallows. He loved whiskey. Nick pulled on his trousers. He wasn’t thinking at all. Horny Bill, Art Meyer and the Ghee were dressing upstairs. They ought to have liquor. Christ, why wasn’t there any more than one bottle.

After the wedding was over they got into John Kotesky’s Ford and drove over the hill road to the lake. Nick paid John Kotesky five dollars and Kotesky helped him carry the bags down to the rowboat. They both shook hands with Kotesky and then his Ford went back up along the road. They could hear it for a long time. Nick could not find the oars where his father had hidden them for him in the plum trees back of the ice house and Helen waited for him down at the boat. Finally he found them and carried them down to the shore.

It was a long row across the lake in the dark. The night was hot and depressing. Neither of them talked much. A few people had spoiled the wedding. Nick rowed hard when they were near shore and shot the boat up on the sandy beach. He pulled it up and Helen stepped out. Nick kissed her. She kissed him back hard the way he had taught her with her mouth a little open so their tongues could play with each other. They held tight to each other and then walked up to the cottage. It was dark and long. Nick unlocked the door and then went back to the boat to get the bags. He lit the lamps and they looked through the cottage together.

ON WRITING

It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck. Nick had one good trout. He did not care about getting many trout. Now the stream was shallow and wide. There were trees along both banks. The trees of the left bank made short shadows on the current in the forenoon sun. Nick knew there were trout in each shadow. He and Bill Smith had discovered that on the Black River one hot day. In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.

The very biggest ones would lie up close to the bank. You could always pick them up there on the Black. Bill and he had discovered it. When the sun was down they all moved out into the current. Just when the sun made the water blinding in the glare before it went down you were liable to strike a big trout anywhere in the current. It was almost impossible to fish then, the surface of the water was blinding as a mirror in the sun. Of course you could fish upstream, but in a stream like the Black or this you had to wallow against the current and in a deep place the water piled up on you. It was no fun to fish upstream although all the books said it was the only way.

All the books. He and Bill had fun with the books in the old days. They all started with a fake premise. Like fox hunting.

Bill Bird’s dentist in Paris said, in fly fishing you pit your intelligence against that of the fish. That’s the way I’d always thought of it, Ezra said. That was good for a laugh. There were so many things good for a laugh, in the States they thought bullfighting was a joke. Ezra thought fishing was a joke. Lots of people think poetry is a joke. Englishmen are a joke.

Remember when they pushed us over the barrera in front of the bull at Pamplona because they thought we were Frenchmen? Bill’s dentist is as bad the other way about fishing. Bill Bird, that is. Once Bill meant Bill Smith. Now it means Bill Bird. Bill Bird was in Paris now.

When he married he lost Bill Smith, Odgar, the Ghee, all the old gang. Was it because they were virgins? The Ghee certainly was not. No, he lost them because he admitted by marrying that something was more important than the fishing.

He had built it all up. Bill had never fished before they met. Everyplace they had been together. The Black, the Sturgeon, the Pine Barrens, the Upper Minnie, all the little streams. Most about fishing he and Bill had discovered together. They worked on the farm and fished and took long trips in the woods from June to October. Bill always quit his job every spring. So did he. Ezra thought fishing was a joke.

Bill forgave him the fishing he had done before they met. He forgave him all the rivers. He was really proud of them. It was like a girl about other girls. If they were before they did not matter. But after was different.

That was why he lost them, he guessed.

They were all married to fishing. Ezra thought fishing was a joke. So did most everybody. He’d been married to it before he married Helen. Really married to it. It wasn’t any joke.

So he lost them all. Helen thought it was because they didn’t like her.

Nick sat down on a boulder in the shade and hung his sack down into the river. The water swirled around both sides of the boulder. It was cool in the shade. The bank of the river was sandy under the edge of the trees. There were mink tracks in the sand.

He might as well be out of the heat. The rock was dry and cool. He sat letting the water run out of his boots down the side of the rock.

Helen thought it was because they did not like her. She really did. Gosh, he remembered the horror he used to have of people getting married. It was funny. Probably it was because he had always been with older people, nonmarrying people.

Odgar always wanted to marry Kate. Kate wouldn’t ever marry anybody. She and Odgar always quarreled about it but Odgar did not want anybody else and Kate wouldn’t have anybody. She wanted them to be just as good friends and Odgar wanted to be friends and they were always miserable and quarreling trying to be.

It was the Madame planted all that asceticism. The Ghee went with girls in houses in Cleveland but he had it, too. Nick had had it, too. It was all such a fake. You had this fake ideal planted in you and then you lived your life to it.

All the love went into fishing and the summer.

He had loved it more than anything. He had loved digging potatoes with Bill in the fall, the long trips in the car, fishing in the bay, reading in the hammock on hot days, swimming off the dock, playing baseball at Charlevoix and Petoskey, living at the Bay, the Madame’s cooking, the way she had with servants, eating in the dining room looking out the window across the long fields and the point to the lake, talking with her, drinking with Bill’s old man, the fishing trips away from the farm, just lying around.

He loved the long summer, it used to be that he felt sick when the first of August came and he realized that there were only four more weeks before the trout season closed. Now sometimes he had it that way in dreams. He would dream that the summer was nearly gone and he hadn’t been fishing. It made him feel sick in the dream, as though he had been in jail.

The hills at the foot of Walloon Lake, storms on the lake coming up in the motorboat, holding an umbrella over the engine to keep the waves that came in off the spark plug, pumping out, running the boat in big storms delivering vegetables around the lake, climbing up, sliding down, the wave following behind, coming up from the foot of the lake with the groceries, the mail and the Chicago paper under a tarpaulin, sitting on them to keep them dry, too rough to land, drying out in front of the fire, the wind in the hemlocks and the wet pine needles underfoot when he was barefoot going for the milk. Getting up at daylight to row across the lake and hike over the hills after a rain to fish in Hortons Creek.

Hortons always needed a rain. Shultz’s was no good if it rained, running muddy and overflowing, running through the grass. Where were the trout when a stream was like that?

That was where a bull chased him over the fence and he lost his pocketbook with all the hooks in it.

If he knew then what he knew about bulls now. Where were Maera and Algabeno now? August the Feria at Valencia, Santander, bad fights at St. Sebastien. Sanchez Mejias killing six bulls. The way phrases from bullfight papers kept coming into his head all the time until he had to quit reading them The corrida of the Miuras. In spite of his notorious defects in the execution of the pase natural. The flower of Andalucia. Chiquelín el camelista. Juan Terremoto. Belmonte Vuelve?

Maera’s kid brother was a bullfighter now. That was the way it went.

His whole inner life had been bullfights all one year. Chink pale and miserable about the horses. Don never minded them, he said. “And then suddenly I knew I was going to love bullfighting.” That must have been Maera. Maera was the greatest man he’d ever known. Chink knew it, too. He followed him around in the encierro.

He, Nick, was the friend of Maera and Maera waved at them from Box 87 above their sobrepuerta and waited for Helen to see him and waved again and Helen worshipped him and there were three picadors in the box and all the other picadors did their stuff right down in front of the box and looked up and waved before and after and he said to Helen that picadors only worked for each other, and of course it was true. And it was the best pic-ing he ever saw and the three pics in the box with their Cordoba hats nodded at each good vara and the other pics waved up at them and then did their stuff. Like the time the Portuguese were in and the old pic threw his hat into the ring hanging on over the barrera watching young Da Veiga. That was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. That was what that fat pic wanted to be, a caballero en plaza. God, how that Da Veiga kid could ride. That was riding. It didn’t show well in the movies.

The movies ruined everything. Like talking about something good. That was what had made the war unreal. Too much talking.

Talking about anything was bad. Writing about anything actual was bad. It always killed it.

The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined. That made everything come true. Like when he wrote “My Old Man” he’d never seen a jockey killed and the next week Georges Parfrement was killed at that very jump and that was the way it looked. Everything good he’d ever written he’d made up. None of it had ever happened. Other things had happened. Better things, maybe. That was what the family couldn’t understand. They thought it all was experience.

That was the weakness of Joyce. Daedalus in Ulysses was Joyce himself, so he was terrible. Joyce was so damn romantic and intellectual about him. He’d made Bloom up, Bloom was wonderful. He’d made Mrs. Bloom up. She was the greatest in the world.

That was the way with Mac. Mac worked too close to life. You had to digest life and then create your own people. Mac had stuff, though.

Nick in the stories was never himself. He made him up. Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That was what made it good. Nobody knew that. He’d seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her. That was the way it was.

He wished he could always write like that. He would sometime. He wanted to be a great writer. He was pretty sure he would be. He knew it in lots of ways. He would in spite of everything. It was hard, though.

It was hard to be a great writer if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you loved so many places. Then you were healthy and felt good and were having a good time and what the hell.

He always worked best when Helen was unwell. Just that much discontent and friction. Then there were times when you had to write. Not conscience. Just peristaltic action. Then you felt sometimes like you could never write but after a while you knew sooner or later you would write another good story.

It was really more fun than anything. That was really why you did it. He had never realized that before. It wasn’t conscience. It was simply that it was the greatest pleasure. It had more bite to it than anything else. It was so damn hard to write well, too.

There were so many tricks.

It was easy to write if you used the tricks. Everybody used them. Joyce had invented hundreds of new ones. Just because they were new didn’t make them any better. They would all turn into clichés.

He wanted to write like Cezanne painted.

Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do. He was the greatest. The greatest for always. It wasn’t a cult. He, Nick, wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. There wasn’t any trick. Nobody had ever written about country like that. He felt almost holy about it. It was deadly serious. You could do it if you would fight it out. If you’d lived right with your eyes.

It was a thing you couldn’t talk about. He was going to work oil it until he got it. Maybe never, but he would know as he got near it. It was a job. Maybe for all his life.

People were easy to do. All this smart stuff was easy. Against this age, skyscraper primitives, Cummings when he was smart, it was automatic writing, not The Enormous Room, that was a book, it was one of the great books. Cummings worked hard to get it.

Was there anybody else? Young Asch had something but you couldn’t tell. Jews go bad quickly. They all start well. Mac had something. Don Stewart had the most next to Cummings. Sometimes in the Haddocks. Ring Lardner, maybe. Very maybe. Old guys like Sherwood. Older guys like Dreiser. Was there anybody else? Young guys, maybe. Great unknowns. There are never any unknowns, though.

They weren’t after what he was after.

He could see the Cezannes. The portrait at Gertrude Stein’s. She’d know it if he ever got things right. The two good ones at the Luxembourg, the ones he’d seen every day at the loan exhibit at Bernheim’s. The soldiers undressing to swim, the house through the trees, one of the trees with a house beyond, not the lake one, the other lake one. The portrait of the boy. Cezanne could do people, too. But that was easier, he used what he got from the country to do people with. Nick could do that, too. People were easy. Nobody knew anything about them. If it sounded good they took your word for it. They took Joyce’s word for it.

He knew just how Cezanne would paint this stretch of river. God, if he were only here to do it. They died and that was the hell of it. They worked all their lives and then got old and died.

Nick, seeing how Cezanne would do the stretch of river and the swamp, stood up and stepped down into the stream. The water was cold and actual. He waded across the stream, moving in the picture. He kneeled down in the gravel on the bank and reached down into the trout sack. It lay in the stream where he had dragged it across the shallows. The old boy was alive. Nick opened the mouth of the sack and slid the trout into the shallow water and watched him move off through the shallows, his back out of water, threading between rocks toward the deep current.

“He was too big to eat,” Nick said. “I’ll get a couple of little ones in front of camp for supper.”

He climbed the bank of the stream, reeling up his line and started through the brush. He ate a sandwich. He was in a hurry and the rod bothered him. He was not thinking. He was holding something in his head. He wanted to get back to camp and get to work.

He moved through the brush, holding the rod close to him. The line caught on a branch. Nick stopped and cut the leader and reeled the line up. He went through the brush now easily, holding the rod out before him.

Ahead of him he saw a rabbit, flat out on the trail. He stopped, grudging. The rabbit was barely breathing. There were two ticks on the rabbit’s head, one behind each ear. They were gray, tight with blood, as big as grapes. Nick pulled them off, their heads tiny and hard, with moving feet. He stepped on them on the trail.

Nick picked up the rabbit, limp, with dull button eyes, and put it under a sweet fern bush beside the trail. He felt its heart beating as he laid it down. The rabbit lay quiet under the bush. It might come to, Nick thought. Probably the ticks had attached themselves to it as it crouched in the grass. Maybe after it had been dancing in the open. He did not know. He went on up the trail to the camp. He was holding something in his head.

The Short Stories

Hemingway in Milan in 1918, where he worked for the Red Cross

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

UP IN MICHIGAN

OUT OF SEASON

MY OLD MAN

ON THE QUAI AT SMYRNA

INDIAN CAMP

THE DOCTOR AND THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

THE END OF SOMETHING

THE THREE-DAY BLOW

THE BATTLER

A VERY SHORT STORY

SOLDIER’S HOME

THE REVOLUTIONIST

MR. AND MRS. ELLIOT

CAT IN THE RAIN

OUT OF SEASON

CROSS-COUNTRY SNOW

MY OLD MAN

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART I

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART II

THE UNDEFEATED

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS

THE KILLERS

CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA?

FIFTY GRAND

A SIMPLE ENQUIRY

TEN INDIANS

A CANARY FOR ONE

AN ALPINE IDYLL

A PURSUIT RACE

TODAY IS FRIDAY

BANAL STORY

NOW I LAY ME

AFTER THE STORM

A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

GOD REST YOU MERRY, GENTLEMEN

THE SEA CHANGE

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

THE MOTHER OF A QUEEN

ONE READER WRITES

HOMAGE TO SWITZERLAND

A DAY’S WAIT

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

WINE OF WYOMING

THE GAMBLER, THE NUN, AND THE RADIO

FATHERS AND SONS

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER

THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE

THE DENUNCIATION

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TANK

NIGHT BEFORE BATTLE

UNDER THE RIDGE

ONE TRIP ACROSS

THE TRADESMAN’S RETURN

NOBODY EVER DIES

THE GOOD LION

THE FAITHFUL BULL

GET A SEEING-EYED DOG

A MAN OF THE WORLD

SUMMER PEOPLE

THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY

AN AFRICAN STORY

THREE SHOTS

THE INDIANS MOVED AWAY

CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI

NIGHT BEFORE LANDING

NICK SAT AGAINST THE WALL…

WEDDING DAY

ON WRITING

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A CANARY FOR ONE

A CLEAN, WELL-LIGHTED PLACE

A DAY’S WAIT

A MAN OF THE WORLD

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

A PURSUIT RACE

A SIMPLE ENQUIRY

A VERY SHORT STORY

A WAY YOU’LL NEVER BE

AFTER THE STORM

AN AFRICAN STORY

AN ALPINE IDYLL

BANAL STORY

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART I

BIG TWO-HEARTED RIVER PART II

CAT IN THE RAIN

CHE TI DICE LA PATRIA?

CROSS-COUNTRY SNOW

CROSSING THE MISSISSIPPI

FATHERS AND SONS

FIFTY GRAND

GET A SEEING-EYED DOG

GOD REST YOU MERRY, GENTLEMEN

HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS

HOMAGE TO SWITZERLAND

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY

INDIAN CAMP

MR. AND MRS. ELLIOT

MY OLD MAN

MY OLD MAN

NICK SAT AGAINST THE WALL…

NIGHT BEFORE BATTLE

NIGHT BEFORE LANDING

NOBODY EVER DIES

NOW I LAY ME

OLD MAN AT THE BRIDGE

ON THE QUAI AT SMYRNA

ON WRITING

ONE READER WRITES

ONE TRIP ACROSS

OUT OF SEASON

OUT OF SEASON

SOLDIER’S HOME

SUMMER PEOPLE

TEN INDIANS

THE BATTLER

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE TANK

THE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

THE DENUNCIATION

THE DOCTOR AND THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

THE END OF SOMETHING

THE FAITHFUL BULL

THE GAMBLER, THE NUN, AND THE RADIO

THE GOOD LION

THE INDIANS MOVED AWAY

THE KILLERS

THE LAST GOOD COUNTRY

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

THE MOTHER OF A QUEEN

THE REVOLUTIONIST

THE SEA CHANGE

THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF FRANCIS MACOMBER

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

THE THREE-DAY BLOW

THE TRADESMAN’S RETURN

THE UNDEFEATED

THREE SHOTS

TODAY IS FRIDAY

UNDER THE RIDGE

UP IN MICHIGAN

WEDDING DAY

WINE OF WYOMING

The Play

Hemingway was present at the Battle of Ebro, the longest and largest battle of the Spanish Civil War, 1938

THE FIFTH COLUMN

Hemingway’s only full length play, The Fifth Column was first published by Scribner’s in October 1938, and it has largely garnered a lukewarm critical reception. Hemingway wrote the drama in Madrid in 1937 during his time reporting on the Spanish Civil War. He composed it at the Hotel Florida, while hiding out from Franco’s forces in the capital. The building was frequently bombarded by enemy shells and he commented that the quality of the play — good or bad — was influenced by these multiple attacks. He described in letters that after he began to write in the autumn of 1937, he quickly realised there were certain rooms in the hotel which could not be hit by the shells due to the positioning of other buildings, and so he chose to remain there rather than to retreat to an ostensibly safer environment. He experienced great difficulty in arranging a production of the play and the first staging did not take place until 1940, when it had a short run on Broadway, after being heavily revised by the screenwriter, Benjamin Glazer. However, Hemingway greatly disliked the alterations made to the work and distanced himself from production, trying to ensure he would not be associated with the changes made to his text.

The title of the play originates from a comment made in 1936 by the Spanish Nationalist commander, Emilio Mola, who stated that there were four columns descending on Madrid, and a fifth column of fascists from within the city would help to destroy the Republican government. However, the work is not about members of this fifth column, but instead revolves around Philip Rawlings, an American agent of the Republic, who is determined to defend against the threat posed by this internal column. He is torn between his duty and devotion to the anti-fascist cause and his attraction to Dorothy Bridges; a rich, glamorous and pampered woman. Rawlings must decide if he wishes to live an easy life with her, where they can travel to luxurious places and have a tranquil existence, or if he believes it is his moral responsibility to fight the Nationalist forces to the end. He has to decide if any measures, no matter how brutal and barbarous, are justifiable in order to protect the Republic from the insidious Fifth Column.

The play was originally published in conjunction with this short story collection

CONTENTS

Act One Scene One

Act One Scene Two

Act One Scene Three

Act Two Scene One

Act Two Scene Two

Act Two Scene Three

Act Two Scene Four

Act Three Scene One

Act Three Scene Two

Act Three Scene Three

Act Three Scene Four

Hemingway wrote the play at the Hotel Florida, Madrid

Act One Scene One

It is seven-thirty in the evening. A corridor on the first floor of the Hotel Florida in Madrid. There is a large white paper hand-printed sign on the door of Room 109 which reads, ‘Working, Do Not Disturb.’ TWO GIRLS with TWO SOLDIERS in International Brigade uniform pass along the corridor. One of the GIRLS stops and looks at the sign.

FIRST SOLDIER. Come on. We haven’t got all night.

GIRL. What does it say?

[The OTHER COUPLE have gone on down the corridor]

SOLDIER. What does it matter what it says?

GIRL. No, read it to me. Be nice to me. Read to me in English.

SOLDIER. So that’s what I’d draw. A literary one. The hell with it. I won’t read it to you.

GIRL. You’re not nice.

SOLDIER. I’m not supposed to be nice.

[He stands off and looks at her unsteadily]

Do I look nice? Do you know where I’ve just come from?

GIRL. I don’t care where you come from. You all come from some place dreadful and you all go back there. All I asked you was to read me the sign. Come on then, if you won’t.

SOLDIER. I’ll read it to you. ‘Working. Do Not Disturb.’

[The GIRL laughs, a dry high, hard laugh]

GIRL. I’ll get me a sign like that too.

CURTAIN

Act One Scene Two

Curtain rises at once on Scene II. Interior of Room 109. There is a bed with a night table by it, two cretonne-covered chairs, a tall armoire with mirror, and a typewriter on another table. Beside the typewriter is a portable victrola. There is an electric heater which is glowing brightly, and a tall handsome blonde GIRL is sitting in one of the chairs reading with her back to the lamp which is on the table beside the phonograph. Behind her are two large windows with their curtains drawn. There is a map of Madrid on the wall, and a MAN about thirty-five, wearing a leather jacket, corduroy trousers, and very muddy boots, is standing looking at it. Without looking up from her book, the girl, whose name is DOROTHY BRIDGES, says in a very cultivated voice

DOROTHY. Darling, there’s one thing you really could do, and that’s clean your boots before you come in here.

[The man, whose name is ROBERT PRESTON, goes on looking at the map]

And darling, don’t you put your finger on it. It makes smudges.

[PRESTON continues to look at the map]

Darling, have you seen Philip?

PRESTON. Philip who?

DOROTHY. Our Philip.

PRESTON. [Still looking at the map] Our Philip was in Chicote’s with that Moor that bit Rodgers, when I came up the Gran Via.

DOROTHY. Was he doing anything awful?

PRESTON. [Still looking at the map] Not yet.

DOROTHY. He will though. He’s so full of life and good spirits.

PRESTON. The spirits are getting awfully bad at Chicote’s.

DOROTHY. You make such dull jokes, darling. I wish Philip would come. I’m bored, darling.

PRESTON. Don’t be a bored Vassar bitch.

DOROTHY. Don’t call me names, please. I don’t feel up to it just now. And besides, I’m not typical Vassar. I didn’t understand anything they taught me there.

PRESTON. Do you understand anything that’s happening here?

DOROTHY. No, darling. I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera — and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful.

PRESTON. God, I wonder sometimes why I love you.

DOROTHY. I wonder why I love you, too, darling. I don’t think it’s very sensible, really. It’s just sort of a bad habit I’ve gotten into. And Philip’s so much more amusing, and so much livelier.

PRESTON. He’s much livelier, all right. You know what he was doing last night before they shut Chicote’s? He had a cuspidor, and he was going around blessing people out of it. You know, sprinkling it on them. It was better than ten to one he’d get shot.

DOROTHY. But he never does. I wish he’d come.

PRESTON. He will. He’ll be here as soon as Chicote’s shuts.

[There is a knock at the door]

DOROTHY. It’s Philip. Darling, it’s Philip.

[The door opens to admit the MANAGER of the hotel. He is a dark, plump little man, who collects stamps, and speaks extraordinary English]

Oh, it’s the Manager.

MANAGER. How’re you, very well, Mr. Preston? How’re you, all right, Miss? I just come by see you have any little thing of any kind of sort you don’t want to eat. Everything all right, everybody absolutely comfortable?

DOROTHY. Everything’s marvelous, now the heater’s fixed.

MANAGER. With a heater always is continually trouble. Electricity is a science not yet dominated by the workers. Also, the electrician drinks himself into a stupidity.

PRESTON. He didn’t seem awfully bright, the electrician.

MANAGER. Is bright. But the drink. Always the drink. Then rapidly the failing to concentrate on electricity.

PRESTON. Then why do you keep him on?

MANAGER. Is the electrician of the committee. Frankly resembles a catastrophe. Is now in 113 drinking with Mr. Philip.

DOROTHY. [Happily] Then Philip’s home.

MANAGER. Is more than home.

PRESTON. What do you mean?

MANAGER. Difficult to say before lady.

DOROTHY. Ring him up, darling.

PRESTON. I will not.

DOROTHY. Then I will.

[She unhooks the telephone from the wall and says]

Ciento trece — Hello. Philip? No. Come and see us. Please. Yes. All right.

[She hooks up the phone again]

He’s coming.

MANAGER. Highly preferable he does not come.

PRESTON. Is it that bad?

MANAGER. Is worse. Is an unbelievable.

DOROTHY. Philip’s marvelous. He does go about with dreadful people though. Why does he, I wonder?

MANAGER. I come another time. Maybe perhaps if you receive too much of anything you unable to eat always very welcome in the house where family constantly hungry unable understand lack of food. Thank you to another time. Good-bye.

[He goes out just before the arrival of MR. PHILIP nearly bumping into him in the hallway. Outside the door he is heard to say]

Good afternoon, Mr. Philip.

[A deep voice says very jovially]

PHILIP. Salud, Comrade Stamp Collector. Picked up any valuable new issues lately?

[In a quiet voice]

MANAGER. No, Mr. Philip. Is have people from very dull countries lately. Is a plague of five cent U.S. and three francs fifty French. Is needed comrades from New Zealand written to by air-mail.

PHILIP. Oh, they’ll come. We’re just in a dull epoch now. The shellings upset the tourist season. Be plenty of delegations when it slacks off again.

[In a low non-joking voice]

What’s on your mind?

MANAGER. Always a little something.

PHILIP. Don’t worry, that’s all set.

MANAGER. Am worry a little just the same.

PHILIP. Take it easy.

MANAGER. You be careful, Mr. Philip.

[In to the door comes MR. PHILIP, very large, very hearty, and wearing rubber boots]

Salud, Comrade Bastard Preston. Salud, Comrade Boredom Bridges. How are you comrades doing? Let me present an electrical comrade. Come in, Comrade Marconi. Don’t stand out there.

[A very small and quite drunken electrician, wearing soiled blue overalls, espadrilles, and a blue beret, comes in the door]

ELECTRICIAN. Salud, Camaradas.

DOROTHY. Well. Yes. Salud.

PHILIP. And here’s a Moorish comrade. You could say the Moorish comrade. Almost unique a Moorish comrade. She’s awfully shy. Come in, Anita.

[Enter a MOORISH TART from Cueta. She is very dark, but well built, kinky-haired and tough looking, and not at all shy]

MOORISH TART. [Defensively] Salud, Camaradas.

PHILIP. This is the comrade that bit Vernon Rodgers that time. Laid him up for three weeks. Hell of a bite.

DOROTHY. Philip, darling, you couldn’t just muzzle the comrade while she’s here, could you?

MOORISH TART. Am insult.

PHILIP. The Moorish comrade learned English in Gibraltar. Lovely place, Gibraltar. I had a most unusual experience there once.

PRESTON. Let’s not hear about it.

PHILIP. You are gloomy, Preston. You haven’t got the party line right on that. All that long-faced stuff is out, you know. We’re practically in a period of jubilation now.

PRESTON. I wouldn’t talk about things you know nothing about.

PHILIP. Well, I see nothing to be gloomy about. What about offering these comrades some sort of refreshment?

MOORISH TART. [To DOROTHY] You got nice place.

DOROTHY. So good of you to like it.

MOORISH TART. How you keep from be evacuate?

DOROTHY. Oh, I just stay on.

MOORISH TART. How you eat?

DOROTHY. Not always too well, but we bring in tinned things from Paris in the Embassy pouch.

MOORISH TART. You what, Embassy pouch?

DOROTHY. Tinned things, you know. Civet lievre. Foie gras. We had some really delicious Poulet de Bresse. From Bureau’s.

MOORISH TART. You make fun me?

DOROTHY. Oh, no. Of course not. I mean we eat those things.

MOORISH TART. I eat water soup.

[She stares at DOROTHY belligerently]

What’s a matter? You no like way I look? You think you better than me?

DOROTHY. Of course not. I’m probably much worse. Preston will tell you I’m infinitely worse. But we don’t have to be comparative, do we? I mean in war time and all that, and you know all working for the same cause.

MOORISH TART. I scratch you eyes out if you think that.

DOROTHY. [Appealingly, but very languid] Philip, please talk to your friends and make them happy.

PHILIP. Anita, listen to me.

MOORISH TART. O.K.

PHILIP. Anita. Dorothy here is a lovely woman —

MOORISH TART. No lovely woman this business.

ELECTRICIAN. [Standing up] Camaradas me voy.

DOROTHY. What does he say?

PRESTON. He says he’s going.

PHILIP. Don’t believe him. He always says that.

[To ELECTRICIAN]

Comrade, you must stay.

ELECTRICIAN. Camaradas entonces me quedo.

DOROTHY. What?

PRESTON. He says he’ll stay.

PHILIP. That’s more like it, old man. You wouldn’t rush off and leave us, would you, Marconi? No. An electrical comrade can be depended on to the last.

PRESTON. I thought it was a cobbler that stuck to the last.

DOROTHY. Darling, if you make jokes like that I’ll leave you. I promise you.

MOORISH TART. Listen. All time talk. No time anything else. What we do here?

[To PHILIP]

You with me? Yes or no?

PHILIP. You put things so flatly, Anita.

MOORISH TART. Want a answer.

PHILIP. Well then, Anita, it must be in the negative.

MOORISH TART. What you mean? Take picture?

PRESTON. You see connection? Camera, take picture, negative? Charming, isn’t it? She’s so primitive.

MOORISH TART. What you mean take picture? You think me spy?

PHILIP. No, Anita. Please be reasonable. I just meant I wasn’t with you any more. Not just now. I mean it’s more or less off just for now.

MOORISH TART. No? You no with me?

PHILIP. No, my pretty one.

MOORISH TART. You with her?

[Nodding toward DOROTHY]

PHILIP. Possibly not.

DOROTHY. It would need a certain amount of discussion.

MOORISH TART. O.K. I scratch her eyes out.

[She moves toward DOROTHY]

ELECTRICIAN. Camaradas, tengo que trabajar.

DOROTHY. What does he say?

PRESTON. He says he must go to work.

PHILIP. Oh, don’t pay attention to him. He gets these extraordinary ideas. It’s an idee fixe he has.

ELECTRICIAN. Camaradas, soy analfabetico.

PRESTON. He says he can’t read or write.

PHILIP. Comrade, I mean, I mean, but really, you know, if we hadn’t all gone to school we’d be in the same fix. Don’t give it a thought, old man.

MOORISH TART. [To DOROTHY] O.K. I suppose, yes, all right. Downa hatch. Cheerio. Chin chin. Yes, O.K. Only one thing.

DOROTHY. But what, Anita?

MOORISH TART. You gotta take sign down.

DOROTHY. What sign?

MOORISH TART. Sign outside door. All the time working, isn’t fair.

DOROTHY. And I’ve had a sign like that on my room door ever since college and it’s never meant a thing.

MOORISH TART. You take down?

PHILIP. Of course she’ll take it down. Won’t you, Dorothy?

DOROTHY. Certainly, I’ll take it down.

PRESTON. You never do work anyway.

DOROTHY. No, darling. But I always mean to. And I am going to finish that Cosmopolitan article just as soon as I understand things the least bit better.

[There is a crash outside the window in the street, followed by an incoming whistling rush, and another crash. You hear pieces of brick and steel falling, and the tinkle of falling glass]

PHILIP. They’re shelling again.

[He says it very quietly and soberly]

PRESTON. The bastards.

[He says it very bitterly and rather nervously]

PHILIP. You’d best open your windows, Bridges, my girl. There aren’t any more panes now and winter’s coming, you know.

MOORISH TART. You take the sign down?

[DOROTHY goes to the door and removes the sign, taking out the thumbtacks with a nail file. She hands it to ANITA]

DOROTHY. You keep it. Here are the thumbtacks too.

[DOROTHY goes to the electric light and switches it off. Then opens both the windows. There is a sound like a giant bango twang and an incoming rush like an elevated train or a subway train coming toward you. Then a third great crash, this time followed by a shower of glass]

MOORISH TART. You good comrade.

DOROTHY. No. I’m not, but I would like to be. MOORISH TART. You O.K. with me.

[They are standing side by side in the light that comes in from the open door into the corridor]

PHILIP. Having them open saved them from the concussion that time. You can hear the shells leave the battery. Listen for the next one.

PRESTON. I hate these damned night shellings.

DOROTHY. How long did the last one go on?

PHILIP, just over an hour.

MOORISH TART. Dorothy, you think we better go in cave?

[There is another banjo twang — a moment of quiet and then a great incoming rush, this time much closer, and at the crashing burst, the room fills with smoke and brick dust]

PRESTON. The hell with it. I’m going down below.

PHILIP. This room has an excellent angle, really. I mean it. I could show you from the street.

DOROTHY. I think I’ll just stay here. It doesn’t make any difference where you wait for it.

ELECTRICIAN. Camaradas, no hay luz!

[He says this in a loud and almost prophetic voice, suddenly standing up and opening his arms wide]

PHILIP. He says there isn’t any light. You know the old boy is getting to be rather terrific. Like an electrical Greek chorus. Or a Greek electrical chorus.

PRESTON. I’m going to get out of here.

DOROTHY. Then, darling, will you take Anita and the electrician with you?

PRESTON. Come on.

[They go as the next shell comes. The next shell is really something]

DOROTHY. [As they stand listening to the clattering of the brick and glass after the burst] Philip, is the angle really safe?

PHILIP. It’s as good here as anywhere. Really. Safe’s not quite the word; but safety’s hardly a thing people go in for any more.

DOROTHY. I feel safe with you.

PHILIP. Try to check that. That’s a terrible phrase.

DOROTHY. But I can’t help it.

PHILIP. Try very hard. That’s a good girl.

[He goes to the phonograph and puts on the Chopin Mazurka in C Minor, Opus 33, No. 4. They are listening to the music in the light from the glow of the electric heater]

PHILIP. It’s very thin and very old fashioned, but it’s very beautiful.

[Then comes the heavy banjo whang of the guns firing from Garabitas Hill. It whishes in with a roar and bursts in the street outside the window, making a bright flash through the window]

DOROTHY. Oh darling, darling, darling.

PHILIP. [Holding her] Couldn’t you use some other term? I’ve heard you call so many people that.

[You hear the clanging of an ambulance. Then in the quiet the phonograph goes on playing the Mazurka as the — ]

CURTAIN COMES DOWN

Act One Scene Three

Rooms 109 and 110 in the Hotel Florida. The windows are open and sunlight is pouring in. There is an open door between them and over this door has been tacked, to the framework of the door, a large war poster so that when the door opens the open doorway is blocked by this poster. Still the door can open. It is open now, and the poster is like a large paper screen between the two rooms. There is a space perhaps two feet high between the bottom of the poster and the floor. In the bed in 109 DOROTHY BRIDGES is asleep. In the bed in 110 PHILIP RAWLINGS is sitting up looking out of the window. Through the window comes the sound of a man crying the daily papers. ‘El Sol! Libertad! El A.B.C. de Hoy!’ There is a sound of a motor horn passing and then the distant clatter of machine-gun fire. PHILIP reaches for the telephone.

PHILIP. Send up the morning papers, please. Yes. All of them.

[He looks around the room and then out of the window.

He looks at the war poster which shows transparent across the doorway in the bright morning sunlight]

No.

[Shakes his head]

Don’t like it. Too early in the morning.

[There is a knock at the door]

Adelante.

[There is another knock]

Come in. Come in!

[The door opens. It is the MANAGER holding the papers in his hands]

MANAGER. Good morning, Mr. Philip. Thank you very much. Good morning to you all right. Terrible things last night, eh?

PHILIP. Terrible things every night. Frightful.

[He grins]

Let’s see the papers.

MANAGER. They tell me the bad news from the Asturias. Is almost finish there.

PHILIP. [Looking at the papers] Not in here though.

MANAGER. No, but I know you know.

PHILIP. Quite. I say, when did I get this room?

MANAGER. You don’t remember, Mr. Philip? You don’t remember last night?

PHILIP. No. Can’t say I do. Mention something and see if I recall it.

MANAGER. [In really horrified tones] You don’t remember, really?

PHILIP. [Cheerily] Not a thing. Little bombardment early in the evening. Chicote’s. Yes. Brought Anita around for a little spot of good clean fun. No difficulty with her, I hope?

MANAGER. [Shaking his head] No. No. Not with Anita. Mr. Philip, you don’t remember about Mr. Preston?

PHILIP. No. What was the gloomy beggar up to? Not suicide, I hope.

MANAGER. You unremember throw him out in street?

PHILIP. From here?

[He looks from the bed out toward the window]

Any sign of him below?

MANAGER. No, from entry when you coming in from Ministerio very late last night after go for communique.

PHILIP. Hurt him?

MANAGER. Stitches. Some stitches.

PHILIP. Why didn’t you stop it? Why do you permit that sort of thing in a decent hotel?

MANAGER. Then you take his room.

[Sadly and reprovingly]

Mr. Philip. Mr. Philip.

PHILIP. [Very cheerily, but slightly baffled] It’s a lovely day though, isn’t it?

MANAGER. Oh yes, is a superbly day. A day for picnics in the country.

PHILIP. And what did Preston do? He’s very well set up, you know. And so gloomy. Must have put up quite a struggle.

MANAGER. He in other room now.

PHILIP. Where?

MANAGER. One thirteen. Your old room.

PHILIP. And I’m here?

MANAGER. Yes, Mr. Philip.

PHILIP. And what’s that horrible thing?

[Looking at the transparent poster between the doors]

MANAGER. Is a patriotic poster very beautiful. Has fine sentiment, only see backwards from here.

PHILIP. And what’s it cover? Where’s that lead to?

MANAGER. To lady’s room, Mr. Philip. Now you have a suite of rooms just newly married happy couple I come see everything all right you need anything at all anyway ring and ask for me. Congratulations, Mr. Philip. More than congratulations absolutely.

PHILIP. Does the door bolt on this side?

MANAGER. Absolutely, Mr. Philip.

PHILIP. Then bolt it and get out and have them bring me some coffee.

MANAGER. Yes, sir, Mr. Philip. Don’t be cross on beautiful day like this.

[Then hurriedly]

Please, Mr. Philip, also remember food situation Madrid; if by any chance too much food any kind including anything any little can any sort always at home demanding lack every sort. In a family now is seven peoples including, Mr. Philip you would not believe what I permit myself the luxury of, a mother-in-law. Everything she eats. Everything agrees with her. Also one son seventeen formerly a champion of natation. What you call it the breast stroke. Built like this —

[He gestures to show an enormous chest and arms]

Is eat? Mr. Philip you cannot believe. Is a champion also of the eating. You should see. That is only two of the seven.

PHILIP. I’ll see what I can get. Have to get it from my room. If any calls come have them ring me here.

MANAGER. Thank you, Mr. Philip. You have a heart big as the street. Is outside to see you two comrades.

PHILIP. Tell them to come in.

[All this time DOROTHY BRIDGES, in the other room, is sleeping soundly. She did not awaken during the first of the conversation between PHILIP and the MANAGER, but only stirred a little in the bed. Now that the door is closed and bolted nothing can be heard between the two rooms]

[Enter TWO COMRADES in LB. uniform]

FIRST COMRADE. All right. He got away.

PHILIP. What do you mean he got away?

FIRST COMRADE. He’s gone, that’s all.

PHILIP. [Very quickly] How?

FIRST COMRADE. You tell me how.

PHILIP. Let’s not have any of that.

[Turning to the SECOND COMRADE, in a very dry voice]

What about it?

SECOND COMRADE. He’s gone.

PHILIP. And where were you?

SECOND COMRADE. Between the elevator and the stairs.

PHILIP. [To FIRST COMRADE] And you?

FIRST COMRADE. Outside the door all night.

PHILIP. And what time did you leave those posts?

FIRST COMRADE. Not at all.

PHILIP. Better think it over. You know what you’re risking, don’t you?

FIRST COMRADE. I am very sorry, but he’s gone and that’s all there is to it.

PHILIP. Oh no, it’s not, my boy.

[He takes down the telephone and calls a number]

Noventa y siete zero zero zero. Yes. Antonio? Please. Yes. He’s not there yet? No. Send over to pick up two men please in room one thirteen at the Hotel Florida. Yes. Please. Yes.

[He hangs up the telephone]

FIRST COMRADE. And all we ever did —

PHILIP. Take your time. You’re going to need a very good story indeed.

FIRST COMRADE. There isn’t any story except what I told you.

PHILIP. Take your time. Don’t be rushed. Just sit down and think it over. Remember you had him here in this hotel. Where he couldn’t get past you.

[He reads in the papers. The TWO COMRADES stand there glumly]

[Without looking at them]

Sit down. Make yourselves comfortable.

SECOND COMRADE. Comrade, we —

PHILIP. [Without looking at him] Don’t use that word.

[The TWO COMRADES look at each other]

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade —

PHILIP. [Discarding a paper and taking up another] I told you not to use that word. It doesn’t sound good in your mouth.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar, we want to say —

PHILIP. Save it.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar, you must listen to me.

PHILIP. I’ll listen to you later. Don’t you worry, my lad. I listen to you. When you came in here you sounded snotty enough.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar, please listen to me. I want to tell you.

PHILIP. You let a man get away that I wanted. You let a man get away that I needed. You let a man get away who is going to kill.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar, please —

PHILIP. Please, that’s a funny word to hear in a soldier’s mouth.

FIRST COMRADE. I am not a soldier by profession.

PHILIP. When you put the uniform on you’re a soldier.

FIRST COMRADE. I came to fight for an ideal.

PHILIP. That’s awfully pretty. Now let me tell you something. You come to fight for an ideal say, and you get scared in an attack. You don’t like the noise or something, and people get killed — and you don’t like the look of it — and you get afraid to die — and you shoot yourself in the hand or foot to get the hell out of it because you can’t stand it. Well you get shot for that and your ideal isn’t going to save you, brother.

FIRST COMRADE. But I fought well. I wasn’t any self-inflicted wound.

PHILIP. I never said you were. I was just trying to explain something to you. But I don’t seem to make myself clear. I’m thinking, you see, what the man is going to do that you let get away, and how I’m going to get him in a nice fine place like that again before he kills somebody. You see I needed him very much and very much alive. And you let him go.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar, if you do not believe me —

PHILIP. No, I don’t believe you and I’m not a Commissar. I’m a policeman. I don’t believe anything I hear and very little of what I see. What do you mean, believe you? Listen. You’re out of luck. I have to try to find out if you did it on purpose. I don’t look forward to that.

| He pours himself a drink]

And if you’re smart you won’t look forward to it either. And if you didn’t do it on purpose the effect is just the same. There’s only one thing about duty. You have to do it. And there’s only one thing about orders. THEY ARE TO BE OBEYED. I could, given enough time, explain to you that discipline is kindness, but then, I don’t explain things very well.

FIRST COMRADE. Please, Comrade Commissar —

PHILIP. Use that word once more and you’ll irritate me.

FIRST COMRADE. Comrade Commissar.

PHILIP. Shut up. I haven’t any manners — see? I have to use them so much I get tired of them. And they bore me. I have to talk to you in front of my boss. And cut out the Commissar part. I’m a cop. What you tell me now doesn’t mean anything. You see it’s my ass too, you know. If you didn’t do it on purpose I wouldn’t worry too much. I just have to know, you see. I tell you what. If you didn’t do it on purpose I’ll split it with you.

[There is a knock at the door]

Adelante.

[The door opens and shows two ASSAULT GUARDS in blue uniforms, flat caps, with rifles]

FIRST GUARD. A sus ordenes mi comandante.

PHILIP. Take these two men over to Seguridad. I’ll be by later to talk to them.

FIRST GUARD. A sus ordenes.

[The SECOND COMRADE starts for the door. The ASSAULT GUARD runs his hands up and down his flanks to see if he is armed]

PHILIP. They’re both armed. Disarm them and take them along.

[To the TWO COMRADES]

Good luck.

[He says this sarcastically]

Hope you come out fine.

[The four go out, and you hear them going down in the hall. In the other room, DOROTHY BRIDGES stirs in bed, wakes, yawns, and stretching, reaches up for the bell that hangs by the bed. You hear the bell ring. PHILIP hears it ring too. There is a knock on his door]

PHILIP. Adelante.

[It is the MANAGER, very upset]

MANAGER. Is arrest two Comrades.

PHILIP. Very bad Comrades. One anyway. Other may be perfectly all right.

MANAGER. Mr. Philip is too much happening near you right now. I tell you as friend. Try and keep a things quieter. Is no good come with so much happen all the time.

PHILIP. No. I guess not. And it’s a pretty day too, isn’t it? Or isn’t it?

MANAGER. I tell you what you should do. You should make a day like this excursion and picnic in the country.

[In the next room DOROTHY BRIDGES has put on dressing gown and slippers. She disappears into the bathroom, and when she comes out she is brushing her hair. Her hair is very beautiful and she sits on the bed, in front of the electric heater, brushing it. With no make-up on she looks very young. She rings the bell again, and a MAID opens the door. She is a little old woman of about sixty in a blue blouse and apron]

MAID. [PETRA] Se puede?

DOROTHY. Good morning, Petra.

PETRA. Buenos dias, Sehorita.

[DOROTHY gets into bed and PETRA puts the breakfast tray down on the bed]

DOROTHY. Petra, aren’t there any eggs?

PETRA. No, Senorita.

DOROTHY. Is your mother better, Petra?

PETRA. No, Senorita.

DOROTHY. Have you had any breakfast, Petra?

PETRA. No, Senorita.

DOROTHY. Get a cup and have some of this coffee right away. Hurry.

PETRA. I’ll take some when you’re through, Senorita. Was the bombardment very bad here last night?

DOROTHY. Oh, it was lovely.

PETRA. Senorita, you say such dreadful things.

DOROTHY. No, but Petra it was lovely.

PETRA. In Progresso, in my quarter, there were six killed in one floor. This morning they were taking them out and all the glass gone in the street. There won’t be any more glass this winter.

DOROTHY. Here there wasn’t any one killed.

PETRA. Is the Senor ready for his breakfast?

DOROTHY. The Senor isn’t here any more.

PETRA. He has gone to the front?

DOROTHY. Oh, no. He never goes to the front. He just writes about it. There’s another Senor here.

PETRA. [Sadly] Who, Senorita?

DOROTHY. [Happily] Mr. Philip.

PETRA. Oh, Senorita. How terrible.

[She goes out crying]

DOROTHY. [Calling after her] Petra. Oh, Petra!

PETRA. [Resignedly] Yes, Senorita.

DOROTHY. [Happily] See if Mr. Philip’s up.

PETRA. Yes, Senorita.

[PETRA comes to MR. PHILIP’S door and knocks]

 PHILIP. Come in.

PETRA. The Senorita asks me to see if you are up.

PHILIP. No.

PETRA. [At the other door] The Senor says he’s not up.

DOROTHY. Tell him to come and have some breakfast, Petra, please.

PETRA. [At the other door] The Senorita asks you to come and have some breakfast, but there is very little as there is.

PHILIP. Tell the Senorita that I never eat breakfast.

PETRA. [At the other door] He says he never eats breakfast. But I know he eats more breakfast than three people.

DOROTHY. Petra, he’s so difficult. Just ask him not to be stupid and come in here please.

PETRA. [At the other door] She says come.

PHILIP. What a word. What a word.

[He puts on a dressing gown and slippers]

These are rather small. Must be Preston’s. Nice robe though. Might offer to buy it from him.

[He gathers up the papers, opens the door and goes into the other room, knocking as he pushes the door open]

DOROTHY. Come in. Oh, here you are.

PHILIP. Isn’t this all very rather unconventional?

DOROTHY. Philip, you stupid darling. Where have you been?

PHILIP. In a very strange room.

DOROTHY. How did you get there?

PHILIP. No idea.

DOROTHY. Don’t you remember anything?

PHILIP. I recall some muck about chucking someone out.

DOROTHY. That was Preston.

PHILIP. Really?

DOROTHY. Yes very really.

PHILIP. We must get him back. Shouldn’t be rude that way.

DOROTHY. Oh, no. Philip. No. He’s gone for good.

PHILIP. Awful phrase; for good.

DOROTHY. [Determinedly] For good and all.

PHILIP. Even worse phrase. Gives me the horrorous.

DOROTHY. What are the horrorous, darling?

PHILIP. Sort of super horrors. You know. Now you see them. Now you don’t. Watch for them to go around the corner.

DOROTHY. You haven’t had them?

PHILIP. Oh, yes. I’ve had everything. Worst I remember was a file of marines. Used to come into the room suddenly.

DOROTHY. Philip, sit here.

[PHILIP sits down on the bed very gingerly]

Philip, you must promise me something. You won’t just go on drinking and not have any aim in life and not do anything real? You aren’t just going to be a Madrid playboy are you?

PHILIP. A Madrid playboy?

DOROTHY. Yes. Around Chicote’s. And the Miami. And the embassies and the Ministerio and Vernon Rodgers’ flat and that dreadful Anita. Though the embassies are really the worst. Philip, you aren’t, are you?

PHILIP. What else is there?

DOROTHY. There’s everything. You could do something serious and decent. You could do something brave and calm and good. You know what will happen if you keep on just crawling around from bar to bar and going with those dreadful people? You’ll be shot. A man was shot the other night in Chicote’s. It was terrible.

PHILIP. Any one we know?

DOROTHY. No. Just a poor man who was squirting every one with a flit gun. He didn’t mean any harm. And some one took offense and shot him. I saw it and it was very depressing. They shot him very suddenly and he lay on his back and his face was very gray and he’d been so gay just a little while before. They kept every one there for two hours, and the police smelt of everybody’s pistol and they wouldn’t serve any more drinks. They didn’t cover him up and we had to go and show our papers to a man at a table just beside where he was and it was very depressing, Philip. And he had such dirty hose and his shoes were completely worn through on the bottoms and he had no undershirt at all.

PHILIP. Poor chap. You know the stuff they drink is absolutely poison now. Makes people quite mad.

DOROTHY. But Philip, you don’t have to be like that. And you don’t have to go around and maybe have people shoot at you. You could do something political or something military and fine.

PHILIP. Don’t tempt me. Don’t make me ambitious.

[He pauses]

Don’t open vistas.

DOROTHY. That was a dreadful thing you did the other night with the spittoon. Trying to provoke trouble there in Chicote’s. Simply trying to provoke it, everybody said.

PHILIP. And who was I provoking?

DOROTHY. I don’t know. What does it matter who? You shouldn’t be provoking anybody.

PHILIP. No, I suppose not. It probably comes soon enough without provoking it.

DOROTHY. Don’t talk pessimistically, darling, when we’ve just started our life together.

PHILIP. Our — ?

DOROTHY. Our life together. Philip, don’t you want to have a long, happy, quiet life at some place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez was and have long walks, and go swimming and have children and be happy and everything? I mean really. Don’t you want all this to end? I mean you know, war and revolution?

PHILIP. And will we have the Continental Daily Mail for breakfast and brioches and fresh strawberry jam?

DOROTHY. Darling, we’ll have oeufs au jambon and you can have the Morning Post if you like. And every one will say Messieur-Dame.

PHILIP. The Morning Post’s just stopped publishing.

DOROTHY. Oh, Philip, you’re so depressing. I wanted us to have such a happy life. Don’t you want children? They can play in the Luxembourg and roll hoops and sail boats.

PHILIP. And you can show them on a map. You know; on a globe even. ‘Children’; we’ll call the boy Derek, worst name I know. You can say, ‘Derek. That’s the Wangpoo. Now follow my finger and I’ll show you where Daddy is.’ And Derek will say, ‘Yes, Mummy. Have I ever seen Daddy?’

DOROTHY. Oh, no. It won’t be like that. We’ll just live somewhere where it’s lovely and you’ll write.

PHILIP. What?

DOROTHY. Whatever you like. Novels and articles and a book on this war perhaps.

PHILIP. Be a pretty book. Might make it with — with — you know — illustrations.

DOROTHY. Or you could study and write a book on politics. Books on politics sell forever, some one told me.

PHILIP. [Ringing the bell] I imagine.

DOROTHY. You could study and write a book on dialectics. There’s always a market for a new book on dialectics.

PHILIP. Really?

DOROTHY. But, darling Philip, the first thing is for you to start here now and do something worth doing and stop this absolutely utter playboy business.

PHILIP. I read it in a book, but I never really knew about it. Is it true that the first thing an American woman does is try to get the man she’s interested in to give up something? You know, boozing about, or smoking Virginia cigarettes, or wearing gaiters, or hunting, or something silly?

DOROTHY. No, Philip. It’s that you’re a very serious problem for any woman.

PHILIP. I hope so.

DOROTHY. And I don’t want you to give up something. I want you to take up something.

PHILIP. Good.

[He kisses her]

I will. Now have some breakfast. I have to go back and make a few phone calls.

DOROTHY. Philip, don’t go.

PHILIP. I’ll be back in just a moment, darling. And I’ll be so serious.

DOROTHY. You know what you said?

PHILIP. Of course.

DOROTHY. [Very happily] You said darling.

PHILIP. I knew it was infectious but I never knew it was contagious. Forgive me, dear.

DOROTHY. Dear is a nice word, too.

PHILIP. Good-bye then — er — sweet.

DOROTHY. Sweet, oh you darling.

PHILIP. Good-bye, Comrade.

DOROTHY. Comrade. Oh, and you said darling before.

PHILIP. Comrade’s quite a word. I suppose I oughtn’t to chuck it around. I take it back.

DOROTHY. [Rapturously] Oh, Philip. You’re developing politically.

PHILIP. God — er, oh you know, whatever it is, save us.

DOROTHY. Don’t blaspheme. It’s frightfully bad luck.

PHILIP. [Hurriedly and rather grimly] Good-bye, darling dear sweet.

DOROTHY. You don’t call me comrade.

PHILIP. [Going out] No. You see I’m developing politically.

[He goes into the next room]

DOROTHY. [Rings for PETRA. Speaks to her. Leaning back comfortably in bed against the pillows] Oh, Petra, he’s so lovely and so sort of vital and so gay. But he doesn’t do anything. He’s supposed to send dispatches to some stupid London paper, but they say at Censura he practically never sends anything. He’s so refreshing after Preston always going on about his wife and children. Let him go back to his wife and children now if he’s so excited about them. I’ll bet he won’t. Those wife-and-children men at a war. They just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them. I mean positively club you. I don’t know why I ever put up with Preston so long. And he’s so gloomy. Expecting the city to fall and everything and always looking at the map. Always looking at a map is one of the most irritating habits a man can get into. Isn’t it, Petra?

PETRA. I don’t understand, Senorita.

DOROTHY. Oh, Petra, I wonder what he’s doing now.

PETRA. Nothing good.

DOROTHY. Petra, don’t talk that way. You’re a defeatist.

PETRA. No, Senorita, I have no politics. I only work.

DOROTHY. Well, you can go now because I think I’ll go back to sleep for just a little while longer. I feel so sleepy and good this morning.

PETRA. That you rest well, Senorita.

[She goes out closing the door]

[In the next room PHILIP answers the phone]

PHILIP. Yes. Right. Send him up.

[There is a knock on the door and a COMRADE in I.B. uniform enters. He salutes smartly. He is a young, good-looking, dark boy of perhaps twenty-three]

Salud, Comrade. Come in.

COMRADE. They sent me here from Brigade. I was to report to you in room one thirteen.

PHILIP. The room’s changed. Do you have a copy of the order?

COMRADE. It was a verbal order.

[PHILIP takes the phone; asks for a number]

PHILIP. Ochenta — dos zero uno cinco. Hello Haddock? No. Haddock. Hake speaking. Yes. Hake. Good. Haddock?

[He turns to the COMRADE]

What’s your name, Comrade?

COMRADE. Wilkinson.

PHILIP. Hello, Haddock. Sent a Comrade Wilkinson over to the Booth Fisheries? Right. Thanks so much. Salud.

[Hooks up the telephone. He turns to the COMRADE and puts out his hand]

I’m glad to see you, Comrade. Now what was it? COMRADE WILKINSON. I’m under your orders.

PHILIP. Oh.

[He seems very reluctant, about something]

How old are you, Comrade?

COMRADE WILKINSON. Twenty.

PHILIP. Had much fun?

COMRADE WILKINSON. I’m not in this for fun.

PHILIP. No. Of course not. Was just a question.

[He pauses. Then goes on abandoning the reluctance; he speaks in a very military way]

Now one thing I have to tell you. In this particular show you have to be armed to enforce your authority. But you’re not to use your weapon under any circumstances. Under any circumstances. Is that quite clear?

COMRADE WILKINSON. Not in self-defense?

PHILIP. Not under any circumstances.

COMRADE WILKINSON. I see. And what are my orders?

PHILIP. Go down and take yourself a walk. Then come back here and take a room and register. When you have the room stop by here and let me know what room it is, and I’ll tell you what to do. You’ll have to spend most of your time in your room today.

[He pauses]

Have a good walk. Might have a glass of beer. There’s beer today at the Aguilar places.

COMRADE WILKINSON. I don’t drink, Comrade.

PHILIP. Quite right. Excellent. We of the older generation have certain leprous spots of vice which can hardly be eradicated at this date. But you are an example to us. Get along now.

COMRADE WILKINSON. Yes, Comrade.

[He salutes and goes out]

PHILIP. [After he has gone] Awful pity. Yes. An awful pity.

[The telephone rings]

Yes? Here speaking. Good. No. I’m sorry. Later.

[He hangs up the phone... The phone rings again]

Oh, hello. Yes. I’m awfully sorry. What a shame. I will. Yes. Later.

[He hangs up. The phone rings again]

Oh, hello. Oh, I am sorry, I really am. What do you say to a little later? No? Good man. Come in and we’ll get it over with.

[There is a knock at the door]

Come on in.

[Enter PRESTON. He has a bandaged eyebrow and looks none too well]

I am sorry, you know.

PRESTON. What good does that do? You behaved disgustingly.

PHILIP. Right. Now what can I do?

[Spoken very flatly]

I said I was sorry.

PRESTON. Well, you might take off my dressing gown and slippers.

PHILIP. [Taking them off] Good.

[He hands them over]

[Regretfully]

You wouldn’t sell the robe, would you? It’s nice stuff.

PRESTON. No. And now get out of my room.

PHILIP. Do we have to do the whole thing over again?

PRESTON. If you won’t get out I’ll ring and have you thrown out.

PHILIP. Better ring, then.

[PRESTON rings. PHILIP goes into the bathroom. There is a sound of water splashing. There is a knock at the door and the MANAGER enters]

MANAGER. Nothing is all right?

PRESTON. I want you to call the police and have this man removed from my room.

MANAGER. Mr. Preston. I have maid pack your things up right away. You be comfortable in one fourteen. Mr. Preston you know better than call police into a hotel. What’s a first thing police say? Whosa cana milk belong to? Whosa corn beef belong to? Whosa hoards coffee in this hotel? Whatsa meaning all this sugar in the armoire? Whosa got three bottles of whiskey? Whatsa matter here? Mr. Preston never calla police in private matter. Mr. Preston, I appeal to you.

PHILIP. [From the bathroom] Whosa these three cakesa soap belong to?

MANAGER. You see, Mr. Preston? In a private matter public authority is giva always a wrong interpretation. Is a law against to have these things. Is a severe law against all forms of hoarding. Is a police misunderstand.

PHILIP. [From the bathroom] Whosa got three bottles eau de cologne in here?

MANAGER. You see, Mr. Preston? With all my good voluntaries I could not introduce police.

PRESTON. Oh, go to — hell then, both of you. Have the things moved into one fourteen then. You’re a rotten cad, Rawlings. Remember I told you, will you?

PHILIP. [From the bathroom] Whosa four tubes Mennen’s shaving cream belong to?

MANAGER. Mister Preston. Four tubes. Mister Presston.

PRESTON. All you do is beg for food. I’ve given you plenty. Pack up the things and have them moved.

MANAGER. Very good, Mister Preston, but only one thing. When against all my voluntaries initiate slight petition for food only wishing superating quantities —

PHILIP. [From bathroom, choking with laughing] What’s that?

MANAGER. Am telling Mr. Preston only petition unnecessary amounts and then only on basis of seven in family. Listen, Mr. Preston, has my mother-in-law — that luxury — now in her head one tooth remaining. You understand. Only one tooth. With this eats all and enjoys. When this goes must I buy entire apparatus of teeth both higher and lower, and is fit for eating higher things. Is fit for the beefsteak, is fit for the chops, is fit for the what you call it, the salomillo. Every night I tell you, Mr. Preston, I ask her how is the tooth old woman? Every night I think if that goes where are we? Given entire new up and down teeth would not be enough horses left in Madrid for the army. I tell you, Mr. Preston, you never saw such a woman. Such a luxury. Mr. Preston, you unable spare one small can of any sort that superates?

PRESTON. Get something from Rawlings. He’s your friend.

PHILIP. [Coming out of the bathroom] With me Comrade Stamp Collector superates one can of bully beef.

MANAGER. Oh, Mr. Philip. You have heart bigger than the hotel.

PRESTON. And twice as dirty.

[He goes out]

PHILIP. He’s very bitter.

MANAGER. You take away the young lady. Makes him furious. Fills him with, how you call, jellishness.

PHILIP. That’s it. He’s simply crammed with jellishness. Tried to knock some of it out of him last night. No good.

MANAGER. Listen, Mr. Philip. Tell me one thing. How long the war going last?

PHILIP. A long time, I’m afraid.

MANAGER. Mr. Philip, I hate to hear you say so. Is now a year. Is not funny, you know.

PHILIP. Don’t you worry about it. You just last yourself.

MANAGER. You be careful and last too. Mr. Philip, be more careful. I know. Don’t think I don’t know.

PHILIP. Don’t know too much. And whatever you know keep your good old mouth shut, eh? We work all right together that way.

MANAGER. But be careful, Mr. Philip.

PHILIP. I’m lasting all right. Have a drink?

[He pours a Scotch and puts water in it]

MANAGER. Never I touch the alcohol. But listen, Mr. Philip. Be more careful. In one o five is very bad. In one o seven is very bad.

PHILIP. Thanks. I know that. Only what I had in one o seven I lost. They let him get away.

MANAGER. In one fourteen is only a fool.

PHILIP. Quite.

MANAGER. Last night is try get into one thirteen for you, pretending was mistake. I know.

PHILIP. That’s why I wasn’t there. I had some one looking after the fool.

MANAGER. Mr. Philip, you be very careful. You like I should put the Yale lock on door? The big lock? Very strongest type?

PHILIP. No. The big lock wouldn’t do any good. You don’t do this business with big locks.

MANAGER. You want anything special, Mr. Philip? Anything can do?

PHILIP. No. Nothing special. Thanks for turning away that fool journalist from Valencia who wanted a room here. We’ve got enough fools here now including you and me.

MANAGER. But I let him in later if you want. I told him was no room would let him know. If things quiet can let him in later on. Mr. Philip, you take care yourself. Please. You know.

PHILIP. I’m lasting well enough. I just get sort of low in my mind sometimes.

[During this time DOROTHY BRIDGES has gotten out of bed, gone into the bathroom, dressed and come back to the room. She sits at the typewriter, then gets up and puts a record on the gramophone. It is a Chopin Ballade in La Bemol Menor Op. 47. PHILIP hears the music]

PHILIP. [To the MANAGER] Excuse me a moment, will you? You going to move his things? If any one comes in for me ask them to wait, will you?

MANAGER. I tell the maid that moves.

[PHILIP goes to DOROTHY’s door and knocks]

DOROTHY. Come in, Philip.

PHILIP. Mind if I have a drink in here for a moment?

DOROTHY. No. Please do.

PHILIP. Two things I’d like to ask you to do.

[The record has stopped. In the other room you see that the MANAGER has gone out and that the MAID has come in and is making a pile of PRESTON’s things on the bed]

DOROTHY. What are they, Philip?

PHILIP. One is move out of this hotel, and the other is go back to America.

DOROTHY. Why, you impudent, impertinent man. Why you’re worse than Preston.

PHILIP. I mean them both. This hotel’s no place for you now. I mean it.

DOROTHY. And I was just beginning to be so happy with you. Philip, don’t be silly. Please, darling, don’t be silly.

[At the door of the other room you see the YOUNG COMRADE WILKINSON in I.B. uniform at the open door]

WILKINSON. [To the MAID] Comrade Rawlings?

MAID. Come in and sit down. He said to wait.

[WILKINSON sits down in a chair with his back to the door. In the other room DOROTHY has put the record on the phonograph again. PHILIP lifts the needle off, and the record goes round and round on the turntable]

DOROTHY. You said you wanted a drink. Here.

PHILIP. I don’t want one.

DOROTHY. What’s the matter, darling?

PHILIP. You know I’m being serious. You must get out of here.

DOROTHY. I’m not afraid of the shelling. You know that.

PHILIP. It’s not the shelling.

DOROTHY. Well then, what is it, darling? Don’t you like me? I’d like to make you very happy here.

PHILIP. What can I do to make you get out?

DOROTHY. Nothing. I won’t go.

PHILIP. I’ll have you moved over to the Victoria.

DOROTHY. You will not.

PHILIP. I wish I could talk to you.

DOROTHY. But why can’t you?

PHILIP. I can’t ever talk to any one.

DOROTHY. But darling, that’s just an inhibition. You could go to an analyst and have that fixed in no time. It’s easy and it’s very fascinating.

PHILIP. You’re hopeless. But you’re beautiful. I’ll just have you moved out.

[He puts the needle back on the record and winds up the phonograph]

PHILIP. I’m sorry if I seem dismal.

DOROTHY. It’s probably just your liver, darling.

[As the record plays, you see that some one has stopped outside the door of the room where the MAID is working and the boy is sitting. The man is wearing a beret and a trench coat, and he leans against the door jamb to steady his aim and shoots the boy in the back of his head with a long-barrelled Mauser pistol. The maid screams— ‘Ayee’ — then starts to cry into her apron. PHILIP, as he hears the shot, pushes DOROTHY toward the bed and goes to the door with a pistol in his right hand. Opening the door he looks both ways from it keeping himself covered, then rounds the corner and enters the room. As the MAID sees him with the pistol she screams again]

PHILIP. Don’t be silly.

[He goes over to the chair where the body is, lifts the head and lets it drop]

The bastards. The dirty bastards.

[DOROTHY had followed him to the door. He pushes her out]

PHILIP. Get out of here.

DOROTHY. Philip, what is it?

PHILIP. Don’t look at him. That’s a dead man. Somebody shot him.

DOROTHY. Who shot him?

PHILIP. Maybe he shot himself. It’s none of your business. Get out of here. Didn’t you ever see a dead man before? Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go and write an article. This is none of your business.

[Then to the MAID]

Hurry up and get those cans and bottles out of here.

[He commences to throw things from the armoire shelves onto the bed]

All the cans of milk. All the corn beef. All the sugar. All the tinned salmon. All the eau de cologne. All the extra soap. Get them out. We have to call the police.

CURTAIN

Act Two Scene One

A room in Seguridad headquarters. There is a plain table, bare except for a green-shaded lamp. The windows are all closed and shuttered. Behind the table a short man with a very thin-lipped, hawk-nosed ascetic-looking face is sitting. He has very thick eyebrows. PHILIP sits on a chair beside the table. The hawk-faced man is holding a pencil. On a chair in front of the table a MAN is sitting. He is crying with very deep shaking sobs. ANTONIO (the hawk-nosed man) is looking at him very interestedly. It is the FIRST COMRADE from Act I, Scene III. He is bareheaded, his tunic is off, and his braces, which hold up his baggy I.B. trousers, hang down along his trousers. As the curtain rises PHILIP stands up and looks at the FIRST COMRADE.

PHILIP. [In a tired voice] I’d like to ask you one more thing.

FIRST COMRADE. Don’t ask me. Please don’t ask me. I don’t want you to ask me.

PHILIP. Were you asleep?

FIRST COMRADE. [Choking] Yes.

PHILIP. [In a very tired flat voice] You know the penalty for that?

FIRST COMRADE. Yes.

PHILIP. Why didn’t you say so at the start and save a lot of trouble? I wouldn’t have you shot for that. I’m just disappointed in you now. Do you think people shoot people for fun?

FIRST COMRADE. I should have told you. I was frightened.

PHILIP. Yeah. You should have told me.

FIRST COMRADE. Truly, Comrade Commissar.

PHILIP. [To ANTONIO, coldly] You think he was asleep?

ANTONIO. How do I know? Do you want me to question him?

PHILIP. No, mi Coronel, no. We want information. We don’t want a confession.

[To the FIRST COMRADE]

Listen, what did you dream about when you went to sleep?

FIRST COMRADE. [Checks himself sobbing, hesitates, then goes on] I don’t remember.

PHILIP. Just try to. Take your time. I only want to be sure, you see. Don’t try to lie. I’ll know if you lie.

FIRST COMRADE. I remember now. I was against the wall and my rifle was between my legs when I leaned back, and I remember.

[He chokes]

In the dream I — I thought it was my girl and she was doing something — kind of funny — to me. I don’t know what it was. It was just in a dream.

[He chokes]

PHILIP. [To ANTONIO] You satisfied now?

ANTONIO. I do not understand it completely.

PHILIP. Well, I guess nobody really understands it completely, but he’s convinced me.

[To the FIRST COMRADE]

What’s your girl’s name?

FIRST COMRADE. Alma.

PHILIP. O.K. When you write her tell her she brought you a lot of luck.

[To ANTONIO]

As far as I’m concerned you can take him out. He reads the Worker. He knows Joe North. He’s got a girl named Alma. He’s got a good record with the Brigade, and he went to sleep and let a citizen slip who shot a boy named Wilkinson by mistake for me. The thing to do is to give him lots of strong coffee to keep him awake and keep rifles out from between his legs. Listen, Comrade, I’m sorry if I spoke roughly to you in the performance of my duty.

ANTONIO. I would like to put a few questions.

PHILIP. Listen, mi Coronel. If I wasn’t good at this you wouldn’t have let me go on doing it so long. This boy is all right. You know we are none of us exactly what you would call all right. But this boy is pretty all right. He just went to sleep, and I’m not justice, you know. I’m just working for you, and the cause, and the Republic and one thing and another. And we used to have a President named Lincoln in America, you know, who commuted sentences of sentries to be shot for sleeping, you know. So I think if it’s all right with you we’ll just sort of commute his sentence. He comes from the Lincoln Battalion you see — and it’s an awfully good battalion. It’s such a good battalion and it’s done such things that it would break your damn heart if I tried to tell you about it. And if I was in it I’d feel decent and proud instead of the way I feel doing what I am. But I’m not, see? I’m a sort of a second-rate cop pretending to be a third-rate newspaperman — But listen Comrade Alma —

[Turning to prisoner]

If you ever go to sleep again on duty when you are working for me I’ll shoot you myself, see? You hear me? And write it to Alma.

ANTONIO. [Ringing. Two ASSAULT GUARDS come in] Take him away. You speak very confusedly, Philip. But you have a certain amount of credit to exhaust.

FIRST COMRADE. Thank you, Comrade Commissar.

PHILIP. Oh, don’t say thank you in a war. This is a war. You don’t say thank you in it. But you’re welcome, see?

And when you write to Alma tell her she brought you a lot of luck.

[FIRST COMRADE goes out with ASSAULT GUARDS]

ANTONIO. Yes, and now. This man got away from room 107 and shot this boy by mistake for you, and who is this man?

PHILIP. Oh, I don’t know. Santa Claus, I guess. He’s got a number. They have A numbered one to ten, and B numbered one to ten, and C numbered one to ten, and they shoot people and they blow up things and they do everything you’re overly familiar with. And they work very hard, and aren’t really awfully efficient. But they kill a lot of people that they shouldn’t kill. The trouble is they’ve worked it out so well on the lines of the old Cuban A.B.C. that unless you get somebody outside that they deal with, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just like cutting the heads off boils instead of listening to a Fleischman’s Yeast Program. You know, correct me if I become confusing.

ANTONIO. And why do you not take this man with a sufficient force?

PHILIP. Because I cannot afford to make much noise and scare others that we need much more. This one is just a killer.

ANTONIO. Yes. There are plenty of fascists left in a town of a million people, and they work inside. Those who have the courage to. We must have twenty thousand active here.

PHILIP. More. Double that. But when you catch them they won’t talk. Except the politicians.

ANTONIO. Politicians. Yes, politicians. I have seen a politician on the floor in that corner of the room unable to stand up when it was time to go out. I have seen a politician walk across that floor on his knees and put his arms around my legs and kiss my feet. I watched him slobber on my boots when all he had to do was such a simple thing as die. I have seen many die, and I have never seen a politician die well.

PHILIP. I don’t like to see them die. It’s O.K. I guess, if you like to see it. But I don’t like it. Sometimes I don’t know how you stick it. Listen, who dies well?

ANTONIO. You know. Don’t be naive.

PHILIP. Yes. I suppose I know.

ANTONIO. I could die all right. I don’t ask anyone to do something that is impossible.

PHILIP. You’re a specialist. Look, Tonico. Who dies well? Go ahead, say it. Go ahead. Do you good to talk about your trade. Talk about it you know. Then next thing you know, forget it. Simple, eh? Tell me about in the first days of the movement.

ANTONIO. [Rather proudly] You want to hear? You mean definite people?

PHILIP. No. I know a couple of definite people. I mean sort of by classes.

ANTONIO. Fascists, real fascists, the young ones; very well. Sometimes with very much style. They are mistaken, but they have much style. Soldiers, yes, the majority all right. Priests all my life I am against. The church fights us. We fight the church. I am a Socialist for many years. We are the oldest revolutionary party in Spain. But to die —

[He shakes his hand in the quick triple flip of the wrist that is the Spanish gesture of supreme admiration]

To die? Priests? Terrific. You know; just simple priests. I don’t mean bishops.

PHILIP. And Antonio. Sometimes there must have been mistakes, eh? When you had to work in a hurry perhaps. Or you know, just mistakes, we all make mistakes. I just made a little one yesterday. Tell me, Antonio, were there ever any mistakes?

ANTONIO. Oh, yes. Certainly. Mistakes. Oh, yes. Mistakes. Yes. Yes. Very regrettable mistakes. A very few.

PHILIP. And how did the mistakes die?

ANTONIO. [Proudly] All very well.

PHILIP. Ah —

[It is noise a boxer might make when he is hit with a hard body punch]

And this trade we’re in now. You know, what’s the silly name they call it? Counter-espionage. It doesn’t ever get on your nerves?

ANTONIO. [Simply] No.

PHILIP. With me it’s on the nerves now for a long time.

ANTONIO. But you’ve only been doing it for a little while.

PHILIP. Twelve bloody months, my boy, in this country. And before that, Cuba. Ever been in Cuba?

ANTONIO. Yes.

PHILIP. That’s where I got sucked in on all this.

ANTONIO. How were you sucked in?

PHILIP. Oh, people started trusting me that should have known better. And I suppose because they should have known better I started getting, you know, sort of trustworthy. You know, not elaborately, just sort of moderately trustworthy. And then they trust you a little more and you do it all right. And then you know, you get to believing in it. Finally I guess you get to liking it. I have a sort of a feeling I don’t explain it very well.

ANTONIO. You’re a good boy. You work well. Everybody trusts you very much.

PHILIP. Too bloody much. And I’m tired too, and I’m worried right now. You know what I’d like? I’d like to never kill another son-of-a-bitch, I don’t care who or for what, as long as I live. I’d like to never have to lie. I’d like to know who I’m with when I wake up. I’d like to wake up in the same place every morning for a week straight. I’d like to marry a girl named Bridges that you don’t know. But don’t mind if I use the name because I like to say it. And I’d like to marry her because she’s got the longest, smoothest, straightest legs in the world, and I don’t have to listen to her when she talks if it doesn’t make too good sense. But I’d like to see what the kids would look like.

ANTONIO. She is the tall blonde with that correspondent?

PHILIP. Don’t talk about her like that. She isn’t any tall blonde with some correspondent. That’s my girl. And if I talk too much or take up your valuable time, why, stop me. You know I’m a very extraordinary fellow. I can talk either English or American. Was brought up in one, raised in the other. That’s what I make my living at.

ANTONIO. [Soothingly] I know. You are tired, Philip.

PHILIP. Well, now I’m talking American. Bridges is the same way. Only I’m not sure she can talk American. You see she learned her English at college and from the cheap or literary type of Lord, but you know what’s funny, you see. I just like to hear her talk. I don’t care what she says. I’m relaxed now, you see. I haven’t had anything to drink since breakfast, and I’m a lot drunker than I am when I drink, and that’s a bad sign. Is it all right for one of your operatives to relax, mi Coronel?

ANTONIO. You ought to go to bed. You’re tired out, Philip, and you have much work to do.

PHILIP. That’s right. I’m tired out and I have much work to do. I’m waiting to meet a comrade at Chicote’s. Name of Max. I have, and I do not exaggerate, very much work to do. Max, whom I believe you know and who, to show what a distinguished man he is, has no hind name, while my back name is Rawlings exactly the same as when I started. Which shows you I haven’t gotten very far in this business. What was I saying?

ANTONIO. About Max.

PHILIP. Max. That’s it. Max. Well he’s a day overdue now. He’s been navigating now for about two weeks, say circulating to avoid confusion, behind the fascist lines. It’s his specialty. And he says, and he doesn’t lie. I lie. But not right now. Anyway, I’m very tired, see, and I’m also disgusted with my job, and I’m nervous as a bastard because I’m worried and I don’t worry easy.

ANTONIO. Go on. Don’t be temperamental.

PHILIP. He says, that is Max says, and where he is now I wish to hell I knew, that he has a place located, an observation post, you know. Watch them fall, and say it’s the wrong place. One of those. Well, he says that the German head of the siege artillery that shells this town comes there and a lovely politician. You know a museum piece. He comes there too. And Mux thinks. And I think he is screwball. But he thinks better. I think faster, but he thinks better. That we can bag those citizens. Now listen very carefully, mi Coronet, and correct me instantly. I think it sounds very romantic. But Max says, and he’s a German and very practical, and he’d just as soon go behind the fascist lines as you would go to get a shave, or what shall we say. Well he says it’s perfectly practical. So I thought. And I’m sort of drunk now on drinking nothing for so long. That we would sort of suspend the other projects that we have been working on, temporarily, and try to get these two people for you. I don’t think the German is of much practical use to you, but he has a very high exchange value indeed, and this project sort of, in a way, appeals to Max. Lay it to nationalism, I say. But if we get this other citizen you’ve got something, mi Coronel. Because he is very, very terrific. I mean terrific. He, you see, is outside the town. But he knows who is inside the town. And then you just sort of bring him into good voice and you know who is inside the town. Because they all communicate with him. I talk too much, don’t I?

ANTONIO. Philip.

PHILIP. Yes, mi Coronel.

ANTONIO. Philip, now go to Chicote’s and get drunk like a good boy and do your work, and come or call when you have news.

PHILIP. And what do I talk, mi Coronel, American or English?

ANTONIO. What you like. Do not talk silly. But go now, please, because we are good friends and I like you very much, but I am very busy. Listen, is it true about the observation post?

PHILIP. Yeah.

ANTONIO. What a thing.

PHILIP. Very fancy, though. Awfully, awfully fancy, mi Coronel.

ANTONIO. Go, please, and start.

PHILIP. And I talk either English or American?

ANTONIO. What’s all that about? Go.

PHILIP. Then I’ll talk English. Christ, I can lie so much easier in English, it’s pitiful.

ANTONIO. GO. GO. GO. GO. GO.

PHILIP. Yes, mi Coronel. Thank you for the instructive little talk. I’ll go to Chicote’s now. Salud, mi Coronel.

[He salutes, looks at his watch and goes]

ANTONIO. [At the desk, looks after him. Then rings. Two ASSAULT GUARDS come in. They salute] Now just bring me in that man you took out before. I want to talk to him a little while alone by myself.

CURTAIN

Act Two Scene Two

A corner table at Chicote’s bar. It is the first table on your right as you enter the door. The door and the window are sandbagged about three quarters of the way up. PHILIP is seated at the table with ANITA. A WAITER comes over to the table.

PHILIP. Any of the barrel whiskey left?

WAITER. Nothing now of the real but gin.

PHILIP. Good gin?

WAITER. The yellow of Booth’s. The best.

PHILIP. With bitters.

ANITA. You don’t love any more?

PHILIP. No.

ANITA. You make big mistake with that big blonde.

PHILIP. What big blonde?

ANITA. That great big blonde. Tall like a tower. Big like a horse.

PHILIP. Blonde like a wheat field.

ANITA. You make a mistake. Big a woman. Big a mistake.

PHILIP. What makes you think she’s so big?

ANITA. Big? Is big like a tank. Wait you get her with a baby. Big? Is a Studebaker truck.

PHILIP. That’s a lovely word, Studebaker, as you say it.

ANITA. Yes. I like best any English word I know. Studebaker. Is beautiful. Why you no love?

PHILIP. I don’t know, Anita. You know. Things change.

[He looks at his watch]

ANITA. You use a like fine. Is just the same.

PHILIP. I know it.

ANITA. You like before. You like again. Is must only try.

PHILIP. I know.

ANITA. When is have something good you don’t want to go away. Is a big woman plenty trouble. I know. I been this a long time.

PHILIP. You’re a fine girl, Anita.

ANITA. Is on account they all criticize because I bite Mr. Vernon that time?

PHILIP. No. Of course not.

ANITA. I tell you I give a lot not to do that.

PHILIP. Oh, nobody remembers that.

ANITA. You know why I do? Everybody know I bite, but nobody ever ask why.

PHILIP. Why was it?

ANITA. He try to take three hundred pesetas out my stocking. What I should do? Say ‘Yes, go ahead. All right. Help yourself’? No, I bite.

PHILIP. Quite right, too.

ANITA. You think? Really?

PHILIP. Yes.

ANITA. Oh, you sweet all right. Listen, you don’t want make mistake now with that big blonde.

PHILIP. You know, Anita. I’m afraid I do. I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistake.

[He calls the WAITER, looks at his watch. To WAITER] What time have you?

WAITER. [Looks at the clock over the bar and at Philip’s watch]

The same as you have.

ANITA. Be colossal all right.

PHILIP. You’re not jealous?

ANITA. No. I just hate. Last night I try to like. I say hokay everybody a comrade. Comes a big bombardment. Maybe everybody killed. Should be comrades everybody with each other. Bury the axes. Not be selfish. Not be egotistic. Love a enemy like a self. All that slop.

PHILIP. You were terrific.

ANITA. That kind a stuff don’t last over the night. This morning I wake up. First thing I do I hate that woman all day long.

PHILIP. You mustn’t, you know.

ANITA. What she want with you? She take a man just like you pick a flowers. She don’t want. She just pick to put in her room. She just like you because you big, too. Listen. I like you if you was a dwarf.

PHILIP. Na, Anita. No. Be careful.

ANITA. Listen good. I like you if you was sick. I like you if dry up and be ugly. I like you if you hunchback.

PHILIP. Hunchbacks are lucky.

ANITA. I like you if you unlucky hunchback. I like you if you got no money. You want? I make it.

PHILIP. That’s about the only thing I haven’t tried on this job.

ANITA. I not joke. I’m a serious. Philip, you leave her alone. You come back where you know is hokay.

PHILIP. I’m afraid I can’t, Anita.

ANITA. You just try. Isn’t any change. You like before, you like again. Always works that way when a man is a man.

PHILIP. But you see I change. It’s not that I mean to.

ANITA. You no change. I know you good. I know you long time now. You not the kind that change.

PHILIP. All men change.

ANITA. Is not the truth. Is get tired, yes. Is want to go away, yes. Is run around, yes. Is get angry, yes, yes. Is treat bad, yes, plenty. Is change? No. Only is to start different habits. Is a habit is all. Right away is the same with whoever.

PHILIP. I see that. Yes, that’s right. But you see it’s this sort of running into some one from your own people, and it upsets you.

ANITA. Is not from your own people. Is not like you. Is a different breed of people.

PHILIP. No, it’s the same sort of people.

ANITA. Listen, that big blonde make you crazy already. This soon you can’t think good. Is no more the same as you as blood and paint. Is look the same. Can a blood. Can a paint. All right. Put the paint in the body, instead of blood. What you get? American woman.

PHILIP. You’re unjust to her, Anita. Granted she’s lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still she’s very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocent — and quite brave.

ANITA. Hokay. Beautiful? What you want with beautiful when you’re through? I know you. Friendly? Hokay; is friendly can be unfriendly. Charming? Yes. Is a charming like the snake with rabbits. Innocent? You make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha. Is a innocent until a prove the guilty. Brave? Brave? You make me laugh again if I have any laugh left in my belly. Brave? All right. I laugh. Ho, ho, ho. What you do all the time this war you can’t tell a ignorance from a brave? Brave? My this —

[She rises from the table and slaps her behind]

So. Now I go.

PHILIP. You’re awfully hard on her.

ANITA. Hard on her? I like to throw a hand grenade in the bed where she sleeping right this minute. I tell you true. Last night I try all that stuff. All that sacrifice. All that giveup. You know. Now have one good healthy feeling. I hate.

[She goes]

PHILIP. [To the WAITER] You haven’t seen a comrade from the International Brigades here asking for me? Name of Max? A comrade with a face sort of broken across here.

[He puts his hand across his mouth and jaw]

A comrade with his teeth gone in front? With sort of black gums where they burnt them with a red-hot iron? And with a scar here?

[He runs his finger across the lower angle of his jaw]

Have you seen such a comrade?

WAITER. He hasn’t been here.

PHILIP. If such a comrade comes, will you ask him to come to the hotel?

WAITER. What hotel?

PHILIP. He’ll know what hotel.

[Starts out and, looks back]

Tell him I went out looking for him.

CURTAIN

Act Two Scene Three

Same as Act I, Scene III. The two adjoining rooms 109 and 110 in the Hotel Florida. It is dark outside the rooms and the curtains are drawn. There is no one in room 110 and it is dark. Room 109 is lighted brightly both by the reading lamp on the table, the main light in the ceiling, and a reading lamp clamped to the head of the bed. The electric heater and the electric stove are both on. DOROTHY BRIDGES, wearing a turtle-neck sweater, a tweed skirt, wool stockings and jodhpur boots, is doing something with a long-handled stew-pan on the electric cooking ring. A distant noise of gun fire comes through the curtained windows. DOROTHY rings the bell. There is no answering sound. She rings again.

DOROTHY. Oh, damn that electrician!

[She goes to the door and opens it]

Petra! Oh, Petra!

[You hear the MAID coming down the hall. She comes in the door]

PETRA. Yes, Senorita?

DOROTHY. Where’s the electrician, Petra?

PETRA. Didn’t you know?

DOROTHY. No. What? He’s simply got to come and fix this bell!

PETRA. He can’t come, Senorita, because he’s dead.

DOROTHY. What do you say?

PETRA. He was hit last night when he went out during the bombardment.

DOROTHY. He went out during the bombardment?

PETRA. Yes, Senorita. He had been drinking a little, and he went out to go home.

DOROTHY. The poor little man!

PETRA. Yes, Senorita, it was a shame!

DOROTHY. How was he hit, Petra?

PETRA. Some one shot him from a window, they say. I don’t know. That’s what they told me.

DOROTHY. Who’d shoot him from a window?

PETRA. Oh, they always shoot from windows at night during a bombardment. The fifth column people. The people who fight us from inside the city.

DOROTHY. But why would they shoot him? He was only a poor little workman.

PETRA. They could see he was a workingman from his clothes.

DOROTHY. Of course, Petra.

PETRA. That’s why they shot him. They are our enemies. Even of me. If I was killed they would be happy. They would think it was one working person less.

DOROTHY. But it’s dreadful!

PETRA. Yes, Senorita.

DOROTHY. But it’s terrible. You mean they shoot at people that they don’t even know who they are?

PETRA. Oh, yes. They are our enemies.

DOROTHY. They’re terrible people!

PETRA. Yes, Senorita!

DOROTHY. And what will we do for an electricista?

PETRA. Tomorrow we can get another. But now they would all be closed. You should not burn so many lights perhaps, Senorita, and then perhaps the fuse will not melt out. Use only what you need to see.

[DOROTHY turns off all but the reading light on the bed]

DOROTHY. Now I can’t even see to cook this mess. I suppose that’s better though. It didn’t say on the tin whether you could heat it or not. It will probably be frightful!

PETRA. What are you cooking, Senorita?

DOROTHY. I don’t know, Petra. There wasn’t any label on it.

PETRA. [Peering into the pot] It looks like rabbit.

DOROTHY. What looks like rabbit is cat. But I don’t think they’d bother to put cat up in a tin and ship it all the way from Paris, do you? Of course, they may have tinned it in Barcelona and then shipped it to Paris and then flown it down here. Do you think it’s cat, Petra?

PETRA. If it’s put up in Barcelona, you can’t tell what it is!

DOROTHY. Oh, I’m sick of the whole thing. You go ahead and cook it, Petra!

PETRA. Yes, Senorita. What should I put in?

DOROTHY. [Picking up a book and going over to the reading light to stretch out on the bed] Put in anything. Open a tin of anything.

PETRA. Is it for Mr. Philip?

DOROTHY. If he comes.

PETRA. Mr. Philip wouldn’t like just anything. It would be better to put in carefully for Mr. Philip. One time he threw a whole breakfast tray on the floor.

DOROTHY. Why, Petra?

PETRA. It was something he read in the paper.

DOROTHY. It was Eden, probably. He hates Eden.

PETRA. Still it was a very violent thing to do. I told him he had no right. No hay derecho, I told him.

DOROTHY. And what did he do?

PETRA. He helped me pick it all up, and then he slapped me here when I was bending over. Senorita, I do not like to see him in that next room. He is a different cultural than you.

DOROTHY. I love him, Petra.

PETRA. Senorita! Please do not do such a thing. You haven’t done his room and made his bed for seven months as I have. Senorita, he’s bad. I do not say he is not a good man. But he is bad.

DOROTHY. You mean he’s wicked?

PETRA. No. Not wicked. Wicked is dirty. He is very clean. He takes baths all the time even with cold water. Even in the coldest weather he washes his feet. But, Senorita, he is not good. And he will not make you happy.

DOROTHY. But Petra, he made me happier than any one has ever made me.

PETRA. Senorita, that is nothing.

DOROTHY. What do you mean, that’s nothing?

PETRA. Here everybody can do that!

DOROTHY. You’re just a nation of braggarts. Do I have to listen to all that about conquistadores and all that?

PETRA. I only meant that is a badness here. A good man has that too, perhaps, yes, a really good man such as I was married to has that. But all bad men have that.

DOROTHY. You mean to hear them talk they have it.

PETRA. No. Senorita.

DOROTHY. [Intrigued] You mean they really...?

PETRA. [Sadly] Yes, Senorita.

DOROTHY. I don’t believe a word of it. And you think Mr. Philip is a really bad man?

PETRA. [Earnestly] Frightful!

DOROTHY. Oh, I wonder where he is?

[There is a noise of heavy boots coming down the corridor.

PHILIP and THREE COMRADES in I.B. uniform enter 110, and PHILIP switches on the light. PHILIP is bareheaded, wet, and dishevelled looking. One of the COMRADES is MAX, the one with the broken face. He is covered with mud and as they come into the room, he sits down on a chair before the table, facing the back of the chair, and resting his hands and his chin on the top of the back of the chair. He has an amazing face. One of the other COMRADES has a short automatic rifle slung over his shoulder. The other has a long Mauser parabellum pistol in a wooden holster strapped to his leg.

PHILIP. I want you to block these two rooms off the corridor. Any one to see me you bring them in. How many comrades have you below?

The COMRADE with the rifle. Twenty-five.

PHILIP. Here are the keys to room one o eight and one eleven.

[He hands one to each]

Have the doors open and stand just inside the door, so you can watch the corridor. No, better get a chair apiece and sit inside the door where you can watch. All right. Get along... Comrades!

[THEY salute and go out. PHILIP goes over to the brokenfaced COMRADE. He puts his hand on his shoulder. The audience has seen for several moments that he is asleep, but PHILIP does not know it]

PHILIP. Max.

[MAX wakes, looks at PHILIP and smiles]

Was it very bad, Max?

[MAX looks at him and smiles again and shakes his head]

MAX. Nicht zu schwer.

PHILIP. And when comes he?

MAX. In the evenings of grand bombardment.

PHILIP. And where?

MAX. To the roof of a house at the top of Extremadura road.

It has a little tower.

PHILIP. I thought he came to Garabitas.

MAX. So did I.

PHILIP. And when gives more grand bombardment?

MAX. Tonight.

PHILIP. When?

MAX. Fiertel nach zwolf

PHILIP. You’re sure?

MAX. You should see the shells. Everything all laid out. Also they are very sloppy soldiers. If I did not have this face I could have stayed and worked a gun. Maybe they put me on the staff even.

PHILIP. Where did you change the uniform? I was out there looking for you at a couple of places.

MAX. In one of the houses in Carabanchel. There are a hundred to pick from in that stretch that no one holds. A hundred and four, I think. Between our lines and theirs. Over there it was all right. The soldiers are all young. It was only if an officer should see my face. An officer would know where these faces come from.

PHILIP. So now?

MAX. I think we go tonight. Why wait?

PHILIP. How is it?

MAX. Muddy.

PHILIP. How many do you need?

MAX. You and me. Or whoever you send with me.

PHILIP. Me.

MAX. Good! Now how is it to take a bath?

PHILIP. Fine! Go ahead.

MAX. And I sleep a little while.

PHILIP. What time should we leave?

MAX. By half past nine.

PHILIP. Get some sleep then.

MAX. You call me?

[Heroes into the bathroom. PHILIP goes out of the room, closes the door, and knocks on the door of 109]

DOROTHY. [From the bed] Come in!

PHILIP. Hello, darling.

DOROTHY. Hello.

PHILIP. Are you cooking?

DOROTHY. I was, but I got bored with it. Are you hungry?

PHILIP. Famished.

DOROTHY. It’s in the pot there. Turn on the stove and it will warm up.

PHILIP. What’s the matter with you, Bridges?

DOROTHY. Where have you been?

PHILIP. Just out in the town.

DOROTHY. Doing what?

PHILIP. Just around.

DOROTHY. You’ve left me alone all day. Ever since that poor man was shot in there this morning you’ve left me alone. I’ve waited in here the whole day. No one’s even been to see me all day except Preston and he was so unpleasant I had to ask him to leave. Where have you been?

PHILIP. Just around and about.

DOROTHY. Chicote’s?

PHILIP. Yes.

DOROTHY. And did you see that horrible Moor?

PHILIP. Oh, yes, Anita. She sent messages.

DOROTHY. She’s unspeakable! You can keep the messages.

[PHILIP has ladled some of the contents of the stew-pan onto a plate and tastes it]

PHILIP. I say. What is this?

DOROTHY. I don’t know.

PHILIP. I say. It’s jolly good. Did you cook it yourself?

DOROTHY. [Coyly] Yes. Do you like it?

PHILIP. I didn’t know you could cook.

DOROTHY. [Shyly] Really, Philip?

PHILIP. I say it is good! But what gave you the idea of putting kippers in it?

DOROTHY. Oh, damn Petra! So that was the other tin she opened.

[There is a knock on the door. It is the MANAGER. One of his arms is firmly held by the COMRADE with the automatic rifle]

RIFLE COMRADE. This comrade here said he wanted to see you.

PHILIP. Thank you, Comrade. Let him come in.

[The RIFLE COMRADE turns the MANAGER loose and salutes]

MANAGER. It was an absolutely nothing, Mr. Philip. Passing in hall with overkeenness of smell produced by hunger, detected odor of cooking and stopped. Instantly was seized by the comrade. Perfectly all right, Mr. Philip. Absolutely nothing. Do not concern yourself. Buen provecho, Mr. Philip. Eat well, Madame.

PHILIP. You came by just at the right moment. I have something for you. Take this.

[Hands him the casserole, the plate, the fork, and ladle, with both hands]

MANAGER. Mr. Philip. No. I cannot.

PHILIP. Comrade Stamp Collector, you must!

MANAGER. No, Mr. Philip.

[Taking them]

The Fifth Column I cannot. You move me to the tears. I could never. It is too much!

PHILIP. Comrade, not a word more!

MANAGER. You dissolve my heart in feeling. Mr. Philip, from my heart his bottom, I thank you.

[He goes out, holding the plate in one hand, the stew-pan in the other]

DOROTHY. Philip, I’m sorry.

PHILIP. If you don’t mind, I’ll take a little whiskey with plain water. Then you might open a tin of the bully beef and slice up an onion.

DOROTHY. But Philip, darling, I can’t bear the smell of onions!

PHILIP. Chances are that won’t bother us tonight.

DOROTHY. You mean you’re not going to be here?

PHILIP. I have to go out.

DOROTHY. Why?

PHILIP. With the boys.

DOROTHY. I know what that means.

PHILIP. Do you?

DOROTHY. Yes. Only too well.

PHILIP. Ghastly, isn’t it?

DOROTHY. It’s hateful! The whole way you waste your time and your life is hateful and stupid.

PHILIP. And me so young and promising.

DOROTHY. You’re nasty to go out tonight when we could stay and have a lovely evening like last night.

PHILIP. It’s the beast in me.

DOROTHY. But Philip, you could stay here. You can drink right here or do anything you want. I’ll be gay and play the phonograph. I’ll drink too, even if it gives me a headache afterwards. We’ll get a lot of people in if you want a lot of people. It can be noisy and full of smoke, and everything you like. You don’t have to go out, Philip!

PHILIP. Come here and kiss me!

[He bolds her in his arms]

DOROTHY. And don’t eat onions, Philip. If you don’t eat the onions, I’ll feel surer of you.

PHILIP. All right. I won’t eat the onions. Have you any tomato catsup?

[There is a knock at the door. It is the RIFLE COMRADE again with the MANAGER]

RIFLE COMRADE. This comrade back here again!

PHILIP. Thank you, Comrade. Let him in.

[RIFLE COMRADE salutes and goes out]

MANAGER. Is just come tell you all right can take a joke, Mr. Philip. Is a sense of humor O.K.

[Sadly]

Is a food right now not to joke with. Neither is to spoil, maybe, if you think it over. But is all right. I take the joke.

PHILIP. Take a couple of tins of this.

[He gives him two tins of corned beef from the armoire]

DOROTHY. Whose beef is that?

PHILIP. Oh, I suppose it’s your beef.

MANAGER. Thank you, Mr. Philip. Is a good joke all right. Ha, ha. Expensive all right, yes, maybe. But thank you, Mr. Philip. Thank you, too, Miss.

[He goes out]

PHILIP. Look, Bridges.

[He puts his arms around her]

Don’t mind me if I’m stuffy tonight.

DOROTHY. Darling, all I want is for you to stay in. I want us to have some sort of home-life. It’s nice here. I could fix up your room and make it attractive.

PHILIP. It got a touch messy this morning.

DOROTHY. I’d fix it up so you’d like it to live in. You could have a comfortable chair and a bookcase, and a good reading light, and pictures. I could fix it really nicely. Please stay here tonight and just see how nice it is.

PHILIP. Tomorrow night.

DOROTHY. Why not tonight, darling?

PHILIP. Oh, tonight’s one of those restless nights when you feel you have to get out and buzz around and see people. And, besides, I have an appointment.

DOROTHY. At what time?

PHILIP. At a quarter past twelve.

DOROTHY. Then come back afterwards.

PHILIP. All right.

DOROTHY. Come in any time.

PHILIP. Really — ?

DOROTHY. Yes. Please.

[He takes her in his arms. He strokes her hair. Tips her head back and kisses her. There is noise of shouting and singing downstairs. Then you hear the COMRADES break into ‘The Partizan.’ They sing it all the way through]

DOROTHY. That’s a lovely song.

PHILIP. You’ll never know how fine a song that is.

[The COMRADES are singing ‘Bandera Rosa’]

PHILIP. You know this one?

[He sits by her now on the bed]

DOROTHY. Yes.

PHILIP. The best people I ever knew died for that [In the next room you can see the broken-faced COMRADE asleep. While they have been talking, he finished his bath, dried his clothes, knocked the mud off them, and lay down on the bed. As he sleeps, the light shines on his face]

DOROTHY. [Beside Philip, on the bed] Philip, Philip, please, Philip!

PHILIP. You know I don’t feel so much like making love tonight.

DOROTHY. [Disappointed] That’s fine. That’s lovely! But I’d only like to have you stay here. Just stay in and have a little home-life.

PHILIP. I have to go, you know. Really.

[Downstairs the COMRADES are singing the ‘Comintern’ song]

DOROTHY. That’s the one they always play at funerals.

PHILIP. They sing it at other times, though.

DOROTHY. Philip, please don’t go!

PHILIP. [Holding her in his arms] Good-bye.

DOROTHY. No. Please, please, don’t go!

PHILIP. [Standing up] Look, open both the windows before you go to bed, will you? You don’t want to have any glass broken if there’s a shelling around midnight. DOROTHY. Don’t go, Philip. Please don’t go!

PHILIP. Salud, Camarada!

[He does not salute. He goes into the next room. Downstairs the COMRADES are singing the ‘Partizan’ again. PHILIP, in 110, looks at MAX sleeping; then goes over to wake him]

Max!

[MAX, waking instantly, looks around him, blinks at the light in his eyes, then smiles]

MAX. Is time?

PHILIP. Yes. Want a drink?

MAX. [Getting up from the bed, smiling, and feeling of his boots, which have been drying in front of the electric heater] Very much.

[PHILIP pours two whiskeys and reaches for the water bottle]

Do not spoil it with water.

PHILIP. Salud!

MAX. Salud!

PHILIP. Let’s go.

CURTAIN

[Downstairs the COMRADES are singing the ‘International.’ As the curtain comes down, DOROTHY BRIDGES is on the bed in Room 109, with her arms around the pillows; and her shoulders shaking as she is crying]

Act Two Scene Four

Same as Scene III, but four thirty o’clock in the morning. Both rooms are dark and DOROTHY BRIDGES is asleep in her bed. MAX and PHILIP come down the corridor, and PHILIP unlocks the door of Room 110 and switches on the light. They look at each other, MAX shakes his head. They are both so covered with mud that they are almost unrecognizable.

PHILIP. Well, another time.

MAX. I am very sorry.

PHILIP. It’s not your fault. Want to bathe first?

MAX. [His head on his arms] Go ahead and take it. I am too tired.

[PHILIP goes into the bathroom. Then comes out]

PHILIP. There’s no hot water. Only reason we live in this damn death trap is for hot water, and now there’s none!

MAX. [Very sleepily] I am very sad to fail. I was certain they were coming. But they did not come.

PHILIP. Get your clothes off, and get some sleep. You’re a marvellous bloody damned scout officer, and you know it. Nobody could do what you’ve done... it’s not your fault if they call off the shoot.

MAX. [Really utterly and completely exhausted] I am too sleepy. I am so sleepy I am sick.

PHILIP. Come on, I’ll get you to bed.

[He pulls his boots off and helps him to undress.

PHILIP tumbles him into bed]

MAX. The bed is good.

[He takes hold of the pillow with his arms and spreads his legs wide]

I sleep on my face, and then it does not frighten anybody in the morning.

PHILIP. [From the bathroom] Take the whole bed. I’m bunking in another room.

[PHILIP goes into the bathroom and you hear him splashing. He comes out in pajamas and a dressing gown, opens the door connecting the two rooms, ducks under the poster and goes over to the bed and climbs in]

DOROTHY. [In the dark] Darling, is it late?

PHILIP. Fiveish.

DOROTHY. [Very sleepily] Where have you been?

PHILIP. On a visit.

DOROTHY. [Who is still really asleep] Did you keep your appointment?

PHILIP. [Rolling away to one side of the bed so that he is back to back with her] The man didn’t show up.

DOROTHY. [Very sleepily, but anxious to impart news] There wasn’t any shelling, darling.

PHILIP. Good!

DOROTHY. Good night, darling.

PHILIP. Good night!

[You hear a machine-gun go pop-pop-pop a long way away through the open window. They lie very quietly in the bed and then we hear PHILIP say]

Bridges, are you asleep?

DOROTHY.[Really asleep] No, darling. Not if —

PHILIP. I want to tell you something.

DOROTHY. [Sleepily] Yes, my very dear.

PHILIP. I want to tell you two things. I’ve got the horrors, and I love you.

DOROTHY. Oh, you poor Philip.

PHILIP. I never tell anybody when I get the horrors, and I never tell anybody I love them. But I love you, see? Do you hear me? Do you feel me? Do you hear me say it?

DOROTHY. Why, I love you all the time. And you feel lovely. Sort of like a snow storm if snow wasn’t cold and didn’t melt.

PHILIP. I don’t love you in the daytime. I don’t love anything in the daytime. Listen, I want to say something else. Would you like to marry me or stay with me all the time or go wherever I go, and be my girl? Hear me say it?

I said it, see.

DOROTHY. Darling, I’d like to marry you.

PHILIP. Yeah. I say funny things in the night, don’t I?

DOROTHY. I’d like us to be married and work hard and have a fine life. You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here. And I work when you’re not around. And just because I can’t cook. You can hire people to cook under normal circumstances. Oh, you. I love you with the big shoulders and the walk like a gorilla and the funny face.

PHILIP. It’ll be a lot funnier face when I get through with this business.

DOROTHY. Are the horrors any better, darling? Do you want to tell me about them?

PHILIP. Oh, the hell with them. I’ve had them so long I’d miss them if they went away. Let me say one thing more to you.

[He says it very slowly]

I’d like to marry you, and go away, and get out of all this. Did I say it just like that? Did you hear me say it?

DOROTHY. Well, darling, we will.

PHILIP. No, we won’t. Even lying in the night I know we won’t. But I like to say it. Oh, I love you. Goddamn it, goddamn it, I love you. And you’ve got the loveliest damn body in the world. And I adore you, too. Did you hear me say that?

DOROTHY. Yes, my sweet, but it’s not true about my body. It’s just an all right body, but I like to hear you say it. And tell me about the horrors, and maybe they will go away.

PHILIP. No. Everybody gets their own, and you don’t want to pass them around.

DOROTHY. Should we try to go to sleep, my big lovely one? My old snow storm.

PHILIP. It’s getting almost daylight, and I’m getting sensible again.

DOROTHY. Please try to go to sleep.

PHILIP. Listen, Bridges, while I say something else. It’s getting light now.

DOROTHY. [Her voice catching] Yes, darling.

PHILIP. If you want me to go to sleep, Bridges, just hit me on the head with a hammer.

CURTAIN

Act Three Scene One

TIME: Five days later. It is afternoon in the same two rooms in the Hotel Florida, 109 and 110.

The scene is the same as Act II, Scene III except that the door is open between the two rooms. The poster flaps open at the bottom in PHILIP’s room, on the night table by the bed, there is a vase full of chrysanthemums. There is a bookcase along the wall to the right of the bed, and cretonne covers on the chairs. There are curtains on the windows, of the same cretonne, and the bed has a cover over its white spread. All clothes are hung neatly on hangers, and three pairs of PHILIP’s boots, all brushed and polished, are being put into the closet by PETRA. DOROTHY in the next room, 109, is trying on a silver fox cape before the mirror.

DOROTHY. Petra, please come here!

PETRA. [Straightening her little and old body up from putting the boots away] Yes, Senorita!

[PETRA goes around and comes in by the proper door to 109, knocking as she opens it]

PETRA. [Holding her hands together] Oh, Senorita, it’s beautiful!

DOROTHY. [Looking over her shoulder into the mirror] It’s not right, Petra. I don’t know what they’ve done, but it’s not right!

PETRA. It looks lovely, Senorita!

DOROTHY. No, there’s something wrong with the top of the collar. And I can’t speak Spanish well enough to explain to that fool of a furrier. He is a fool.

[You hear some one coming down the hall. It is PHILIP.

He opens the door to 110 and looks around. He takes off his leather coat, and tosses it onto the bed, then sails his beret toward the clothes-rack in the corner. It falls on the floor. He sits down on one of the cretonne-covered chairs, and pulls his boots off. He leaves them standing, dripping, in the middle of the floor and goes over to the bed. He picks up his coat from the bed and throws it onto a chair. It sprawls there. Then he lies down on the bed, pulls the pillows out from under the cover to make a pile under his head, and turns on the reading light. He reaches down, opens the double door of the night table, by the bed, gets out a bottle of whiskey, pours himself a drink into the glass which had been placed neatly, top down, on top of the water bottle, and splashes water into it. With the glass in his left hand, he reaches over to the bookcase for a book. He lies back a moment, still, then shrugs his shoulders and twists uncomfortably. Finally, he brings a pistol out from underneath his belt band and lays it on the bedcover beside him. He draws his knees up, takes his first sip of the drink, and commences to read]

DOROTHY. [From the next room] Philip, Philip darling!

PHILIP. Yes.

DOROTHY. Come in here, please.

PHILIP. No, dear.

DOROTHY. I want to show you something.

PHILIP. [Reading] Bring it in here.

DOROTHY. All right, darling.

[She takes a last look at the cape in the mirror. She is very beautiful in it, and there is nothing wrong with the neck. She comes in the door wearing the cape very proudly, and turns with it, wearing it very gracefully and elegantly as a model would]

PHILIP. Where did you get that?

DOROTHY. I bought it, darling.

PHILIP. What with?

DOROTHY. Pesetas.

PHILIP. [Coldly] Very pretty.

DOROTHY. Don’t you like it?

PHILIP. [Still staring at the cape] Very pretty.

DOROTHY. What’s the matter, Philip?

PHILIP. Nothing.

DOROTHY. Don’t you want me to have anything nice-looking?

PHILIP. That’s absolutely your affair.

DOROTHY. But, darling. It’s so cheap. The foxes only cost twelve hundred pesetas apiece.

PHILIP. That’s one hundred and twenty days’ pay for a man in the brigades. Let’s see. That’s four months. I don’t believe I know any one who’s been out four months without being hit — or killed.

DOROTHY. But, Philip, it doesn’t have anything to do with the brigades. I bought pesetas at fifty to the dollar in Paris.

PHILIP. [Coldly] Really?

DOROTHY. Yes, darling. And why shouldn’t I buy foxes if I want to? Some one has to buy them. They’re there to be sold, and they come to less than twenty-two dollars a skin.

PHILIP. Marvellous, isn’t it? How many foxes are there?

DOROTHY. About twelve. Oh, Philip, don’t be cross.

PHILIP. You’re doing quite well out of the war, aren’t you? How did you smuggle your pesetas in?

DOROTHY. In a tin of Mum.

PHILIP. Mum, oh, yes, Mum. Mum’s the word. And did the Mum take all the odor off them?

DOROTHY. Philip, you’re acting frightfully moral!

PHILIP. I suppose I am frightfully moral, economically. I don’t think even Mum, or what’s the other lovely thing ladies use, Amolin is it?, would take the taint off those Black Bourse pesetas.

DOROTHY. If you’re going to be unpleasant about it, I’ll leave you.

PHILIP. Good!

[DOROTHY starts out of the room, but turns at the door pleadingly]

DOROTHY. But don’t be unpleasant about it. Just be reasonable, and be pleased that I have such a lovely cape. Do you know what I was doing when you came in? I was thinking what we could do at just this time of day in Paris.

PHILIP. Paris?

DOROTHY. It will just be getting dark, and I meet you at the Ritz bar, and I’m wearing this cape. I’m sitting there waiting for you. You come in wearing a double-breasted guardsman’s overcoat, very close fitting, a bowler hat, and you’re carrying a stick.

PHILIP. You’ve been reading that American magazine, Esquire. You’re not supposed to read what it says, you know. You’re only supposed to look at the pictures.

DOROTHY. You order a whiskey with Perrier, and I have a champagne cocktail.

PHILIP. I don’t like it.

DOROTHY. What?

PHILIP. The story. If you have to have day dreams, just keep me out of them, will you?

DOROTHY. It’s just playing, darling.

PHILIP. Well, I don’t play any more.

DOROTHY. But you did, darling. And we had lovely fun playing.

PHILIP. Just count me out now.

DOROTHY. But aren’t we friends?

PHILIP. Oh, yes, you make all sorts of friends in a war.

DOROTHY. Darling, please stop it! Aren’t we lovers?

PHILIP. Oh, that? Oh, certainly. Of course. Why not?

DOROTHY. But aren’t we going to go and live together and have a lovely time and be happy? The way you say always in the night?

PHILIP. No. Not in a hundred thousand bloody years. Never believe what I say in the night. I lie like hell at night.

DOROTHY. But why can’t we do what you say we’ll do at night?

PHILIP. Because I’m in something where you don’t go on and live together and have a lovely time and be happy.

DOROTHY. But why not?

PHILIP. Because, principally, I’ve discovered you’re too busy. And secondly, it doesn’t seem very important compared to any number of other things.

DOROTHY. But you’re never busy!

PHILIP. [He feels himself talking too much, but goes on\ No. But after this is over I’ll get a course of discipline to rid me of any anarchistic habits I may have acquired. I’ll probably be sent back to working with pioneers or something like that.

DOROTHY. I don’t understand.

PHILIP. And because you don’t understand, and you never could understand, is the reason we’re not going to go on and live together and have a lovely time and etcetera.

DOROTHY. Oh, it’s worse than Skull and Bones.

PHILIP. What in God’s name is Skull and Bones?

DOROTHY. It’s a secret society a man belonged to one time that I had just enough sense not to marry. It’s very superior and awfully good and worthy, and they take you in and tell you all about it, just before the wedding, and when they told me about it, I called the wedding off.

PHILIP. That’s an excellent precedent.

DOROTHY. But can’t we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we aren’t going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?

PHILIP. If you like.

DOROTHY. I’d like.

[She has come over from the door and is standing by the bed while they have been talking. PHILIP looks up at her, then stands up, takes her in his arms and lifts her against him onto the bed, silver foxes and all]

PHILIP. They feel very fine and soft.

DOROTHY. They don’t smell badly, do they?

PHILIP. [His face over her shoulder in the foxes] No, they don’t smell badly. And you feel lovely in them. And I love you, I don’t give a damn. I do. And it’s only half-past five in the afternoon.

DOROTHY. And while we have it we can have it, can’t we?

PHILIP. [Shamelessly] They feel really marvellously. I’m glad you bought them.

[He holds her very close]

DOROTHY. We can have it now just this little while that we have?

PHILIP. Yes. We’ll have it.

[There is a knock on the door and the handle turns to admit MAX. PHILIP gets off the bed. DOROTHY remains seated on it]

MAX. I disturb? Yes?

PHILIP. No. Not at all. Max, this is an American comrade. Comrade Bridges. Comrade Max.

MAX. Salud, Comrade.

[He goes over to the bed where DOROTHY is still seated and puts out his hand. DOROTHY shakes it and looks away]

MAX. You are busy? Yes?

PHILIP. No. Not at all. Will you have a drink, Max?

MAX. No. Thank you.

PHILIP.?Hay novedades?

MAX. Algunas.

PHILIP. You won’t have a drink?

MAX. No. Thank you very much.

DOROTHY. I’ll go. Don’t let me bother you.

PHILIP. There’s no need to go.

DOROTHY. You’ll come by later, perhaps.

PHILIP. Quite.

As she goes out MAX says with great politeness]

MAX. Salud, Camarada.

DOROTHY. Salud.

[She shuts the door between the two rooms before she goes out the regular door]

MAX. [When they are alone] She is a Comrade?

PHILIP. No.

MAX. You introduced her as so.

PHILIP. Just a manner of speech. You call every one comrade in Madrid. All supposed to be working for the same cause.

MAX. It is not such a good manner of speech.

PHILIP. No. I suppose not. I seem to remember saying something like that myself once.

MAX. This girl, how do you call her? Britches?

PHILIP. Bridges.

MAX. She is something serious to you?

PHILIP. Serious?

MAX. Yes. You know what I mean.

PHILIP. I wouldn’t say so. You could call her comic, rather. In some ways.

MAX. You spend much time with her?

PHILIP. A certain amount.

MAX. Whose time?

PHILIP. My time.

MAX. Never the Party’s time?

PHILIP. My time is the Party’s time.

MAX. That is what I mean. I am glad you understand so easily.

PHILIP. Oh, I understand very easily.

MAX. Do not be angry about something that is not you nor me.

PHILIP. I’m not angry. But I’m not supposed to be a damn monk.

MAX. Philip, Comrade. You have never been much like a damned monk.

PHILIP. No?

MAX. Nor does anybody expect you to be — ever.

PHILIP. No.

MAX. It is only a question of what interferes with your work. This girl — where does she come from? What is her background?

PHILIP. Ask her.

MAX. I suppose I will have to, then.

PHILIP. Haven’t I done my work properly? Has anyone complained?

MAX. Not until now.

PHILIP. And who complains now?

MAX. I complain now.

PHILIP. Yes?

MAX. Yes. I should have met you at Chicote’s. If you were not there you should have left word for me. I go to Chicote’s on time. You are not there. There is no word. I come here and find you with ‘ner ganzen menagerie of silver foxes in your arms.

PHILIP. And you never want any of that?

MAX. Oh, yes. I want it all the time.

PHILIP. And what do you do?

MAX. Sometimes when I have time and I am not too tired, I find some one that will give me a little something while she looks the other way.

PHILIP. And you want it all the time?

MAX. I like very much. I am not a saint.

PHILIP. There are saints.

MAX. Yes. And others that are not. Only I am always very busy. Now we will talk of something else. Tonight we go again.

PHILIP. Good.

MAX. You want to go?

PHILIP. Look, I agree with you on the girl if you like; but don’t be insulting to me. Don’t get superior about work.

MAX. This girl is all right?

PHILIP. Oh, quite! She may be bad for me and I may waste time as you say and all that, but she’s absolutely straight.

MAX. You are sure? You must remember I have never seen so many foxes.

PHILIP. She’s a damned fool and all that, but she’s as straight as I am!

MAX. And you are still straight?

PHILIP. I hope so. Does it show when you’re not?

MAX. Oh, yes.

PHILIP. How do I look then?

[He stands and looks at himself contemptuously in the glass. MAX looks at him and smiles very slowly. He nods his head]

MAX. You look pretty straight to me.

PHILIP. You want to go in and question her about her background and all that?

MAX. No.

PHILIP. She has the same background all American girls have that come to Europe with a certain amount of money. They’re all the same. Camps, college, money in family, now more or less than it was, usually less now, men, affairs, abortions, ambitions, and finally marry and settle down or don’t marry and settle down. They open shops, or work in shops, some write, others play instruments, some go on the stage, some into films. They have something called the Junior League I believe that the virgins work at. All for the public good. This one writes. Quite well too, when she’s not too lazy. Ask her about it all if you like. It’s very dull though, I tell you.

MAX. I am not interested.

PHILIP. I thought you were.

MAX. No. I think it over and I leave it all to you.

PHILIP. All what to me?

MAX. All about this girl. To deal with as you should.

PHILIP. I wouldn’t have too much confidence in me.

MAX. I have confidence in you.

PHILIP. [Bitterly] I wouldn’t have too much. Sometimes I’m damned tired of it. Of the whole damned business. So I hate it.

MAX. Of course.

PHILIP. Yes. And now you’ll talk me out of it. I murdered that bloody young Wilkinson the other day. Just through carelessness. Don’t tell me I didn’t.

MAX. Now you talk nonsense. But you were not as careful as you should have been.

PHILIP. It was my fault he was killed. I left him in there in the room in my chair with the door open. That wasn’t where I was going to use him.

MAX. You did not leave him there on purpose. You must not think about it now that it is over.

PHILIP. No — just a deathtrap set from carelessness.

MAX. He would probably have been killed later anyway.

PHILIP. Oh, yes. Of course. That makes it marvellous, doesn’t it? That’s perfectly splendid. I suppose I didn’t know that, either.

MAX. I have seen you in such a mood before. I know you will be all right again.

PHILIP. Yes. But you know how I’ll be when I’m all right? I’ll have a dozen drinks in me and I’ll be with some tart. Very jolly I’ll be. That’s your idea of all right with me.

MAX. No.

PHILIP. I’m fed up with it. You know where I’d like to be? At some place like Saint Tropez on the Riviera, waking up in the morning with no bloody war, and a cafe creme with proper milk in it... and brioches with fresh strawberry jam, and ceufs au jambon all on one tray.

MAX. And the girl?

PHILIP. Yes, and the girl, too. You’re damned right, the girl. Silver foxes and all.

MAX. I told you she was bad for you.

PHILIP. Or good for me. I’ve been doing this so long I’m bloody well fed up with it. With all of it.

MAX. You do it so every one will have a good breakfast like that. You do it so no one will ever be hungry. You do it so men will not have to fear ill health or old age; so they can live and work in dignity and not as slaves.

PHILIP. Yes. Sure. I know.

MAX. You know why you do it. And if you have a little defaillance I understand.

PHILIP. This one was a pretty big defaillance, and I’ve had it a long time. Ever since I saw the girl. You don’t know what they do to you.

[There is the incoming scream of a shell and the sound of its burst in the street. You hear a child scream; first high, then in short, sharp, thin cries. You hear people running in the street. Another shell comes in. PHILIP has opened the windows wide. After the burst you hear the sound of people running again]

MAX. You do it to stop that forever.

PHILIP. The swine! They timed it for the minute the cinemas are out.

[Another shell comes in and bursts, and you hear a dog go yelping down the street]

MAX. You hear? You do it for all men. You do it for the children. And sometimes you do it even for dogs. Go in and see the girl a while now. She needs you now.

PHILIP. No. Let her take it by herself. She’s got her silver foxes. The hell with it all.

MAX. No. Go in now. She needs you now.

[Another shell comes in with a long swishing rush, and bursts outside in the street. There is no running and no noise after this one]

MAX. I lie down now for a while here. Go in to her now.

PHILIP. All right. Sure. Anything you say. I do whatever you say.

[He starts for the door and opens it as there is another inrushing, down-dropping, whishing sound and another burst; beyond the hotel this time]

MAX. It is just a little bombardment. The big one is for tonight.

[PHILIP opens the door of the other room. Through the door you hear PHILIP speak, in a flat voice]

PHILIP. Hello, Bridges. How are you?

CURTAIN

Act Three Scene Two

Interior of an artillery observation post in a shelled house on the top of the Extremadura road.

It is located in the tower of what has been a very pretentious house and access to it is by a ladder which replaces the circular iron stairway which has been smashed and hangs, broken and twisted. You see the ladder against the tower and at its top, the back of the observation post which faces toward Madrid. It is night and the sacks which plug its windows have been removed and looking out through them you see nothing but darkness because the lights of Madrid have been extinguished. There are large-scale military maps on the walls with the positions marked with colored tacks and tapes, and on a plain table there is a field telephone. There is an extra large size, single, German model, long tube telemeter opposite the narrow opening in the wall to the right of the table and a chair beside it. There is an ordinarysized double tube telemeter at the other opening with a chair at its base. There is another plain table with a telephone on the right of the room. At the foot of the ladder is a SENTRY with fixed bayonet, and at the top of the ladder in the room, where there is just enough height for him to stand straight with his rifle and bayonet, there is another SENTRY. As the curtain rises, you see the scene as described with the TWO SENTRIES at their posts. Two SIGNALLERS are bending over the larger table. After the curtain is up, you see the lights of a motor which shine brightly on the ladder at the base of the tower. They come closer and closer and almost blind the SENTRY.

SENTRY. Cut those lights!

[The lights shine on, illuminating the SENTRY with a blinding light]

SENTRY. [Presenting his rifle, pulling back the bolt, and shoving it forward with a click] Cut those lights!

[He says it very slowly, clearly and dangerously, and it is obvious that he will fire. The lights go off and THREE MEN, two of them in officer’s uniform, one large and stout, the other rather thin and elegantly dressed, with riding boots which shine in the flashlight the stout man carries, and a CIVILIAN, cross the stage from the left where they have left the motor car off stage; and approach the ladder]

SENTRY. [Giving the first half of the password] The Victory —

THIN OFFICER. [Snappily and disdainfully] To those who deserve it.

SENTRY. Pass.

THIN OFFICER. [To CIVILIAN] Just climb up here.

CIVILIAN. I’ve been here before.

[The three of them climb the ladder. At the top of the ladder the SENTRY, seeing the insignia on the cap of the large, stout officer, presents arms. The SIGNALLERS remain seated at their telephones. The large officer goes over to the table followed by the CIVILIAN and the shiny-booted officer who is obviously his AIDE]

LARGE OFFICER. What’s the matter with these Signallers?

AIDE. [To SIGNALLERS] Come along! Stand to attention there! What’s the matter with you?

[SIGNALLERS stand to attention rather wearily]

At ease!

[The SIGNALLERS sit down. The LARGE OFFICER is studying the map. The CIVILIAN looks out of the telemeter and sees nothing in the darkness]

CIVILIAN. The bombardment’s for midnight?

AIDE. What time is the shoot for, Sir?

[Speaking to the LARGE OFFICER]

LARGE OFFICER. [Speaking with a German accent] You talk too much!

AIDE. I’m sorry, sir. Would you care to have a look at these?

[He hands him a sheaf of typed orders clipped together. LARGE OFFICER takes them and glances at them. Hands them back]

LARGE OFFICER. [In heavy voice] I am familiar with them. I wrote them.

AIDE. Quite, sir. I thought perhaps you wished to verify them.

LARGE OFFICER. I heff verified them!

[One of the phones rings. SIGNALLER at table takes it and listens]

SIGNALLER. Yes. No. Yes. All right.

[He nods to the LARGE OFFICER]

For you, sir.

[LARGE OFFICER takes the phone]

LARGE OFFICER. Hello. Yes. That is right. Are you a fool? No? As ordered. By salvos means by salvos.

[He hangs up the receiver and looks at his watch]

[To AIDE]

What time have you?

AIDE. Twelve minus one, sir.

LARGE OFFICER. I deal with fools here. You cannot say that you command where there is no discipline. Signallers who sit at table when a General comes in. Artillery brigadiers who ask for explanations of orders. What time did you say it was?

AIDE. [Looking at his watch] Twelve minus thirty seconds, sir.

SIGNALLER. The brigade called six times, sir!

LARGE OFFICER. [Lighting a cigar] What time?

AIDE. Minus fifteen, sir.

LARGE OFFICER. What minus fifteen what?

AIDE. Twelve minus fifteen seconds, sir.

| Just then you hear the guns. They are a very different sound from the incoming shells. There is a sharp, cracking boom, boom, boom, boom, as a kettle drum would make struck sharply before a microphone and then whish, whish, whish, whish, chu, chu, chu, chu, chu — chu — as the shells go away followed by a distant burst. Another battery closer and louder commences firing and then they are firing all along the line in quick, pounding thuds and the air is full of the noise the departing protectiles make. Through the open window you see the skyline of Madrid lit now by the flashes. The LARGE OFFICER is standing at the big telemeter. The CIVILIAN at the two-branched one. The AIDE is looking over the CIVILIAN’s shoulder]

CIVILIAN. God, what a beautiful sight!

AIDE. We’ll kill plenty of them tonight. The Marxist bastards. This catches them in their holes.

CIVILIAN. It’s wonderful to see it.

GENERAL. Is it satisfactory?

[He does not remove his eyes from the telemeter]

CIVILIAN. It’s beautiful! How long will it go on?

GENERAL. We’re giving them an hour. Then ten minutes without. Then fifteen minutes more.

CIVILIAN. No shells will light in the Salamanca quarter, will they? That’s where nearly all our people are.

GENERAL. A few will land there.

CIVILIAN. But why?

GENERAL. Errors by Spanish batteries.

CIVILIAN. Why by Spanish batteries?

GENERAL. Spanish batteries are not so good as ours.

[The CIVILIAN does not answer and the firing keeps up although the batteries are not firing with the speed with which they commenced. There is an incoming whistling rush, then a roar, and a shell has landed just short of the observation post]

GENERAL. They answer now a little.

[There are no lights in the observation post now except that of the gun flashes and the light of the cigarette the SENTRY at the foot of the ladder is smoking. As you watch you see the glow of this cigarette describe half an arc in the dark, and there is a thud clearly heard by the audience as the SENTRY falls. You hear the sound of two blows. Another shell comes in with the same sort of screaming rush, and at its burst you see in the flash two men climbing the ladder]

GENERAL. [Speaking from the telemeter] Ring me Garabitas.

[SIGNALLER rings. Then rings again]

SIGNALLER. Sorry, sir. The wire’s gone.

GENERAL. [To the other SIGNALLER] Get me through to the Division.

SIGNALLER. I have no wire, sir.

GENERAL. Put some one to trace your wire!

SIGNALLER. Yes, sir.

[He rises in the dark]

GENERAL. What’s that man smoking for? What sort of an army out of the chorus of Carmen is this?

[You see the cigarette in the mouth of the SENTRY at the top of the ladder describe a long parabola toward the ground as though he had tossed it away, and there is the solid noise of a body falling. A flashlight illuminates the three men by the telemeters and the two SIGNALLERS]

PHILIP. [From inside the open door at the top of the ladder. In a low, very quiet voice] Put your hands up and don’t try anything heroic, or I’ll blow your heads off.

[He is holding a short automatic rifle which was slung over his back as he climbed up the ladder]

I mean all five of you! KEEP them up there, you fat bastard!

[MAX has a hand grenade in his right hand, the flashlight in his left]

MAX. You make a noise, you move, and everybody is dead. You hear?

PHILIP. Who do you want?

MAX. Only the fat one and the townsman. Tie me up the rest. You have also good adhesive tape?

PHILIP. Da.

MAX. You see. We are all Russians. Everybody is Russians in Madrid! Hurry up, Tovarich, and tape good the mouths, because I have to throw this thing before we go. You see the pin is pulled already!

[Just before the curtain goes down, as PHILIP is advancing toward them with the short automatic rifle, you see the men’s white faces in the flashlight. The batteries are still firing. From below and beyond the house comes a voice— ‘Cut out that light!’]

MAX. O.K. soldier, in just a minute!

CURTAIN

Act Three Scene Three

As the curtain rises you see the same room in Seguridad headquarters that was shown in Act II, Scene I. ANTONIO, of the Comisariato de Vigilancia, is sitting behind the table. PHILIP and MAX, muddy and much the worse for wear, are seated in the two chairs. PHILIP still has the automatic rifle slung over his back. The CIVILIAN from the observation post, his beret gone, his trench coat ripped clean up the back, one sleeve hanging loose, is standing before the table with an ASSAULT GUARD on either side of him.

ANTONIO. [To the two ASSAULT GUARDS] You can go!

[They salute and go out to the right, carrying their rifles at trail]

[To PHILIP]

What became of the other?

PHILIP. We lost him coming in.

MAX. He was too heavy and he would not walk.

ANTONIO. It would have been a wonderful capture.

PHILIP. You can’t do these things as they do them in the cinema.

ANTONIO. Still, if we could have had him!

PHILIP. I’ll draw you a little map and you can send out there and find him.

ANTONIO. Yes?

MAX. He was a soldier and he would never have talked. I would have liked the questioning of him, but such a business is useless.

PHILIP. When we’re through here I’ll draw you a little map and you can send out for him. No one will have moved him. We left him in a likely spot.

CIVILIAN. [In an hysterical voice] You murdered him.

PHILIP. [Contemptuously] Shut up, will you?

MAX. I promise you, he would not have ever talked. I know such men.

PHILIP. You see, we didn’t expect to find two of these sportsmen at the same time. And this other specimen was oversized and he wouldn’t walk finally. He made a sort of sit-down strike. And I don’t know whether you’ve ever tried coming in at night from up there. There are a couple of very odd spots. So you see we didn’t really have any bloody choice in the matter.

CIVILIAN. [Hysterically] So you murdered him! I saw you do it.

PHILIP. Just quiet down, will you? No one asked you for your opinion.

MAX. You want us now?

ANTONIO. No.

MAX. I think I like to go. This isn’t what I like very much. It makes too much remember.

PHILIP. You need me?

ANTONIO. No.

PHILIP. You don’t need to worry. You’ll get everything — the lists, the locations, everything. This thing has been running it.

ANTONIO. Yes.

PHILIP. You don’t need to worry about his talking. He’s the talkative type.

ANTONIO. He is a politician. Yes. I have talked to many politicians.

CIVILIAN. [Hysterically] You’ll never make me talk! Never! Never! Never!

[MAX and PHILIP look at each other — PHILIP grins]

PHILIP. [Very quietly] You’re talking now. Haven’t you noticed it?

CIVILIAN. No! No!

MAX. If it is all right I will go.

[He stands up]

PHILIP. I’ll run along too, I think.

ANTONIO. You do not want to stay to hear it?

MAX. Please, no.

ANTONIO. It will be very interesting.

PHILIP. It’s that we are tired.

ANTONIO. It will be very interesting.

PHILIP. I’ll be by tomorrow.

ANTONIO. I would like you very much to stay.

MAX. Please. If you do not mind. As a favor.

CIVILIAN. What are you going to do to me?

ANTONIO. Nothing. Only that you should answer some questions.

CIVILIAN. I’ll never talk.

ANTONIO. Oh, yes, you will!

MAX. Please. Please. I go now!

CURTAIN

Act Three Scene Four

Same as Act I, Scene III, but it is late afternoon.

As the curtain rises, you see the two rooms. DOROTHY BRIDGES’ room is dark. PHILIP’s is lighted, with the curtains drawn. PHILIP is lying face down on the bed. ANITA is sitting on a chair by the bed.

ANITA. Philip!

PHILIP. [Not turning or looking toward her] What’s the matter?

ANITA. Please, Philip.

PHILIP. Please bloody what?

ANITA. Where is whiskey?

PHILIP. Under the bed.

ANITA. Thank you.

[She looks under the bed. Then crawls part way under]

No find.

PHILIP. Try the closet then. Somebody’s been in here cleaning up again.

ANITA. [Goes to the closet and opens it. She looks carefully inside] Is all empty bottles.

PHILIP. You’re just a little discoverer. Come here. ANITA. I want find a whiskey.

PHILIP. Look in the night table.

[ANITA goes over to the night table by the bed and opens the door — she brings out a bottle of whiskey. Goes for a glass into the bathroom, and pours a whiskey into it and adds water from the carafe by the bed]

ANITA. Philip. Drink this feel better.

[PHILIP sits up and looks at her]

PHILIP. Hello, Black Beauty. How did you get in here?

ANITA. From the pass key.

PHILIP. Well.

ANITA. I no see you. I plenty worried. I come here they say you inside. I knock door no answer. I knock more. No answer. I say open me up with the pass key.

PHILIP. And they did?

ANITA. I said you sent for me.

PHILIP. Did I?

ANITA. No.

PHILIP. Thoughtful of you to come though.

ANITA. Philip you still that big blonde?

PHILIP. I don’t know. I’m sort of mixed up about that. Things are getting sort of complicated. Every night I ask her to marry me, and every morning I tell her I don’t mean it. I think, probably, things can’t go on like that. No. They can’t go on like that.

[ANITA sits down by him and pats his head and smooths his hair back]

ANITA. You feel plenty bad. I know.

PHILIP. Want me to tell you a secret?

ANITA. Yes.

PHILIP. I never felt worse.

ANITA. Is a disappoint. Was think you tell how you catch all the people of the Fifth Column.

PHILIP. I didn’t catch them. Only caught one man. Disgusting specimen he was, too.

[There is a knock on the door. It is the MANAGER]

MANAGER. Excuse profoundly if disturbation —

PHILIP. Keep it clean you know. There’s ladies present.

MANAGER. I mean only to enter and see if every thing in order. Control possible actions of young lady in case your absence or incapacity. Also desire offer sincerest warmest greetings congratulations admirable performance feat of counterespionage resulting announcement evening papers arrest three hundred members Fifth Column.

PHILIP. That’s in the paper?

MANAGER. With details of arrestations of every type of reprehensible engaged in shooting, plotting assassinations — sabotaging, communicating with enemy, every form of delights.

PHILIP. Of delights?

MANAGER. Is a French word, spells out D-E-L-I-T-S, meaning offenses.

PHILIP. And that’s all in the paper?

MANAGER. Absolutely, Mr. Philip.

PHILIP. And where do I come in?

MANAGER. Oh, everybody knows you were engaged in prosecution of such investigations.

PHILIP. Just how do they know?

MANAGER. [Reproachfully] Mr. Philip. Is Madrid. In Madrid everybody knows everything often before occurrence of same. After occurrence sometimes is discussions as to who actually did. But before occurrence all the world knows clearly who must do. I offer congratulations now in order to precede reproaches of unsatisfiables who ask, ‘Ah ha! Only 300? Where are the others?’

PHILIP. Don’t be so gloomy. I suppose I’ll have to be leaving now though.

MANAGER. Mr. Philip, I have thought of that and I come here, make what hope will result as excellent proposition. If you leave is useless to carry tinned goods as baggage.

[There is a knock on the door. It is MAX]

MAX. Salud camaradas.

EVERY ONE. Salud.

PHILIP. [To MANAGER] Run along now, Comrade Stamp Collector. We can talk about that later.

MAX. [To PHILIP] Wie gehts?

PHILIP. Gut. Not too gut.

ANITA. O.K. I take bath?

PHILIP. More than O.K., darling. But keep the door shut, will you?

ANITA. [From bathroom] Is warm water.

PHILIP. That’s a good sign. Shut the door, please.

[ANITA shuts the door. MAX comes over by the bed and sits down on a chair. PHILIP is sitting on the bed with his legs hanging over]

PHILIP. Want anything?

MAX. No, Comrade. You were there?

PHILIP. Oh, yes. I stayed all through it. Every bit of it. All of it. They needed to know something and they called me back.

MAX. How was he?

PHILIP. Cowardly. But it only came out a little at a time for a while.

MAX. And then?

PHILIP. Oh, and then finally he was spilling it out faster than a stenographer could take it. I have a strong stomach, you know.

MAX [Ignoring this] I see in the paper about the arrests. Why do they publish such things?

PHILIP. I don’t know, my boy. Why do they? I’ll bite.

MAX. It is good for morale. But it is also very good to get every one. Did they bring in — the — ah —

PHILIP. Oh, yes. The corpse you mean? They fetched him in from where we left him, and Antonio had him placed in a chair in the corner and I put a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and it was all very jolly. Only the cigarette wouldn’t stay lighted, of course.

MAX. I am very happy I did not have to stay.

PHILIP. I stayed. And then I left. And then I came back. Then I left and they called me back again. I’ve been there until an hour ago and now I’m through. For today, that is. Finished my work for the day. Something else to do tomorrow.

MAX. We did very good job.

PHILIP. As good as we could. It was very brilliant and very flashy, and there were probably many holes in the net and a big part of the haul got away. But they can haul again. You have to send me some place else though. I’m no good here any more. Too many people know what I’m doing. Not because I talk, either. It just gets that way.

MAX. There are many places to send. But you still have some work to do here.

PHILIP. I know. But ship me out as quickly as you can, will you? I’m getting on the jumpy side.

MAX. What about the girl in the other room?

PHILIP. Oh, I’m going to break it off with her.

MAX. I do not ask that.

PHILIP. No. But you would sooner or later. There’s no sense babying me along. We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration. I don’t exactly remember when it was, but I signed up all right.

MAX. So have we all. There is no question of signing. There is no need to talk with bitterness.

PHILIP. I’m not bitter. I just don’t want to fool myself. Nor let things get a hold in part of me where no things should get hold. This thing was getting pretty well in. Well, I know how to cure it.

MAX. How?

PHILIP. I’ll show you how.

MAX. Remember, Philip, I am a kind man.

PHILIP. Oh, quite. So am I. You ought to watch me work sometime.

[While they have been talking you see the door of 109 open and DOROTHY BRIDGES comes in. She turns up the lights, takes off her street coat and puts on the silver fox cape. Standing, she turns in it before the mirror. She looks very beautiful this evening. She goes to the phonograph and puts on the Chopin Mazurka and sits in a chair by the reading light with a book]

PHILIP. There she is. She’s come, what do you call the place, home — now.

MAX. Philip, Comrade, you do not have to. I tell you truly I see no signs that she interferes with your work in any way.

PHILIP. No, but I do. And you would damned soon.

MAX. I leave it to you as before. But remember to be kind. To us to whom dreadful things have been done, kindness in all possible things is of great importance.

PHILIP. I’m very kind, too, you know. Oh, am I kind! I’m terrific!

MAX. No, I do not know that you are kind. I would like you to be.

PHILIP. Just wait in here, will you?

[PHILIP goes out of the door and knocks on the door of 109. He pushes it open after knocking and goes in]

DOROTHY. Hello, beloved.

PHILIP. Hello. How have you been?

DOROTHY. I’m very well and very happy now you’re here. Where have you been? You never came in last night. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.

PHILIP. Have you a drink?

DOROTHY. Yes, darling.

[She makes him a whiskey and water. In the other room MAX is sitting in a chair staring at the electric stove]

DOROTHY. Where were you, Philip?

PHILIP. Just around. Checking up on things.

DOROTHY. And how were things?

PHILIP. Some were good, you know. And some were not so good. I suppose they evened up.

DOROTHY. And you don’t have to go out tonight?

PHILIP. I don’t know.

DOROTHY. Philip, beloved, what’s the matter?

PHILIP. Nothing’s the matter.

DOROTHY. Philip, let’s go away from here. I don’t have to stay here. I’ve sent away three articles. We could go to that place near Saint Tropez and the rains haven’t started yet and it would be lovely there now with no people. Then afterwards we could go to ski.

PHILIP. [Very bitterly] Yes, and afterwards to Egypt and make love happily in all the hotels, and a thousand breakfasts come up on trays in the thousand fine mornings of the next three years; or the ninety of the next three months; or however long it took you to be tired of me, or me of you. And all we’d do would be amuse ourselves. We’d stay at the Crillon, or the Ritz, and in the fall when the leaves were off the trees in the Bois and it was sharp and cold, we’d drive out to Auteuil steeplechasing, and keep warm by those big coal braziers in the paddock, and watch them take the water jump and see them coming over the bullfinch and the old stone wall. That’s it. And nip into the bar for a champagne cocktail and afterwards ride back in to dinner at La Rue’s and weekends go to shoot pheasants in the Sologne. Yes, yes, that’s it. And fly out to Nairobi and the old Mathaiga Club, and in the spring a little spot of salmon fishing. Yes, yes, that’s it. And every night in bed together. Is that it?

DOROTHY. Oh, darling, think how it would be! Have you that much money?

PHILIP. I did have. Till I got into this business.

DOROTHY. And we’ll do all that and Saint Moritz, too?

PHILIP. Saint Moritz? Don’t be vulgar. Kitzbtihel you mean. You meet people like Michael Arlen at Saint Moritz.

DOROTHY. But you wouldn’t have to meet him, darling. You could cut him. And will we really do all that?

PHILIP. Do you want to?

DOROTHY. Oh, darling!

PHILIP. Would you like to go to Hungary, too, some fall? You can take an estate there very cheaply and only pay for what you shoot. And on the Danube flats you have great flights of geese. And have you ever been to Lamu where the long white beach is, with the dhows beached on their sides, and the wind in the palms at night? Or what about Malindi where you can surfboard on the beach and the northeast monsoon cool and fresh, and no pajamas, and no sheets at night. You’d like Malindi.

DOROTHY. I know I would, Philip.

PHILIP. And have you ever been out to the Sans Souci in Havana on a Saturday night to dance in the Patio under the royal palms? They’re gray and they rise like columns and you stay up all night there and play dice, or the wheel, and drive in to Jaimanitas for breakfast in the daylight. And everybody knows every one else and it’s very pleasant and gay.

DOROTHY. Can we go there?

Ernest Hemingway PHILIP. No.

DOROTHY. Why not, Philip?

PHILIP. We won’t go anywhere.

DOROTHY. Why not, darling?

PHILIP. You can go if you like. I’ll draw you up an itinerary.

DOROTHY. But why can’t we go together?

PHILIP. You can go. But I’ve been to all those places and I’ve left them all behind. And where I go now I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go.

DOROTHY. And I can’t go there?

PHILIP. No.

DOROTHY. And why can’t I go wherever it is? I could learn and I’m not afraid.

PHILIP. One reason is I don’t know where it is. And another is I wouldn’t take you.

DOROTHY. Why not?

PHILIP. Because you’re useless, really. You’re uneducated, you’re useless, you’re a fool and you’re lazy.

DOROTHY. Maybe the others. But I’m not useless.

PHILIP. Why aren’t you useless?

DOROTHY. You know — or you ought to know.

[She is crying]

PHILIP. Oh, yes. That.

DOROTHY. Is that all it means to you?

PHILIP. That’s a commodity you shouldn’t pay too high a price for.

DOROTHY. So I’m a commodity?

PHILIP. Yes, a very handsome commodity. The most beautiful I ever had.

DOROTHY. Good. I’m glad to hear you say it. And I’m glad it’s daylight. Now get out of here. You conceited, conceited drunkard. You ridiculous, puffed-up, posing braggart. You commodity, you. Did it ever occur to you that you’re a commodity, too? A commodity one shouldn’t pay too high a price for?

PHILIP. [Laughing] No. But I see it the way you put it.

DOROTHY. Well, you are. You’re a perfectly vicious commodity. Never home. Out all night. Dirty, muddy, disorderly. You’re a terrible commodity. I just liked the package it was put up in. That was all. I’m glad you’re going away.

PHILIP. Really?

DOROTHY. Yes, really. You and your commodity. But you didn’t have to mention all those places if we weren’t ever going to them.

PHILIP. I’m very sorry. That wasn’t kind.

DOROTHY. Oh, don’t be kind either. You’re frightful when you’re kind. Only kind people should try being kind. You’re horrible when you’re kind. And you didn’t have to mention them in the daytime.

PHILIP. I’m sorry.

DOROTHY. Oh, don’t be sorry. You’re at your worst when you’re sorry. I can’t stand you sorry. Just get out.

PHILIP. Well, good-bye.

[He puts his arms around her to kiss her]

DOROTHY. Don’t kiss me either. You’ll kiss me and then you’ll go right in to commodities. I know you.

[PHILIP holds her tight and kisses her]

Oh, Philip, Philip, Philip.

PHILIP. Good-bye.

DOROTHY. You — you — you don’t want the commodity?

PHILIP. I can’t afford it.

[DOROTHY twists away from him]

DOROTHY. Then, go then.

PHILIP. Good-bye.

DOROTHY. Oh, get out.

[PHILIP goes out the door and into his room, MAX is still sitting in the chair. In the other room DOROTHY rings the bell for the maid]

MAX. So?

[PHILIP stands there looking into the electric stove. MAX looks into the stove too. In the other room PETRA has come to the door]

PETRA. Yes, Senorita.

[DOROTHY is sitting on the bed. Her head is up but there are tears running down her cheeks. PETRA goes over to her]

What is it, Senorita?

DOROTHY. Oh, Petra, he’s bad just as you said he was. He’s bad, bad, bad. And like a damn fool I thought we were going to be happy. But he’s bad.

PETRA. Yes, Senorita.

DOROTHY. But oh, Petra, the trouble is I love him.

[PETRA stands there by the bed with DOROTHY. In Room 110 PHILIP stands in front of the night table. He pours himself a whiskey and puts water in it]

PHILIP. Anita.

ANITA. [From inside the bathroom] Yes, Philip.

PHILIP. Anita, come out whenever you’ve finished your bath.

MAX. I go.

PHILIP. No. Stay around.

MAX. No. No. No. Please, I go.

PHILIP. [In a very dry flat voice] Anita, was the water hot?

ANITA. [From inside the bathroom] Was lovely bath. MAX. I go. Please, please, please, I go.

CURTAIN

The Poetry

Hemingway’s home, Finca Vigia (“Lookout Farm”), a 15-acre property 15 miles from Havana, Cuba

HEMINGWAY’S POEMS

CONTENTS

Dedicated to F. W.

How Ballad Writing Affects Our Seniors

The Worker

The Safety Man

The Inexpressible

Oklahoma

Captives

Champs d’Honneur

Chapter Heading

Mitrailliatrice

On Weddynge Gyftes

Ultimately

Blood is thicker than water...

Oily Weather

Roosevelt

Riparto d’Assalto

Montparnasse

Along With Youth

The Earnest Liberal’s Lament

The Age Demanded

They All Made Peace — What Is Peace?

I Like Americans

I Like Canadians

The Big Dance on the Hill

The Sport of Kings

The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

Part Two of the Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

Part Three of The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

Part Four of the Same Story

Part Five Follows

Part Six A Serious and Vivid Account of a Dramatic Moment in the Cruel Sport

The Lady Poets With Foot Notes

Neothomist Poem

I think that I have never trod...

Valentine

Little Mr. Wilson...

Advice to a Son

First Poem to Mary in London

Poem to Mary (Second Poem)

Dedicated to F. W.

Lives of football men remind us,
We can dive and kick and slug,
And departing leave behind us,
Hoof prints on another’s mug.

Trapeze, 24 November 1916

How Ballad Writing Affects Our Seniors

Oh, I’ve never writ a ballad
And I’d rather eat shrimp salad,
(Tho’ the Lord knows how I hate the
Pink and scrunchy little beasts),
But Miss Dixon says I gotto —
(And I pretty near forgotto)
But I’m sitting at my table
And my feet are pointing east.

Now one stanza, it is over —
Oh! Heck, what rhymes with “over”?
Ah! yes; “I’m now in clover,”
But when I’ve got that over
I don’t yet know what to write.
I might write of young Lloyd Boyle,
Sturdy son of Irish soil,
But to write of youthful Boyle
Would involve increasing toil,
For there is so much material
I’d never get it done.

Somewhere in this blessed metre
There’s a crook. The stanzas peter
Out before I get them started
Just like that one did, just then.
But I’ll keep a-writing on
Just in hope some thought will strike me
When it does, I’ll let it run
Just in splashes off my pen.

(Wish that blamed idea would come.)
I’ve been writing for two pages,
But it seems like countless ages,
For I’ve scribbled and I’ve scribbled,
But I haven’t said a thing.
This is getting worse each minute,
For whatever I put in it
I shall have to read before the English class.

‘Know where I would like to be —
Just a-lyin’ ‘neath a tree
Watchin’ clouds up in the sky —
Fleecy clouds a-sailin’ by
And we’d look up in the blue —
Only me, an’ maybe you.
I could write a ballad then
That would drip right off my pen.
(Aw, shucks!)

For the future I shall promise
(If you let me live this time),
I’ll ne’er write another ballad —
Never venture into rhyme.

Tabula, November 1916

The Worker

Far down in the sweltering guts of the ship
The stoker swings his scoop
Where the jerking hands of the steam gauge drive
And muscles and tendons and sinews rive;
While it’s hotter than hell to a man alive,
He toils in his sweltering coop.

He is baking and sweating his life away
In that blasting roar of heat;
But he’s fighting a battle with wind and tide,
All to the end that you may ride;
And through it all he is living beside;
He can work and sleep and eat.

Tabula, March 1917

The Safety Man

Standing, a little figure alone in the middle of a white-lined field,
Two stands full of faces rise to their feet with
A mighty roar.
A grey figure whirls free of the tumbled line of scrimmage.
He tears straight down the field,
His flying feet thudding over the white lines.
The safety man poises, then shoots forward;
He brings the grey sweatered man to the ground with a crash.
Cole is on the job.

Tabula, March 1917

The Inexpressible

When the June bugs were a-circlin’
Round the arc light on the corner
And a-makin’ shooty shadows on the street;
When you strolled along barefooted
Through a warm dark night of June
Where the dew from off the cool grass bathed your feet —

When you heard a banjo thunkin’
On the porch across the road,
And you smelled the scent of lilacs in the park
There was something struggling in you
That you couldn’t put in words —
You was really livin’ poetry in the dark!

Tabula, March 1917

Oklahoma

All of the Indians are dead
(A good Indian is a dead Indian)
Or riding in motor cars.
(The oil lands, you know, they’re all rich)
Smoke smarts my eyes,
Cottonwood twigs and buffalo dung
Smoke grey in the teepee —
(Or is it myopic trachoma?)

The prairies are long,
The moon rises,
Ponies
Drag at their pickets.
The grass has gone brown in the summer —
(Or is it the hay crop failing?)

Pull an arrow out,
If you break it
The wound closes.
Salt is good too
And wood ashes.
Pounding it throbs in the night —
(Or is it the gonorrhea)

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Captives

Some came in chains
Unrepentant but tired.
Too tired but to stumble.
Thinking and hating were finished
Thinking and fighting were finished
Retreating and hoping were finished.
Cures thus a long campaign,
Making death easy.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Champs d’Honneur

Soldiers never do die well;
Crosses mark the places,
Wooden crosses where they fell;
Stuck above their faces.
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch;
All the world roars red and black,
Soldiers smother in a ditch;
Choking through the whole attack.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Chapter Heading

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Mitrailliatrice

The mills of the gods grind slowly;
But this mill
Chatters in mechanical staccato.
Ugly short infantry of the mind,
Advancing over difficult terrain,
Make this Corona
Their mitrailleuse.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

On Weddynge Gyftes

Three traveling clocks
Tick
On the mantelpiece
Comma
But the young man is starving.

Toronto Star Weekly, 17 December 1921

Ultimately

He tried to spit out the truth;
Dry mouthed at first,
He drooled and slobbered in the end;
Truth dribbling his chin.

Double-Dealer, June 1922

Blood is thicker than water...

“Blood is thicker than water,”
The young man said
As he knifed his friend
For a drooling old bitch
And a house full of lies.

Paris, 1922

Oily Weather

The sea desires deep hulls —
It swells and rolls.
The screw churns a throb —
Driving, throbbing, progressing.
The sea rolls with love.
Surging, caressing,
Undulating its great loving belly.
The sea is big and old —
Throbbing ships scorn it.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Roosevelt

Workingmen believed
He busted trusts,
And put his picture in their windows.
“What he’d have done in France!”
They said.
Perhaps he would —
He could have died
Perhaps,
Though generals rarely die except in bed,
As he did finally.
And all the legends that he started in his life
Live on and prosper,
Unhampered now by his existence.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Riparto d’Assalto

Drummed their boots on the camion floor,
Hob-nailed boots on the camion floor.
Sergeants stiff,
Corporals sore.
Lieutenants thought of a Mestre whore —
Warm and soft and sleepy whore,
Cozy, warm and lovely whore:
Damned cold, bitter, rotten ride,
Winding road up the Grappa side.
Arditi on benches stiff and cold,
Pride of their country stiff and cold,
Bristly faces, dirty hides —
Infantry marches, Arditi rides.
Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride —
To splintered pines on the Grappa side
At Asalone, where the truck-load died.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Montparnasse

There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the cafe.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

Along With Youth

A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biased twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boys’ letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday’s Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.

Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923)

The Earnest Liberal’s Lament

I know monks masturbate at night,
That pet cats screw,
That some girls bite,
And yet
What can I do
To set things right?

Querschnitt, 1924

The Age Demanded

The age demanded that we sing
and cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
and hammered in the bung.
The age demanded that we dance
and jammed us into iron pants.
And in the end the age was handed
the sort of shit that it demanded.

Querschnitt, 1925

They All Made Peace — What Is Peace?

All of the turks are gentlemen and Ismet Pasha is a little
deaf. But the Armenians. How about the Armenians?
Well the Armenians.

Lord Curzon likes young boys.
So does Chicherin.
So does Mustapha Kemal. He is good looking too. His eyes
are too close together but he makes war. That is the way
he is.

Lord Curzon does not love Chicherin. Not at all. His beard
trickles and his hands are cold. He thinks all the time.

Lord Curzon thinks too. But he is much taller and goes to
St. Moritz.

Mr. Child does not wear a hat.
Baron Hayashi gets in and out of the automobile.
Monsieur Barrere gets telegrams. So does Marquis Garroni.
His telegrams come on motorcycles from MUSSOLINI.
MUSSOLINI has nigger eyes and a bodyguard and has his
picture taken reading a book upside down. MUSSOLINI is
wonderful. Read the Daily Mail.

I used to know Mussolini. Nobody liked him then. Even I
didn’t like him. He was a bad character. Ask Monsieur
Barrere.

We all drink cocktails. Is it too early to have a cocktail?
How about a drink George? Come on and we’ll have a cocktail
Admiral. Just time before lunch. Well what if we do? Not
too dry.

Well what do you boys know this morning?
Oh they’re shrewd. They’re shrewd.

Who have we got in on the subcommission this morning,
Admiral?

M. Stambuliski walks up the hill and down the hill. Don’t talk
about M. Venizelos. He is wicked. You can see it. His beard
shows it.
Mr. Child is not wicked.
Mrs. Child has flat breasts and Mr. Child is an idealist and
wrote Harding’s campaign speeches and calls Senator
Beveridge Al.
You know me Al.
Lincoln Steffens is with Child. The big C. makes the joke easy.

Then there is Mosul
And the Greek Patriarch
What about the Greek Patriarch? —

Little Review, Spring 1923

I Like Americans

By A Foreigner

I like Americans.
They are so unlike Canadians.
They do not take their policemen seriously.
They come to Montreal to drink.
Not to criticize.
They claim they won the war.
But they know at heart that they didn’t.
They have such respect for Englishmen.
They like to live abroad.
They do not brag about how they take baths.
But they take them.
Their teeth are so good.
And they wear B.V.D.’s all the year round.
I wish they didn’t brag about it.
They have the second best navy in the world.
But they never mention it.
They would like to have Henry Ford for president.
But they will not elect him.
They saw through Bill Bryan.
They have gotten tired of Billy Sunday.
Their men have such funny hair cuts.
They are hard to suck in on Europe.
They have been there once.
They produced Barney, Mutt and Jeff.
And Jiggs.
They do not hang lady murderers.
They put them in vaudeville.
They read the Saturday Evening Post
And believe in Santa Claus.
When they make money
They make a lot of money.
They are fine people.

Toronto Star Weekly, 1923

I Like Canadians

By A Foreigner

I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarets don’t smell bad.
Their hats fit.
They really believe that they won the war.
They don’t believe in Literature.
They think Art has been exaggerated.
But they are wonderful on ice skates.
A few of them are very rich.
But when they are rich they buy more horses
Than motor cars.
Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.
But both boxing and horse-racing are illegal
In Chicago. —
Nobody works on Sunday.
Nobody.
That doesn’t make me mad.
There is only one Woodbine.
But were you ever at Blue Bonnets?
If you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario
You are liable to go to jail.
So it isn’t done.
There have been over 500 people killed by motor cars
In Chicago
So far this year.
It is hard to get rich in Canada.
But it is easy to make money.
There are too many tea rooms.
But, then, there are no cabarets.
If you tip a waiter a quarter
He says “Thank you.”
Instead of calling the bouncer.
They let women stand up in the street cars.
Even if they are good-looking.
They are all in a hurry to get home to supper
And their radio sets.
They are a fine people.
I like them.

Toronto Star Weekly, 1923

The Big Dance on the Hill

The arrival.
The vast crowd on the floor.
The encounter with the boss.
The man to man smile from the boss.
The feeling of elation.
The door keeper from the office who is serving out.
The whisper from the door keeper.
The long journey down the hall.
The closed door.
The clink of glasses.
The opening of the door.
The imposing array of glassware.
The sight of the host.
The look on the host’s face.
The sight of the boss with the host.
The look on the boss’ face
The sight of several other distinguished looking men.
The look on the distinguished looking men’s faces.
The atmosphere of disapproval.
The request from the attendant.
The giving of the order.
The silent consumption of the order.
The silence kept by the host, the boss and the distinguished looking men.
The uncomfortable feeling.
The increase of the uncomfortable feeling.
The retreat.
The journey down the long hallway.
The chuckles from the door keeper.
The statement by the door keeper that he had been instructed
to admit only the family and old friends.
The renewed chuckles by the door keeper.
The desire to kill the door keeper.
The sad return to the dance floor.

Toronto Star Weekly, November 1923

The Sport of Kings

The friend who calls up over the telephone.
The horse that has been especially wired from Pimlico.
The letting in of the friends in the office.
The search for ready money.
The studying of the entries.
The mysterious absence from the office.
The time of suspense and waiting.
The feeling of excitement among the friends in the office.
The trip outside to buy a sporting extra.
The search for the results.
The sad return upstairs.
The hope that the paper may have made a mistake.
The feeling among the friends in the office that the paper is right.
The attitude of the friends in the office.
The feeling of remorse.
The lightened pay envelope.

Toronto Star Weekly, 24 November 1923

The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

In the rain in the rain in the rain in the rain in Spain.
Does it rain in Spain?
Oh yes my dear on the contrary and there are no bull fights.
The dancers dance in long white pants
It isn’t right to yence your aunts
Come Uncle, let’s go home.
Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
Come let us fart in the home.
There is no art in a fart.
Still a fart may not be artless.
Let us fart an artless fart in the home.
Democracy.
Democracy.
Bill says democracy must go.
Go democracy.
Go
Go
Go
Bill’s father would never knowingly sit down at table with a Democrat.
Now Bill says democracy must go.
Go on democracy.
Democracy is the shit.
Relativity is the shit.

Dictators are the shit.
Menken is the shit.
Waldo Frank is the shit.
The Broom is the shit.
Dada is the shit.
Dempsey is the shit.
This is not a complete list.
They say Ezra is the shit.
But Ezra is nice.
Come let us build a monument to Ezra.
Good a very nice monument.
You did that nicely
Can you do another?
Let me try and do one.
Let us all try and do one.
Let the little girl over there on the corner try and do one.
Come on little girl.
Do one for Ezra.
Good.
You have all been successful children.
Now let us clean the mess up.
The Dial does a monument to Proust.
We have done a monument to Ezra.
A monument is a monument.
After all it is the spirit of the thing that counts.

Querschnitt, 1924

Part Two of the Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

You come to Spain but do not remain. Anna Veronica,
Marcial Veronica, Pablo Veronica, Gitanillo Veronica. No
they cannot Veronica because the wind blows. The wind blows
and it does not snows look at the bull with his bloody nose.

Part Three of The Soul of Spain with McAlmon and Bird the Publishers

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but
they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying
the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the
morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and
you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round
and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life
comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how
much are the drinks it is not night life.

Part Four of the Same Story

After a while there were no bull fights. What the hell
no bull fights? No bull fights. Not really you can’t mean it
no bull fights. But there were no bull fights.

Part Five Follows

We got on a train and went somewhere else.

Part Six A Serious and Vivid Account of a Dramatic Moment in the Cruel Sport

Estocada stuck well stuck. They run round in circles
with the capes and the bull whirls round and round and then
goes down and folds his knees under and his tongue sticks out
and the sword sticks out dully the hilt and the banderillos
stick out sharply at angles. Well stuck by the applauded
diestro. Well stuck by the afamoused espada. They are going
to kill him back of the horns with the short knife.
Short knives are thickshort knives are quick short knives make a needed nick.
Women love to see the puntillo used. It is exactly like
turning off an electric light bulb.

Querschnitt, November 1924

The Lady Poets With Foot Notes

One lady poet was a nymphomaniac and wrote for Vanity Fair. One lady poet’s husband was killed in the war.
One lady poet wanted her lover, but was afraid of having a
baby. When she finally got married, she found she couldn’t have a baby.
One lady poet slept with Bill Reedy got fatter and fatter —
and made half a million dollars writing burn plays.
One lady poet never had enough to eat.
One lady poet was big and fat and no fool.

Neothomist Poem

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not
want him for long.

Exile, 1927

I think that I have never trod...

I think that I have never trod
On anything as swell as sod
Sod whose hungry heart extracts
The wisdom of the railway tracks
Sod that underneath thy feets
Produces pumpkins trees and beets
That lies on mother nature’s breast
And gives the meadow lark a nest
Trees are made by fools like God
Who pushes them up through the sod.

L’ENVOI

For God is love and love is sod
Let all unite to worship God.
And let the Maker’s trembling hand
Emulate the ductless gland
Thus are we in His wisdom brought
To see the things that God has wrought.

New York Times Magazine, October 1977

Valentine

FOR A MR LEE WILSON DODD AND ANY OF HIS FRIENDS WHO WANT IT.

Sing a song of critics
pockets full of lye
four and twenty critics
hope that you will die
hope that you will peter out
hope that you will fail
so they can be the first one
be the first to hail
any happy weakening or sign of quick decay.
(All are very much alike, weariness too great,
sordid small catastrophes, stack the cards on fate,
very vulgar people, annals of the callous,
dope fiends, soldiers, prostitutes,
men without a gallus)
If you do not like them lads
one thing you can do
stick them up your asses lads
My Valentine to you.

Little Review, May 1929

Little Mr. Wilson...

Little Mr. Wilson
Wrote a little book
Maxie Perkins published it,
(A friend of Mr. Snook)
No one liked to screw in it
Wilson is pedantic
So if you liked to screw your girl
Chirps Wilson “Too Romantic.”
All the ball-less critics
All their cuntless wives
Give to Mr. Hemingway
A violent case of Hives.

30 November 1930

Advice to a Son

Never trust a white man,
Never kill a Jew,
Never sign a contract,
Never rent a pew.
Don’t enlist in armies;
Nor marry many wives;
Never write for magazines;
Never scratch your hives.
Always put paper on the seat,
Don’t believe in wars,
Keep yourself both clean and neat,
Never marry whores.
Never pay a blackmailer,
Never go to law,
Never trust a publisher.
Or you’ll sleep on straw.
All your friends will leave you
All your friends will die
So lead a clean and wholesome life
And join them in the sky.

Berlin, 1931

First Poem to Mary in London

I loving only the word
Trying to make with a phrase and a sentence
Something no bomber can reach
Something to stand when all of us are gone
And long after:
(Given a little luck at the moment of wording)
(Needing much luck then. Playing it out when I get it)
Come now to a new city.
(Owning no part of it. Shy from too long on the water. Killing
I know and believe in. Or do not believe in but practice.
Practice make perfect make practice make perfect make
practice. People I cannot explain to. Eyes burned from the
sun on the water. My heart, my dear, was eaten by a
trunkback turtle who did not recognize the taste and all my
hopes are part of a shoal where the Red Groupers spawned a month ago.)
Now come to this city tired and shy and living with my true
headache who is faithful and true and never leaves me. My
headache never had a brother before and so he does not
know that they become tired. He does not know that all of us
need to be alone. He is a friendly and true headache and I do
not like him to know that he bores me.
Only in the air does he leave me. Selfishly shifting the
ear-phones, I am unfaithful a little. The days between flying
are months. And a week between flying is always. But never
let my headache know because I should not wish to hurt his
feelings.
Sitting now here in the room waiting to go to the battle. A man
without his children nor his cats. No mangoes growing in the
ante-room of the Dorchester and the five inch bath instead of the
long plunge into the differing temperatures of the pool in Summer. His boat is in the far away sea. His people are dispersed
and his armament surrendered to the proper authorities.
Duly receipted and accounted for.
The battle will be another man’s battle and we will only be
baggage. Sharing a jeep with three others. Your choice
between drunkards or liars.
No, it is not a good ending. Not the end we had hoped for.
Not as when sighting her rising we closed dry mouthed but
happy. Not as we thought it would be in the long nights on
the bridge with the head-phones. Not as we thought it should
be each time we took her from harbour.
Where are you Wolfie now? Where are you Paxtchi? Put
her on the fucking course. Who gives a shit for these
bastards? Not us, we know, and always tried to close and have
that now the only wealth that we will ever keep. But you
can’t spend that here in this hotel. And if you could I’d starve
before I’d eat on it or drink on it and I can’t even go to see
the censor because of changes that are made; not in the copy but in me.
Then I am homesick for Paxtchi who took the armour from
his cockpit so she would trim better in the sea and never
dropped the drums of gas he sat on when we closed. For
Wolfie standing on the flying bridge the muscles jumping in
his cheeks. Saying, “Papa it’s all right with me. Don’t worry
for a moment Papa it’s all right with me.”
So now I sit in this town, homesick and lonely for the sea.
By-passing the town while I am in it. Taking what pleasure I
meet but sick and alone for the sea and my people. The
headache does not matter. I have good fun with the mob and
have not become a sad one. Don’t worry Wolfie. Never. It is
all right. I promise you always it is all right.
For in the evening now, alone from choice, I watch the
clock electrically tick and jump forward toward the hour
when she will come opening softly with the in-left key. Saying
“May I come in?” Coming small-voiced and lovely to the
hand and eye to bring your heart back that was gone; to cure
all loneliness and bring the things we left behind upon the boat.
Don’t worry Wolfie, ever. I’m all right and would not
change for any ever time. We’ve taken losses and we’ve made
great gains and nothing ever bores us when it starts. Not even
someone else’s battle.
(I’ll write you more about this later)

Atlantic, August 1965

Poem to Mary (Second Poem)

Now sleeps he
With that old whore Death
Who, yesterday, denied her thrice.
Repeat after me
Now sleeps he
With that old whore Death
Who, yesterday, denied her thrice.
Pause. Wait for them to close up.
Continue.
Did you deny her?
Yes.
Thrice?
Yes.
Repeat after me.
Do you take this old whore
Death for thy lawful
Wedded wife?
Repeat after me
I do
I do
I do.
K.I.A. 6 off. 61 em. 13 Sept. 2400 — 14 Sept. 2400.
Translate
Killed in action 6 officers 61 enlisted men from midnight 13th
September to midnight 14th September
Repeat after me sixtyseven times
I do
I do
I do, sixtyseven times
Continue
It is continued
In the next war we shall bury the dead in cellophane
In the next war we shall bury the dead in cellophane
The Host shall come packaged in every K ration
The Host shall come packaged in every K ration
Every man shall be provided with a small but perfect
Archbishop Spellman, which shall be self-inflatable (courtesy
of Air Reduction, opened — closed — previous — opened — closed — )
You don’t need to repeat this. There is not any ceremony any more.
Everyone is gone and you say this out loud to yourself.
You are alone at the time and the time now is always. Always was
a word you used in promises. It is valueless.
All officers, warrant officers and enlisted men will be
provided with a copy of their own true loves that they will
never see again and all these copies will be returnable
through the proper channels.
My own true love is Mary Welsh.
Then, of course, she will be returnable.
But I, on this day, will not accept the signature of Archbishop
Spellman. Nor of you. Nor of you. Nor of you.
You may all go now, all of you. Go as quietly as possible.
Go as far as possible. You may even take possible with you
if you can find him. And you may hang him or dispose of
him in any manner that you see fit.
Today no one uses slang because clarity is of the utmost importance.
Fucking, alone, is retained, but is only used as an adjective.
Sweating out is retained.
It means that which one must suffer without any possibility of
changing the result or the outcome.
Those of us who know walk very slowly, and we look at one
another with infinite love and compassion.
This comes only after one hundred days and is one of the final symptoms.
There has been irritation, anger, fear, doubt, accusations,
denials, misinterpretations, mistakes, cowardice, inability and
lack of talent for this work.
All this has been and will be again. To be counterbalanced
by firmness, steadiness, courage, quick understanding and the
ability both to maneuver and to fight.
But now, for a moment, there is only love and compassion.
Know how to endure. And only love and compassion.
Repeat it.
Only love and compassion.
For the B.F.’s too?
(Battle Fatigues, officers, men, midnight 13th Sept — ? midnight 14th Sept.)
No.
Then it is not compassion.
Not for the B.F.’s too. And
Yes, it is love and compassion.
How can you say that here?
How can you say the other?
Not that we ask for more. Not that we wish ever any. Not that
we wish any all. Not that we want any greater.
But when they walked away from that undiscovered country
from whose bourne no traveller returns who hasn’t been there,
They walked away from this we cannot state. And in them
died this inner knowing that grows — fresher and lovelier than
any rose. Manured by death and watered only with unshed
tears until, this day, it flowers into this love and this compassion.
Not for them.
No. I am sorry.
Then it is not complete.
No, nor will it be ever.
There is no contrition.
(No bloody fucking contrition)
Only love and compassion.
Reach out your hand to Love’s dark sister Hate, and walk with
her across that hill we slowly walked, and see if Love is
waiting at the top. Or who is waiting there instead.
Did I tell you my heart is a target of opportunity?
Love’s lovely sister
Lovingly unloving
Unworryingly succeeding
Procuring unprocuringly
Never wholly wrong
Nor more than half right
Holding unholdingly to hold where Love leaves easily without address.
Love lightly leaves without a trace and her dark sister fills in all the forms
All all the forms so neatly filled
The writing clear and good, where Love’s is often quite illegible
Scrawled lightly in a hurry as she smiled,
Giving unimportance to the page.
Do you think there upon the hill, we’ll find her there?
No. She’s long gone. She never stands to fight.
Knowing too well the idiocy of battle, Love’s always gone, leaving
us only the deserted sacrament
As one finds dinner on the table in the house of a new taken village.
So that we wear it now. Traces of it are worn on our chins. Like
remnants of the yolk of the rare and much desired egg, our
scooped up, newly eaten sacrement.
Bringing it with our newly issued pictures of our true loves up
toward the high ground beyond the town. Up toward the easy,
dirt-mouthed smile we had denied so many days (D plus 108)
Now all move slowly plodding up that hill
Making feet slowly go where they know better than to take you.
Feet are wise and feet are wary
Feet of John and feet of Harry
Feet know better
Feet won’t go.
Make feet move on slowly now
Make feet follow where no plow
Leads you ahead
Where things are sown
Toward the place where you’ll be dead.
RETURN HER NOW THROUGH THE PRESCRIBED CHANNELS.
RETURN HER.
This will aid you.
Song to Aid You to Return Her.
“What they will do to others,
“They will do to you.
“If you never suffer
“God will see you through.
“Onward Christian soldiers
“Marching to a whore
“With the cross of Mary Welsh
“Going on before.
(Throw your love away)
You must do it slowly now
“Slowly now and pray
“Pray to all of nothing
“Pray to all of nil
“Throw away your own true love
“Walking up a hill.”
Repeat it now again:
Now sleeps he
With that old whore Death
Who, yesterday, denied her thrice.
If you know, if you conceive
If you too if. If. If. (Not the poem that was given you framed for
Christmas in Oak Park, Illinois, written by Rudyard Kipling.)
But the other If.
Older than the If of Hamlet.
The old long ugly If that we have faced
In all the nights and all the forests of our hearts,
Always coming out into a clearing
Always sighting finally the smoke of the camp fire.
Now on this wooded hill again
If iffingly to proceed
If me no ifs, my true love
While we expend that which is not expendable,
While we violate all that is inviolate,
While we destroy that which is indestructable.
With nothing more than harrassing fire.
Nothing more than that.
All my heart is a target of opportunity,
All of us have been interdicted.
This is not the way it was.
I have not been there.
No one was there.
No one saw it.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Make a guess now while it is easy.
Get your guess in early.
Try and get your guess in for tonight, especially for tonight.
Tonight would be bank night for Archbishop Spellman.
If we were catholics.
And there are only 89 more days until Christmas (put in Xmas)
All of us will die today
Hail to Father Christmas
Old and young together say,
Hail to Father Christmas
Bright the colored flack spits shine
Hail to Father Christmas.
Bright today our love divine
Hail to Father Christmas.
D plus one O one O nine
Hail to Father Christmas.
Christmas minus ninety-nine
Hail to Father Christmas
Come, let’s put it on the line,
Hail to Fa-a-a-ther Christmas

It is no longer Christmas
And from this hill, bare-topped.
Its flanks covered with Christmas trees,
Many further hills are seen.

So, Mary, now I love you straight and true and send you
this to let you know that we had a rather sticky day today in the
forest. Casualties were fairly heavy, and a certain amount of
battle fatigue. Many more than there should be. But there
are many contributing factors. I’m getting sort of mixed up on
a lot of things again. But much clearer on others. Very hard
to write about this stuff. It is different from the boat. In the
boat we were always waiting for it. Here it is the happening
all the time and who it happens to. I do not think about me
at all any more. Bragging again. I think about you and that
brings me in. I write you awfully dull letters darling, because
I get tired and sort of emptied out. And all I have to tell you
that I can write is that I love you.

ERNEST

Atlantic, August 1965

The Non-Fiction

Hemingway writing in the late 1940’s in his house in Cuba

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

Death in the Afternoon was first published by Scribner’s on 23 September 1932 and had a first edition print run of about ten thousand copies. It is a work of non-fiction, detailing Hemingway’s interest and passion for bullfighting, and the importance he places on it as a practice that illuminates vital aspects of human nature and life itself. It is a work of more than five hundred pages and it frequently details specific technical aspects of bullfighting, alongside ideas on modern literature and ruminations on death. Hemingway delves deep into the aesthetic and cultural components of the spectacle as he explains why he finds it so engaging. He explains that it is the only ‘art’ form where the artist is in actual danger of losing his life, and that the ‘degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honour’. The author acknowledges that while he was entranced with bullfighting, he knew it was a form of entertainment despised by others, as he believes, ‘anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it’.

Hemingway had fought in the First World War and knew the horrors and senseless blood-letting of the conflict. However, the author retained an interest in violence and death, viewing bullfighting as a war with rules; a confrontation with death which is only ever seconds away. He believed that to become a truly good writer he needed to understand the ‘simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death’. It is this fascination with death that primarily fuels his interest in bullfighting; Hemingway suggests that there is a sense of transcendence and beauty in the matador repeatedly being on the brink of death in every performance. It is the proximity to harm that is a central element in determining the skill and honour of the matador; he must be one hair’s breadth away from being killed and the crowd should be able to feel the terror of death.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

ILLUSTRATIONS

AN EXPLANATORY GLOSSARY OF CERTAIN WORDS, TERMS AND PHRASES USED IN BULLFIGHTING

SOME REACTIONS OF A FEW INDIVIDUALS TO THE INTEGRAL SPANISH BULLFIGHT

A SHORT ESTIMATE OF THE AMERICAN, SIDNEY FRANKLIN, AS A MATADOR

DATES ON WHICH BULLFIGHTS WILL ORDINARILY BE HELD IN SPAIN, FRANCE, MEXICO, AND CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A photograph of Hemingway in front of a charging bull

TO PAULINE

CHAPTER 1

AT THE FIRST bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses. Everything I had read about the bull ring insisted on that point; most people who wrote of it condemned bullfighting outright as a stupid brutal business, but even those that spoke well of it as an exhibition of skill and as a spectacle deplored the use of the horses and were apologetic about the whole thing. The killing of the horses in the ring was considered indefensible. I suppose, from a modern moral point of view, that is, a Christian point of view, the whole bullfight is indefensible; there is certainly much cruelty, there is always danger, either sought or unlooked for, and there is always death, and I should not try to defend it now, only to tell honestly the things I have found true about it. To do this I must be altogether frank, or try to be, and if those who read this decide with disgust that it is written by some one who lacks their, the readers’, fineness of feeling I can only plead that this may be true. But whoever reads this can only truly make such a judgment when he, or she, has seen the things that are spoken of and knows truly what their reactions to them would be.

Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, and I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna, and I remember saying that I did not like the bullfights because of the poor horses. I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it. The only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death. It has none of the complications of death by disease, or so-called natural death, or the death of a friend or some one you have loved or have hated, but it is death nevertheless, one of the subjects that a man may write of. I had read many books in which, when the author tried to convey it, he only produced a blur, and I decided that this was because either the author had never seen it clearly or at the moment of it, he had physically or mentally shut his eyes, as one might do if he saw a child that he could not possibly reach or aid, about to be struck by a train. In such a case I suppose he would probably be justified in shutting his eyes as the mere fact of the child being about to be struck by the train was all that he could convey, the actual striking would be an anti-climax, so that the moment before striking might be as far as he could represent. But in the case of an execution by a firing squad, or a hanging, this is not true, and if these very simple things were to be made permanent, as, say, Goya tried to make them in Los Desastros de la Guerra, it could not be done with any shutting of the eyes. I had seen certain things, certain simple things of this sort that I remembered, but through taking part in them, or, in other cases, having to write of them immediately after and consequently noticing the things I needed for instant recording, I had never been able to study them as a man might, for instance, study the death of his father or the hanging of some one, say, that he did not know and would not have to write of immediately after for the first edition of an afternoon newspaper.

So I went to Spain to see bullfights and to try to write about them for myself. I thought they would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them, but that I would see certain definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death that I was working for. I found the definite action; but the bullfight was so far from simple and I liked it so much that it was much too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with and, aside from four very short sketches, I was not able to write anything about it for five years — and I wish I would have waited ten. However, if I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it. Certainly I do not say that now; every year I know there is more to learn, but I know some things which may be interesting now, and I may be away from the bullfights for a long time and I might as well write what I know about them now. Also it might be good to have a book about bullfighting in English and a serious book on such an unmoral subject may have some value.

So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very fine. Also, I do not mind the horses; not in principle, but in fact I do not mind them. I was very surprised at this since I cannot see a horse down in the street without having it make me feel a necessity for helping the horse, and I have spread sacking, unbuckled harness and dodged shod hoofs many times and will again if they have horses on city streets in wet and icy weather, but in the bull ring I do not feel any horror or disgust whatever at what happens to the horses. I have taken many people, both men and women, to bullfights and have seen their reactions to the death and goring of horses in the ring and their reactions are quite unpredictable. Women that I felt sure would enjoy the bullfights with the exception of the goring of the horses were quite unaffected by it; I mean really unaffected, that is, something that they disapproved of and that they expected would horrify and disgust them did not disgust them or horrify them at all. Other people, both men and women, were so affected that they were made physically ill. I will go into the way some of these people acted in detail later but let me say now that there was no difference, or line of difference, so that these people could be divided by any standard of civilization or experience into those that were affected and those that were not affected.

From observation I would say that people may possibly be divided into two general groups; those who, to use one of the terms of the jargon of psychology, identify themselves with, that is, place themselves in the position of, animals, and those who identify themselves with human beings. I believe, after experience and observation, that those people who identify themselves with animals, that is, the almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts, are capable of greater cruelty to human beings than those who do not identify themselves readily with animals. It seems as though there were a fundamental cleavage between people on this basis although people who do not identify themselves with animals may, while not loving animals in general, be capable of great affection for an individual animal, a dog, a cat, or a horse for instance. But they will base this affection on some quality of, or some association with, this individual animal rather than on the fact that it is an animal and hence worthy of love. For myself, I have felt profound affection for three different cats, four dogs, that I remember, and only two horses; that is horses that I have owned, ridden or driven. As for horses that I have followed, watched race and bet on I have had profound admiration and, when I had bet money on them, almost affection for a number of these animals; the ones that I remember best being Man of War, Exterminator, I believe I honestly had affection for him, Epinard, Kzar, Heros XII, Master Bob, and a half-bred horse, a steeplechaser like the last two, named Uncas. I had great, great admiration for all of those animals, but how much of my affection was due to the sums staked I do not know. Uncas, when he won a classic steeplechase race at Auteuil at odds of better than ten to one, carrying my money on him, I felt profound affection for. But if you should ask me what eventually happened to this animal that I was so fond of that Evan Shipman and I were nearly moved to tears when speaking of the noble beast, I would have to answer that I do not know. I do know that I do not love dogs as dogs, horses as horses, or cats as cats.

The question of why the death of the horse in the bull ring is not moving, not moving to some people that is, is complicated; but the fundamental reason may be that the death of the horse tends to be comic while that of the bull is tragic. In the tragedy of the bullfight the horse is the comic character. This may be shocking, but it is true. Therefore the worse the horses are, provided they are high enough off the ground and solid enough so that the picador can perform his mission with the spiked pole, or vara, the more they are a comic element. You should be horrified and disgusted at these parodies of horses and what happens to them, but there is no way to be sure that you will be unless you make up your mind to be, no matter what your feelings. They are so unlike horses; in some ways they are like birds, any of the awkward birds such as the adjutants or the wide-billed storks, and when, lifted by the thrust of the bull’s neck and shoulder muscles their legs hang, big hoofs dangling, neck drooping, the worn-out body lifted on the horn, they are not comic; but I swear they are not tragic. The tragedy is all centred in the bull and in the man. The tragic climax of the horse’s career has occurred off stage at an earlier time; when he was bought by the horse contractor for use in the bull ring. The end in the ring, somehow, seems not unfitting to the structure of the animal and when the canvases are stretched over the horses, the long legs, and necks, the strange-shaped heads and the canvas covering the body to make a sort of wing, they are more like birds than ever. They look a little as a dead pelican does. A live pelican is an interesting, amusing, and sympathetic bird, though if you handle him he will give you lice; but a dead pelican looks very silly.

This is not being written as an apology for bullfights, but to try to present the bullfight integrally, and to do this a number of things must be admitted which an apologist, making a case, would slide over or avoid. The comic that happens to these horses is not their death then; death is not comic, and gives a temporary dignity to the most comic characters, although this dignity passes once death has occurred; but the strange and burlesque visceral accidents which occur. There is certainly nothing comic by our standards in seeing an animal emptied of its visceral content, but if this animal instead of doing something tragic, that is, dignified, gallops in a stiff old-maidish fashion around a ring trailing the opposite of clouds of glory it is as comic when what it is trailing is real as when the Fratellinis give a burlesque of it in which the viscera are represented by rolls of bandages, sausages and other things. If one is comic the other is; the humor comes from the same principle. I have seen it, people running, horse emptying, one dignity after another being destroyed in the spattering, and trailing of its innermost values, in a complete burlesque of tragedy. I have seen these, call them disembowellings, that is the worst word, when, due to their timing, they were very funny. This is the sort of thing you should not admit, but it is because such things have not been admitted that the bullfight has never been explained.

These visceral accidents, as I write this, are no longer a part of the Spanish bullfight, as under the government of Primo de Rivera it was decided to protect the abdomens of the horses with a sort of quilted mattress designed in the terms of the decree “to avoid those horrible sights which so disgust foreigners and tourists.” These protectors avoid these sights and greatly decrease the number of horses killed in the bull ring, but they in no way decrease the pain suffered by the horses; they take away much of the bravery from the bull, this to be dealt with in a later chapter, and they are the first step toward the suppression of the bullfight. The bullfight is a Spanish institution; it has not existed because of the foreigners and tourists, but always in spite of them and any step to modify it to secure their approval, which it will never have, is a step toward its complete suppression.

This that has been written about one person’s reaction to the horses in the bull ring is not put in because of a desire of the author to write about himself and his own reactions, considering them as important and taking delight in them because they are his, but rather to establish the fact that the reactions were instant and unexpected. I did not become indifferent to the fate of the horses through the callousness of seeing a thing many times so that the emotions are no longer touched. It was not a matter of the emotions becoming insulated through familiarity. However I feel about the horses emotionally, I felt the first time I saw a bullfight. It might be argued that I had become callous through having observed war, or through journalism, but this would not explain other people who had never seen war, nor, literally, physical horror of any sort, nor ever even worked on, say, a morning newspaper, having exactly the same reactions.

I believe that the tragedy of the bullfight is so well ordered and so strongly disciplined by ritual that a person feeling the whole tragedy cannot separate the minor comic-tragedy of the horse so as to feel it emotionally. If they sense the meaning and end of the whole thing even when they know nothing about it; feel that this thing they do not understand is going on, the business of the horses is nothing more than an incident. If they get no feeling of the whole tragedy naturally they will react emotionally to the most picturesque incident. Naturally, too, if they are humanitarians or animalarians (what a word!) they will get no feeling of the tragedy but only a reaction on humanitarian or animalarian grounds, and the most obviously abused thing is the horse. If they sincerely identify themselves with animals they will suffer terribly, more so perhaps than the horse; since a man who has been wounded knows that the pain of a wound does not commence until about half an hour after it has been received and there is no proportional relation in pain to the horrible aspect of the wound; the pain of an abdominal wound does not come at the time but later with the gas pains and the beginnings of peritonitis; a pulled ligament or a broken bone, though, hurts at once and terribly; but these things are not known or they are ignored by the person who has identified himself with the animal and he will suffer genuinely and terribly, seeing only this aspect of the bullfight, while, when a horse pulls up lame in a steeplechase, he will not suffer at all and consider it merely regrettable.

The aficionado, or lover of the bullfight, may be said, broadly, then, to be one who has this sense of the tragedy and ritual of the fight so that the minor aspects are not important except as they relate to the whole. Either you have this or you have not, just as, without implying any comparison, you have or have not an ear for music. Without an ear for music the principle impression of an auditor at a symphony concert might be of the motions of the players of the double bass, just as the spectator at the bullfight might remember only the obvious grotesqueness of a picador. The movements of a player of the double bass are grotesque and the sounds produced are many times, if heard by themselves, meaningless. If the auditor at a symphony concert were a humanitarian as he might be at the bullfight he would probably find as much scope for his good work in ameliorating the wages and living conditions of the players of the double bass in symphony orchestras as in doing something about the poor horses. However, being, let us suppose, a man of culture and knowing that symphony orchestras are wholly good and to be accepted in their entirety he probably has no reactions at all except pleasure and approval. He does not think of the double bass as separated from the whole of the orchestra or as being played by a human being.

As in all arts the enjoyment increases with the knowledge of the art, but people will know the first time they go, if they go open-mindedly and only feel those things they actually feel and not the things they think they should feel, whether they will care for the bullfights or not. They may not care for them at all, no matter whether the fight should be good or bad, and all explanation will be meaningless beside the obvious moral wrongness of the bullfight, just as people could refuse to drink wine which they might enjoy because they did not believe it right to do so.

The comparison with wine drinking is not so far-fetched as it might seem. Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased. One can learn about wines and pursue the education of one’s palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine even though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely. Just as the eye which is only a good healthy instrument to start with becomes, even though it is no longer so strong and is weakened and worn by excesses, capable of transmitting constantly greater enjoyment to the brain because of the knowledge or ability to see that it has acquired. Our bodies all wear out in some way and we die, and I would rather have a palate that will give me the pleasure of enjoying completely a Chateaux Margaux or a Haut Brion, even though excesses indulged in in the acquiring of it has brought a liver that will not allow me to drink Richebourg, Corton, or Chambertin, than to have the corrugated iron internals of my boyhood when all red wines were bitter except port and drinking was the process of getting down enough of anything to make you feel reckless. The thing, of course, is to avoid having to give up wine entirely just as, with the eye, it is to avoid going blind. But there seems to be much luck in all these things and no man can avoid death by honest effort nor say what use any part of his body will bear until he tries it.

This seems to have gotten away from bullfighting, but the point was that a person with increasing knowledge and sensory education may derive infinite enjoyment from wine, as a man’s enjoyment of the bullfight might grow to become one of his greatest minor passions, yet a person drinking, not tasting or savoring but drinking, wine for the first time will know, although he may not care to taste or be able to taste, whether he likes the effect or not and whether or not it is good for him. In wine, most people at the start prefer sweet vintages, Sauternes, Graves, Barsac, and sparkling wines, such as not too dry champagne and sparkling Burgundy because of their picturesque quality while later they would trade all these for a light but full and fine example of the Grand crus of Medoc though it may be in a plain bottle without label, dust, or cobwebs, with nothing picturesque, but only its honesty and delicacy and the light body of it on your tongue, cool in your mouth and warm when you have drunk it. So in bullfighting, at the start it is the picturesqueness of the paseo, the color, the scene, the picturesqueness of farols and molinetes, the bullfighter putting his hand on the muzzle of the bull, stroking the horns, and all such useless and romantic things that the spectators like. They are glad to see the horses protected if it saves them from awkward sights and they applaud all such moves. Finally, when they have learned to appreciate values through experience what they seek is honesty and true, not tricked, emotion and always classicism and the purity of execution of all the suertes, and, as in the change in taste for wines, they want no sweetening but prefer to see the horses with no protection worn so that all wounds may be seen and death given rather than suffering caused by something designed to allow the horses to suffer while their suffering is spared the spectator. But, as with wine, you will know when you first try it whether you like it as a thing or not from the effect it will have on you. There are forms of it to appeal to all tastes and if you do not like it, none of it, nor, as a whole, while not caring for details, then it is not for you. It would be pleasant of course for those who do like it if those who do not would not feel that they had to go to war against it or give money to try to suppress it, since it offends them or does not please them, but that is too much to expect and anything capable of arousing passion in its favor will surely raise as much passion against it.

The chances are that the first bullfight any spectator attends may not be a good one artistically; for that to happen there must be good bullfighters and good bulls; artist bullfighters and poor bulls do not make interesting fights, for the bullfighter who has ability to do extraordinary things with the bull which are capable of producing the intensest degree of emotion in the spectator will not attempt them with a bull which he cannot depend on to charge; so, if the bulls are bad, that is only vicious rather than brave, undependable in their charges, reserved and unpredictable in their attacks, it is best that they be fought by bullfighters with knowledge of their profession, integrity, and years of experience rather than artistic ability. Such bullfighters will give a competent performance with a difficult animal, and because of the extra danger from the bull and the skill and courage they must use to overcome this danger, to prepare for the killing and kill with any degree of dignity, the bullfight is interesting, even to a person who has never seen one before. However, if such a bullfighter, skillful, knowing, brave and competent but without either genius or great inspiration happens to receive in the ring a truly brave bull, one which charges in a straight line, which responds to all the cites of the bullfighter, which grows braver under punishment, and has that technical quality that the Spanish call “nobility” and the bullfighter has only bravery and honest ability in the preparation for killing and killing of bulls and nothing of the wrist magic and aesthetic vision that, given a bull that will charge in a straight line, has produced the sculptural art of modern bullfighting; then he fails completely, he gives an undistinguished, honest performance and he goes on lower down in the commercial ranking of bullfighting while men in the crowd who earn, perhaps, less than a thousand pesetas a year will say, and mean it truly, “I would have given a hundred pesetas to have seen Cagancho with that bull.” Cagancho is a gypsy, subject to fits of cowardice, altogether without integrity, who violates all the rules, written and unwritten, for the conduct of a matador but who, when he receives a bull that he has confidence in, and he has confidence in them very rarely, can do things which all bullfighters do in a way they have never been done before and sometimes standing absolutely straight with his feet still, planted as though he were a tree, with the arrogance and grace that gypsies have and of which all other arrogance and grace seems an imitation, moves the cape spread full as the pulling jib of a yacht before the bull’s muzzle so slowly that the art of bullfighting, which is only kept from being one of the major arts because it is impermanent, in the arrogant slowness of his veronicas becomes, for the seeming minutes that they endure, permanent. That is the worst sort of flowery writing, but it is necessary to try to give the feeling, and to some one who has never seen it a simple statement of the method does not convey the feeling. Any one who has seen bullfights can skip such flowerishness and read the facts which are much more difficult to isolate and state. The fact is that the gypsy, Cagancho, can sometimes, through the marvellous wrists that he has, perform the usual movements of bullfighting so slowly that they become, to old-time bullfighting, as the slow motion picture is to the ordinary motion picture. It is as though a diver could control his speed in the air and prolong the vision of a swan dive, which is a jerk in actual life, although in photographs it seems a long glide, to make it a long glide like the dives and leaps we sometimes take in dreams. Other bullfighters who have or have had this ability with their wrists are Juan Belmonte and, occasionally with the cape, Enrique Torres and Felix Rodriguez.

The spectator going to a bullfight for the first time cannot expect to see the combination of the ideal bull and the ideal fighter for that bull which may occur not more than twenty times in all Spain in a season and it would be wrong for him to see that the first time. He would be so confused, visually, by the many things he was seeing that he could not take it all in with his eyes, and something which he might never see again in his life would mean no more to him than a regular performance. If there is any chance of his liking the bullfights the best bullfight for him to see first is an average one, two brave bulls out of six, the four undistinguished ones to give relief to the performance of the two excellent ones, three bullfighters, not too highly paid, so that whatever extraordinary things they do will look difficult rather than easy, a seat not too near the ring so that he will see the entire spectacle rather than, if he is too close, have it constantly broken up into bull and horse, man and bull, bull and man — and a hot sunny day. The sun is very important. The theory, practice and spectacle of bullfighting have all been built on the assumption of the presence of the sun and when it does not shine over a third of the bullfight is missing. The Spanish say, “El sol es el mejor torero.” The sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there. He is like a man without a shadow.

CHAPTER 2

THE BULLFIGHT IS not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal. This danger to the man can be increased by the bullfighter at will in the measure in which he works close to the bull’s horns. Keeping within the rules for bullfighting on foot in a closed ring formulated by years of experience, which, if known and followed, permit a man to perform certain actions with a bull without being caught by the bull’s horns, the bullfighter may, by decreasing his distance from the bull’s horns, depend more and more on his own reflexes and judgment of that distance to protect him from the points. This danger of goring, which the man creates voluntarily, can be changed to certainty of being caught and tossed by the bull if the man, through ignorance, slowness, torpidness, blind folly or momentary grogginess breaks any of these fundamental rules for the execution of the different suertes. Everything that is done by the man in the ring is called a “suerte.” It is the easiest term to use as it is short. It means act, but the word act has, in English, a connotation of the theatre that makes its use confusing.

People seeing their first bullfight say, “But the bulls are so stupid. They always go for the cape and not for the man.”

The bull only goes for the percale of the cape or for the scarlet serge of the muleta if the man makes him and so handles the cloth that the bull sees it rather than the man. Therefore to really start to see bullfights a spectator should go to the novilladas or apprentice fights. There the bulls do not always go for the cloth because the bullfighters are learning before your eyes the rules of bullfighting and they do not always remember or know the proper terrain to take and how to keep the bull after the lure and away from the man. It is one thing to know the rules in principle and another to remember them as they are needed when facing an animal that is seeking to kill you, and the spectator who wants to see men tossed and gored rather than judge the manner in which the bulls are dominated should go to a novillada before he sees a corrida de toros or complete bullfight. It should be a good thing for him to see a novillada first anyway if he wants to learn about technique, since the employment of knowledge that we call by that bastard name is always most visible in its imperfection. At a novillada the spectator may see the mistakes of the bullfighters, and the penalties that these mistakes carry. He will learn something too about the state of training or lack of training of the men and the effect this has on their courage.

One time in Madrid I remember we went to a novillada in the middle of the summer on a very hot Sunday when every one who could afford it had left the city for the beaches of the north or the mountains and the bullfight was not advertised to start until six o’clock in the evening, to see six Tovar bulls killed by three aspirant matadors who have all since failed in their profession. We sat in the first row behind the wooden barrier and when the first bull came out it was clear that Domingo Hernandorena, a short, thick-ankled, graceless Basque with a pale face who looked nervous and incompletely fed in a cheap rented suit, if he was to kill this bull would either make a fool of himself or be gored. Hernandorena could not control the nervousness of his feet. He wanted to stand quietly and play the bull with the cape with a slow movement of his arms, but when he tried to stand still as the bull charged his feet jumped away in short, nervous jerks. His feet were obviously not under his personal control and his effort to be statuesque while his feet jittered him away out of danger was very funny to the crowd. It was funny to them because many of them knew that was how their own feet would behave if they saw the horns coming toward them, and as always, they resented any one else being in there in the ring, making money, who had the same physical defects which barred them, the spectators, from that supposedly highly paid way of making a living. In their turn the other two matadors were very fancy with the cape and Hernandorena’s nervous jerking was even worse after their performance. He had not been in the ring with a bull for over a year and he was altogether unable to control his nervousness. When the banderillas were in and it was time to go out with the red cloth and the sword to prepare the bull for killing and to kill, the crowd which had applauded ironically at every nervous move he had made knew something very funny would happen. Below us, as he took the muleta and the sword and rinsed his mouth out with water I could see the muscles of his cheeks twitching. The bull stood against the barrier watching him. Hernandorena could not trust his legs to carry him slowly toward the bull. He knew there was only one way he could stay in one place in the ring. He ran out toward the bull, and ten yards in front of him dropped to both knees on the sand. In that position he was safe from ridicule. He spread the red cloth with his sword and jerked himself forward on his knees toward the bull. The bull was watching the man and the triangle of red cloth, his ears pointed, his eyes fixed, and Hernandorena knee-ed himself a yard closer and shook the cloth. The bull’s tail rose, his head lowered and he charged and, as he reached the man, Hernandorena rose solidly from his knees into the air, swung over like a bundle, his legs in all directions now, and then dropped to the ground. The bull looked for him, found a wide-spread moving cape held by another bullfighter instead, charged it, and Hernandorena stood up with sand on his white face and looked for his sword and the cloth. As he stood up I saw the heavy, soiled gray silk of his rented trousers open cleanly and deeply to show the thigh bone from the hip almost to the knee. He saw it too and looked very surprised and put his hand on it while people jumped over the barrier and ran toward him to carry him to the infirmary. The technical error that he had committed was in not keeping the red cloth of the muleta between himself and the bull until the charge; then at the moment of jurisdiction as it is called, when the bull’s lowered head reaches the cloth, swaying back while he held the cloth, spread by the stick and the sword, far enough forward so that the bull following it would be clear of his body. It was a simple technical error.

That night at the café I heard no word of sympathy for him. He was ignorant, he was torpid, and he was out of training. Why did he insist on being a bullfighter? Why did he go down on both knees? Because he was a coward, they said. The knees are for cowards. If he was a coward why did he insist on being a bullfighter? There was no natural sympathy for uncontrollable nervousness because he was a paid public performer. It was preferable that he be gored rather than run from the bull. To be gored was honorable; they would have sympathized with him had he been caught in one of his nervous uncontrollable jerky retreats, which, although they mocked, they knew were from lack of training, rather than for him to have gone down on his knees. Because the hardest thing when frightened by the bull is to control the feet and let the bull come, and any attempt to control the feet was honorable even though they jeered at it because it looked ridiculous. But when he went on both knees, without the technique to fight from that position; the technique that Marcial Lalanda, the most scientific of living bullfighters, has, and which alone makes that position honorable; then Hernandorena admitted his nervousness. To show his nervousness was not shameful; only to admit it. When, lacking the technique and thereby admitting his inability to control his feet, the matador went down on both knees before the bull the crowd had no more sympathy with him than with a suicide.

For myself, not being a bullfighter, and being much interested in suicides, the problem was one of depiction and waking in the night I tried to remember what it was that seemed just out of my remembering and that was the thing that I had really seen and, finally, remembering all around it, I got it. When he stood up, his face white and dirty and the silk of his breeches opened from waist to knee, it was the dirtiness of the rented breeches, the dirtiness of his slit underwear and the clean, clean, unbearably clean whiteness of the thigh bone that I had seen, and it was that which was important.

At the novilladas, too, besides the study of technique, and the consequences of its lack you have a chance to learn about the manner of dealing with defective bulls since bulls which cannot be used in a formal bullfight because of some obvious defect are killed in the apprentice fights. Nearly all bulls develop defects in the course of any fight which must be corrected by the bullfighter, but in the novillada these defects, those of vision for instance, are many times obvious at the start and so the manner of their correcting, or the result of their not being corrected, is apparent.

The formal bullfight is a tragedy, not a sport, and the bull is certain to be killed. If the matador cannot kill him and, at the end of the allotted fifteen minutes for the preparation and killing, the bull is led and herded out of the ring alive by steers to dishonor the killer, he must, by law, be killed in the corrals. It is one hundred to one against the matador de toros or formally invested bullfighter being killed unless he is inexperienced, ignorant, out of training or too old and heavy on his feet. But the matador, if he knows his profession, can increase the amount of the danger of death that he runs exactly as much as he wishes. He should, however, increase this danger, within the rules provided for his protection. In other words it is to his credit if he does something that he knows how to do in a highly dangerous but still geometrically possible manner. It is to his discredit if he runs danger through ignorance, through disregard of the fundamental rules, through physical or mental slowness, or through blind folly.

The matador must dominate the bulls by knowledge and science. In the measure in which this domination is accomplished with grace will it be beautiful to watch. Strength is of little use to him except at the actual moment of killing. Once some one asked Rafael Gomez, “El Gallo,” nearing fifty years old, a gypsy, brother of Jose Gomez, “Gallito,” and the last living member of the great family of gypsy bullfighters of that name, what physical exercise he, Gallo, took to keep his strength up for bullfighting.

“Strength,” Gallo said. “What do I want with strength, man? The bull weighs half a ton. Should I take exercises for strength to match him? Let the bull have the strength.”

If the bulls were allowed to increase their knowledge as the bullfighter does and if those bulls which are not killed in the allotted fifteen minutes in the ring were not afterwards killed in the corrals but were allowed to be fought again they would kill all the bullfighters, if the bullfighters fought them according to the rules. Bullfighting is based on the fact that it is the first meeting between the wild animal and a dismounted man. This is the fundamental premise of modern bullfighting; that the bull has never been in the ring before. In the early days of bullfighting bulls were allowed to be fought which had been in the ring before and so many men were killed in the bull ring that on November 20, 1567, Pope Pius the Fifth issued a Papal edict excommunicating all Christian princes who should permit bullfights in their countries and denying Christian burial to any person killed in the bull ring. The Church only agreed to tolerate bullfighting, which continued steadily in Spain in spite of the edict, when it was agreed that the bulls should only appear once in the ring.

You would think then that it would make of bullfighting a true sport, rather than merely a tragic spectacle, if bulls that had been in the ring were allowed to reappear. I have seen such bulls fought, in violation of the law, in provincial towns in improvised arenas made by blocking the entrances to the public square with piled-up carts in the illegal capeas, or town-square bullfights with used bulls. The aspirant bullfighters, who have no financial backing, get their first experience in capeas. It is a sport, a very savage and primitive sport, and for the most part a truly amateur one. I am afraid however due to the danger of death it involves it would never have much success among the amateur sportsmen of America and England who play games. We, in games, are not fascinated by death, its nearness and its avoidance. We are fascinated by victory and we replace the avoidance of death by the avoidance of defeat. It is a very nice symbolism but it takes more cojones to be a sportsman when death is a closer party to the game. The bull in the capeas is rarely killed. This should appeal to sportsmen who are lovers of animals. The town is usually too poor to afford to pay for the killing of the bull and none of the aspirant bullfighters has enough money to buy a sword or he would not have chosen to serve his apprenticeship in the capeas. This would afford an opportunity for the man who is a wealthy sportsman, for he could afford to pay for the bull and buy himself a sword as well.

However, due to the mechanics of a bull’s mental development the used bull does not make a brilliant spectacle. After his first charge or so he will stand quite still and will only charge if he is certain of getting the man or boy who is tempting him with a cape. When there is a crowd and the bull charges into it he will pick one man out and follow him, no matter how he may dodge, run and twist until he gets him and tosses him. If the tips of the bull’s horns have been blunted this chasing and tossing is good fun to see for a little while. No one has to go in with the bull who does not want to, although of course many who want to very little go in to show their courage. It is very exciting for those who are down in the square, that is one test of a true amateur sport, whether it is more enjoyable to player than to spectator (as soon as it becomes enjoyable enough to the spectator for the charging of admission to be profitable the sport contains the germ of professionalism), and the smallest evidence of coolness or composure brings immediate applause. But when the bull’s horns are sharp-pointed it is a disturbing spectacle. The men and boys try cape work with sacks, blouses and old capes on the bull just as they do when his horns have been blunted; the only difference is that when the bull catches them and tosses them they are liable to come off the horn with wounds no local surgeon can cope with. One bull which was a great favorite in the capeas of the province of Valencia killed sixteen men and boys and badly wounded over sixty in a career of five years. The people who go into these capeas do so sometimes as aspirant professionals to get free experience with bulls but most often as amateurs, purely for sport, for the immediate excitement, and it is very great excitement; and for the retrospective pleasure, of having shown their contempt for death on a hot day in their own town square. Many go in from pride, hoping that they will be brave. Many find they are not brave at all; but at least they went in. There is absolutely nothing for them to gain except the inner satisfaction of having been in the ring with a bull; itself a thing that any one who has done it will always remember. It is a strange feeling to have an animal come toward you consciously seeking to kill you, his eyes open looking at you, and see the oncoming of the lowered horn that he intends to kill you with. It gives enough of a sensation so that there are always men willing to go into the capeas for the pride of having experienced it and the pleasure of having tried some bullfighting manœuvre with a real bull although the actual pleasure at the time may not be great. Sometimes the bull is killed if the town has the money to afford it, or if the populace gets out of control; every one swarming on him at once with knives, daggers, butcher knives and rocks; a man perhaps between his horns, being swung up and down, another flying through the air, surely several holding his tail, a swarm of choppers, thrusters and stabbers pushing into him, laying on him or cutting up at him until he sways and goes down. All amateur or group killing is a very barbarous, messy, though exciting business and is a long way from the ritual of the formal bullfight.

The bull which killed the sixteen and wounded the sixty was killed in a very odd way. One of those he had killed was a gypsy boy of about fourteen. Afterwards the boy’s brother and sister followed the bull around hoping perhaps to have a chance to assassinate him when he was loaded in his cage after a capea. That was difficult since, being a very highly valued performer, the bull was carefully taken care of. They followed him around for two years, not attempting anything, simply turning up wherever the bull was used. When the capeas were again abolished, they are always being abolished and re-abolished, by government order, the bull’s owner decided to send him to the slaughter-house in Valencia, for the bull was getting on in years anyway. The two gypsies were at the slaughter-house and the young man asked permission, since the bull had killed his brother, to kill the bull. This was granted and he started in by digging out both the bull’s eyes while the bull was in his cage, and spitting carefully into the sockets, then after killing him by severing the spinal marrow between the neck vertebræ with a dagger, he experienced some difficulty in this, he asked permission to cut off the bull’s testicles, which being granted, he and his sister built a small fire at the edge of the dusty street outside the slaughter-house and roasted the two glands on sticks and when they were done, ate them. They then turned their backs on the slaughter-house and went away along the road and out of town.

CHAPTER 3

IN THE MODERN formal bullfight or corrida de toros there are usually six bulls that are killed by three different men. Each man kills two bulls. The bulls by law are required to be from four to five years old, free from physical defects, and well armed with sharp-pointed horns. They are inspected by a municipal veterinary surgeon before the fight. The veterinary is supposed to reject bulls that are under age, insufficiently armed or with anything wrong with their eyes, their horns or any apparent disease or visible bodily defect such as lameness.

The men who are to kill them are called matadors and which of the six bulls they are to kill is determined by lot. Each matador or killer, has a cuadrilla, or team, of from five to six men who are paid by him and work under his orders. Three of these men who aid him on foot with capes, and, at his orders place the banderillas, three-foot wooden shafts with harpoon points, are called peones or banderilleros. The other two, who are mounted on horses when they appear in the ring, are called picadors.

No one is called a toreador in Spain. That is an obsolete word which was applied to those members of the nobility who, in the days before professional bullfighting, killed bulls from horseback for sport. Any one who fights bulls for money, whether as a matador, banderillero or a picador is called a torero. A man who kills them on horseback with a javelin, using trained thoroughbred horses, is called a rejoneador or a caballero en plaza. A bullfight in Spanish is called a corrida de toros or a running of bulls. A bull ring is called a plaza de toros.

In the morning before the bullfight the representatives of each matador, usually their oldest or most trusted banderilleros, meet at the corrals of the plaza de toros where the bulls that are to be fought that afternoon are quartered. They look over the bulls, compare their size, weight, height, the length of their horns, width of horns, sharpness of horns, and the condition of their coats. This last is as good an indication as any of their physical condition and probable bravery. There is no sure sign by which bravery may be determined although there are many indications of probable cowardice. The confidential banderilleros question the herder or vaquero who has travelled from the ranch with the bulls and who, while he is in charge of them, is called the mayoral, about the qualities and probable disposition of each bull. The bulls must be divided into three lots of two bulls each by common consent of the representatives assembled and the effort is to have one good bull and one bad bull, good and bad from the bullfighter’s standpoint, in each lot. A good bull for the bullfighter is not too big, not too strong, not too much horns, not too much height at shoulder, but above all with good vision, good reaction to color and movement, brave and frank to charge. A bad bull, for the bullfighter, is too big a bull, too old a bull, too powerful a bull, with too wide horns; but above all a bad bull is one with no reaction to color or movement or with defective courage and lack of sustained viciousness, so that the bullfighter cannot tell when, whether or how he will charge. The representatives, usually short men in caps, not yet shaven for the day, with a great variety of accents, but all with the same hard eyes, argue and discuss. They say the number 20 has more horns than the 42, but the 42 weighs two arrobas (fifty pounds) more than the 16. The 46 is as big as a cathedral, one calls to him and he raises his head from where he has been feeding, and the 18 is roan colored and may be as cowardly as a steer. The lots are made up after much arguing and the numbers of two bulls, those branded on their flanks, are written on three different cigarette papers and the papers rolled up into balls and dropped into a cap. The roan-colored probable coward has been paired with a medium-weight, black bull with not too long horns and a glossy coat. The cathedral-sized 46 is coupled with the 16 which, being just barely big enough to be passed by the veterinaries and without salient characteristics, is the ideal of the half-bull that looks like a bull but lacks the full development of muscle and knowledge of how to use his horns, that all the representatives have hoped to get for their bullfighter. The number 20 with the wide horns with the needle points is balanced by the 42 which is the next smallest to the 16. The man who holds the cap shakes it and each representative puts in a brown hand and draws out a tight-rolled cigarette paper. They unroll them, read them, perhaps take a final look at the two bulls they have drawn and go off to the hotel to find the matador and tell him what he has to kill.

The matador decides in which order he prefers to take his bulls. He may take the worst one first and hope to rehabilitate himself with the second in case his work with the first turns out badly. Or if he is third in the order to kill he may take the best one first knowing that he will be killing the sixth bull and if it should be getting dark and the crowd wanting to leave he will be pardoned an attempt to finish quickly and in the easiest way possible should his bull turn out to be difficult.

The matadors kill their bulls in turn in the order of their seniority; this dating from their presentation as a matador de toros in the Plaza of Madrid. If any matador is gored so that he is unable to return from the infirmary his bulls were formerly all killed by the senior-ranking matador of those remaining in the ring. Now they are divided between the remaining matadors.

The bullfight usually takes place at five o’clock or five-thirty in the afternoon. At a half hour past noon of the day of the fight the apartado takes place. This is the sorting out of bulls in the corrals with the aid of steers and, by the use of swinging doors, runways and trap doors, separating them and trapping them into the individual pens or chiqueros where they are to stay and rest until they come out into the ring in the order in which it has been determined they are to be fought. Bulls are not deprived of food and water before fighting as one may read in various guides to Spain, nor are they kept in a dark pen for several days. They are in the chiqueros in a dim light for not more than four hours before the bullfight commences. They are not fed there after they leave the corral any more than a boxer would be fed immediately before a fight, but the reason for placing them in the small dimly lighted pens is to have some way of getting them promptly into the ring, and to rest them and keep them quiet before the fight.

Usually only the matadors, their friends and representatives, the bull ring management, the authorities, and a very few spectators attend the apartado. It is usually the first time the matador sees the bulls he is to kill that afternoon. The number of spectators is kept down in most places by putting the price of tickets at five pesetas. The bull ring management wants few people at the sorting in order that the bulls may not have their attention attracted by the spectators who want to see action and so call to the bulls to excite them that they may charge the doors or the walls or each other. If they charge in the corrals they run a risk of injuring their horns or of goring each other and the management would have to replace them in the ring at the expense of a couple of hundred dollars apiece. Many bullfight spectators and hangers-on have a belief that they can talk to the bulls as well or better than the bullfighters. Protected by the high fence or the wall of the corral they try to catch the bull’s eye and they utter the guttural “huh!-huh!-huhs!” that the herders and toreros use to call the bull’s attention. If the bull in the pen below raises his great head with the wide horns, solid looking as wood and smoothly pointed and the hump of muscle in his neck and shoulders, heavy and wide in repose, rises in a great swelling crest under the black, hairy sheen of his hide and his nostrils widen and he lifts and jerks his horns as he looks toward the spectator then the amateur speaker of bull talk has had a success. If the bull should really charge, driving his horns into the wood, or tossing his head at the talker it would be a triumph. To hold down the number of successes and avoid triumphs the management puts the tickets at five pesetas on the theory that any one able to pay five pesetas to see bulls sorted will be too dignified to try to talk to bulls before bullfights.

There is no way they can be sure of this, and at some places in the country where they have bulls only once a year you see men at the apartado who pay five pesetas only in order to have a better opportunity to exercise their powers as talkers to bulls. But in general the five pesetas reduces the amount of sober talking. The bulls pay little attention to a drunk. I have many times seen drunken men shout at bulls and never seen the bulls pay any attention. The five-peseta atmosphere of dignity in a town like Pamplona, where a man can be drunk twice and eat a meal at the horse fair on five pesetas, gives an almost religious hush to the apartado. No one spends five pesetas there to see the bulls sorted unless he is very rich and dignified. But the atmosphere of the sorting can be very different in other places. I have never seen it quite the same in any two towns. After the sorting everybody goes to the café.

The bullfight itself takes place in a sand-covered ring enclosed by a red wooden fence a little over four feet high. This red wooden fence is called a barrera. Behind it is a narrow circular passageway that separates it from the first row of seats in the amphitheatre. This narrow runway is called the callejon. In it stand the sword handlers with their jugs of water, sponges, piles of folded muletas and heavy leather sword cases, the bull ring servants, the venders of cold beer and gaseosas, of iced fruits in nets that float in galvanized buckets full of ice and water, of pastries in flat baskets, of salted almonds, and of peanuts. In it also are the police, the bullfighters who are not in the ring at the moment, several plainclothes policemen ready to arrest amateurs who may jump into the ring, the photographers, and on seats built in it and protected by shields of boards, are the doctors, the carpenters who repair the barrera if it is broken, and the delegates of the government. In some rings the photographers are allowed to circulate in the callejon; in others they must work from their seats.

The seats of the bull ring are uncovered except for the boxes or palcos and the first gallery or grada. From the gallery the seats descend in circular rows to the edge of the rings. These rows of numbered places are called tendidos. The two rows nearest the ring, the front rows of all the seats, are called barreras and contra-barreras. The third row are known as delanteras de tendidos or the front row of the tendidos. The bull ring for numbering purposes is cut into sections as you would cut a pie, and these sections numbered tendidos 1, 2, 3, and so on up to 11 and 12 depending on the size of the ring.

If you are going to a bullfight for the first time the best place for you to sit depends on your temperament. From a box or from the first row in the gallery details of sound and smell and those details of sight that make for the perception of danger are lost or minimized, but you see the fight better as a spectacle and the chances are that, if it is a good bullfight, you will enjoy it more. If it is a bad bullfight, that is, not an artistic spectacle, you will be better off the closer you are since you can then, for lack of a whole to appreciate, learn and see all the details, the whys and the wherefores. The boxes and the gallery are for people who do not want to see things too closely for fear they may upset them, for people who want to see the bullfight as a spectacle or a pageant, and for experts who can see details even though a long way from them and want to be high enough up so they can see everything that happens in any part of the ring in order to be able to judge it as a whole.

The barrera is the best seat if you want to see and hear what happens and to be so close to the bull that you will have the bullfighter’s point of view. From the barrera the action is so near and so detailed that a bullfight that would be soporific from the boxes or the balcony is always interesting. It is from the barrera that you see danger and learn to appreciate it. There too you have an uninterrupted view of the ring. The only other seats, besides the first row in the gallery and the first row in the boxes, where you do not see people between you and the ring, are the sobrepuertas. These are the seats that are built over the doorways through which you enter the various sections of the ring. They are about halfway up to the sides of the bowl and from them you get a good view of the ring and a good perspective, yet you are not as distant as in the boxes or gallery. They cost about half as much as the barreras or the first row of gallery or boxes and they are very good seats.

The west walls of the bull ring building cast a shadow and those seats that are in the shade when the fight commences are called seats of the sombra or shade. Seats that are in the sun when the fight commences but that will be in shadow as the afternoon advances are called of sol y sombra. Seats are priced according to their desirability and whether they are shaded or not. The cheapest seats are those which are nearest the roof on the far sunny side and have no shade at all at any time. They are the andanadas del sol and on a hot day, close under the roof, they must reach temperatures that are unbelievable in a city like Valencia where it can be 104° fahrenheit in the shade, but the better seats of the sol are good ones to buy on a cloudy day or in cold weather.

At your first bullfight if you are alone, with no one to instruct you, sit in a delantera de grada or a sobrepuerta. If you cannot get these seats you can always get a seat in a box. They are the most expensive seats and the farthest from the ring, but they give a good panoramic view of the fight. If you are going with some one who really knows bullfighting and want to learn to understand it and have no qualms about details a barrera is the best seat, contra-barrera the next best and sobrepuerta the next.

If you are a woman and think you would like to see a bullfight and are afraid you might be badly affected by it do not sit any closer than the gallery the first time. You might enjoy the fight from there where you will see it as a spectacle and not care for it at all if you sat closer so that the details destroyed the effect of the whole. If you have plenty of money, want not to see but to have seen a bullfight and plan no matter whether you like it or not to leave after the first bull, buy a barrera seat so that some one who has never had enough money to sit in a barrera can make a quick rush from above and occupy your expensive seat as you go out taking your preconceived opinions with you.

That is the way it used to happen at San Sebastian. Due to various grafts of ticket resale and the reliance of the management on the wealthy curiosity trade from Biarritz and the Basque Coast, the barreras, by the time you buy them, cost a hundred pesetas apiece or over. A man could live a week on that in a bullfighters’ boarding house in Madrid, go to the Prado four times a week, buy good seats in the sun for two bullfights, buy the papers afterwards and drink beer and eat shrimp in the Pasaje Alvarez off the Calle de Vitoria, and still have something left to get his shoes shined with. Yet by buying any sort of seat within diving range of the barrera at San Sebastian you could be sure of having a hundred-peseta seat to occupy when the citizens who knew they were morally bound to leave the bull ring after the first bull stand up to make their well-fed, skull and bonesed, porcellian-ed, beach-tanned, flannelled, Panama-hatted, sport-shod exits. I’ve seen them go many times when the women with them wanted to stay. They could go to the bullfight, but they had to meet at the Casino after they had seen the first bull killed. If they didn’t leave and liked it there was something wrong with them. Maybe they were queer. There was never anything wrong with them. They always left. That was until bullfights became respectable. In nineteen thirty-one I did not see one leave within range and now it looks as though the good days of the free barreras at San Sebastian are over.

CHAPTER 4

THE BEST BULLFIGHT to see first would be a novillada and the best place to see a novillada is Madrid. The novilladas usually start about the middle of March and there is one every Sunday and usually every Thursday until Easter when the major fights or corridas de toros start. After Easter, in Madrid, starts the first subscription season of seven bullfights. Books of tickets for all seven fights are sold and the best seats are always subscribed year in and year out. The best of all seats are the barreras in the middle of the shade where the bullfighters put their capes over the red wooden barrier. There is where they stand when they are not in the ring; it is there that they have the bull brought when they are going out with the muleta; it is to there they come to sponge off after the killing. A seat there is equivalent in what you see and hear to being in the corner of a boxer during a fight or to sitting in the dugout or on the bench in a baseball or football game.

You will not be able to buy any of those seats during the first or the second abono or subscription season at Madrid, but you can get them for the novilladas that come before, between and after the regular bullfight season, on Sundays and, usually, Thursdays. When you buy a barrera seat ask where the capes are put. “Adonde se pone los capotes?” and then ask that you be given a seat as close as possible to them. The ticket seller may lie to you in the provinces and give you the worst seat he has but he may, because you are a foreigner and seem to want to have a really good seat and know what one is, give you the best that he has. I have been lied to most in Galicia where the truth in any business transaction is hard to come at, and treated best in Madrid, and, of all places, Valencia. In most parts of Spain you will find the institution of the subscription or abono and the re-venta. The re-venta are ticket brokers who take over all or most of the unsubscribed tickets from the bull ring management and sell them at a twenty per cent increase over their face value. The bull rings favor them sometimes because while they buy the tickets at a discount yet they insure the paper being disposed of. If the tickets for the fight are not all sold it is the re-venta that has the big loss, not the bull ring — although the bull ring usually manages to have big losses in some manner or other. Since you will seldom, unless you are living in a town, be there at the time the subscription or abono for a fight or series of fights is opened, and since, in all cases, old seat holders have a right to renew their subscriptions before new ones are taken, and since these subscriptions are taken two or three weeks before the fights at some place perhaps difficult to find and open only from, say, four to five in the afternoon, the chances are you must buy your seats from the re-venta.

If you are in a town and know you are going to the bullfight buy your seats as soon as you are decided. The chances are there will be nothing in the Madrid papers about any bullfight before it is to take place except a small classified advertisement under Plaza de Toros de Madrid in the column of espectaculos. Bullfights are not written up in the papers in advance in Spain except in the provinces. But in all parts of Spain they are advertised by large colored posters which give the number of bulls to be killed with the names of the men who are to kill them, the breeder who is furnishing them, the cuadrillas and the place and hour of the fight. There is usually also a list of prices of the various seats. To these prices you must expect to add the twenty-per-cent commission if you buy the tickets from the re-venta.

If you want to see a bullfight in Spain there will be one of some sort in Madrid every Sunday from the middle of March until the middle of November, weather permitting. During the winter there are rarely any fights in Spain except very occasionally in Barcelona and sometimes in Malaga or Valencia. The first formal bullfight of each year is at Castellón de la Plana late in February or early in March for the fiesta of the Magdalena and the last one of the year is usually in Valencia, Gerona, or Ondara in the first part of November, but if the weather is bad these November fights will not take place. There will be fights every Sunday in Mexico City from October until, and probably through, April. There will be novilladas in the spring and summer. Dates of bullfights in other places in Mexico vary. The days on which there will be fights in other towns in Spain than Madrid vary, but, in general, except for Barcelona, where they are held almost as regularly as in Madrid, the dates coincide with the national religious festivals and the times of the local fairs or ferias which usually commence on the Saints day of the town. In an appendix to this book I have given a list of the dates of the main ferias, so far as these are fixed, on which bullfights will be held in Spain, Mexico and South and Central America. It is easy, easier than you can believe, in a two or three weeks’ trip to Spain to miss a chance to see bullfights, but using this appendix any one can see a bullfight if they want to be at any of the places on any of the fixed dates, rain permitting. After the first one you will know if you want to see any more.

Aside from the novilladas and the two subscription seasons at Madrid the best place to see a series of bullfights in the early spring is at the feria in Sevilla where there are at least four fights on successive days. This feria starts after Easter. If you are in Sevilla for Easter ask any one when the feria starts or you can find the dates from the big posters advertising the fights. If you are in Madrid before Easter go to any of the cafés around the Puerta del Sol or the first café on your right on the Plaza de Canalejas going down the Calle de San Jeronimo from the Puerta del Sol toward the Prado and you will find a poster on the wall advertising the feria of Sevilla. In this same café you will always find in the summer the posters or cartels advertising the ferias of Pamplona, Valencia, Bilbao, Salamanca, Vallodolid, Cuenca, Malaga, Murcia and many others.

On Easter Sunday there are always bullfights in Madrid, Sevilla, Barcelona, Murcia, Zaragoza, and novilladas in Granada, Bilbao, Vallodolid and many other places. There is also a bullfight in Madrid on the Monday after Easter. On the 29th of April of each year there is a bullfight and fair at Jerez de la Frontera. This is an excellent place to visit with or without bulls, and is the home of sherry and everything distilled from it. They will take you through the cellars of Jerez and you may taste many different grades of wines and brandies, but it is best to do this on another day than the one you plan to go to the corrida. There will be two fights in Bilbao on either the 1st, 2d or 3d of May depending on whether one of those dates falls on a Sunday. Those would be good fights to go to if you were, say, at Biarritz or St. Jean de Luz for Easter. There is a fine road to Bilbao from anywhere along the Basque coast. Bilbao is a rich, ugly, mining city where it gets as hot as St. Louis, either St. Louis, Missouri, or St. Louis, Senegal, and where they love bulls and dislike bullfighters. When they like a bullfighter in Bilbao they buy bigger and bigger bulls for him to fight until he finally has a disaster with them, either moral or physical. Then the Bilbao enthusiast says, “See — they are all alike — all cowards, all fakes. Give them big enough bulls and they will prove it.” If you want to see how big bulls can be produced, how much horn they can carry on their heads, how they can look up over the barrera so that you think you are going to have them in your lap, how tough a crowd can be and how thoroughly bullfighters can be terrorized, go to Bilbao. They do not have as big bulls in May as they do during their big-bull, seven-corrida fair which starts the middle of August, but in May it will not be as hot in Bilbao as it will be in August. If you do not mind heat, really heavy, damp, lead and zinc mining heat, and want to see big, wonderfully presented bulls, the August feria in Bilbao is the place. Cordoba has the only other feria in May where more than two bullfights are given and its dates vary, but on the 16th there is always a bullfight at Talavera de la Reina; on the 20th one at Ronda, and on the 30th one at Aranjuez.

There are two ways to go to Sevilla by road from Madrid. One goes by Aranjuez, Valdapenas, and Cordoba and is called the highroad of Andalucia and the other is by Talavera de la Reina, Trujillo and Merida and is called the road of Extremadura. If you are in Madrid in May and driving to the south you can see the fight at Talavera de la Reina on the 16th if you go by the Extremadura road. It is a fine road, smooth and rolling, Talavera is a good place in fair time and the bulls, nearly always furnished by a local breeder, the widow Ortega, are moderately big, vicious, difficult, and dangerous. It was there that Jose Gomez y Ortega, called Gallito or Joselito, who was probably the greatest bullfighter that ever lived, was killed on the 16th of May, 1920. The bulls of the widow Ortega are famous because of that accident and as they do not make a brilliant fight and are big and dangerous they will usually be killed, now, by the disinherited of the profession.

Aranjuez is only forty-seven kilometres from Madrid on a billiard smooth road. It is an oasis of tall trees, rich gardens and a swift river set in brown plain and hills. There are avenues of trees like the background of Velasquez canvases, and on May 30 you can drive out there, if you have money, or get a special-rate third-class round-trip railway ticket or go on a bus if you haven’t (there will be a special bus leaving from the Calle Victoria opposite the Pasaje Alvarez), and, coming from the hot sun of the bare, desert country, suddenly, under the shade of the trees, see brown-armed girls with baskets of fresh strawberries piled on the smooth, bare, cool ground, strawberries you cannot reach around with thumb and forefinger, damp and cool, packed on green leaves in wicker baskets. The girls and the old women sell them and bunches of wonderful asparagus, each stalk as thick as your thumb, to the crowd that comes off the special train from Madrid and Toledo and the people who drive into the town in motor cars and ride in on busses. You can eat at booths where they grill steaks and roast chickens over a charcoal fire and drink all the Valdapenas wine you can hold for five pesetas. You can lie in the shade or walk and see the sights until time for the bullfights. You can find the sights in Baedeker. The bull ring is at the end of a hot, wide, dusty street that runs into the heat from the cool forest shade of the town and the professional cripples and horror and pity inspirers that follow the fairs of Spain line this road, wagging stumps, exposing sores, waving monstrosities and holding out their caps, in their mouths when they have nothing left to hold them with, so that you walk a dusty gauntlet between two rows of horrors to the ring. The town is Velasquez to the edge and then straight Goya to the bull ring. The ring itself dates from before Goya. It is a lovely building in the style of the old ring at Ronda and you can sit in a barrera seat and drink wine and eat strawberries in the shade with your back to the sand and watch the boxes fill and see the girls from Toledo and all the surrounding country of Castille come in and drape their shawls over the front of the boxes, sitting, with much fan waving, to smile and talk with the pleasant, conscious confusion of amateur beauties under inspection. This girl inspection is a big part of bullfighting for the spectator. If you are near-sighted you can carry a pair of opera or field glasses. They are taken as an additional compliment. It is best not to neglect a single box. The use of a good pair of glasses is an advantage. They will destroy for you some of the greatest and most startling beauties who will come in with cloudy white lace mantillas, high combs and complexions and wonderful shawls and who in the glasses will show the gold teeth and flour-covered swartness of some one you saw last night perhaps somewhere else and who is attending the fight to advertise the house; but in some box you might not have noticed without the glasses you may see a beautiful girl. It is very easy for the traveller in Spain seeing the flour-faced fatness of the flamenca dancers and the hardy ladies of the brothels to write that all talk of beautiful Spanish women is nonsense. Whoring is not a highly paid profession in Spain and the Spanish whore works too hard to keep her looks. Do not look for beautiful women on the stage, in the brothels or the canta honda places. You look for them in the evening at the time of the paseo when you can sit in a chair at a café or on the street and have all the girls of the town walk by you for an hour, passing not once but many times as they walk up the block, make the turn and come back, walking three or four abreast; or you look for them carefully, with glasses in the boxes at the bull ring. It is not polite to focus the glasses on any one not in a box, nor is it polite to use them from the ring itself in those rings where the admirers of girls are allowed to stay in the ring to circle about before the fight and congregate before any special beauties. To use glasses when standing on the sand of the ring is the mark of a voyeur, a looker in the worst sense; that is a looker rather than a do-er. But to use the glasses on the boxes from a barrera seat is legitimate, and a compliment, and a means of communication and almost an introduction. There is no better preliminary introduction than acceptable sincere admiration and there is no way admiration at a certain distance can be conveyed or any response noted better than with a good-looking pair of racing glasses. Even if you never look at girls the glasses are good to watch the killing of the last bull if it is getting dusk and the bull is being killed on the far side of the ring.

Aranjuez would be a fine place to see your first bullfight. It would be a good place if you were only going to see one bullfight, much better than Madrid, since it has all the color and picturesqueness that you want when you are still in the spectacle stage of appreciation. Later on what you will want at a bullfight, good bulls and good matadors being given, is a good public, and a good public is not the public of a one bullfight fiesta where every one drinks and has a fine time, and the women come in costume, nor is it the drunken, dancing, bull-running public of Pamplona, nor the local, patriotic, bullfighter worshippers of Valencia. A good public is Madrid, not the days of the benefit fights with elaborate decorations, much spectacle and high prices, but the serious public of the abonos who know bullfighting, bulls, and bullfighters, who know the good from the bad, the faked from the sincere and for whom the bullfighter must give his absolute maximum. The picturesque is for when you are young, or if you are a little drunk so that it will all seem real, or if you never grow up, or if you have a girl with you who has never seen it, or for once in a season, or for those who like it. But if you really want to learn about bullfighting, or if you ever get to feel strongly about it, sooner or later you will have to go to Madrid.

There is one town that would be better than Aranjuez to see your first bullfight in if you were only going to see one and that is Ronda. That is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with any one. The entire town and as far as you can see in any direction is romantic background and there is an hotel there that is so comfortable, so well run and where you eat so well and usually have a cool breeze at night that, with the romantic background and the modern comfort, if a honeymoon or an elopement is not a success in Ronda it would be as well to start for Paris and both commence making your own friends. Ronda has everything you wish for a stay of that sort, romantic scenery, you can see it if necessary without leaving the hotel, beautiful short walks, good wine, seafood, a fine hotel, practically nothing else to do, two resident painters who will sell you water colors that will frame as attractive souvenirs of the occasion; and really, in spite of all this, it is a fine place. It is built on a plateau in a circle of mountains and the plateau is cut by a gorge that divides the two towns and ends in a cliff that drops sheer to the river and the plain below where you see the dust rising from the mule trains along the road. The people who settled it when the Moors were driven away, came from Cordoba and the north of Andalucia, and the bullfight and the fair that starts the 20th of May celebrate the conquest of the town by Ferdinand and Isabella. Ronda was one of the cradles of modern bullfighting. It was the birthplace of Pedro Romero, one of the first and greatest of professional fighters and, in our times, of Nino de la Palma who started to be great but after his first severe goring developed a cowardice which was only equalled by his ability to avoid taking risks in the ring. The bull ring at Ronda was built toward the end of the eighteenth century and is of wood. It stands at the edge of the cliff and after the bullfight when the bulls have been skinned and dressed and their meat sent out for sale on carts they drag the dead horses over the edge of the cliff and the buzzards that have circled over the town and high in the air over the ring all day, drop down to feed on the rocks below the town.

There is one other feria with a series of bullfights that sometimes comes in May although the date is movable, and it may not come until June, and that is Cordoba. Cordoba has a good country feria and May is the best time to visit that city because of the heat that comes in the summer. The three hottest towns in Spain when the heat really comes are Bilbao, Cordoba and Sevilla. By hottest more is meant than mere degrees of temperature; I mean the heavy, airless heat of nights when you cannot sleep, nights when it is hotter than in the day, and no coolness to get to, Senegal heat, when it is too hot to sit in the café except early in the morning, too hot to do anything after lunch but lie on the bed in the room, dark from the strip of curtain pulled down over the balcony, and wait for the time for the bullfight.

Valencia is hotter in temperature sometimes and hotter in fact when the wind blows from Africa, but there you can always go out on a bus or the tramway to the port of Grau at night and swim at the public beach or, when it is too hot to swim, float out with as little effort as you need and lie in the barely cool water and watch the lights and the dark of the boats and the rows of eating shacks and swimming cabins. At Valencia too, when it is hottest, you can eat down at the beach for a peseta or two pesetas at one of the eating pavilions where they will serve you beer and shrimps and a paella of rice, tomato, sweet peppers, saffron and good seafood, snails, crawfish, small fish, little eels, all cooked together in a saffron-colored mound. You can get this with a bottle of local wine for two pesetas and the children will go by barelegged on the beach and there is a thatched roof over the pavilion, the sand cool under your feet, the sea with the fishermen sitting in the cool of the evening in the black felucca rigged boats that you can see, if you come to swim the next morning, being dragged up the beach by six yoke of oxen. Three of these eating shacks on the beach are named Granero, after the greatest bullfighter Valencia ever produced, who was killed in the ring in Madrid in 1922. Manuel Granero, after having 94 fights the year before, died leaving nothing but debts, the half-million pesetas he made all spent on publicity, propaganda, subsidies to newspaper men and taken by parasites. He was twenty years old when he was killed by a Veragua bull that lifted him once, then tossed him against the wood of the foot of the barrera and never left him until the horn had broken up the skull as you might break a flowerpot. He was a fine-looking boy who had studied the violin until he was fourteen, studied bullfighting until he was seventeen and fought bulls until he was twenty. They really worshipped him in Valencia and he was killed before they ever had time to turn on him. Now there is a pastry that is named for him and three rival eating pavilions Granero on different parts of the beach. The next bullfighter they got to worship in Valencia was called Chaves and he had well-vaselined hair, a big face, a double chin, and a big stomach that he puffed out toward the bull as soon as the horns were past to give a sensation of great danger. The Valencians, who are a people who worship bullfighters, Valencian bullfighters, rather than enjoy the bullfights, were mad about Chaves for a time. As well as his stomach and his great air of arrogance he had a pair of gigantic buttocks which he threw out when he drew his stomach in and everything he did with great style. We had to watch him all through one feria. We saw him in five fights, if I remember correctly, and once of Chaves is enough for any one who is not his neighbor. But on the last fight while he was attempting to stab a big Miura bull somewhere, anywhere, in the neck, the Miura elongated that neck just enough to catch Chaves under the armpit and he hung a little and then made a big-stomached pinwheel around the horn. It took a long time to cure the tears and the destruction in the arm muscle and he is now so prudent that he does not even advance his stomach toward the bull after the horn is past. They have turned on him in Valencia now too, where they have two new bullfighters as idols, and the one time I saw him a year ago he was not so well fed looking as formerly and standing in the shade he began sweating the minute he saw the bull come out. But he has one consolation. In his home town of Grau, the port of Valencia, where they have turned on him too, they have named a public monument after him. It is an iron monument on the corner of the street where the tramcar turns that runs to the beach. In America it would be called a comfort station and on the circular iron wall is written in white paint, El Urinario Chaves.

CHAPTER 5

THE BAD THING about going to Spain in the spring to see bullfights is the rain. It may rain everywhere you go, especially in May and June, and that is why I prefer the summer months. It rains then too, sometimes, but never yet have I seen it snow in Spain in July and August although it snowed in August of 1929 in some of the mountain summer resorts of Aragon and in Madrid it snowed one year on May 15th and was so cold they called off the bullfights. I remember having gone down that year to Spain thinking spring would be well along, and all day on the train we rode through country as bare and cold as the badlands in November. I could hardly recognize the country as the same I knew in the summer and when I got off the train at night in Madrid snow was blowing outside the station. I had no overcoat and stayed in my room writing in bed or in the nearest café drinking coffee and Domecq brandy. It was too cold to go out for three days and then came lovely spring weather. Madrid is a mountain city with a mountain climate. It has the high cloudless Spanish sky that makes the Italian sky seem sentimental and it has air that is actively pleasurable to breathe. The heat and the cold come and go quickly there. I have watched, on a July night when I could not sleep, the beggars burning newspapers in the street and crouching around the fire to keep warm. Two nights later it was too hot to sleep until the coolness that comes just before morning.

Madrileños love the climate and are proud of these changes. Where can you get such a variation in any other large city? When they ask you at the café how you slept and you say it was too bloody hot to sleep until just before morning they tell you that is the time to sleep. There is always that coolness just before daylight at the hour a man should go to sleep. No matter how hot the night you always get that. It really is a very good climate if you do not mind changes. On hot nights you can go to the Bombilla to sit and drink cider and dance and it is always cool when you stop dancing there in the leafyness of the long plantings of trees where the mist rises from the small river. On cold nights you can drink sherry brandy and go to bed. To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night. Appointments with a friend are habitually made for after midnight at the café. In no other town that I have ever lived in, except Constantinople during the period of the Allied occupation, is there less going to bed for sleeping purposes. It may be based on the theory that you stay up until that cool time that comes just before daylight but that cannot have been the reason at Constant because we always used that cool time to take a ride out along the Bosphorus to see the sun rise. Seeing the sun rise is a fine thing. As a boy, fishing or shooting, or during the war you used to see it rather regularly; then, after the war, I do not remember seeing it until Constantinople. There seeing it rise was the traditional thing to do. In some way it seemed to prove something if, after whatever you had been doing, you went out along the Bosphorus and saw the sun rise. It finished off everything with a healthy outdoor touch. But being away from such things one forgets them. At Kansas City during the Republican convention of 1928 I was driving out to my cousins’ house in the country at an hour that I felt was much too late in the evening when I noticed the glow of a tremendous fire. It looked exactly as it did the night the stockyards burned and, while I felt there was little I could do about it, still I felt that I should go. I turned the motor car toward the fire. When the car came to the top of the next hill I saw what it was. It was the sunrise.

The ideal weather to visit Spain and to see bullfights and the time when there are most bullfights to see is in the month of September. The only drawback to that month is that the bullfights are not so good. The bulls are at their best in May and June, still good in July and early in August, but by September the pastures are pretty well burned up by the heat and the bulls lean and out of condition, unless they have been fed up on grain which makes them fat, sleek and glossy and very violent for a few minutes but as unfit for fighting as a boxer that has trained exclusively on potatoes and ale. Then too, in September, the bullfighters are fighting nearly every day and have so many contracts and the prospect of making so much money in a short time, if they are not injured, that they take the minimum of chances. This does not always hold true and if there is a rivalry existing between two fighters they may each put out everything they have, but many times the fights are spoiled by poor bulls in bad condition and by bullfighters who have either been wounded and come back too quickly while still in bad physical condition in order not to lose their contracts or by bullfighters who are worn out after a heavy season. September may be a splendid month if there are new fighters who have only just taken the alternativa and in their first season are giving all they have to try to make names for themselves and get contracts for the next year. If you wanted to, and had a fast enough motor car, you could see a bullfight some place in Spain on every single day in September. I guarantee you would be worn out getting to them without having to fight in them and then you would have some idea of the physical strain a bullfighter goes through toward the end of the season in moving about the country from one place to another.

Of course there is no law that compels them to fight so often. They fight for money, and if they get tired, worn out and unable to do their best through trying to fill so many contracts it does not help the spectator any who has paid money to see them. But when you yourself are travelling the same way, stopping at the same hotel, seeing the bullfight through the eyes of the bullfighter rather than the spectator who is paying a good price to see the bullfighter only once in a year perhaps, it is hard not to get the bullfighter’s point of view about his engagements. Truly enough, from any point of view, the bullfighter has no right to sign a contract which means that he must leave immediately after the fight is over in a motor car, the capes and muletas folded into baskets that are roped on over the baggage trunks, the sword cases and suitcases piled in the front and the whole cuadrilla packed tightly into the big motor car, a huge headlight on the front, to leave for a run of perhaps five hundred miles, driving all night, and through all the dust and heat of the next day to arrive in the town where they are to fight in the afternoon with barely time to wash off the dust, bathe and shave before dressing for the corrida. In the ring the bullfighter may be tired and stale, and you understand because you know the trip he has just made, having made such a trip yourself, and know that, with a good night’s rest, he will be different the next day, but the spectator who has paid his money to see him on that one day does not forgive, whether he understands or not. He calls it hoggishness for money and if the bullfighter cannot take advantage of a fine bull and get all there is out of him he feels he has been defrauded — and he has been.

There is another reason for seeing your first and last bullfight in Madrid, for the spring fights there are not during the feria season and the bullfighters are at their best; they are trying for triumphs which will bring them contracts for the various ferias, and, unless they have been in Mexico for the winter with the resultant fatigue, and often staleness, of a double season and the faults they acquire from working with the smaller and less difficult Mexican bulls, they should be in the very best of condition. Madrid is a strange place anyway. I do not believe any one likes it much when he first goes there. It has none of the look that you expect of Spain. It is modern rather than picturesque, no costumes, practically no Cordoban hats, except on the heads of phonies, no castanets, and no disgusting fakes like the gypsy caves at Granada. There is not one local-colored place for tourists in the town. Yet when you get to know it, it is the most Spanish of all cities, the best to live in, the finest people, month in and month out the finest climate and while the other big cities are all very representative of the province they are in, they are either Andalucian, Catalan, Basque, Aragonese, or otherwise provincial. It is in Madrid only that you get the essence. The essence, when it is the essence, can be in a plain glass bottle and you need no fancy labels, nor in Madrid do you need any national costumes; no matter what sort of building they put up, though the building itself may look like Buenos Aires, when you see it against that sky you know it is Madrid. If it had nothing else than the Prado it would be worth spending a month in every spring, if you have money to spend a month in any European capital. But when you can have the Prado and the bullfight season at the same time with El Escorial not two hours to the north and Toledo to the south, a fine road to Avila and a fine road to Segovia, which is no distance from La Granja, it makes you feel very badly, all question of immortality aside, to know that you will have to die and never see it again.

The Prado is altogether characteristic of Madrid. From the outside it looks as unpicturesque as an American High School building. The pictures are so simply arranged, so easy to see, so well-lighted and with no attempt, with one exception, the Velasquez of the small maids of honor, to theatricalize or set off masterpieces that the tourist looking in the red or blue guide book to see which are the famous ones feels vaguely disappointed. The colors have kept so wonderfully in the dry mountain air and the pictures are so simply hung and easy to see that the tourist feels cheated. I have watched them being puzzled. These cannot be great pictures, the colors are too fresh and they are too simple to see. These pictures are hung as though in a modern dealer’s gallery where they are being shown off to their best and clearest advantage in order to be sold. It cannot be right, the tourist thinks. There must be a catch somewhere. They get their money’s worth in Italian galleries where they cannot find any given picture nor see it any too well if they do find it. That way they feel they are seeing great art. Great art should have great frames and needs either red plush or bad lighting to back it up. It is as though, after having known of certain things only through reading pornographic literature, the tourist should be introduced to an attractive woman quite unclothed with no draperies, no concealments and no conversation and only the plainest of beds. He would probably want a book to aid him or at least a few properties or suggestions. That may be one reason there are so many books on Spain. For one person who likes Spain there are a dozen who prefer books on her. France sells better than books on France.

The longest books on Spain are usually written by Germans who make one intensive visit and then never return. I should say that it is probably a good system, if one has to write books on Spain, to write them as rapidly as possible after a first visit as several visits could only confuse the first impressions and make conclusions much less easy to draw. Also the one-visit books are much surer of everything and are bound to be more popular. Books like Richard Ford’s have never had the popularity of the bedside mysticism of such a book as Virgin Spain. The author of this book once published a piece in a now dead little magazine called S4N explaining how he did his writing. Any historian of letters wanting to explain certain phenomena of our writing can look it up in the files of that magazine. My copy is in Paris or I could quote it in full, but the gist of it was how this writer lay naked in his bed in the night and God sent him things to write, how he “was in touch ecstatically with the plunging and immobile all.” How he was, through the courtesy of God, “everywhere and everywhen.” The italics are his or maybe they are God’s. It didn’t say in the article. After God sent it he wrote it. The result was that unavoidable mysticism of a man who writes a language so badly he cannot make a clear statement, complicated by whatever pseudo-scientific jargon is in style at the moment. God sent him some wonderful stuff about Spain, during his short stay there preparatory to writing of the soul of the country, but it is often nonsense. The whole thing is what, to make a belated entry into the pseudo-scientific field, I call erectile writing. It is well known, or not known, whichever you prefer, that due to a certain congestion or other, trees for example look different to a man in that portentous state and a man who is not. All objects look different. They are slightly larger, more mysterious, and vaguely blurred. Try it yourself. Now there has or had arisen in America a school of writers who (this is old Dr. Hemingstein the great psychiatrist deducing) had, it would seem, by conserving these congestions, sought to make all objects mystic through the slight distortion of vision that unrelieved turgidness presents. The school seems to be passing now, or to have passed, and it was an interesting mechanical experiment while it lasted, and full of pretty phallic images drawn in the manner of sentimental valentines, but it would have amounted to more if only the vision of those writers had been a little more interesting and developed when, say, not so congested.

I wonder what such a book as Virgin Spain would have been like if written after a few good pieces of that sovereign specific for making a man see clearly. Perhaps it was. We pseudo-scientific coves may be all wrong. But to those inner-searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer, it seems as though, had the brain been cleared sufficiently, by a few good pieces, there might have been no book at all.

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

CHAPTER 6

IF YOU GO first to a corrida in Madrid you can go down into the ring and walk about before the fight. The gates into the corrals and the patio de caballos are open and there in the courtyard you will see the line of horses against the wall, and the picadors arriving on the horses they have ridden in from town, these horses having been ridden from the bull ring by the red-bloused monos or bullring servants to the lodgings in the town where the picadors live, so the picador, dressed in his white shirt, narrow black four-in-hand tie, brocaded jacket, wide sash, bowl-topped hat with the pompom on the side and the thick buckskin trousers that cover the steel leaf armor over the right leg, may mount and ride through the streets and in the traffic along the carretera de Aragon out to the ring; the mono sometimes riding behind his saddle, sometimes on another horse he has led out; these few horsemen in the stream of carriages, carts, taxis and motor cars serving to advertise the bullfights, to tire the horses ridden, and to spare the matador from having to provide room for the picador in his coach or motor. As you ride toward the ring the best way to go is on one of the horse-drawn busses that leave the Puerta del Sol. You can sit on the top and see all the other people who are going and if you watch the crowd of vehicles you will see a motor car pass packed full of bullfighters in their costumes. All you will see will be their heads with the flat black-topped hats, their gold or silver brocade covered shoulders and their faces. If, in one car, there are several men in silver or dark jackets and only one in gold and while the others may be laughing, smoking and joking, his face is still, he is the matador and the others are his cuadrilla. The ride to the ring is the worst part of the day for the matador. In the morning the fight is still a long way off. After lunch it is still a long way off, then, before the car is ready or the carriage comes, there is the preoccupation of dressing. But once in the car or the carriage the fight is very near and there is nothing he can do about it during all that closely packed ride to the ring. It is closely packed because the upper part of a bullfighter’s jacket is heavy and thick at the shoulders and the matador and his banderilleros, now that they ride in the motor car, crowd each other tightly when they are dressed in their fighting clothes. There are some that smile and recognize friends on the ride, but nearly all are still-faced and detached. The matador, from living every day with death, becomes very detached, the measure of his detachment of course is the measure of his imagination and always on the day of the fight and finally during the whole end of the season, there is a detached something in their minds that you can almost see. What is there is death and you cannot deal in it each day and know each day there is a chance of receiving it without having it make a very plain mark. It makes this mark on every one. The banderilleros and the picadors are different. Their danger is relative. They are under orders; their responsibility is limited; and they do not kill. They are under no great strain before a fight. Ordinarily though, if you wish to see a study in apprehension see an ordinarily cheerful and careless picador after he has been to the corrals, or the sorting of the bulls, and seen that these are really very big and powerful. If I could draw I would make a picture of a table at the café during a feria with the banderilleros sitting before lunch reading the papers, a boot-black at work, a waiter hurrying somewhere and two returning picadors, one a big brown-faced, dark-browed man usually very cheerful and a great joker, the other a gray-haired, neat, hawknosed, trim-waisted little man, both of them looking the absolute embodiment of gloom and depression.

“Qué tal?” asks one of the banderilleros.

“Son grandes,” says the picador.

“Grandes?”

“Muy grandes!”

There is nothing more to be said. The banderilleros know everything that is in the picador’s mind. The matador may be able to assassinate the big bull, if he swallows his pride and puts away his honor, as easily as any small bull. The veins of the neck are in the same place and as easily reached with the point of the sword. There is no greater chance of a banderillero’s being caught if the bull is big. But there is nothing the picador can do to help himself. After the bulls are above a certain age and weight, when they hit the horse it means the horse goes up into the air and perhaps he comes down with the picador under him, perhaps the picador is thrown against the barrier and pinned under the horse, or if they lean forward gallantly, put their weight on the vara and try to punish the bull during the encounter it means they fall between the bull and the horse when the horse goes and must lie there, with the bull looking for them with the horn, until the matador can take the bull away. If the bulls are really big, each time they hit the horse the picador will fall and he knows this and his apprehension when “they are big” is greater than any the matador, unless he is a coward, can feel. There is always something the matador can do if he keeps his nerve. He may sweat ink, but there is a way to fight each bull no matter how difficult. The picador has no recourse. All he can do is turn down the customary bribe from the horse contractor for accepting an undersized mount and insist on a good strong horse, tall enough to keep him above the bull at the start, try to peg him well once and hope for not the worst.

By the time you see the matadors standing in the opening of the patio de caballos their worst time of apprehension is over. The crowd around them has removed that loneliness of the ride with people who know them all too well, and the crowd restores their characters. Nearly all bullfighters are brave. Some are not. This seems impossible since no man who was not brave would get into the ring with a bull, but in certain special cases natural ability and early training, commencing the training with calves where there is no danger, have made bullfighters of men with no natural courage. There are only about three of these. I will go into their cases later and they are among the most interesting phenomenons of the ring, but the usual bullfighter is a very brave man, the most common degree of bravery being the ability temporarily to ignore possible consequences. A more pronounced degree of bravery, which comes with exhilaration, is the ability not to give a damn for possible consequences; not only to ignore them but to despise them. Nearly all bullfighters are brave and yet nearly all bullfighters are frightened at some moment before the fight begins.

The crowd starts to thin in the patio de caballos, the bullfighters line up, the three matadors abreast, their banderilleros and picadors behind them. The crowd goes from the ring, leaving it empty. You go to your seat and, if you are in a barrera you buy a cushion from the vender below, sit on it, and with your knees pressing the wood look out across the ring to the doorway of the patio you have just left with the three matadors, the sun shining on the gold of their suits, standing in the doorway, the other bullfighters, on foot and mounted, making a mass behind them. Then you see the people around you looking up above them toward a box. It is the president coming in. He takes his seat and waves a handkerchief. If he is on time there is a burst of clapping; if he is late there is a storm of whistling and booing. A trumpet blows and from the patio two mounted men in the costume of the time of Philip II ride out across the sand.

They are the aguacils or mounted bailiffs and it is through them that all orders by the president who represents the constituted authority are transmitted. They gallop across the ring, doff their hats, bow low before the president and presumably having received his authorization gallop back to place. The music starts, and from the opening in the courtyard of the horses comes the procession of the bullfighters; the paseo or parade. The three, if there are six bulls, four, if there are eight, matadors walk abreast, their dress capes are furled and wrapped around their left arms, their right arms balance, they walk with a loose-hipped stride, their arms swinging, their chins up, their eyes on the president’s box. In single file behind each matador comes his cuadrilla of banderilleros and his picadors in the order of their seniority. So they come across the sand in a column of three or four. As the matadors come in front of the president’s box they bow low and remove their black hats or monteras — the bow is serious or perfunctory depending on their length of service or degree of cynicism. At the start of their careers all are as devoutly ritual as altar boys serving a high mass and some always remain so. Others are as cynical as night club proprietors. The devout ones are killed more frequently. The cynical ones are the best companions. But the best of all are the cynical ones when they are still devout; or after; when having been devout, then cynical, they become devout again by cynicism. Juan Belmonte is an example of the last stage.

After they have bowed to the president they replace their hats, settling them carefully, and go to the barrera. The procession breaks up as, all having saluted, the matadors remove their heavy gold brocaded and jewelled parade capes and send them or pass them to friends or admirers to spread along the front of the wall protecting the first rows of seats, or, sometimes, send them by the sword handler to some one, usually a singer, a dancer, a quack doctor, an aviator, a cinema actor, a politician or some one notorious in the news of the day who happens to be in a box. Very young matadors or very cynical ones send their capes to bullfight impresarios from other towns who may be in Madrid, or to the bullfight critics. The best ones send them to friends. It is better not to have one sent to you. It is a pleasant compliment if the bullfighter has a good day and does well, but if he does badly it is too much responsibility. To have an obvious allegiance to a bullfighter who through bad luck, a bad bull, some accident that makes him lose confidence, or bad nerves from coming back to the ring in poor physical shape after a goring, disgraces himself and finally makes the public so indignant that he may have to be protected by the police as he goes out of the ring, head down, under a bombardment of thrown leather cushions, makes one conspicuous when the sword handler comes dodging around the falling cushions to reclaim the cape. Or perhaps, anticipating the disaster, the sword handler has come for the cape before the last bull so that you can see the cape, so proudly received, drawn tightly around the disgraced shoulders, being carried sprinting across the ring, the cushions sailing, a few of the more violent spectators being charged by the police as they pursue your matador. The banderilleros give their capes to friends to display too, but as these capes are regal looking only at a distance, are often thin, well-sweated and lined with that same striped material that seems to form the lining for vests all over the world and as the banderilleros do not take the conferring of this favor seriously, the honor is only nominal. While the capes are being thrown and spread and the fighting capes taken from the barrera, the bullring servants smooth the sand of the ring that has been disturbed by the procession of the mounted picadors, the harnessed mules for handling of dead bulls and horses and the hooves of the horses of the alguacils. Meantime the two matadors (it is inferred that this is a six-bull fight) who are not killing retire with their cuadrillas into the callejon or narrow passage way between the red fences of the barrera and the first seats. The matador whose bull is to come out selects one of the heavy percale fighting capes. These are usually rose-colored on the outside and yellow inside with a wide stiffened collar, and big and full enough so that if the matador should put it over his shoulders the bottom of it would fall to his knees or just below and he would be able to wrap himself completely in it. The matador who is to kill places himself behind one of the little flat plank shelters which are built out from the barrera, wide enough for two men to stand in and just narrow enough to dodge behind, the alguacils ride up to under the president’s box to ask for the key to the red door of the toril where the bull is waiting. The president throws it and the alguacil tries to catch it in his plumed hat. If he does the crowd claps. If he misses it whistles. But it does not take any of this seriously. If it is not caught a bull ring servant picks it up and hands it to the alguacil who gallops across the ring and hands it to the man who stands ready to open the door of the toril, gallops back, salutes the president and gallops out while the servants smooth away the traces of the horse marks on the sand. This smoothing completed there is no one in the ring but the matador behind his little shelter or burladero and two banderilleros, one on each side of the ring, tight against the fence. It is very quiet and every one is looking at the red plank door. The president gives a signal with his handkerchief, the trumpet sounds and the very serious, white-haired, wide old man, his name is Gabriel, in a sort of burlesque bullfighter’s suit (it was bought for him by popular subscription) unlocks the door of the toril and pulling heavily on it runs backward to expose the low passageway that shows as the door swings open.

CHAPTER 7

AT THIS POINT it is necessary that you see a bullfight. If I were to describe one it would not be the one that you would see, since the bullfighters and the bulls are all different, and if I were to explain the possible variations as I went along the chapter would be interminable. There are two sorts of guide books; those that are read before and those that are to be read after and the ones that are to be read after the fact are bound to be incomprehensible to a certain extent before; if the fact is of enough importance in itself. So with any book on mountain ski-ing, sexual intercourse, wing shooting, or any other thing which it is impossible to make come true on paper, or at least impossible to attempt to make more than one version of at a time on paper, it being always an individual experience, there comes a place in the guide book where you must say do not come back until you have ski-ed, had sexual intercourse, shot quail or grouse, or been to the bullfight so that you will know what we are talking about. So from now on it is inferred that you have been to the bullfight.

You went to the bullfight? How was it?

It was disgusting. I couldn’t stand it.

All right, we will give you an honorable discharge but no refund.

How did you like it? It was terrible. How do you mean terrible? Just terrible. It was terrible, awful, horrible. Good. You get an honorable discharge, too.

How did it seem to you? I was simply bored to death. All right. You get the hell out of here.

Didn’t anybody like the bullfight? Didn’t anybody like the bullfight at all? No answer. Did you like it, sir? I did not. Did you like it, madame? Decidedly not.

An old lady in the back of the room: What is he saying? What is that young man asking?

Some one near her: He’s asking if any one liked the bullfight.

Old lady: Oh, I thought he was asking if any of us wanted to be bullfighters.

Did you like the bullfight, madame?

Old lady: I liked it very much.

What did you like about it?

Old lady: I liked to see the bulls hit the horses.

Why did you like that?

Old lady: It seemed so sort of homey.

Madame, you are a mystic. You are not among friends here. Let us go to the Café Fornos where we can discuss these matters at leisure.

Old lady: Wherever you wish, sir, provided it is clean and wholesome.

Madame, there is no wholesomer place in the Peninsula.

Old lady: Will we see the bullfighters there?

Madame, the place is packed with them.

Old lady: Then let us be off.

Fornos is a café frequented only by people connected with the bullfights and by whores. There is smoke, hurrying of waiters, noise of glasses and you have the noisy privacy of a big café. We can discuss the fight, if you wish, and the old lady can sit and look at the bullfighters. There are bullfighters at every table and for all tastes and all the other people in the café live off bullfighters in some way or another. A shark rarely has more than four remoras or sucking fish that fasten to him or swim along with him, but a bullfighter, when he is making money, has dozens. The old lady does not care to discuss the bullfight. She liked it; she is now looking at the bullfighters and never discusses things she has enjoyed even with her most intimate friends. We talk about it because there were a number of things you say you did not understand.

When the bull came out did you notice that one of the banderilleros ran across his course trailing a cape and that the bull followed the cape driving at it with one horn? They run him that way always, at the start, to see which horn he favors. The matador, standing behind his shelter, watches the bull run by the trailing cape and notices whether he follows the zig-zagging cape on both his right and his left sides, this showing whether he sees with both eyes and which horn he prefers to hook with. He also notices whether he runs straight or if he has a tendency to cut ground toward the man as he charges. The man who went out with the cape in both hands after the bull had been run, and cited him from in front, standing still as the bull charged, and with his arms moving the cape slowly just ahead of the bull’s horns, passing the bull’s horns close by his body with a slow movement of the cape, seeming to keep him controlled, in the folds of the cape, bringing him past his body each time as he turned and recharged; doing this five times and then finishing off with a swirl of the cape that turned the man’s back on the bull and, by cutting the bull’s charge brusquely, fixed him to the spot; that man was the matador and the slow passes that he made were called veronicas and the half pass at the end a media-veronica. Those passes were designed to show the matador’s skill and art with the cape, his domination of the bull and also to fix the bull in a certain spot before the entry of the horses. They are called veronicas after St. Veronica who wiped the face of Our Lord with a cloth and are so called because the saint is always represented holding the cloth by the two corners in the position the bullfighter holds the cape for the start of the veronica. The media-veronica that stops the bull at the end of the passes is a recorte. A recorte is any pass with the cape that, by causing the bull to try to turn in less than his own length, stops him brusquely or checks his rush by cutting his course and doubling him on himself.

The banderilleros are never supposed to use both hands on the cape when the bull first comes out. If they use only one hand the cape will be trailed and when they turn it at the end of a run the bull will turn easily and not sharply and brusquely. He will do this because the turn of the long cape gives him an indication of the turn to make and gives him something to follow. With the cape held in both hands the banderillero can snap it away from the bull, flop it brusquely out of his sight and stop him dead, and turn him sharply so that he twists his spinal column, lames himself, has his speed cut, not by being worn down, but by laming, and make him unfit for the rest of the fight. Only the matador is supposed to use two hands on the cape during the early part of the fight. Strictly speaking the banderilleros, who are also called peones, are never supposed to use two hands on the cape except when bringing the bull out from a position he has taken and refused to leave. But in the way bullfighting has developed, or decayed, with emphasis increasingly placed on the manner of execution of the various passes rather than their effect, the banderilleros now do much of the work of preparing the bull for killing that was formerly done by the matador; and matadors without resources or science, whose only ability is their plastic or artistic talent, have their bulls, if these offer the slightest difficulty, prepared, worn down, dominated and everything but killed by the skilled and destructive cape of an experienced banderillero.

It may seem foolish to speak of almost killing such an animal as a fighting bull with a cape. Of course you could not kill, but you can so damage the spinal column, twist the legs and lame the animal and, by abusing its bravery, force it to charge uselessly again and again, each time recorting it ferociously, that you may tire it, lame it, and deprive it of all speed and a great part of its natural forces. We speak of killing a trout with a rod. It is the effort made by the trout that kills it. A catfish arrives at the side of the boat in full possession of all its force and strength. A tarpon, a trout or a salmon will often kill himself fighting the rod and line if you hold him long enough.

It was for this reason that banderilleros were prohibited from caping the bull with both hands. The matador was supposed to do all of the preparation for killing and the killing himself. The picadors were to slow the bull, to change his tempo, and to bring down the carriage of his head. The banderilleros were supposed to run him at the start, to place the banderillas quickly and in such a position as to correct any faults of hooking if they existed, and never to do anything to destroy the strength of the bull, in order that he might come intact into the hands of the matador who was supposed, with the muleta, to correct any tendencies toward hooking to one side or the other, to place him in position for killing and to kill him from in front, making him lower his head with the red serge of the muleta and killing him with the sword, driving it in high up at the top of the angle between the two shoulder blades.

As the corrida has developed and decayed there has been less emphasis on the form of killing, which was once the whole thing, and more on the cape work, the placing of the banderillas and the work with the muleta. The cape, the banderillas and the muleta have all become ends in themselves rather than means to an end and the bullfight has both lost and gained thereby.

In the old days the bulls were usually bigger than they are now; they were fiercer, more uncertain, heavier and older. They had not been bred down to a smaller size to please the bullfighters and they were fought at the age of four and a half to five years instead of three and a half to four and a half years. Matadors often had from six to twelve years of apprenticeship as banderilleros and as novilleros before becoming formal matadors. They were mature men, knew bulls thoroughly, and faced bulls which were brought to the highest point of physical force, strength, knowledge of how to use their horns and general difficulty and danger. The whole end of the bullfight was the final sword thrust, the actual encounter between the man and the animal, what the Spanish call the moment of truth, and every move in the fight was to prepare the bull for that killing. With such bulls it was not necessary to give emotion for the man to pass the animal as deliberately close to him with the cape as was possible. The cape was used to run the bulls, to protect the picadors, and the passes that were made with it, by our modern standards, were exciting because of the size, strength, weight and fierceness of the animal and the danger the matador ran in making them rather than by the form or the slowness of their execution. It was exciting that the man should pass such a bull at all, that a man should be in the ring with and dominate such an animal furnished the emotion rather than that he should deliberately, as now, try to pass the points of the horn as mathematically close to his body as possible without moving his feet. It is the decadence of the modern bull that has made modern bullfighting possible. It is a decadent art in every way and like most decadent things it reaches its fullest flower at its rottenest point, which is the present.

It is impossible, day in and day out, to fight bulls that are really bulls, huge, strong, fierce and fast, knowing how to use their horns and old enough so that they have their full growth, with the technique that has been developed, starting with Juan Belmonte, in modern bullfighting. It is too dangerous. Belmonte invented the technique. He was a genius, who could break the rules of bullfighting and could torear, that is the only word for all the actions performed by a man with the bull, as it was known to be impossible to torear. Once he had done it all bullfighters had to do it, or attempt to do it since there is no going back in the matter of sensations. Joselito who was strong (Belmonte was weak), healthy (Belmonte was sickly), who had an athlete’s body, gypsy grace and an intuitive and acquired knowledge of bulls that was never surpassed by any bullfighter; Joselito for whom everything in bullfighting was easy, who lived for bullfighting, and seemed to have been made and bred almost to the measurement of what a great bullfighter should be, had to learn Belmonte’s way of working. Joselito, the heritor of all great bullfighters, probably the greatest bullfighter that ever lived, learned to torear as Belmonte did. Belmonte worked that way because of his lack of stature, his lack of strength, because of his feeble legs. He did not accept any rules made without testing whether they might be broken, and he was a genius and a great artist. The way Belmonte worked was not a heritage, nor a development; it was a revolution. Joselito learned it, and during the years of their competition, when they each had around a hundred corridas a year, he used to say, “They say that he, Belmonte, works closer to the bull. It looks as though he does. But that isn’t true. I really work closer. But it is more natural so it doesn’t look so close.”

Anyway, the decadent, the impossible, the almost depraved, style of Belmonte was grafted and grown into the great healthy, intuitive genius of Joselito and in his competition with Juan Belmonte, bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact that it was in the process of being destroyed.

They bred the bulls down in size; they bred down the length of horn; they bred them for suavity in their charges as well as fierceness because Joselito and Belmonte could do finer things with these smaller, easier bulls. They could do fine enough things with any bulls that came out of the torils; they were not helpless with any of them but, with the smaller, easier bulls they were certain to do the wonderful things that the public wanted to see. The big bulls were easy for Joselito although they were difficult for Belmonte. All bulls were easy for Joselito and he had to make his own difficulties. The competition ended when Joselito was killed in the ring on May 16, 1920. Belmonte went on one more year, then retired, and bullfighting was left with the new decadent method, the almost impossible technique, the bred down bulls and, as bullfighters, only the bad ones, the hardy, tough ones who had not been able to learn the new method and so no longer pleased, and a crop of new ones, decadent, sad and sickly enough, who had the method but no knowledge of bulls, no apprenticeship, none of the male courage, faculties or genius of Joselito, and none of the beautiful unhealthy mystery of Belmonte.

Old lady: I saw nothing decadent or rotten about the spectacle we observed to-day.

Nor did I, to-day, madame, for the matadors were Nicanor Villalta, the courageous telephone pole of Aragon; Luis Fuentes Bejarano, the valorous and worthy workman, the pride of Union Labor, and Diego Mazquiaran, Fortuna, the brave butcher boy of Bilbao.

Old lady: They all seemed to me to be most valorous and manly chaps. In what way, sir, do you speak of decadence?

Madame, they are most manly chaps although Villalta’s voice is a shade high sometimes, and the decadence I speak of does not apply to them but to the decay of a complete art through a magnification of certain of its aspects.

Old lady: Sir, you are hard to understand.

I will explain later, madame, but indeed decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

Old lady: I always understood it to mean that there was something rotten as there is at courts.

Madame, all our words from loose using have lost their edge but your inherent concepts are most sound.

Old lady: If you please, sir, I do not care for all this discussion of words. Are we not here to be instructed about the bulls and those who fight them?

If you so wish, but start your writer to talking of words and he will go on until you are wearied and wish he would show more skill in using them and preach less of their significance.

Old lady: Can you not stop then, sir?

Have you ever heard of the late Raymond Radiguet?

Old lady: I cannot say I have.

He was a young French writer who knew how to make his career not only with his pen but with his pencil if you follow me, madame.

Old lady: You mean?

Not exactly, but something of the sort.

Old lady: You mean he — ?

Precisely. When the late Radiguet was alive he often wearied of the tenuous, rapturous and querulous society of his literary protector, Jean Cocteau, and spent the nights at an hotel near the Luxembourg Gardens with one of two sisters who were then working as models in the quarter. His protector was greatly upset and denounced this as decadence saying, bitterly, yet proudly of the late Radiguet, “Bebé est vicieuse — il aime les femmes.” So you see, madame, we must be careful chucking the term decadence about since it cannot mean the same to all who read it.

Old lady: It repelled me from the first.

Then let us return to the bulls.

Old lady: Gladly, sir. But what finally happened to the late Radiguet?

He caught typhoid fever from swimming in the Seine and died of it.

Old lady: Poor chap.

Poor chap, indeed.

CHAPTER 8

THOSE YEARS after Joselito’s death and the retirement of Belmonte were the worst bullfighting has gone through. The bull ring had been dominated by the two figures that, in their own art, remembering of course that it is an impermanent and so minor art, were comparable to Velasquez and Goya, or, in writing, to Cervantes and Lope da Vega, though I have never cared for Lope, but he has the needed reputation for the comparison, and when they were gone it was, as though in English writing Shakespeare had suddenly died, and Marlowe retired and the field left to Ronald Firbank who wrote very well about what he wrote about but was, let us say, a specialist. Manuel Granero of Valencia was the one bullfighter the aficion had great faith in. He was one of three boys who had, with protection and money furnished, been made into bullfighters by the best mechanical means and instruction; practicing with calves on the bull ranches around Salamanca. Granero had no bullfighting blood in his veins and his immediate family had wanted him to be a violinist, but he had an ambitious uncle and natural talent for bullfighting, aided by much courage, and he was the best of the three. The other two were Manuel Jiminez, Chicuelo, and Juan Luis de la Rosa. As children they were all perfectly trained miniature bullfighters and the three of them all had pure Belmontistic styles, beautiful execution in everything they did, and they were all three called phenomenons. Granero was the soundest, the healthiest, and the bravest and he was killed in Madrid in the May following the death of Joselito.

Chicuelo was the son of a matador of that same name who had been dead some years from tuberculosis. He was reared, trained and launched and managed as a matador by his uncle, Zocato, who had been a banderillero of the old school and was a good business man and a heavy drinker. Chicuelo was short, unhealthily plump, without a chin, with a bad complexion, tiny hands and with the long eyelashes of a girl. Trained in Sevilla and then on the ranches around Salamanca he was as perfect a miniature bullfighter as could be manufactured and he was about as authentic a bullfighter, really, as a little porcelain statuette. After the death of Joselito and Granero and the retirement of Belmonte bullfighting had him. It had Juan Luis de la Rosa who was Chicuelo in everything but the uncle and the way he was built in the altogether. Some one, not a relative, had put up the money for his education and he was another perfectly manufactured product. It had Marcial Lalanda who knew bulls from being brought up among them — he was the son of the overseer of the breeding ranch of the Duke of Veragua, and he was advertised as the successor of Joselito. All he had as successor at that time was his knowledge of bulls, and a certain way of walking as he cited the bulls for the banderillas. I saw him often in those days and he was always a scientific bullfighter, but he was not strong and he was listless. He seemed to take no pleasure in bullfighting, to derive no emotion or elation from it and to have much controlled, but depressing, fear. He was a sad and unemotional bullfighter, although he was technically skillful and completely intelligent, and for once that he was good in the ring he was mediocre and uninteresting a dozen times. He, Chicuelo and La Rosa all fought as though they were condemned to it rather than as if they had chosen it. I believe that no one of them could ever completely forget the death of Joselito and of Granero. Marcial had been in the ring when Granero was killed and had been unjustly accused of not having made an effort to take the bull off of him in time. He was very bitter about this.

Bullfighting then, too, had two brothers, the Anllos, from Aragon. One, the older, Ricardo, they were both called Nacional, was of medium height and thick set, a monument of probity, courage, undistinguished but classic style and bad luck. The second, Juan, called Nacional II, was tall, with a thin mouth and slanting eyes. He was ungraceful, angular, very brave and with a style of fighting as ugly as you could see.

There was Victoriano Roger, Valencia II, the son of a banderillero. Born in Madrid, he was trained by his father and he too had an older brother who was a failure as a matador. A boy of the same vintage as Chicuelo and company, he managed a cape beautifully, was arrogant, quarrelsome and brave as the bull itself in Madrid, but anywhere else let his nerves master him and felt his honor was secure in provincial disasters, if he could only triumph in Madrid. This confining of their personal honor to Madrid is the mark of those bullfighters who make a living from the profession but never dominate it.

With Julian Saiz, Saleri II, a very complete bullfighter and a splendid banderillero who had competed at one time with Joselito for a season, but who had become the embodiment of caution and safety before all things; Diego Mazquiaran, Fortuna, brave, stupid, a great killer, but of the old school, and Luis Freg, a Mexican, short, brown, with Indian hair, in his late thirties, heavy on his feet, the muscles of his legs gnarled like an old oak with the scars where the bulls had punished him for his slowness, his awkwardness and his never-varying courage with the sword; with a few more veterans and a good many more failures, those were about all the lot in those first years after the two great ones were gone.

Freg, Fortuna and the elder of the Nacionals did not please because the new way of fighting had made their styles old-fashioned and there were no longer the big bulls, that, with a brave, competent man in the ring made all that was needed for a bullfight. Chicuelo was wonderful until he was first touched by a bull. Then, utterly cowardly if the bull offered any difficulties, he was good about twice a year thereafter, only giving all his repertoire when he found a bull without any bad ideas that would move past him without deviation as though it were mounted on rails. In between the beauty of his performances with the mechanically perfect bull that he awaited all season, and his occasional, nerved up, good, scientific work with a difficult bull came some of the saddest exhibitions of cowardice and shamelessness it would be possible to see. La Rosa was gored once, frightened forever, and quickly disappeared from circulation. He was very talented as a bullfighter, but he was even more talented in another respect and he is still fighting in South America and, by combining his two talents, living very well.

Valencia II started every season as brave as a fighting cock, worked closer to the bulls each time he appeared in Madrid until the bull had only to reach a little with its horn to catch him, toss him, gore him and send him to the hospital; and when he recovered his courage was gone until the next season.

There were a few others, too. One called Gitanillo, in spite of the name he was no gypsy but had only worked as horse-tender for a gypsy family in his youth, was short, arrogant and really brave; in Madrid, at least. In the provinces, like all cheap bullfighters, he relied on his Madrid reputation. He was one of the sort that does everything but eat the bulls raw. He was unskillful at everything and relied on such business as, when the bull was tired or fixed for a moment, turning his back on the animal a foot or so in front of the horns and then kneeling, smiling at the crowd. He was gored badly nearly every season and finally recovered from a terrible horn wound that transfixed his chest, destroyed a good part of the lung and pleura and left him a cripple for life.

A doctor in Soria hit Juan Anllo, Nacional II, over the head with a bottle in an argument during a bullfight at which Nacional II, a spectator, was defending the conduct of the fighter in the ring who was dealing with a difficult animal. The police arrested the bullfighter but not the assailant and Nacional II lay in jail all night with the red dust of Soria on his clothes and in his hair, dying with his skull fractured and a blood clot on his brain while the people of the jail treated him as a drunk, trying various expedients to rouse him from his unconsciousness. He never roused. That rid bullfighting of one of the really brave men who were matadors during this decadence.

A year before another had died, one who looked as though he were going to be one of the greatest of all. He was Manuel Garcia, Maera. He was a body with Juan Belmonte in the barrio of Triana in Sevilla and when Belmonte, who worked as a day laborer, had no one to protect him, to send him to a bullfight school and furnish him with money to learn to fight by practicing with the calves, wanted to practice with the cape he and Maera and sometimes Varelito, another local boy, would swim across the river, their capes and a lantern on a log, and, dripping and naked, climb the fence into the corral to where the fighting bulls were kept at Tablada to rouse one of the great full-grown fighting bulls from his sleep. While Maera held the lantern Belmonte passed the bull with the cape. When Belmonte became a matador, Maera, tall, dark, thin-hipped, gaunt-eyed, his face blue black even after a close shave, arrogant, slouching, and sombre, went with him as a banderillero. He was a great banderillero and in the years with Belmonte, fighting ninety to a hundred times in a season, working with all sorts of bulls, he came to know bulls as well as any one, even Joselito. Belmonte never placed the banderillas since he could not run. Joselito nearly always placed banderillas in the bulls he killed and in their competition Belmonte used Maera as an antidote to Joselito. Maera could banderillear as well as Joselito and Belmonte kept him dressed in the worst-fitting, most awkward suits a bullfighter could wear so that he would seem more of a peon; to hold down his personality, and make it seem that he, Belmonte, had a banderillero, a mere peon, who could compete as a banderillero with the great matador, Joselito. In the last year Belmonte fought Maera asked him for an increase of wages. He was getting two hundred and fifty pesetas a fight and he asked for three hundred. Belmonte, although he was then making ten thousand a fight, refused the increase. “All right, I’ll be a matador and I’ll show you up,” Maera said. “You’ll be ridiculous,” Belmonte told him. “No,” said Maera, “you’ll be ridiculous when I’m through.”

At first as a matador, Maera had many of the faults and manners of a peon to overcome, such faults as too much movement (a matador should never run), and he was also styleless with the cape. He was capable and scientific but unfinished with the muleta and he killed trickily but well. But he had a complete knowledge of bulls and a valor that was so absolute and such a solid part of him that it made everything easy that he understood; and he understood it all. Also he was very proud. He was the proudest man I have ever seen.

In two years he corrected all his faults with the cape, he got to manage the muleta beautifully; he was always one of the finest, most emotional and finished banderilleros that ever nailed a pair; and he became one of the best and most satisfying matadors I have ever watched. He was so brave that he shamed those stylists who were not and bullfighting was so important and so wonderful to him that, in his last year, his presence in the ring raised the whole thing from the least effort, get-rich-quick, wait-for-the-mechanical bull basis it had fallen to, and, while he was in the ring, it again had dignity and passion. If Maera was in the plaza it was a good bullfight for at least two bulls and as often as he intervened in the fighting of the other four. When the bulls did not come to him he did not point out the fact to the crowd asking for their indulgence and sympathy, he went to the bulls, arrogant, dominating and disregarding danger. He gave emotion always and, finally, as he steadily improved his style, he was an artist. But all the last year he fought you could see he was going to die. He had galloping consumption and he expected to die before the year was out. In the meantime he was very occupied. He was gored badly twice but he paid no attention to it. I saw him fight on a Sunday with a five-inch wound in his armpit that he received on a Thursday. I saw the wound, saw it dressed before and after the fight and he paid no attention to it. It hurt as a torn wound made by a splintered horn hurts after two days but he paid no attention to the pain. He acted as though it were not there. He did not favor it or avoid lifting the arm; he ignored it. He was a long way beyond pain. I never saw a man to whom time seemed so short as it did to him that season.

The next time I saw him he had been gored in the neck in Barcelona. The wound was closed with eight stitches and he was fighting, his neck bandaged, the day after. His neck was stiff and he was furious. He was furious at the stiffness he could do nothing about and the fact that he had to wear a bandage that showed above his collar.

A young matador who must watch the observance of all etiquette, to command a respect he may not always inspire, never eats with his cuadrilla. He eats apart, thus keeping the gulf between master and servant that he cannot maintain if he mixes with those who work for him. Maera always ate with the cuadrilla; they all ate at one table; they all travelled together and lived, sometimes in crowded ferias, all in the same room, and they all respected him as I have seen no matador respected by his cuadrilla.

He had trouble with his wrists. They are the part of the body that are of most vital use to a good bullfighter. As the trigger finger of a rifleman is sensitive and educated to the tiniest degrees of squeezing to approach and release the discharge of his piece, so it is with his wrists that a bullfighter controls and makes the delicacy of art with the cape and muleta. All the sculpturing that he does with the muleta is done with the wrist and it is with the wrist that he sinks the banderillas, and with the wrist, stiff this time, the chamois-wrapped, lead-weighted pommel of the sword held in the palm of the hand, that he kills. Maera, killing one time, driving in as the bull charged and leaning hard, shoulder forward, after the sword, struck the point of the sword on one of the vertebrae, inside the opening between the shoulder blades. He was driving and the bull was driving and the sword buckled nearly double and then shot up into the air. As it buckled it dislocated his wrist. He picked the sword up in his left hand and carried it over to the barrera and with his left hand pulled out a new sword from the leather sheath his sword handler offered him.

“And the wrist?” the sword handler asked.

“F — k the wrist,” Maera said.

He went toward the bull, squared him with two passes with the muleta, putting it in front of his damp muzzle and quickly withdrawing it as the bull’s fore feet rose to follow it and then fell into the right position for killing, holding both the sword and muleta in his left hand, he lifted the sword to his right hand, profiled, and went in. Again he hit bone, insisted, and the sword buckled, shot into the air and fell. This time he didn’t go for a new sword. He picked up the sword with his right hand and as he lifted it I could see the sweat on his face from the pain. He chopped the bull into position with the red cloth, profiled, sighted along the blade and went in. He went in as though he would drive through a stone wall, his weight, his height and all onto the sword and it hit bone, doubled, not so far this time because his wrist gave quicker, buckled, and fell. He lifted the sword with his right hand and the wrist would not hold it and it dropped. He lifted the wrist and banged it against his doubled left fist, then picked up the sword in his left hand, placed it in his right and as he held it you could see the sweat come down his face. The second matador tried to get him to go to the infirmary and he shook himself away and cursed them all.

“Let me alone,” he said, “and go f — k yourselves.”

He went in twice more and hit the bone both times. Now at any time he could have, without danger or pain, slipped the sword into the neck of the bull, let it go into the lung or cut the jugular and killed him with no trouble. But his honor demanded that he kill him high up between the shoulders, going in as a man should, over the horn, following the sword with his body. And on the sixth time he went in this way and the sword went in too. He came out from the encounter, the horn just clearing his belly as he shrugged over it as he passed and then stood, tall and sunken eyed, his face wet with sweat, his hair down on his forehead, watching the bull as he swung, lost his feet and rolled over. He pulled the sword out with his right hand, as punishment for it I suppose, but shifted it to his left, and carrying it point down, walked over to the barrera. His rage was all over. His right wrist was swollen to double its size. He was thinking about something else. He would not go to the infirmary to get it bandaged.

Somebody asked about his wrist. He held it up and sneered at it.

“Go to the infirmary, man,” one of the banderilleros said. “Put yourself inside.” Maera looked at him. He wasn’t thinking about his wrist at all. He was thinking about the bull.

“He was made out of cement,” he said. “F — king bull made out of cement.”

Anyway he died that winter in Seville with a tube in each lung, drowned with pneumonia that came to finish off the tuberculosis. When he was delirious he rolled under the bed and fought with death under the bed dying as hard as a man can die. I thought that year he hoped for death in the ring but he would not cheat by looking for it. You would have liked him, Madame. Era muy hombre.

Old lady: Why wouldn’t Belmonte pay him more money when he asked for it?

That is a strange thing about Spain, Madame. Of all things financial that I have any acquaintance with the dirtiest in regard to money is bullfighting. A man’s ranking is made by the amount he receives for fighting. But in Spain a man feels that the less he pays his subordinates the more man he is and in the same way the nearer he can bring his subordinates to slaves the more man he feels he is. This is especially true of matadors who have come from the lowest ranks of the people. They are affable, generous, courteous and well liked by all who are superior to them in station and miserly slave drivers with those who must work for them.

Old lady: Is this true of all?

No, and certainly being surrounded by fawning parasites a matador could be excused any bitterness or desire to protect his earnings. But in general I say there is no man meaner about money with his inferiors than your matador.

Old lady: Was your friend Maera, then, mean about money?

He was not. He was generous, humorous, proud, bitter, foulmouthed and a great drinker. He neither sucked after intellectuals nor married money. He loved to kill bulls and lived with much passion and enjoyment although the last six months of his life he was very bitter. He knew he had tuberculosis and took absolutely no care of himself; having no fear of death he preferred to burn out, not as an act of bravado, but from choice. He was training his younger brother and believed he would be a great matador. The younger brother, also afflicted in the lungs, turned out to be a coward. It was a great disappointment to us all.

CHAPTER 9

OF COURSE IF you should happen to go to a bullfight and not see any of the decadent matadors there would be no need for all this explanation of the decadence of bullfighting. But if at your first bullfight you should see, instead of whatever your idea of how a matador should look, a fat, weak-faced, long-eyelashed little man with great delicacy of wrist and skill with, and horror of, bulls, this requires some explanation. That is how Chicuelo looks to-day, ten years after his first appearance as a phenomenon. He still has contracts because people are always in hope that his bull, the perfect bull that he waits for, will come out of the toril and he will unroll his beautiful, pure, improved over Belmonte even, repertoire of linked passes. You may see him twenty times in a season and never see him give a complete performance once, but when he is good he is wonderful.

Of the others who dominated with their names and with the hopes they roused, but never with consistent triumphs, the period immediately after Joselito and Belmonte, Marcial Lalanda has become a masterly, dependable, skillful, able and sincere bullfighter. He can deal with any and all bulls and can do skillful and sincere work with them all. He is confident and secure. His nine years of service have ripened him and given him confidence and pleasure in his work rather than frightened him. As a complete, scientific torero he is the best there is in Spain.

Valencia II is the same as he was at the start, in ability and limitations, except that he has grown fat and prudent and a badly sewn wound at the corner of one eye has distorted his face so that he has lost his cockiness. He does beautiful work with the cape, has a few tricks with the muleta, but they are only tricks and in the main he only defends himself with it. He gives everything he has in Madrid when he is capable of nerving himself to it and in the provinces he is as cynical as ever. He is nearly through as a matador.

There are two matadors I have said nothing about because they were no part of the decadence of the fighting bull but rather individual cases. They would have been the same at any epoch. These two are Nicanor Villalta and Nino de la Palma. But first I must explain why there should be so much discussion of individuals. Individuals are interesting, Madame, but they are not all. In this case it is because, with the decadence of bullfighting, it has become altogether a matter of the individual. Some one has seen a bullfight. You ask who were the matadors. If they remember the names you know exactly what sort of bullfight they may have seen. For, now, certain matadors are only capable of certain things. They have become as much specialists as doctors. In the old days you went to a doctor and he fixed up, or tried to fix up, whatever was wrong with you. So in the old days you went to a bullfight and the matadors were matadors; they had served a real apprenticeship, knew bullfighting, performed as skillfully as their ability and courage permitted with cape, muleta, banderillas, and they killed the bulls. It is of no use to describe the state of specialization doctors have reached, nor speak of the aspects of this which are most repellent and ridiculous because every one has some contact with them sooner or later, but a person who is going to the bullfights does not know that this malady of specialization has spread to bullfighting so that there are matadors who are only good with the cape and useless at anything else. The spectators may not watch the cape work closely, it all being new and strange to their eyes, and they will then think that the rest of the performance of that particular matador is representative of bullfighting and judge it, bullfighting, accordingly, when, in reality, it is the sorriest parody of the way bulls should be fought.

What is needed in bullfighting to-day is a complete bullfighter who is at the same time an artist to save it from the specialists; the bullfighters who can do only one thing, and who do it superlatively, but who require a special, almost made-to-order bull to bring their art to its highest point or, sometimes, to be able to have any art at all. What it needs is a god to drive the half-gods out. But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones. There is no record in the Bible of the number of fake messiahs that came before Our Lord, but the history of the last ten years of bullfighting would record little else.

It is because you may see some of these fake messiahs in action that it is important to know about them. You do not know whether you have seen a bullfight or not until you know whether the bulls were really bulls and the matadors really bullfighters.

For instance, you might see Nicanor Villalta. If you saw him in Madrid you could think he was splendid and see something very fine because, in Madrid, he keeps his feet together when he uses the cape and muleta and thus keeps from being grotesque and he always, in Madrid, kills very valiantly. Villalta is a strange case. He has a neck three times as long as that of the average man. He is six feet tall to start with and those six feet are mostly legs and neck.

You cannot compare it with the neck of a giraffe because the giraffe’s neck looks natural. Villalta’s neck looks as though it were being stretched out right before your eyes. It seems to stretch like rubber but it never snaps back. It would be wonderful if it did. Now a man with such a neck if he keeps his feet together, looks fairly normal; if he keeps his feet together, bends backward at the waist and inclines that neck toward the bull a certain effect is produced which while not æsthetic is not completely grotesque, but once he spreads his legs and his long arms apart no valor can save him from being utterly ridiculous. One night in San Sebastian, as we walked along the concha, Villalta talked about his neck, in his Aragonese sort of baby talk dialect, cursed it and told us how he had to concentrate always, remember always, in order not to be grotesque. He invented a sort of gyroscopic way of using the muleta, of making his unnatural natural passes, his feet tight together, his gigantic muleta (spread out it would be large enough for a respectable hotel bed sheet) in the right hand, spread by the sword, he spins slowly with the bull. No one passes the bull closer, no one works closer to the bull, and no one spins as he, the master spins. With the cape he is not good, he is much too fast with it and too snatchy, and killing he goes in straight and follows the sword well with his body but he, often, instead of dropping his left hand low so that the bull follows it and uncovers the vital spot between his shoulders, blinds the bull with the red volume of his muleta and relies on his height to carry him over the horns and let him get the sword well in. Sometimes, however, he kills absolutely correctly and according to the rules. Lately his killing has been almost classical and very consistent. Everything he does he does bravely and everything he does he does in his own way, so that if you see Nicanor Villalta that is not bullfighting either. But you should see him once in Madrid where he puts out everything he has and if he has a bull that permits him to keep his feet together and only one of six will, you will see something very strange, very emotional and very, thank God, except for the great courage employed, unique.

If you see Nino de la Palma the chances are you will see cowardice in its least attractive form; its fat rumped, prematurely bald from using hair fixatives, prematurely senile form. He, of all the young bullfighters who came up in the ten years after Belmonte’s first retirement, raised the most false hopes and proved the greatest disappointment. He started bullfighting in Malaga and he only fought twenty-one times in the ring, in contrast to the eight to ten years of apprenticeship of the run of old-time bullfighters, before he was made a full-fledged matador. There were two great bullfighters who became full matadors when they were only sixteen years of age, Costillares and Joselito, and because they seemed to skip all apprenticeship and found a royal road to learning many boys have been given premature and disastrous elevation. Nino de la Palma was a great sample of this. The only cases where these early alternatives were justified were where the boys had served years as child bullfighters and came from bullfighting families so they could make up in early paternal or fraternal training and counsel what they lacked in experience. Even then it was only successful if they were super-geniuses. I say super-geniuses because every matador is a genius. You cannot learn to be a full matador any more than you can learn to be a major-league ballplayer, an opera singer, or a good professional boxer. You can learn to play baseball, to box, or to sing, but unless you have a certain degree of genius you cannot make your living at baseball or boxing or singing in opera. In bullfighting this genius, which must be there to start with, is further complicated by the necessity of physical courage to face wounding and possible death after the wounding has become reality through its first experience. Cayetano Ordonez, Nino de la Palma, in his first season as a matador, promoted in the spring after some beautiful performances as a novillero in Sevilla, Malaga and some incomplete ones in Madrid, looked like the messiah who had come to save bullfighting if ever any one did.

I tried to describe how he looked and a couple of his fights in a book one time. I was present the day of his first presentation as a matador in Madrid and I saw him in Valencia that year in competition with Juan Belmonte, returned from retirement, do two faenas that were so beautiful and wonderful that I can remember them pass by pass to-day. He was sincerity and purity of style itself with the cape, he did not kill badly, although, except when he had luck, he was not a great killer. He did kill several times recibiendo, receiving the bull on the sword in the old manner and he was beautiful with the muleta. Gregorio Corrochano, the bullfighter critic of the influential newspaper, A. B. C., in Madrid, said of him, “Es de Ronda y se llama Cayetano.” He is from Ronda, the cradle of bullfighting, and they call him Cayetano, a great bullfighter’s name; the first name of Cayetano Sanz, the greatest old-time stylist. The phrase went all over Spain. Translated freely it might be, in its implications, as though a great young golfer many years from now should come from Atlanta again and his name be Bobby Jones. Cayetano Ordonez looked like a bullfighter, he acted like a bullfighter and for one season he was a bullfighter. I saw him in most of his fights and in all his best ones. At the end of the season he was gored severely and painfully in the thigh, very near the femoral artery.

That was the end of him. The next year he had the most contracts of any matador in the profession, signed because of his first splendid year, and his actions in the ring were a series of disasters. He could hardly look at a bull. His fright as he had to go in to kill was painful to see and he spent the whole season assassinating bulls in the way that offered him least danger, running across their line of charge and shoving the sword at their necks, sticking them in the lungs, anywhere he could reach without bringing his body within range of the horns. It was the most shameful season any matador had ever had up until that year in bullfighting. What had happened was that the horn wound, the first real goring, had taken all his valor. He never got it back. He had too much imagination. Several times, in succeeding years, he nerved himself to give good performances in Madrid so that by publicity they would give him in the press he would still obtain contracts. The Madrid papers are distributed and read all over Spain and a triumph by a bullfighter in the capital is read about all over the peninsula while a triumph in the provinces goes no farther than the immediate neighborhood and is always discounted in Madrid because the fighters’ managers always announce triumphs by telephone and telegram from wherever their fighters appear in the provinces even though the fighter may have nearly been lynched by the disgusted spectators. But these nerved-up performances were the brave actions of a coward.

Now the brave actions of a coward are very valuable in psychological novels and are always extremely valuable to the man who performs them, but they are not valuable to the public who, season in and season out, pay to see a bullfighter. All they do is give that bullfighter a seeming value which he does not have. Going sometimes to church in his bullfighting clothes to pray before the fight, sweating under the armpits, praying that the bull will embiste, that is charge frankly and follow the cloth well; oh blessed Virgin that thou wilt give me a bull that will embiste well, blessed Virgin, give me this bull, blessed Virgin, that I should touch this bull in Madrid to-day on a day without wind; promising something of value or a pilgrimage, praying for luck, frightened sick, and then that afternoon perhaps such a bull comes out and the fighter’s face drawn with the strain of maintaining a bravery that is not there; sometimes simulating almost successfully the light-heartedness of a great faena; the cowardly bullfighter by a taut unnatural nerve-strained effort, abrogating his imagination, does a splendid and brilliant performance. One of these a year in Madrid in the spring time gives him enough contracts to keep him in circulation, but they are really of no importance. If you see one you are fortunate, but you will go to see that matador twenty times in the year and never see another.

Thinking about all this you must have either the bullfighter’s standpoint or the spectator’s. It is the matter of death that makes all the confusion. Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor. In Spain honor is a very real thing. Called pundonor, it means honor, probity, courage, self-respect and pride in one word. Pride is the strongest characteristic of the race and it is a matter of pundonor not to show cowardice. Once it has been shown, truly and unmistakably shown, honor is gone and then a bullfighter may give purely cynical performances dosing his effort, only creating danger for himself if there is financial need for improving his standing and obtaining contracts. A bullfighter is not always expected to be good, only to do his best. He is excused for bad work if the bull is very difficult, he is expected to have off-days, but he is expected to do the best he can with the given bull. But once his honor is gone you cannot be sure that he will do his best or that he will do anything at all except technically fulfill his obligation by killing his bull as safely, dully, and dishonestly as he can. Having lost his honor he goes along living through his contracts, hating the public he fights before, telling himself that they have no right to hoot and jeer at him who faces death when they sit comfortable and safe in the seats, telling himself he can always do great work if he wants to and they can wait until he wants. Then in one year he finds that he no longer can do good work even when he has a good bull and makes the great effort to nerve himself and the next year is usually the one in which he retires. Because a Spaniard must have some honor and when he no longer has the honor-among-thieves sort of belief that he can be good if he only wants to as sustenance then he retires and he gains honor with himself for that decision. This honor thing is not some fantasy that I am trying to inflict on you in the way writers on the peninsula give out their theories on its people. I swear it is true. Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

Honor in the bullfighter is as necessary to a bullfight as good bulls and it is because there are a half dozen bullfighters, some of them with the greatest talent, who possess the very minimum of it; this condition being caused by early exploitation of the bullfighter with consequent cynicism or sometimes permanent cowardice caused by wounds, to be differentiated from the temporary loss of nerve that may always follow a goring, that you may see bad bullfights altogether aside from the shortcomings and incompletely trained fighters.

Now, what puzzles you, Madame? What would you like explained?

Old lady: I notice that when one of the horses was hit by the bull some sawdust came out. What explanation have you for that, young man?

Madame, that sawdust was placed in the horse by a kindly veterinarian to fill a void created by the loss of other organs.

Old lady: Thank you, sir. You made me understand it all. But surely the horse could not permanently replace those organs with sawdust?

Madame, it is only a temporary measure, and one that no one can well approve of.

Old lady: And yet I find it very cleanly, that is if the sawdust be pure and sweet.

Madame, no sweeter, purer sawdust ever stuffed a horse than that used in the Madrid ring.

Old lady: I am very glad to hear it. Tell me who is the gentleman smoking the cigar and what are those things he is eating?

Madame, that is Dominguin the successful promoter, ex-matador and manager of Domingo Ortega and he is eating shrimp.

Old lady: Let us order some, if it be not too difficult, and eat them ourselves. He has a kindly face.

He has indeed, but do not loan him money. The shrimps here are of the best although they are larger across the street and are there known as langostinos. Waiter, three orders of gambas.

Old lady: What did you call them, sir?

Gambas.

Old lady: The word means limb in the Italian tongue if I am not mistaken.

Author: There is an Italian restaurant not far from here if you should wish to dine there.

Old lady: Is it frequented by the bullfighters?

Author: Never, Madame. It is full of politicians who are becoming statesmen while one watches them.

Old lady: Then let us dine elsewhere. Where do the matadors eat?

Author: They eat in modest pensions.

Old lady: Do you know such a one?

Author: I do indeed.

Old lady: I would like to know them better.

Author: The modest pensions?

Old lady: No, sir, the bullfighters.

Author: Madame, many of them are wracked with disease.

Old lady: Tell me of their diseases that I may judge for myself. Are they affected with mumps?

Author: Nay, madame, mumps claims but few victims amongst them.

Old lady: I have had the mumps and so I do not fear them. As for these other diseases are they rare and strange like their costumes?

Author: No, they are most common. We will discuss them later.

Old lady: But tell me first before you go; was this Maera the bravest bullfighter you have known?

Author: He was, madame, because, of the naturally brave ones, he was most intelligent. It is easier to be stupid and naturally brave than to be exceedingly intelligent and still completely brave. No one would deny that Marcial Lalanda is brave but his bravery is all of intelligence and was acquired. Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, who married the sister of Joselito and was an excellent banderillero, but with a heavy style, was very brave but he laid his bravery on as with a trowel. It was as though he were constantly showing you the quantity of hair on his chest or the way in which he was built in his more private parts. That is not the function of bravery in bullfighting. It should be a quality whose presence permits the fighter to perform all acts he chooses to attempt unhampered by apprehension. It is not something to club the public with.

Old lady: I have never been clubbed with it yet.

Author: Madame, you will be clubbed silly with it if you ever see Sanchez Mejias.

Old lady: When can I see him?

Author: He is now retired, but if he should lose his money you would see him fight again.

Old lady: You do not seem to care for him.

Author: Although I respect his bravery, his skill with the sticks and his insolence, I do not care for him as a matador, nor as a banderillero, nor as a person. Therefore I devote little space to him in this book.

Old lady: Are you not prejudiced?

Author: Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open. But cannot that be because one part of our mind, that which we act with, becomes prejudiced through experience and still we keep another part completely open to observe and judge with?

Old lady: Sir, I do not know.

Author: Madame, neither do I and it may well be that we are talking horseshit.

Old lady: That is an odd term and one I did not encounter in my youth.

Author: Madame, we apply the term now to describe unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over-metaphysical tendency in speech.

Old lady: I must learn to use these terms correctly.

CHAPTER 10

THERE ARE three acts to the fighting of each bull and they are called in Spanish los tres tercios de la lidia, or the three thirds of the combat. The first act, where the bull charges the picadors, is the suerte de varas, or the trial of the lances. Suerte is an important word in Spanish. It means, according to the dictionary: Suerte, f., chance, hazard, lots, fortune, luck, good luck, haphazard; state, condition, fate, doom, destiny, kind, sort; species, manner, mode, way, skillful manœuvre; trick, feat, juggle, and piece of ground separated by landmark. So the translation of trial or manœuvre is quite arbitrary, as any translation must be from the Spanish.

The action of the picadors in the ring and the work of the matadors who are charged with protecting them with their capes when they are dismounted make up the first act of the bullfight. When the president signals for the end of this act and the bugle blows the picadors leave the ring and the second act begins. There are no horses in the ring after the first act except the dead horses which are covered with canvas. Act one is the act of the capes, the pics and the horses. In it the bull has the greatest opportunity to display his bravery or cowardice.

Act two is that of the banderillas. These are pairs of sticks about a yard long, seventy centimetres to be exact, with a harpoon-shaped steel point four centimetres long at one end. They are supposed to be placed, two at a time, in the humped muscle at the top of the bull’s neck as he charges the man who holds them. They are designed to complete the work of slowing up the bull and regulating the carriage of his head which has been begun by the picadors; so that his attack will be slower, but surer and better directed. Four pair of banderillas are usually put in. If they are placed by the banderilleros or peones they must be placed, above all other considerations, quickly and in the proper position. If the matador himself places them he may indulge in a preparation which is usually accompanied by music. This is the most picturesque part of the bullfight and the part most spectators care for the most when first seeing fights. The mission of the banderilleros is not only to force the bull by hooking to tire his neck muscles and carry his head lower but also, by placing them at one side or another, to correct a tendency to hook to that side. The entire act of the banderillas should not take more than five minutes. If it is prolonged the bull becomes discomposed and the fight loses the tempo it must keep, and if the bull is an uncertain and dangerous one he has too many opportunities to see and charge men unarmed with any lure, and so develops a tendency to search for the man, the bundle, as the Spanish call him, behind the cloth when the matador comes out for the last act with the sword and muleta.

The president changes the act after three or at most four pairs of banderillas have been placed and the third and final division is the death. It is made up of three parts. First the brindis or salutation of the president and dedication or toasting of the death of the bull, either to him or to some other person by the matador, followed by the work of the matador with the muleta. This is a scarlet serge cloth which is folded over a stick which has a sharp spike at one end and a handle at the other. The spike goes through the cloth which is fastened to the other end of the handle with a thumb screw so that it hangs in folds along the length of the stick. Muleta means literally crutch, but in bullfighting it refers to the scarlet-serge-draped stick with which the matador is supposed to master the bull, prepare him for killing and finally hold in his left hand to lower the bull’s head and keep it lowered while he kills the animal by a sword thrust high up between his shoulder blades.

These are the three acts in the tragedy of the bullfight, and it is the first one, the horse part, which indicates what the others will be and, in fact, makes the rest possible. It is in the first act that the bull comes out in full possession of all of his faculties, confident, fast, vicious and conquering. All his victories are in the first act. At the end of the first act he has apparently won. He has cleared the ring of mounted men and is alone. In the second act he is baffled completely by an unarmed man and very cruelly punished by the banderillas so that his confidence and his blind general rage goes and he concentrates his hatred on an individual object. In the third act he is faced by only one man who must, alone, dominate him by a piece of cloth placed over a stick, and kill him from in front, going in over the bull’s right horn to kill him with a sword thrust between the arch of his shoulder blades.

When I first saw bullfights the only part that I did not like was the banderillas. They seemed to make such a great and cruel change in the bull. He became an altogether different animal when the banderillas were in and I resented the loss of the free, wild quality he brought with him into the ring; that quality that reaches its greatest expression when he faces the picadors. When the banderillas are in he is done for. They are the sentencing. The first act is the trial, the second act is the sentencing and the third the execution. But afterwards when I learned how much more dangerous the bull becomes as he goes on the defensive, how, after the banderillas have sobered him and his speed of foot has been cut he aims every horn stroke, as a hunter aims at an individual bird in a covey rather than shooting at them all and missing, and finally, when I learned the things that can be done with him as an artistic property when he is properly slowed and still has kept his bravery and his strength I kept my admiration for him always, but felt no more sympathy for him than for a canvas or the marble a sculpture cuts or the dry powder snow your skis cut through.

I know no modern sculpture, except Brancusi’s, that is in any way the equal of the sculpture of modern bullfighting. But it is an impermanent art as singing and the dance are, one of those that Leonardo advised men to avoid, and when the performer is gone the art exists only in the memory of those who have seen it and dies with them. Looking at photographs, reading descriptions, or trying to recall it too often can only kill it in the memory of an individual. If it were permanent it could be one of the major arts, but it is not and so it finishes with whoever makes it, while a major art cannot even be judged until the unimportant physical rottenness of whoever made it is well buried. It is an art that deals with death and death wipes it out. But it is never truly lost, you say, because in all arts all improvements and discoveries that are logical are carried on by some one else; so nothing is lost, really, except the man himself. Yes, and it would be very comforting to know that if at his death all the painter’s canvases disappeared with him, that Cezanne’s discoveries, for example, were not lost but would be used by all his imitators. Like hell it would.

Suppose a painter’s canvases disappeared with him and a writer’s books were automatically destroyed at his death and only existed in the memory of those that had read them. That is what happens in bullfighting. The art, the method, the improvements of doing, the discoveries remain; but the individual, whose doing of them made them, who was the touchstone, the original, disappears and until another individual, as great, comes, the things, by being imitated, with the original gone, soon distort, lengthen, shorten, weaken and lose all reference to the original. All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures. The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own. But there is sometimes a long time between great ones and those that have known the former great ones rarely recognize the new ones when they come. They want the old, the way it was that they remember it. But the others, the contemporaries, recognize the new great ones because of their ability to know so quickly, and finally even the ones who remember the old do. They are excused from not recognizing at once because they, in the period of waiting, see so many false ones that they become so cautious that they cannot trust their feelings; only their memory. Memory, of course, is never true.

After you get a great bullfighter, you may lose him most easily from disease; much more easily than by death. Of the only two really great ones since Belmonte retired neither ever made a full career. Tuberculosis took one and syphilis ruined the other. They are the two occupational diseases of the matador. He starts the corrida in the hot sun, in a sun that is often so hot that people with little money will gladly pay three times as much for their ticket to be able to sit in the shade. He wears a heavy, gold-brocaded jacket that makes him sweat in the sun as a boxer sweats skipping rope in training. From this heat, in this perspiration, with no chance for a shower or an alcohol rub to close the pores, the matador, as the sun goes down, and the shadow of the amphitheatre falls on the sand, stands, comparatively inactive but in readiness to aid, while his companions kill their last bulls. Often at the end of summer and in the early fall in the high plateaus of Spain it is cold enough for you to need an overcoat at the end of a bullfight in a town where it was so hot in the sun at the beginning of the fight that you were liable to sunstroke if you were bareheaded. Spain is a mountain country and a good part of it is African and in the fall and end of summer when the sun is gone the cold comes quickly and deadly for any one who must stand in it, wet with sweat, unable even to wipe himself dry. A boxer takes every precaution to avoid catching cold when he is in a sweat, and a bullfighter can take none. That would be enough to account for the number who get tuberculosis even without the fatigue of the nightly journeying, and dust and daily fighting during the feria season of August and September.

Syphilis is another thing. Boxers, bullfighters and soldiers contract syphilis for the same reasons that make them choose those professions. In boxing most sudden reversals of form, the majority of cases of what is called punch drunkenness, of “walking on the heels” are products of syphilis. You cannot name the individuals in a book because it is libelous, but any one in the profession will tell you of a dozen recent cases. There are always recent cases. Syphilis was the disease of the crusaders in the middle ages. It was supposed to be brought to Europe by them, and it is a disease of all people who lead lives in which a disregard of consequences dominates. It is an industrial accident, to be expected by all those who lead irregular sexual lives and from their habits of mind would rather take chances than use prophylactics, and it is a to-be-expected end, or rather phase, of the life of all fornicators who continue their careers far enough. A few years ago I had the opportunity of observing the rakes’ progress of some citizens who, in college, were great moral influences, but after coming out into the world discovered the joys of immorality, which, as believers in Yale in China, they had never indulged in as young men, and, delivering themselves to these joys, seemed to believe that they had discovered, if not indeed invented, sexual intercourse. They believed this was this great new thing that they had just discovered and were most joyously promiscuous until their first experience with disease which they then believed they too had discovered and invented. Surely one could never have known of this dreadful thing, nor could have experienced it or it would not have been allowed to exist and they become again, for a time, preachers and practisers of the greatest purity of life or, at least, limited their activities to a narrower social circle. There has been much change in fashion in morals and many who were formerly destined for teachers in fashionable Sunday-school classes are now our most prominent rounders. Like the bullfighters who are ruined by their first goring they have really no vocation as rounders, but it is a trial to watch or to hear them during their discovery of what Guy de Maupassant classed among the diseases of adolescence, and of what, incidentally, to justify his right so to speak, he died of. They say, “He jests at scars who never felt a wound.” But he jests very well at scars who is covered with them, or at least men once did, although now our jesters will be most humorous about anything which happens to any one else, and the moment they are touched by anything themselves cry out, “But you don’t understand. This is really serious!” and become great moralists or abandon the whole thing through something as banal as suicide. Probably venereal diseases must exist as bulls must have horns in order to keep all things in their proper relation, or the numbers of Casanovas and of matadors would be so great there would be practically no one else. But I would give much to have it eliminated in Spain, because of what it can do to a great matador. Though even if we did without it in Spain it could be acquired in other places or men would go upon a crusade and bring it back from somewhere.

You cannot expect a matador who has triumphed in the afternoon by taking chances not to take them in the night and “mas cornadas dan las mujeres.” Three things keep boys from promiscuous intercourse, religious belief, timidity, and fear of venereal diseases. The last is most commonly the basis of appeal made by the Y. M. C. A. and other institutions for clean living. Against these influences in a bullfighter is the tradition which demands that a torero have many affairs, his inclinations, the fact that there will always be women after him, some for himself, some for his money and plenty for both, and his contempt for venereal diseases as danger. But, says the old lady, do many bullfighters contract these diseases?

Madame, they contract them as all men do who go with women thinking only of the woman and not of their future health.

Old lady: But why do they not take thought for their health?

Madame, it is difficult. Truly it is not a thought that comes into the head of a man if he is well pleased. Even though a woman be a whore, yet if she be a good whore a man thinks well of her at the time and sometimes after.

Old lady: And are these illnesses then all from commercial women?

No, madame, they come often from friends or the friends of friends, or from any one you may bed with here, there or indeed anywhere.

Old lady: It must be most dangerous then to be a man.

It is indeed, madame, and but few survive it. ’Tis a hard trade and the grave is at the end of it.

Old lady: Would it not be better if these men all married and bedded only with their wives?

For their souls’ good, yes, and for their bodies, too. But as bullfighters many are ruined if they marry if they love their wives truly.

Old lady: And their wives? What of them?

Of their wives who can speak who has not been one? If the husband has no contracts he does not make a living. But at each contract he risks death and no man can go into the ring and say that he will come out alive. It is not like being wife to a soldier, for your soldier earns his living when there is no war; nor your sailor for he is long gone, but his ship is his protection; nor your boxer for he does not face death. It is like being wife to no other man and I would not wish it for her if I had a daughter.

Old lady: Have you a daughter, sir?

No, madame.

Old lady: Then at least, we need not worry for her. But I wish that the bullfighters did not get these illnesses.

Ah, madame, you will find no man who is a man who will not bear some marks of past misfortune. Either he has been hit here, or broken this or contracted that, but a man throws off many things and I know a champion at golf who never putted so well as with the gonorrhea.

Old lady: Have you no remedy then?

Madame, there is no remedy for anything in life. Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes and we’d do best to leave off all discoursing now and get to table. — Within our time the scientists may well abolish these old diseases and we’ll live to see the end of all morality. But meantime I would rather dine on suckling pig at Botin’s than sit and think of casualties my friends have suffered.

Old lady: Then let us dine. To-morrow you can tell us more about the bullfights.

CHAPTER 11

THE FIGHTING BULL is to the domestic bull as the wolf is to the dog. A domestic bull may be evil tempered and vicious as a dog may be mean and dangerous, but he will never have the speed, the quality of muscle and sinew and the peculiar build of the fighting bull any more than the dog will have the sinews of the wolf, his cunning and his width of jaw. Bulls for the ring are wild animals. They are bred from strain that comes down in direct descent from the wild bulls that ranged over the Peninsula and they are bred on ranches with thousands of acres of range where they live as free ranging animals. The contacts with men of the bulls that are to appear in the ring are held to the absolute minimum.

The physical characteristics of the fighting bull are its thick and very strong hide with glossy pelt, small head, but wide forehead; strength and shape of horns, which curve forward; short, thick neck with the great hump of muscle which erects when the bull is angry; wide shoulders, very small hooves and length and slenderness of tail. The female of the fighting bull is not as heavily built as the male; has a smaller head; shorter and thinner horns; a longer neck, a less pronounced dewlap under the jaw; is not as wide through the chest, and has no visible udder. I have frequently seen these cows in the ring in the amateur fights in Pamplona charging like bulls, tossing the amateurs about and they were invariably spoken of by the visiting foreigners as steers, since they showed no visible signs of their cowhood and gave no evidence of femininity. It is in the female of the fighting bull that you see most plainly the difference between the savage and domestic animal.

One of the things one hears oftenest about bullfighting is the statement that a cow is much more dangerous when charging than a bull as the bull shuts his eyes while a cow keeps hers open. I do not know who started this, but there is no truth in it. The females that are used in amateur fights almost invariably make for the man rather than the cape, cut in on him rather than charge straight and will often single out one particular man or boy and pursue him through a crowd of half a hundred, but they do this not because of any innate superior intelligence in the female, as Virginia Woolf might suppose, but because female calves, since they are never to appear in the ring in normal fights and since there is no objection to their becoming completely educated in all the phases of bullfighting, are used exclusively for the bullfighters to train on with cape and muleta. Either a bull calf or a cow calf, if passed a few times with cape or muleta, learns all about it, remembers, and, if it is a bull, becomes consequently useless for a formal bullfight where everything is built on the basis of this being the bull’s first encounter with a dismounted man. If the bull is unfamiliar with cape or muleta and charges straight, the man can create the danger himself by working as close to the bull’s charge as possible and will be able to attempt a variety of passes, selecting them himself and arranging them in an emotional sequence rather than being forced into them as defensive measures. If the bull has been fought before, he will cut in constantly on the man, will chop with his horns into the cloth looking for the man, and will create all the danger himself, putting the man constantly in retreat and on the defensive and making any clarity of passes or brilliance of fight impossible.

The bullfight has been so developed and organized that the bull has just time enough, coming into the ring completely unfamiliar with dismounted men, to learn to distrust all their artifices and reach the summit of his danger at the moment of killing. The bull learns so rapidly in the ring that if the bullfight drags, is badly done, or is prolonged an extra ten minutes he becomes almost unkillable by the means prescribed in the rules of the spectacle. It is for this reason that bullfighters always practice and train with female calves which, after a few sessions, become so educated, the fighters say, that they can talk Greek and Latin. After this education, they are released in the ring for the amateurs; sometimes with naked horns, sometimes with the points covered with a leather ball, they come in as fast and lithe as deer to practice on the amateur capemen and aspirant bullfighters of all sorts in the capeas; to toss, rip, gore, pursue and inspire with terror these amateurs until, when the vacas tire, steers are let into the ring to take them out to rest in the corrals until their next appearance. The fighting cows, or vaquillas, seem to enjoy these appearances. They are not goaded, no divisa is placed in their shoulders, they are not irritated to make them charge and they seem to enjoy charging and tossing as much as a fighting cock does fighting. Of course they receive no punishment while the bull’s bravery is judged by the manner in which he behaves under punishment.

The manœuvring of fighting bulls is made possible by the operation of the herd instinct which makes it possible to drive bulls in groups of six or more where one bull, if detached from the herd, will charge instantly and repeatedly anything, man, horse, or any moving object, vehicle or otherwise, until he is killed; and by the use of trained steers or cabestros to herd and decoy the fighting bulls as wild elephants are caught and herded by elephants which have been tamed. It is one of the most interesting of all phases of bullfighting to see the steers work in the operations of loading, separating, putting the bulls into the runways that lead to the shipping cages and in all the many operations connected with the raising, transporting and unloading of fighting bulls.

In the old days before they were shipped in their cages by railroad, or now, since the building of good roads in Spain, sometimes in motor trucks, an excellent and much less fatiguing way, bulls were driven along the roads in Spain, the fighting bulls surrounded by steers and the whole herd guarded by the mounted herders carrying their protective lances, much like those the picadors use, raising a cloud of dust as they moved and sending the inhabitants of villages running into their houses to slam and lock doors and look through the windows at the wide, dusty backs, the great horns, the quick eyes and damp muzzles, the belled necks of the cabestros and the short jackets, brown faces and wide high-crowned gray hats of the herdsmen moving along through the street. When they are together, moving in the herd, they are quiet because the feeling of numbers gives them confidence and the herd instinct makes them follow the leader. Bulls are still driven in that way in the provinces away from the railways and occasionally one will desmandar or unherd. One year when we were in Spain this happened before the last house of a little village outside of Valencia. The bull stumbled and went to his knees and the others were past when he got to his feet. The first thing he saw was an open door with a man standing in it. He charged at once, lifted the man clear out of the door, and swung him back over his head. Inside the house he saw no one and went straight through. In the bedroom a woman sat in a rocking chair. She was old and had not heard the commotion. The bull demolished the chair and killed the old woman. The man who had been tossed in the doorway came in with a shotgun to protect his wife who was already lying where the bull had tossed her into a corner of the room. He fired point blank at the bull but only tore up his shoulder. The bull caught the man, killed him, saw a mirror, charged that, charged and smashed a tall, old-fashioned armoire and then went out into the street. He went a little way down the road, met a horse and cart, charged and killed the horse and overturned the cart. The driver stayed inside it. The herders by this time were coming back down the road, their galloping horses raising a great dust. They drove out two steers that picked the bull up and, as soon as there was a steer on each side of him, his crest lowered, he dropped his head and trotted, between the two steers, back to the herd.

Bulls in Spain have been known to charge a motor car and even, getting onto the tracks, to stop a train, refusing to back up or leave the track when the train stopped and when, with much blowing of the whistle the train finally advanced, charging the engine blindly. A really brave fighting bull is afraid of nothing on earth and in various towns in Spain in special and barbarous exhibitions a bull has charged an elephant repeatedly; bulls have killed both lions and tigers, charging these animals as blithely as they go for the picadors. A true fighting bull fears nothing and, to me, is the finest of all animals to watch in action and repose. From a standing start a fighting bull will outrun a horse for twenty-five yards although a horse will beat him in fifty yards. The bull can turn on his feet almost as a cat does, he can turn much quicker than a polo pony, and at four years he has the strength in his neck and shoulder muscles to lift a horse and rider and throw them over his back. Many times I have seen a bull attack the inch-thick wooden planks of the barrera with his horns, or horn rather, for he uses either the one or the other, and splinter the planks into bits, and there is, in the bull ring museum at Valencia, a heavy iron stirrup that a bull from the ranch of Don Esteban Hernandez perforated with a horn stroke to the depth of four inches. This stirrup is preserved not because it is unique for having the horn driven through it but because of the fact that on this occasion the picador was miraculously not wounded by the horn stroke.

There is a book, now out of print in Spain, called Toros Celebres, which chronicles, alphabetically by the names the breeders gave them, the manner of dying and feats of some three hundred and twenty-two pages of celebrated bulls. At random you can take Hechicero, or the Wizard, from the ranch of Concha and Sierra, a gray bull fought in Cadiz in 1844 who sent to the hospital all the picadors of all the matadors of the fight, a minimum of seven men, in addition to killing seven horses. Vibora, or the Viper, from the ranch of Don Jose Bueno, a black bull, fought at Vista Alegra, the 9th of August, 1908, as he came into the ring, jumped the barrera and gored the bull ring carpenter, Luis Gonzales, giving him an enormous wound in the right thigh. The matador charged to kill Vibora, was unable to do so and he was returned to the corrals. That is not the sort of case which would be long remembered except, perhaps, by the carpenter, and Vibora was probably included in the book more because of the timeliness of his action and the recent impression he had made on possible buyers of the book than for any permanent motive. There is no record of what the matador named Jaqueta, whose only appearance in history is this one action, went through before he was declared unable to kill Vibora, and the bull may have been more memorable for more than the not exceptional goring of the carpenter. I have seen two carpenters gored myself and have never written a line about it.

The bull Zaragoza, raised by the Lesireas ranch, while being taken to the ring at Moetia, Portugal, on the 2nd of October, 1898, broke out of his cage and pursued and wounded many people. He pursued a boy who ran into the town hall, and the bull, pursuing the boy, climbed the stairs to the first floor, where, according to the book, he caused great destruction. He probably did.

Comisario, of the ranch of Don Victoriano Ripamilan, a red bull with the eye of a partridge and wide horns, was the third bull fought in Barcelona on the 14th of April, 1895. He jumped the barrera and got into the grandstand, and, driving through the spectators, the book says, produced the imagined disorder and damage. The civil-guard, Isidro Silva, drove his sabre into him and the corporal of the civil-guards, Ubaldo Vigueres, shot at him with his carbine, the bullet passing through the neck muscles of the bull and lodging in the left breast of the bull ring servant, Juan Recaseus, who died on the spot. Comisario was finally lassoed and killed with dagger strokes.

None of these occurrences belong to the realm of pure bullfighting except the first, nor does the case of Huron, a bull of the ranch of Don Antonio Lopez Plata, which fought a Bengal tiger on the 24th of July, 1904, in the Plaza of San Sebastian. They fought in a steel cage and the bull whipped the tiger, but in one of his charges broke the cage apart and the two animals came out into the ring in the midst of the spectators. The police, attempting to finish the dying tiger and the very live bull, fired several volleys which “caused grave wounds to many spectators.” From the history of these various encounters between bulls and other animals I should say they were spectacles to stay away from, or at least to view from one of the higher boxes.

The bull Oficial, from the ranch of the Arribas brothers, fought in Cadiz the 5th of October, 1884, caught and gored a banderillero, jumped the barrera and gored the picador Chato three times, gored a civil-guard, broke the leg and three ribs of a municipal guard, and the arm of a night watchman. He would have been an ideal animal to turn loose when the police are clubbing manifestants in front of the city hall. Had he not been killed a strain of police-hating bulls might have been bred which would give the populace the advantage they lost in street fighting with the disappearance of the paving stone. A paving stone at short range is more effective than a club or sabre. The disappearance of cobble and paving stones has been more of a deterrent to the overthrowing of governments than machine guns, tear bombs and automatic pistols. For it is in the clashes when the government does not want to kill its citizens but to club, ride down and beat them into submission with the flat of a sabre that a government is overthrown. Any government that uses machine guns once too often on its citizens will fall automatically. Régimes are kept in with the club and the blackjack, not the machine gun or bayonet, and while there were paving stones there was never an unarmed mob to club.

The type of bull the aficionados of bullfighting rather than police-fighting would remember is Hechicero, whose feats were performed in the ring against trained bullfighters and in the face of punishment. It is the difference between street fights which are usually infinitely more exciting, portentous and useful, but out of place here, and the winning of a championship in boxing. Any bull might, on escaping, kill a number of people and smash up much property without taking punishment, but in the confusion and excitement of a bull getting into the grandstand the people who are in his way are in much less danger than a bullfighter is at the moment of killing, for the bull, when confused and in a mob of people, charges blindly and does not aim his horn strokes. A bull that jumps the barrera, unless he makes the leap while pursuing the man, is not a brave bull. He is a cowardly bull who is simply trying to escape the ring. The really brave bull welcomes the fight, accepts every invitation to fight, does not fight because he is cornered, but because he wants to and this bravery is measured, and can only be measured, by the number of times he freely and willingly, without pawing, threatening, or bluffing, accepts combat with the picador and whether, when the steel point of the pic is sunk in his muscles of neck or shoulder, he insists under the iron and continues his charge after he begins to really receive the punishment, until man and horse are thrown. A brave bull is one that, without any hesitation and in approximately the same part of the ring, will charge the picadors four times, paying no attention to the punishment he receives and each time charging with the steel in him until he has reversed the rider and horse.

It is only by his conduct against the pic that the bravery of a bull can be judged and appreciated, and the bravery of the bull is the primal root of the whole Spanish bullfight. The bravery of a truly brave bull is something unearthly and unbelievable. This bravery is not merely viciousness, ill-temper, and the panic-bred courage of a cornered animal. The bull is a fighting animal and where the fighting strain has been kept pure and all cowardice bred out he becomes often, when not fighting, the quietest and most peaceful acting in repose, of any animal. It is not the bulls that are most difficult to handle that make the best fights. The best of all fighting bulls have a quality, called nobility by the Spanish, which is the most extraordinary part of the whole business. The bull is a wild animal whose greatest pleasure is combat and which will accept combat offered to it in any form, or will take up anything it believes to be an offer of combat; yet the very best fighting bulls of all often recognize and know the mayoral or herder who is in charge of them on the ranch and on their trip to the ring, and will even allow him to stroke and pat them. I have seen a bull which in the corrals allowed the herder to stroke its nose, curry it like a horse, and even mount on its back, go into the ring without any preliminary excitement or goading, charge the picadors again and again, kill five horses, do its best to kill banderilleros and matador and be, in the ring, vicious as a cobra and brave as a charging lioness.

Of course not all bulls are noble, for one that the mayoral can make friends with, there are fifty that will charge even when he is bringing them food if they see any movement which makes them think he is challenging them. Neither are all bulls brave. When they are two years old they are tested for bravery by the breeder, being confronted with a picador on horseback either in a closed corral or on the open range. The year before they were branded, being thrown by men on horseback who tumble them over with a long blunt pole, and when, at two years, they are tested against the steel-tipped lances of the picadors they already have their numbers and names, and the breeder makes a note of the manifestations of bravery given by each one. Those that are not brave, if the bull breeder is scrupulous, are marked for veal. The others are marked in the book according to their bravery shown so that when he makes up a corrida of six bulls to ship away to some ring the breeder may dose the quality as he desires.

Branding is done as it is on ranches in the cattle-raising country of the American west except for the precautions necessary for separating the calves from their mothers, the necessity not to injure their horns or eyes and the complications of the marking. The branding irons are heated in a big fire and consist of the brand of the bull raiser, which is usually a combination of letters or a crest, and ten irons bearing the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The branding irons have a wooden handle and the points that are in the fire are heated red hot. The calves are in one corral, the fire and the irons in another; the two connected by a swinging door, and when the door is open the vaqueros drive them, one at a time, into the branding corral where they are thrown and held. It takes from four to five men to hold a fighting-bull calf still and they must be careful not to injure the budding horns, for a calf whose horns are injured will never be accepted for a formal bullfight, and the breeder then must sell him for a novillada or defective bullfight and lose at least two-thirds of his probable value. Also they must be very careful of their eyes since a straw in the eye may make a defect of vision that will unfit the bull for the ring. When they are branded one man holds the head, and the others the legs, body and tail. The calf’s head is usually placed on a sack of straw to protect it as much as possible, the legs are tied together and the tail pulled forward between the legs. The main brand is placed on the right hind quarters and the numbers along the flank. Both male and female calves are numbered. After the brands are on, the ears are slit or clipped with the sign of the ranch and the hairs at the end of the tails of the male calves are snipped with scissors so that they will grow out long and silky. Then the calf is released, gets up furious, charges everything and anything it sees and finally goes out of the opened door of the branding corral. The herradero or branding day is the noisiest, dustiest, most confused of all operations in bullfighting. When a Spaniard wishes to describe the utter confusion of a bad bullfight he compares it to a herradero.

The actual testing for bravery, the part of it which takes place in a closed corral, is the quietest of operations. Bulls are tested when they are two years old. At a year they are too young and not powerful enough to stand it, and at three years they are too powerful, too dangerous and would remember it too well. If they are tested in a closed corral this will be either square or round, fitted with burladeros or plank shelters for a few men with capes to stand behind. These are professional fighters, or amateurs who have been invited to the testing, being promised the chance of practicing with the female calves, and they take the calves in turn for their workouts.

The whole corral is usually about thirty yards across, or half the size of a major bull ring, the two-year-old bulls are in an adjacent corral and are let into the testing corral one at a time. When they come in, a picador, who wears the leather chaps and short jacket of a bull herder, is waiting for them, holding a long pic about twelve feet long and with a triangular steel point slightly shorter than that used in the actual fight. He places his horse with his back turned toward the gate the young bull has entered by and waits quietly. No one in the corral says a word and the picador does nothing to excite the bull, for the most important part of the testing is the willingness with which the bull charges without being harassed or annoyed in any way.

When the young bull charges every one notes his style; whether he charges from a distance, without pawing the ground first or without any preliminary bawling; when he comes at the horse whether he keeps his feet well back and thrusts with full power, keeping on pushing to reach the man and animal when the steel goes into his muscle, using the full force of his hind legs and the small of his back; or whether he gets his feet forward and only chops with his neck to try and get rid of the pic, turning quickly and quitting the charge when he is punished. If he does not charge at all he is, if the owner is scrupulous, certified for castration and the meat market. If he is sentenced to this the owner calls out “buey” or ox instead of saying “toro,” which means the bull has been approved for the ring.

If the bull knocks over horse and man, and sometimes even at two years they are able to, the bullfighters must take him away with their capes, but ordinarily the bulls are not allowed to see the capes at all. When they have charged the picador once, or at most twice, if their style and probable bravery could not be judged in the first charge, the gate to the open range is opened and they are allowed to go free. How they accept this freedom, whether they are eager or reluctant for it; hurrying off or turning at the gate to look back, wanting to charge again, are all valuable indications of how they will act in the ring.

Most breeders are reluctant to have the bulls charge more than once. They feel that a bull has only so many pics in him to accept. That if he takes two or three in the testing that is three less he will take in the ring, and so they put their faith in the lineage of the bulls and do the real testing on those bulls that are to be used at stud and on the cows. They believe that the get of an exceptional bull and really brave females are all proper bulls, and they call every two-year-old “toro” that is perfect of horn and body without making any practical test of their bravery.

Cows which are to be used for breeding are sometimes allowed to charge the testing picador as many as twelve or fifteen times and are passed with both cape and muleta by the bullfighters to test their charging quality and their aptitude for following the cloth. It is most important that the cows be of great bravery and that they take the cloth well, as these are qualities which they transmit to their offspring. They should be strong, well built, and sturdy. On the other hand if they have defects of horn this is not important as these are not generally transmittable. A tendency to shorter horns can be transmitted and breeders who are trying to make their product highly acceptable to bullfighters, so that these will select this breeders’ bulls when they have an opportunity in their contracts to specify the bulls to be fought, often try to breed down the length of horn by careful selection, trying to keep the length of horn to the minimum that the government delegates will allow and breed for a low-slanting horn which will pass below the knee when the bull’s head is lowered in charging, rather than a high horn that will pass higher and more dangerously as the man goes in to kill.

Bulls that are to be used in breeding are tested with greatest rigor. After they have been used for breeding for some years if they are then sent to the ring you may always recognize them. They seem to know all about the picadors. They will charge bravely often, but will be able to knock the pic out of the man’s hand with their horns, and I have seen one ignoring pic and horse, reach up and hook the man out of the saddle. If they have, too, been tested with cape and muleta they become, often, absolutely unkillable, and a bullfighter who has signed a contract to kill two “new bulls” is perfectly within his rights to refuse these bulls or to kill these learnéd animals in any way that he can. By law every bull that has appeared in the ring must be killed immediately thereafter to prevent bulls being used more than once. But this law is often broken in the provinces, and is always broken in capeas or amateur fights which have long been forbidden by law. A stud-bull that has been thoroughly tested has not the skill of these criminals, but he has been obviously fought before and any intelligent spectator can see the difference at once. In the testing of bulls it is important not to confuse the power of the young bull with his bravery. A bull may be strong enough in a single charge, if the pic should slip, to overthrow the rider and mount and make a fine showing while, if the pic should have held firm, he might have been quiet under the punishment, refused to insist and finally turned his head. Bulls are tested in corrals in Castilla, the country around Salamanca, Navarra and Extremadura, but in Andalucia they are usually tested in the open range.

Those who advocate testing in the open say that the true bravery of a bull can only be shown that way since in the corral he feels himself cornered, and any cornered animal will fight. In open-range testing though, the bulls are ridden after until they turn; are toppled by the long poles carried by the horsemen or are roused in some way before they charge the picador, while in the corral they are let absolutely alone and harassed in no way; so the two ways are about equal in advantage; the testing on the open range, with a crowd of mounted guests, is more picturesque, and the corral method is nearer to approximating the actual conditions of the bull ring.

All of the operations of bull raising to one who loves bullfighting are of great fascination and in the testings one has much eating, drinking, companionship, practical joking, bad amateur cape-work by the aristocracy, often excellent amateur cape-work by the visiting bootblacks who aspire to be matadors, and long days with the smell of cold, fall air, of dust and leather and lathered horses, and the big bulls not so far away looking very big in the fields, calm and heavy, and dominating the landscape with their confidence.

Fighting bulls are raised in the provinces of Navarra, Burgos, Palencia, Logrono, Zaragoza, Vallodolid, Zamora, Segovia, Salamanca, Madrid, Toledo, Albacete, Extremadura and Andalucia, but the principal regions are Andalucia, Castilla, and Salamanca. The biggest bulls and the best bred come from Andalucia and Castilla, and those which are made nearest to order for the bullfighters from Salamanca. Navarra still raises many bulls, but their cast, type and bravery have deteriorated greatly in the last twenty years.

All brave bulls may be roughly divided into two classes: those that are made, bred and created for bullfighters, and those that are bred to please their breeders. Salamanca stands at one extreme and Andalucia at the other.

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn’t there more dialogue? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn’t do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy. Citizen, perhaps you are right. Let us have a little dialogue.

What do you ask, Madame? Is there anything you would like to know about the bulls?

Yes, sir.

What would you like to know? I’ll tell you absolutely anything.

It is a difficult thing to ask, sir.

Do not let that trouble you; talk to me frankly; as you would to your doctor, or to another woman. Do not be afraid to ask what you would really like to know.

Sir, I would like to know about their love life.

Madame, you have come to just the man.

Then tell me, sir.

Madame, I will. It is as good a subject as another. It combines popular appeal, a touch of sex, a world of useful information and it lends itself to dialogue. Madame, their love lives are tremendous.

I had thought as much, sir, but can you not give us some statistics?

Most readily. The little calves are born in the winter months.

It was not of the little calves that we wished most to hear.

But you must be patient, Madame. All these things but lead to the little calves and so, indeed, they must be taken to start from them too. The little calves are born in three months of the winter and, counting backward nine months on your fingers as who, being married, has not counted forward nine months on their fingers many times, you find that if the calves are born in December, January and February the bulls have been let run with the cows during April, May and June when, as a fact, they most usually are. In a good ranch there are from two hundred to four hundred cows and for every fifty cows there is one bull. The usual ranch has two hundred cows and four seed bulls. These bulls are from three to five years old and older. When a bull is first turned loose with the cows no one knows how he will act, although were a bookmaker present he would lay you odds that the bull would show enthusiasm for his companions. But sometimes a bull will have nothing to do with them nor they with him and they will fight savagely with their horns making a clatter of horn on horn you can hear across the field. Sometimes such a bull will change his attitude toward one of the cows, but this is rare. At other times the bulls range quietly with the cows but will leave them to return to the other bulls, who, being destined for the ring, are never let run with the cows at all. But the ordinary result is that which the bookmaker would lay you odds would occur, and a single bull would do for more than fifty cows, but if there were too many he would finally weaken and end in impotence. Are these the facts you care to hear or do I speak too baldly?

No one could say, sir, you place the facts in any but a straightforward Christian way and we find them most instructive.

This gratifies me and I will tell you of an odd occurrence. The bull is polygamous as an animal, but occasionally an individual is found that is monogamous. Sometimes a bull on the range will come to so care for one of the fifty cows that he is with that he will make no case of all the others and will only have to do with her and she will refuse to leave his side on the range. When this occurs they take the cow from the herd and if the bull does not then return to polygamy he is sent with the other bulls that are for the ring.

I find that a sad story, sir.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. Especially do all stories of monogamy end in death, and your man who is monogamous while he often lives most happily, dies in the most lonely fashion. There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

Sir, I do not know what you mean by love. It does not sound well as you say it.

Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are all marked by it and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times. I would sooner have the pox than to fall in love with another woman loving the one I have.

What has this to do with the bulls, sir?

Nothing, Madame, nothing at all, it is only conversation to give you your money’s worth.

I find the subject interesting. What way are people marked who have had this thing or is that only a way of speaking?

All those who have really experienced it are marked, after it is gone, by a quality of deadness. I say this as a naturalist, not to be romantic.

This does not amuse me.

Nor is it designed to, Madame, but only to give you your money’s worth.

But often you amuse me very much.

Madame, with a little luck I will amuse you again.

CHAPTER 12

NO ONE CAN say, on seeing a fighting bull in the corrals, whether that bull will be brave in the ring although, usually, the quieter the bull is, the less nervous he seems, the calmer he is, the more chance that he will turn out brave. The reason for this is that the braver he is, usually, the more confident he is and the less he bluffs. All supposed exterior signs of danger that a bull gives, such as pawing the ground, threatening with his horns, or bellowing are forms of bluffing. They are warnings given in order that combat may be avoided if possible. The truly brave bull gives no warning before he charges except the fixing of his eye on his enemy, the raising of the crest of muscle in his neck, the twitching of an ear, and, as he charges, the lifting of his tail. A completely brave bull, if he is in perfect condition will never open his mouth, will not even let his tongue out, during the course of the entire fight and, at the finish, with the sword in him, will come toward the man while his legs support him, his mouth tight shut to keep the blood in.

Now what makes a bull brave is first the strain of fighting blood which can only be kept pure by conscientious testing in the tientas and second his own health and condition. Health and condition will not replace scrupulous breeding, but lack of them will ruin the natural inherited bravery of an animal, will make his body incapable of responding to it, or else cause the bravery to burn up as a fire of straw, burning out in a single flare and the bull being then empty and hollow. Health and condition are determined, granting there has been no disease on the ranch, by pasture and water.

It is the differences of pasture and water in different parts of Spain caused by the different climates, the changes in composition of the soil and the distances the stock must go to water from their pastures that make entirely different types of bulls. Spain is more a continent than a country in regard to climates, for the climate and vegetation of the north, of Navarra for example, has nothing in common with that of Valencia or Andalucia and none of those three, except parts of Navarra, have any resemblance to the high plateau of Castilla. So the bulls raised in Navarra, Andalucia and Salamanca differ greatly, and this is not due to them coming from differing strains. Navarrese bulls are almost a different race, smaller and usually of a reddish color, but when bull raisers in Navarra have taken seed bulls and cows from an Andalucian ranch and tried to transplant them to Navarra they have invariably taken on the present vices of the northern bulls, nervousness, uncertainty in attack and lack of true bravery, and have lost their original character without gaining any of the quickness, courage and deerlike speed that characterized the old strains of Navarra. Bulls in Navarra are about bred out due to inbreeding of the original Navarrese strain and the selling of their best cows to France a number of years ago for use in the Course Landaise, a French form of bull fête, and the inability of the Andalucian and Castillian strains to retain their type and bravery on the northern ranges although many costly experiments have been made to develop a new and brave Navarrese strain. The best fighting bulls come from Andalucia, Colmenar, Salamanca, and, exceptionally, Portugal. The most typical bulls are those of Andalucia. The Andalucian breeds have been taken to Salamanca and perverted by breeding them down in size and in length of horn in order to please the bullfighters. Salamanca is an ideal province for bull breeding. The pastures and water are good and the bulls from there are sold at under four years and often, to make them appear larger and older, are fed on grain for a time which gives them a false size, covering the natural muscle with fat, giving them a false well-being, causing them to tire quickly and to be short of wind. Many bulls from Salamanca, if fought at four and one-half to five years, hence having their natural size and not needing to be fed up on grain to reach the government-required poundage, with a year more on the range and the consequent added maturity, would be the ideal fighting bulls except for a tendency that they have to lose frankness and bravery when they have passed their fourth year. Occasionally you will see such a corrida in Madrid, but on the publicity they receive from such a splendid lot of bulls and with the aid and connivances of the bullfighters the same breeders that send such an ideal corrida to the capital will sell fifteen or twenty other corridas throughout the provinces in a season which will be composed of bulls under the minimum age, stuffed on grain to make them seem big, giving the minimum of danger because of their lack of experience in using their horns, and helping in every way, by depriving the spectacle of that which makes it, the true fighting bull, to contribute to the decadence of bullfighting.

For the third factor in the making of a bull, after breeding and condition, is age. With any one of these three factors lacking you cannot have a complete fighting bull. A bull is not mature until after his fourth year. It is true that after his third year he looks mature, but he is not. Maturity brings strength, resistance, but above all, knowledge. Now the knowledge of a bull consists principally in his memory of experience, he forgets nothing, and in his knowledge of, and ability to use, his horns. It is the horn that makes bullfighting and the ideal bull is one whose memory is as clean as possible from any experience of bullfighting so that he will learn everything that he is to learn in the ring; being dominated if the bullfighter works him properly, and dominating the bullfighter if his work is deficient or cowardly; and for this bull to provide the most real danger and put the bullfighter to the necessary test of knowledge of how to handle a bull properly he must know how to use his horns. At four years a bull has this knowledge, he has acquired it by fighting on the range, the only way he can acquire it. To see two bulls fight is a beautiful sight. They use their horns as a fencer does his weapon. They strike, parry, feint, block, and have an exactitude of aim that is amazing. When they both know how to use the horn the combat usually ends as does a fight between two really skillful boxers, with all dangerous blows stopped, without bloodshed and with mutual respect. They do not have to kill each other for a decision. The bull that loses is the first one that breaks and turns acknowledging the other’s superiority. I have seen them fight again and again for small causes that I was not able to make out; coming head on, feinting with their master horn, the horns clattering as they knocked together, the blows being parried and countered, then, suddenly one bull would wheel and turn and gallop off. Once though, in the corrals after a fight in which one bull turned away admitting he was beaten, the other followed him and charged, getting the horn in the defeated bull’s flank and throwing him over. Before the bull that was down could get to his feet the other was on him, driving the horn in with chopping thrusts of his neck and head; driving in all the time. The defeated bull got to his feet once, wheeled to face head-on, but in the first horn exchange he was caught in the eye, then went down under another charge. The bull killed him without letting him get to his feet again. Before the fight, two days later, that same bull killed another in the corrals, but when he came into the ring he was one of the best animals, both for bullfighters and public, that I have ever seen. His horn knowledge had been acquired as it should be. He had no vices with the horn, he simply knew how to use it, and the matador, Felix Rodriguez, dominated him, did splendid work with the cape and muleta and killed him perfectly.

A three-year-old bull may know how to use his horns, but it is exceptional. He has not had enough experience. Bulls over five years know too well how to use their armament. They have had so much experience and become so skilled with the horn that the necessity for overcoming and watching out for this makes it almost impossible for the bullfighter to do anything brilliant. They make an interesting fight, but you need a thorough knowledge of bullfighting to appreciate the matadors’ work. Nearly every bull has one horn that he prefers to use more than the other and this horn is called the master horn. They are often almost as right or left horned as people are right or left handed, but there is no such preponderance in favor of the right horn. One is as liable to be the master as the other. You may see which horn is the master when the banderilleros run the bull with the cape at the start of the fight, but there is another way you can often tell. A bull when he is about to charge, or when he is angry, twitches one or, occasionally, both ears. The ear that he twitches is usually on the side of the horn that he uses for preference.

Bulls vary greatly in the way they use their horns; some are called assassins from the way in which, attacking the picadors, they will not give a single chop until they are sure of their range; then when they are close, driving the horn into the vulnerable part of the horse with the surety of a dagger stroke. Such bulls have usually attacked a herder or killed a horse previously at some time on the range, and they remember how it is done. They do not charge from a distance and try to overthrow horse and man, but only to get in under the picador in some way, often chopping at the shaft of the pole with their horns, so they can place their horn stroke. For this reason the number of horses killed by a bull may not be an indication of his bravery nor of his power, for a bull with a deadly horn will kill horses where a braver, more powerful bull will, perhaps, only overthrow horse and rider, and, in his violence, aim scarcely at all with the horn.

A bull that has gored a man becomes much more liable to gore again. A great part of the matadors who have been gored and killed in the ring have been caught and tossed previously by the bull that finally killed them. Of course many times this repetition of the goring in the course of the same fight is due to the man being shocked into grogginess or deprived of his agility or judgment of distance by the first tossing, but it is also true that a bull which has found the man under the lure or after the placing of a pair of banderillas, will repeat the process by which he caught him. He will give a sudden chop with his head as he passes the man while following the cape or muleta, or a braking with his feet in the centre of the charge, or a swerving from the cloth toward the man with his horn or whatever act it was which caught the man the first time. Similarly there are certain strains even of bulls in which the ability to learn rapidly in the ring is highly developed. These bulls must be fought and killed as rapidly as possible with the minimum of exposure by the man, for they learn more rapidly than the fight ordinarily progresses and become exaggeratedly difficult to work with and kill.

Bulls of this sort are the old caste of fighting bulls raised by the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla, although the sons of that most scrupulous bull breeder have tried to make their bulls less dangerous and more acceptable to the bullfighters by crossbreeding with bulls of the Vistahermosa strain, the noblest, bravest and most candid of all the strains, and have succeeded in turning out bulls that have the imposing size, horns, and all the other appearance of the old deadly Miuras without their ferocious and crescient intelligence which made them the curse of all bullfighters. There is a breed of bulls which have the old Miura caste, blood, stature, power and fierceness that are raised in Portugal by Don José Palha, and if you ever see a bullfight with them advertised you will see what bulls can be at their fiercest, most powerful and most dangerous. They say that the Palha range where the mature bulls pasture is twelve kilometres from the water, I do not vouch for this, and that the bulls develop their great strength, wind and staying power by having to go so far for water. This was told me by a cousin of Palha, but I have never checked up on it.

As certain strains of fighting bulls will be particularly stupid and brave and others intelligent and brave, others will have different characteristics which are highly individual and yet will persist in most of the bulls of that breed. The bulls formerly bred and owned by the Duke of Veragua were examples of this. They were at the beginning of this century and for years after, among the bravest, strongest, fastest and finest looking of all the bulls of the Peninsula. But what were only minor tendencies twenty years earlier finally came to be the dominant characteristics of the whole strain. When they were nearly perfect bulls one of their first characteristics was a great rush of speed in the first third of the fight which left the bull rather winded and logy at the end. Another characteristic was that once a Veragua had caught and gored a man or a horse he would not leave him but would attack again and again, seeming to want to destroy his victim entirely; but they were very brave, willing to charge, and followed cape and muleta well. In twenty years there was almost nothing left of the original good qualities except the first speed in charging, while the tendency to become heavy and leaden as the fight went on was so exaggerated that a Veragua bull was almost dead on its feet after the first contact with the picadors. The tendency to keep on after a victim persisted, greatly exaggerated, but the speed, strength and bravery were all decreased to the minimum. In this way great strains of bulls will decrease in value for fighting in spite of the care and scruples of the breeder. He will try crossing with other strains, the only remedy, and sometimes these will be successful and there will be a new good strain, but more often they will cause the breed to disintegrate even more rapidly and lose whatever good characteristics it had.

An unscrupulous bull breeder can buy the bulls of a good breed and by profiting by their reputation for good presentation and bravery and himself selling everything with horns that is not a cow as a bull, destroy the good name of the breed and make a certain amount of money in a few years. He will not destroy the value of the breed as long as the blood remains good and the bulls have pasture and water that are good for them. A scrupulous breeder can take the same bulls and by testing them carefully and selling only those for fights which show bravery re-establish the breed in a short time. But when the blood that made the reputation of a breed goes thin, and defects that were only minor characteristics become dominant, then a breed, except for the occasional good bull that will be produced as an exception, is finished unless revived by a lucky and dangerous cross. I saw the last of the good bulls, the fast decay and the finish of the Veragua breed, and it was sad to watch. The present Duke sold them finally and the new owners are trying to revive the strain again.

Half-bred bulls or bulls in which there is a little fighting bull blood, called moruchos in Spanish, are often very brave while calves, showing the best characteristics of fighting stock, but as they reach maturity they lose all bravery and style and are altogether unfit for the ring. This falling off in bravery and style on complete maturity is characteristic of all bulls in which the fighting strain is mixed with ordinary blood and is the principal difficulty the Salamanca breeders face. There it is not the result of half-caste breeding, but is rather a characteristic seemingly inherent in bulls bred and pastured in that country. As a result if the Salamanca breeder wishes his bulls to come out with the maximum of bravery he must sell them young. These immature bulls have done more harm to bullfighting in every way than almost any other influence.

The main strains from which most of the best of the present-day breeds of bulls come, directly or through various crossings, are those of Vasquez, Cabrera, Vista Hermosa, Saavedra, Lesaca and Ibarra.

The breeders who furnish the best bulls to-day are the sons of Pablo Romero of Sevilla, the Conde de Santa Coloma of Madrid, Conde de la Corte of Badajoz, Doña Concepcion de la Concha y Sierra of Sevilla, daughter of the famous widow of Concha y Sierra; Doña Carmen de Federico, of Madrid, present owner of the Murube breed; the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla, Marques de Villamarta of Sevilla, Don Argimiro Perez Tabernero, Don Gracialano Perez Tabernero and Don Antonio Perez Tabernero, all of Salamanca; Don Francisco Sanchez of Coquilla in the province of Salamanca, Don Florentino Sotomayor of Cordoba, Don José Pereira Palha of Villafranca de Xifra, Portugal, the widow of Don Felix Gomez of Colmenar Viejo, Doña Enriqueta de la Cova of Sevilla, Don Felix Moreno Ardanuy of Sevilla, Marques de Albayda of Madrid, and Don Julian Fernandez Martinez of Colmenar Viejo, who owns the old breed of Don Vicente Martinez.

THERE IS not a word of conversation in the chapter, Madame, yet we have reached the end. I’m very sorry.

No sorrier than I am, sir.

What would you like to have? More major truths about the passions of the race? A diatribe against venereal disease? A few bright thoughts on death and dissolution? Or would you care to hear the author’s experience with a porcupine during his earliest years spent in Emmett and Charlevoix counties in the state of Michigan?

Please, sir, no more about animals to-day.

What do you say to one of those homilies on life and death that delight an author so to write?

I cannot truly say I want that either. Have you not something of a sort I’ve never read, amusing yet instructive? I do not feel my best to-day.

Madame, I have the very thing you need. It’s not about wild animals nor bulls. It’s written in popular style and is designed to be the Whittier’s Snow Bound of our time and at the end it’s simply full of conversation.

If it has conversation in it I would like to read it.

Do so then, it’s called —

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

Old lady: I don’t care for the title.

Author: I didn’t say you would. You may very well not like any of it. But here it is:

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE DEAD

It has always seemed to me that the war has been omitted as a field for the observations of the naturalist. We have charming and sound accounts of the flora and fauna of Patagonia by the late W. H. Hudson; the Reverend Gilbert White has written most interestingly of the Hoopoe on its occasional and not at all common visits to Selborne and Bishop Stanley has given us a valuable, although popular, Familiar History of Birds. Can we not hope to furnish the reader with a few rational and interesting facts about the dead? I hope so.

When that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, was at one period of his course fainting in the vast wilderness of an African desert, naked and alone, considering his days as numbered and nothing appearing to remain for him to do but to lie down and die, a small moss-flower of extraordinary beauty caught his eye. “Though the whole plant,” says he, “was no larger than one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsules without admiration. Can that Being who planted, watered and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suffering of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not. Reflections like these would not allow me to despair; I started up and, disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forward, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.”

With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, as Bishop Stanley says, can no branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead.

In war the dead are usually the male of the human species although this does not hold true with animals, and I have frequently seen dead mares among the horses. An interesting aspect of war, too, is that it is only there that the naturalist has an opportunity to observe the dead of mules. In twenty years of observation in civil life I had never seen a dead mule and had begun to entertain doubts as to whether these animals were really mortal. On rare occasions I had seen what I took to be dead mules, but on close approach these always proved to be living creatures who seemed to be dead through their quality of complete repose. But in war these animals succumb in much the same manner as the more common and less hardy horse.

Old lady: I thought you said it wasn’t about animals.

Author: It won’t be for long. Be patient, can’t you? It’s very hard to write like this.

Most of those mules that I saw dead were along mountain roads or lying at the foot of steep declivities whence they had been pushed to rid the road of their encumbrance. They seemed a fitting enough sight in the mountains where one was accustomed to their presence and looked less incongruous there than they did later, at Smyrna, where the Greeks broke the legs of all their baggage animals and pushed them off the quay into the shallow water to drown. The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya since there has only been one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for some one to alleviate their condition.

Old lady: You wrote about those mules before.

Author: I know it and I’m sorry. Stop interrupting. I won’t write about them again. I promise.

Regarding the sex of the dead it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking. I first saw inversion of the usual sex of the dead after the explosion of a munition factory which had been situated in the countryside near Milan, Italy. We drove to the scene of the disaster in trucks along poplar-shaded roads, bordered with ditches containing much minute animal life, which I could not clearly observe because of the great clouds of dust raised by the trucks. Arriving where the munition plant had been, some of us were put to patrolling about those large stocks of munitions which for some reason had not exploded, while others were put at extinguishing a fire which had gotten into the grass of an adjacent field, which task being concluded, we were ordered to search the immediate vicinity and surrounding fields for bodies. We found and carried to an improvised mortuary a good number of these and, I must admit, frankly, the shock it was to find that these dead were women rather than men. In those days women had not yet commenced to wear their hair cut short, as they did later for several years in Europe and America, and the most disturbing thing, perhaps because it was the most unaccustomed, was the presence and, even more disturbing, the occasional absence of this long hair. I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire fence which had surrounded the position of the factory and from the still existent portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. Many fragments we found a considerable distance away in the fields, they being carried farther by their own weight. On our return to Milan I recall one or two of us discussing the occurrence and agreeing that the quality of unreality and the fact that there were no wounded did much to rob the disaster of a horror which might have been much greater. Also the fact that it had been so immediate and that the dead were in consequence still as little unpleasant as possible to carry and deal with made it quite removed from the usual battlefield experience. The pleasant, though dusty, ride through the beautiful Lombard countryside also was a compensation for the unpleasantness of the duty and on our return, while we exchanged impressions, we all agreed that it was indeed fortunate that the fire which broke out just before we arrived had been brought under control as rapidly as it had and before it had attained any of the seemingly huge stocks of unexploded munitions. We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell.

Old lady: This is not amusing.

Author: Stop reading it then. Nobody makes you read it. But please stop interrupting.

A naturalist, to obtain accuracy of observation, may confine himself in his observations to one limited period and I will take first that following the Austrian offensive of June, 1918, in Italy as one in which the dead were present in their greatest numbers, a withdrawal having been forced and an advance later made to recover the ground lost so that the positions after the battle were the same as before except for the presence of the dead. Until the dead are buried they change somewhat in appearance each day. The color change in Caucasian races is from white to yellow, to yellow-green, to black. If left long enough in the heat the flesh comes to resemble coal-tar, especially where it has been broken or torn, and it has quite a visible tar-like iridescence. The dead grow larger each day until sometimes they become quite too big for their uniforms, filling these until they seem blown tight enough to burst. The individual members may increase in girth to an unbelievable extent and faces fill as taut and globular as balloons. The surprising thing, next to their progressive corpulence, is the amount of paper that is scattered about the dead. Their ultimate position, before there is any question of burial, depends on the location of the pockets in the uniform. In the Austrian army these pockets were in the back of the breeches and the dead, after a short time, all consequently lay on their faces, the two hip pockets pulled out and, scattered around them in the grass, all those papers their pockets had contained. The heat, the flies, the indicative positions of the bodies in the grass and the amount of paper scattered are the impressions one retains. The smell of a battlefield in hot weather one cannot recall. You can remember that there was such a smell, but nothing ever happens to you to bring it back. It is unlike the smell of a regiment, which may come to you suddenly while riding in the street car and you will look across and see the man who has brought it to you. But the other thing is gone as completely as when you have been in love; you remember things that happened, but the sensation cannot be recalled.

Old lady: I like it whenever you write about love.

Author: Thank you, Madame.

One wonders what that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, would have seen on a battlefield in hot weather to restore his confidence. There were always poppies in the wheat in the end of June and in July, and the mulberry trees were in full leaf and one could see the heat waves rise from the barrels of the guns where the sun struck them through the screens of leaves; the earth was turned a bright yellow at the edge of holes where mustard gas shells had been and the average broken house is finer to see than one that has never been shelled, but few travellers would take a good full breath of that early summer air and have any such thoughts as Mungo Park about those formed in His own image.

The first thing that you found about the dead was that, hit badly enough, they died like animals. Some quickly from a little wound you would not think would kill a rabbit. They died from little wounds as rabbits die sometimes from three or four small grains of shot that hardly seem to break the skin. Others would die like cats, a skull broken in and iron in the brain, they lie alive two days like cats that crawl into the coal bin with a bullet in the brain and will not die until you cut their heads off. Maybe cats do not die then, they say they have nine lives, I do not know, but most men die like animals, not men. I’d never seen a natural death, so called, and so I blamed it on the war and like the persevering traveller, Mungo Park, knew that there was something else, that always absent something else, and then I saw one.

The only natural death I’ve ever seen, outside of loss of blood, which isn’t bad, was death from Spanish influenza. In this you drown in mucus, choking, and how you know the patient’s dead is; at the end he shits the bed full. So now I want to see the death of any self-called Humanist because a persevering traveller like Mungo Park or me lives on and maybe yet will live to see the actual death of members of this literary sect and watch the noble exits that they make. In my musings as a naturalist it has occurred to me that while decorum is an excellent thing some must be indecorous if the race is to be carried on since the position prescribed for procreation is indecorous, highly indecorous, and it occurred to me that perhaps that is what these people are, or were; the children of decorous cohabitation. But regardless of how they started I hope to see the finish of a few, and speculate how worms will try that long preserved sterility; with their quaint pamphlets gone to bust and into foot-notes all their lust.

Old lady: That’s a very nice line about lust.

Author: I know it. It came from Andrew Marvell. I learned how to do that by reading T. S. Eliot.

Old lady: The Eliots were all old friends of our family. I believe they were in the lumber business.

Author: My uncle married a girl whose father was in the lumber business.

Old lady: How interesting.

While it is, perhaps, legitimate to deal with these self-designated citizens in a natural history of the dead, even though the designation may mean nothing by the time this work is published, yet it is unfair to the other dead, who were not dead in their youth of choice, who owned no magazines, many of whom had doubtless never even read a review, that one has seen in the hot weather with a half-pint of maggots working where their mouths have been. It was not always hot weather for the dead, much of the time it was the rain that washed them clean when they lay in it and made the earth soft when they were buried in it and sometimes then kept on until the earth was mud and washed them out and you had to bury them again. Or in the winter in the mountains you had to put them in the snow and when the snow melted in the spring some one else had to bury them. They had beautiful burying grounds in the mountains, war in the mountains is the most beautiful of all war, and in one of them, at a place called Pocol, they buried a general who was shot through the head by a sniper. This is where those writers are mistaken who write books called Generals Die in Bed, because this general died in a trench dug in snow, high in the mountains, wearing an Alpini hat with an eagle feather in it and a hole in front you couldn’t put your little finger in and a hole in back you could put your fist in, if it were a small fist and you wanted to put it there, and much blood in the snow. He was a damned fine general, and so was General von Behr who commanded the Bavarian Alpenkorps troops at the battle of Caporetto and was killed in his staff car by the Italian rearguard as he drove into Udine ahead of his troops, and the titles of all such books should be Generals Usually Die in Bed, if we are to have any sort of accuracy in such things.

Old lady: When does the story start?

Author: Now, Madame, at once. You’ll soon have it.

In the mountains too, sometimes, the snow fell on the dead outside the dressing station on the side that was protected by the mountain from any shelling. They carried them into a cave that had been dug into the mountainside before the earth froze. It was in this cave that a man whose head was broken as a flower-pot may be broken, although it was all held together by membranes and a skillfully applied bandage now soaked and hardened, with the structure of his brain disturbed by a piece of broken steel in it, lay a day, a night, and a day. The stretcher-bearers asked the doctors to go in and have a look at him. They saw him each time they made a trip and even when they did not look at him they heard him breathing. The doctor’s eyes were red and the lids swollen, almost shut from tear gas. He looked at the man twice; once in daylight, once with a flashlight. That too would have made a good etching for Goya, the visit with the flashlight, I mean. After looking at him the second time the doctor believed the stretcher-bearers when they said the soldier was still alive.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

There was nothing they wanted done. But after a while they asked permission to carry him out and lay him with the badly wounded.

“No. No. No!” said the doctor who was busy. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of him?”

“We don’t like to hear him in there with the dead.”

“Don’t listen to him. If you take him out of there you will have to carry him right back in.”

“We wouldn’t mind that, Captain Doctor.”

“No,” said the doctor. “No. Didn’t you hear me say no?”

“Why don’t you give him an overdose of morphine?” asked an artillery officer who was waiting to have a wound in his arm dressed.

“Do you think that is the only use I have for morphine? Would you like me to have to operate without morphine? You have a pistol, go out and shoot him yourself.”

“He’s been shot already,” said the officer. “If some of you doctors were shot you’d be different.”

“Thank you very much,” said the doctor waving a forceps in the air. “Thank you a thousand times. What about these eyes?” He pointed the forceps at them. “How would you like these?”

“Tear gas. We call it lucky if it’s tear gas.”

“Because you leave the line,” said the doctor. “Because you come running here with your tear gas to be evacuated. You rub onions in your eyes.”

“You are beside yourself. I do not notice your insults. You are crazy.”

The stretcher-bearers came in.

“Captain Doctor,” one of them said.

“Get out of here!” said the doctor.

They went out.

“I will shoot the poor fellow,” the artillery officer said. “I am a humane man. I will not let him suffer.”

“Shoot him then,” said the doctor. “Shoot him. Assume the responsibility. I will make a report. Wounded shot by lieutenant of artillery in first curing post. Shoot him. Go ahead shoot him.”

“You are not a human being.”

“My business is to care for the wounded, not to kill them. That is for gentlemen of the artillery.”

“Why don’t you care for him then?”

“I have done so. I have done all that can be done.”

“Why don’t you send him down on the cable railway?”

“Who are you to ask me questions? Are you my superior officer? Are you in command of this dressing post? Do me the courtesy to answer.”

The lieutenant of artillery said nothing. The others in the room were all soldiers and there were no other officers present.

“Answer me,” said the doctor holding a needle up in his forceps. “Give me a response.”

“F — k yourself,” said the artillery officer.

“So,” said the doctor. “So, you said that. All right. All right. We shall see.”

The lieutenant of artillery stood up and walked toward him.

“F — k yourself,” he said. “F — k yourself. F — k your mother. F — k your sister….”

The doctor tossed the saucer full of iodine in his face. As he came toward him, blinded, the lieutenant fumbled for his pistol. The doctor skipped quickly behind him, tripped him and, as he fell to the floor, kicked him several times and picked up the pistol in his rubber gloves. The lieutenant sat on the floor holding his good hand to his eyes.

“I’ll kill you!” he said. “I’ll kill you as soon as I can see.”

“I am the boss,” said the doctor. “All is forgiven since you know I am the boss. You cannot kill me because I have your pistol. Sergeant! Adjutant! Adjutant!”

“The adjutant is at the cable railway,” said the sergeant.

“Wipe out this officer’s eyes with alcohol and water. He has got iodine in them. Bring me the basin to wash my hands. I will take this officer next.”

“You won’t touch me.”

“Hold him tight. He is a little delirious.”

One of the stretcher-bearers came in.

“Captain Doctor.”

“What do you want?”

“The man in the dead-house — —”

“Get out of here.”

“Is dead, Captain Doctor. I thought you would be glad to know.”

“See, my poor lieutenant? We dispute about nothing. In time of war we dispute about nothing.”

“F — k you,” said the lieutenant of artillery. He still could not see. “You’ve blinded me.”

“It is nothing,” said the doctor. “Your eyes will be all right. It is nothing. A dispute about nothing.”

“Ayee! Ayee! Ayee!” suddenly screamed the lieutenant. “You have blinded me! You have blinded me!”

“Hold him tight,” said the doctor. “He is in much pain. Hold him very tight.”

Old lady: Is that the end? I thought you said it was like John Green-leaf Whittier’s Snow Bound.

Madame, I’m wrong again. We aim so high and yet we miss the target.

Old lady: You know I like you less and less the more I know you.

Madame, it is always a mistake to know an author.

CHAPTER 13

ALL OF BULLFIGHTING is founded on the bravery of the bull, his simplicity and his lack of experience. There are ways to fight cowardly bulls, experienced bulls and intelligent bulls, but the principle of the bullfight, the ideal bullfight, supposes bravery in the bull and a brain clear of any remembrance of previous work in the ring. A cowardly bull is difficult to fight since he will not charge the picadors more than once if he receives any punishment and so is not slowed down by the chastisement he would receive and the effort he would make and consequently the regular plan of the fight cannot be followed, since the bull comes intact and fast to the last third of the fight where he should come with his tempo slowed. No one can be sure when a cowardly bull will charge. He will go away from the man often rather than toward him, but you cannot count on him always doing so, and all brilliance is impossible unless the matador has the science and valor to get so close to the bull that he makes him confident and works on his instincts against his inclinations and then, when he has gotten him to charge a few times, dominates him and almost hypnotizes him with the muleta.

The cowardly bull upsets the order of the fight because he violates the rule of the three stages a bull must go through in the progress of the encounter between bull and man; the three stages which have formulated the order of the corrida. Each act of the bullfight is both a result of and a remedy for one of the stages the bull is in, and the nearer he is to normal, the less his condition is exaggerated, the more brilliant the bullfight will be.

The three phases of the bull’s condition in the fight are called in Spanish, levantado, parado, and aplomado. He is called levantado, or lofty, when he first comes out, carries his head high, charges without fixing any object closely and, in general, tries, confident in his power, to sweep the ring clear of his enemies. It is at this time that the bull is least dangerous to the bullfighter and a fighter may attempt passes with the cape such as kneeling with both knees on the ground, citing the bull with the cape spread wide with his left hand, then as the bull arrives at the cape and lowers his head to hook, swinging the cape with the left hand toward the right without changing the position of the right hand so that the bull which would have passed to the left of the kneeling man follows the swirl the cape makes and passes to the right instead. This pass is called a cambio de rodillas and would be impossible, or suicidal, to attempt when the bull, from the punishment he has received and the increasing accuracy in the aiming of his charging brought about by his progressive disillusion in his power, has passed from levantado to parado.

When the bull is parado he is slowed and at bay. At this time he no longer charges freely and wildly in the general direction of any movement or disturbance; he is disillusioned about his power to destroy or drive out of the ring anything that seems to challenge him and, his initial ardor calmed, he recognizes his enemy, or sees the lure that his enemy presents him instead of his body, and charges that with full aim and intention to kill and destroy. But now he is aiming carefully and charging from a quick start. It is comparable to the change from a cavalry charge where all reliance is placed upon shock or impetus and the general administration of shock, the effect upon the individual being left to chance, to a defensive action of infantry where each individual will fire upon, supposedly, an individual object. It is when the bull is parado, or slowed, and is still in possession of his strength and intentions that he is able to be worked with the greatest brilliance on the part of the bullfighter. A bullfighter may attempt and accomplish suertes, a suerte here being any action attempted by the fighter deliberately rather than those actions he is forced into as a defense or by accident, with a bull that is slowed which are impossible with a bull which is still levantado, since a bull which has not been cut down by punishment will not pay the necessary attention, being still in full possession of all his force and confidence, or give the importance of interest and sustained attack to the manœuvre of the bullfighter. It is the difference between playing cards with an individual who, giving no importance to the game and having no sum at stake, gives no attention to the rules and makes the game impossible and one who having learned the rules, through having them forced on him and through losing; and now, having his fortune and life at stake, gives much importance to the game and the rules, finding them forced upon him, and does his best with utmost seriousness. It is up to the bullfighter to make the bull play and to enforce the rules. The bull has no desire to play, only to kill.

Aplomado is the third and last general stage the bull goes through. When he is aplomado he has been made heavy, he is like lead; he has usually lost his wind, and while his strength is still intact, his speed is gone. He no longer carries his head high; he will charge if provoked; but whoever cites him must be closer and closer. For in this state the bull does not want to charge unless he is sure of his objective, since he has obviously been beaten, to himself as well as the spectator, in everything he has attempted up to that time; but he is still supremely dangerous.

It is when he is aplomado that the bull is usually killed; especially in the modern bullfight. The extent of his wearing out, of his heaviness and tiredness, depends upon the amount he has charged, and been punished by, the picadors, the number of times he has followed the capes, the amount his vigor has been lessened by the banderillas and the effect that the matador’s work with the muleta has had upon him.

All of these phases have had, for practical end, the regulating of the way he carries his head, the cutting of his speed, and the correcting of whatever tendencies he may have had to hook to one side or the other. If they have been accomplished properly the bull arrives at the final stage of the fight with his great neck muscles fatigued so that he holds his head neither too high nor too low, his speed less than half what it was at the start of the fight, his attention fixed on the object that is presented him, and any tendency to hooking to one side or the other, but especially with his right horn, corrected.

Those are the three main states that the bull goes through in the course of the fight; they are the natural progress of his fatigue if the fatigue has been properly induced. If the bull has not been fought properly he may arrive at the hour of killing uncertain, chopping with his head, unable to be fixed in one spot, purely on the defensive; his offensive spirit, that is so necessary to a good bullfight, uselessly wasted. He is then unwilling to charge and altogether unfit for the bullfighter to perform with brilliantly. He may be ruined in the course of the fight by a picador sinking the point of his pic into a shoulder blade or placing it far back in the centre of the bull’s spine, instead of the muscles of his neck, thereby laming him or injuring his spine; he may be ruined by a banderillero nailing the banderillas into a wound made by a picador, driving them in so deep that the shafts stick up straight instead of hanging down the bull’s flank with the barbs caught only under the skin as they should be placed; or he may be destroyed for any possibility of brilliant work by the way in which the banderilleros handle him with the capes. If they turn him on himself again and again, twisting his spinal column, straining the tendons and muscles of his legs, sometimes catching the sack of his scrotum between his hind legs, they can destroy his force and much of his bravery, ruining him by quick turns and twists instead of fatiguing him honestly by his own efforts in straight charging. But if the bull is fought properly he will go through the three stages, modified as they will be by his own individual force and temperament, and will arrive slowed but intact at the moment of the last third of the fight when the matador himself should wear him down to the proper degree with the muleta before killing him.

The first reason that the bull must be slowed is so that he may be played properly with the muleta, with the man planning and controlling the passes and increasing their danger by his own volition, that is going on the offensive himself rather than merely being forced to defend himself against the bull, and secondly so that he may be killed properly with the sword. The only way this slowness can be produced in a normal manner, without the loss of bravery and the harm to the bull’s muscular structure, caused by the constant, jerking deception of the cape, is by his charging of the horses where he wears himself down by his efforts in attacking an object that it is possible to attain, thus finding that his bravery is rewarded rather than that he is steadily deceived. A bull that has successfully charged the horses and has killed or wounded one or several of his opponents goes on to the rest of the fight believing that his charges lead to something and if he continues to charge, he will get the horn into something again. On such a bull the bullfighter can play to the extent of his artistic ability as an organist can play on a pipe organ that is pumped for him. The pipe organ, and let us say the steam calliope, if the symbols are becoming too delicate, are, I believe, the only musical instruments in which the musician utilizes a force which is already there, simply releasing this force in the directions he chooses rather than applying force in a varying degree himself to produce music. So the pipe organ and the steam calliope are the only musical instruments whose players can be compared to the matador. A bull that does not charge is like an unpumped pipe organ or a steamless calliope and the performance the bullfighter can give with such a bull is only comparable in brilliance and lucidity with that which would be given by an organist who had also to pump his pipe organ or a calliopeist who must at the same time stoke his calliope.

Aside from the normal physical and mental stages the bull goes through in the ring each individual bull changes his mental state all through the fight. The most common, and to me the most interesting, thing that passes in the bull’s brain is the development of querencias. A querencia is a place the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring; a preferred locality. That is a natural querencia and such are well known and fixed, but an accidental querencia is more than that. It is a place which develops in the course of the fight where the bull makes his home. It does not usually show at once, but develops in his brain as the fight goes on. In this place he feels that he has his back against the wall and in his querencia he is inestimably more dangerous and almost impossible to kill. If a bullfighter goes in to kill a bull in his querencia rather than to bring him out of it he is almost certain to be gored. The reason for this is that the bull, when he is in querencia, is altogether on the defensive, his horn stroke is a riposte rather than an attack, a counter rather than a lead, and the speed of eye and stroke being equal the riposte will always beat the attack since it sees the attack coming and parries or beats it to the touch. The attacker must lay himself open and the counter is certain to arrive if it is as fast as the attack, since it has the opening before it while the attack must try to create that opening. In boxing Gene Tunney was an example of a counter-puncher; all those boxers who have lasted longest and taken least punishment have been counter-punchers too. The bull, when he is in querencia, counters the sword stroke with his horn when he sees it coming as the boxer counters a lead, and many men have paid with their lives, or with bad wounds, because they did not bring the bull out of his querencia before they went in to kill.

The natural querencias of all bulls are the door of the passageway through which they entered the ring and the wall of the barrera. The first because it is familiar to them; it is the last place they remember; and the second because it gives them something to get their back against so they feel safe from attack in the rear. These are the known querencias and a bullfighter utilizes them in many ways. He knows that a bull, at the conclusion of a pass or a series of passes, will probably have a tendency to make for the natural querencia and in so doing will pay little or no attention to what is in his way. A bullfighter can, therefore, place a prepared and very statuesque pass as the bull goes by him on the way to his refuge. Such passes can be very brilliant; the man standing firm, his feet together, seemingly giving no importance to the bull’s charge, letting the whole bulk of the bull rush by him without making the slightest movement of retreat, the horns sometimes passing only a fraction of an inch from his chest; but to the person who knows bullfighting they are valueless except as tricks. They seem dangerous but they are not, for the bull is really intent on reaching his querencia and the man has only placed himself beside his path. It is the bull that controls the direction, speed and aim, therefore to the real lover of bullfighting it is valueless since in real bullfighting, not circus bullfighting, the man should force the bull to charge as he wants him to; should make him curve rather than go straight, should control his direction, not merely profit by his charges to posture as the bull goes by. The Spaniards say, torear es parar, templar y mandar. That is, in real bullfighting the matador should remain still, should measure the speed of the bull by the movement of his wrists and arms holding the cloth, and should dominate and direct the bull’s course. Any other way of fighting, such as making statuesque passes in the direction of the bull’s natural voyage, no matter how brilliant, is not true bullfighting, since it is the animal that is dominating, not the man.

A bull’s accidental querencias that come up in his brain during the fight may be, and most often are, the places where he has had some success; killed a horse, for example. That is the most common querencia of a brave bull, although another very usual one on a hot day is any place on the sand of the ring where it has been dampened and cooled, often the mouth of the underground pipe to which a hose is screwed on during the intermission to be used in laying the dust of the arena; where the sand feels cool under the bull’s hooves. The bull too may take up his querencia in a place where a horse has been killed in a previous fight, where he smells the blood; a place where he has tossed a bullfighter, or any part of the ring for no apparent reason at all; simply because he feels at home there. You can see the idea of the querencia establishing itself in his brain during the course of the fight. He will go first tentatively, then with more purpose, and finally, unless the bullfighter has noticed his tendency and deliberately kept him away from his chosen spot, the bull will go to his querencia constantly, will take his place there with his back or his flank to the barrier and will refuse to leave. It is then that the bullfighters sweat the big drop. The bull must be brought out; but he is gone completely on the defensive and will not respond to the cape and will cut at them with his horns, refusing altogether to charge. The only way to get him out is to get so close to him that he is absolutely sure he can get the man, and with short pulling jerks of the cape, or by dropping the cape under his muzzle on the ground and pulling it a little at a time, tempt him a few steps at a time, from his querencia. There is nothing pretty about it, it is only dangerous, and usually, the fifteen minutes allotted the matador for killing the bull are passing steadily, he is getting angrier each minute, the banderilleros working more dangerously and the bull becoming more entrenched. But if the matador, impatient, finally says, “All right, if he wants to die there let him die there,” and goes in to kill, that will probably be the last thing he will remember until he comes down out of the air with or without a horn wound. For the bull will watch him as he comes in, will knock up the muleta and sword, and will catch the man every time. When the capes and muleta are powerless to get a bull out of his querencia, sometimes fire banderillas are tried, pushed into his rump over the barrera, to smoulder and then go off in a series of explosions and smell of black powder and burning pasteboard; but I have seen a bull, the explosive banderillas in him, leave his querencia perhaps twenty feet, stimulated by the noise, and then return at once to pay no attention to any further means for dislodging him. In such a case the matador is justified in killing the bull in any way that least exposes the man. He may start at one side of the bull and run in a half circle past his head, stabbing him in passing while a banderillero attracts his attention with the cape as the man passes, or he may kill him in any other way that, to attempt with a brave bull, would risk his being lynched by the crowd. The thing to do is to kill him quickly, not well, for a bull who knows how to use his horns and who cannot be made to leave his querencia is as dangerous for the man to come within range of as a rattlesnake and as impossible to make a bullfight with. But the man should not have allowed him to make such a firm querencia. He should have started to keep him away, get him out into the ring and away from the back-to-the-wall feeling of security, and take him to other parts of the ring long before he took a definite and final stand in his chosen position. Once, about ten years ago, I saw a bullfight in which all six bulls, one after another, took up firm querencias, refused to leave them, and died in them. It was a corrida of Miura bulls in Pamplona. They were enormous roan-colored bulls, high on their legs, long, with huge shoulders and neck muscles and formidable horns. They were the finest-looking bulls I have ever seen and every one of them went on the defensive from the minute they came into the ring. You could not call them cowardly because they defended their lives seriously, desperately, wisely and ferociously, taking up a querencia soon after they came into the ring and refusing to leave it. The corrida lasted until dark, and there was not one graceful or artistic moment, it was an afternoon and early evening of bulls defending themselves against man and man trying to butcher bulls under extreme danger and difficulty. It was about as brilliant an action as the battle of Passchendaele; with apologies for comparing a commercial spectacle with a battle. There were present, for the first time at bullfights, some people to whom I had spoken of the brilliance, the art, the and so forth of bullfighting at great length. I had held forth a long time, stimulated to eloquence by two or three absinthes at the Café Kutz, and before they went had them all pretty eager to see a bullfight and especially this bullfight. None of them spoke to me after the fight and two, including one on whom I had hoped to make a good impression, were quite ill. I enjoyed the fight very much myself for I learned more about the mentality of the non-cowardly bull that still will not charge, a rare thing in bullfights, than I might have learned in a season, but the next time I see such a fight I hope that I go alone. I also hope that I am not fond of, nor a friend of, any of the bullfighters involved.

Aside from the destructive changes in his natural progress of fatigue that may be produced in the bull by an abuse of cape work, by the faulty placing of the banderillas and by the unskillful or deliberate damaging of his spine or shoulder blades by a misplaced pic, the bull may be rendered unfit for the rest of the fight by deliberate misuse of the pic by the picador acting under his matador’s orders. There are three main ways to harm a bull and destroy his strength. To over-cape him, to try and bleed him with the pic by opening a tearing gash, and to try to injure him by driving the pic too far back so that it hits the spine, or too far to one side so that it hits the top of the shoulder blade. All of these means of destroying bulls are attempted deliberately by the peones under the matadors’ orders on all bulls of which the matadors are afraid. They may be afraid of the bull because he is too big, too fast or too strong and, if they have this fear, they order the picadors and the banderilleros to bear down on him. Often now, the order is unnecessary and the picadors, as a matter of course, bear down on them all unless the matador, feeling confident with the bull, and wishing to preserve him intact so he may work with him with the maximum brilliance and credit to himself, says to his aids, “Take care of this bull for me. Don’t waste him.” But often the picadors and banderilleros understand before a fight that they are to do everything in their power to destroy the bulls and are to disregard any contrary orders given by the matador in the ring, these orders, usually very vehement and accompanied by curses, are only for the benefit of the spectators.

But aside from the deliberate damage that may be done to a bull physically, making him unfit for a brilliant fight, with the only end of delivering him to the matador as far on the way to death as possible, incalculable damage may be done to a bull mentally by unskillful work by the banderilleros. When they face the bull with the banderillas, their duty is to get the shafts planted as quickly as possible, for all the delay they may make in unsuccessful attempts, unsuccessful eighty times out of a hundred through cowardice, is upsetting the bull, making him nervous and uncertain, breaking the rhythm of the fight and losing, through giving the bull experience in chasing an unarmed, unmounted man, the advantage of his carefully preserved lack of experience in the past.

The man who usually fails in this way in putting in the banderillas is almost always between forty and fifty. He is kept in the cuadrilla as the confidential banderillero of the matador. He is there for his knowledge of bulls, his probity, his wise old head. He represents the matador at the sorting of the bulls, the making up of the lots and is his confidential adviser on all technical things. But because he is past forty his legs have usually gone back on him, he has no confidence in them as a means of saving himself if the bull goes after him, and so, when it is his turn to place a pair of banderillas if the bull is difficult, the old banderillero becomes of such an exaggerated prudence that it is indistinguishable from cowardice. In his faulty execution with the sticks he destroys the effect of his skillful and wise art with the cape, and bullfighting would gain much if these wise, old, fatherly, but spavined relics were not permitted to place banderillas but were only carried in the cuadrilla for their opportune capes and their mental equipment.

Placing the banderillas is the part of bullfighting that demands the most physical equipment in a man. One pair or two pairs may be placed by a man who cannot even run across the ring if he has some one else to prepare the bull for him and if he waits for the bull to come to him. But to place them consistently, seeking out the bull, preparing him and then nailing in the shafts properly, demands good legs and good physical condition. On the other hand a man may be a matador and not place the banderillas, but be able to fight the bull properly with cape and muleta and kill him moderately well even with his legs so crippled and twisted with horn wounds that he could not run across the ring and he himself, perhaps, in the last stages of tuberculosis. For a matador should never run except when he is placing the banderillas, he should be able to make the bull do all the work, even to the driving in of the sword. When Gallo was over forty years of age some one asked him what he did for exercise and he said he smoked Havana cigars.

“What do I want with exercise, hombre? What do I want with strength? The bull takes plenty of exercise, the bull has plenty of strength! I have now forty years, but every year the bulls are four and a half going on five.”

He was a great bullfighter and the first one to admit fear. Until Gallo’s time it was thought utterly shameful to admit to being afraid, but when Gallo was afraid he dropped muleta and sword and jumped over the fence head first. A matador is never supposed to run, but Gallo was liable to run if the bull looked at him in a peculiarly knowing way. He was the inventor of refusing to kill the bull if the bull looked at him in a certain way, and when they locked him up in jail he said that it was better that way, “all of us artists have bad days. They will forgive me my first good day.”

He gave more farewell performances than Patti and now, going on toward fifty, he is still giving them. His first formal permanent farewell he gave in Sevilla. He was greatly moved and when the time came to dedicate the last bull he was to kill in his life as a bullfighter he decided to dedicate to his old friend Señor Fulano. He took off his hat and, with his brown bald head shining, said, “To thee, Fulano, friend of my childhood, protector of my early career, prince of aficionados, I toast this last bull of my life as a bullfighter.” But as he finished he saw the face of another old friend, a composer, and going along the barrier until he was opposite him he looked up, his eyes moist, and said, “To thee, oh excellent friend, thou who art one of the glories in the heaven of Spanish music, I dedicate this, the last bull I shall ever kill in my life as a torero.” But as he turned away he saw Algabeno, the father, one of the best killers who ever came out of Andalucia, sitting a little way along the barrera and stopping so he faced him he said, “To thee, old comrade, who always followed the sword in with thy heart, to thee the best killer of bulls that I have ever known I dedicate this, the ultimate bull of my bullfighting life and watch if my work shall not be worthy of thee.” He turned impressively and walked toward the bull which had been standing quite still looking at him, looked carefully at the bull, and then turned to his brother, Joselito: “Kill him for me, José. Take him for me. I don’t like the way he looks at me.”

On this, the first and greatest of his farewell performances, the last bull killed by him in his life as a bullfighter was killed by his brother Joselito.

The last time I saw him was in Valencia before he left Spain for South America. He looked like an old, very old, butterfly. He had more grace, more looks and was finer looking at forty-three than any other bullfighter that I have ever seen of any age. His were not the sort of looks that photograph. El Gallo never looked handsome in a picture. It was not the grace of youth; it was something that does endure, and as you watched him with the big gray Concha y Sierra bull, that he played as delicately as a spinet, you knew that if a bull should ever gore and kill him, and you should see it, you would know better than to go to any more bullfights. Joselito should die to prove that no one is safe in the ring and because he was getting fat. Belmonte should die because he deals in tragedy and has only himself to blame. The novilleros you see killed are all victims of economics, and your best friends in the profession die of occupational disorders that are quite understandable and logical, but for Rafael El Gallo to be killed in the bull ring would not be irony, nor tragedy, since there would be no dignity; El Gallo would be too frightened for that; he never admitted the idea of death and he would not even go in to look at Joselito in the chapel after he was killed; killing El Gallo would be bad taste and prove the bullfight was wrong, not morally, but æsthetically. El Gallo did something to the bullfight as he did something to all of us who admired him; he corrupted it perhaps, but not as much as Guerrita did; certainly he is the grandfather of the modern style as Belmonte is its father. He was not utterly without honor as Cagancho is, he was only lacking in courage and a little simple minded; but what a great fighter he was and what security he had, really; his divings over the barrera were fits of panic after the danger was over, never necessities. El Gallo, in a panic, was still closer to the bull than most fighters when they were showing their tragic domination, and the grace and excellence of his work were as delicate as that lovely early Mexican feather work that is preserved at El Escorial. Do you know the sin it would be to ruffle the arrangement of the feathers on a hawk’s neck if they could never be replaced as they were? Well, that would be the sin it would be to kill El Gallo.

CHAPTER 14

THE BULLFIGHTER’S ideal, what he hopes will always come out of the toril and into the ring is a bull that will charge perfectly straight and will turn by himself at the end of each charge and charge again perfectly straight; a bull that charges as straight as though he were on rails. He hopes for him always, but such a bull will come, perhaps, only once in thirty or forty. The bullfighters call them round-trip bulls, go-and-come bulls, or cariles, or mounted-on-rails bulls, and those bullfighters who have never learned to dominate difficult bulls nor how to correct their faults, simply defend themselves against the regular run of animals and wait for one of these straight charging bulls to attempt any brilliant work. These bullfighters are the ones who have never learned to fight bulls, who have skipped their apprenticeship by being promoted to matadors because of some great afternoon in Madrid, or a series in the provinces, with bulls that charged to suit them. They have art, personalities, when the personalities are not scared out of them, but no métier and, since courage comes with confidence, they are often frightened simply because they do not know their trade properly. They are not naturally cowardly or they would never have become bullfighters, but they are made cowardly by having to face difficult bulls without the knowledge, experience or training to handle them, and since out of ten bulls that they fight there may not be a one that will be the ideal animal that they only know how to work with, most of the times you will see them their work will be dull, defensive, ignorant, cowardly and unsatisfactory. If you see them with the animal that they want you will think that they are wonderful, exquisite, brave, artistic and sometimes almost unbelievable in the quietness and closeness with which they will work to the bull. But if you see them day in and day out unable to give a competent performance with any bull that offers any difficulties whatsoever you will wish for the old days of competently trained fighters and to hell with phenomenons and artists.

The whole trouble with the modern technique of bullfighting is that it has been made too perfect. It is done so close to the bull, so slowly and so completely without defense or movement on the part of the matador that it can only be accomplished with an almost made-to-order bull. Therefore to be done regularly and consistently it can only be accomplished in two ways. First it can be done by great geniuses such as Joselito and Belmonte who can dominate the bulls by science, defend themselves by their own superior reflexes, and apply their technique whenever possible, or it can only be done by waiting for a perfect bull or by having the bulls made to order. The modern bullfighters, with the exception of perhaps three, either wait for their bulls or do their best, by refusing difficult breeds, to have the bulls made to order.

I remember a corrida of Villar bulls in Pamplona in 1923. They were ideal bulls, as brave as any I have ever seen, fast, vicious, but always attacking; never going on the defensive. They were big but not so large as to be ponderous, and they were well horned. Villar bred splendid bulls but the bullfighters did not care for them. They had just a little too much of every good quality. The breeding stock was sold to another man who set out to reduce these qualities enough to make the bulls acceptable to the bullfighters. In 1927 I saw his first product. The bulls looked like Villars but were smaller, had less horn and were still quite brave. A year later they were still smaller, the horns further decreased and they were not so brave. Last year they were a little smaller, the horns about the same and they were not brave at all. The original splendid strain of fighting bulls by breeding for defects, or rather weaknesses, to make them into a popular breed with bullfighters, to try and rival the made-to-order Salamanca bulls, had been wiped out and ruined.

After you go to bullfights for a certain length of time, when you see what they can be, if finally they come to mean something to you, then sooner or later you are forced to take a definite position about them. Either you stand for the real bulls, the complete bullfight and hope that good bullfighters will develop who will know how to fight, as for instance Marcial Lalanda does, or that a great bullfighter will appear who can afford to break the rules as Belmonte did, or you accept the condition the fiesta is in now, you know the bullfighters, you see their point of view; there are, in life, always good and valid excuses for every failure; and you put yourself in the bullfighters’ place, put up with their disasters on the bulls they fail with, and wait for the bull that they want. Once you do that you become as guilty as any of those that live off and destroy bullfighting and you are more guilty because you are paying to help destroy it. All right, but what are you to do? Should you stay away? You can but you cut your nose to spite your face that way. As long as you get any pleasure from the fiesta you have a right to go. You can protest, you can talk, you can convince others of what fools they are, but those are all fairly useless things to do, although protests are necessary and useful at the time in the ring. But there is one thing you can do and that is know what is good and what is bad, to appreciate the new but let nothing confuse your standards. You can continue to attend bullfights even when they are bad; but never applaud what is not good. You should, as a spectator, show your appreciation of the good and valuable work that is essential but not brilliant. You should appreciate the proper working and correct killing of a bull that it is impossible to be brilliant with. A bullfighter will not be better than his audience very long. If they prefer tricks to sincerity they soon get the tricks. If a really good bullfighter is to come and to remain honest, sincere, without tricks and mystifications there must be a nucleus of spectators that he can play for when he comes. If this sounds too much like a Christian Endeavor programme may I add that I believe firmly in the throwing of cushions of all weights, pieces of bread, oranges, vegetables, small dead animals of all sorts, including fish, and, if necessary, bottles provided they are not thrown at the bullfighters’ heads, and the occasional setting fire to a bull ring if a properly decorous protest has had no effect.

One of the principal evils of bullfighting in Spain is not the venality of the critics, who can make, at least temporarily, a bullfighter by their criticisms in the Madrid daily papers; but the fact that because these critics live principally on the money they receive from matadors, their viewpoint is entirely that of the matador. In Madrid they cannot distort so favorably an account of a man’s work in the ring as they do when they send dispatches to Madrid from the Provinces or edit their provincial correspondent’s account, because the public who read the account of the Madrid fight have, an important nucleus of them, also seen it. But in all their influence, all their interpretations, all their criticism of the bulls and bullfighters, they are influenced by the viewpoint of the matador; the matador who has sent them by his sword handler the envelope that contains a hundred or two hundred peseta note, or more, and his card. Those envelopes are carried by the sword handler to the critics of each and every paper in Madrid and the amount varies with the importance of the paper and of the critic. The most honest and the best critics receive them and they are not expected to twist the matadors’ disasters into triumphs nor distort their accounts in his favor. It is simply a compliment that the matador pays them. This is the land of honor, you must remember. But because most of their living comes from the matadors they have the matadors’ standpoint and his interests at heart. It is an easy standpoint to see too and a just enough one since it is the matador who risks his life, not the spectator. But if the spectator did not impose the rules, keep up the standards, prevent abuses and pay for the fights there would be no professional bullfighting in a short time and no matadors.

The bull is the part of the fiesta that controls its health or its sickness. If the public, in the person of the individual paying spectator, demands good bulls, bulls that are big enough to make the fight serious, bulls that are from four to five years old so that they are mature and strong enough to stand up through the three stages of the fight; not necessarily huge bulls, fat bulls, or bulls with giant horns, but simply sound, mature animals; then the breeders will have to keep them on the pastures the proper time before they sell them, and the bullfighters will have to take them as they come and learn to fight them. There may be bad fights during the time that certain incomplete fighters are being eliminated through their failures with these animals, but the fiesta will be healthier in the end. The bull is the main element of the fiesta and it is the bulls that the highest-paid bullfighters are constantly trying to sabotage by having them bred down in size and horn and fought as young as possible. It is only the bullfighters at the top who can impose their conditions. The unsuccessful bullfighters and the apprentices have to take the big bulls that the stars refuse. It is this that accounts for the constantly increasing number of deaths among matadors. It is the moderately talented, the beginners and the failures as artists who are most often killed. They are killed because they attempt, and the public demands that they attempt, to fight the bulls, using the technique that the leaders of bullfighting use. But they are forced to try this technique, if they are to attempt to make a living, on the bulls that the leaders refuse, or that are never offered to them because they would most certainly refuse, as too dangerous and as impossible to perform with brilliantly. This accounts for the constant goring and destruction of many of the most promising novilleros, but it will in the end produce some great bullfighters if the period of apprenticeship is of the proper duration and if the apprentice has good fortune. A young bullfighter who has learned to fight with yearlings and has been carefully guarded in his career and only been allowed to face young bulls may fail with big bulls entirely. It is the difference between shooting at a target and shooting at dangerous game or at an enemy who is shooting at you. But an apprentice who has learned to fight with the yearlings, acquired a good pure style, and then perfects his technique and learns bulls by going through the hell of facing the huge, rejected, sometimes defective, supremely dangerous bulls, that he will have in novilladas if he is not protected by the impresario of the Madrid ring, will have the perfect education for a bullfighter if his enthusiasm and his courage are not gored out of him.

Manuel Mejias, Bienvenida, an old-time bullfighter who trained his three sons to fight with yearlings, making of them such skillful, completely rounded, miniature fighters that as child wonders, working only with calves, the two older boys filled the bull rings of Mexico City, Southern France and South America, while they were barred from appearing in Spain by a child-performer law, launched his eldest son, Manolo, at the age of sixteen, as a full-fledged matador, jumping him from child performer with two-year-olds to full matador rather than have him go through the hell of being a novillero. The father believed, and rightly, that the son would not have to face as big nor as dangerous bulls as a full matador as he would as a novillero; that he would make more money as a full matador, and that if his passion and courage were to be taken out of him working with mature bulls, it was better for him to be as highly paid as possible while he lasted.

The first year the boy was a failure. The transition from working with the immature to the mature bulls; the difference in speed of charge; the responsibility; in short the insertion of constant danger of death into his life robbed him of his style and boyish elegance. He was too visibly solving problems and impressed by his responsibility to be able to give a good afternoon of bulls. But in the second year, with a sound scientific education in bullfighting behind him, a training that started when he was four years old, a complete knowledge of how to execute every suerte in bullfighting, he had solved the problem of the mature bulls and triumphed in Madrid on three successive occasions, triumphed in the Provinces wherever he went, with bulls of all breeds, sizes and age. He showed no fear of bulls because of their size, he understood how to correct their defects and how to dominate them and he has done work with the biggest kind of bulls, work of extreme brilliance, that the leaders of the decadent bullfighters have only been able to do, or would only attempt, with bulls that were deficient in size, strength, age and horns. One thing he did not attempt; to kill properly, but everything else he did well. He was the highly publicized Messiah of the year 1930, but one thing is lacking before he can be judged; his first severe horn wound. All matadors are gored dangerously, painfully and very close to fatally, sooner or later, in their careers, and until a matador has undergone this first severe wound you cannot tell what his permanent value will be. For no matter how much he may keep of his courage you cannot tell how it will affect his reflexes. A man may be as brave as the bull himself to face any danger and still, by his nerves, be unable to face that danger coldly. When a bullfighter can no longer be calm and put danger away after the fight once starts, can no longer see the bull come calmly, without having to nerve himself, then he is through as a successful bullfighter. Nerved-up bullfighting is sad to watch. The spectators do not want it. They pay to see the tragedy of the bull; not the man. Joselito was only gored badly three times and killed fifteen hundred and fifty-seven bulls, but the fourth time he was gored he was killed. Belmonte used to be wounded several times each season and none of his wounds had any effect on his courage, his passion for bullfighting, nor his reflexes. I hope the young Bienvenida boy will never be gored, but if he has been by the time this book comes out and it has made no difference to him, then it will be time to talk about the inheritance of Joselito. Personally I do not believe he will ever be the inheritor of Joselito. Finished as his style is and with all his facility in everything but killing, still, watching him in action, it seems to me to smell of the theatre. Much of his work is tricked, it is a more subtle trick than any we have seen yet and it is a very pretty trick to watch; seemingly very gay and lighthearted. But I fear very much that the first big wound will take away his lightness and that the trickiness will then be more visible. Bienvenida, the father, deflated as badly as Nino de la Palma did after his first horn wound, but in breeding bullfighters perhaps it is the way it is with bulls and the valor may come from the mother, and the type from the father. It is unfriendly enough to predict a coming lack of courage, but the last time I saw it the much advertised Bienvenida smile was very forced, and all I can say is that I do not believe in this particular Messiah.

In 1930 Manolo Bienvenida was the local Redeemer of bullfighting, but by 1931 there was a new one: Domingo Lopez Ortega. The critics of Barcelona, where the most money had been spent on his launching, wrote that Ortega began where Belmonte left off; that he combined the best of Belmonte and the best of Joselito, and that in all the history of bullfighting there had never been such a case as Ortega, nor any man who so combined the artist, the dominator and the killer. Ortega is not as impressive as his eulogies. He is thirty-two years old, and has been fighting for several years in the villages of Castilla, especially those around Toledo. He comes from a town of less than five hundred people, in the dry country between Toledo and Aranjuez, called Borox, and his nickname is the Hayseed of Borox. In the fall of 1930 he had a good afternoon in the second-rate Madrid ring of Tetuan de las Vitorias which was then directed and promoted by Domingo Gonzales, called Dominguin, a former matador. Dominguin took him to Barcelona and rented the ring there after the season closed to give a fight featuring Ortega and a Mexican fighter called Carnicerito de Mexico. Fighting young bulls, they both had good days and filled the Barcelona ring three times in succession. Skillfully built up by Dominguin during the winter months with an elaborate press campaign and ballyhoo, Ortega was made a full matador at the opening of the 1931 season in Barcelona. I arrived in Spain immediately after the revolution and found him ranking with politics as a café topic. He had not yet fought in Madrid but every night the Madrid papers published notices of his triumphs in the provinces. Dominguin was spending much money on his publicity and Ortega cut ears and tails each night in all the evening papers. The nearest he had fought to Madrid was in Toledo and I found good aficionados who had seen him there did not agree in their judgments of him. All agreed he had certain details that were well executed but the most intelligent aficionados said they were not convinced by his work. On the 30th of May, Sidney Franklin, who had just come to Madrid after a Mexican campaign, and I went out together to Aranjuez to see the great phenomenon. He was lousy. Marcial Lalanda made a fool of him as did Vicente Barrera.

That day Ortega showed coolness and an ability to move the cape slowly and well, holding it low, provided the bull did the commanding. He showed an ability to cut the natural voyage of the bull and double him on himself with a two-handed pass with the muleta which was very effective in punishing and he made a good one-handed pass with his right. With the sword he killed quickly and trickily profiling with great style and then not keeping the promise of his very arrogant way of preparing to kill when he actually made the trip in. All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes. He had, very obviously, been reading and believing his own newspaper propaganda.

In appearance he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house, a good, mature, but rather thick-jointed figure, and the self-satisfaction of a popular actor. Sidney, who knew that he himself was capable of putting up a much better fight, cursed him all the way home in the car. I wanted to judge him impartially, knowing you cannot place a bullfighter by one performance, so I noted his good qualities and his defects and kept my mind open about him.

That night when we got to the hotel the papers were out and again we read of another great triumph for Ortega. Actually he had been hooted and jeered on the last bull, but in the Heraldo de Madrid we read that he had cut the bull’s ear after a great triumph and been carried out of the ring on the shoulders of the crowd.

Next I saw him in Madrid in his formal presentation as a full matador. He was exactly as he had been at Aranjuez except that he had lost the knack of killing quickly. Twice again in Madrid he fought without showing anything to justify his propaganda and in addition he was beginning to have spells of cowardice. At Pamplona he was so bad he was disgusting. He was being paid twenty-three thousand pesetas a fight and he did absolutely nothing that was not ignorant, vulgar and low.

Juanito Quintana, who is one of the best aficionados in the north, had written me to Madrid about Ortega telling how pleased they were to have gotten him for Pamplona and about the price his manager was demanding to produce him. He was very eager to see him and my account of his dismal performances in and around Madrid only depressed him for a moment. After we had seen him once though he was very disillusioned and after we had seen him three times Juanito could not stand to have his name mentioned.

During the summer I saw him several times more and only once was he good even in his fashion. That was in Toledo with hand-picked bulls which were so small and inoffensive that anything he did needed to be discounted. What he has, when he is good, is a lack of movement and a serenity which is phenomenal. The best pass he makes is the two-handed one designed to cut the voyage of the bull and turn him on himself, but because he does this best he does it again and again on every bull that he gets whether the bull needs this punishment or not and consequently unfits the animal for anything else. He makes a right-handed pass with the muleta, inclining his body toward the bull, very well but he does not link it up with other passes and he is still quite incapable of making effective natural passes with his left. He is very good at spinning between the bull’s horns, a very silly business, and he is a waster of all the vulgarities which are substituted for the dangerous manœuvres in bullfighting whenever the fighter knows that the public is ignorant enough to accept them. He has plenty of courage, strength and health, and friends whom I trust tell me he was truly very good at Valencia, and if he were younger and less conceited he could undoubtedly become an excellent matador if he were able to learn to use his left hand; he may, like Robert Fitzsimmons, violate all standards of age and still do this, but as a messiah he is non-existent. I would not devote so much space to him except that he has had so many thousand columns of paid publicity, some of it is very skillful, that I know that if I would have been away from Spain and only following the fights through the papers I would have probably taken him too seriously.

One bullfighter inherited the qualities of Joselito and lost his inheritance through venereal disease. Another died of bullfighting’s other occupational disorder, and a third became a coward through the first horn wound that came to test his valor. Of the two new messiahs Ortega does not convince me nor does Bienvenida, but I wish Bienvenida much luck. He is a well-brought-up, pleasant, not conceited boy and he is going through a hard time.

Old lady: You are always wishing people good luck and telling them about their mistakes and it seems to me you criticise them very meanly. How is it, young man, that you talk so much and write so long about these bullfights and yet are not a bullfighter yourself. Why did you not take up this profession if you liked it so and think you know so much about it?

Madame, I tried it in its simplest phases but without success. I was too old, too heavy and too awkward. Also my figure was the wrong shape, being thick in all the places where it should be lithe and in the ring I served as little else than target or punching dummy for the bulls.

Old lady: Did they not wound you in horrible fashion? Why are you alive to-day?

Madame, the tips of their horns were covered or blunted or I should have been opened up like a sewing basket.

Old lady: So you fought bulls with covered horns. I had thought better of you.

Fought is an exaggeration, Madame. I did not fight them but was merely tossed about.

Old lady: Did you ever have experience with bulls with naked horns? Did they not wound you grievously?

I have been in the ring with such bulls and was unwounded though much bruised since when I had compromised myself through awkwardness I would fall onto the bull’s muzzle clinging to his horns as the figure clings in the old picture of the Rock of Ages and with equal passion. This caused great hilarity among the spectators.

Old lady: What did the bull do then?

If he were of sufficient force he threw me some distance. If this did not occur I rode a distance on his head, he tossing all the while, until the other amateurs had seized his tail.

Old lady: Were there witnesses to these feats you tell of? Or do you just invent them as a writer?

There are thousands of witnesses, although many may have died since from injuries to their diaphragms or other inner parts caused by immoderate laughter.

Old lady: Was it this that decided you against bullfighting as a profession?

My decision was reached on a consideration of my physical ineptitudes, on the welcome advice of my friends and from the fact that it became increasingly harder as I grew older to enter the ring happily except after drinking three or four absinthes which, while they inflamed my courage, slightly distorted my reflexes.

Old lady: Then I may take it that you have abandoned the bull ring even as an amateur?

Madame, no decision is irrevocable, but as age comes on I feel I must devote myself more and more to the practice of letters. My operatives tell me that through the fine work of Mr. William Faulkner publishers now will publish anything rather than to try to get you to delete the better portions of your works, and I look forward to writing of those days of my youth which were spent in the finest whorehouses in the land amid the most brilliant society there found. I had been saving this background to write of in my old age when with the aid of distance I could examine it most clearly.

Old lady: Has this Mr. Faulkner written well of these places?

Splendidly, Madame. Mr. Faulkner writes admirably of them. He writes the best of them of any writer I have read for many years.

Old lady: I must buy his works.

Madame, you can’t go wrong on Faulkner. He’s prolific too. By the time you get them ordered there’ll be new ones out.

Old lady: If they are as you say there cannot be too many.

Madame, you voice my own opinion.

CHAPTER 15

THE CAPE IN bullfighting was the original means of defense against the danger of the animal. Later, when the fiesta became formalized, its uses were to run the bull when he first came out, to take the bull away from the fallen picador and to place him before the next picador who was to receive his charge, to place him in position for the banderillas, to place him in position for the matador, and to distract his attention when any bullfighter had gotten himself into a compromising position. The whole aim and culmination of the bullfight was the final sword thrust, the moment of truth, and the cape was in principle only an adjunct used to run the bull and help towards preparing that moment.

In modern bullfighting the cape has become increasingly important and its use increasingly dangerous and the original moment of truth, or of reality, the killing, has become a very tricky business indeed. The matadors take turns in being responsible for taking the bull away from the picador and his mount and protecting the man and the horse after the bull’s charge. This act of taking the bull out into the ring away from the man and horse and then, supposedly, placing him in position to charge the next picador is called the quite or removing. The matadors stand in line on the left of the horse and rider and the one who takes the bull out and away from the fallen man and horse goes to the rear of the line when he comes back from making the quite. The quite, pronounced key-tay, from being merely an act of protection for the picador, performed as quickly, as valiantly and as gracefully as possible has now become an obligation on the matador performing it after he has taken the bull out to pass the bull with the cape in whatever style he elects, but usually in veronicas, at least four times as closely, as quietly and as dangerously as he is able. A bullfighter is now judged, and paid, much more on the basis of his ability to pass the bull quietly, slowly and closely with the cape than on his ability as a swordsman. The increasing importance and demand for the style of cape work and work with the muleta, that was invented, or perfected, by Juan Belmonte; the expectation and demand that each matador pass the bull, giving a complete performance with the cape, in the quites; and the pardoning of deficiency in killing of a matador who is an artist with the cape and muleta, are the main changes in modern bullfighting.

The present quite, as a matter of fact, has become almost as much a moment of truth as the killing ever was. The danger is so real, so controlled and selected by the man, and so apparent, and the slightest tricking or simulating of danger shows so clearly, that the modern quites in which the matadors rival with each other in invention and in seeing with what purity of line, how slowly, and how closely they can make the horns of the bull pass their waists, keeping him dominated and slowing the speed of his rush with the sweep of the cape controlled by their wrists; the whole hot bulk of the bull passing the man who looks down calmly where the horns almost touch, and sometimes do touch, his thighs while the bull’s shoulders touch his chest, with no move of defense against the animal and no means of defense against the death that goes by in the horns except the slow movement of his arms and his judgment of distance; these passes are finer than any cape work of the past and as emotional as anything can be. It is to have an animal that they can do this with, increasing the closeness of the horns until they actually touch the man, that the bullfighters pray for a straight-charging bull, and it is the modern cape work, supremely beautiful, supremely dangerous and supremely arrogant, that has kept bullfighting popular and increasingly prosperous through a period when all was decadence and the cape the only real moment of truth. Matadors torear with the cape now as never before, the good ones have taken Belmonte’s invention of working close in the bull’s territory, keeping the cape low, and using only the arms and made it even better than Belmonte did, better than Belmonte if they have a bull that suits them. There has been no decadence in bullfighting in the use of the cape. There has been not a renaissance, but a constant, steady and complete improvement.

I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can. Instantaneous photography has been brought to such a point that it is silly to try and describe something that can be conveyed instantly, as well as studied, in a picture. But the veronica is the touchstone of all cape work. It is where you can have the utmost in danger, beauty, and purity of line. It is in the veronica that the bull passes the man completely and, in bullfighting, the greatest merit is in those manœuvres where the bull passes the man in his charge. Nearly all other passes with the cape are picturesque variations of the same principle or else are more or less tricks. The one exception to this is the quite of the mariposa, or the butterfly, invented by Marcial Lalanda. This, the photograph shows clearly what it is, partakes more of the principal of the muleta than of the cape. Its merit is when it is done slowly and when the folds of the cape that correspond to the butterfly wings swing back from the bull, moved suavely rather than snatched away, while the man shifts backward from side to side. When it is done properly each backward swing of the wings of the cape is like a pase natural with the muleta and is as dangerous. I have seen no one but Marcial Lalanda do it well. The imitators, especially the steel-sinewed, leg-jittering, eagle-nosed Vicente Barrera of Valencia, do the mariposa as though they snatched the cape from under the bull’s nose by electricity. There is a good reason why they do not do it slowly. If you do it slowly there is danger of death.

Originally quites were made, preferably, by the use of largas. In these the cape was fully extended and one end offered to the bull who was drawn away following the extended cape and then turned on himself to fix him in place by a movement made by the matador who would swing the cape over his shoulder and walk away. These could be executed with great elegance. Many variations were possible. Largas could be done while the man knelt and the cape could be so swung that it would wind in the air like a snake making the so-called serpentinas and other fantasies that Rafael El Gallo did so well. But in all largas the principle was that the bull followed the loose length of the cape and was finally turned on himself and fixed by a movement of the cape’s end imparted to it by the man who held the opposite extremity. Their advantage was that they turned the bull less brusquely than the two-handed passes with the cape and so kept the animal in better condition to attack during the final act.

The amount of cape work that is now done with the bull by the matadors alone is, of course, very destructive to him. If the object of the fight had remained, as it was originally, simply to put the bull in the best condition for the killing, the amount that the matadors use the cape, using both hands, would be indefensible. But as bullfighting has progressed or decayed so that the killing is now only a third of the fight rather than the whole end and the cape work and the muleta work a large two-thirds the type of bullfighter has changed. Rarely, extremely rarely, do you get a matador who is both a great killer and a great artist with either cape or muleta. As rarely as you would get a great boxer who was also a first-rate painter. To be an artist with the cape, to use it as well as it can be used, takes an æsthetic sense that can only be a handicap to a great killer. A great killer must love to kill. He must have extraordinary courage and ability to perform two distinctly different acts with two hands at the same time, much more difficult than patting your head with one hand and rubbing your stomach with the other, he must have a primitive and all-controlling sense of honor, for there are many ways to trick the killing of bulls without going straight in on them; but above all he must love to kill. To most of the bullfighters who are artists, starting with Rafael El Gallo and going on down through Chicuelo the necessity to kill seems almost regrettable. They are not matadors but toreros, highly developed, sensitive manipulators of cape and muleta. They do not like to kill, they are afraid to kill and ninety times out of a hundred they kill badly. Bullfighting has gained greatly by the art they have brought to it and one of the great artists, Juan Belmonte, learned to kill well enough. Although he was never a great killer, he had enough of the natural killer in him to develop it and such a great pride in doing everything perfectly that he finally became acceptable and secure as a killer after being deficient for a long time. But there was always a wolf look about Belmonte and there is nothing of the wolf in any of the other æstheticians that have developed since his time, and since they cannot kill honestly, since they would be driven out of bullfighting if they had to kill bulls as they should be killed, the public has taken to expecting and wanting the maximum they can give with the cape and the muleta, regardless of its final fitting of the bull for killing, and the structure of bullfighting has been changed accordingly.

MADAME, does all this writing of the bullfights bore you?

Old lady: No, sir, I cannot say it does, but I can only read so much of it at one time.

I understand. A technical explanation is hard reading. It is like the simple directions which accompany any mechanical toy and which are incomprehensible.

Old lady: I would not say your book is that bad, sir.

Thank you. You encourage me, but is there nothing I can do to keep your interest from flagging?

Old lady: It does not flag. It is only that I get tired sometimes.

To give you pleasure then.

Old lady: You give me pleasure.

Thank you, Madame, but I mean in the way of writing or conversation.

Old lady: Well, sir, since we have stopped early to-day why do you not tell me a story?

About what, Madame?

Old lady: Anything you like, sir, except I would not like another one about the dead. I am a little tired of the dead.

Ah, Madame, the dead are tired too.

Old lady: No tireder than I am of hearing of them and I can speak my wishes. Do you know any of the kind of stories Mr. Faulkner writes?

A few, Madame, but told baldly they might not please you.

Old lady: Then do not tell them too baldly.

Madame, I will tell you a couple and see how short and how far from bald I can make them. What sort of story would you like first?

Old lady: Do you know any true stories about those unfortunate people?

A few, but in general they lack drama as do all tales of abnormality since no one can predict what will happen in the normal while all tales of the abnormal end much the same.

Old lady: Just the same I would like to hear one. I have been reading of these unfortunate people lately and they are very interesting to me.

All right, this is a very short one, but well written it could be tragic enough, but I will not try to write it but only to tell it quickly. I was eating at the Anglo-American Press Association lunch in Paris and sat next to the man who told this story. He was a poor newspaperman, a fool, a friend of mine, and a garrulous and dull companion and he lived at a hotel too expensive for his salary. He still held his job because the circumstances which were later to demonstrate how poor a newspaperman he was had not yet arisen. He told me at lunch that he had slept very badly the night before because there had been a row going on the whole night in the room next to his at the hotel. About two o’clock some one had knocked on his door and begged to be let in. The newspaperman had opened the door and a dark-haired young man about twenty in pyjamas and a new-looking dressing gown came into the room crying. At first he was too hysterical to make much sense except to give the newspaperman the impression that something horrible had been narrowly averted. It seemed this young man had arrived with his friend in Paris on that day’s boat train. The friend, who was a little older, he had met only recently, but they had become great friends and he had accepted his friend’s invitation to come abroad as his guest. His friend had plenty of money and he had none and their friendship had been a fine and beautiful one until tonight. Now everything in the world was ruined for him. He was without money, he would not see Europe, at this point he sobbed again, but nothing on earth would induce him to go back into that room. He was firm on this point. He would kill himself first. He really would. Just then there was another knock on the door and the friend who was also a fine, clean-cut-looking American youth wearing an equally new and expensive looking dressing gown came into the room. On the newspaperman asking him what this was all about he said it was nothing; his friend was overwrought from the trip. At this the first friend commenced crying again and said nothing on earth would make him go back in that room. He would kill himself, he said. He would absolutely kill himself. He went back, however, finally, after some very sensible reassuring pleading by the older friend and after the newspaperman had given them each a brandy and soda and advised them to cut it all out and get some sleep. The newspaperman did not know what it was all about, he said, but thought it was something funny all right, and anyway he went to sleep himself and was next awakened by what sounded like fighting in the next room and some one saying, “I didn’t know it was that. Oh, I didn’t know it was that! I won’t! I won’t!” followed by what the newspaperman described as a despairing scream. He hammered on the wall and the noise ceased, but he could hear one of the friends sobbing. He took it to be the same one who had sobbed earlier.

“Do you want any help?” the newspaperman asked. “Do you want me to get some one? What’s the matter in there?”

There was no answer except the sobbing by the one friend. Then the other friend said, very clearly and distinctly, “Please mind your own business.”

The newspaperman was angry at this and thought he would call the desk and have them both thrown out of the hotel, and he would have too if they had said anything more. As it was he told them to cut it out and went back to bed. He could not sleep very well because the one friend sobbed for quite a long while but finally ceased sobbing. The next morning he saw them at breakfast outside the Café de la Paix, chatting together happily, and reading copies of the Paris New York Herald. He pointed them out to me a day or two later riding together in an open taxi and I frequently saw them, after that, sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots.

Old lady: And is that all of the story? Is there not to be what we called in my youth a wow at the end?

Ah, Madame, it is years since I added the wow to the end of a story. Are you sure you are unhappy if the wow is omitted?

Old lady: Frankly, sir, I prefer the wow.

Then, Madame, I will not withhold it. The last time I saw the two they were sitting on the terrace of the Café des Deux Magots, wearing well-tailored clothes, looking clean cut as ever, except that the younger of the two, the one who had said he would kill himself rather than go back in that room, had had his hair hennaed.

Old lady: This seems to me a very feeble wow.

Madame, the whole subject is feeble and too hearty a wow would overbalance it. Would you like me to relate another story?

Old lady: Thank you, sir. But this will be enough for to-day.

CHAPTER 16

YOU READ OF bulls in the old days accepting thirty, forty, fifty and even seventy pics from the picadors while to-day a bull that can take seven pics is an amazing animal, and it seems as though things were very different in those days and the bullfighters must have been such men as were the football players on the high-school team when we were still in grammar school. Things change very much and instead of great athletes only children play on the high-school teams now and if you sit with the older men at the café you know there are no good bullfighters now either; they are all children without honor, skill or virtue, much the same as those children who now play football, a feeble game it has become, on the high-school team and nothing like the great, mature, sophisticated athletes in canvas-elbowed jerseys, smelling vinegary from sweated shoulder pads, carrying leather head-guards, their moleskins clotted with mud, that walked on leather-cleated shoes that printed in the earth along beside the sidewalk in the dusk, a long time ago.

There were always giants in those days and the bulls really did accept that many pics, the contemporary accounts prove, but the pics were different. In the oldest old days the pic had a very small steel triangular tip so wrapped and protected that only that small tip could go into the bull. The picadors received the bull with their horse straight toward him, drove the pic at him and as they held him off pivoted the horse to the left freeing him from the charge and letting the bull go by. A bull, even a modern bull, could accept a large number of those pics since the steel did not cut into him deeply and it was a move of address on the part of the picador rather than a deliberately sought shock and punishment.

Now, after many modifications, the pic is as the illustration represents it. There is always dispute between bull breeders and picadors as to its form since the form determines its deadliness and the amount of times the bull may charge against it without being ruined, both physically and in bravery.

The present pic is very destructive even though properly placed. It is especially destructive since the picador does not place it, shoot the stick it is called, until the bull has reached the horse. The bull must then make the effort of lifting the horse at the same time the man is leaning his weight on the shaft and driving the steel into the bull’s neck muscle or his withers. If all of the picadors were as skillful as a few are there would be no need to let the bull reach the horse before shooting the stick. But the majority of the picadors, because it is a poorly paid occupation that leads only to concussion of the brain, are not even capable of sinking the pic into a bull properly. They rely on a lucky drive and the certain effort the bull must make in tossing horse and rider to tire the bull’s neck muscles and do the work that a real picador could accomplish without losing either his horse or his seat in the saddle. The wearing of protective mattresses by the horses has made the picadors’ work much more difficult and hazardous. Without the mattress the bull’s horn can get into the horse and he can lift him, or, sometimes, satisfied with the damage he is doing with his horn, be held off by the man’s pic; with the mattress he butts into the horse, there is nothing for his horn to go into and he crashes horse and rider over in a heap. The use of the protective mattress has led to another abuse in bullfighting. Horses that are no longer killed in the ring may be offered by the horse contractor again and again. They are so afraid of the bulls and become so panic stricken on smelling them that they are almost impossible to manage. The new government regulation provides that the picadors may refuse such horses and that they must be marked so that they cannot be used or offered by any horse contractor, but since the picador is so poorly paid, this regulation too will probably be destroyed by the propina, or tip, which makes up a regular part of the picador’s income and which he accepts from the contractor for riding the animals he is given the right and duty, by the government regulations, to refuse.

The propina is responsible for almost every horror in bullfighting. The regulations provide for the size, sturdiness and fitness of the horses used in the bull ring and if proper horses are used and the picadors well trained there would be no need for any horses to be killed except accidentally and against the will of the riders as they are killed, for instance, in steeple-chasing. But the enforcing of these regulations for his own protection are left to the picador as the most interested party and the picador is so poorly paid for the danger he undergoes that, for a small addition to this pay, he is willing to accept horses that make his work even more difficult and dangerous. The horse contractor must furnish or have available thirty-six horses for each fight. He is paid a fixed sum no matter what happens to his horses. It is to his interest to furnish the cheapest animals he can get and see that as few of them are used as possible.

This is about how it works out; the picadors arrive the day before the fight or in the morning of the fight at the corrals of the bull ring to choose and test the horses they are to ride. There is a piece of iron set in the stone wall of the corral that marks the minimum height at the shoulder that a horse must have to be accepted. A picador has the big saddle put on a horse, mounts, tests whether the horse minds bit and spur, backs, wheels and riding toward the corral wall drives against it with the shaft of a pic to see if the horse is sound and solid on his feet. He then dismounts and says to the contractor, “I wouldn’t risk my life on that lousy skate for a thousand dollars.”

“What’s the matter with that horse?” says the contractor. “You’ll go a long way before you’ll find a horse like that.”

“Too long a way,” says the picador.

“What’s the matter with him? That’s a handsome little horse.”

“He’s got no mouth,” the picador says. “He won’t back. Besides he’s short.”

“He’s just the right size. Look at him. Just the right size.”

“Just the right size for what?”

“Just the right size to ride.”

“Not me,” says the picador turning away.

“You won’t find a better horse.”

“I believe that,” says the picador.

“What’s your real objection?”

“He’s got glanders.”

“Nonsense. That isn’t glanders. That’s just dandruff.”

“You ought to spray him with flit,” says the picador. “That would kill him.”

“What’s your real objection?”

“I have a wife and three children. I wouldn’t ride him for a thousand dollars.”

“Be sensible,” the contractor says. They talk in low tones. He gives the picador fifteen pesetas.

“All right,” says the picador. “Mark up the little horse.”

So, in the afternoon you see the picador ride out the little horse and if the little horse gets ripped and, instead of killing him, the red-jacketed bull ring servant runs with him toward the horse gate to get him back where he can be patched up so the contractor can send him in again, you may be sure the bull ring servant has received or been promised a propina for every horse he can bring alive out of the ring, instead of killing them mercifully and decently when they are wounded.

I have known some fine picadors, honest, honorable, brave and in a bad business, but you may have all the horse contractors I have ever met, although some of them were nice fellows. If you wish and will take them, you may have all the bull ring servants too. They are the only people I have found in bullfighting that are brutalized by it and they are the only ones who take an active part who undergo no danger. I have seen several of them, two especially that are father and son, that I would like to shoot. If we ever have a time when for a few days you may shoot any one you wish I believe that before starting out to bag various policemen, Italian statesmen, government functionaries, Massachusetts judges, and a couple of companions of my youth I would shove in a clip and make sure of that pair of bull ring servants. I do not want to identify them any more closely because if I ever should bag them this would be evidence of premeditation. But of all the filthy cruelty I have ever seen they have furnished the most. Where you see gratuitous cruelty most often is in police brutality; in the police of all countries I have ever been in, including, especially, my own. These two Pamplona and San Sebastian monosabios should be, by rights, policemen and policemen on the radical squad, but they do the best they can with their talents in the bull ring. They carry on their belts puntillas, broad-headed knives, with which they can give the gift of death to any horse that is badly wounded, but I have never seen them kill a horse that could possibly be gotten on his feet and made to move toward the corrals. It is not only a question of the money they could make by salvaging horses to be taxidermed while alive so they may be reintroduced into the ring, for I have seen them refuse to kill, until forced to by the public, a horse there was no hope of getting onto his feet or of bringing back into the ring purely from pleasure in exerting their power to refuse to perform a merciful act as long as possible. Most bull ring servants are poor devils that perform a miserable function for a mean wage and are entitled to pity if not sympathy. If they save a horse or two that they should kill they do it with fear that outruns any pleasure and earn their money as well as the men do who pick up cigar butts, say. But these two that I speak of are both fat, well-fed and arrogant. I once succeeded in landing a large, heavy one-peseta-fifty rented, leather cushion alongside the head of the younger one during a scene of riotous disapproval in a bull ring in the north of Spain and I am never at the ring without a bottle of Manzanilla which I hope yet I will be able to land, empty, on one or the other at any time rioting becomes so general that a single bottle stroke may pass unperceived by the authorities. After one comes, through contact with its administrators, no longer to cherish greatly the law as a remedy in abuses, then the bottle becomes a sovereign means of direct action. If you cannot throw it at least you can always drink out of it.

In bullfights now a good pic is not one in which the picador, pivoting, protects his horse completely. That is what it should be, but you might go a long time and never see one. All you can expect in a good pic now is that the picador will place his stick properly, that is drive the point into the morillo, or hump of muscle that rises from the back of the bull’s neck to his shoulders, that he will try to hold the bull off and that he will not twist his pic or turn it to try and make a deep wound in the bull in order that he may lose blood and so weaken, to make the danger less for the matador.

A bad pic is one that is placed anywhere else but in the morillo, one which rips or opens a big wound, or one in which the picador lets the bull reach the horse, then when the horn is in, pushes, drives and twists on the pic which is in the bull and tries to give the impression he is protecting his horse when he is really only injuring the bull to no good purpose.

If picadors had to own their own horses and were well paid they would protect them and the horse part of bullfighting would become one of the most brilliant and skillful of all rather than a necessary evil. For my own part if horses are to be killed the worse the horses are the better. For the picadors’ part an old horse with big feet is much more useful to them in the way they pic now than would be a thoroughbred in good condition. To be useful in the bull ring a horse must be either old or well-tired. It is as much to tire the horses as to provide transportation for the picadors that the animals are ridden from the ring into town to the picadors’ boarding house and back. In the provinces the bull ring servants ride the horses in the morning to tire them. The rôle of the horse has become that of providing something the bull will charge so that his neck muscles will be tired and of supporting the man who receives the charge and places his pic in such a manner as to force the bull to tire those muscles. His duty is to tire the bull rather than weaken him by wounds. The wound made by the pic is an incident rather than an end. Whenever it becomes an end it is censorable.

Used for this purpose the worst horses possible, that is those past any other usefulness, but which are solid on their feet and moderately manageable, are the best. I have seen thoroughbreds killed in their prime in other places than the bull ring and it is always a sad and disturbing business. The bull ring is a death’s business for horses and the worse horses they are the better.

As I say, having the picadors own their own horses would change the whole spectacle. But I would rather see a dozen old worthless horses killed on purpose than one good horse killed by accident.

WHAT about the Old Lady? She’s gone. We threw her out of the book, finally. A little late you say. Yes, perhaps a little late. What about the horses? They are what people always like to talk about in regard to the bullfight. Has there been enough about the horses? Plenty about the horses, you say. They like it all but the poor horses. Should we try to raise the general tone? What about higher things?

Mr. Aldous Huxley writing in an essay entitled “Foreheads Villainous Low” commences: “In [naming a book by this writer] Mr. H. ventures, once, to name an Old Master. There is a phrase, quite admirably expressive [here Mr. Huxley inserts a compliment], a single phrase, no more, about ‘the bitter nail-holes’ of Mantegna’s Christs; then quickly, quickly, appalled by his own temerity, the author passes on (as Mrs. Gaskell might hastily have passed on, if she had somehow been betrayed into mentioning a water-closet), passes on, shame-facedly, to speak once more of Lower Things.

“There was a time, not so long ago, when the stupid and uneducated aspired to be thought intelligent and cultured. The current of aspiration has changed its direction. It is not at all uncommon now to find intelligent and cultured people doing their best to feign stupidity and to conceal the fact that they have received an education” — and more; more in Mr. Huxley’s best educated vein which is a highly educated vein indeed.

What about that, you say? Mr. Huxley scores there, all right, all right. What have you to say to that? Let me answer truly. On reading that in Mr. Huxley’s book I obtained a copy of the volume he refers to and looked through it and could not find the quotation he mentions. It may be there, but I did not have the patience nor the interest to find it, since the book was finished and nothing to be done. It sounds very much like the sort of thing one tries to remove in going over the manuscript. I believe it is more than a question of the simulation or avoidance of the appearance of culture. When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature. If a writer can make people live there may be no great characters in his book, but it is possible that his book will remain as a whole; as an entity; as a novel. If the people the writer is making talk of old masters; of music; of modern painting; of letters; or of science then they should talk of those subjects in the novel. If they do not talk of those subjects and the writer makes them talk of them he is a faker, and if he talks about them himself to show how much he knows then he is showing off. No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature. People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birth-right and what he must, in turn, take his departure from. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

CHAPTER 17

THERE IS NO part of the fiesta that appeals to the spectator seeing bullfights for the first time as does the placing of the banderillas. The eye of a person unfamiliar with the bullfight cannot really follow the cape work; there is the shock of seeing the horse struck by the bull and no matter how this affects the spectator he will be liable to continue to watch the horse and miss the quite that the matador has made. The work with the muleta is confusing; the spectator does not know which passes are difficult to make and, it all being new, his eye is hardly competent to distinguish one move from another. He watches the muleta as something picturesque and the killing may be done so suddenly that unless the spectator has very trained eyes he will not be able to break up the different figures and see what really happens. Often enough, too, the killing will be done so without style or sincerity, the matador making as little of it as he can in order to decrease its importance, that the spectator will have no idea of the emotion and the spectacle that a properly killed bull will give. But the placing of the banderillas he sees clearly, he follows it easily in all its details and almost invariably, when it is well done, he enjoys it.

In the banderillas he sees a man walk out carrying two slender sticks with barbed points; the first man he has seen go toward the bull without a cape in his hands. The man attracts the bull’s attention, I am describing the simplest way of planting banderillas, runs toward him as the bull charges and as bull and man come together and the bull lowers his head to hook the man puts his feet together, raises his arms high and drives the shafts straight down into the lowered neck of the bull.

That is as much of it as the spectator’s eye can follow.

“Why doesn’t the bull get him?” some one seeing their first fight, or even after many fights, will ask. The answer is this, the bull cannot turn in a shorter space than his own length. Therefore, if the bull charges, once the man has passed the horn he is safe. He may pass the horn by taking a course which brings him at an angle toward the bull’s course, judging the moment of encounter when he puts his feet together so that the bull’s head is down, sinking the sticks and pivoting on them past the horn. This is called placing them poder-a-poder or force to force. The man may start from a position so that he makes a quarter of a circle as he crosses the bull’s charge, thus placing them al cuarteo, the commonest way, or he may stand still and await the bull’s charge, the finest way of planting them, and as the bull reaches him in his charge and is about to lower his head to hook the man lifts the right foot and sways to the left so that the bull follows the lure of his body, then sways back, brings his right foot down, and drives down the sticks. This is called placing the banderillas al cambio. It may be done, of course, to either the right or left. The way I have described it the bull would pass to the left.

There is another variation of this called al quiebro in which the man is not supposed to lift either foot, deceiving the bull and giving him the false direction with a movement of his body, the feet kept still; but I have never seen this done. I have seen many pairs of banderillas that the critics called al quiebro, but I have never seen one placed without the man raising either one foot or the other.

In all these ways of placing the banderillas there are two men with capes in different parts of the ring, in general a matador in the centre and another, either matador or banderillero, in the rear of the bull so that, when the man has planted the banderillas and passed the bull’s horn, by whatever means he has chosen, the bull, as he turns to pursue him, will see a cape before he has made his turn and taken out after the man. There is a definite place in the ring that each of the two or three men with capes occupies in all of the various ways of placing banderillas. The ways I have described, the cuarteo or quarter of a circle, power-to-power and its variations, in both of which the man and bull are both running, and the cambio and its variations, in which the man stands still and awaits the bull’s charge, are the usual ways of placing banderillas in which the man seeks to perform brilliantly. They are usually the ones used by the matador when he takes the banderillas himself and their effect depends upon the grace, cleanness, decision and domination that the man puts into them and the proper placing of the shafts. They should be placed high up on the top of the shoulders, well back behind the bull’s neck, they should be sunk together, not spread apart, and they should not be placed where they will interfere with the sword thrust. Banderillas should never be placed in the wounds made by the picadors. A banderilla properly placed pierces the hide only and the weight of the shaft causes it to hang down the bull’s flank. If it is driven in too deep it stands straight up, makes it impossible to work brilliantly with the bull with the muleta, and instead of a sharp prick that has no lasting effect it makes a painful wound that discomposes the bull and makes him uncertain and difficult. There is no manœuvre in the bullfight which has, as object, to inflict pain on the bull. The pain that is inflicted is incidental, not an end. The object of all the manœuvres, in addition to giving the most brilliant spectacle, is to try to tire the bull and slow him in preparation for the killing. I believe that part of the bullfight which inflicts most pain and suffering, some of it useless, on the bull is the placing of the banderillas. Yet it is the part of the fight which causes least repugnance to American and British spectators. I believe this is because it is the easiest to follow and to understand. If all of the bullfight were as easy to follow, appreciate, understand and see the danger of as is the placing of the banderillas the attitude of the non-Spanish world toward the bullfight might be very different. In my own time I have seen the attitude of American newspapers and popular magazines changed greatly toward bullfighting by some presentation of it, as it is, or an honest attempt at this presentation in fiction; and this before the son of a Brooklyn policeman had become a capable and popular matador.

There are, in addition to the three ways of placing banderillas that I have described, at least ten others some of which have become obsolete, such as the man who is to place the banderillas citing the bull with a chair in one hand, seating himself as the bull charges, rising from the chair to lure the bull to one side with a feint, driving in the banderillas and then sitting again in the chair. This is almost never seen now, nor are various other ways of placing banderillas which were invented by certain bullfighters and being rarely executed well except by their inventors, passed into disuse.

Bulls that take up a querencia against the barrera cannot be banderilla-ed by the use of the quarter or the half-circle method of running across the line of the bull’s charge, placing the sticks as the man’s line of movement crosses that of the bulls, since the man after passing the horn would be caught between the bull and the barrier and such bulls must be banderilla-ed on this bias or al sesgo. In this manœuvre the bull being against the barrera one man should be in the passage way with a cape to attract the bull’s attention until the man who is to place the banderillas starts at an angle, from farther down the barrera, plants his banderillas as he passes the bull’s head without stopping, as best he can. Often he has to vault the barrera if the bull takes after him. There is a man farther out in the ring with a cape to try to pick the bull as he turns, but since bulls that necessitate this manœuvre are usually those that are liable to make for the man rather than the lure, often the man with the cape is comparatively useless.

Bulls which will not charge or, in charging, cut in on the man or those which are nearsighted are banderilla-ed by what is called by the media-vuelta or half turn. In this way of placing, the banderillero comes close behind the bull, calls the bull’s attention and as the bull revolves toward the man and drops his head to hook the man, who is already in motion, drives in the banderillas.

This is only an emergency method of placing them since it violates the principle of the bullfight that the man should, in accomplishing any manœuvres with the bull, approach him from the front.

Another way of placing the banderillas that you still sometimes see is what is called a relance; that is when the bull is still running and tossing after the placing of a pair of banderillas the man takes advantage of this running, as distinct from a charge he has provoked deliberately, to cut in on it in a half or quarter-circle and place another pair.

The matador usually takes the banderillas himself when he thinks the bull is one that he can perform brilliantly with. In former times a matador took the banderillas only when the crowd asked him to. Now placing the banderillas is a part of the regular repertoire of all matadors who have the necessary physique and who have taken the time to learn to banderillear well. In the preparation of the bull alone, sometimes drawing the bull on by running backwards in zigzags, these sudden shifts of direction being the defense of a man on foot against the bull, seeming to play with him while they place him where they want him, then challenging him arrogantly, walking steadily and slowly toward him and then when the charge comes either awaiting it or running in to meet it, a matador has an opportunity to impress his personality and his style on all that he does in this third of the fight. A banderillero, however, even though he might be more skillful than his master, has only one instruction, aside from advice as to where to place them in the animal, to put them in quickly and properly so that the bull will be delivered as soon and in the best condition possible to his master, the matador, for the last and final act. Most banderilleros are good at placing the sticks from either one side or the other. It is very rarely that a man is able to banderillear properly from both sides. For this reason a matador will carry one banderillero who is best on the right and another who is good on the left.

The best banderillero I have ever seen was Manuel Garcia Maera. He, with Joselito and Rodolfo Gaona, the Mexican, were the greatest of modern times. A peculiar thing is the overwhelming excellence of all Mexican bullfighters with the banderillas. For the last few years, each season there have come to Spain from three to six unknown Mexican apprentice bullfighters any one of whom is as good as or better than the best artists with the banderillas in Spain. They have a style in their preparation and execution and an emotional quality that comes from the unbelievable chances they take, that are, except for the Indian coldness of the rest of their work, the mark and characteristics of Mexican bullfighting.

Rodolfo Gaona was one of the greatest bullfighters that ever lived. He was produced under the régime of Don Porfirio Diaz and worked in Spain exclusively during the years when the fights were suspended while Mexico was in revolution. He modified his early style in imitation of Joselito and Belmonte and competed with them on almost equal terms during the season of 1915; on equal terms in 1916, but after that a horn wound and an unfortunate marriage ruined his career in Spain. He was steadily worse in his performances as a fighter while Joselito and Belmonte improved. The pace, he was not as young as they were, the new style, and his loss of morale caused by domestic difficulties were too much for him and he returned to Mexico where he dominated all other bullfighters and served as a model for all the present crop of elegant Mexicans. Most of the youngest Spanish bullfighters have never seen either Joselito or Belmonte, only their imitators, but the Mexicans have all seen Gaona. In Mexico he was also the master of Sidney Franklin and Franklin’s style with the cape, which so puzzled and amazed Spaniards when he first appeared, was formed and influenced by Gaona. Mexico is producing now, during another period without civil war, a quantity of bullfighters who may become great if the bulls leave anything of them. The arts never flourish much in war time, but with Mexico at peace the art of bullfighting is flourishing now to a greater degree in Mexico than in Spain. The difficulty is the difference in size, temperament and nerve of the Spanish bulls which, when the young Mexicans come to Spain they are not used to, and so are, often after the most brilliant work, caught and gored not through any defects in their technique, but simply because they are working with animals more nervous, powerful, and difficult to judge than those of their own country. You cannot have a great bullfighter that is not gored sooner or later, but if you gore him too early, too often and too young he will never be the bullfighter he might have been if the bulls had respected him.

When you judge the placing of a pair of banderillas the thing to notice is how high the man raises his arms when he puts in the sticks since the higher he raises them the closer he lets the bull come to his body. Notice too the amount of circle or cuarteo he uses to cut across the bull’s charge, the more he cuarteos the safer it is. In a really good pair the man puts his feet together as he raises his hands, and in the cambios and so-called quiebros you should watch how well he waits and how close he lets the bull come before he shifts his feet. The merits of banderillas placed from the barrera depend entirely on whether the manœuvre is tricked or not by capes flung over from behind the barrera to attract the bull’s attention. When working in the centre of the ring the man, when he comes toward the bull, has two men with capes some distance away on each side, but they are to distract the bull if he pursues the man after the sticks are planted. When placing banderillas from against the barrera it may be necessary to flop a cape over after the banderillas have been placed, to protect the man if he has gotten into an impossible position. But a cape flopped over each time at the moment of placing means that it is only a trick.

Among the actual matadors the best performers with the banderillas are Manolo Mejias (“Bienvenida”), Jesus Solorzano, José Gonzalez (“Carnicerito de Mexico”), Fermin Espinosa (“Armillita II”) and Heriberto Garcia. Antonio Marquez, Felix Rodriguez and Marcial Lalanda are very interesting with the banderillas. Lalanda sometimes puts in excellent pairs, but he usually makes much too big a quarter of a circle past the bull’s head, Marquez has difficulty dominating and placing the bull and when he puts the banderillas in close to the barrera almost always has the bull tricked into driving his horns against the wood to make him shy of the barrier and, at the time he is driving in his pair, has a peon flop a cape over the barrier to distract the bull while he makes his escape. Felix Rodriguez is a splendid banderillero, but has been ill and lacks the necessary physical strength to banderillear well. When he is at his best he is perfect.

Fausto Barajas, Julian Saiz (“Saleri II”) and Juan Espinoza (“Armillita”) were excellent banderilleros, but are on the decline. Saleri may have retired by the time this is published. Ignacio Sanchez Mejeas was a very great banderillero, who has also retired as a matador, but his style was heavy and graceless.

There are half a dozen young Mexicans who are as good as any of these matadors who, by the time this book is published, may be dead, ruined or famous.

Of banderilleros working as peons under the orders of matadors the best with the sticks that I know are Luis Suarez, “Magritas,” Joachin Manzanares, “Mella,” Antonio Duarte, Rafael Valera, “Rafaellillo,” Mariano Carrato, Antonio Garcia, “Bombita IV,” and with the cape Manuel Aguilar, “Rerre,” and Bonifacio Perea, “Boni,” Bienvenida’s peon de confianza or confidential banderillero. The greatest peon with the cape that I ever saw was Enrique Berenguet, “Blanquet.” The best banderilleros are often men who have wanted to be matadors, but having failed in their trials with the sword have resigned themselves to the position of working for wages in a cuadrilla. They often know more about bulls than the matador they are working for and often have more personality and style, but they are in a servile position and must be careful not to take any of the attention away from their chief. The only man in bullfighting who really makes money is the matador. This is right in that he takes the responsibility and runs the greatest danger of death, but good picadors, who receive only two hundred and fifty pesetas, and banderilleros who are paid two hundred and fifty to three hundred, are ridiculously underpaid if the matador is receiving ten thousand pesetas and over. If they are not good at their trade they are a definite liability to the matador and are expensive at any price, but as it is, no matter how good they become at their profession, they cannot become more than day laborers compared to the matadors. The very best banderilleros and picadors are in great demand and a half dozen of each may have as many as eighty fights in a season, but there are many good and capable ones who make a bare living. They are organized into a syndicate and matadors must pay them a minimum wage; this varies depending on the matador’s ranking, they are divided into three categories according to the price they receive for fighting; but there are many more banderilleros than there are opportunities to fight and a matador may get them at any price he wishes, if he is mean enough, by making them sign a note for a certain amount of the money they should receive and holding out this amount when he pays them. In spite of how badly paid a profession it is these men keep on, living always close to hunger, from the illusion that they may make a living from the bulls and from the pride of being fighters.

Banderilleros are sometimes lean, brown, young, brave, skillful and confident; more of a man than their matador, perhaps deceiving him with his mistress, making what seems to them a good living; enjoying the life; other times they are respectable fathers of families, wise about bulls, fat but still fast on their feet, small business men with the bulls as their business; other times they are tough, unintelligent, but brave and capable, lasting like ballplayers, as long as their legs hold out; others may be brave but unskillful, eking out a living, or they may be old and intelligent but with their legs gone, sought out by young fighters for their authority in the ring and their skill at placing bulls correctly.

Blanquet was a very small man, very serious and honorable, with a Roman nose and an almost gray face, who had the greatest intelligence of the bullfight I have ever seen and a cape that seemed magic in correcting the faults of a bull. He was the confidential peon of Joselito, Granero and Litri, all of whom were killed by bulls and to none of whom his cape, so providential always when needed, was of any use on the days when they were killed. Blanquet himself died of a heart attack coming on in a hotel room after he had left the ring and before he had changed his clothes to bathe.

Of the banderilleros working now, the one with the most style with the sticks is probably Magritas. There is no one with the cape who has the style Blanquet had. He handled the cape with one hand with the same sort of delicacy that Rafael El Gallo did, but with the skillful, self-effacing modesty of a peon. It was watching the interest and activities of Blanquet at moments when nothing particular seemed to be happening that I learned the profundity of unseen detail in the fighting of any single bull.

DO YOU want conversation? What about? Something about painting? Something to please Mr. Huxley? Something to make the book worthwhile? All right, this is the end of a chapter, we can put it in. Well, when Julius Meier-Graefe, the German critic, came to Spain he wanted to see the Goyas and Velasquezes to have publishable ecstasies about them, but he liked the Greco better. He was not content to like Greco better; he had to like him alone, so he wrote a book proving what poor painters Goya and Velasquez were in order to exalt Greco, and the yardstick that he chose to judge these painters by was their respective paintings of the crucifixion of Our Lord.

Now it would be hard to do anything stupider than this because of the three only Greco believed in Our Lord or took any interest in his crucifixion. You can only judge a painter by the way he paints the things he believes in or cares for and the things he hates; and to judge Velasquez, who believed in costume, and in the importance of painting as painting, by a portrait of a nearly naked man on a cross who had been painted, Velasquez must have felt, very satisfactorily in the same position before, and in whom Velasquez took no interest at all, is not intelligent.

Goya was like Stendhal; the sight of a priest could stimulate either of those good anti-clericals into a rage of production. Goya’s crucifixion is a cynically romantic, wooden oleograph that could serve as a poster for the announcement of crucifixions in the manner of bullfight posters. A crucifixion of six carefully selected Christs will take place at five o’clock in the Monumental Golgotha of Madrid, government permission having been obtained. The following well-known, accredited and notable crucifiers will officiate, each accompanied by his cuadrilla of nailers, hammerers, cross-raisers and spade-men, etc.

Greco liked to paint religious pictures because he was very evidently religious and because his incomparable art was not then limited to accurate reproducing of the faces of the noblemen who were his sitters for portraits and he could go as far into his other world as he wanted and, consciously or unconsciously, paint saints, apostles, Christs and Virgins with the androgynous faces and forms that filled his imagination.

One time in Paris I was talking to a girl who was writing a fictionalized life of El Greco and I said to her, “Do you make him a maricón?”

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

“Did you ever look at the pictures?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you ever see more classic examples anywhere than he painted? Do you think that was all accident or do you think all those citizens were queer? The only saint I know who is universally represented as built that way is San Sebastian. Greco made them all that way. Look at the pictures. Don’t take my word for it.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Think it over,” I said, “if you are writing a life of him.”

“It’s too late now,” she said. “The book is done.”

Velasquez believed in painting in costume, in dogs, in dwarfs, and in painting again. Goya did not believe in costume but he did believe in blacks and in grays, in dust and in light, in high places rising from plains, in the country around Madrid, in movement, in his own cojones, in painting, in etching, and in what he had seen, felt, touched, handled, smelled, enjoyed, drunk, mounted, suffered, spewed-up, lain-with, suspected, observed, loved, hated, lusted, feared, detested, admired, loathed, and destroyed. Naturally no painter has been able to paint all that but he tried. El Greco believed in the city of Toledo, in its location and construction, in some of the people who lived in it, in blues, grays, greens and yellows, in reds, in the holy ghost, in the communion and fellowship of saints, in painting, in life after death and death after life and in fairies. If he was one he should redeem, for the tribe, the prissy exhibitionistic, aunt-like, withered old maid moral arrogance of a Gide; the lazy, conceited debauchery of a Wilde who betrayed a generation; the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman and all the mincing gentry. Viva El Greco El Rey de los Maricónes.

CHAPTER 18

THE ABILITY OF a bullfighter with the muleta is what, in the end, determines his ranking in the profession, for it is the most difficult of all the phases of modern bullfighting to dominate and is the part of the bullfight where the genius of a matador has greatest latitude for expression. It is with the muleta that a reputation is made and it is by the extent of this ability to give a complete, imaginative, artistic and emotional performance with the muleta, granted that he has a good bull, that a bullfighter is paid much or little. To draw a brave bull in Madrid, have him come in ideal condition to the final act and then, through a limited repertoire, not be able to take advantage of his bravery and nobility to make a brilliant faena finishes a bullfighter’s chance of a successful career. For bullfighters are now categoried, classed and paid, strangely enough, not by what they actually do, for the bull may upset their performance, they themselves may be ill, they may not be altogether recovered from a horn wound, or they may simply have off-days; but by what they are capable of doing under most favorable conditions. If the spectators know the matador is capable of executing a complete, consecutive series of passes with the muleta in which there will be valor, art, understanding and, above all, beauty and great emotion, they will put up with mediocre work, cowardly work, disastrous work because they have the hope sooner or later of seeing the complete faena; the faena that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carrying the bullfighter with it, he playing on the crowd through the bull and being moved as it responds in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over, and the death administered to the animal that has made it possible, as empty, as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you.

A bullfighter who can do a great faena is at the top of his profession as long as he is believed capable of still doing it, if the conditions are favorable; but a bullfighter who has shown his inability to do a great faena with the conditions right, who is lacking in artistry and genius with the muleta even though he be brave, honorable, skillful and not lacking in knowledge of his work, will always be one of the day laborers of bullfighting and paid accordingly.

It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick. If you do not choose to believe it possible and want to regard it all as nonsense you may be able to prove you are right by going to a bullfight in which nothing magical occurs; and there are many of them; enough always so you will be able to prove it to your own satisfaction. But if you should ever see the real thing you would know it. It is an experience that either you will have in your life or you will never have. However, there is no way you can be sure you will ever see a great faena in bullfighting unless you go to many bullfights. But if you ever do see one, finished by a great estocada, you will know it and there will be many things you will forget before it will be gone.

Technically, the muleta is used to defend the man from the charge of the bull, to regulate the carriage of the bull’s head, to correct a tendency he may have to hook to one side or the other, to tire him and place him in position for killing and, in killing, to furnish an object for him to charge in place of the man’s body as the matador goes in on him with the sword.

The muleta is, in principal, held in the left hand and the sword in the right and passes made with the muleta in the left hand are of greater merit than those made with it in the right since when it is held in the right hand, or in both hands, it is spread wide by the sword and the bull having a larger lure to charge may pass farther from the man’s body and also, by the swing of the larger lure, be sent away to a greater distance before recharging; thus allowing the man more time to prepare his next pass.

The greatest pass with the muleta, the most dangerous to make and the most beautiful to see is the natural. In this the man faces the bull with the muleta held in his left hand, the sword in his right, the left arm hanging naturally at his side, the scarlet cloth dropping in a fold over the stick that supports it and which the man holds as you see in the picture. The man walks toward the bull and cites him with the muleta and as he charges the man simply sways with the charge, swinging his left arm ahead of the bull’s horns, the man’s body following the curve of the charge, the bull’s horns opposite his body, the man’s feet still, he slowly swings his arm holding the cloth ahead of the bull and pivots, making a turn of a quarter-circle with the bull. If the bull stops the man may cite him again and describe another quarter of a circle with him, and again, and again, and again. I have seen it done six successive times; the man seeming to hold the bull with the muleta as though by magic. If the bull instead of stopping with the charge, and what stops him is a final flick the man gives the lowest end of the cloth at the end of each pass, and the great twist that has been given his spinal column through the curve the matador has forced him to describe in bending him around, turns and recharges, the man may get rid of him by a pase de pecho, or pass past the chest. This is the reverse of the pass natural. Instead of the bull coming from in front and the man moving the muleta slowly before his charge, in the pase de pecho the bull, having turned, comes from behind or from the side, and the man swings the muleta forward, lets the bull go past the man’s chest and sends him away with the sweep of the folds of scarlet cloth. The chest pass is the most impressive when it completes a series of naturals or when it is forced by an unexpected return and charge of the bull and is used by the man to save himself rather than as a planned manœuvre. The ability to execute a series of naturals and then to finish them off with the chest pass mark a real bullfighter.

First it takes courage to cite the bull for a true natural when there are so many other passes in which the bullfighter exposes himself less; it takes serenity to await the arrival of the bull with the unspread muleta low in the left hand, knowing that if he does not take the small lure offered he will take the man, then it takes great ability to move the muleta ahead of his charge, keeping him well centred in it, the elbow straight as the arm moves, swinging straight, and to follow the curve with the body without moving the location of the feet. It is a difficult pass to make properly four times in succession before a mirror in a drawing room without any bull being present and if you make it seven times you will be dizzy enough. There are many bullfighters who never learn to make it presentably at all. To do it well, without contortion, keeping the lines of the figure with the horn of the bull so close to the man’s waist that they would only have to move up an inch or two to gore, controlling the bull’s charge by the movement of arm and wrist and keeping him centred in the cloth, stopping him with the wrist flick at just the proper moment, repeating this three or four or five times takes a bullfighter and an artist.

The natural can be tricked by doing it with the right hand, the muleta spread wide with the sword and the man gyrating on his feet so that the bull follows a sort of half spin made by man and muleta rather than a slowly moved arm and wrist. There are many passes made with the right hand that are of positive merit, but in almost all the sword with its point pricked into the cloth and the hilt held in the same hand with the stick enlarges the spread of the muleta and by giving it greater extent enables the bullfighter to pass the bull farther from his body if he wishes. He may pass him close, but he has a means of passing him farther away in case of necessity that the man working with the muleta in his left hand does not possess.

Aside from the natural and the pecho, the principal passes with the muleta are the ayudados, passes made with sword pricked into the muleta and the two held in both hands. These passes are either called por alto or por bajo, depending on whether the muleta passes over the bull’s horns or is swung below the bull’s muzzle.

All passes, and half passes, that is those in which the bull does not completely pass the man, made with the muleta have a definite purpose. Nothing so punishes a bull that is strong and willing to charge as a series of naturals which at the same time that they are twisting and tiring him make him follow the lure and the man with his left horn, training him to take the direction the man wants him to take as he later goes in to kill. A bull whose neck muscles have not been sufficiently tired and who carries his head high, will after a series of ayudados por alto; passes made with the muleta and sword held in both hands and the muleta held high so that the bull drives up after it as he goes by the man; have his muscles tired so the head will be much lower. If he is tired and carries his head too low the matador can bring it up, temporarily, with the same pass if he modifies it and does not wait for the carriage of the head to fall again before he goes in to kill. The low passes, made with a swing and a sharp twist of the muleta, sometimes a slow-drawing swing and flip of the lower part of the cloth, and the quick chops back and forth are for bulls that are still too strong on their feet or difficult to fix in one spot. They are made from in front of bulls that will not pass and the merit of the bullfighter consists in his foot-work in never losing his place at the head of the animal, never retreating more than he needs to, and with the movements of his muleta dominating the animal, making him turn sharply on himself, wearing him down quickly, and fixing him in position. A bull that will not pass, that is charge from a certain distance with sufficient force so that if the man remains still and moves the muleta properly the bull will pass him entirely, is either a cowardly bull or a bull who has been so used in the fight that he has lost all buoyancy and will no longer attack. A skillful matador can by a few passes that he forces at close range and is careful to keep suave, not turning the bull too much on himself or twisting his legs, make the cowardly bull believe that the muleta is not a punishment; that he will not be hurt if he charges, and convert the cowardly bull into the semblance of a brave bull by giving him confidence. In the same way, by working delicately and wisely, he can light up the bull that has lost his charging ability and bring him out of his defense and into the offensive again. To do this a bullfighter must take great chances as the only way to give a bull confidence, to force him to charge when he is on the defensive and to master him is to work as close to him as you can get, leave him just enough of his own terrain to stand on, as Belmonte puts it, and in provoking the charge from such close range the bullfighter has no way to avoid being caught if he guesses wrong and no time to prepare his passes. His reflexes must be perfect and he must know bulls. If at the same time he is graceful you may be sure that grace is an altogether inherent quality and not a pose. You may be able to pose as the horns approach from a distance, but there is no time to pose when you are between them, or shifting back and forth to a little place of safety at the corner of his neck as by giving him the muleta on one side and then withdrawing it, pricking him with the point of the sword or the muleta stick to make him turn, you wear him down, or light him up when he does not want to charge.

There is a whole school of bullfighting in which grace is developed until it is the one essential and the passing of the horn past the man’s belly eliminated as far as possible, which was inaugurated and developed by Rafael El Gallo. El Gallo was too great and sensitive an artist to be a complete bullfighter so he gradually avoided, as much as possible, those parts of the bullfight which had to do with or were capable of bringing on death, either of the man or the bull, but most especially of the man. In this way he developed a way of working with the bull in which grace, picturesqueness, and true beauty of movement replaced and avoided the dangerous classicism of the bullfight as he found it. Juan Belmonte took such of Gallo’s inventions as he wanted and combined them with the classic style and then developed the two into his own great revolutionary style. Gallo was as much of an inventor as was Belmonte, he had more grace, and if he would have had the cold, passionate, wolf-courage of Belmonte there could never have been a greater bullfighter. The nearest you come to that combination was Joselito, his brother, and his only fault was that everything in bullfighting was so easy for him to do that it was difficult for him to give it the emotion that was always supplied by Belmonte’s evident physical inferiority, not only to the animal he was facing but to every one who was working with him and most of those who were watching him. Watching Joselito was like reading about D’Artagnan when you were a boy. You did not worry about him finally because he had too much ability. He was too good, too talented. He had to be killed before the danger ever really showed. Now the essence of the greatest emotional appeal of bullfighting is the feeling of immortality that the bullfighter feels in the middle of a great faena and that he gives to the spectators. He is performing a work of art and he is playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer, to himself, a death that you know is in the horns because you have the canvas-covered bodies of the horses on the sand to prove it. He gives the feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours. Then when it belongs to both of you, he proves it with the sword.

When you have a bullfighter to whom bullfighting is as easy as it was to Joselito he cannot give the feeling of danger that Belmonte gave. Even if you saw him killed it would not be you who would be killed, it would be more like the death of the gods. Gallo was something entirely different. He was pure spectacle. There was no tragedy in it, but no tragedy could replace it. But it was only good if he did it. His imitators only showed how unsound it all was.

One of Gallo’s inventions was the pase de la muerte or the pass of the dead one. He used this pass to start his faenas and it has been adopted by most bullfighters as the first pass in almost any faena. It is the one pass in bullfighting that any person who could dominate his nerves enough to see the bull approach could learn to make, yet it is tremendously effective to see. The matador goes out toward the bull and cites him, standing in profile, the muleta, spread by the sword, held in both hands, at the height of his waist somewhat as a baseball player holds his bat when facing the pitcher. If the bull does not charge the matador advances two or three strides and again stands still, his feet together, the muleta spread wide. When the bull charges the man stands still as though he were dead until the bull reaches the muleta, then he raises it slowly and the bull goes by him, usually going up in the air after the muleta so that you see the man standing straight still and the bull going up into the air at an angle, his impetus then carrying him away from the man. It is easy and safe to make because it is usually given in the direction of the natural querencia of the bull, so that he goes by as though going to a fire, and because, instead of a small lure of scarlet cloth as in the natural on which the man must focus the bull’s attention, a great spread like a jib is offered to the bull and he sees it instead of the man. He is not dominated and controlled, his charge is merely taken advantage of.

Gallo, too, was a master of gracious passes made before the bull’s horns, passes made with both hands, changing the muleta from one hand to the other, sometimes behind his back, passes that started as though they were to be naturals and instead, the man spinning around, the muleta wrapping itself around him and the bull following the spinning loose end of it; others in which the man turned on himself getting close to the bull’s neck and winding him around him, passes made kneeling, using both hands on the muleta to swing the bull around in a curve; all passes that needed a great knowledge of the bull’s mentality and great confidence to make safely, but that, with that knowledge and confidence, were beautiful to see and very satisfying to Gallo to make although they were the negation of true bullfighting.

Chicuelo is a present-day bullfighter who possesses much of Gallo’s repertoire of working before the face of the bull. Vicente Barrera does them all too, but his nervous footwork and his electric speed of execution give no idea of the pure grace of Gallo or the skill of Chicuelo although Barrera is improving his style and execution greatly.

All this flowery work is for bulls that will not pass or for the second part of a faena, for the matador to show his domination of a bull and his inventive grace. To work only at the head of a bull that will pass, no matter how effectively, gracefully or with what invention it is done is to deprive the spectators of the real part of bullfighting, the man deliberately passing the bull’s horns as close and as slowly as he can past his own body and to substitute a series of graceful tricks, valuable as ornaments to a faena, for the sincere danger of the faena itself.

The present-day bullfighter who dominates the bulls most completely with his muleta, who masters them quickest whether they are brave or cowardly and then executes most often all the classic and dangerous passes, the natural with the left hand and the pase de pecho which are the base of sincere bullfighting, and yet is excellent in the picturesque and graceful work before the bull’s horns is Marcial Lalanda. At the start of his career his style was faulty, he twisted and corkscrewed with the cape and his naturals were not at all natural but forced, made very much on the bias, and affected looking. He has steadily improved his style, until it is now excellent with the muleta, he has become much more robust in health, and with his great knowledge of bulls, and his very great intelligence he can give an adequate and interesting performance with any bull that comes out of the toril. He has lost most of the apathy that was his first characteristic, he has been gored severely three times and it has given him more rather than less courage and his seasons of 1929, 1930 and 1931 were those of a great bullfighter.

Manuel Jiminez, Chicuelo, and Antonio Marquez are each capable of giving a complete, pure, and classical faena with the muleta when the bull is without difficulty and the man able to conquer his nerves. Felix Rodriguez and Manolo Bienvenida are both masters with the muleta, able to reduce a difficult bull and profit by the candor and bravery of an easy bull, but Rodriguez has not been well and Bienvenida, as I explained in another chapter, should not really be judged until his ability to dominate his nerves and reflexes after his first serious wounding has been proven. Vicente Barrera is an able dominator of bulls with a tricky style in all of the passes in which the bull goes completely by the man, but he is steadily improving his way of working and he may, if he keeps on, become a very satisfactory performer. He has in him the ability to be a great bullfighter. He has talent, a natural sense of bullfighting and ability to see the fight as a whole, extraordinary reflexes and a good physique, but he had for a long time such an overwhelming conceit that it was easier for him to subsidize a press to praise his defects than it was for him to face those defects and correct them. He is at best in the picturesque work at the face of the bull and especially in one particular ayudado por bajo in which he imitates Joselito, where the sword and muleta are held together pointed straight down and the man turns the bull with a slightly ridiculous but delicate lifting motion as though he were with extended hands together stirring a great kettle of soup with a furled umbrella.

Joaquin Rodriguez, called Cagancho, is a gypsy who is the inheritor of Gallo as far as grace, picturesqueness and panics go, but in no sense inherits Gallo’s great knowledge of bulls and of the principles of bullfighting. Cagancho has statuesque grace, majestic slowness and suavity of movement, but faced by a bull which will not allow him to put his feet together and prepare his passes he shows he has no resources and if the bull deviates at all from mechanical perfection, the gypsy becomes panic stricken and will get no closer to the animal than the tip of his muleta held at the greatest distance possible from his body. He is a bullfighter who, if you should happen to see him with a bull he had confidence in, could give you an afternoon you would not forget, but you might see him seven successive times and have him act in a way that would disgust you thoroughly with bullfighting.

Francisco Vega de los Reyes, called Gitanillo de Triana, is a cousin of Cagancho who can be very good with the cape and while he lacks Cagancho’s grace with the muleta is much more able and courageous with it although his work is fundamentally unsound. While he is doing a faena he seems unable to get rid of the bull properly, to send him far enough with each pass so that, as he turns, he does not cut back in too quickly and so is constantly getting the bull on top of him when he wants him least and has been gored many times through his own awkwardness. Like Chicuelo and Marquez he is not well nor strong and while there is no reason for the public to excuse a highly paid performer on the grounds of his health, since there is no law which requires him to fight bulls unless he is in condition to do so, yet the physical condition of a bullfighter is one of the things that must be taken into account in judging his work critically even though he has no right to evoke it as excuse to the paying spectator. Gitanillo de Triana is cheerfully brave and naturally honorable in the ring, but the confident unsoundness of his technique gives you a feeling that he may be gored at any time while you are watching him.

Since writing that about Gitanillo de Triana I saw him destroyed by a bull in Madrid on Sunday afternoon, May 31, 1931. It had been over a year since I had seen him fight and on the way to the ring in a taxi I wondered if he would be changed and how much I should have to revise what I had written about him. He came out in the paseo with long-legged easy swing, dark-faced, better looking than he had been before and smiling at every one he recognized as he came up to the barrera to change capes. He looked healthy, his skin clear-tobacco brown, his hair that had been discolored by the peroxide they had used to soak out the clotted blood after a motorcar accident in which he had been severely hurt in the last year I had seen him, was ebony black again and shining, and he wore a silver bullfighting suit to emphasize all this black and brown and seemed very pleased with things.

With the cape he was confident, managing it beautifully and slowly; the style of Belmonte except that it was being done by a long-legged, thin-hipped, dark gypsy. His first bull was the third of the afternoon and after being very good with the cape he watched the banderillas placed; then, before he went out with sword and muleta, he motioned to the banderilleros to bring the bull closer in to the barrera.

“Watch him; he hooks a little to the left,” said his sword handler as he handed him the sword and the cloth.

“Let him hook as he wants; I can handle him,” Gitanillo drew the sword out of the leather sheath that went limp as the stiffness was gone and strode, long legging, toward the bull. He let him come once and go by for the pase de la muerte. The bull turned very quickly and Gitanillo turned with the muleta to let him come by on the left, raised the muleta and then rose himself into the air, his legs wide spread, his hands still holding the muleta, his head down, the bull’s left horn in his thigh. The bull turned him on the horn and threw him against the barrera. The bull’s horn found him, picked him up once more and threw him against the wood again. Then as he lay there the bull drove the horn through his back. All of this did not take three seconds and from the instant the bull first lifted him Marcial Lalanda was running toward him with the cape. The other bullfighters had their capes wide spread, flopping them at the bull. Marcial went in at the bull’s head, shoving his knee into the bull’s muzzle, slapping him across the face to make him leave the man and come out in a rush; Marcial running out into the ring backwards, the bull following the cape. Gitanillo tried to get to his feet, but couldn’t, the bull ring servants picked him up and ran with him, his head swaying, toward the infirmary. A banderillero had been gored by the first bull and the doctor still had him on the operating table when they came in with Gitanillo. He saw there was no tremendous hemorrage, the femoral artery had not been severed, finished with the banderillero and then went to work. There was a horn wound in each thigh and in each wound the quadriceps and abductor muscles had been torn loose. But in the wound in the back the horn had driven clean through the pelvis and had torn the sciatic nerve and pulled it out by the root as a worm may be pulled out of the damp lawn by a robin.

When his father came to see him, Gitanillo said, “Don’t cry, little papa. You remember how bad the automobile thing was and they all said we wouldn’t get over it? This is going to be the same way.” Later he said, “I know I can’t drink, but tell them to moisten my mouth. Just moisten my mouth a little.”

Those people who say they would pay to go to a bullfight if they could see the man gored not just always the bulls killed by the men, should have been at the ring, in the infirmary, and later in the hospital. Gitanillo lived through the heat of June and July and the first two weeks of August dying finally then of meningitis from the wound at the base of the spine. He weighed one hundred and twenty-eight pounds when he was gored and he weighed sixty-three pounds when he died and during the summer suffered three different ruptures of the femoral artery, weakened by ulcers from the drainage tubes in his thigh wound and rupturing when he coughed. While he was in the hospital Felix Rodriguez and Valencia II came in with almost identical thigh wounds and were both discharged as able to fight, although their wounds were still open, before Gitanillo died. Gitanillo’s bad luck was that the bull threw him against the base of the wooden fence so that he was against something solid when the horn made that chop at his back. Had he been lying on the sand in the open ring the same horn stroke that wounded him fatally would probably have thrown him into the air rather than driven through his pelvis. The people who say they would pay to see a bullfighter killed would have had their money’s worth when Gitanillo became delirious in the hot weather with the nerve pain. You could hear him in the street. It seemed a crime to keep him alive and he would have been much luckier to have died soon after the fight while he still had control of himself and still possessed his courage rather than to have gone through the progressive horror of physical and spiritual humiliation that the long enough continued bearing of unbearable pain produces. To watch and to hear a human being in this time should, I suppose, make one more considerate about the horses, the bulls and other animals, but there is a quick pull forward on a horse’s ears to tighten the skin over the vertebræ at the base of the skull and an easy stroke by the puntilla between the vertebræ that solves all a horse’s problems and drops him dead without a twitch. The bull gets death within fifteen minutes of when the man starts to play him and all wounds he receives are in hot blood and if they do not hurt any more than the wounds a man receives in hot blood they cannot hurt much. But as long as man is regarded as having an immortal soul and doctors will keep him alive through times when death would seem the greatest gift one man could give another, then the horses and the bulls will seem well taken care of and man to run the greatest risk.

Heriberto Garcia and Fermin Espinoza, Armillita Chico, are two Mexicans who are complete and capable artists with the muleta. Heriberto Garcia can equal the very best and his work does not have the cold Indian quality that takes away emotion from most Mexicans’ work in the bull ring. Armillita is cold; a brown little chinless Indian with an odd collection of teeth, a beautiful build for a fighter, more length in legs than torso, and is one of the really great artists with the muleta.

Nicanor Villalta when he has a bull that charges straight enough so that the matador can put his feet together works closer to the bull, becomes more exalted, more excited, curving on himself so he thrusts his waistline at the horns and with his amazing wrist controlling the muleta brings the bull around him in circles, again and again, passes him so close before his chest that the bull’s shoulder sometimes jostles him and the horns so close to his belly that you can see welts on his abdomen afterwards at the hotel, no exaggeration; I’ve seen the welts, but I thought they might have come from the shafts of the banderillas that struck him as he passed the bulk of the bull by him so close that it covered his shirt from blood; but they might have come from the flat of the horns, the horns were so close I did not want to watch them too closely. When he does a great faena it is all valor; valor and that magic wrist and it makes you put up with the greatest awkwardness you could see on all bulls which will not allow him to get his feet together. You may see a great faena of Villalta’s in Madrid; he has drawn more good bulls there than any matador who ever lived. You are certain to see him as awkward looking as a praying mantis any time he draws a difficult bull, but remember that his awkwardness is caused by his physical structure, not cowardliness. Because of the way he is built he can only be graceful if he can put his feet together, and where awkwardness on the part of a naturally graceful bullfighter is a sign of panic, in Villalta it only means that he has drawn a bull which he must spread his legs apart to work with. But if you can ever see him when he can put his feet together, see him bend like a tree in a storm before the bull’s charge, see him wind the bull around him again, and again, and again; see him get so excited that he will kneel in front of the bull after he has dominated him and bite the horn, then you will forgive him the neck God gave him, the muleta the size of a bed sheet that he uses and his telephone pole legs because his strange mixture of a body contains enough valor and pundonor to make a dozen bullfighters.

Cayetano Ordonez, Nino de la Palma, could manage the muleta perfectly with either hand, was a beautiful performer with a great artistic and dramatic sense of a faena, but he was never the same after he found the bulls carried terms in the hospital, inevitable, and death, perhaps, in their horns as well as five thousand peseta notes between their withers. He wanted the notes, but he was unwilling to approach the horns to get them when he found the forfeit that was collectable from their points. Courage comes such a short distance; from the heart to the head; but when it goes no one knows how far away it goes; in a hemorrhage, perhaps, or into a woman and it is a bad thing to be in bullfighting business when it is gone, no matter where it went. Sometimes you get it back from another wound, the first may bring fear of death and the second may take it away, and sometimes one woman takes it away and another gives it back. Bullfighters stay in the business relying on their knowledge and their ability to limit the danger and hope the courage will come back and sometimes it does and most times it does not.

Neither Enrique Torres nor Victoriano Roger Valencia II has any real ability with the muleta and it is that which limits them in their profession for they are both, at their best, fine artists with the cape. Luis Fuentes Bejarano and Diego Mazquarian, Fortuna, are two bullfighters, very brave, very sound in their knowledge of their profession, able to reduce difficult bulls and give competent performance with any, but with heavy undistinguished styles. Fortuna’s is more old-fashioned than Bejarano’s whose style is simply bad modern tricks, but they are alike in their bravery, their competence, their very good luck, and their lack of genius. They are matadors to see with ordinary or difficult bulls. Where the stylists would attempt nothing they will give you a competent bullfight with all the cheap thrills and theatricalisms intermixed with one or two moments of true emotion. Of the three best killers, in bullfighting, Antonio de la Haba, Zurito, Martin Aguero, and Manolo Martinez, only Martinez can give a semblance of a faena with the muleta and his success, when he has it, is entirely due to his courage and the chances he takes rather than any true ability in managing the serge.

Of the thirty-four other full matadors in active service only a few are worth mentioning. One, Andres Merida, from Malaga is a tall, thin, vacant-faced gypsy who is a genius with cape and muleta and is the only bullfighter I have ever seen who had a completely absent-minded air in the ring as though he were thinking of something very distant and very different. He is liable to attacks of fear so complete that there is no word for them, but if he becomes confident with a bull he can be wonderful. Of the three real gypsies, Cagancho, Gitanillo de Triana and Merida I like Merida the best. He has the grace of the others with an added grotesque which, with his absentmindedness makes him, for me, the most appealing of all the gypsies after Gallo. Cagancho is, of all of them, the most talented. Gitanillo de Triana the bravest and most honorable. Last summer I heard from several people from Malaga that Merida was not really a gypsy. If this is true then he is even better as an imitation than a real one.

Saturio Toron is an excellent banderillero, very valiant, with the worst, most ignorant, most dangerous manner of working as a matador that I have ever seen. After being a banderillero he took the sword as an apprentice bullfighter in 1929 and he had an excellent season forcing success through valor and good luck. He was made a formal matador in 1930 by Marcial Lalanda at Pamplona and was severely gored in his first three fights. If his taste improves he can possibly rid himself of some of his small-town vulgarities of style and learn to fight bulls, but from what I saw of him in 1931 his case looked hopeless and I can only hope the bulls do not destroy him.

In this list of those who started as though they might be good matadors and end in varying degrees of failure and tragedy the two great causes of failure, eliminating bad luck, are lack of artistic ability, which of course cannot be overcome by valor, and fear. The two really brave matadors who have nevertheless failed to hold any place because of the shortness of their repertoires are Bernard Munoz, Carnicerito, and Antonio de la Haba, Zurito. Another who is really brave and has more of a repertoire than Carnicerito and Zurito and may amount to something although handicapped by lack of stature is Julio Garcia, Palmeno.

Besides Domingo Ortega, whom I have written about in another place in this book, the new matadors of any reputation include José Amoros, who has a peculiar rubbery style, seeming to stretch away from the bull as though he were made of elastic bands, and is completely second rate, except of course in his unique rubberyness; José Gonzalez called Carnicerito of Mexico, a Mexican Indian belonging to the gutful-wonder school who eats them alive and while very brave, a good banderillero and a capable and very emotional performer will not be with us very long if he takes the same chances with the real bulls that he does with the young ones and, since he has accustomed his public to such strong sensations, will almost certainly cease to interest if he stops taking these chances; and, most promising of all the new fighters, Jesus Solorzano. Jesus, called Chucho, in case you don’t know the diminutive for that Christian name, is a non-Indian Mexican who is a perfect bullfighter, brave, artistic, intelligent and dominating every department of his art completely except the very minor one of administering the descabello or coup de grace, and yet is completely without personality. This lack of personality is difficult to analyze, but so far it seems to consist of a sort of apologetic, slinking, faulty, hump-backed way of carrying himself when he is not directly involved with the bull. Bullfighters say that fear of a bull takes the type away from a bullfighter, that is, if he is arrogant and bossy, or easy and graceful, fear removes these characteristics; but Solorzano seems to have no type to lose. Yet when he is working with a bull that he is confident with he is perfect in everything he does and he placed the finest pair of banderillas walking slowly, foot by foot toward the bull in the style of Gaona, did the best and slowest work with the cape and the closest and most emotional faena with the muleta that I saw in all the season of 1931. The negative part of his work is that he performs beautifully with the bull and then as soon as he steps away from the animal lapses into that humpbacked, frozen-faced apathy, but personality or not he is a wonderful bullfighter with knowledge and great art and valor.

Two other new matadors are José Mejias, called Pepe Bienvenida, the younger brother of Manolo, who is braver and more excitable than his elder brother, has a varied and picturesque repertoire and a very attractive personality, but is lacking in Manolo’s artistic ability and knowledge of how to dominate bulls safely, although this may come with time, and David Liceaga, a young Mexican fighter, who is enormously skillful with the muleta and without style or ability with the cape and, oddly enough for a Mexican, mediocre with the banderillas. I write this about Liceaga without having seen him on the reports of those people whose opinion I trust who have watched him work. He fought only twice in Madrid in 1931; once as a novillero on the day I went out to Aranjuez to see Ortega and again in October, to be made a full matador, after I had left Spain. But he is very popular in Mexico City and any one who wants to check up on him will probably be able to see him in Mexico during the winter.

I have omitted all phenomenons from this listing, rating no one who has not proved his right to be judged. There are always new phenomenons in bullfighting. There will be newer ones by the time this book comes out. Watered by publicity they sprout each season on the strength of one good afternoon in Madrid with a bull that was kind to them; but the morning glory is a floral monument of lasting endurance compared to these one-triumph bullfighters. Five years from now, eating only occasionally but keeping their one suit neat to wear to the café, you will be able to hear them tell how, on their presentation in Madrid, they were better than Belmonte. It may be true too. “And how were you the last time?” you ask. “I had a little bad luck killing. Just a little bad luck,” the ex-phenomenon says, and you say, “That’s a shame. A man can’t have luck killing them all,” and in your mind you see the phenomenon, sweating, white-faced and sick with fear, unable to look at the horn or go near it, a couple of swords on the ground, capes all around him, running in at an angle on the bull hoping the sword will strike a vital spot, cushions sailing down into the ring and the steers ready to come in. “Just a little bad luck killing.” That was two years ago and he hasn’t fought since except in bed at night when he wakes up wet with sweat and fear and he will not fight again unless hunger makes him and then, because every one knows he is a coward and worthless, he may have to take some bulls that no one else will take and if he nerves himself up to do something, since he is out of training, the bulls may kill him. Or else he may have, “Just a little bad luck killing,” again.

There are seven hundred and sixty-some unsuccessful bullfighters still attempting to practice their art in Spain; the skillful ones unsuccessful through fear and the brave ones through lack of talent. You sometimes see the brave ones killed if you are unlucky. In the summer of 1931 I saw a fight with very big, very fast, five-year-old bulls and three apprentice matadors. The oldest in point of service was Alfonzo Gomez, called Finito de Valladolid, well over thirty-five, once handsome, a failure in his profession, yet very dignified, intelligent and brave, who had been fighting in Madrid ten years without ever interesting the public enough to justify a move from novillero to full matador. Next oldest in service was Isidoro Todo, called Alcalareno II, thirty-seven years old, only a little over five feet tall, a chunky cheerful little man who supported four children, his widowed sister and the woman he lived with on the little money he made from the bulls. All he had as a bullfighter was great bravery and the fact that he was so short that this defect, which made it impossible for him to succeed as a matador, made him an attraction as a curiosity in the ring. The third fighter was Miguel Casielles, a complete coward. But it is a dull and ugly story and the only thing to remember was the way Alcalareno II was killed and that was too ugly, I see now, to justify writing about when it is not necessary. I made the mistake of telling my son about it. When I came home from the ring he wanted to know all about the fight and just what had happened and like a fool I told him what I’d seen. He did not say anything except to ask if he had not been killed because he was so small. He himself was small. I said yes he was small, but also because he had not known how to cross with the muleta. I hadn’t said he was killed; only hurt; I’d had that much sense although it was not much. Then somebody came in the room, Sidney Franklin I think it was, and said in Spanish, “He’s dead.”

“You didn’t say he was dead,” the boy said.

“I didn’t know for sure.”

“I don’t like it that he’s dead,” the boy said.

The next day he said, “I can’t stop thinking about that man who was killed because he was so small.”

“Don’t think about it,” I said, wishing for the thousandth time in my life that I could wipe out words that I’d said. “It’s silly to think about that.”

“I don’t try to think about it, but I wish you hadn’t told me because every time I shut my eyes I see it.”

“Think about Pinky,” I said. Pinky is a horse in Wyoming. So we were very careful about death for a while. My eyes were too bad to read and my wife was reading Dashiell Hammett’s bloodiest to date, The Dain Curse, out loud and every time that Mr. Hammett would kill a character or a set of characters she would substitute the word umpty-umped for the words killed, cut the throat of, blew the brains out of, spattered around the room, and so on, and soon the comic of umpty-umped so appealed to the boy that when he said, “You know the one who was umpty-umped because he was so small? I don’t think about him now,” I knew it was all right.

There have been four new matadors promoted in 1932, two of whom deserve mention as possibilities, one as a curiosity and one could probably be omitted as a phenomenon. The two possibilities are Juanito Martin Caro called Chiquito de la Audiencia and Luis Gomez called El Estudiante. Chiquito, at twenty, has been fighting young bulls as a child prodigy since he was twelve. Elegant in style, very graceful, sound, intelligent, and competent, he has the pretty, pretty look of a young girl, but in the ring he is domineering and serious and has nothing effeminate about him except his girl’s face and certainly none of the feeble, whipped look of Chicuelo. His drawback is that his work while intelligent and beautiful is cold and passionless; he has been fighting so long that he seems to have the caution and protective resources of a matador at the end of his career rather than to be a boy who must risk everything to arrive. But he has great artistic ability and intelligence and his career will be very interesting to follow.

Luis Gomez, El Estudiante, is a young medical student with a keen, brown, good looking face and a good figure that might serve as a model for a formalized young matador type, who possesses a good sound classic modern style with cape and muleta and kills quickly and well. After three seasons of fighting in the provinces in the summer and studying medicine in Madrid in the winter, he made his début last fall in Madrid as a novillero and had a great success. He became a full matador at Valencia in the corridas of San José in March of 1932 and according to aficionados, whom I trust, he was very good and showed great promise although, occasionally with the muleta, his valor and desire to make a faena led him into compromising situations which he was unconscious of and from which he was saved only by luck and good reflexes. On the surface it seemed he dominated the bulls but in reality luck saved him more than once; but with intelligence, valor and a good style, he is a legitimate hope as a matador if his luck holds during his first full campaign.

Alfredo Corrochano, son of Gregorio Corrochano, the very influential bullfight critic of the Madrid monarchist daily, A. B. C., is a matador made to order by his father under the influence of Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, the brother-in-law of Joselito, whom Corrochano attacked so bitterly and virulently during the season that saw his death. Alfredo is a dark, slight, contemptuous and arrogant boy with a rather Bourbonic face a little like that of Alfonso XIII as a child. He was educated in Switzerland and trained as a matador at the testings of the calves and brood stock of the bull ranches around Madrid and Salamanca by Sanchez Mejias, his father and all those who toady to his father. For about three years he has fought as a professional, first with the Bienvenida boys as a child performer, then last year as a full novillero. Due to his father’s position, his presentation in Madrid aroused much feeling and he was made to feel the bitterness of all the enemies his father’s often excellent and extremely well written sarcasms had made, as well as those who hated him as a son of the middle-class royalist and believed he was depriving boys who needed bread to eat of the chance to earn it in the ring. At the same time he profited by the publicity and curiosity all this feeling aroused and through his three appearances as a novillero in Madrid he bore himself insolently, arrogantly and very much like a man. He showed he was a good banderillero, an excellent dominator with the muleta, with much intelligence and vista in handling of the bull, but with a lamentably bad style with the cape and an utter inability to kill properly or even decently. In 1932 he took the alternative in Castellon de la Plana in the first corrida of the year and according to my informants he was not changed since I had seen him except that he was trying to remedy his vulgar way of making the veronica by substituting various picturesque tricks with the cape for that one irreplaceable test of a fighter’s serenity and artistic ability. As a curiosity his career will be extremely interesting, but I believe that unless he acquires security in killing he will soon cease to interest the public, once his novelty as a son of his father has been thoroughly exploited.

Victoriano de la Serna was a young novillero who had that necessity for the production of a phenomenon, a great afternoon in Madrid, in September of 1931. He was taken up, exploited, shown near Madrid, with hand-picked, small bulls, where a disaster could be minimized and a triumph made much of by the Madrid critics paid to attend, then at the very end of the season he was presented for his second Madrid appearance as a full matador. He showed that the elevation was premature, that he was green, insufficiently grounded in his profession and needed much more seasoning and experience before being able to handle the mature bulls securely. This season he has a certain amount of contracts signed last year before his failure in Madrid but in spite of his undoubtedly phenomenal natural ability, his too early elevation to a matador would seem to have started him on the quick descent to oblivion, well greased as it is by all those other phenomenons who have slid along it before him. As always, I hope for the performer, who is less guilty than his exploiters, that I am wrong and that he may miraculously learn his trade while practising it as a master but it is such a defrauding of the public to do so that even when a matador does so learn his craft, the public rarely forgives him and when he is secure enough to satisfy them they have no wish to see him.

CHAPTER 19

THERE ARE ONLY two proper ways to kill bulls with the sword and muleta and as both of them deliberately invoke a moment in which there is unavoidable goring for the man if the bull does not follow the cloth properly, matadors have steadily tricked this finest part of the fight until ninety of one hundred bulls that you will see killed will be put to death in a manner that is only a parody of the true way to kill. One reason for this is that rarely will a great artist with the cape and muleta be a killer. A great killer must love to kill; unless he feels it is the best thing he can do, unless he is conscious of its dignity and feels that it is its own reward, he will be incapable of the abnegation that is necessary in real killing. The truly great killer must have a sense of honor and a sense of glory far beyond that of the ordinary bullfighter. In other words he must be a simpler man. Also he must take pleasure in it, not simply as a trick of wrist, eye, and managing of his left hand that he does better than other men, which is the simplest form of that pride and which he will naturally have as a simple man, but he must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. Killing cleanly and in a way which gives you æsthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race. Because the other part, which does not enjoy killing, has always been the more articulate and has furnished most of the good writers we have had a very few statements of the true enjoyment of killing. One of its greatest pleasures, aside from the purely æsthetic ones, such as wing shooting, and the ones of pride, such as difficult game stalking, where it is the disproportionately increased importance of the fraction of a moment that it takes for the shot that furnishes the emotion, is the feeling of rebellion against death which comes from its administering. Once you accept the rule of death thou shalt not kill is an easily and a naturally obeyed commandment. But when a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes; that of giving it. This is one of the most profound feelings in those men who enjoy killing. These things are done in pride and pride, of course, is a Christian sin, and a pagan virtue. But it is pride which makes the bullfight and true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador.

Of course these necessary spiritual qualities cannot make a man a good killer unless the man has all the physical talent for the performance of the act; a good eye, a strong wrist, valor, and a fine left hand to manage the muleta. He must have all of these to an exceptional degree or his sincerity and pride will only put him in the hospital. There is not, in Spain to-day, one really great killer. There are successful matadors who can kill perfectly though without great style when they wish, luck being with them, but who do not attempt it often because they do not need to in order to hold their public; there are matadors who might have been great killers in the old days, who started in their careers killing bulls as well as it could be done, but who, through their lack of ability with cape and muleta, early ceased to interest the public and so have few contracts and lack the opportunity to develop their art with the sword or even to keep in practice; and there are matadors who are starting their careers who still kill well, but are not yet proven or tested by time. But there is no outstanding matador who day in and day out kills well, easily, and with pride. The leading matadors have developed a facile and tricky way of killing which has robbed what should be the culmination of the emotion of the bullfight of all emotion except that of disappointment. The emotion now is given by the cape, by, occasionally, the banderillas, most surely by the work with the muleta, and the best you can hope for from the sword is a quick ending that will not spoil the effect of what has gone before. I believe I saw more than fifty bulls killed with various degrees of facility before I consciously saw one killed well. I had no complaint about the bullfight as it was, it was interesting enough, better than anything I had seen up to that time; but I thought the sword business was a not particularly interesting anticlimax. Still, knowing nothing about it, I thought perhaps it was really an anticlimax and that the people who spoke and wrote highly of the killing of the bull in bullfighting were merely liars. My own standpoint was quite simple; I could see the bull had to be killed to make the bullfight; I was pleased that he was killed with a sword, for anything to be killed with a sword was a rare enough business; but the way that he was killed looked like a trick and gave me no emotion at all. This is the bullfight, I thought, the end is not so good, but perhaps that is part of it and I do not understand it yet. Anyway it is the best two dollars’ worth I have ever had. Still, I remembered, at the first bullfight I ever saw, before I could see it clearly, before I could even see what happened, in the new, crowded, confused, white-jacketed beer vender passing in front of you, two steel cables between your eyes and the ring below, the bull’s shoulders smooth with blood, the banderillas clattering as he moved and a streak of dust down the middle of his back, his horns solid-looking like wood on top, thicker than your arm where they curved; I remembered in the midst of this confused excitement having a great moment of emotion when the man went in with the sword. But I could not see in my mind exactly what happened and when, on the next bull, I watched closely the emotion was gone and I saw it was a trick. I saw fifty bulls killed after that before I had the emotion again. But by then I could see how it was done and I knew I had seen it done properly that first time.

When you see a bull killed for the first time, if it is the usual run of killing, this is about how it will look. The bull will be standing square on his four feet facing the man who will be standing about five yards away with his feet together, the muleta in his left hand and the sword in his right. The man will raise the cloth in his left hand to see if the bull follows it with his eyes; then he will lower the cloth, hold it and the sword together, turn so that he is standing sideways toward the bull, make a twist with his left hand that will furl the cloth over the stick of the muleta, draw the sword up from the lowered muleta and sight along it toward the bull, his head, the blade of the sword and his left shoulder pointing toward the bull, the muleta held low in his left hand. You will see him draw himself taut and start toward the bull and the next thing you will see is that he is past the bull and either the sword has risen into the air and gone end over end or you will see its red flannel wrapped hilt, or the hilt and part of the blade sticking out from between the bull’s shoulders or from his neck muscles and the crowd will be shouting in approval or disapproval depending on the manner in which the man has gone in and the location of the sword.

That is all you will see of the killing; but the mechanics of it are these. Bulls are not killed properly by a sword thrust in the heart. The sword is not long enough to reach the heart, if driven in where it should go high up between the shoulder blades. It goes past the vertebræ between the top of the ribs and, if it kills instantly, cuts the aorta. That is the end of a perfect sword thrust and to make it the man must have the good luck that the sword point should not strike either the spine or the ribs as it goes in. No man can go toward a bull, reach over the top of his head if it is carried high, and put a sword in between his shoulders. The instant the bull’s head is up the sword is not long enough to reach from his head to his shoulders. For it to be possible for the man to put the sword into the place where it is designed to go to kill the bull he must have the bull’s head down so that this place is exposed and even then the man must lean forward over the bull’s lowered head and neck to get the sword in. Now, if when the bull raises his head as the sword goes in the man is not to go up in the air, one of two things must be happening; either the bull must be in motion past the man, guided by the muleta in the man’s left arm as he shoves the sword in with his right or else the man must be in motion past the bull who is guided away from the man by the muleta held by the left hand which is crossed low in front of and to the left of the man’s body as he goes in over the bull’s head and comes out along his flank. Killing can be tricked by having both the man and bull in motion.

These are the mechanical principles of the two ways to kill bulls properly; either the bull must come to and pass the man, cited, drawn on, controlled and going out and away from the man by a movement of the muleta while the sword is being inserted between his shoulders; or else the man must fix the bull in position, his front feet together and his hind feet square with them, his head neither too high nor too low, must test him by raising and lowering the cloth to see if he follows it with his eyes and then, with the muleta in his left hand making a cross in front of him so that if the bull follows it he will pass to the man’s right, go in toward the bull and as he lowers his head after the cloth which is to guide him away from the man, put the sword in and come out along the bull’s flank. When the man awaits the charge of the bull it is called killing recibiendo.

When the man goes in on the bull it is called a volapié or flying with the feet. Preparing to go in, left shoulder toward the bull, sword pointed along the man’s body, muleta held furled in the left hand, is called profiling. The closer it is done to the animal the less chance the man has to deviate and escape if the bull does not follow the cloth as the man goes in. The movement made to swing the left arm holding the muleta, which is crossed in front of the body, out and past the right side to get rid of the bull is called crossing. Any time the man does not make this cross he will have the bull under him. Unless he swings him far enough out the horn is certain to catch him. To make this cross successfully necessitates a wrist movement which will swing the folds of the furled muleta out and to the side as well as a simple arm movement across and away from the body. Bullfighters say that a bull is killed more with the left hand which controls the muleta and guides the animal than with the right which shoves in the sword. There is no great force needed to put in the sword if the point does not strike bone; properly guided by the muleta if the man leans after the blade the bull will seem sometimes to pluck the sword out from his hand. Other times, hitting bone, it will seem as though he had struck a wall of rubber and cement.

In the old days bulls were killed recibiendo, the matador provoking and awaiting the final charge and those bulls which were too heavy on their feet to charge were ham-strung with a half-moon-shaped blade attached to a long pole and then killed with a dagger stroke between the vertebræ of the neck after they were helpless. This repugnant business was made unnecessary by the invention of the volapié by Joachin Rodriguez, called Costillares, toward the end of the eighteenth century.

The killing of a bull recibiendo; the man now standing still and erect his feet only a little apart after he has provoked the charge by bending one leg forward and swinging the muleta toward the bull, letting the bull come until man and bull become one figure as the sword goes in; then the figure broken by the shock of the encounter, there coming a moment when they are joined by the sword that seems to slip in an inch at a time, is the most arrogant dealing of death and is one of the finest things you can see in bullfighting. You may never see it because the volapié, dangerous enough when properly executed, is so much less dangerous than the suerte de recibir that only very rarely does a fighter ever receive a bull in our times. I have seen it properly completed only four times in over fifteen hundred bulls I have seen killed. You will see it attempted, but unless the man really waits out the encounter and gets rid of the bull with an arm-and-wrist movement rather than by tricking with a sidestepping at the end it is no receiving. Maera did it, Nino de la Palma did it once in Madrid, and faked it several times, and Luis Freg did it. Few bulls come now to the end of a fight in proper condition to be received, but there are even fewer fighters to receive them. One reason for the decadence of this form of killing is that if the bull leaves the cloth as he reaches the man the horn wound will be in the chest. In fighting with the cape the first wound or catching will usually be in the lower leg or thigh. Where the second one is, if the bull passes the man from one horn to another, is a matter of luck. In the muleta or in killing by the volapié the wound is nearly always in the right thigh as that is where the bull’s horn passes when it is lowered, although a man who has gone well over the horn may be caught under the arm or even at the neck if the bull raises his head before the man has passed him. But in killing recibiendo if anything goes wrong the horn chop hits the chest and so you hardly ever see it attempted any more except by some one who has drawn such a fine bull and done such a splendid faena that at the end he wants to make a super-emotional climax so he tries to kill recibiendo and usually he has used his bull up with the muleta or else the man lacks the experience to receive properly and the faena ends in an anticlimax or in a goring.

The volapié, if properly executed, that is slowly, closely and well-timed, is a fine enough way to kill. I have seen bullfighters gored in the chest, have heard the rib crack, literally, with the shock and seen a man turn on the horn with the horn in him and out of sight, muleta and sword in the air, then on the ground, the bull thrusting head and man high and the man not leaving the horn when he is tossed to come off the next toss into the air and be caught by the other horn and come down, try to get up, put his hands where he was breathing through his chest and be carried with his teeth knocked out to die within an hour in the infirmary still in his clothes, the wound too big to do anything with. I have seen that man’s, Isidoro Todo’s, face while he was in the air, he being fully conscious all of the time on the horn and after and able to talk in the infirmary before he died, although the blood in his mouth made his words unintelligible, so I see the bullfighters’ viewpoint about killing recibiendo when they know the cornada comes in the chest.

According to historians Pedro Romero, who was a matador in Spain at the time of the American revolution, killed five thousand six hundred bulls recibiendo between the years of 1771 and 1779 and lived to die in his bed at the age of ninety-five. If this is true we live in a very decadent time indeed when it is an event to see a matador even attempt to receive a bull, but we do not know how many bulls Romero would have lived to receive if he had tried to pass them as close as Juan Belmonte with the cape and muleta. Nor do we know how many of those five thousand he received well, waiting quietly and getting the sword in high up between the shoulders or how many he received badly; side-stepping and letting the sword go into the neck. Historians speak highly of all dead bullfighters. To read any history of the great fighters of the past it would seem impossible that they ever had bad days or that the public was ever dissatisfied with them. It may be that they never were dissatisfied with them before 1873 because I have not had time to read the contemporary account any farther back than that, but since that time bullfighting has always been considered by contemporary chroniclers to be in a period of decadence. During what you now hear referred to as the golden age of all golden ages, that of Lagartijo and Frascuelo, which really was a golden age, there was a generally expressed opinion that things were in a bad way; the bulls were much smaller and younger, or else they were big and they were cowardly. Lagartijo was no killer; Frascuelo, yes, but he was mean as dirt to his cuadrilla and impossible to get along with; Lagartijo was chased from the ring by the crowd on his final performance in Madrid. When in the accounts we come to Guerrita, another golden-age hero, who corresponds to the period just before, during and after the Spanish-American war you read that the bulls are small and young again; gone are the giant animals of phenomenal bravery of the days of Lagartijo and Frascuelo. Guerrita is no Lagartijo we read, it is sacrilege to compare the two and this florid monkey business makes those who remember the serious honesty (no longer ugly meanness) of Frascuelo turn in their graves; El Espartero is no good and proves it by getting killed; finally Guerrita retires and every one is relieved; they have had enough of him, although once the great Guerrita is gone bullfighting is in a profound depression. The bulls, oddly enough, have gotten smaller and younger, or if they are big they are cowardly; Mazzantini is no good, he kills still, yes, but not recibiendo, and he cannot get out of his own way with a cape and is a loss with the muleta. Fortunately he retires, and once the great Don Luis Mazzantini is gone the bulls get smaller and younger although there are a few huge cowardly ones more fit to draw carts than for the ring, and with that colossus of the sword disappeared, gone alas with Guerrita, the master of masters, such newcomers as Ricardo Bombita, Machaquito and Rafael El Gallo, none of them anything but a fake, dominate the bull business. Bombita masters bulls with the muleta and has a pleasant smile, but he cannot kill as Mazzantini killed; Gallo is ridiculous, an insane gypsy, Machaquito is brave but ignorant, only his luck saves him and the fact that the bulls are so much younger and smaller than those giant, always brave animals of the time of Lagartijo and Salvador Sanchez, Frascuelo, now always called the Negro affectionately rather than as an insult and beloved for his kindness to all. Vicente Pastor is honorable and brave in the ring, but he gives a little jump when killing and is frightened sick before he goes in to fight. Antonio Fuentes is still elegant, a beautiful performer with the sticks and with a nice style killing, and that lets him out since who wouldn’t be elegant working with the bulls that are nowadays so much younger and smaller than in the time of those faultless colossi Lagartijo, Frascuelo, the heroic Espartero, the ruler of masters Guerrita, and that pinnacle of swordsmanship Don Luis Mazzantini. In this epoch incidentally, when Don Indalecio Mosquera promoted the Madrid Ring and cared nothing about bullfights but only about the size of the bulls, statistics show the bulls were consistently the biggest that were ever fought in Madrid.

Along about this time Antonio Montes got himself killed in Mexico and it was at once realized that he had been the real fighter of his era. Serious and masterly, always giving them their money’s worth, Montes was killed by a hollow-flanked, long-necked, little Mexican bull that lifted his head instead of following the muleta when the sword went in and as Montes turned and tried to swing out of the cradle of the horns the bull’s right horn caught him between the cheeks of his rump, lifted him and carried him, as though he were seated on a stool (the horn had gone in out of sight), for four yards and then fell dead from the sword thrust. Montes lived four days after the accident.

Then comes Joselito who when he appeared was called Pasos-Largos or big jumps and was attacked by all the admirers of Bombita, Machaquito, Fuentes and Vicente Pastor who fortunately all retired and at once became incomparable. Guerrita said if you want to see Belmonte, see him in a hurry because he won’t last; no man can work so close to bulls. When he kept working closer and closer, it was discovered that the bulls were, of course, parodies of the giant animals he, Guerrita, had killed. Joselito was admitted to be very good in the press, but it was pointed out that he was only able to place banderillas on one side, the right (the bulls of course were very small), he insisted on that; that he killed holding the sword so high that some said he pulled it out of his hat and others that he merely used it as a prolongation of his nose and, this is Christ’s truth: he was hooted, whistled at and had cushions thrown at him the last day he fought in Madrid, the 15th of May, 1920, while he was working his second bull, after having cut the ear of his first, and was hit in the face by a cushion while the crowd shouted “que se vaya! que se vaya!” which can be translated “May he get the hell out of here and stay!” The next day, the 16th of May, he was killed in Talavera de la Reina, gored through the lower abdomen so his intestines came out (and he was unable to hold them in with both hands, but died of traumatic shock from the force of the cornada while the doctors were working on the wound, and his face composed very peacefully on the operating table after he was dead, with his brother-in-law having his picture taken holding a handkerchief to his eyes and a crowd of wailing gypsies outside with more coming and Gallo wandering around outside very pitiful, afraid to go in to see his brother dead, and Alamendro the banderillero saying, “If they can kill this man I tell you none of us is safe! None of us!”) and at once became, in the press, and remains, the greatest bullfighter of all time; greater than Guerrita, Frascuelo, Lagartijo according to the same men who, while he lived, attacked him. Belmonte retired and became greater than José even, returned after Maera died, and was discovered to be an exploiter of a formerly great name avid for money (he did have his bulls selected that year), fought one more year, I swear this was the best he ever had, he fought all bulls, made no specifications on size and triumphed along the whole line including killing, which he had never truly mastered before, and was attacked the whole season in the press. He retired again after a nearly mortal horn wound and all contemporary accounts agree he is the greatest living bullfighter. So there you have it, and I will not know how Pedro Romero was until I shall have read the contemporary accounts before, during and after, and I doubt very much if enough of these exist, even in letters, to enable a true judgment to be formed.

From all the different sources I have read and all contemporary accounts the epoch of biggest bulls and true golden age in Madrid was that of Lagartijo and Frascuelo who were the greatest bullfighters of the last sixty years until Joselito and Belmonte. Guerrita’s was no golden age and he was responsible for introducing younger and smaller bulls (I’ve looked up the weights and the photographs), and in the twelve years that he fought he had only one truly great year as a fighter, that of 1894. Big bulls were brought back during the epoch of Machaquito, Bombita, Pastor and Gallo and the size of the bulls was sensibly decreased during the golden age of Joselito and Belmonte although they fought the biggest kind of bulls many times. At present the bulls are big and old for the matadors without influence and small and young whenever the bullfighter is powerful enough to have any hand or influence in their selection. Bulls are always as big as they can be bred at Bilbao in spite of the matadors and usually the Andalucian breeders send their biggest and finest bulls to the July fair at Valencia. I have seen Belmonte and Marcial Lalanda triumph in Valencia with bulls as large as any ever fought in the history of that ring.

This historical summary started with regrets for the disappearance of the killing of the bulls recibiendo, which, to recapitulate, disappeared because it is not taught nor practised, since the public does not demand it, and since it is a difficult thing which must be practised, understood and dominated and is much too dangerous to be improvised. If it were practised it could be performed readily enough if the bulls were allowed to reach the end of the fight in proper condition for it. But any suerte which can be approximated in bullfighting by another almost equal in public appeal and with less chance of death if its execution goes wrong, will surely die out in bullfighting unless the public demands that fighters perform it.

The volapié to be properly executed demands that the bull be heavy on his feet and that he have his two front feet on a line and together. If he has one foot farther forward than the other the top of one shoulder blade will be moved forward and the opening through which the sword must go, and which is shaped rather like that between the palm of your hands if you place them with finger tips touching and wrists a little way apart, will be closed just as that between your hands will close if you bring the wrist of one hand forward. If the bull’s feet are spread wide this opening is narrowed by the shoulder blades being forced together and if the feet are not together it is closed entirely. It is through this opening that the point of the sword must enter to penetrate into the body cavity, and it will only continue on in if it does not strike a rib or the spine. In order to make it have a better chance of going in and taking a downward course in the direction of the aorta the tip of the sword is curved so that it dips down. If the man goes in to kill the bull from in front with his left shoulder forward, if he puts the sword in between the shoulder blades he will automatically come within reach of the bull’s horns; in fact his body must pass over the horn, at the moment of putting in the sword. If his left hand, crossed in front of him and holding the muleta almost to the ground, does not keep the bull’s head down until the man has passed over the horn and come out along the bull’s flank, the man will be gored. To avoid this moment of very great danger to which the man exposes himself each time he kills a bull according to the rules bullfighters who wish to kill without exposition profile at a considerable distance from the bull so that the bull, seeing the man coming in, will be in motion himself and the man running across the line of the bull’s charge with his right arm forward rather than his left shoulder tries to drive the sword in without ever letting his body come within range of the horn. The way that I have just described is the most flagrant form of bad killing. The farther forward in the bull’s neck the sword is put in and the lower down at the side the less the man exposes himself and the surer he is of killing the bull since the sword is driven into the chest cavity, the lungs, or cuts the jugular or other veins, or the carotid or other arteries of the neck all of which can be reached by the point of the sword without the man exposing himself to the slightest danger.

It is for this reason that a killing is judged by the place in which the sword is put in and by the manner in which the man goes in to kill rather than by the immediate results. To kill the bull with a single sword thrust is of no merit at all unless the sword is placed high between the bull’s shoulders and unless the man passed over and had his body within reach of the horn at the moment he went in.

Many times in Southern France and occasionally in provinces in Spain where they have few bullfights I have seen a matador applauded enthusiastically because he killed his bull with a single entry when the killing was no more than a riskless assassination; the man having never exposed himself at all, but merely slipped the sword into an unprotected and vulnerable spot. The reason the man is required to kill the bull high up between the shoulders is because the bull is able to defend that place and will only uncover it and make it vulnerable if the man brings his body within range of the horn provided he enters according to the rules. To kill a bull in his neck or his flank, which he cannot defend, is assassination. To kill him high up between the shoulders demands risk by the man and studied ability if great danger is to be avoided. If the man uses this ability to make the proper execution of the entry with the sword as secure as possible, exposing his body but protecting it through his skill with his left hand, then he is a good killer. If he uses his ability merely to trick the killing so that he gets enough of the sword into the correct place to kill without ever exposing his body then he is an able remover of bulls but, no matter how quickly or securely he kills them off, he is no killer.

The truly great killer is not the man who is simply brave enough to go in straight on the bull from a short distance and get the sword in somehow high between the shoulders, but is a man who is able to go in from a short distance, slowly, starting with the left foot and being so skillful in the management of his left hand that as he goes in, left shoulder forward, he makes the bull lower his head and then keeps it down as he goes over the horn, pushes in the sword and, as it is in, goes out along the bull’s flank. The great killer must be able to do this with security and with style and if, as he goes in left shoulder first, the sword strikes bone and refuses to penetrate, or if it strikes ribs or the edge of the vertebræ and is deviated so that it goes in only a third of the way, the merit of the attempt at killing is as great as though the sword had gone all the way in and killed, since the man has taken the risk and the result has only been falsified by chance.

A little over a third of a sword, properly placed, will kill a bull that is not too big. Half a sword will reach the aorta on any bull there is, if the sword is directed properly and placed high enough up. Many bullfighters, therefore, do not follow the sword all the way with their body but only try to slip in half of the blade, knowing it will account for the bull if in the right spot and realizing they themselves are much safer if they do not have to push in that last foot and a half. This practice of skillfully administering half estocades, originated by Lagartijo, is what has robbed killing of its emotion since the beauty of the moment of killing is that flash when man and bull form one figure as the sword goes all the way in, the man leaning after it, death uniting the two figures in the emotional, æsthetic and artistic climax of the fight. That flash never comes in the skillful administering of half a blade to the bull.

Marcial Lalanda is the most skillful of present matadors at getting the sword in, holding it high up on a level with his eyes, as he sights, taking one or more backward steps before he starts the voyage in and with the point of the blade tilted up, he enters, avoids the horn skillfully, and leaves the sword nearly always perfectly placed yet without there having been the least exposition or emotion in the killing. He can kill well too. I have seen him execute the volapié perfectly; but he gives them their money’s worth in the other departments of the fight and relies on his ability to remove the bull from in front of him speedily so that the memory of how good he was with cape, banderillas and muleta will not be spoiled. His ordinary manner of killing, as I have described it, is a sorry parody of what killing can be. From much reading of contemporary accounts I believe Marcial Lalanda’s case, not his early trials but his present continuous mastery, his philosophy of the bullfight and his manner of killing are very comparable to the middle period of the great Lagartijo, although Lalanda certainly cannot compare with the grace, style and naturalness of the Cordovan; but no one can be the present Lalanda’s superior in mastery. I believe ten years from now people will be referring to the years 1929, 1930, 1931 as the golden age of Marcial Lalanda. Now he has as many enemies as any great bullfighter attracts, but he is unquestionably the master of all present fighters.

Vicente Barrera kills in worse style than Lalanda, but he has a different system. Instead of having a skillful way of placing half a blade in the correct spot he relies on a tricky entry to place part of a blade anywhere above the neck, thus complying with the law which requires at least one entry by the matador, in order that, having gone in once, he may kill the bull with a descabello. He is the living virtuoso of the descabello which is a push with the point of the sword between the cervical vertebræ to cut the spinal cord, supposedly for use as a coup de grâce on a bull which is dying and is too far gone to follow the muleta with his eyes, thus preventing the matador from going in another time to kill. Barrera uses his first entry, required by law of every matador, according to the regulations of bullfighting, simply to try his luck at getting the sword in without exposing himself in any way. No matter what the effect of this sword thrust Barrera plans to kill the live bull with a descabello. He relies on his foot-work, tricks the bull with the muleta into lowering his muzzle and exposing the spot between the vertebræ at the base of his skull while he raises the sword slowly from behind him, bringing it high over his head, keeping it carefully out of sight of the bull and then, with it poised point down, controlled by the wrist and with the precision of a juggler he drives it down and severs the spinal marrow, dropping the bull dead as suddenly as an electric light is extinguished by the pushing of a button. Barrera’s method of killing, while it keeps within the letter of the rules, is the negation of the whole spirit and tradition of the bullfight. The descabello which is administered by surprise as a coup de grâce designed to avoid the suffering of an animal which can no longer defend itself is used by him to assassinate live bulls that he is supposed to expose his body to in killing with the sword. He has developed such a deadly precision in its use, and the public know from experience that nothing will influence him to expose a hair in killing, that they have come to tolerate his abuse of the descabello and even sometimes to applaud it. To applaud him for cheating in the killing because he performs a trick with skill, assurance and security that is made safe by his sureness in his foot-work before the bull, and ability to make a live bull lower his head as though he were dying, is about as low as the mentality of a bull ring public can go.

Manolo Bienvenida is the worst at killing of any of the first series of matadors except Cagancho. Both of these make no pretense of observing the rules in killing and usually go in running on a bias to stab the bull with the sword with less exposing of themselves than a banderillero suffers in putting in the banderillas. I have never seen Bienvenida kill a bull well and only twice in twenty-four times, in 1931, did I see him kill a bull even decently. His cowardice at the moment of killing is disgusting. Cagancho’s cowardice when he has to kill is more than disgusting. It is not the sweating, dry-mouthed fear of the nineteen-year-old boy who cannot kill properly having been too frightened of it with big bulls ever to take the chances necessary to attempt it in order to learn to dominate it properly and so is sick afraid of the horn. It is a cold-blooded gypsy defrauding of the public by the most shameless, anger-arousing obtainer of money under false pretenses, that ever went into a bull ring. Cagancho can kill well, he has height, which makes killing much easier, and any time he wants to he can kill competently, well and with good style. But Cagancho never takes a chance on performing anything that he thinks might cost him a horn wound. Killing is admittedly dangerous, even to a great killer, therefore Cagancho, sword in hand, will not let his body come within range of the bull’s horn unless he has become convinced that the bull is candid and inoffensive and will follow the cloth as though his muzzle were glued to it. If Cagancho has proved to his satisfaction that the bull offers him no danger he will kill with style, grace, and absolute security. If he believes there is the faintest danger he will not let his body approach the horn. His cynical cowardice is the most disgusting negation of bullfighting that can be seen; worse even than the panic of Nino de la Palma for Nino de la Palma no longer can execute his passes correctly, he is altogether unnerved by his fear, while nearly everything that Cagancho does when he is confident could serve as a model and illustration of perfection in artistic bullfighting. He only performs, however, if he is certain that there is no danger to a man working with the bull; not that the chances are all in the man’s favor; that is not enough for him. He does not take chances. He must be certain in his own mind that danger does not exist or he will flop a cape from two yards away, wave the spike end of a muleta and assassinate with a side-running stab. He will do this to bulls which are not criminal or even particularly dangerous to a matador with average ability and good courage. He has not the courage of a louse since his amazing physical equipment, his knowledge and his technique permit him to be much safer in the bull ring than any one is crossing a street in traffic provided he attempts nothing close to the bull. A louse takes chances in the seams of your garments. It may turn out that you are in a war and eventually be de-loused, or you may hunt the louse down with a thumb nail, but you cannot de-louse Cagancho. If there were any commission to regulate bullfighters and suspend matadors as faking boxers are occasionally deprived of their licenses, when their political protection is inadequate, Cagancho might be eliminated from the bull rings or he might, through fear of the commission, become a great bullfighter.

The one really great fight that Manolo Bienvenida made in all of 1931 was the last day at Pamplona when he was more afraid of the public and their anger at his previous cowardly performances than he was of the bulls. He had asked the governor for troops to protect him before the fight and the governor told him if he went into the ring and performed well he would need no protection. Each night at Pamplona Manolo had been on the long-distance telephone hearing news of the chopping down of trees on his father’s ranch by the peasant jacquerie in Andalucia; groves of trees being cut down and charcoal burnings started, pigs and chickens killed, cattle driven off; the ranch, which was not yet paid for and which he was fighting bulls to complete the payment on, being gradually pillaged in the sound Agrarian sabotage plan of the Andalucian revolt and being nineteen years old and hearing his world destroyed over the telephone each night, he was worried enough. But the boys at Pamplona and the peasants from the country around who were spending their savings to see bullfights and not seeing them, through the cowardice of matadors, could not go into the economic causes of a matador’s abstraction and lack of interest in his work and they rioted against Manolo so violently and so scared him that finally, afraid of being lynched, he gave a splendid afternoon on the last day of the fair.

If there was a penalty of suspension from his profitable business operations, Cagancho might give a good afternoon oftener. His excuse is that he runs danger and the spectator does not, but one is being paid proportionately and the other is paying, and when the spectators protest is when Cagancho refuses to run danger. True, he has been gored, but each time through an accident such as a sudden gust of wind that left him uncovered when he was working close to a bull that he believed safe. There is the one chance he cannot eliminate and after he comes back to the ring from the hospital he will not even come close to a bull he believes to be harmless since there is no guaranty the wind will not blow up while he is working, or the cape get between his legs, or that he might not step on the cape or even that the bull may not go blind. He is the only bullfighter I have been glad to see gored; but goring him is no solution since he behaves much worse on coming out of the hospital than before he went in. Yet he keeps on having contracts and robbing the public because they know that when he wishes he can do a complete and splendid faena, a model of perfect execution, and end it by killing beautifully.

The best killer to-day is Nicanor Villalta who started in by tricking his killing, using his height to lean over the bull as he blinded him with his huge muleta and has now so purified, so mastered, and so perfected the art that, in Madrid at least, he kills nearly every bull he faces closely, confidently, correctly, securely and emotionally, having learned the way to profit by his magic left wrist really to kill instead of merely tricking. Villalta is an example of the simple man that I spoke of at the beginning of this chapter. In intelligence and in conversation he is not as smart as your twelve-year-old sister if she is a backward child and he has a sense of glory and belief in his greatness that you could reach high enough to hang your hat upon. Added to this he has a semi-hysterical bravery that no cold valor can compete with in intensity. Personally I find him insufferable although he is pleasant enough if you do not mind conceited hysteria, but with sword and muleta in Madrid he is the bravest, most secure, and most consistent and emotional killer in Spain to-day.

The best swordsmen in my time were Manuel Vare, called Varelito, probably the best killer of my generation; Antonio de la Haba, called Zurito; Martin Aguero; Manolo Martinez and Luis Freg. Varelito was of moderate stature, simple, sincere and a consistently great killer. Like all killers of only moderate height he took much punishment from the bulls. Not yet recovered from the effects of a horn wound received the year before, he was unable to kill with his old style in the April fair in Seville in 1922 and, his work unsatisfactory, the crowd jeered and insulted him all through the fair. Turning his back on a bull after he had put the sword in the bull caught him and gave him a terrific wound near the rectum that perforated the intestines. It was almost the same wound that Sidney Franklin received and recovered from in the spring of 1930 and it was the same sort of wound that killed Antonio Montes. He, Varelito, being gored late in April, lived until May 13. As they were carrying him down the passageway around the ring to the infirmary, the crowd, which had been hooting him a minute before, now murmuring with the rush of talk that always follows a serious cogida, Varelito kept saying, looking up at them, “Now you’ve given it to me. Now I’ve got it. Now you’ve given it to me. Now you’ve got what you wanted. Now I’ve got it. Now you’ve given it to me. Now I’ve got it. Now I’ve got it. I’ve got it.” He had it although it took nearly four weeks for it to kill him.

Zurito was the son of the last and one of the greatest of the old-time picadors. He was from Cordoba, dark and rather thin; his face very sad in repose; serious and with a deep sense of honor. He killed classically, slowly and beautifully with a sense of honor that forbade him to use any advantage, or trick, or to deviate from a straight line as he went in. He was one of four novilleros who were sensations in their class in 1923 and 1924 and when the other three, who were all much riper than he, though none of them were very ripe, became matadors he became one himself at the very end of the season although his apprenticeship, in the sense that an apprenticeship should continue until the craft has been mastered, was not finished.

None of the four had served a proper apprenticeship. Manuel Baez, called Litri, the most sensational of the four, was a prodigy of valor and wonderful reflexes, but insensate in his bravery and very ignorant in his fighting. He was a brown-faced, bowlegged little boy with black hair, a face like a rabbit and a nervous tic of vision which made his eyelids wink as he watched the bull come; but for a year he substituted bravery, luck and reflexes for knowledge and while he was tossed, literally, hundreds of times he was often so close to the horn that it could not get a good chop at him and his luck saved him from all but one serious horn wound. We all spoke of him as carne de toro, or meat for the bulls, and it really did not make much difference when he took the alternative since he fought on a nervous valor that could not last, and with his faulty technique he was certain to be destroyed by a bull and the more money he made before it happened the better. He was fatally wounded in the first fight of the year in Malaga early in February of 1926 after he had been a matador one full season. He need not have died of that wound if it had not become infected with gaseous gangrene and his leg amputated too late to save his life. The bullfighters say, “If I must be gored let it be in Madrid,” or if they are Valencian they substitute Valencia for Madrid, since it is in those two cities that there are most serious bullfights; therefore most horn wounds and, consequently, two of the greatest specialists in that surgery. There is no time for a specialist to come from one city to another for the most vital part of a wound treatment which is the opening and cleaning to avoid the possibility of infections of all the multiple trajectories a horn wound makes. I have seen a horn wound in the thigh with an opening no larger than a silver dollar which when probed and opened inside had as many as five different trajectories, these being caused by the man’s body revolving on the horn and, sometimes, by the end of the horn being splintered. All of these inner wounds must be opened and cleaned and at the same time all incisions in the muscle must be made so that it will heal in the minimum of time and with the least possible loss of mobility. A bull ring surgeon has two aims; to save the man, the aim of ordinary surgery; and to place the torero back in the ring as soon as possible in order that he may fulfil contracts. It is his ability to get the fighter back to work rapidly that makes a horn-wound specialist able to command high fees. It is a very special sort of surgery, but its simplest form, which is the caring for the ordinary wound, which comes oftenest between knee and groin or between knee and ankle, since that is where the bull’s lowered horns catch the man in goring, is to ligate the femoral artery with promptness if it has been opened, and then find, with the finger usually, or with a probe, open and clean all the various trajectories which a horn wound may have, at the same time keeping the patient’s heart going with camphor injections and replacing the lost blood with injections of normal salt solution and so forth. Anyway, Litri’s leg infected in Malaga and they amputated it, having promised him, when he was anæsthetized, it was only to clean the wound; and when he was conscious and found the leg gone he did not want to live and was in great despair. I was very fond of him and wished he might have died without the amputation since he was marked to die anyway when he took the alternative and was certain to be destroyed as soon as his luck ran out.

Zurito never had any luck. His apprenticeship uncompleted he had the shortest kind of repertoire with cape and muleta, the latter consisting principally of passes por alto and the easily learned trick of the molinete and the excellence of his swordsmanship and the purity of his style with the sword were obscured by the hair-raising campaign Litri was making and the great season Nino de la Palma had. Zurito had two good seasons after Litri’s death, but before he ever had a chance to really become a dominating figure his work was old-fashioned since he made no improvement with the cape and muleta and, as he always aimed the sword for the very top of the opening between the shoulder blades and going in so high with his left shoulder forward it was difficult to keep the muleta low enough to get rid of the bull completely, he took much punishment from the bulls; especially those terrible blows from the flat of the horn against the chest with which the bulls lifted him off his feet nearly every time he killed. Then he almost lost a season from internal injuries and a growth of some sort that came on his lip where it had been hurt. In 1927 he was fighting in such bad physical condition that it was tragic to watch him. He knew that to lose out on a single season may put a bullfighter in the discard so that he will have only two or three fights a year and not be able to make a living and all that season Zurito was fighting; his face, that had been a healthy brown, now as gray as weathered canvas; so short of breath that it was pitiful to see him; yet attacking as straight, as close and with the same classic style and the same bad luck. When the bull bumped him off his feet or gave him one of those palatazos or strokes with the flat of the horn that the bullfighters claim harm as much as wounds since they cause internal hemorrhages, he would faint from weakness, be carried into the infirmary, brought to, and come out again, weak as a convalescent, to kill his other bull. Due to his style of killing he was bumped nearly every time he killed. He fought twenty-one times, fainted dead away in twelve of them, and killed all of his forty-two bulls. It was not enough though, because his work with the cape and muleta, never stylish, in the condition he was in was not even competent, and the publics did not like to see him faint. There was an editorial against it in the San Sebastian paper. That was the town where he had been most successful and they did not contract him again since his fainting was very repugnant to foreigners and the best people. So that season, in which he gave the most harrowing display of courage I have ever seen, did him no good. He married at the end of it. She wanted to marry him, they said, before he died, and instead he got much better; became rather fat, and loving his wife did not go in quite so straight on the bulls and fought only fourteen times. The next year he fought only seven times in Spain and South America. The next year he was going in as straight as ever, but he had only two contracts in Spain for the whole year; not enough to support his family. Of course his fainting that year was not pleasant to see, but he only knew one way to kill and that was perfectly and if, in attempting it, the horn or the muzzle struck him and he lost the consciousness of this world that was his hard luck and he always returned to fight as soon as he was conscious. The public did not like it. It became an old story so rapidly. I did not like it myself, but by Christ how I admired it. Too much honor destroys a man quicker than too much of any other fine quality and with a little bad luck it ruined Zurito in one season.

Old Zurito, the father, brought up one son to be a matador and taught him honor, technique and classic style and that boy is a failure in spite of great skill and integrity. He taught the other boy to be a picador and he has a perfect style, great courage, is a splendid horseman and would be the best picador in Spain but for one thing. He is too light to be able to punish the bulls. No matter how hard he pegs them he can barely draw blood. So he, with the most ability and style of any picador living, is pic-ing in novilladas at fifty to a hundred pesetas apiece when with fifty pounds more weight he would be continuing the great tradition of the father. There is another son, too, who is a picador that I have not seen; but they tell me he too is too light. They are not a lucky family.

Martin Aguero, the third of the killers, was a boy from Bilbao who did not look like a bullfighter at all but more like a husky, well-built, professional ballplayer, a third baseman or shortstop. He had a full-lipped face, German-American looking in the sense that Nick Altrock’s was, and was no artist with cape or muleta although he managed a cape well enough; sometimes excellently; understood bullfighting; was not ignorant; and did what he did with the muleta well although he was altogether without artistic imagination. Put him down as a capable and close worker with the cape and a competent but dull performer with the muleta. With the sword he was a secure and rapid killer. His estocadas always looked wonderful in photographs because the photograph does not give any sense of time, but when you watched him kill he went in so lightning fast that even though he killed more securely than Zurito, crossing magnificently, and nine times out of ten getting the sword in all the way to the hilt yet one estocada of Zurito’s was worth many of Aguero’s to watch, since Zurito went in so slowly and directly, marking the time of the killing so completely that there was no element of taking the bull by surprise. Aguero killed like a butcher boy and Zurito like a priest at benediction.

Aguero was very brave and very efficient and was one of the leading matadors in 1925, 1926, and 1927, fighting fifty and fifty-two times in those last two years and almost never being tossed. In 1928 he was gored severely twice, the second cornada coming as a result of his fighting before he was in good shape after the first, and the two of them breaking down his fine health and physique. A nerve in one of his legs was so badly injured that it atrophied and this led to gangrene of the toes of his right foot and an operation for their removal in 1931. The last I heard his foot had been so mutilated that it was considered impossible that he would ever fight again. He leaves two younger brothers as novilleros with the same looks, the same athletic physique and the beginnings of the same skill with the sword.

Diego Mazquiaran “Fortuna” of Bilbao is another great killer of the butcher-boy type. Fortuna is curly-haired, big-wristed, husky, swaggering, married much money, fights just enough to have money of his own, is brave as the bull himself and just a little less intelligent. He is the luckiest man that ever fought bulls. He knows only one way to work with a bull, he treats them as though they were all difficult and chops them and doubles them into position with the muleta no matter what sort of faena they require. If the bull happens to be difficult this is very satisfactory, but if he is asking for a grand faena it is not. Once he gets their two front feet together, Fortuna furls the muleta, profiles with the sword, looks over his shoulder at his friends and says, “See if we can kill him this way!” and goes in straight, strong and well. He is so lucky that the sword may even cut the spinal marrow and drop the bull as though he were struck by lightning. If he is not lucky he will sweat and his hair will get more frizzy, he will explain to the spectators with gestures the difficulties of the animal; will call on them all to witness it is not his, Fortuna’s, fault. The next day in his regular seat in tendido two (he is one of the few bullfighters who attend bullfights regularly), when a really difficult bull comes out for some other fighter to handle, he will tell all the rest of us, “That’s not a difficult bull. That bull is good. He ought to do something with that bull.” Fortuna is really brave though, brave and stupid. He has absolutely no nervousness about the fight. I have heard him say to a picador, “Come on. Come on. Hurry it up. I’m bored in here. The whole thing bores me. Hurry it up.” Among the fragile artists, he stands out as a survival from a different time. But he will bore you blinder than he ever has been bored in the ring if you sit near him for a season.

Manolo Martinez of the barrio of Ruzafa in Valencia, slight, with his round eyes, his twisted-crooked face, his thin smile, looks as though he belonged around a race track or like one of the best of the tough citizens you knew around the pool-rooms when you were a boy. Many critics deny he is a great killer because he has never had any luck in Madrid and the editors of the French bullfight paper, Le Toril, a very good periodical, deny him all merit because he has sense enough not to risk his life when fighting in the south of France where any sword that disappears into the bull, no matter how placed, or how trickily inserted, is universally applauded. Martinez is as brave as Fortuna and he is never bored. He loves to kill and he is not conceited as Villalta is; when it comes out well he is pleased, seemingly as much for you as for himself. He has been greatly punished by the bulls and I saw him get a terrible cornada one year in Valencia. His work with cape and muleta is unsound, but if the bull is a frank, fast charger Martinez works as close as any man can pass bulls. This day he had a bull that hooked to the right and he seemingly did not notice the defect. The bull bumped him once in passing with the cape and the next time Martinez passed him on the same side and did not give him room he caught him with the horn and tossed him. He was unwounded, the horn had slid along the skin without catching and had only torn his trousers, but he had come down on his head and was groggy and on his next turn with the cape he took the bull all the way out into the centre of the ring and there, alone, tried to pass him closely on the right side again. Of course the bull caught him, his defect had been accentuated by his success at getting the man before, and this time the horn went in, and Martinez went into the air on the horn, the bull tossed him clear, and as he lay still on the ground, gored at him again and again before the other bullfighters running to the centre of the ring could attract the bull away. As Manolo rose to his feet he saw the blood pumping from his groin and knowing the femoral artery was severed he put both hands over it to try to contain the hemorrhage and ran as fast as he could for the infirmary. He knew his life was going out in that stream that spurted between his fingers and he could not wait to be carried. They tried to grab him, but he shook his head. Dr. Serra came running down the passageway and Martinez shouted to him, “Don Paco, I’ve got a big cornada!” and with Dr. Serra pressing with his thumb to stop the artery they went into the infirmary together. The horn had passed almost completely through his thigh, his loss of blood was so tremendous and he was so weak and prostrated no one believed he would live and at one time, being unable to get any pulse, they announced he was dead. The destruction in the muscle was so great no one thought he would be able to fight again if he lived, but being gored on the 31st of July he was well enough to fight in Mexico on the 18th of October due to his constitution and the skill of Dr. Paco Serra. Martinez has suffered terrible horn wounds, rarely when killing; but usually from his desire to work close to bulls that will not permit it and his fundamental unsoundness in handling the cape and muleta and desire to keep his feet absolutely together when letting the bull pass; but his horn wounds only seem to refresh his valor. He is a local fighter. I have never seen him really good except in Valencia, but in 1927 in a fair that was built around Juan Belmonte and Marcial Lalanda and for which Martinez was not even contracted, when Belmonte and Marcial were gored he came in to substitute and fought three fights in which he was superb; doing everything with cape and muleta so closely and dangerously and taking such chances you could not believe it possible the bulls would not kill him, and then, when it was time to kill, profiling closely, arrogantly, rocking a little back on his heels to plant himself solidly, his left knee a little bent, settling his weight on the other foot, then going in and killing in a way no living man could better. In 1931 he was dangerously gored in Madrid and was still unrecovered when he fought in Valencia. The critics all say he is finished now, but he has made his living proving them wrong from the start and I believe as soon as his nerves and muscles will obey his heart again he will be the same as ever until a bull destroys him. With his unsoundness and inability to dominate a difficult bull coupled to his great bravery that seems inevitable. His valor is almost humorous. It is a sort of cockney bravery, while Villalta’s is conceited, Fortuna’s is dumb, and Zurito’s is mystic.

The valor of Luis Freg, he has no art, except with the sword, is the strangest that I know. It is as indestructible as the sea, but there is no salt in it unless it is the salt of his own blood and human blood has a sweet and sickly taste in spite of its saline quality. If Luis Freg had died in any of the four times that I remember him being given up as dead I could write more freely of his character. He is a Mexican Indian, heavy-set now, soft-voiced, soft-handed, nose rather hooked, slant-eyed, full mouth, very black hair, the only matador who still wears the pigtail plaited on his head and he has been a full matador in Mexico since Johnson fought Jeffries at Reno, Nevada, in 1910 and in Spain since the year after that fight. In the twenty-one years he has fought as a matador the bulls have given him seventy-two severe horn wounds. No bullfighter who ever lived has been so punished by the bulls as he has. He has received extreme unction five different times when he was believed certain to die. His legs are as gnarled and twisted by scars as the branches of an old oak tree and his chest and his abdomen are covered with scars of wounds that should have killed him. Most of them have come from his heaviness on his feet and his inability to control the bulls with cape and muleta. He was a great killer though; slow, secure and straight and the few times, few in proportion to his other gorings, that he was wounded when killing were due to his lack of speed of foot to come out from between the horns and along the flank after he had the sword in rather than to any defects in his technique. His terrible gorings, his months in the hospitals, which used up all his money, had no effect on his valor at all. But it was a strange valor. It never fired you; it was not contagious. You saw it, appreciated it and knew the man was brave, but somehow it was as though courage was a syrup rather than a wine or the taste of salt and ashes in your mouth. If qualities have odors the odor of courage to me is the smell of smoked leather or the smell of a frozen road or the smell of the sea when the wind rips the top from a wave, but the valor of Luis Freg did not have that odor. It was clotted and heavy and there was a thin part underneath that was unpleasant and oozy and when he is dead I will tell you about him and it is a strange-enough story.

The last time he was given up for dead at Barcelona, torn open terribly, the wound full of pus, delirious and dying, every one believed, he said, “I see death. I see it clearly. Ayee. Ayee. It is an ugly thing.” He saw death clearly, but it did not come. He is broke now and giving a final series of farewell performances. He was marked for death for twenty years and death never took him.

There you have portraits of five killers. If we can synthesize from studying good killers you might say that a great killer needs honor, courage, a good physique, a good style, a great left hand and much luck. Then he needs a good press and plenty of contracts. The location, and the effect, of estocadas and the various manners of killing are described in the glossary.

IF THE people of Spain have one common trait it is pride and if they have another it is common sense and if they have a third it is impracticality. Because they have pride they do not mind killing; feeling that they are worthy to give this gift. As they have common sense they are interested in death and do not spend their lives avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come to die. This common sense that they possess is as hard and dry as the plains and mesas of Castille and it diminishes in hardness and dryness as it goes away from Castille. At its best it is combined with a complete impracticality. In the south it becomes picturesque; along the littoral it becomes mannerless and Mediterranean; in the north in Navarra and Aragon there is such a tradition of bravery that it becomes romantic, and along the Atlantic coast, as in all countries bounded by a cold sea, life is so practical there is no time for common sense. Death, to people who fish in the cold parts of the Atlantic ocean is something that may come at any time, that comes often and is to be avoided as an industrial accident; so that they are not preoccupied with it and it has no fascination for them.

There are two things that are necessary for a country to love bullfights. One is that the bulls must be raised in that country and the other that the people must have an interest in death. The English and the French live for life. The French have a cult of respect for the dead, but the enjoyment of the daily material things, family, security, position and money, are the things that are most important. The English live for this world too and death is not a thing to think of, to consider, to mention, to seek, or to risk except in the service of the country, or for sport, or for adequate reward. Otherwise it is an unpleasant subject to be avoided or, at best, moralized on, but never to be studied. Never discuss casualties, they say, and I have heard them say it very well. When the English kill they kill for sport and the French kill for the pot. It is a fine pot too, the loveliest in the world, and well worth killing for. However, any killing which is not for the pot nor for sport seems to the English and the French to be cruel. Like all general statements things are not as simple as I have written them, but I am seeking to state a principle and refrain from listing exceptions.

Now in Spain the bullfight is out of place in Galicia and in most of Catalonia. They do not raise bulls in those provinces. Galicia is beside the sea and because it is a poor country where the men emigrate or go to sea, death is not a mystery to be sought and mediated on, but rather a daily peril to be avoided and the people are practical, cunning, often stupid, often avaricious, and their favorite amusement is choral singing. Catalonia is Spain, but the people are not Spanish and although bullfighting flourishes in Barcelona it is on a fake basis because the public that attends goes as to a circus for excitement and entertainment and is as ignorant, almost, as the publics of Nîmes, Béziers and Arles. The Catalans have a rich country, a great part of it at least; they are good farmers, good business men, good salesman; they are the commercially elect of Spain. The richer the country the simpler the peasantry and they combine a simple peasantry and a childish language, with a highly developed commercial class. With them, as in Galicia, life is too practical for there to be much of the hardest kind of common sense nor much feeling about death.

In Castille the peasant has nothing of the simple-mindedness, combined as always with cunning, of the Catalan or Gallego. He lives in a country with as severe a climate as any that is farmed, but it is a very healthy country; he has food, wine, his wife and children, or he has had them, but he has no comfort, nor much capital and these possessions are not ends in themselves; they are only a part of life and life is something that comes before death. Some one with English blood has written: “Life is real; life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal.” And where did they bury him? and what became of the reality and the earnestness? The people of Castille have great common sense. They could not produce a poet who would write a line like that. They know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security; that it transcends all modern comforts and that with it you do not need a bathtub in every American home, nor, when you have it, do you need the radio. They think a great deal about death and when they have a religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter than death. Having this feeling they take an intelligent interest in death and when they can see it being given, avoided, refused and accepted in the afternoon for a nominal price of admission they pay their money and go to the bull ring, continuing to go even when, for certain reasons that I have tried to show in this book, they are most often artistically disappointed and emotionally defrauded.

Most of the great bullfighters have come from Andalucia, where the best bulls are raised and where with the warm climate and the Moorish blood the men have a grace and indolence that is foreign to Castille although they have, mixed with the Moorish blood, the blood of the men of Castille who drove out the Moors and occupied that pleasant country. Of the truly great fighters both Cayetano Sanz and Frascuelo were from around Madrid (although Frascuelo was born to the south), as well as Vicente Pastor of the minor greats and Marcial Lalanda, the best of the present fighters. There are fewer bullfights given all the time in Andalucia, due to the Agrarian troubles, and fewer first-rate matadors produced. In 1931 out of the first ten matadors there were only three from Andalucia, Cagancho and the two Bienvenidas; and Manolo Bienvenida although of Andalucian parentage was born and raised in South America, while his brother, although born in Spain, was also raised out of the country. Chicuelo and Nino de la Palma representing Seville and Ronda are both finished and Gitanillo de Triana, of Seville, was killed.

Marcial Lalanda is from near Madrid as are Antonio Marquez, who will be fighting again, and Domingo Ortega. Villalta is from Zaragoza and Barrera from Valencia along with Manolo Martinez and Enrique Torres. Felix Rodriguez was born in Santander and raised in Valencia and Armillita Chico, Solorzano, and Heriberto Garcia are all Mexicans. Nearly all the leading young novilleros are from Madrid or from around Madrid, the north, or Valencia. Since the death of Joselito and Maera and the final retirement of Belmonte the reign of Andalucia in modern bullfighting has been over. The centre of bullfighting in Spain now, both as to the production of fighters and the greatest enthusiasm for the fight itself, is Madrid and the country around Madrid. Valencia comes next. The most complete and masterly fighter in bullfighting to-day is unquestionably Marcial Lalanda and the most complete young fighters in point of view of valor and technical equipment are being turned out in Mexico. The bullfight is undoubtedly losing ground in Seville, which was once, with Cordoba, its great centre and it is undoubtedly gaining in Madrid where all spring and early summer, in 1931, in bad financial times, in a time of much political unrest, and with only ordinary programmes, the ring was filled to capacity two and sometimes three times a week.

Judging from the enthusiasm I saw shown for it under the Republic the modern bullfight will continue in Spain in spite of the great wish of her present European-minded politicians to see it abolished so that they will have no intellectual embarrassments at being different from their European colleagues that they meet at the League of Nations, and at the foreign embassies and courts. At present a violent campaign is being conducted against it by certain newspapers with government subsidies, but so many people derive their livings from the many ramifications of raising, shipping, fighting, feeding and butchering of fighting cattle that I do not believe the government will abolish it even if they felt themselves strong enough.

An exhaustive study is being made of the actual and potential use of all lands used for the grazing of fighting bull stock. In the Agrarian readjustments that must come in Andalucia some of the biggest ranches are sure to be broken up, but since Spain is a grazing as well as an agricultural country and much of the grazing land is unfit for cultivation and none of the cattle produced are wasted, all being butchered and sold whether killed in the ring or the slaughter-house, much of the land now used for fighting-bull grazing in the south will certainly be retained. In a country where to give work to the agricultural laborers all machines for harvesting and sowing had to be banned in 1931 the government will go slowly about putting much new land under cultivation. There is no question of trying to cultivate the grazing land used for bulls around Colmenar and Salamanca. I look for a certain reduction of acreage in bull-raising land in Andalucia and the breaking up of a number of ranches, but believe there will be no great change in the industry under the present government although many of its members would be proud to abolish the bullfight and doubtless will do all they can toward that end and the quickest way to get at it is through the bulls, since bullfighters grow up, unencouraged, having a natural talent as acrobats or jockeys or even writers have, and none of them are irreplaceable; but fighting bulls are the products of many generations of careful breeding as race horses are and when you send that strain to the slaughter-house that strain is finished.

CHAPTER 20

IF I COULD have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it. The Prado, looking like some big American college building, with sprinklers watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white mud hills looking across toward Carabanchel; days on the train in August with the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them; chaff blown against the car in the wind from the hard earthen threshing floors; the odor of grain and the stone windmills. It would have had the change when you leave the green country behind at Alsasua; it would have had Burgos far across the plain and eating the cheese later up in the room; it would have had the boy taking the wicker-bound jugs of wine on the train as samples; his first trip to Madrid and opening them in enthusiasm and they all got drunk including the pair of Guardia Civil and I lost the tickets and we were taken through the wicket by the two Guardia Civil (who took us out as though prisoners because there were no tickets and then saluted as they put us in the cab); Hadley, with the bull’s ear wrapped in a handkerchief, the ear was very stiff and dry and the hair all wore off it and the man who cut the ear is bald now too and slicks long strips of hair over the top of his head and he was beau then. He was, all right.

It should make clear the change in the country as you come down out of the mountains and into Valencia in the dusk on the train holding a rooster for a woman who was bringing it to her sister; and it should show the wooden ring at Alciras where they dragged the dead horses out in the field and you had to pick your way over them; and the noise in the streets in Madrid after midnight, and the fair that goes on all night long, in June, and walking home on Sundays from the ring; or with Rafael in the cab. Que tal? Malo, hombre, malo; with that lift of the shoulders, or with Roberto, Don Roberto, Don Ernesto, so polite always, so gentle and such a good friend. Also the house where Rafael lived before being a republican became respectable with the mounted head of the bull Gitanillo had killed and the great oil jar and always presents and the excellent cooking.

It should have the smell of burnt powder and the smoke and the flash and the noise of the traca going off through the green leaves of the trees and it should have the taste of horchata, ice-cold horchata, and the new-washed streets in the sun, and the melons and beads of cool on the outside of the pitchers of beer; the storks on the houses in Barco de Avila and wheeling in the sky and the red-mud color of the ring; and at night dancing to the pipes and the drum with lights through the green leaves and the portrait of Garibaldi framed in leaves. It should, if it were enough of a book, have the forced smile of Lagartito; it was once a real smile, and the unsuccessful matadors swimming with the cheap whores out on the Manzanares along the Pardo road; beggars can’t be choosers, Luis said; playing ball on the grass by the stream where the fairy marquis came out in his car with the boxer; where we made the paellas, and walked home in the dark with the cars coming fast along the road; and with electric lights through the green leaves and the dew settling the dust, in the cool at night; cider in Bombilla and the road to Pontevedra from Santiago de Campostella with the high turn in the pines and blackberries beside the road; Algabeno the worst faker of them all; and Maera up in the room at Quintana’s changing outfits with the priest the one year every one drank so much and no one was nasty. There really was such a year, but this is not enough of a book.

Make all that come true again; throw grasshoppers to the trout in the Tambre on the bridge in the evening; have the serious brown face of Felix Merino at the old Aguilar; have the brave, awkward, wall-eyed Pedro Montes dressing away from home because he had promised his mother he had stopped fighting, after Mariano, his brother, was killed at Tetuan; and Litri, like a little rabbit, his eyes winking nervously as the bull came; he was very bow-legged and brave and those three are all killed and never any mention made about the beer place on the cool side of the street underneath the Palace where he sat with his father and how it is a citroen show room now; nor about them carrying Pedro Carreño, dead, through the streets with torches and finally into the church and put him naked on the altar.

There is nothing in this book about Francisco Gomez, Aldeano, who worked in Ohio in a steel plant and came home to be a matador and now is scarred and marked worse than any one except Freg, his eye twisted so a tear runs down his nose. Nor Gavira dead at the very instant as the bull with the same cornada that killed El Espartero. Nor does it tell about Zaragossa, at night on the bridge watching the Ebro, and the parachute jumper the next day and Rafael’s cigars; nor the jota contests in the old red plush theatre and the wonderful boy and girl pairs; nor when they killed the Noy de Sucre in Barcelona, nor about any of that; nor anything about Navarra; nor about the lousy town Leon is; nor about lying with a muscle torn in a hotel on the sunny side of the street in Palencia when it was hot and you do not know what hot is when you have not been there; nor on the road where dust is deeper than the hubs between Requena and Madrid; nor when it was one hundred and twenty in the shade in Aragon and the car, with no carbon nor anything wrong, would boil the water out of the radiator in fifteen miles on a level road.

If it were more of a book it would make the last night of feria when Maera fought Alfredo David in the Café Kutz; and it should show the bootblacks. My God, you could not get in all the boot-blacks; nor all the fine girls passing; nor the whores; nor all of us ourselves as we were then. Pamplona now is changed; they have built new apartment buildings out over all the sweep of plain that ran to the edge of the plateau; so now you cannot see the mountains. They tore down the old Gayarre and spoiled the square to cut a wide thoroughfare to the ring and in the old days there was Chicuelo’s uncle sitting drunk in the upstairs dining room watching the dancing in the square; Chicuelo was in his room alone, and the cuadrilla in the café and around the town. I wrote a story about it called A Lack of Passion, but it was not good enough although when they threw the dead cats at the train and afterwards the wheels clicking and Chicuelo in the berth, alone; able to do it alone; it was fair enough.

It should, if it had Spain in it, have the tall thin boy, eight feet six inches, he advertised the Empastre show before they came to town, and that night, at the feria de ganado, the whores wouldn’t have anything to do with the dwarf, he was full size except that his legs were only six inches long, and he said, “I’m a man like any man,” and the whore said, “No you’re not and that’s the trouble.” There are many dwarfs in Spain and cripples that you wouldn’t believe that follow all the fairs.

In the morning there we would have breakfast and then go out to swim in the Irati at Aoiz, the water clear as light, and varying in temperature as you sunk down, cool, deep cool, cold, and the shade from the trees on the bank when the sun was hot, the ripe wheat in the wind up on the other side and sloping to the mountain. There was an old castle at the head of the valley where the river came out between two rocks; and we lay naked on the short grass in the sun and later in the shade. The wine at Aoiz was no good so then we brought our own, and neither was the ham, so the next time we brought a lunch from Quintana’s. Quintana, the best aficionado and most loyal friend in Spain, and with a fine hotel with all the rooms full. Que tal Juanito? Que tal, hombre, que tal?

And why should it not have the cavalry crossing another stream at a ford, the shadow of the leaves on the horses, if it is Spain, and why not have them marching out from the machine-gun school across the clay white ground, very small so far away, and looking beyond from Quintanilla’s window were the mountains. Or waking in the morning, the streets empty on Sunday, and the shouting far away and then the firing. That happens many times if you live long enough and move around.

And if you ride and if your memory is good you may ride still through the forest of the Irati with trees like drawings in a child’s fairy book. They cut those down. They ran logs down the river and they killed the fish, or in Galicia they bombed and poisoned them; results the same; so in the end it’s just like home except for yellow gorse on the high meadows and the thin rain. Clouds come across the mountains from the sea but when the wind is from the south Navarra is all the color of wheat except it does not grow on level plains but up and down the sides of hills and cut by roads with trees and many villages with bells, pelota courts, the smell of sheep manure and squares with standing horses.

If you could make the yellow flames of candles in the sun; that shines on steel of bayonets freshly oiled and yellow patent leather belts of those who guard the Host; or hunt in pairs through scrub oak in the mountains for the ones who fell into the trap at Deva (it was a bad long way to come from the Café Rotonde to be garrotted in a drafty room with consolation of the church at order of the state, acquitted once and held until the captain general of Burgos reversed the finding of the court) and in the same town where Loyola got his wound that made him think, the bravest of those who were betrayed that year dove from the balcony onto the paving of the court, head first, because he had sworn they would not kill him; (his mother tried to make him promise not to take his life because she worried most about his soul but he dove well and cleanly with his hands tied while they walked with him praying); if I could make him; make a bishop; make Candido Tiebas and Toron; make clouds come fast in shadows moving over wheat and the small, careful stepping horses; the smell of olive oil; the feel of leather; rope soled shoes; the loops of twisted garlics; earthen pots; saddle bags carried across the shoulder; wine skins; the pitchforks made of natural wood (the tines were branches); the early morning smells; the cold mountain nights and long hot days of summer, with always trees and shade under the trees, then you would have a little of Navarra. But it’s not in this book.

There ought to be Astorga, Lugo, Orense, Soria, Tarragona and Calatayud, the chestnut woods on the high hills, the green country and the rivers, the red dust, the small shade beside the dry rivers and the white, baked clay hills; cool walking under palms in the old city on the cliff above the sea, cool in the evening with the breeze; mosquitoes at night but in the morning the water clear and the sand white; then sitting in the heavy twilight at Miro’s; vines as far as you can see, cut by the hedges and the road; the railroad and the sea with pebbly beach and tall papyrus grass. There were earthen jars for the different years of wine, twelve feet high, set side by side in a dark room; a tower on the house to climb to in the evening to see the vines, the villages and the mountains and to listen and hear how quiet it was. In front of the barn a woman held a duck whose throat she had cut and stroked him gently while a little girl held up a cup to catch the blood for making gravy. The duck seemed very contented and when they put him down (the blood all in the cup) he waddled twice and found that he was dead. We ate him later, stuffed and roasted; and many other dishes, with the wine of that year and the year before and the great year four years before that and other years that I lost track of while the long arms of a mechanical fly chaser that wound by clock work went round and round and we talked French. We all knew Spanish better.

That is Montroig, pronounced Montroych, one of many places in Spain, where there are also the streets of Santiago in the rain; seeing the town down in the cup of hills as you come home across the high country; and all the carts that roll, piled high, on smooth stone tracks along the road to Grau should be there with the temporary wooden ring in Noya, smelling of fresh cut boards; Chiquito with his girl’s face, a great artist, fino muy fino, pero frio. Valencia II with his eye they sewed up wrong so that the inside of the lid showed and he could not be arrogant any more. Also the boy who missed the bull entirely when he went in to kill and missed him again the second time. If you could stay awake for the nocturnals you saw them funny.

In Madrid the comic bullfighter, beaten up twice by Rodalito stabbing him in the belly because he thought there was another beating coming. Aguero eating with his whole family in the dining room; they all looking alike in different ages. He looked like a shortstop or a quarterback, not like a matador. Cagancho eating in his room with his fingers because he could not use a fork. He could not learn it, so when he had enough money he never ate in public. Ortega engaged to Miss Espana, the ugliest and the prettiest, and who was the wittiest? Derperdicios in la Gaceta del Norte was the wittiest; the wittiest I ever read.

And up in Sidney’s rooms, the ones coming to ask for work when he was fighting, the ones to borrow money, the ones for an old shirt, a suit of clothes; all bullfighters, all well known somewhere at the hour of eating, all formally polite, all out of luck; the muletas folded and piled; the capes all folded flat; swords in the embossed leather case; all in the armoire; muleta sticks are in the bottom drawer, suits hung in the trunk, cloth covered to protect the gold; my whiskey in an earthen crock; Mercédes, bring the glasses; she says he had a fever all night long and only went out an hour ago. So then he comes in. How do you feel? Great. She says you had fever. But I feel great now. What do you say, Doctor, why not eat here? She can get something and make a salad. Mercedés oh Mercédes.

Then you could walk across the town and to the café where they say you get your education learning who owed who money and who chiselled this from who and why he told him he could kiss his what and who had children by who and who married who before and after what and how long it took for this and that and what the doctor said. Who was so pleased because the bulls were delayed, being unloaded only the day of the fight, naturally weak in the legs, just two passes, poom, and it is all over, he said, and then it rained and the fight postponed a week and that was when he got it. Who wouldn’t fight with who and when and why and does she, of course she does, you fool you didn’t know she does? Absolutely and that’s all and in no other fashion, she gobbles them alive, and all such valuable news you learn in cafés. In cafés where the boys are never wrong; in cafés where they are all brave; in cafés where the saucers pile and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble table tops among the shucked shrimps of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in cafés.

What else should it contain about a country you love very much? Rafael says things are very changed and he won’t go to Pamplona any more. La Libertad I find is getting like Le Temps. It is no longer the paper where you could put a notice and know the pickpocket would see it now that Republicans are all respectable and Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it was always. I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change. We’ll all be gone before it’s changed too much and if no deluge comes when we are gone it still will rain in summer in the north and hawks will nest in the Cathedral at Santiago and in La Granja, where we practiced with the cape on the long gravelled paths between the shadows, it makes no difference if the fountains play or not. We never will ride back from Toledo in the dark, washing the dust out with Fundador, nor will there be that week of what happened in the night in that July in Madrid. We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it. No. It is not enough of a book, but still there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be said.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Seed Bull

At twenty-two years the horns are splintered; the eyes are slow and all the weight has gone forward and away from where eight hundred and twenty-two sons came from to the ring so that in the end the hind quarters are light as a calf’s but all the rest is built into the bull’s own monument.

The Ox

While here we have the ox built for beef and for service who might have been president with that face if he had started in some other line of work. He differs from the fighting bull in this, as well as in his general shape; his hoofs are large and broad, his tail is thick and the hairs are flaxy, not silky; he is built high instead of low and there is no hump of muscle that runs from just behind his horms until the middle of his back. He may work hard all his life or he may be made into beef early in his career but he will never kill a horse. Nor will he ever want to. Hail to the useful ox; a friend and contemporary of man.

Two Fighting Bulls

The hump of muscle in the neck rises in a crest when the bull is disturbed. It is his tossing muscle and when the bull carries his head as high as this one in the picture a man could not reach over the horms with a sword. This muscle must be tired for the man to kill the bull properly and it is in the process of tiring this muscle so that a man may kill him by putting a sword in from in front high up between the bull’s shoulder blades that the bullfight consists.

Zurito, from Cordoba, one of the greatest picadors who ever lived, shooting the stick a little back of where it should go, having let the bull get the horn in so he may be well pegged. The style is perfect, the execution is cynical, and the horse, who will be dead shortly (if you look closely you may assure yourself of this), is not panicky because those knees have convinced him that he is being properly ridden. The horses, incidentally, mostly come from the United States where they are bought at the St. Louis and Chicago markets at five dollars or less a head and shipped through Newport News, a shipload at a time, to Spain. The bull is rather cowardly, otherwise Zurito would not have thrown his hat, seen on the ground, to provoke a charge. Knowing the charges will be few may account for him pegging the bull further back than would be necessary ordinarily.

Veneno, killed in the Madrid ring, pic-ing a brave bull, leaning forward onto the stick, the matadors (standing on the right) watch to see where and how the picador will fall and how the bull will turn since they must take him out and away with the capes.

This is what happens when the saddle girth breaks and the picador falls onto the horns. Chicuelo, the matador whose face is partly hidden by the hat, seems a little late in starting in but photographs are very tricky and the fact the picador’s hat is still on shows he has just arrived on the horns, which are usually short. Only the right horn has penetrated. The other matador is Juan Anllo, Nacional II, and the chances are that he will make the quite although if the man falls from the horn when tossed and the bull sees the horse before his horn finds the man the horse will make the quite.

Here every one is coming in to make the quite; even El Gallo, the furthest on the left whose face shows that he does not like the looks of things at all. The bull, trying to gore too fast, is bumping with his nose.

Veronica by Juan Belmonte. Having taken the bull out away from the fallen picador the matador passes him with the cape.

Veronica to the right made by Gitanillo de Triana. This is the second movement in the process of passing the bull by veronicas.

Veronica to the left by Enrique Torres. This is the third movement in passing a bull by veronicas and the three matadors shown making the passes are, with the addition of Felix Rodriguez, the finest artists with the cape the ring has known. Belmonte has not the complete suavity and the low, slow swing of the other three but his is the original style on which they have improved.

Gathering the cape toward him at the end of a series of veronicas to wind the bull around him like a belt, his right leg pushed toward the bull in that bent slant, which will be copied but never made truly until another genius comes in the same twisted body - the media veronica of Juan Belmonte. This pass is the end of a series of veronicas and serves to fix the bull in place and allow the man to walk away.

Juan Belmonte

Cagancho sculpturing with the cape. Finishing a series of veronicas with a rebolera, he has turned the bull so short that he has brought him to his knees.

The gaonera as performed by its inventor, Rodolfo Gaona.

Bulls Fighting On The Range At Colmenar

Bulls In The Corral

Five sons of Diano the seed bull

Vicente Barrera in a pase de pecho. This picture and the one below show the basis of the emotion in bullfighting. The emotion is given by the closeness with which the matador brings the bull past his body and it is prolonged by the slowness with which he can execute the pass.

This is Vicente Barrera in the same pass as in the photograph above except that here instead of letting the horn go by his chest he has pulled away prudently so that with the danger removed man and bull do not form one group but are separate entities held together neither by emotion nor by plastic line. A position which would be artistically correct becomes ridiculous without the danger of the horns and the necessary bulk of the bull to give it dignity.

Grace and the lack of it in the ring are in this picture of Cagancho and the following one of Nicanor Villalta performing the same pass, an ayudado por alto, in their respective fashions.

Nicanor Villalta, in the pass Cagancho has made in the photograph above. Villalta can be much more anti-esthetic than this but this is a fair example of his praying-mantis manner.

Villalta kills though in a way no gypsy ever killed and it would be unfair to show how silly he looks with his feet apart and not show him leaning in after the sword.

While when he gets his feet together he will do things like this that you see here; the bull is coming by his legs and as you watch he will spin with him so close the blood from the bull’s shoulder will come off onto Villalta’s belly. There is great demand for this and only Nicanor can do it.

Here you have him spinning and if there is no blood on his belly afterwards you ought to get your money back.

Manuel Garcia, Maera

The year before he died

Maera in a pair of banderillas. Notice how the arms are raised and how straight the body is held. The straighter the body and the higher the arms the closer the bull’s horn can come to the man.

Maera citing the bull for the second of four pairs of banderillas he placed at Pamplona in 1924; citing for each pair from such an increasingly dangerous and seemingly impossible terrain that after the second pair the audience were all shouting together “No! No! No! No!” begging him not to take such risks. He placed all four pairs perfectly in the manner and terrain that he chose, performed a brilliant faena and killed the bull as well as a bull could be killed. He had not been to bed the night before and had taken part in the amateur fight at seven o’clock that same morning.

Maera in his characteristic right-handed pass made in the manner of a pase de pecho.

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, Maera’s only rival as a banderillero in difficult and impossible terrains, placing a pair and letting the bull’s horn come so close that it is ripping the gold embroidery from his right trouser leg.

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias cheating in the placing of a pair of banderillas through having a number of capes flopping to take the bull away from the man as he places the sticks. Note, however, how well all the banderillas are placed together.

The beginning of the faena. Luis Freg in the pase de la muerta in Madrid.

The end of the faena. Luis Freg in the hospital with a cornada in his chest. Note the scars on the right leg, the scar in the left armpit, and the unplaited lock of hair, that when braided makes the pigtail that was formerly the caste mark of a bullfighter.

Rafael Gomez y Ortega, called El Gallo, standing in the entrance to the Madrid ring with his young brother José, called Joselito or Gallito, at the start of Joselito’s career as a matador. El Gallo is on the left, Joselito beside him. Fourth from the left is Enrique Berenguet, called Blanquet, the confidential banderillero of Joselito. The matador on the right is Paco Madrid of Malaga.

Joselito in a pase natural at the start of his career. Note how, without any contortions, with complete naturalness, with no cork-screwing or faking, he is passing the horn past his belly; bringing the bull around controlled by the swinging end of the cloth that the man is keeping before his far eye.

Joselito, at eighteen, watching a Miura bull that he has killed swaying on his legs before going over on his back, four legs in the air.

Joselito working with a difficult bull, provoking the charge with his leg; then doubling the bull on himself with the muleta, making him attempt to turn in a shorter space than his own length to tire him.

Joselito at the height of his career, working close, dominating the bull with absolute security, knowing just how much swing of the cloth will move him, controlled a step at a time, and how much more will provoke the full charge. His intelligence and security and the closeness with which he worked made all the bulls look easy to handle. Blanquet, standing by the white-marked burladero, knowing as much about bulls as Joselito, is the only one in all the audience who looks worried.

Joselito the spring he was killed, fat and out of condition after a winter in Lima, Peru, citing an uncertain bull to charge. The bull is slow to start and Joselito, reluctant to rise from his knees and admit his proposal to pass the bull with both knees on the ground was a failure, has just taken out his pocket handkerchief and thrown it at the bull to start him.

The bull comes (the handkerchief still shows on the ground) and Joselito passes him with the muleta without rising from his knees or having to sway back, having calculated exactly the angle the bull will take in his charge.

Joselito taking a bull out a step at a time from the querencia or position he has taken by the barrera; talking to the bull, working on the eye furthest away from the man with the end of the cloth that he imparts a swinging, flicking motion to with his wrist; exposing his own body to give the bull confidence that there is something to charge and yet keeping the animal’s main point of vision on the cloth and controlling his impulse to charge with that wrist movement. A brave bull is easy to work with if the man is brave and technically sound; it is the cowardly bull and the uncertain bull that call for most intelligent and careful handling since they will charge as fast as the brave bull but there is no way of knowing when the charge may come.

Here are the naturals of Joselito amd Belmonte; the touchstones of their art. Joselito, below, is healthy, sound, natural, his physique and knowledge enabling him to keep the bull well controlled in the muleta. Belmonte, above, is natural in that there is no distortion of his body by himself, but he takes the bull from a more dangerous angle, he emphasizes his peril at the same time as his domination and he has a sinister delicacy of movement that Joselito lacks.

JOSELITO DEAD

JUAN BELMONTE

LAST VIEW OF JUAN BELMONTE

FIRST VIEW OF CHICUELO

CHICUELO: Who could do this

CHICUELO Who hated to kill

AFRAID OF THIS: Opening a cornada in the Madrid infirmary

AFRAID OF THIS Valencia II, called Chato, with a cornada in the right thigh.

AND OF THIS: Manuel Granero killed in the Madrid ring

AND OF THIS

Granero dead in the infirmary. Only two in the crowd are thinking about Granero. The others are all intent on how they will look in the photograph.

AND OF THIS

Vicente Pastor killing in the ring at Burgos. The horn has caught him as he put in the sword because the wind has blown the muleta up and toward the man.

AND OF THIS

After the cornada. Varelito in the hospital

AND OF THESE

Bull of Vicente Martinez that went alive out of the Madrid ring in 1923 when Chicuelo was unable to kill him.

These took his place. Manolo Bienvenida, Domingo Ortega and Marcial Lalanda making the paseo in the ring at Aranjuez. Ortega when this photograph was taken was still an unknown novillero and acted as sobre-saliente or substitute matador for the other two.

Marcial Lalanda making the quite of the mariposa or butterfly. Moving backward across the ring, the folds of the cape swing lightly. It takes great skill and knowledge of bulls to do properly or at all.

Marcial Lalanda in a cambio de rodillas made when the bull first comes into the ring.

Marcial Lalanda, mot scientific and able of present fighters, watching the bull go down after an estocade.

The highly paid Cagancho often kills like this from cowardice while in Navarra amateurs do this for fun.

AMATEUR FIGHT IN PAMPLONA

Sidney Franklin killing on the day of his début in Sevilla and below the same Franklin making a veronica in the ring at Cadiz.

GOOD AND BAD KILLING

Above, Varelito has gone in over the horn, kept the bull’s head down as he crossed with his left hand guiding the bull after the muleta and is coming out with the sword in and the bull already dead from the thrust.

Below, Manolo Bienvenida is coming out before he has ever gone in and is stabbing at the bull in passing without ever bringing his body withing range of the horn.

Zurito killing - see how the man’s whole body will pass over the horn, the sword seems going in an inch at a time - the bull’s front legs are doubling under him.

Luis Freg killing - his sword hand tight up against the bull - the bull’s eye controlled by the swing of the cloth at the tip of the muleta.

El Espartero killing - both the bull’s front legs are off the ground - notice how he is crossing with the left hand.

What happens when the bull raises his head from the muleta when the sword is in. The horn is lifting Varelito by the neck. No man going in to kill can be certain the bull may not raise his head from the cloth while the man’s body is passing the horn no matter how well controlled the muleta may be. It is this moment that gives the bull his chance at the man and it is when the man avoids this moment that he is said to assassinate the bull rather than to kill him according to rule.

This, for movement, is Felix Rodriguez in a pase natural on a fast charging bull.

This for instruction, with a certain amount of movement still, is a picador ruining a bull by pic-ing him in the ribs instead of placing the pic in the hump of muscle over his neck and shoulders.

This, to remove all tragedy, is El Gallo, dedicating the last bull of his life as a bullfighter. The story is in the text.

Four of the type of incidents El Gallo avoided so assiduously while fighting bulls for thirty years as a full matador.

Half-bred bull killed in an amateur fight or capea near Madrid but not without, first, having wet his left horn.

The amateur bullfight is as unorganized as a riot and all results are uncertain, bulls or men may be killed; it is all chance and the temper of the populace. The formal bullfight is a commercial spectable built on the planned and ordered death of the bull and that is its end. Horses are killed incidentally. Men are killed accidentally and in the case of full matadors, rarely. All are wounded; many of them severely and often. But in a perfect bullfight no men are wounded nor killed and six bulls are put to death in a formal and ordered manner by men who expose themselves to the maximum danger over which their ability and knowledge will allow them to triumph without casualties. In a perfect bullfight, it may be admitted frankly, some horses will be killed as well as the bulls since the power of the bull will allow him to reach the horse sometimes even though the picadors were completely skillful and honorable - which they are not. But the death of the horses in the ring is an unavoidable accident and affords pleasure to no one connected with or viewing the fight except the bull who derives supreme satisfaction from it. The only practical good the death of the horse gives is in showing the spectator the danger the man is constantly exposed to and keeping him reminded that the spectable, which the grace and skill of the men engaged in makes him take lightly, or for granted, is one of great physical peril. Writers on the peninsula who tell of the public applauding the death of the horses in the ring are wrong. The public is applauding the force and bravery of the bull which has killed those horse, not their death which is incidental and, to the public, unimportant. The writer is looking at the horses and the public is looking at the bull. It is the lack of understanding of this view-point in the public which made the bullfight unexplainable to non-Spaniards.

And finally El Gallo in one of the series of delicate formal compositions that the happier part of his life in the ring consisted of. The bull, as he should be, is dead. The man, as he should be, is alive and with a tendency to smile.

AN EXPLANATORY GLOSSARY OF CERTAIN WORDS, TERMS AND PHRASES USED IN BULLFIGHTING

A

Abanico: spread like a fan.

Abano: a bull which comes out in a cowardly way, refusing to charge, but may improve under punishment.

Abierto de cuerna: wide horned.

Abrir-el-Toro: to take the bull out into the ring away from the barrera.

Aburrimiento: boredom, the predominant sensation at a bad bullfight. Can be alleviated slightly by cold beer. Unless beer is very cold the aburrimiento increases.

Acero: the steel. A common word for the sword.

Acometida: the charge of the bull.

Acornear: goring with the horn.

Acosar: part of the testing of young bulls on the ranch. The horseman cuts the young bull or calf out of the herd, pursues him until he turns at bay and charges.

Acoson: when the bullfighter is closely pursued by the bull.

Acostarse: a tendency in the bull to come closer to the bullfighter on one side or the other when charging. If the bull cuts in close on one side the bullfighter must give him room on that side or he will be caught.

Achuchón: the bull bumping the man in passing.

Adentro: the part of the ring between the bull and the barrera.

Adorno: any useless or flowery theatricality performed by the bullfighter to show his domination over the bull. They may be in good or bad taste varying from kneeling with the back toward the animal to hanging the straw hat of a spectator on the bull’s horn. The worst adorno I ever saw performed was by Antonio Marquez who bit the bull’s horn. The finest was by Rafael El Gallo who placed four pairs of banderillas in the bull and later, very delicately, in the pauses he gave the bull to refresh him while working with the muleta, extracted the banderillas one at a time.

Afición: love of bullfights. It also means the entire bull ring public, but is usually used in this generic sense to denote the most intelligent part of the public.

Aficionado: one who understands bullfights in general and in detail and still cares for them.

Afueros: the part of the ring between the bull and the centre of the ring.

Aguantar: a method of killing the bull with sword and muleta in which, if the bull charges unexpectedly while the matador is profiled and is furling his muleta, the matador awaits him as he stands, guides him past with the muleta held low in the left hand while with his right hand he puts in the sword. Nine out of ten of the killings in this form that I have seen turn out badly since the matador will not wait for the bull to get close enough to place the sword properly, but lets the blade slip into the neck which can be reached by the man practically without exposition.

Aguja: agujas or needles are one of the names for the bull’s horns. It also means the top forward ribs beside the shoulder blades.

Ahondar el estoque: to push the sword farther in after it has been already placed. This is often attempted by the sword handler when the bull is close to the barrera if the matador is showing himself unable to kill the bull. It is sometimes accomplished by the banderilleros throwing a cape over the sword and pulling down on it.

Ahormar la cabeza: getting the bull’s head in correct position for killing. The matador should accomplish this by his work with the muleta. He brings it down with low passes and up with high, but sometimes a few high passes will bring down a head held too high by making the bull stretch his neck so high that he tires it. If the matador cannot bring the bull’s head up a banderillero will usually raise it with a few upward flops of a cape. Whether the matador will have much or little regulating to do depends on the manner in which the bull has been treated by the picadors and how the banderillas have been placed.

Aire: the wind; worst enemy of the bullfighter. Capes and muletas are wet and scuffed into the sand to make them more manageable in wind. They cannot be made much heavier than the cloth is naturally or they will deaden the bullfighter’s wrist and if there is enough wind the man could not hold them. The cape or muleta may at any time be blown clear of the man so that he will have the bull on top of him. In each fight there is some part of the ring where the wind is least strong and the bullfighter should find that lee and do all his fancy work with cape and muleta there if possible, if the bull can be worked with in that section of the ring.

Al Alimón: a very silly pass in which two men each hold one end of the cape and the bull passes under the cape between them. There is no danger in this pass and you will only see it used in France or where the public is very naïve.

Alegrar al Toro: to rouse the bull’s attention when he has become logy.

Alegria: lightheartedness, in bullfighting; a graceful, picturesque Sevillian style as opposed to the classical tragic manner of the Ronda school.

Alguacil: a mounted bailiff under the orders of the president who rides at the head of the bullfighters in the entry or Paseo wearing a costume of the reign of Philip II, receives the key of the toril from the president and during the bullfight transmits any orders of the president to those engaged in the bullfight. These orders are usually given by a speaking tube which connects the president’s box with the runway between the ring and the seats. There are ordinarily two alguacils at each bullfight.

Alternativa: is the formal envesture of an apprentice matador or matador de novillos as a full matador de toros. It consists in the senior matador of the fight giving up his right to kill the first bull and signifying it by presenting muleta and sword to the bullfighter who is alternating for the first time in the killing of bulls with full matadors de toros. The ceremony takes place when the trumpet sounds for the death of the first bull. The man who is being initiated as a matador goes out with a fighting cape over his arm to meet the senior matador who gives him the sword and muleta, and receives the cape. They shake hands and the new matador kills the first bull. On the second bull he returns sword and muleta to his sponsor who then kills that animal. After that they alternate in the usual manner, the fourth bull being killed by the senior, the fifth by the next in seniority and the new matador killing the last one. Once he has taken the alternativa in Spain his ranking as a formal matador is valid in all bull rings in the peninsula except Madrid. On his first presentation in Madrid after a provincial alternativa the ceremony must be repeated. Alternativas given in Mexico or South America are not recognized in Spain until confirmed in the provinces and Madrid.

Alto: a pase por alto is a pass in which the bull passes under the muleta.

Alto (en todo lo): a sword thrust or estocada placed properly high up between the shoulder blades.

Ambos: both; ambos manos, both hands.

Amor propio: amour propre, self-respect, a rare thing in modern bullfighters especially after their first successful season or when they have fifty or sixty engagements ahead of them.

Anda: go on! You will hear this frequently shouted at picadors who are reluctant to approach the bull.

Andanada: the high cheap seats on the sunny side of the ring which correspond in position to the boxes on the shady side.

Anillo: the bull ring. Also the ring at the base of the horn by which the bull’s age can be told. The first ring means three years. There is a ring thereafter for each year.

Anojo: a yearling bull.

Apartado: the sorting of the bulls usually at noon before the fight, separating them and putting them in the pens in the order in which it has been decided they are to be fought.

Aplomado: the heavy or leaden state the bull is often in toward the end of the fight.

Apoderado: bullfighter’s representative or manager. Unlike the managers of boxers they rarely get more than 5 per cent for each fight they sign for their matador.

Apodo: the professional nick-name of a bullfighter.

Aprovechar: to take advantage of and profit by the good bull a matador has drawn. The worst a matador can do is not to make the most of an easy and noble bull in order to perform brilliantly. He will get many more difficult bulls than good ones and if he does not aprovechar good bulls to do his utmost the crowd is much more severe than if he had been really poor with a difficult bull.

Apurado: a bull worn out and empty of force through being badly fought.

Arena: the sand which covers the ring.

Arenero: a bull ring servant who flattens out the sand after each bull has been killed and drawn out.

Armarse: when the matador furls the muleta, and sights along the sword, which should form a continuous line with his face and arm preparatory to killing.

Arrancada: another name for the bull’s charge.

Arrastre: the dragging out by a trio of mules or horses of the dead horses and the body of the bull after each bull has been killed. The horses are taken out first. If the bull has been exceptionally brave the crowd applauds him very much. He is sometimes given a tour of the ring as he is dragged out.

Arreglar los pies: to make the bull put his front feet together before going in to kill. If one foot is in front of the other one shoulder blade will be farther forward than the other, closing the opening between the shoulder blades into which the sword must go or greatly reducing its opening.

Arrimar: to work close to the bull. If the matadors arriman al toro it will be a good bullfight. The boredom comes when they see how far away they can work from the bull’s horns.

Asiento: seat.

Astas: bayonets — another synonym for the horn.

Astifino: a bull with thin sharp horns.

Astillado: a bull with the ends of one or both of his horns splintered, usually from battering against his cage or charging in the corral when unloaded. Such horns make the worst wounds.

Atrás: to the rear; backwards.

Atravesada: crosswise — a sword thrust that goes in on the bias so that the point of the sword comes out through the skin of the bull’s flank. Such a thrust, unless the bull obviously deviated in his charge, shows that the man did not go in straight at the moment of killing.

Atronar: a stroke with the point of the puntilla or dagger between the cervical vertebræ given from behind when the bull is on the ground mortally wounded which severs the spinal marrow and kills the animal instantly. This coup de grâce is given by the puntillero, one of the banderilleros, who pulls an oilcloth sleeve over his right arm to save his clothes from blood before he approaches the bull. When the bull is on his feet and this same thrust is given from in front by the matador, either armed with a special sword with a straight, stiff point, or with the puntilla, it is called a descabello.

Avíos de matar: the tools for killing, i.e., sword and muleta.

Aviso: a warning given by a bugle at the signal of the president to a matador whose bull is still alive ten minutes after the man has gone out to kill with sword and muleta. The second aviso comes three minutes after the first and the third and final aviso is given two minutes later. At the third aviso the matador is compelled to retire to the barrera and the steers, which are held in readiness after the first warning, come into the ring and take the bull out alive. There is a large clock displayed in all of the more important rings in order that the spectators may keep track of the time the matador takes for his work.

Ayudada: pass in which the point of the sword is pricked into the cloth of the muleta to spread the serge; the muleta thus being referred to as being aided by the sword.

Ayuntamiento: the city hall or municipal government in Spanish towns. A box is reserved for the ayuntamiento in Spanish bull rings.

B

Bajo: low. A low pic is one which is placed on the side of the neck near the shoulder blades. A sword thrust into the right side anywhere below the top of the shoulder blades and forward on the neck is also called bajo.

Bajonazo: is usually a deliberate sword thrust into the neck or lower part of the shoulder by a matador who seeks to kill the bull without exposing himself. In a bajonazo the matador seeks to cut arteries or veins in the neck or to reach the lungs with the sword. By such a thrust he assassinates the bull without having gone in and passed the horn with his body.

Banderilla: a rounded dowel, seventy centimetres long, wrapped in colored paper, with a harpoon shaped steel point, placed in pairs in the withers of the bull in the second act of the bullfight; the prong of the harpoon catching under the skin. They should be placed high on the very top of the withers and close together.

Banderillas cortas: short banderillas only twenty-five centimetres long. Seldom used now.

Banderillas de fuego: banderillas with firecrackers along their shafts which are placed in bulls which have not charged the picadors in order that the explosion of the powder may make the bull jump, toss his head, and tire his neck muscles; the object sought in the encounter with the picador which the bull has refused.

Banderillas de lujas: heavily ornamented banderillas used in benefit performances. Hard to place because of their weight and awkwardness.

Banderillero: bullfighter under the orders of the matador and paid by him, who helps run the bull with the cape and places banderillas. Each matador employs four banderilleros who are sometimes called peones. They were once called chulos, but that term is no longer used. Banderilleros make from 150 to 250 pesetas a fight. They take turns placing the banderillas, two of them placing them on one bull and the other two on the next. When travelling their expenses, except wine, coffee and tobacco, are paid by the matador, who, in turn, collects them from the promoter.

Barbas — El Barbas: fighters’ slang term for the big mature bulls, which at four and a half years old will dress out three hundred and twenty kilos of meat with horns, head, hoofs and hide gone, know how to use their horns when alive and make the bullfighters earn their money.

Barrenar: pushing on the sword by the matador after he has gone in to kill and is coming along the flank after having passed the bull’s horn. Once he is past the horn he may push on the sword without danger.

Barrera: the red painted wooden fence around the sanded ring in which the bull is fought. The first row of seats are also called barreras.

Basto: heavy on the feet, lacking in grace, art and agility.

Batacazo: a heavy fall by a picador.

Becerrada: benefit performance by amateurs or apprentice bullfighters in which bulls too young to be dangerous are used.

Becerro: a calf.

Bicho: bug or insect. A slang name for the bull.

Billetes: tickets to the bullfight. NO HAY BILLETES — a sign at the ticket window meaning all tickets sold; the promoter’s dream. But the waiter at the café can nearly always get you one if you will pay scalper’s prices.

Bisco: a bull with one horn lower than the other.

Blando: a bull which cannot stand punishment.

Blandos: meat without bone. An estocada is said to be in the blandos when the sword went in easily in the proper place without hitting bone.

Bota: individual wine skin, called gourd by the English. These are thrown into the ring by their exalted owners in the north of Spain as an ovation to a bullfighter who is making a tour of the ring. The triumphant fighter is supposed to take a drink and throw the wine skin back. The bullfighters dislike this practice very much as the wine is liable, if any spills, to spot their expensive frilled shirt fronts.

Botella: a bottle; these are thrown into the ring by savages, drunks and exalted spectators to express their disapproval.

Botellazo: a stroke on the head with a bottle; avoided by not arguing with drunks.

Boyante: an easy bull to work with and one which follows the cloth well and charges bravely and frankly.

Bravo — Toros Bravos: brave and savage bulls.

Bravucón: a bull who bluffs and is not really brave.

Brazuelo: the upper part of the foreleg. The bull can be lamed and ruined for the fight by the picadors wounding him in the tendons of the brazuelo.

Brega: the routine work that must be accomplished with each bull fought up to and including the killing.

Brindis: the formal salute or dedication of the bull to the president or to any individual made by the matador before going out to kill. The salute to the president is obligatory in the first bull each matador kills in an afternoon. After saluting the president he may dedicate the bull to any high governmental authority present at the corrida, any distinguished spectator, or a friend. When the matador dedicates or toasts a bull to an individual he throws up his hat at the conclusion of the toast and the person honored keeps the hat until the bull has been killed. After the bull is dead the matador comes back for the hat which is thrown down with the card of the man who has held it or some gift in it if the man has come prepared to be dedicated to. The gift is obligatory by etiquette unless the dedication is between friends in the same profession.

Brío: brilliance and vivacity.

Bronca: a noisy protest of disapproval.

Bronco: a bull that is savage, nervous, uncertain and difficult.

Buey: steer or ox; or a bull which is heavy and oxlike in his actions.

Bulto: bundle; the man rather than the cloth. A bull that makes for the bundle is one that pays no attention to the cape or muleta no matter how well managed, but goes after the man instead. A bull that does this nearly always has been fought before either on the ranch as a calf or, contrary to the regulations, has appeared in some village ring without being killed.

Burladero: a shelter of planks set close together and a little out from the corral or barrera behind which the bullfighters and herders can dodge if pursued.

Burriciegos: bulls with defective vision. Either far-sighted, nearsighted or simply hazy visioned. Near-sighted bulls can be fought well by a bullfighter who is not afraid to get close and by turning with the bull keep him from losing sight of the lure when he turns. Far-sighted bulls are very dangerous since they will charge suddenly and with great speed from an abnormal distance at the largest object that attracts their attention. Hazy-visioned bulls, often caused by their eyes becoming congested during the fight, when the bull is overweight and the day is hot, or, from driving into and scattering the visceral content of a horse over them, are almost impossible to do any brilliant work with.

C

Caballero en Plaza: a Portuguese or Spanish mounted bullfighter riding trained, blooded horses who, aided by one or more men on foot with capes who help place the bull for him, puts in banderillas with either one or both hands and kills the bull with a javelin from on horseback. These riders are also called rejoneadores from the rejón or javelin they use. These are razor-sharp, narrow, dagger-shaped lance points which are on a shaft which has been partially cut through to weaken it so that the point can be driven in by a straight thrust and the long shaft then broken off in order that the point will remain in the wound sinking deeper as the bull tosses his head and often killing him from what seems a slight thrust. The equestrian ability required for this form of bullfighting is very great and the manœuvres are complicated and difficult, but after you have seen it a few times, it lacks the appeal of the ordinary bullfight since the man undergoes no danger. It is the horse that takes the risks, not the rider; since the horse is in motion whenever he approaches the bull and any wound he may receive through his rider’s lack of judgment or skill will not be of a sort to bring him to the ground and expose the rider. The bull too is bled and rapidly exhausted by the deep lance wounds which are often made in the forbidden territory of the neck. Also since the horse, after the first twenty yards, can always outdistance the bull it becomes a chase of an animal of superior speed by one less fast in the course of which the pursuing animal is stabbed from horseback. This is altogether opposed to the theory of the bullfight on foot in which the bullfighter is supposed to stand his ground while the bull attacks him and deceive the animal by a movement of a cloth held in his arms. In bullfighting on horseback the man uses the horse as a lure to draw the bull’s charge, often approaching the bull from the rear, but the lure is always in motion and I find the business, the more I see of it, very dull. The horsemanship is always admirable, and the degree of training of the horses amazing, but the whole thing is closer to the circus than it is to formal bullfighting.

Caballo: horse. Picadors’ horses are also called pencos or more liter-arily rocinantes and a variety of names which correspond to our calling poor race horses, skins, skates, dogs, etc.

Cabestros: the trained steers used in handling fighting bulls. The older and more experienced these are the greater their value and usefulness.

Cabeza: head.

Cabeza á rabo: a pase in which the bull passes his entire length under the muleta from head to tail.

Cabezada: a toss of the head.

Cachete: another name for the despatching of the bull with the puntilla once he has gone to the ground.

Cachetero: one who gives the coup de grâce with the puntilla. Caída: fall of a picador when his horse is knocked over by the bull. Sword thrusts which are placed lower toward the neck than they should be without being intentionally bajonazos are also called caída.

Calle: street; the worst bullfighters are usually the ones seen most constantly on the street. It is implied in Spain that some one seen always on the street has no better place to go or, if he has, is unwelcome there.

Callejón: the passage way between the wooden fence or barrera which surrounds the ring and the first row of seats.

Cambio: change. A pase with the cape or muleta in which the bullfighter after taking the bull’s charge into the cloth changes the animal’s direction with a movement of the cloth so that where the animal would have passed to one side of the man he is made to pass on the other side. The muleta may also be changed from one hand to the other in a cambio, doubling the bull on himself to fix him in place. Sometimes the man will change the muleta from hand to hand behind his back. This is merely ornamental and without effect on the bull. The cambio in banderillas is a feint made by the body to change the bull’s direction; it has been fully described in the text.

Camelo: fake; a bullfighter who by tricks tries to appear to work close to the bull while in reality never taking any chances.

Campo: the country. Faenas del campo are all the operations in the breeding, branding, testing, herding, selecting, caging and shipping of the bulls from the ranches.

Capa or capote: the cape used in bullfighting. Shaped like the capes commonly worn in Spain in the winter, it is usually made of raw silk on one side and percale on the other, heavy, stiff and reinforced in the collar, cerise colored on the outside and yellow on the inner side. A good fighting cape costs 250 pesetas. They are heavy to hold and at the lower extremities small corks have been stitched into the cloth of the capes the matadors use. These the matador holds in his hands when he lifts the lower ends of the cape and gathers them together for handholds when swinging the cape with both hands.

Caparacón: the mattresslike covering for the chest and belly of a picador’s horse.

Capea: informal bullfights or bull baitings in village squares in which amateurs and aspirant bullfighters take part. Also a parody of the formal bullfight given in parts of France or where the killing of the bull is prohibited in which no picadors are used and the killing of the bull is simulated.

Capilla: the chapel in the bull ring where the bullfighters may pray before entering the ring.

Capote de brega: the fighting cape as above described.

Capote de paseo: the luxurious cape the bullfighter wears into the ring. These are heavily brocaded with gold or silver and cost from fifteen hundred to five thousand pesetas.

Cargar la suerte: the first movement of the arms made by the matador when the bull reaches the cloth to move the lure ahead of the bull and send him away from the man.

Carpintero: bull ring carpenter who waits in the callejón ready to repair any damage to the barrera or gates of the ring.

Carril: a rut, furrow or railway track; a carril in bullfighting is a bull that charges perfectly straight as though coming down a groove or mounted on rails, permitting the utmost in brilliance to the matador.

Cartel: the composed programme for a bullfight. May also mean the amount of popularity a bullfighter has in any determined locality. For instance, you ask a friend in the business, “What cartel have you in Malaga?” “Wonderful; in Malaga no one has more cartel than me. My cartel is unmeasurable.” As a matter of record on his last appearance in Malaga he may have been chased out of the city by angry and disappointed customers.

Carteles: the posters announcing a bullfight.

Castigaderas: the long poles used from above in herding and sorting the bulls into the various runways and passages of the corrals when placing them in their compartments before the fight.

Castoreno: or beavers: the wide hats with pompons at the side worn by the picador.

Cazar: to kill the bull deceitfully and treacherously with the sword without the man allowing his body to come close to the horn.

Ceñido: close to the bull.

Ceñirse: to close in on. Applied to the bull it means those which pass as close to the man as he will permit, gaining a little ground each attack. The man is said to ciñe when he works very close to the animal.

Cerca: close; as in close to the horns.

Cerrar: to shut in.

Cerrar el toro: to bring the bull close into the barrera; the opposite of Abrir. The bullfighter is called encerrado en Tablas when he has provoked the charge of the bull close to the barrera so that the bull cuts off his retreat on one side and the barrera cuts it on the other.

Cerveza: beer; there is good draft beer almost anywhere in Madrid, but the best is found at the Cervezeria Alvarez in the calle Victoria. Draft beer is served in pint glasses which are called dobles or in half-pint glasses called cañas, cañitas or medias. The Madrid breweries were founded by Germans and the beer is the best anywhere on the continent outside of Germany and Czecho-Slovakia. The best bottled beer in Madrid is the Aguilar. In the provinces good beer is brewed in Santander, the Cruz Blanca, and in San Sebastian. In the latter town the best beer I have drunk has been at the Cafe de Madrid, Café de la Marina, and Café Kutz. In Valencia the best draft beer I have ever drunk has been at the Hotel Valencia where it is served ice cold in large glass pitchers. The food at this hotel, which has only very modest accommodations as to rooms, is superb. In Pamplona the finest beer is at the Café Kutz and the Café Iruña. The beer at the other cafés can not be recommended. I have drunk excellent draft beer in Palencia, Vigo and La Corña, but have never encountered good draft beer in any very small Spanish town.

Cerviguillo: the high part of the bull’s neck where the hump of muscle forms the so-called morillo or erective muscular crest of the neck.

Chato: snub nosed.

Chico: small; also means youngster. The younger brothers of bullfighters are usually referred to by the family name or professional name with Chico appended as: Armillita Chico, Amoros Chico, etc.

Chicuelinas: a pass with the cape invented by Manuel Jiminez “Chicuelo.” The man offers the cape to the bull and when the bull has charged and is past, the man, while the bull turns, makes a pirouette in which the cape wraps itself around him. At the conclusion of the pirouette he is facing the bull ready to make another pass.

Chiquero: the closed stalls in which the bulls await their entrance into the ring.

Choto: a calf which is still nursing; term of contempt to describe under-aged and undersized bulls.

Citar: challenging the bull’s attention to provoke a charge.

Clarines: the trumpets that give the signals at the president’s orders to announce the different changes in the fight.

Claro: a bull that is simple and easy to work with.

Cobarde: a cowardly bull or bullfighter.

Cobrar: to collect; el mano de cobrar is the right hand.

Cogida: the tossing of a man by the bull; means literally the catching; if the bull catches he tosses.

Cojo: lame; a bull which comes into the ring lame may be retired. The spectators will commence to shout “Cojo” as soon as they perceive the lameness.

Cojones: testicles; a valorous bullfighter is said to be plentifully equipped with these. In a cowardly bullfighter they are said to be absent. Those of the bull are called criadillas and prepared in any of the ways sweetbreads are usually cooked they are a great delicacy. During the killing of the fifth bull the criadillas of the first bull were sometimes served in the royal box. Primo de Rivera was so fond of interlarding his discourse with reference to manly virtues that he was said to have eaten so many criadillas that they had gone to his brain.

Cola: the bull’s tail; usually called rabo. Cola may also mean the line in front of a ticket window.

Colada: the instant in which the bullfighter finds his position untenable when through mismanagement of the cloth or through the bull paying no attention to it or abandoning it to seek the man, the man must save himself from the charge as best he can.

Coleando: hanging onto the bull’s tail, twisting it toward his head. This gives great pain to the bull and often damages his spinal column. It is only permissible when the bull is goring, or trying to gore a man on the ground.

Coleta: the short, tightly braided, curved pigtail worn at the back of the head by the bullfighter to attach the mona, a black sort of hollow, dull, silk-covered button about twice the size of a silver dollar which supports the hat. Bullfighters formerly all wore this tress of hair pinned forward on their head out of sight when not fighting. Now they have found that they can attach both mona and a made-up coleta at the same time by a clasp to the hair at the back of their heads when dressing for the ring. You only see the pigtail now, once the caste mark of all bullfighters, on the heads of young aspirant fighters in the provinces.

Colocar: to place; a man is bien colocado when he places himself correctly in the ring for all the different acts of the bullfight. It is also used when speaking of the placing of the sword, the pic and the banderillas in the bull. A bullfighter is also said to be bien colocado when he has finally arrived at a recognized position in his profession.

Compuesto: composed; holding his figure straight while the bull charges.

Confianza: self-confidence; peón de confianza — confidential banderillero who represents and may even advise the matador.

Confiar: to become confident and sure of himself with a bull.

Conocedor: a professional overseer of the fighting bulls on a breeder’s estates.

Consentirse: to get very close to the bull with the body or lure in order to force a charge and then keep close and keep the bull charging.

Contrabarrera: second row of seats at the bull ring.

Contratas: contracts signed by bullfighters.

Contratista de Caballos: horse contractor; furnishes horses for a fight for a fixed sum.

Cornada: a horn wound; a real wound as distinct from a varetazo or bruising scratch. A cornada de caballo is a huge cornada, the same sort of wound in a man that the bull usually makes in the chest of a horse.

Cornalón: bull with exceptionally large horns.

Corniabierto: exceptionally wide horned.

Corniavacado: cowhorned. Bull in which the horns turn up and back.

Cornicorto: shorthorned.

Cornigacho: bull with low horns coming quite straight forward.

Corniveleto: high straight horns.

Corral: enclosure adjoining the ring in which the bulls are kept immediately before they are to be fought. Provided with feed-boxes, salt and fresh water.

Correr: to run; used to denote the running of the bull by the banderillero when the animal first enters the ring.

Corrida or Corrida de Toros: the Spanish bullfight.

Corrida de Novillos Toros: fight in which young or big but defective bulls are used.

Corta: short, an estocada in which the sword goes in a little more than half way.

Cortar: to cut; bullfighters often sustain slight cuts on the hands with the sword when managing sword and muleta. Cortar la oreja — to cut the bull’s ear. Cortar la coleta — to cut the pigtail or retire.

Cortar terreno: the bull is said to cut in on the terrain of the bullfighter when after the man has provoked a charge and is running toward and across the line of the bull’s charge to place the banderillas, say, at the point where their two courses will meet, the bull changes his direction while charging in order to cut in toward the man; gaining ground by running sideways.

Corto (torero corto): matador with a limited repertoire.

Corto — vestido de corto: wearing the short jacket of the Andalucian bull herders. Bullfighters formerly dressed in their costume when not in the ring.

Crecer: to increase; a bull that increases in bravery under punishment.

Cruz: the cross. Where the line of the top of the bull’s shoulder blades would cross the spine. The place the sword should go in if the matador kills perfectly. The cruz is also the crossing of the sword arm over the arm that holds the lowered muleta as the matador goes in to kill. He is said to cross well when his left hand manages the cloth so that it moves low and well out accentuating the cross made with the other arm thus getting well rid of the bull as the man follows the sword in. Fernando Gomez, father of the Gallos, is supposed first to have remarked that the bullfighter who does not cross in this way belongs to the devil at once. Another saying is that the first time you do not cross is your first trip to the hospital.

Cuadrar: squaring the bull for killing; both front and hind feet together and the head neither too high nor too low. In banderillas: the moment when the bull lowers his head to hook and the man puts his feet together, his hands together and sinks the shafts into the bull.

Cuadrilla: the troupe of bullfighters under the orders of a matador including picadors and banderilleros one of whom acts as puntillero.

Cuarteo: the most common form of placing banderillas, described in the text; a feint with the body or dodging motion used to avoid going in straight toward the bull when killing.

Cuidado: watch out! when it is an ejaculation. When applied to the bull as a descriptive term means one who has learned in the course of the fight and become dangerous.

Cuidando la línea: looking after the line; taking care that his movements shall be æsthetically graceful while working with the bull.

Cumbre: summit; torero cumbre: the very best possible; faena cumbre: the absolute top in work with the muleta.

Cuna: the cradle formed on the bull’s head between the bull’s horns. The one temporary refuge of a man whose position has become hopelessly compromised.

D

Defenderse: to defend; a bull is said to defend himself when he refuses to charge but pays close attention to everything and gores at anything that comes close to him.

Dehesa: pasture land.

Déjalo: leave him alone! Let him be! Shouted by the bullfighter to his peones when they have the bull correctly placed or when the matador wishes the bull left alone and not tired any more by the capes.

Delantal: a pass with the cape invented by Chicuelo in which the cape is swung in front of the man so that it billows out like an apron on a pregnant woman in a breeze.

Delantera de tendido: third row of seats at the ringside behind contra-barrera and barrera. Delantera de grada: first row of seats in gallery.

Delantero: a pair of banderillas or estocade placed too far forward.

Derecho: straight; mano derecha: the right hand.

Derramar la vista: scattering the vision; a bull which fixes his sight rapidly on a number of different objects before suddenly fixing on one and charging.

Derrame: hemorrhage, from the mouth usually; always, if the blood is bright or frothy, a sign that the sword has been badly placed and has entered the lungs. A bull may bleed from the mouth when he has been stuck properly, but it is very rare.

Derribar: to knock over; the riding after young bulls on the ranch by a man armed with a long pole with which, while both bull and horse are galloping, the man upsets the bull by placing the point of the pole near the root of the tail and throwing the animal off balance so that it falls to the ground.

Derrote: high-chopping motion of the bull’s horns.

Desarmar: to disarm the matador by loss of his muleta either through the horn catching in it and the bull tossing it away or through the bull deliberately chopping upward with his horns as the man comes in to kill.

Desarrollador: where the bulls are dressed out and the meat butchered after the fight.

Descabellar: to descabello or kill the bull from in front after he has been mortally wounded through an estocade by driving the point of the sword between the base of the skull and the first vertebra so that the spinal cord is severed. This is a coup de grâce administered by the matador while the bull is still on his feet. If the bull is nearly dead and carries his head low, the stroke is not difficult since with the head nearly to the ground the space between the vertebra and the skull will be open. However, many matadors not caring to risk going in and passing the horn again if they have administered one estocade, whether mortal or not, try to descabello while the bull is in no sense nearly dead and, since the animal must then be tricked into lowering his head and may chop up with it as he sees or feels the sword, the descabello then becomes difficult and dangerous. It is dangerous both for spectators and matador since the bull with an upward chop of his head will often send the sword thirty or more feet into the air. Swords tossed in this way by bulls have frequently killed spectators in Spanish rings. A Cuban visitor at Biarritz was killed a few years ago in the bull ring at Bayonne, France, by a sword with which Antonio Marquéz was attempting to descabello. Marquéz was tried for manslaughter but was acquitted. In 1930 a spectator was killed by a tossed sword in Tolosa, Spain, the matador engaged in descabelloing being Manolo Martinez. The sword, entering the man’s back, pierced his body completely and was withdrawn with difficulty by two men, both of whom cut their hands badly on the blade. The practice of attempting to descabello on a bull which is still strong and requires another estocade to kill or wound him mortally is one of the worst and most shameful practices of modern bullfighting. Most of the scandalous and shameful disasters suffered by bullfighters subject to attacks of cowardice such as Cagancho, Niño de la Palma and Chicuelo have been due to their trying to descabellar a bull which was in a state to defend itself against this stroke. In the proper way of descabelloing the muleta is held low on the ground to force the bull to lower his muzzle. The matador may prick the bull’s muzzle either with the point of the muleta or with the sword to force him to lower it. When the point of the sword used in this thrust, the blade of which is straight and stiff rather than curved down in the usual way, is properly placed, it strikes and severs the spinal marrow and the bull falls as suddenly as light goes off when a button is turned to extinguish an electric light.

Descansar: to rest; the descanso is the intermission between the third and fourth bulls which occurs in some bull rings while the ring is being sprinkled and smoothed. A man may also rest the bull a moment between two series of passes while passing him with the muleta if he finds the bull is winded.

Descompuesto: gone to pieces nervously.

Desconfiado: worried or lacking in confidence.

Descordando: an estocade or sword thrust which accidentally going between two vertebræ cuts the spinal cord and brings the bull down instantly. This is not to be confused with the descabello or the puntilla stroke which cuts the spinal marrow deliberately.

Descubrirse: to uncover; in the bull to lower the head well so that the part where the sword is to enter is easily reached. In the man, to leave himself uncovered by the cloth when working with the bull.

Desgarradura: a torn rip in the hide of the bull made by an unskillful or conscienceless picador.

Desigual: a bullfighter whose performances are not consistent; brilliant one day and boring the next.

Despedida: the farewell performance of a bullfighter; not to be taken any more seriously than that of a singer. The actual final performances of bullfighters are usually very poor affairs since the man usually has some incapabilities which force him to retire or else he is retiring to live on his money and will be very careful to take no chances in the last time bulls will have a chance to kill him.

Despedir: when the man with cape or muleta sends the bull out and away from him at the end of a pass. The pushing away of the bull by the picador at the end of a charge as the picador turns his horse.

Despejo: clearing of the public from the ring before the fight commences. The spectators are no longer allowed to parade in the Madrid ring before the fight commences.

Desplante: any theatrical gesture by a bullfighter.

Destronque: the damage suffered by a bull through too sudden twisting of his spinal column by turning him too shortly with cape or muleta.

Diestro: skillful; generic term for the matador.

Divisa: the colors of the bull breeder which are attached to a small harpoon-shaped iron and placed in the bull’s morillo as he enters the ring.

División de Plaza: dividing the ring into two parts by running a barrera across the centre and giving two bullfights at once. Never seen now since the bullfight has become formalized except very occasionally in nocturnal fights when it is done, for lack of other attractions, as a curiosity and relic of old days.

Doblar: to turn; a bull that turns after a charge and recharges; Doblando con el: a bullfighter who turns with the bull keeping the cape or muleta in front of the bull to hold his attention when he has a tendency to leave after each charge.

Doctorado: slang for alternativa; taking the doctor’s degree in Tauromachia.

Dominio: the ability to dominate the bull.

Duro: hard, tough and resistant. Also slang for the bony structure which the sword may strike in killing; also a silver five-peseta piece.

E

Embestir: to charge;

Embestir bien: to follow the cloth well; to charge freshly and frankly.

Embolado: a bull, steer or cow whose horns have been covered with a leather sheath thickened at the ends in order to blunt the points.

Embroque: space between the bull’s horns; to be between the horns.

Emmendar: to correct or improve the position he has taken the bull in, to change from a place or a pass in which he is compromised to another that is successful.

Empapar: to centre the bull’s head well into the cloth of either cape or muleta when receiving a charge so that the animal can see nothing beyond the folds of the lure as it is moved ahead of him.

Emplazarse: for the bull to take a position well out in the centre of the ring and refuse to leave it.

Empresa: organization in charge of promoting bullfights in any given ring.

Encajonamiento: the putting of bulls into their individual travelling boxes or cages for shipment from ranch to ring.

Encierro: the driving of fighting bulls on foot, surrounded by steers, from one corral to the corral of the ring. In Pamplona the running of the bulls through the streets with the crowd running ahead of them from the corral at the edge of the town into and through the bull ring into the corral of the ring. The bulls to be fought in the afternoon are run through the streets at seven o’clock in the morning of the day they are to be fought.

Encorvado: bent over; bullfighter who works leaning forward in order to hold the lure so that the bull will pass as far as possible from his body. The straighter the man stands the closer the bull will come to his body.

Enfermeria: operating room attached to all bull rings.

Enganchar: to hook into anything with the horn and raise it into the air.

Engaño: anything used to deceive the bull or the spectator. In the first case the cape and muleta, in the second any tricks to simulate a danger not really experienced.

Entablerarse: for the bull to take up a position which he refuses to leave along the planks of the barrera.

Entero: complete; a bull which has arrived at the stage of the killing without having been slowed or weakened by his encounters with the picadors and banderilleros.

Entrar á Matar: to go in to kill.

Eral: two-year-old bull.

Erguido: erect and straight; bullfighter who holds himself very straight when working with the animal.

Espada: synonym for the sword; also used to refer to the matador himself.

Espalda: the shoulders or back of the man. A man who is said to work from the back is a sodomite.

Estocada: sword thrust or estocade in which the matador goes in from the front to attempt to place the sword high up between the bull’s shoulder blades.

Estoque: the sword used in bullfighting. It has a lead-weighted, chamois-covered pommel, a straight cross guard five centimetres from the pommel and the hilt and cross guard are wrapped in red flannel. It is not jewel hilted as we read in Virgin Spain. The blade is about seventy-five centimetres long and is curved downward at the tip in order that it may penetrate better and take a deeper direction between the ribs, vertebræ, shoulder blades and other bony structure which it may encounter. Modern swords are made with one, two or three grooves or canals along the back of the blade, the purpose of these being to allow air to be introduced into the wound caused by the sword, otherwise the blade of the sword serves as a plug to the wound it makes. The best swords are made in Valencia and their prices vary according to the number of canals and the quality of steel used. The usual equipment for a matador is four ordinary killing swords and one straight-tipped sword with slightly widened point for the descabello. The blades of all these swords except that used for the descabello are ground razor-sharp half way up their length from the tip. They are kept in soft leather sheaths and the complete outfit is carried in a large, usually embossed, leather sword case.

Estribo: metal stirrup of the picador; also the ridge of wood about eighteen inches above the ground which runs around the inside of the barrera which aids the bullfighters in vaulting the wooden fence.

Extraño: sudden movement to one side or the other made by either bull or man.

F

Facultades: physical abilities or assets in the man; in the bull preserving his facultades is called keeping his qualities intact in spite of punishment.

Facultativo: — Parte Facultativo: official diagnosis to be sent to the President of the fights of a bullfighter’s wound or wounds dictated by the surgeon in charge in the infirmary after he has treated or operated on the man.

Faena: the sum of the work done by the matador with the muleta in the final third of the bullfight; it also means any work carried out; a faena de campo being any of the operations of bull raising.

Faja: sash worn around the waist as a belt.

Falsa: false, incorrect, phoney. Salidas en falsa are attempts to place the banderillas in which the man passes the bull’s head without deciding to place the sticks either because the bull has not charged, in which case the man’s action is correct, or because the man simply had made an error in lack of decision. They are sometimes made, very gracefully, simply to show the matador’s judgment of distance.

Farol: pass with the cape which commences as a veronica with the cape held in both hands, but as the bull passes the man the cape is swung around the man’s head and behind his back as he turns with the bull following the swing of the cape.

Farpa: long, heavy banderilla used by Portuguese bullfighters who place them on horseback.

Fenómeno: a phenomenon; originally used to designate a young matador who showed exceptional aptitudes for his profession, it now is principally used as a sarcasm to describe a bullfighter who is advanced by publicity faster than his experience and aptitudes warrant.

Fiera: wild beast; slang for the bull. Also slang for loose woman as we would say bitch.

Fiesta: holiday time or time of enjoyment; Fiesta de los toros: the bullfight. Fiesta nacional: bullfight; used in a sneering way by writers opposed to the corrida as a symbol of Spain’s backwardness as a European nation.

Fijar: to cut short the bull’s running and fix him in a certain place.

Filigranas: fancy business done with the bull; or artistic refinements of any pass or act in bullfighting.

Flaco: — toro flaco: bull that is lean, flaccid or hollow. Not well filled in.

Flojo: weak, so-so, unconvincing, spiritless.

Franco: noble bull easy to work with.

Frenar: to put on the brakes; bull which slows suddenly when passing the man to stop and gore instead of pursuing his normal course; one of the most dangerous bulls to work with as he appears to be going to pass and gives no previous indication of his intention of braking.

Frente par detrás: pass with the cape in which the man’s back is turned toward the bull but his body covered with the cape which is extended to one side by both arms. It is really a form of the veronica performed with the back toward the bull.

Fresco: calmly, shamelessly, cynical.

Fuera: get away! Get out! Get the hell out! Depending on the degree of vehemence with which it is shouted.

G

Gachis: tarts about town.

Gacho: horns that point down.

Galleando: the man with the cape on his back as though he were wearing it looks back over his shoulder toward the bull and moving in a series of zig-zags, feints, and dodgings causes the bull to follow the turns and swings of the lower part of the cape.

Gallo: fighting cock; the professional name of the great Gomez family of gypsy bullfighters.

Ganadería: ranch where fighting bulls are raised; all the bulls, cows, calves and steers on such a ranch.

Ganadero: breeder of fighting bulls.

Ganar terreno: bull which forces the man to give ground each time he charges thus gaining it for himself.

Garrocha: synonym for the pike or pic used by the picador; a vaulting pole used for leaping over the bull in old-time fights.

Gente: people; gente coletudo or the pigtailed citizenry refers to the bullfighters.

Ginete: horseman, picador; buen ginete: a good rider.

Golletazo: sword thrust in the side of the neck of the bull which goes into the lung causing death almost at once from choking hemorrhage; used to assassinate bulls by panic-stricken matadors who are afraid to approach the horns; this estocade is only justified on bulls that have received one or more proper estocades or attempts and which defend themselves so well, refusing to uncover the space where they should be killed between the shoulders, tossing the muleta out of the man’s hand as he comes in and refusing to charge, that the man has no other choice than to attempt a golletazo.

Gótico: gothic; un niño gótico in bullfighting is a conceited boy fond of striking gothic architectural attitudes.

Gracia: grace and elegance of manner while undergoing danger; gracia gitana: gypsy grace.

Grado: the balcony or covered seats in a bull ring above the open seats or tendidos and the covered boxes or palcos.

Grotesca: grotesque; the opposite of graceful.

Guardia: municipal policeman; not taken seriously even by himself.

Guardia Civil: national police, are taken very seriously; armed with sabres and 7 mm. caliber mauser carbines they are, or were, a model of ruthless, disciplined constabulary.

H

Hachazo: chopping stroke of the bull’s horns.

Herida: wound.

Herradera: branding of calves on the ranch.

Herradura: horseshoe; cortar la herradura: to cut the horseshoe, an estocada well placed, fairly high up but in which the blade, once in, takes an oblique downward direction into the bull’s chest, cutting the pleura, and causing immediate death without any external hemorrhage.

Hierro: branding iron; brand of a bull breeder of fighting bulls.

Hombre: man, as an ejaculation expresses surprise, pleasure, shock, disapproval or delight, according to tone used. Muy Hombre: very much of a man, i.e., plentifully supplied with huevos, cojones, etc.

Hondo: deep; estocada honda: sword in up to the hilt.

Hueso: bone; in slang means a tough one.

Huevos: eggs; slang for testicles as we say balls.

Huir: to run away; shameful both in bull and matador.

Hule: oilcloth; slang for the operating table.

Humillar: lower the head.

I

Ida: estocada in which the blade takes a pronounced downward direction without being perpendicular. Such an estocade although well placed may cause hemorrhage from the mouth through the blade going so nearly straight down that it touches the lungs.

Ida y Vuelta — allez et retour: round trip; a bull which turns by himself at the end of a charge and comes again on a straight line. Ideal for the bullfighter who can look after his æsthetic effects without having to bring the bull around at the end of the charge with cape or muleta.

Igualar: get the bull’s front feet together.

Inquieto: nervous.

Izquierda: left; mano izquierda: the left hand, called zurda in bull ring dialect.

J

Jaca: riding horse, mare or pony; Jaca torera: a mare so well trained by the Portuguese bullfighter Simao Da Veiga that he was able, when he was mounted on her, to place banderillas with both hands, not touching the bridle, the horse being guided by spur and pressure of the knees alone.

Jalear: to applaud.

Jaulones: the individual boxes or cages in which bulls are shipped from the ranch to the ring. These are owned by the breeders, marked with his brand, name and address and returned after the fight.

Jornalero: day laborer; bullfighter who barely makes his living through his profession.

Jugar: to play; jugando con el toro: when one or more matadors unarmed with a cape but carrying the banderillas held together in one hand play with the bull by half provoking a series of charges; running in zig-zags or seeing how close they can approach the bull while playing without provoking a charge. To do this attractively much grace and knowledge of the bull’s mental processes is necessary.

Jurisdicción: the moment in which the bull while charging arrives within reach of where the man is standing and lowers his head to hook; more technically speaking, when the bull leaves his terrain and enters the terrain of the bullfighter arriving at the place the man wishes to receive him with the cloth.

K

Kilos: a kilo equals two and one-fifth pounds. Bulls are weighed in kilos sometimes after they are killed and before being dressed out and always after they are dressed, drawn, skinned, heads and hoofs and all parts of the meat that has been damaged cut away. This latter state is called en canal and for many years the weight of bulls has been judged when they are in this state. A four-and-a-half-year-old fighting bull should weigh from 295 to 340 kilos en canal depending on their size and type; the present legal minimum that they may weigh is 285 kilos. The dressed-out or en canal weight of a bull is estimated as 52½ per cent of his live weight. Just as in money where the legal unit is the peseta yet sums are never mentioned in conversation in pesetas but rather in reales or 25 centimos, a fourth of a peseta, or in duros, five pesetas, in the weight of bulls for conversational purpose the arroba or weight unit of twenty-five pounds is the measuring unit. A bull is measured or estimated in the number of arrobas of meat he will dress out when butchered. A bull of 26 arrobas will dress out a fraction over 291 kilos. That is as small as bulls should be fought if the animal is to be imposing enough to give real emotion to the corrida. From 26 to 30 arrobas is the ideal weight for fighting bulls that have not been fattened on grain. Each arroba between 24 and 30 means as definite a difference in the hitting power, size, and destructiveness as there is between the different classes in boxing. To make a comparison we may say that in point of strength and destructive power bulls under 24 arrobas are the flyweights, bantamweights, and featherweights. Bulls from 24 to 25 arrobas are lightweights and welterweights. Bulls of 26 arrobas are middleweights and light heavyweights; 27 to 30 arrobas are heavyweights, and all above 30 arrobas approach the Primo Carnera class. A cornada or horn wound from a bull that weighs only 24 arrobas will, if it is properly placed, be as fatal as one from a much larger animal. It is a dagger stroke with ordinary force while the bull of 30 arrobas gives the same dagger stroke with the force of a pile-driver. It is a fact, however, that a bull of 24 arrobas is generally immature; little over three years old; and bulls of that age do not know how to use their horns skillfully either offensively or defensively. The ideal bull therefore to provide a sufficiently dangerous enemy for the bullfighters so that the corrida will retain its emotion should be at least four and a half years old in order to be mature, and weigh, when dressed out, an absolute minimum of 25 arrobas. The more arrobas it weighs from 25 up, without losing speed and not simply gaining weight by being fattened, the greater the emotion will be and the more meritorious will be any work accomplished by the man with the animal. To follow bullfights intelligently or understand them thoroughly you must learn to think in arrobas just as in boxing you must class the men in the various formal classifications by weight. At present the bullfight is being killed by unscrupulous bull breeders who sell under-aged, under-weight and under-bred bulls, not testing them sufficiently for bravery, and thus abusing and forfeiting the tolerance that had been extended to their undersized products as long as they were brave and liable to provide a brilliant if unemotional corrida.

L

Ladeada: to one side; especially refers to an estocade.

Lances: any formalized passes made by the cape.

Largas: a pass to draw the bull toward and then send him away from the man made with the cape fully extended and held at extremity by one hand.

Lazar: to lasso; or use the lariat or riata of the American west to catch cattle or the lazo with a weight on one end used in South America.

Levantado: first stage of the bull on entering the ring when he tries to sweep everything out of the ring without concentrating his charges.

Liar: to furl with a twist of the left wrist the cloth of the muleta over the stick which supports it before profiling on going in to kill with the sword.

Librar: to free; librar la acometida: to free himself from the unsuspected charge either by foot-work or by an improvised pass with muleta or cape.

Libre de cacho: anything performed with the bull out of range of his horns; either from a distance or after the horn has passed; means literally free from the possibility of being caught.

Lidia: the fight; toro de lidia: fighting bull. Also the name of the most famous and oldest bullfight weekly.

Lidiador: one who fights bulls.

Ligereza: agility; one of the three qualities necessary to be a matador according to the great Francisco Montés; the three being agility or lightness on the feet, valor, and a perfect knowledge of his profession.

Llegar: to arrive; the bull is said to llegar when he actually reaches the horse with his horn in spite of the picador’s opposition.

Lleno: a full house or sell-out; every seat in the ring occupied.

M

Macheteo: chopping as with a cane knife or machete; macheteo por la cara is a series of chopping strokes from side to side with the muleta, with the man retreating by footwork if the bull charges, designed to tire the bull’s neck muscles and prepare him for killing. It is the simplest and safest way to tire a bull with the muleta and employed by bullfighters who do not desire to take any risks or to attempt anything difficult.

Macho: male, masculine, abundantly endowed with male reproductive organs; torero macho: bullfighter whose work is on a basis of courage rather than perfected technique and style, although the style may come later.

Maestro: a master at anything; as a matador might be addressed by his peones. Has come to be used sarcastically, in Madrid especially. You address any one as maestro to whom you wish to show the minimum of respect.

Maldito or Maldita: damned; cursed as in speaking to a bull, “Damned be the cow that dropped you!” Maleante: crook or cheap criminal; the type of maleante encountered most often going to or leaving the bullfight is the pickpocket or carterista; literally pocketbooker. These citizens are numerous, tolerated, in the sense that the police in Madrid have lists of them all and if you were robbed and saw the pickpocket they will have several hundred of them called in off the streets or from their homes and paraded for you; and extremely skillful. The way to avoid them is never to ride on a street car or the subway for that is where they work most easily. They have one good quality — they do not destroy your personal papers or passports or keep them as other pickpockets would do, but after taking the money drop the pocketbook with the papers it contains into a mail-box either in a tobacco store or in one of those ambulatory boxes attached to tramways. The pocket-book will then be obtainable at the general post office. From my own and my friends’ experiences at being pickpocketed in Spain I should say that in their own walk of life these gentry combine the same qualities that Montés listed as indispensable to a bullfighter — lightness, valor, and a perfect knowledge of their profession.

Maleta: literally valise; is slang for a bad or cheap bullfighter.

Malo: bad, imperfect, defective, unhealthy, vicious, disagreeable, obnoxious, lousy, rotten, filthy, stinking, putrid, crooked, sonof-abitching, etc., depending on the circumstances. Toro malo: bull having these attributes and other inherent defects such as a tendency to jump the barrera into the crowd; to run at the sight of a cape, etc.

Mamarracho: insult shouted at deficient bullfighter; American would be awkward bum, stumble bum, flat-footed tramp or yellow bastard.

Mancornar: bull-dogging or throwing a calf by twisting the horns by hand at the same time throwing the weight of the man’s body on them.

Mandar: to command or order; in bullfighting to make the bull obey the cloth; to dominate him with it.

Manejable: manageable; bull possible to work with.

Mano: hand; mano bajo: with the hand low; the proper way to move the cape in the veronica. Manos also refers to the feet of the bull. Mansedumbre: slow oxlike peacefulness in a bull.

Manso: tame, mild and unwarlike; a bull which does not have the fighting blood is manso as are also the steers called cabestros when they are trained.

Manzanilla: natural light dry sherry wine which has not been fortified by adding more than its natural alcohol. Much drunk in Andalucia and by all connected with bullfights. It is ordered in chatos or short glasses and is usually served with a tapa or bit of food of some sort such as an olive and anchovy, a sardine, piece of tuna fish and red sweet pepper, or a slice of smoked ham. One chato lightens the spirits, three or four make you feel rather good, but if you eat the tapas as you drink, a dozen of them will not make you drunk. Manzanilla also means camomile, but if you remember to ask for a chato of manzanilla there is no danger that you will be served camomile tea.

Marear: to make seasick; to make the bull dizzy by turning him from side to side by flopping a cape on each side of his head or turn him round and round. This is done to get him to his knees after he has received an inconclusive estocade and is ugly to watch and dishonorable to perform.

Maricón: a sodomite, nance, queen, fairy, fag, etc. They have these in Spain too, but I only know of two of them among the forty-some matadors de toros. This is no guaranty that those interested parties who are continually proving that Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, etc., were fags would not be able to find more. Of the two, one is almost pathologically miserly, is lacking in valor but is very skillful and delicate with the cape, a sort of exterior decorator of bullfighting, and the other has a reputation for great valor and awkwardness and has been unable to save a peseta. In bullfighting circles the word is used as a term of opprobrium or ridicule or as an insult. There are many very, very funny Spanish fairy stories.

Mariposa: butterfly; series of passes with cape over the man’s shoulders and the man facing the bull, zig-zagging slowly backwards, drawing the bull on with a wave of first one side of the cape, then the other, supposedly imitating the flight of a butterfly. Invented by Marcial Lalanda this quite requires great knowledge of bulls to execute properly.

Mariscos: shellfish eaten in the cafés while drinking beer before or after bullfights; the best of these are percebes, a sort of goose barnacle with a tasty stem of a very delicate and delicious flavor; longostinos, large, plump, oversized Mediterranean prawns; cigalas, a pink-and-white, long, narrow-clawed member of the lobster family whose claws and tail you crack with a nut cracker or a hammer; cangrejos del rio, ecrivisse or fresh-water crayfish, cooked with whole black pepper seeds in their tails, and gambas or common shrimps served in their shells to be shucked and eaten by hand. Percebes which grow along the rocks of the Atlantic coast of Spain are not obtainable in Madrid after April until September due to the closed season. Eaten while drinking beer or absinthe they are very good; the stems of the barnacle having a taste more delicate and attractive than any oyster, clam or shellfish I have ever eaten.

Marronazo: the picador missing the bull when he charges and the point of the pic slipping over the bull’s hide without tearing it.

Matadero: slaughter-house. Training place for the use of puntilla and sword.

Matador: a formal killer of bulls, as a Mata Toros is only a bull butcher.

Mayoral: overseer on a bull-raising ranch; also those vaqueros or herders who accompany the caged bulls from the ranch to the ring, sleeping with the cages on the freight cars, seeing the bulls are fed and watered, and assisting in their unloading and sorting before the fight.

Media-estocada: an estocade in which only half of the blade goes into the bull. If properly placed on a medium-sized bull a media-esto-cada will kill as quickly as one that goes in the full length. If the bull is very large, however, half a blade may not be long enough to reach the aorta or other large blood vessels, the cutting of which produces death quickly.

Media-luna: sickle-shaped blade attached to a long pole used in the early days of bullfighting to hamstring bulls which the matador had been unable to kill. For a long time after it passed out of use and the bull which a matador had failed to kill was removed by steers the media-luna was still exhibited to shame the matador and order the entry of the steers into the ring. It is no longer exhibited.

Medias: long stockings such as are worn by bullfighters.

Media veronica: a recorte, or cutting short of the bull’s charge, which ends a series of passes with the cape known as veronicas (see explanation). The media veronica is accomplished by the man holding the cape in both hands, as for the veronica, and as the bull passes the man, moving from left to right, the man brings his left hand close to his hip and gathers the cape toward his hip with his right hand, shortening the swing of the veronica and making the cape swing half full, turning the bull on himself and fixing him in place so that the man may walk away with his back toward the animal. This fixing in place is accomplished by the swirl of the cape cutting the bull’s normal course through making him attempt to turn in a shorter distance than his own length. Juan Belmonte was the perfecter of this lance with the cape and it is now the obligatory ending for any series of veronicas. The half passes made by the matador when holding the cape in both hands and running backward swaying the cape from side to side to take the bull from one part of the ring to another were once called media-veronicas, but the real media veronica at present is the one described above.

Media-vuelta: method of placing banderillas on bulls that do not charge well in which the man takes his position at the rear of the bull and runs in toward the bull’s head as the latter turns to come toward him. Bulls which are impossible to kill from the front are also stuck with the sword by the man going in to kill by a media-vuelta.

Medios: central part of the ring which is divided into three terrains for the purpose of executing different suertes with the bull; the centre or medios; the next third or tercios and the ground next to the barrera called tablas.

Mejorar: to improve; mejorando su estilo: improving his style; mejorar el terreno is when a bullfighter finds himself too close to the barrera to be able to accomplish the pass which he is preparing without being caught and using cape or muleta to aid him changes to a better or safer position.

Meter el pie: to incite the bull to charge by bending forward the knee and then straightening up, profiled toward the bull, when awaiting him in order to kill in the manner known as recibiendo (see text).

Metisacas: put and pulled; estocades in which the matador through lack of decision puts the sword in a little way and then pulls it out.

Mogón: bull with one horn broken off or crumpled, sometimes leaving a rounded protuberance; such bulls are used in novilladas.

Mojiganga: masquerade; in the old days bulls would be let into the ring at novilladas while a procession was in progress or a play being acted. They were called mojigangas; the last survival of this are the various bands imitating the bullfighting band, El Empastre, founded by Rafael Dutrus, in which a young bull is released into the ring while the band is playing and is fought and killed by some of the musicians while the rest continue to play their instruments.

Molinete: pass with the muleta in which the man turns a complete circle on himself letting the muleta wind itself around his body. Is of greatest effect when done between the bull’s horns or just beside them, in this case the bull being turned completely on himself while following the loose end of the cloth.

Mona: silk-covered button worn at the base of the bullfighter’s pigtail.

Monerias: monkey business; childish extravagances committed with the bull.

Monosabios: red-shirted bull ring servants who aid the picadors when they fall, help them to mount, lead horses toward the bull, kill horses that have been wounded, unsaddle them, spread canvas over them, etc. They were first so nicknamed when a troupe of performing monkeys uniformed in the same colors were presented in Madrid in 1847 shortly after the direction of the ring had put the servants into red blouses.

Morillo: the hump of muscle rising from the neck of a fighting bull which erects when the bull is angry. In the top part of this hump, nearest the shoulders, is where the picador should place his pic and the banderilleros their sticks.

Morucho: half-bred bull sometimes brave, vicious and dangerous but without the type or caste of the thoroughbred. In many parts of Spain bulls are raised which have a strain of wild fighting blood by breeders who do not belong to any of the associations of thoroughbred fighting-bull raisers and these bulls are sold to be fought in novilladas in the small rings and in capeas. Their lack of good blood can be most easily seen in the thickness of their tails, the size of their horns and hoofs, and the lack of morillo when they otherwise have the appearance of real fighting bulls.

Movido: moving; toreo movido: using too much foot-work when working with the bull.

Mozo de estoques: personal servant and sword handler for the matador. In the ring he prepares the muletas and hands his master the swords as he needs them, wiping off the used swords with a sponge and drying them before putting them away. While the matador is killing he must follow him around in the passage way to be always opposite him ready to hand him a new sword or muleta over the barrera as he needs it. When it is windy he dampens capes and muleta from a water jug he carries and also looks after all personal wants of the matador. Outside the ring before the fight he takes around the envelopes containing the matador’s card and a certain sum of money to the different bullfight critics, aids the matador to dress, and sees that all the equipment is transported to the ring. After the fight he sends the telefonemas — messages sent by the telephone company and written and delivered as telegrams are in the United States — or the more rare verbal messages to the matador’s family, friends, the press and any clubs of bullfight enthusiasts that may be organized in the matador’s name.

Mucha: much; de muchas piernas: with plenty of legs; very strong in the legs; muchas arrobas: very heavy. De mucho cuidado: very suspicious; that is, a bull very difficult to work with.

Muchacho: boy; youth.

Muerte: death; also the place where the sword should enter to kill the bull properly. Bullfighters say the bull uncovers the muerte when he lowers his head well. Pase de la muerte: pass with the muleta explained in the text.

Muleta: heart-shaped scarlet cloth of serge or flannel folded and doubled over a tapered wooden stick equipped with a sharp steel point at the narrow end and a grooved handle at the widened extremity; the sharp point is pricked through the cloth where it is folded to a point and the loose end is fastened to the handle with a thumbscrew so that the wood supports the folds of the cloth. The muleta is used to defend the man; to tire the bull and regulate the position of his head and feet; to perform a series of passes of more or less æsthetic value with the bull; and to aid the man in the killing.

Muletazo: a pass performed with the muleta.

Multa: fine assessed by the presiding officer of the corrida or by the civil-governor against a bullfighter, bull raiser, or the management of the ring itself. Fines assessed against bullfighters are a farce since all matadors’ contracts contain a clause which stipulates that any fines assessed against them must be paid by the promoters. This clause dates from over thirty-five years and was first inserted to prevent promoters from contracting a matador at his own figure and then having the president fine him the difference between the figure he asked in order to fight and the figure the promoter was willing to pay. At present with the matadors, picadors and banderilleros organized as they are and able to place a boycott on any ring whose promoter does not pay his debts and maintain that boycott until the debt is paid, not permitting fights to be held even under another promoter until their claims have been satisfied, there is no need to maintain the clause about fines to protect the bullfighters. Its only effect at present is to let unscrupulous fighters know that any fines they may be assessed, no matter how justly, for deficient or dishonest work will not come out of their own pockets. This is one of the abuses that should be corrected the next time a new government ordinance for regulation of the bullfight is drawn up.

N

Nalgas: buttocks, or rump; location of many horn wounds caused by the matador turning his back on the bull without having fixed him properly to avoid a charge. Prominent buttocks destroy the line that the bullfighter seeks to make in working with the bull and prevent him being taken seriously as a stylist, hence a tendency to carry weight there is a source of much worry to a matador in modern bullfighting.

Natural: pass made with the muleta held low in the left hand, the man citing the bull from in front; with his right leg toward the bull, the muleta held by the centre of the stick in the left hand, left arm extended and the cloth in front of the man, it is swung slightly toward the bull to start him, this swing being almost imperceptible to the spectator; as the bull charges and arrives at the muleta the man turns with him, his arm fully extended and moving the muleta slowly ahead of the bull making him turn in a quarter of a circle around the man; giving a swinging flip imparted with a lift of the wrist at the conclusion of the pass to hold the bull in position for another pass. This pass is fully described in the text. It is the fundamental pass of bullfighting, the simplest, capable of greatest purity of line and the most dangerous to make.

Navarra: province in North of Spain; name of pass with the cape, no longer used, in which the matador first swings the cape as in the veronica, then, as the bull is about to leave the cape, the man makes a complete turn in the opposite direction from which he has been swinging the cape, swinging the cape low in front of and below the bull’s muzzle.

Nervio: energy and vigor in the bull.

Niño: child or young boy; lately there has been a plague of niños as nommes de guerre in bullfighting. Following on the success of El Niño de la Palma there have been over three hundred bullfighters who have dubbed themselves the Niño of this or that from the Niño of the slaughter-house to the Niño of the Sierra Nevada. In earlier times there were pairs or trios of child bullfighters called after the towns they came from such as the Niños Sevillanos; Niños Cordobeses, etc. The bullfighters who graduated from these juvenile associations did not continue to call themselves Niños however, but were called Gallito, Machaquito, and so on; making their names famous, and abandoning the childish designation when they ceased to be children even though they kept the affectionate diminutive of their fighting name.

Noble: bull that is frank in its charges, brave, simple and easily deceived.

No Hay Derecho: you have no right; common phrase of protest against any violation of the rules or the rights of the individual.

Noticiero: notice; El Noticiero de Lunes is the official sheet giving government news and a short report of the Sunday bullfights issued in Spanish cities on Monday morning in the absence of any newspapers Sunday night and Monday morning due to the no-work-on-Sunday law put through by the workers on Spanish newspapers several years ago.

Novedad: novelty; new fighter who attracts by his novelty.

Novillada: at the present time a novillada is a bullfight in which bulls which are under aged, or over aged, for a formal bullfight, that is, under four years and over five, or defective in vision or horn, are fought by bullfighters who have either never taken or renounced the title of matador de toros. In every way except the quality of the bulls and the inexperience or admitted failure of the bullfighters a novillada or corrida de novillos-toros is the same as a regular bullfight. In former times a novillada was any form of bull entertainment other than the formal corrida, but the present-day novillada has come about through the desire to present a regular bullfight at less than formal prices due to the bulls being bargains and the men, due to a desire to present themselves and make a name, or to the fact that they have failed as formal matadors, are less exigent in their demands for money than the full matadors. The season for novilladas in Madrid is from early March until Easter and from July until the middle of September. In the provinces they go on during the entire bullfight season, being given by all small towns which cannot afford a formal corrida. The admission to a novillada is usually about half that of an ordinary corrida. Bulls fought are often larger and more dangerous than those used in corridas de toros; the novilleros being forced to accept bulls refused by the stars of their profession. It is in the novilladas that the majority of the bullfighters who die in the ring are killed each year since men with little experience fight exceedingly dangerous bulls in small towns where the ring often has only rudimentary operating equipment and no surgeon skilled in the very special technique of horn wounds.

Novillero: a matador of novillos-toros, the bulls described above. He may either be an aspirant or a matador who has failed to make a living in the class above and renounced his alternative in search of contracts. The most a novillero makes in Madrid is 5,000 pesetas a fight and he may, if a debutant, fight for as low as a thousand pesetas. If out of this latter sum he must pay the rent of a suit, wages to two picadors, two banderilleros and his sword handler, and send envelopes containing fifty or a hundred pesetas around to the critics of the press he will owe money after the fight is over. Novilleros who are protected by the management of the bull ring may only have to fight young bulls and may be very successful with these and fail completely when they become full matadors due to the difference in danger, strength and speed between the immature and mature bulls. It is never safe to judge a bullfighter on his performance with immature animals for no matter how perfect his technique and training he may completely lack the heart necessary for working with the real bull.

Novillo: bull used in novilladas.

Nuevo: new; Nuevo en esta Plaza after a bullfighter’s name on a programme means that this is his presentation in that ring.

Nulidad: a complete nobody; bullfighter who is a drawback rather than an attraction on a programme.

O

Ojo: eye; a matador who wishes to give the crowd the information, either true or false, that the bull does not see well as an excuse for his own lack of brilliance will point to his own eye. Buen-ojo: means a good eye or good judgment.

Olivo: olive tree; tomar el olivo: to take to the olive tree, phrase used to describe the action of the matador when seized by panic or through having let the bull put him in an impossible terrain he scrambles head first over the barrera. The matador should never run with his back toward the bull; let alone run and flop over the barrera.

Oreja: ear; when the matador has been excellent with the bull both with muleta and sword, killing him promptly and well after a good faena with the muleta or if the work with the muleta has not been brilliant making up for it by killing superbly, the crowd will wave handkerchiefs to request that the president concede the ear of the bull as a token of honor to the matador. If the president agrees and believes the demands to be justified, he will wave his own handkerchief after which a banderillero may cut the ear and present it to the matador. In reality several matadors who are anxious to have a long list of ears for the publicity value it gives them, have a banderillero who is instructed to cut the ear at the first sign of a display of any handkerchiefs. If the public shows any signs of demanding the ear this peón cuts it off and runs with it to the matador who shows it, raising it in his hand toward the president and smiling, and the president confronted with an accomplished fact, is most liable to agree to the concession of the ear and bring out his own handkerchief. This way of falsifying the concession of the ear, which was formerly a great honor, has taken all value away from it and now if a bullfighter puts up a decent performance and has any luck killing he will probably cut the ear of his bull. These professional ear-cutting peones have established an even worse custom; that, if the president actually gives the signal to cut the ear without the matador first begging it from him, of cutting both ears and the tail which they rush over and present to the matador on the excuse of the most moderate enthusiasm. The matadors, I am thinking of two especially, one a short, eagle-nosed, black-haired conceited Valencian and the other a conceited, brave, simple-minded, long-necked, telephone pole from Aragon, then make a tour of the ring carrying an ear in one hand, another ear and a dung-covered tail in the other, smirking and believing they have triumphed in an absolute apotheosis while in reality they have only performed conscientiously and employed a skillful trimmer of the visible parts of the bull to flatter them. Originally the cutting of the ear signified the bull became the property of the matador to dispose of as beef to his own advantage. This significance has long been obsolete.

P

Padrear: to breed.

Padrino: godfather or sponsor; in bullfighting the older matador who cedes sword and muleta to the younger matador who is alternating for the first time as killer in a formal corrida de toros.

Pala: shovel, bat, or oar blade; in bullfighting the flat of the horn on the outside; blows received by a bullfighter from the flat of the horn are called paletazos or varetazos and are often very serious causing severe internal hemorrhage and other internal injuries without these being anything more visible than a bruise.

Palitroques: twigs; another name for banderillas.

Palmas: handclappings, applause.

Palos: sticks; slang for the banderillas.

Pañuelo: handkerchief; a white handkerchief exhibited by the president signals the termination or the commencement of the acts of pic-ing, banderillas, and sword; a green one that the bull should be taken out; a red one that explosive banderillas should be placed. The signal for each warning or aviso to the matador, denoting the lapse of time in killing, is given by the president showing a white handkerchief.

Par: pair of banderillas.

Parado: slowed or fixed without being exhausted; the second state of the bull during the course of the fight and the one in which the bullfighter should be able to get the most out of him. To torear parado is to work with the bull with the minimum of movement of the feet. It is the only way worthy of applause to fight a brave bull that is without faults of hooking to one side or the other.

Parar: to stand still and calmly watch the bull come; parar los pies: to keep the feet still while the bull charges. Parar: to keep the feet quite; templar: to move the cloth slowly; and mandar: to dominate and control the animal by the cloth, are the three major commandments of bullfighting.

Parear: to place a pair of banderillas.

Parón: modern term to designate a pass made by the bullfighter with either cape or muleta in which he keeps his feet close together and does not move them from the time the bull charges until the pass is finished. These passes in which the man stands like a statue are brilliant additions to a bullfighter’s repertoire but they cannot be made with a bull that moves other than in a perfectly straight line when he charges; otherwise the man will go up in the air. Also they break one of the commandments for bullfighting; they parar, they templar; but they do not mandar since the man with his feet together cannot swing the cloth far enough to keep the bull dominated by its folds and so unless the bull is so perfect that he turns automatically each time to recharge the man will be unable to hold him in the folds of the muleta enough to turn him so that he may link up a series of passes. With an ideal bull, however, the parones are highly emotional and impressive and all bullfighters should be able to do them when they draw such an animal but should not neglect the real art of dominating bulls, making them deviate from their line of attack by moving the lure, while they wait for a bull who will make the entire faena himself while the man plays the statue. The gyratory passes made by Villalta and his imitators in which the man spins on the tips of his toes in half circles with the bull are also called parones.

Pase: pass made with either cape or muleta; movement of the lure to draw a charge by the animal in which his horns pass the man’s body.

Paseo: entry of the bullfighters into the ring and their passage across it.

Paso atrás: step to the rear taken by matador after profiling to kill in order to lengthen his distance from the bull, while giving impression he is profiled very close, and give him more time to dodge as he goes in to kill in case the bull should not lower his head well to the muleta.

Paso de banderillas: going in to kill not straight, but moving on a quarter of a circle past the bull’s horns, as a banderillero goes in. Permissible on bulls that can be killed in no other way.

Pecho: chest; the pase de pecho is a pass made with the muleta in the left hand at the finish of a natural in which the bull, having turned at the end of the natural, recharges and the man brings him by his chest and sends him out with a forward sweep of the muleta. The pase de pecho should be the ending of any series of naturales. It is also of great merit when it is used by the bullfighter to liberate himself from an unexpected charge or sudden return of the bull. In this case it is called a forzado de pecho or a forced pass. It is called preparado, or prepared, when it is given as a separate pass without having been preceded by a natural. The same pass may be done with the right hand, but it is not then a true pase de pecho since the real natural and real de pecho are done only with the left hand. When either of these passes is done with the right hand the sword, which must always be held in the right hand, spreads the cloth and makes a much bigger lure thus enabling the matador to keep the bull a greater distance away from him and send him further away after each charge. Work done with the muleta held in the right hand and spread by the sword is often very brilliant and meritorious but it lacks the difficulty, danger and sincerity of work done with the muleta in the left hand and the sword in the right.

Pelea: fight, the fight put up by the bull.

Peón: banderillero; torero who works on foot under the orders of the matador.

Pequeño: small; little.

Perder el sitio: bullfighter who through illness, lack of confidence, cowardice or nervousness has lost his style and even his sense of where and how things should be done.

Perder terreño: to lose ground while working with the bull; to have to use footwork rather than control the bull with the cloth; also to lose ground in your profession.

Perfilar: to profile before going in to kill with sword in right hand, right fore arm straight along the chest, muleta in left hand, left shoulder toward the bull, eyes following the line of the sword.

Periódicos: newspapers; those Madrid papers having the most accurate and disinterested accounts of bullfights in Madrid and the provinces are La Libertad among the daily papers and El Eco Taurino among the bullfight papers. La Fiesta Brava of Barcelona, while its accounts of fights are far from impartial, has excellent articles and features.

Periodistas: those who write for the papers; journalists.

Perros: bull dogs used in the old days before explosive banderillas were employed to worry a bull that would not charge the picadors; making him toss his head and tire his neck muscles thus replacing the effect of the pics.

Pesado: heavy; dull; tiresome.

Peso: weight.

Pesuña: hoof of bull. Fighting bulls are ruined by glosopeda or hoof-and-mouth disease which leaves the feet tender and the hooves liable to crack loose and even break off entirely.

Peto: mattress covering worn over chest, right flank, and belly of picador’s horse. Introduced during the late Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship at the instigation of the English-born Ex-Queen of Spain.

Pica: the pic or pike pole used in bullfighting. It is composed of a wooden shaft 2 metres and between 55 and 70 centimetres long made of ash, has a triangular steel point 29 millimetres long. Below the steel point the head of the shaft is wrapped with cord and it is equipped with a round metal guard to prevent its entering more than 108 millimetres into the bull at the very most. The present model of pic is very hard on the bull and bulls which really charge and insist under punishment can rarely accept more than four pics without losing most of their force. This is especially true since the picadors, handicapped by the peto, often place their pics well behind the morillo, the place they are supposed to pic, and where the hump of muscle can support the punishment and, pic-ing directly over the unprotected spine, injure the bull severely and destroy most of his force. A wound by the present pic too low down at the side so that it goes between the ribs is also liable to reach the lungs or at least the pleura. Part of this bad pic-ing is intentional at the orders of the matador who wishes the bull to be deprived of all force but much of it is not since the picador is so handicapped by the peto or protective mattress that he must strike the bull well out as he comes in, at a distance where the aim cannot be sure; instead of being able to pic carefully he pics where and how he can. The reason for this is that if the picador waits for the bull to get close enough so he can place the pic properly the bull, if he is of any size, will strike the solid wall of the mattress and topple man and horse over with a crash before the pic can take hold. There is nothing for the bull to hook and lift and to have his head and neck muscles pushed on by the pic while lifting. For this reason picadors, when a bull, disillusioned by the mattress, has refused to charge it heavily more than once, have made a custom of turning the horse as they push the bull away so that the bull may gore the horse in his unprotected hind quarters and tire his neck with that lifting. Since these wounds are almost never fatal and very little apparent, unless you look for them; you will see the same horse brought back again and again; the wound being sewed up and washed off between bulls, where, in the days before the peto, the bull would have been allowed to reach the horse, to gore and lift him, in order to tire the bull’s neck muscles, but the horse would have been killed. Now with the peto few horses are killed in the ring but nearly all are wounded in the hind quarters or between the legs in the manner described. The frank admission of the necessity for killing horses to have a bullfight has been replaced by a hypocritical semblance of protection which causes the horses much more suffering but, once implanted, will be maintained as long as possible because it saves the horse-contractor money, enabling the promoters to save money and allowing the authorities to feel that they have civilized the bullfight. Technically, not morally, the point to remember is that the slowing of the bull without depriving him of his force or his wish to attack, which is accomplished by his charge arriving at its destination, lifting with his neck, pushing with all four feet, resisting the pic pressing on his hump of neck muscle, overthrowing, and killing puts him into the next two stages of the fight in a desirable condition for the consummation of the bullfight which cannot be produced by the picador simply punishing him severely in a way to injure him and make him lose strength, blood, and all desire to attack. This is what happens to the bull when he is pic-ed in the shoulder blades, centre of the spine, or in the ribs and instead of arriving at the next two stages ready to make a bullfight, once he has suffered the damage the present pic can inflict, there is no bull left to fight.

Picador: man who pics bulls from on horseback under the orders of the matador. Is paid from one hundred to two hundred and fifty pesetas a fight, has his right leg and foot armored under chamois-skin breeches, wears short jacket and a shirt and tie like any other bullfighter, and a wide low-crowned hat with a pompom on the side. Picadors are seldom gored by the bull since the matadors must protect them with their capes when they fall toward the bull. If they fall away from the bull they are protected by the horse. Picadors suffer broken arms, jaws, legs, and ribs frequently, and fractured skulls occasionally. Few are killed in the ring in proportion to matadors, but many suffer permanently from concussion of the brain. Of all ill-paid professions in civil life I believe it is the roughest and the most constantly exposed to danger of death, which, fortunately, is nearly always removed by the matador’s cape.

Picar arriba: to place the pic well up on the morillo of the bull.

Picar atrás: to pic too far back behind the morillo.

Picar corta: to pic holding well down on the wood of the shaft close to the steel point. Exposes the man more since he may fall forward between horse and bull, but makes his shot at the bull much more secure.

Picar delante: to pic too far forward on the neck.

Piernas: legs — Tiene muchas piernas of either bull or man means very strong in the legs.

Pinchazo: puncture, a pinchazo is an estocade that has only gone in a very little way. Pinchar en el duro — is to go in a little way and hit bone. A pinchazo in which the matador goes in well, puts the sword in the proper place but hits bone is not to his discredit since the point of the sword striking or not striking a rib, or part of a vertebra is altogether a matter of luck. If the man has gone in straight, directed the sword properly he should be applauded even though the sword hits bone and refuses to go in. On the other hand cowardly matadors will give a series of pinchazos never attempting to follow the sword in and drive it to the hilt, avoiding all chance of coming close to the horn in the hope of bleeding the bull with these punctures and then trying to do away with him by a descabello. The merit or lack of merit of a pinchazo should be judged by the way the man goes in and his evident intention.

Pisar: to tread; pisar terreno del toro — to work so close to the bull that you are in his terrain.

Pisotear: to trample on — bull stepping on man on the ground while trying to gore him.

Pitillo: a cigarette.

Pitón: points of a bull’s horns; or, sometimes, the entire horn. Passes de pitón á pitón are the chopping strokes with the muleta from one horn to the other to tire the bull’s neck muscles. Pitónes are the two horns.

Pitos: whistlings; expressions of disapproval. Sometimes when a matador is fighting who is known to be cowardly or is in a bad epoch in his career or unpopular in that particular town, spectators go to the ring armed with police or dog whistles in order to demonstrate more loudly. One of these armed whistlers immediately behind you can deafen you temporarily. There is nothing to do about it but put your fingers in your ears. These whistles are commonly used in Valencia where the deafening of any one is regarded as a great joke.

Plaza: public place — Plaza de toros — bull ring.

Poder á poder: force to force; method of placing banderillas described in text.

Pollo: chicken — also young man about town. Young bullfighter who fancies himself as a man of the world.

Polvo: dust; raised in the ring by the wind and laid by sprinkling. When the wind raises dust in a ring spectators will shout “Agua! Agua!” until a sprinkling cart is brought in or the dust laid with a hose.

Pomo: pummel of a sword.

Presidencia: authority in charge of the conduct of the bullfight.

Prueba: test, trial or proof; Prueba de caballos is the testing of the horses by the picadors. Prueba is also the name of one of the bullfights given each year at Pamplona in which four local bulls were formerly used, and the fight given at popular prices was supposed to be a test of local breeds. It is now a fight in which six matadors take part each killing one bull.

Punta de Capote: point of the cape; running the bull after the cape which is held by one end so that it stretches out its full length; proper way to run bulls when they first enter the ring.

Puntazo: slight horn wound, as a cornada is a big wound.

Puntilla: dagger used to kill bull or horse after he has been mortally wounded. (See cachete.)

Puntillero: man who kills bull with the puntilla. (See cachetero.)

Puro: Havana cigar; puros are smoked by most people engaged in the bullfight business who can afford them.

Puta: a whore, harlot, jade, broad, chippy, tart or prostitute; hijo de puta: son of any of the above; common insult shouted at bullfighter equivalent to our son of a bitch. In Spanish they insult most fully when speaking or wishing ill of the parents rather than of the person directly.

Puya: another name for the pic — also refers to the triangular steel point.

Puyazo: pic placed in the bull.

Q

Quedar: to remain or to stay in a place — Quedar sin toro — for a bullfighter to be without any enemy due to the bull’s force and spirit having been destroyed by a wound or series of wounds by a picador.

Qué lástima!: what a shame. Expression uttered when you have heard that a friend has been badly gored, or has contracted a venereal disease, or has married a whore, or has had something happen to his wife or children, or when a good bull comes out for a poor bullfighter or a poor bull comes out for a good bullfighter.

Querencia: part of the ring that the bull prefers to be in; where he feels at home.

Querer: to want — no quiere — in bullfighting means the matador doesn’t want to try anything, content to get through with the afternoon as easily as possible; of a bull it means he does not want to charge the horse or the cloth.

Qué se vaya!: meaning that he should get the hell out of here and not return. Shouted at bullfighters.

Quiebro: any inclination of the body, especially the waist, to one side or the other to avoid the horn of the bull; any dodging or feinting movement of the body done close to the bull to avoid being caught.

Quiebro de muleta: inclining and swinging the muleta with the left wrist low and to the right to guide the bull out and away from the man as he puts the sword in; it is because of the left hand guiding and getting rid of the bull while the right pushes in the sword that bullfighters say you kill more with the left hand than with the right.

Quinto: fifth — No hay quinto malo — the fifth one can’t be bad; old belief that the fifth bull would always be good. Probably originated in the days when the bull breeders decided the order in which their bulls should be fought; before they were drawn by the matadors by lot as they are now, and so knowing the value of the bulls would place the best in fifth position. To-day the fifth is as liable to be bad as any other.

Quite: from quitar — to take away — is the taking away of the bull from any one who has been placed in immediate danger by him. It especially refers to the taking away of the bull from the horse and man after he has charged the picadors, by the matadors armed with capes and taking their turns in rotation; each one taking the bull after a charge. The matador who is to kill the bull makes the first quite and the others follow in order. From going in close with the cape, bringing the bull out and away from fallen horse and man and placing him in position before the next picador the quite has changed now so that a series of lances with the cape after taking the bull out is obligatory on a matador each time he makes a quite; they supposedly rivalling to see how close and artistically they can pass the bull. Quites made to take the bull away from a man he is goring or who is on the ground with the bull over him are participated in by all the bullfighters and it is at this time that you can judge their valor, knowledge of bulls and degree of abnegation since a quite in these circumstances is highly dangerous and very difficult to make as the men must get so close to the bull in order to make him leave the object he is trying to gore that their retreat, taking him out with the cape when he charges, is very compromised.

R

Rabioso: raging — a matador is said to be rabioso when he has lashed himself, mentally, into a rage of bravery as contrasted with the cold, consistent valor of a truly brave man; a bullfighter who is coldly brave will only be rabioso when he has been made furious either by the taunts of the crowd or by the bull bumping and tossing him.

Rabo: tail of bull.

Racha: a run of luck; mala racha: streak of bad luck; bullfighter drawing a series of poor bulls; succession of bullfights turning out badly.

Ración: a portion; as in the café you will order un ración of shrimps, prawns, percebes or whatever it is. A ración of shellfish usually consists of a hundred grams, a little under a quarter of a pound. It is for this reason that you may get two huge prawns one time and at another four smaller ones and still be charged the same since they are served by weight.

Rebolera: decorative pass with the cape in which it is held by one extremity and swung so that it describes a circle around the man.

Rebotado: to come out after killing bumped by the bull’s head; to be bounced or jostled without falling.

Rebrincar: to make a sidewise jump; occasionally made by bulls when the cape is first offered them.

Recargar: bull recharging under the punishment of being held off by the pic.

Receloso: bull which is reluctant to charge, not through being worn out by punishment, but through lack of combative temperament and yet, if challenged repeatedly, will charge.

Recibir: to kill the bull from in front awaiting his charge with the sword without moving the feet once the charge has started; with the muleta low in the left hand and the sword in the right hand, right forearm across the chest pointing toward the bull and as he comes in and takes the muleta putting the sword in with the right hand and swinging him out with the muleta in the left as in a pase de pecho, not moving the feet until the sword has gone in. Most difficult, dangerous and emotional way to kill bulls; rarely seen in modern times. I have seen it executed completely three times in almost three hundred bullfights.

Recoger: to regore; for the bull to toss something into the air from the ground; or having tossed a man in the air to catch him again on the other horn.

Recorte: any pass with the cape in which it is snatched away from the bull or turned sharply from him; or quick movement by the man which cuts the bull’s charge; turning the bull on himself sharply with the consequent twist on his legs and spinal column.

Recursos: resources; a bullfighter with many recursos is one who has tricks in reserve and knows how to cope with difficulties as they may arise.

Redondel: synonym for the ring where the bull is fought.

Redondo: En redondo — are several passes in succession such as naturals in which the man and the bull finally execute a complete circle; any pass which tends to make a circle.

Regalo: gift or keepsake given the matador who has dedicated a bull to a spectator by the person who has received the dedication. Used sarcastically to refer to a difficult bull.

Reglamento: government ordinance covering the giving of bullfights in Spain. It was originally intended to publish a translation of the present government regulation as an appendix to this book but since the reglamento in force dates from the era of Primo de Rivera it was decided to await the publication of a newer ruling for inclusion in translation in subsequent editions of this book if there should be such editions.

Regular: normal, ordinary or so-so when applied to a matador’s work or the result of a corrida.

Rehiletes: darts; synonym for banderillas.

Rehilitero: banderillero.

Rejón: javelin used to kill bulls from on horseback.

Rejoneador: man who attempts to kill bulls from on horseback with a rejón.

Relance: al relance — to place a pair of banderillas by surprise in a bull which is still charging after the placing of a previous pair.

Reloj: clock; placed by law in all bull rings in order that the spectators may keep track of the time employed by the matador in killing.

Rematar: to finish; to make the last pass of any series of passes with the cape; to perform some act that will provide an emotional or artistic climax. In regard to the bull he is said to rematar en tablas or finish on the planks when he chases a man over the fence and then drives his horns against the wood.

Remojar: to wet the capes and muletas heavily for use on a windy day.

Remos: fore and hind legs of either bull or horse.

Rendido: worn out; surrendered to the will of the man.

Renovador: reformer, renewer of the art, etc. Many of these are announced in bullfighting, almost one each year, but the only real one in modern bullfighting was Juan Belmonte.

Renunciar: to renounce or give up; a bullfighter renounces his alter-nativa when he abandons his position as a full matador de toros to accept any contracts he may obtain as a novillero.

Reparado de vista: bull with defective vision in one eye though not completely blind. Defects of vision are often caused by a straw or a thistle injuring the eye when the bull is feeding.

Res: wild animal; any head of cattle on fighting-bull-breeding ranch with fighting blood.

Resabio: viciousness; toro de resabio: vicious bull.

Retirada: retirement; bullfighters sometimes retire when they are short of contracts or very much in love with their wives and return to fight again in a few years hoping in the first case that the novelty of their re-appearance will bring contracts and in the second simply returning because they need money or because the intensity of their domestic relations has relaxed.

Revistas: magazines or revues; revistas de toros are bullfight periodicals. Most of them at present are propaganda sheets in which photographs and colored accounts of the performances of bullfighters who pay a certain sum to the editors appear. Bullfighters who owe money for unpaid propaganda or others who have refused to accept propositions made to them for propaganda usually in the form of paying for a cover featuring a photograph of themselves or, cheaper, an inside picture, are attacked more or less scurrilously in the cheaper sheets. Le Toril, published in Toulouse, France, is an impartial bullfight revue sustained by subscription and accepting no propaganda or advertising either hidden in the text or open. Its sincerity and impartiality are handicapped in writing good criticism by the small number of corridas its editors can afford to see each year and by the fact that they do not see the first and second subscription season in Madrid and so see each fight as an individual action rather than as a part of a bullfighter’s season or campaign. El Eco Taurino published in Madrid contains the most complete and accurate accounts of bullfights in Spain and Mexico. La Fiesta Brava of Barcelona, while it is a propaganda weekly, has excellent photographs, and a certain amount of news and fact. None of the others is serious, although some, such as Toreros y Toros, are interesting papers. El Clarín of Valencia is well gotten out with excellent photographs but is only a propaganda sheet. Torerias is always interesting and is the most scurrilous of the blackmail sheets. In the old days La Lidia, Sol y Sombra and for a short time Zig-Zag were real bullfight revues in whose bound volumes you can read the bullfight history of their epoch although none of them appears ever to have been free of the financial influence, manifested in one way or another, of certain matadors. Revistero: bullfight critic or reviewer.

Revolcón: tossed by the bull without being wounded due to the horn catching in the clothing, lifting between the legs, or under an arm.

Revoltoso: bull which turns rapidly, excessively rapidly, to recharge after the man has passed the bull with cape or muleta.

Rodillas: the knees.

Rodillazos: passes made with the bullfighter on one or both knees. Vary in merit according to the terrain they are performed in and whether the matador goes to his knees before or after the horn has passed.

Rondeño: Escuela Rondeño: Ronda school or the Ronda style of bullfighting, sober, limited in repertoire, simple, classic and tragic as against the more varied, playful and gracious style of Sevilla. Belmonte for example, although an innovator, was essentially of the Rondeño School, although born and bred in Sevilla. Joselito was an example of the so-called Sevillian School. As in most talk of schools in art or literature the separating of people into schools is artificial and arbitrary with the critic; in bullfighting more than anywhere else the style is made up of the habits in action, attitude toward the fight and physical capabilities. If a bullfighter is very serious in temperament, sober rather than cheerful in the ring and with a limited repertoire due to lack of imagination, faulty apprenticeship or physical defects that prevent him, for instance, from putting in banderillas, they class him as belonging to the Rondeño school although he may not have any allegiance or belief that the sober way of fighting is better than the gay. He simply happens to be sober. On the other hand many bullfighters who are far from gay or cheerful in the ring simply because they are from Sevilla and trained there employ all the Sevillian tricks, light-hearted airs and graces, smiling forcedly and being very flowery and gracious when they have nothing but cold fear in their hearts. The Sevillian and Rondeño schools of bullfighting as real schools of thought and opposing views on the subject did exist in the early days of professional bullfighting when there was great rivalry between the great matadors of the two towns and their disciples in their ways of fighting but now Rondeño means sober and tragic in the Plaza with a limited repertoire and Sevillano means light-hearted or imitation light-hearted with flowery style and a lengthy repertoire.

Rozandole los alamares: when the bull’s horns graze the ornaments on the bullfighter’s jacket.

Rubios: blonds in men; in bulls the place between the top of the shoulder blades where the sword should enter. Rubias are blondes in women.

S

Sacar: to bring out; Sacar el estoque: to pull out a sword in order that the wound may bleed more freely and the bull go down; or simply to remove it because badly placed. Usually accomplished by a banderillero running forward from behind the bull and tossing the length of a cape across the sword so that the weight of the cape pulled forward on the sword will bring it out. If the bull is nearly dead the matador may pull the sword out himself by hand or with a banderilla sometimes using the same sword to descabellar with. Sacar el toro is to bring the bull out into the ring when he has taken up a position close to the barrera.

Sacar el corcho: to pull out the cork from a bottle. A Sacacorchos is a corkscrew. In bullfighting it is the anti-esthetic, twisting style of working with the cape made by citing the bull too far on the bias when taking him to make veronicas.

Salida en hombros: for a matador to be carried out in triumph on the shoulders of members of the crowd. May mean much or little depending on whether his representative has prepared it beforehand by distribution of free tickets and instructions, or whether it is spontaneous.

Salidas: exits; in bullfighting to da Salida is to send the bull away from the man with the cloth at the finish of a pass. The salida in each pass is the place at which the bull should leave the man’s territory in cases where the bull passes the man. The respective exits of both man and bull from the juncture they make in the putting in of the banderillas and the killing are called their salidas.

Salir por piés: is to run at full speed at the conclusion of any manœuvre attempted with the bull in order to escape being caught.

Salsa torera: literally salsa means sauce, but salsa is the indefinable quality which being lacking in a bullfighter makes his work dull no matter how perfect.

Saltos: in the old days were jumps made over the bull either unaided or vaulted with the aid of a pole. The only jumps made now are those of the bullfighters who are forced to jump the barrera.

Sangre torera: bullfighting blood — as in coming from a family of professional fighters.

Sano: healthy; bulls must be passed by a veterinary as in good health before being fought. Weakness of the hooves caused by the after effects of hoof-and-mouth disease called glosopeda is not easily detected since it is often only in the fight that this weakness will appear.

Santo: a saint; El santo de espaldas: is said of a bullfighter who has had a bad day; the saint turned his back on him. Bullfighters take their patrons from the local Virgen of their town, village or district, but the Virgen de la Soledad is the patron of all bullfighters and it is her portrait and image which are in the chapel of the bull ring at Madrid.

Seco: dry, harsh; torero seco is one who works in a jerky, sharp rather than suave manner. Valor seco: is natural unadorned courage; golpe seco: is the sharp hard chop the bull sometimes gives with his head to try to dislodge the pic. It is this sort of chop that given by a bull to horse or man makes the worst horn wounds. Vino Seco: is wine that is not sweet.

Sencillo: a bull that is frank in his charges, noble and easily deceived.

Sentido: understanding; bull which pays little attention to the cloth but makes for the man, having in the course of the fight learned more rapidly than the men have fought him through their defective actions with cape and banderillas. If a bullfighter runs and works at a distance rather than skillfully deceiving the bull by being so close the bull can only concentrate on the cloth, the animal, seeing the man apart from the lure, learns to distinguish them apart very rapidly. Thus a bull is made difficult by the men, through fear, working far away from him, and failing to get the banderillas in promptly, while he is made easy and dominated by the man working so close that the bull sees nothing but the cloth and by putting in the banderillas promptly before the bull has time to figure out how to catch the man.

Señorito: young gentleman; Señoritos: in bullfighting are bullfighters who give themselves the airs of young men about town or sometimes sons of well-off parents who take up bullfighting.

Sesgo: bias; al sesgo: form of placing banderillas explained in the text.

Sevillano: escuela sevillano: Sevillian school or style of bullfighting, gay, varied and flowery as opposed to the sober, limited and classic Rondeño school. A Sevillano is a five-peseta piece minted in the south, at one time containing the same amount of silver as the ordinary coin of that denomination, but refused in the north in trade because not legal tender for certain debts. Do not take any five-peseta coins stamped with head of the late King as a small boy and you will keep out of trouble. They will give you other coins if you ask for them.

Silla: chair; banderillas were sometimes placed with the man seated in a chair; waiting the charge seated; rising as the bull came close; feinting to one side to draw the bull’s charge, swaying back to the other to free himself; then placing the sticks and, after the bull has passed, reseating himself in the chair.

Simulacro: simulation; bullfights given where the killing of the bull is forbidden in Portugal and France in which the act of killing is simulated by the placing of a rosette or banderilla by the matador at the moment of going in with what would be the sword in a real bullfight.

Sobaquillo: arm pit, frequent site of horn wounds when the man, in going in to kill, has not lowered the bull’s head properly with the muleta.

Sobreros: substitutes, bulls in reserve in case any of those to be fought are refused in the ring by the public.

Sobresaliente: when two matadors fight six bulls between them a novillero or aspirant matador makes the entry with them as sobresaliente or substitute and is charged with killing the bulls in case both matadors should be wounded and unable to continue. A sobresaliente is usually paid only two or three hundred pesetas and is expected to aid with his cape in the routine work of the placing of the banderillos. He is usually allowed by the matadors to make one or two quites toward the end of the fight.

Sol y sombra: sun and shade; seats in the bull ring which are in the sun as the fight commences but will be in the shade as it progresses. Midway in price between the seats in the shade and those in the sun, they afford a considerable saving to any one who must watch expenditure closely.

Sorteo: making up the lots and drawing of the bulls before the fight to determine which bulls shall be killed by which matadors. Also the drawings of the Spanish lottery.

Sucrtes: all predetermined manœuvres in a bullfight; any move in a bullfight which has rules for the manner of its execution. Suerte in the singular also means luck.

Sustos: scares, frights, shocks.

T

Tablas: planks; the barrera which surrounds the ring in which the bull is fought. Entablada is said of a bull that takes up a position close to this plank fence and is reluctant to leave it.

Tabloncillo: highest row of open seats in bull ring below the covered galleries.

Tacones: heels; tacones de goma are rubber heels; these are sold by ambulatory venders who will come up to you while you are seated in the café, cut the heel off your shoe with a sort of instant-acting leather-cutting pincers they carry, in order to force you to put on a rubber heel. The rubber heels they attach are of a low, worthless grade. Their excuse when you protest against the heel rape is that they understood you wanted heels. It is a racket. If any rubber-heel attacker ever cuts a heel off of your shoe without you having first definitely ordered a pair of rubber heels, kick him in the belly or under the jaw and get the heels put on by some one else. I believe the law will sustain you, but if they take you to jail they will not fine you much more than the price of the rubber heels. There is one sinister-faced Catalan high-pressured heel ripper whom you can identify at all the ferias by a scar on his right cheek. I gave him that, but he is more of a dodger by now and you might have difficulty landing on him. The best thing when you see this particular heel-selling bastard (hijo de puta will do) approaching is to take off your shoes and put them inside your shirt. If he then attempts to attach rubber heels to your bare feet, send for the American or British Consul.

Tal: such, similar, so, etc. But Qué tal? is all you have to know to be able to ask, How are you? How was it? What’s new? How are things going? What do you say, old timer? What do you think? How is everything since I saw you last? And if you add to Qué tal the words la familia you enquire about a man’s family, a necessary politeness; la madre? his mother; su señora, his wife; el negocio, his business (usually fatal); los toros, the bulls (usually muy malo); el movimiento, the movement, anarchistic, revolutionary, catholic or monarchial (usually going badly); or las cosas, which includes all of these and much besides. Las cosas are usually going not too badly, there usually existing this personal optimism through pride no matter how detailed and generic the pessimism.

Taleguilla: bullfighter’s breeches.

Tanteo: to calculate; lances de tanteo are the first passes made by the matador with the cape without the man getting close to the bull in order to see how he charges before taking a chance and passing him really close.

Tapar: to veil; Tapando la cara con la muleta: (veiling the face with the muleta) is to go in to kill and by covering the bull’s whole face with the cloth, blind him and then lean over the head to kill; a way of cheating in killing used often by tall matadors whose height enables them to trick in this way with ease (instead of lowering the muleta, making the bull follow it and swinging him away from the man).

Taparse: to cover; is when the bull by lifting his head covers the place where the sword or banderillas should go in; or when he lifts his head so that he covers the place between the neck vertebræ where the matador should descabellar. A bull with quick reflexes who is on the defensive will sometimes raise his head in this way each time he feels the steel of the sword, making it impossible for the matador to get it in.

Tapas: or covers, so called since they were originally placed across the top of the glass instead of being served on small saucers as now, are the appetizers of smoked salmon, tuna and sweet red-peppers, sardines, anchovies, smoked Sierra ham, sausage, sea foods, toasted almonds, olives stuffed with anchovies which are served free with Manzanilla wine or vermouth, in cafés, bars, or bodegas.

Tarascadas: sudden rushes or attacks by the bull.

Tarde: afternoon, also late; muy tarde: very late.

Tardo: slow; toro tardo, a bull that is slow to charge.

Taurino: anything to do with the bullfight.

Tauromachia: art of fighting bulls on foot and on horseback. Most famous of many books of rules for old-time bullfighting are the Tauromachias of José Delgado (Pepé Hillo) — Francisco Montés — and more recently Rafael Guerra — (Guerrita). The Pepé Hillo book and that of Guerrita were written for them. Montés is said to have written his own. Certainly it is the clearest and simplest.

Tela: cloth or stuff; Más tela in a bullfight account means the bull was given another dose of flopping capes; tela is used always in a deprecatory sense; largando tela: means spreading the cape too wide; stretching out cloth to keep the man as far from the bull as possible; spreading the awning.

Temoroso: cowardly bull which shakes his head and retreats from an object, sometimes giving a sudden jump and turning away, or backing away slowly while tossing his head instead of charging.

Templador: small four-sided wooden enclosure erected in centre of some bull rings in South America with entrance at each corner as place of refuge to afford additional protection to their local bullfighters.

Templar: to move cape or muleta slowly, suavely, and calmly, thus prolonging the moment of the pass and the danger and giving a rhythm to the action of the man and bull and cape, or man, bull and muleta.

Temple: the quality of slowness, suavity and rhythm in a bullfighter’s work.

Temporada: a bullfight season; in Spain from Easter until the first of November. In Mexico from the first of November until the end of February.

Tendido: rows of open seats in a bull ring which rise from the barrera to the covered gallery or grada. These rows of seats are divided into as many as ten different sections, each with its own entrance, and numbered Tendido 1, Tendido 2, etc.

Tercio: third; the bullfight is divided into three parts, the tercio de varas, that of the pic, tercio de banderillas and tercio del muerte or third of death. In the division of the terrain of the ring itself for fighting purposes, the tercios is the second third of the ring if its diameter is divided into three parts. The tercios extending from between the third of terrain called tablas which is nearest the barrera and the centre third called the medios.

Terreno: terrain; in the broadest technical sense the terrain of the bull is called that ground between the point where he is standing and the centre of the ring; that of the bullfighter is the ground between where he is standing and the barrera. It is assumed that the bull at the conclusion of a pass will make for the centre of the ring where he has most space and freedom. This is not always true since a tired bull or a cowardly bull will usually make for the barrera. In such cases the terrains may be reversed, the man taking as his terrain the outside and leaving the bull the inside. The idea is to leave the bull his natural exit clear at the end of any meeting between man and bull or any series of passes. The terrain is also the third of ground chosen by the bullfighter for the execution of any manœuvre or series of passes whether the centre of the ring, the middle third or the third next to the planks. A bullfighter’s terrain is also said to be the amount of ground he needs to execute successfully a pass or series of passes in. In killing in the ordinary natural way with the bull in his terrain and the bullfighter in his, the bull will have his right flank toward the barrera and his left flank toward the centre of the ring so that as the matador goes in to kill the bull, after the man has passed, will go toward the centre and the man toward the fence. In the case of bulls who have shown that their natural exit is toward the fence rather than toward the centre of the ring the matador will reverse this natural position when going in to kill and will take the bull with the terrenos cambiado or the terrains changed, placing him so that his left flank is toward the barrera and his right toward the centre of the ring. In this position the man will go toward the centre after he has passed and the bull’s exit will be left free toward the fence. The most certain way for a bullfighter to be caught is not to understand the terrains or directions of natural exits or the particular directions of exit observed in the individual bulls so that he finds himself in the bull’s way at the end of a suerte instead of sending the bull on his preferred way. A querencia or special place the bull has taken a fondness to is always his natural exit at the end of a pass.

Tiempo — estocadas á un tiempo: are those in which the bull charges at the same instant as the man goes in to kill. To be well placed they need much coolness in the matador.

Tienta: the testing of calves for bravery on a bull-breeding ranch.

Tijerillas: scissors; pass with the cape made with the arms crossed; rarely seen although there is a tendency to revive its use at present.

Tirones: passes with the muleta, the lower end flopped close under the bull’s muzzle and then withdrawn, the muleta swinging to one side, to draw the bull after it from one place in the ring to another.

Tomar: to take; a bull is said to take the muleta well when he charges the cloth avidly; a man is said to take the bull de corto when he provokes the charge from close to the animal and de largo when he provokes it from a distance.

Tonterias: nonsense; ornamental foolishness done with the bull such as hanging hats on his horns, etc.

Toreador: Frenchification of the word torero. Not used in Spanish except to refer slightingly to a French bullfighter.

Torear: to fight bulls in an enclosed place either on foot or on horseback.

Toreo: the art of fighting bulls. Toreo de salon: practicing cape and muleta work for form and style without any bull being present; necessary part of a matador’s training.

Torerazo: great bullfighter.

Torerito: a small bullfighter.

Torero: professional bullfighter. Matadors, banderilleros, picadors are all toreros. Torera means having to do with bullfighting.

Torete: little bull.

Toril: enclosure from which bulls come into the ring to be fought.

Toro: fighting bull. Todo es toro: It’s all bull; sarcasm applied to banderillero who has placed the sticks in some ridiculous place on the animal. Los toros dan y los toros quitan: the bulls give and the bulls take away; they give you money and they can take away your life.

Toro de paja: bull of straw; inoffensive bull; simple to the point of being without danger. Toro de lidia: fighting bull. Toro bravo: brave bull. Toro de bandera: supergrade of bravery in bull. Torazo: enormous bull; Torito: little bull. Toro de fuego: life-size papier-mâché bull mounted on wheels and loaded with fireworks, pulled through the streets at night in celebrating fiestas in the North of Spain; also called in Basque — Zezenzuzko. Toro de Aguardiente: bull with a rope attached to his horns held by a number of people and let run in a village street for the amusement of the populace.

Traje de luces: bullfighting suit.

Trampas: tricks, frauds; ways of simulating danger without experiencing it.

Trapio: general condition in a fighting bull. Buen trapio: uniting all the desired qualities of type, condition and size in bulls of fighting strain.

Trapo: the rag; the muleta.

Trasera: estocade placed too far back.

Trastear: to work with the muleta.

Trastos: the tools, in bullfighting the sword and muleta.

Trinchera: trench; de trinchera: pass with the muleta given with the man safely out of reach of the bull; going into the refuge of the neck beside the horn as the bull turns.

Trucos: tricks.

Tuerto: one-eyed; bulls blind in one eye are fought in the novilladas. Tuertos or one-eyed people are considered very bad luck. One-eyed bulls are not exceptionally difficult to fight, but are almost impossible to do any brilliant work with.

Tumbos: falls or spills; the falls taken by picadors.

Turno: in turn; in regular order of seniority as in the action of matadors; everything is done in turn in bullfighting so that the bullfight may be run off rapidly and without disputes.

U

Último: the last; último tercio: the last third of the bullfight in which the bull is killed with sword and muleta.

Uretritis: gonorrhœa; common ailment in the peninsula. Referring to this there is a Spanish proverb: Más cornadas dan las mujeres: the women gore more often than the bulls.

Urinario: comfort station.

Utrero: three-year-old bull. Utrera is cow of the same age. Many bulls now sold to be fought in Spanish rings are little more than utreros. Bulls in which the crosses of different strains made in breeding have not turned out well are often very brave as calves and utreros, but steadily lose bravery after they are mature at four years. This is especially true of bulls raised in the province of Salamanca. Consequently their breeders try to pass as many utreros as they can as bulls; fattening them on grain to make the required weight. It is these bulls sold to be fought before they are mature which eliminate all emotion and seriousness from the bullfight and by depriving it of its fundamental necessity, the bull, do more than any other agency to discredit it.

V

Vaca: cow.

Vacuna: having to do with cattle.

Valiente: courageous, brave.

Valla: wall or wooden fence or barrera.

Valor: courage, bravery, coolness. First quality a bullfighter must have.

Vaquero: caretaker or herder of fighting bulls on the ranch; cowboy, cowpuncher.

Vaquilla: small cow.

Vara: shaft; pic used in bullfighting.

Varetazo: blow by the flat of the bull’s horn; any horn stroke which does not wound. May be a serious bruise with internal hemmorhage or merely a scratch.

Ver llegar: to watch them come; the ability to watch the bull come as he charges with no thought except to calmly see what he is doing and make the moves necessary to the manœuvre you have in mind. To calmly watch the bull come is the most necessary and primarily difficult thing in bullfighting.

Vergüenza: shame or honor; a sin vergüenza is a bullfighter without honor or shame — Qué vergüenza! means what a shame or what a disgrace.

Veronica: pass with the cape so called because the cape was originally grasped in the two hands in the manner in which Saint Veronica is shown in religious paintings to have held the napkin with which she wiped the face of Christ. It has nothing to do with the man wiping the face of the bull as one writer on Spain has suggested. In making the veronica the matador stands either facing or profiled toward the bull with left leg slightly advanced and offers the cape which he holds with both hands having grasped the lower front corners of the cape where the corks are attached and raised them, bunching up the material so that he has a good hand hold with each hand, the fingers pointing down, the thumb up. As the bull charges the man awaits him until his horns lower to hook the cape at which instant the man moves the cape ahead of the bull’s charge with a suave movement of the arms, his arms held low, passing the bull’s head and his body past the man’s waist. He passes the bull out with the cape pivoting slightly on his toes or the balls of his feet as he does so and at the end of the pass, as the bull turns, the man is in position to repeat the pass his right leg slightly advanced this time, drawing cape ahead of the bull so that he passes by in the other direction. The veronica is tricked by the man making a sidestep as the bull charges to take him further away from the horns, by the man putting his feet together once the horn has passed and by the man leaning or stepping toward the bull once the horn has passed to make it look as though he had passed the horn close. A matador who is not faking the veronica will sometimes pass the bull so close that the horns will pick off the gold rosettes that ornament his jacket. Matadors, too, will sometimes cite the bull with both feet together and make a series of veronicas in this way with the feet as still as though the man were nailed to the ground. This can only be done with a bull that turns and recharges of his own accord and in a perfectly straight line. The feet must be slightly apart in making a bull pass and repass if the bull needs to be made to follow the swing of the cape at the end of the pass in order to turn. In any case the merit in the veronica is not determined by whether the feet are together or apart, but by whether they remain immobile from the moment of the charge until the bull has been passed and the closeness with which the man passes the horn by his body. The slower, suaver and lower the man swings the cape with his arms the better the veronica.

Viaje: voyage; the direction followed by the bull’s charge or by the man as he goes in to place banderillas or to kill.

Viento or aire: wind, the worst enemy of the bullfighter.

Vientre: belly; frequent site of horn wounds when the man is gored going in to kill through not being able to shrug his belly over the horn as he must in a really good estocade. Wounds here, and in the chest, are the most often fatal in bullfighting, not alone through the wound, but through the traumatic shock of the force of the blow received from head and horn. The most usual place for a horn wound is in the thigh, since it is there that the point, lowered as the bull charges, will first catch when it is raised to gore.

Vino: wine; Vino corriente is vin ordinaire or table wine; vino del pais is the local wine, always good to ask for; vino Rioja is wine of the Rioja region in the north of Spain; both red and white wines. The best are those of the Bodegas Bilbainos, Marqués de Murrieta, Marqués de Riscal. Rioja Clarete, or Rioja Alta are the lightest and pleasantest of the red wines. Diamante is a good white wine with fish. Valdepenas is fuller bodied than Rioja, but is excellent in both white and rosée. The Spanish vintners produce Chablis and Burgundies that I cannot recommend. The Clarete Valdepenas is a very good wine. The table wines around Valencia are very good, those of Tarragona are better, but do not travel well. Galicia has good local table wine. In Asturias they drink cider. The local wines of Navarra are very good. For any one who comes to Spain thinking only in terms of Sherry and Malaga the splendid, light, dry, red wines will be a revelation. The vin ordinaire in Spain is consistently superior to that of France since it is never tricked or adulterated, and is only about a third as expensive. I believe it to be the best in Europe by far. They have no Grands Vins to compare with those of France.

Vista: clear perception; de mucha vista: having a great perception and knowledge of bullfighting.

Vividores: livers off of; chiselers; those parasites of bullfighting who make their living out of it without contributing anything to it. The Spanish chiseler will make a living where his Armenian or Greek brother would barely exist and where the good American chiseler would starve the Spanish chiseler will gain enough to retire.

Volapié: flying while running; method of killing bulls invented by Joaquín Rodriguez (Costillares) at the time of the American Declaration of Independence from England to deal with those bulls which, because they were too worn out, could not be depended on to charge in order that they might be killed recibiendo, that is, by the man awaiting the charge and taking the bull on his sword. In the volapié the man places the bull with his four feet squared; profiles at a short distance, the muleta held low in his left hand; sights along the sword which makes a prolongation of his forearm held across his chest, and goes in on the bull, his left shoulder forward, putting in the sword with his right hand between the bull’s shoulders; gives the bull his exit with the muleta in the left hand and sucking in his belly to avoid the right horn, exits from the encounter along the bull’s flank. Except that present-day matadors rarely go in close, at the moment of putting in the sword, and almost never arm themselves with the sword on a level with their chests, but instead sight along it anywhere from the level of their chins to above their noses the volapié as described above and invented by Costillares is still the method of killing bulls used in modern times.

Volcar: to overturn or tumble; volcando sobre el morillo: is said of a matador who has gone in to kill so hard and sincerely that he has almost literally fallen forward onto the bull’s shoulders after the sword.

Voluntad: desire or good will; a matador is said to have shown buena voluntad when he has tried his best and if the result has been bad it has been because of the defectiveness of the bull or else the man’s incapacity rather than lack of intention.

Vuelta al ruedo: tour of the ring made by the matador at the insistence of the spectators to receive applause. He goes accompanied by his banderilleros who pick up and pocket cigars and pick up and throw back hats or other articles of clothing thrown down into the ring.

Z

Zapatillas: heel-less pumps worn by bullfighters in the ring.

SOME REACTIONS OF A FEW INDIVIDUALS TO THE INTEGRAL SPANISH BULLFIGHT

Ages given are those at which they first saw fights

P. H. — 4 years old; American; male. Taken by his nurse to a Spanish bullfight at Bordeaux without his parents’ knowledge or permission he called out on first seeing the bull charge the picadors, “Il faut pas faire tomber le horsy!” A short time later he called out, “Assis! Assis! Je ne peux pas voir le taureau!” Asked by his parents his impression of the bullfight he said, “J’aime ça!” Taken to a Spanish bullfight at Bayonne three months later he seemed very interested, but did not comment during the fight. After it he said, “Quand j’étais jeune la course de taureaux n’était pas comme ça.”

J. H — 9 years old; American; male; education, French Lycée; one year kindergarten in U. S. Ridden horses two years — allowed to go to bullfights with his father as reward for work in school and because his younger brother having without parents’ intention seen one with no bad results, he felt it unjust that the smaller child should have seen spectacle he was not to have been allowed to attend until twelve years old. Followed action with great interest and without comment. When cushions commenced to be thrown at cowardly matador whispered, “Can I throw mine, Papa?” Thought blood on horse’s right front leg was paint and asked if horses were so painted so bull would charge them. Was greatly impressed by bulls, but thought work matadors did looked easy. Admired vulgar bravery of Saturio Torón. Said Torón was his favorite. The others were all frightened. Held firm belief that no bullfighter no matter what he did was doing his best. Took dislike for Villalta. Said “I hate Villalta!” first time he had ever employed this word in regard to a human being. Asked why; answered, “I hate the way he looks and the way he acts.” Declared he did not believe there were any fighters as good as his friend Sydney and that he did not want to see any more fights unless Sydney was going to fight. Said he did not like to see the horses injured, but laughed at the time and afterwards at only funny incident in regard to horses. On discovering matadors were killed decided he would rather be a guide in Wyoming or a trapper. Maybe a guide in the summer and a trapper in the winter.

X. Y. — 27 years old; American; male; college education; ridden horses on farm as boy. Took flask of brandy to his first bullfight — took several drinks at ring — when bull charged picador and hit horse X. Y. gave sudden screeching intake of breath — took drink of brandy — repeated this on each encounter between bull and horse. Seemed to be in search of strong sensations. Doubted genuineness of my enthusiasm for bullfights. Declared it was a pose. He felt no enthusiasm and declared no one else could. Still convinced fondness for bullfights in others is a pose. Does not care for sport of any sort. Does not care for games of chance. Amusements and occupation drinking, night life and gossip. Writes. Travels about.

Capt. D. S. — 26 years old; soldier; British; of Irish and English extraction; education, Public Schools and Sandhurst; went out to Mons in 1914 as infantry officer; wounded August 27th, 1914; 1914–1918, brilliant record as infantry officer. Rides to hounds and in regimental point to points. Recreations, hunting, skiing, mountaineering — is widely read and has intelligent appreciation of modern writing and painting. Does not care for gaming or betting. Suffered sincerely and deeply at what happened to horses at first bullfight — said it was most hateful thing he had ever seen. Continued to attend them, he said, in order to understand mentality of people who would tolerate such a thing. At the end of his sixth fight understood them so well that he became embroiled in a dispute through defending the conduct of a matador, John Anllo, Nacional II, during the fight when a spectator insulted him. Went in the ring in the amateur fights in the mornings. Wrote two articles on bullfighting, one of them an apology for it, in the regimental gazette.

Mrs. A. B. — 28 years old; American; not a horsewoman; finishing-school education; studied to sing in opera; does not care for games, or gaming. Does not wager. Attended bullfights — was moderately horrified. Did not like them. Did not go again.

Mrs. E. R. — 30 years old; American; school and college education; ridden horses and owned pony as child; musician; favorite author Henry James; favorite sport, tennis; never seen either boxing or bullfighting until after her marriage. Enjoyed good prizefights. Did not want her to see horses in bullfight, but believed she would enjoy rest of corrida. Had her look away when bull charged horse. Told her when not to look. Did not want to shock or horrify her. Found she was not shocked nor horrified by horses and enjoyed it as a part of bullfight which she enjoyed greatly first time and became great admirer and partizan of. Developed almost unerring judgment for telling a matador’s class, sincerity and possibilities as soon as she saw him work once. Was very much moved at one time by a certain matador. Matador was certainly much moved by her. Was fortunate enough to be away from the fights during this matador’s moral débâcle.

Mrs. S. T. — 30 years old; English; private school and convent education; ridden horses; alcoholic nymphomaniac. Done some painting. Spent money much too fast to be able to gamble with it — gambled occasionally with borrowed money. Loved drinking more than excitement — rather shocked by horses, but so excited by bullfighters and general strong emotion that she became a partizan of the spectacle. Drunk herself out of any remembrance of it shortly after.

W. G. — 27 years old; American; male; college education; excellent baseball player; very good sportsman, keen intelligence and good esthetic appreciation; only experience with horses on farm; recently recovered from manic depression which followed nervous breakdown; shocked and horrified by horses. Unable to see anything else in fight. Put everything on moral basis. Suffered sincerely and truly at pain being inflicted. Took violent dislike to picadors. Felt they were to blame personally. After he was away from Spain, horror died out and he remembered parts of fight he liked, but he truly and sincerely disliked bullfighting.

R. S. — 28 years old; American; male; successful writer without private means; college education; enjoyed bullfights greatly; fond of music of fashionable composers, but not a musician; little esthetic appreciation other than music; no horseman; was not at all distressed by horses; went into amateur fights in the morning and was a great crowd pleaser; came to Pamplona two years. Seemed very fond of the fights, but has not followed them since his marriage although he often says he would like to. May possibly go to them again some time. Seemed genuinely fond of them, but has no time now for non-social or non-money-making manifestations. Is genuinely fond of golf. Does very little gambling, but makes a few bets on questions of veracity, opinion, college loyalty, etc.

P. M. — 28 years old; American; convent and college graduate; not a musician; no musical ability or appreciation; intelligent appreciation of painting and letters; rode horses and owned pony as child. Saw first fight in Madrid in which three men were gored. Did not like it, and left before end. Saw fairly good fight second time and liked it. Completely unaffected by the horses. Came to understand fights and enjoyed them more than any other spectacle. Has attended them steadily. Does not care for boxing or football — enjoys bicycle-racing. Likes shooting, fishing. Does not like to gamble.

V. R. — 25 years old; American; convent and college education; good horsewoman; liked fights tremendously from start; completely unaffected by horses; has attended fights whenever possible ever since seeing her first one. Enjoys boxing very much — enjoys horseracing — does not care for bicycle-racing — likes to gamble.

A. U. — 32 years old; American; college education; poet; great sensitivity; all-around athlete; keen esthetic appreciation of music, painting, letters; rode horses in the army; not a horseman. Does not care for gambling — deeply affected by seeing bulls charge horses in first fight, but this did not prevent his enjoyment of bullfight. Appreciated matadors’ work intensely and was ready to row with spectators who were hooting them. Has not been where he could see bullfights since that fall.

S. A. — Internationally famous novelist writing in Yiddish. Had luck to see excellent bullfight his first time in Madrid — declared there was no emotion comparable in intensity except first sexual intercourse.

Mrs. M. W. — 40 years old; American; education, private schools; not good at sports; has ridden horses; keen esthetic appreciation of music, painting, writing; generous, intelligent, loyal, attractive; very good mother. Did not look at horses — kept her eyes away — enjoyed rest of bullfight, but would not care to see many. Very fond of having a good time and very intelligent about knowing what it consists in.

W. A. — 29 years old; American; male; successful journalist; college education; no horseman; very civilized appreciation of food and drink; well read and wide experience; was disappointed in first fight, but not at all shocked by horses; in fact enjoyed horse part, but tended to be bored by the rest of fight; became rather interested in fights finally and brought wife to Spain, but she disliked them and the next year W. A. no longer followed them. Had bad luck nearly always to see bad fights — was close follower of boxing for a time, but no longer goes to fights. Does little gambling — loves food, drink and good conversation. Extremely intelligent.

In these few reactions of individuals I have tried to be completely accurate as to their first and ultimate impressions of the bullfight. The only conclusion I draw from these reactions is that some people will like the fights and others will not. Because I had never seen her before I could not chronicle the history of an Englishwoman who looked to be about thirty-five I saw once at San Sebastian who was attending the bullfight with her husband and was so overcome by the horses being charged by the bulls that she cried as though they were her own horses or her own children who were being gored. She left the ring crying but urging her husband to stay. She had not meant to make a demonstration, it had only been too horrible for her to stand. She looked a very fine and pleasant woman and I felt very sorry for her. Nor have I described the reactions of a Spanish girl who attended a fight at La Coruña with either her young husband or fiancé and who cried very much and suffered all through the corrida but remained in her seat. These are, speaking absolutely truthfully, the only women I have seen cry at over three hundred bullfights. It is to be understood, of course, that at these fights I could only observe my very immediate neighbors.

A SHORT ESTIMATE OF THE AMERICAN, SIDNEY FRANKLIN, AS A MATADOR

Most Spaniards do not go to bull fights, only a small proportion do, and of those who attend, the competent aficionados are limited in number. Yet many times I have heard people say that they asked a Spaniard, an actual Spaniard, mind you, what sort of bullfighter Sidney Franklin was, and the Spaniard said he was very brave but very awkward and did not know what it was all about. If you asked that Spaniard if he had seen Franklin fight he would say no; what has happened is that he has told the way, from national pride, the Spaniards hoped he would fight. He does not fight that way at all.

Franklin is brave with a cold, serene, and intelligent valor but instead of being awkward and ignorant he is one of the most skillful, graceful, and slow manipulators of a cape fighting to-day. His repertoire with the cape is enormous but he does not attempt by a varied repertoire to escape from the performance of the veronica as the base of his cape work and his veronicas are classical, very emotional, and beautifully timed and executed. You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry and excellence with the cape.

He does not place banderillas, never having studied or practiced this properly, and this is a serious omission since, with his physique, judgment of distance, and coolness, he could have been a very good banderillero.

Franklin manages the muleta well with his right hand but uses his left hand far too little. He kills easily and well. He does not give the importance to killing that it merits, since it is easy for him and because he ignores the danger. Profiling with more style his kills would gain greatly in emotion.

He is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain to-day and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him.

It is too late for him to become a good banderillero, but he understands his other faults and is constantly correcting them. With the cape he has no improvement to make; he is a professor, a Doctor of Tauromachia, and not only a classic artist but an inventor and innovator as well.

He was formed and taught by Rodolfo Gaona, the Mexican, the only matador who ever competed on equal terms with Joselito and Belmonte and who himself was formed and taught by a banderillero of the great Frascuelo, who gave him the most complete training in the classic fundamentals of bullfighting which are ignored by most young matadors who have much courage, a little grace and youth, and posture and hope for the best; and it was the art and soundness of Franklin’s fighting which he learned in the best school possible which so amazed and enthused the Spaniards.

He had great and legitimate artistic triumphs in Sevilla, Madrid, and San Sebastian before the elite of the aficionados as well as triumphs in Cadiz, Ceuta, and other towns in the provinces. He filled the Madrid ring so there was not a ticket to be had three times running, the first time as an American and a novelty every one was curious to see after his great success in Sevilla, but the next two on his merits as a bullfighter. That was in 1929 and that year he could have taken the alternative as a formal matador de toros at any one of half a dozen cities, and I would then have written of him in the body of this book with the other matadors de toros, but he wisely wanted another year as a novillero, he was fighting as often as he wished and getting more as a novillero than many matadors de toros, and another year as a novillero would give him that much more time to perfect his work with the muleta and his experience and knowledge of the Spanish bulls, which are quite different from the Mexican. He ran into bad luck on his second fight early in March of 1930, when he was gored by a bull he had turned his back to after having put the sword in and received a tremendous wound that perforated the rectum, sphincter muscle and large intestine, and when he was able to start filling his contracts his wound was still open and he fought through the season in bad physical shape. During the winter of 1930–31 he fought in Mexico and alternating with Marcial Lalanda in Nuevo Laredo he received an unimportant horn wound in the calf of the leg which would have caused him no inconvenience (he fought the following Sunday), except that the surgeon who attended him insisted on administering anti-tetanus and anti-gangrene vaccine. These injections coming too soon after the usual injections of the same serums he had received when he was wounded in Madrid caused a breaking out in a sort of boil on his left arm which swelled and made the arm nearly useless and spoiled his 1931 season in Spain. Then too he came to Spain from Mexico with plenty of money from his winter campaign and more desire to enjoy life than to start in fighting at once. He had made the Madrid ring pay him the very top price when he was in such demand the year before and as soon as he decided that he was ready to fight the management took their revenge by the typically Spanish method of putting him off on one pretext or another until they had all their dates contracted for.

He has the ability in languages, the cold courage and the ability to command of the typical soldier of fortune, he is a charming companion, one of the best story tellers I have ever heard, has enormous and omnivorous curiosity about everything but gets his information through the eye and ear and reads only The Saturday Evening Post, which he goes through from cover to cover each week, usually finishing it in about three days and then having four bad days of waiting for the next number. He is a very hard master to those who work for him, yet commands amazing loyalty. He speaks Spanish not only perfectly but with the accent of whatever place he may be; he does all his own business and is very proud of his business judgment, which is terrible. He believes in himself as confidently as an opera singer does but he is not conceited.

I have purposely written nothing about his life, since having led it at great peril and in an utterly fantastic manner he would seem to be entitled to whatever profits the story of it might bring. At one time and another I have heard the whole story from the beginning through the fall of 1931 and I have been present while certain chapters of it were happening and it is better than any picaresque novel you ever read. Any man’s life, told truly, is a novel, but the bullfighter’s life has an order in the tragedy of its progression which tends to formalize the story into a groove. Sidney’s life has escaped this and he has truly lived three lives, one Mexican, one Spanish, and one American, in a way that is unbelievable. The story of those lives belongs to him and I will not tell it to you. But I can tell you truly, all question of race and nationality aside, that with the cape he is a great and fine artist and no history of bullfighting that is ever written can be complete unless it gives him the space he is entitled to.

DATES ON WHICH BULLFIGHTS WILL ORDINARILY BE HELD IN SPAIN, FRANCE, MEXICO, AND CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

Prospective spectators are warned not to take seriously any bullfights held in France, Central or South America except, possibly, at Lima, Peru

JANUARY

Bullfights every Sunday in Mexico City, Lima, Peru, and Caracas, Venezuela.

On January 1st there is always a fight at San Luis de Potosi in Mexico.

In the states of Tampico, Vera Cruz, Torreon, Puebla, Leon, Zacatecas, Ciudad Juarez, and Monterey occasional fights will be given on Sundays.

In Casablanca in Spanish Morocco one or more bullfights are given on Sundays in January.

Valencia, Maracay, and Maracaibo in Venezuela give occasional fights on Sundays.

Cartagena de Indias in Colombia also usually has fights in January.

FEBRUARY

Bullfights every Sunday in Mexico City, Lima, and Caracas, and occasionally a benefit fight announced for a week day in Mexico City.

Formal fights or novilladas on Sundays in San Luis de Potosi, Ciudad Juarez, Puebla, Torreon, Monterey, Aguas Calientes, Tampico, Leon, Zacatecas in Mexico, and fights in Bogota, Baranquilla, and Panama in Central America.

Novilladas start in Madrid and Barcelona if the weather is favorable on Sundays and usually in Valencia.

MARCH

Bullfights every Sunday in Mexico City and Caracas (Venezuela). Occasionally fights will be given in Malaga, Barcelona, and Valencia in March and there is always a fight at Castellon de la Plana for the fiestas of the Magdalena, which you may look up in any religious calendar.

Novilladas are usually given, weather permitting, every Sunday in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza, and on one or two Sundays in Bilbao.

APRIL

Bullfights on Easter Sunday at Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, Zaragoza, Malaga, Murcia, Granada.

On the Monday after Easter the first subscription fight starts in Madrid.

The feria at Sevilla starts within a week after Easter and has three fights on successive days.

25th, feria at Lorca.

29th, feria at Jerez de la Frontera.

Bullfights each Sunday after Easter in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and novilladas on Sundays in Zaragoza, Bilbao, and usually at the minor rings of Vista Alegre and Tetuan de las Victorias in Madrid. If you go to either one be careful not to have your pocket picked.

MAY

If Easter is early and Corpus Christi comes in May there will be bullfights on that day in Madrid, Sevilla, Granada, Malaga, Toledo, and Bilbao, possibly also at Zaragoza.

Fixed Dates for Fights

May 2 — Bilbao, Lucena.

May 3 — Bilbao, Figueras, Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

May 4 — Puertollano, Jerez de los Caballeros.

Between May 8 and 10 — Ecija and Caravaca.

Between May 13 and 15 — Osuna and Badajoz.

May 15 — Madrid.

May 16 — Madrid and Talavera de la Reina.

May 17 — Madrid. These three fights are for the feria of San Isidro, patron of Madrid. There is no longer much of a feria but the fights remain.

May 18–19–20 — Ronda, Olivenza, Baeza.

May 21–22 — Zaragoza.

May 25–26 — Cordoba

May 30 — Aranjuez and Cáceres (novillada in Madrid).

May 31 — Cáceres, Teruel, and Antequera.

On the last Sunday in May there is usually a bullfight in the Roman arena in Béziers, France.

In May the season of the summer novilladas starts in Mexico.

JUNE

Bullfights every Thursday and Sunday in Madrid and every Sunday in Barcelona.

June 2–4 — Trujillo.

June 9 — Placencia.

June 9–11 — Big fair at Algeciras — usually three fights.

June 13–17 — Feria at Granada — usually three fights.

June 22 — Avila.

June 24 — Tolosa, Medina del Rio Seco, Cabra, Barcelona, Zafra, Badojoz — Feria at Badajoz with two fights.

June 25 — Tolosa, Badajoz.

June 27–29 — Feria at Segovia — usually two fights.

June 29 — Alicante.

June 29–30 — Feria at Burgos — usually two fights.

JULY

First Sunday in July — Fights at Palma de Mallorca.

July 6 to 12 — Feria of San Fermin at Pamplona, with five fights on successive days, starting July 7. Amateur fights each morning at 7 o’clock. Bulls run through the street the mornings of all bullfights. Better be at the ring by six A.M. to buy seats in the boxes. Other seats are free and filled. Tickets may usually be bought the night before between 6 and 7 at the booths on the square.

July 14 — Bullfights at Bordeaux and Bayonne.

Between the 15th and 18th, fights at La Linea, near Gibraltar.

July 23 — Alcira. Usually a good fight.

July 25 — Big fight at San Sebastian and Santander. First fight of feria at Valencia, where there will be seven to nine fights on successive days until and through August 2.

The first Sunday of July there is a fight at Nîmes, France.

All through July there will be novilladas on every Thursday or Sunday, on which formal fights are not given, in Madrid or Barcelona. The big ferias, not to be missed, are Pamplona and Valencia.

AUGUST

On August 2 there is a feria at Vitoria, with three fights on successive days, and another at La Coruña, also with three fights. Vitoria is easily reached by motor in three hours from the French frontier at Hendaye. In case of a Sunday coming opportunely these fights will sometimes start as late as the 4th or 5th.

Between August 2 and 5 there are fights at Santander, San Sebastian, Cartagena, and Tomellosa.

Between the 8th and 10th there is a feria at Pontevedra in Galicia, usually with only one fight.

August 10 — Manzanares.

August 15, 16, and 17 is the Grande Semaine at San Sebastian, with three successive fights on those days. In case of Sunday coming earlier or later the fights may be on the 14th, 15th, and 16th, promoters always trying to bring one of the series of fights in a feria on a Sunday.

On August 15 and 16 there are also ferias at Gijon, Badajoz, and Almendralejo, with two fights each and single fights on those days at Puerto de Santa Maria (15th), Palma de Mallorca (15th), Jaén, Tafalla, and Jatiba (15th). Tafalla can be reached from Biarritz in 4½ hours by car.

August 16 — Orihuela, Burgode, Osma, and Jumilla.

August 17 to 20 — Ciudad Real, Sanlucar, Toledo, Malaga, Antequera, and, sometimes, Guadalajara.

August 21 — The summer fair at Bilbao starts with usually five successive fights. During this week there are fights on Sunday at San Sebastian, Oviedo, Almagro — two fights, Astorga, two fights (24th and 25th), Almeria, two fights, usually the 26th and 27th, Tarazona de la Mancha (24th), Alcala de Henares (25th).

August 28 — Tarazona de Aragon and Toro. San Sebastian if it is a Sunday.

August 28 to August 30 — Malaga, Puerto de Santa María, Linares, Colmenar Viejo (sometimes two fights).

August 29 — Malaga (second fight of feria).

August 30 — Linares (second fight of feria).

August 31 — Calahorra, Pequena, Constantina.

All of August there will be novilladas in Madrid and Barcelona and usually Zaragoza and Valencia every Sunday and usually every Thursday. The big fairs from a bullfighting standpoint in August are those of Bilbao and San Sebastian. If you want to see country go to Colmenar Viejo, Astorga or Toro.

SEPTEMBER

The great feria month.

2nd and 3rd — Palencia — usually good fights — intelligent public. Nice Castillian town with good beer and excellent quail shooting.

3rd and 4th — Merida, Villarobledo, and Priego. Usually two fights at Merida, one at each of the others.

The first Sunday of September there is a fight at San Sebastian, and if Sunday comes after the 4th, at Aranjuez.

5th and 6th — Feria at Cuenca, with usually two fights and a novillada. Wonderful town, terrible road there. Same dates, feria at Castellar, with two fights. Between 4th and 6th either fights or novilladas at Segovia, Huelva, Requena, Jerez de los Caballeros.

Feria starts at Murcia either 7th or 8th. Usually two fights.

7th or 8th — Utrera, Palma de Mallorca, Cabra, Bélmez, Tortosa, Ayamonte, Cáceres, Barbastro, Santoña, Benavente, and occasionally Valdepeñas and Lorca.

September 9 — A two-fight feria starts at Calatayud, and on the 10th Albacete commences a feria with three successive fights, although sometimes as many as five are given. Either of these is good.

9th, also, San Martin de Valdeiglesias, on the road from Madrid to the Sierra de Gredos, Villanueva del Arzobispo, Barcarrota, and Andújar.

10th or 11th — Usually two-fight feria starts at Zamora, and on the 11th there will usually be fights at Haro, Utiel, and Cehegin.

September 12 — The feria starts at Salamanca, with three fights on successive days.

There are also fights at San Sebastian the second Sunday in September, this usually a cheap fight though sometimes good, and at Utiel, Mellila, and Barcelona.

The third Sunday in September the fall subscription season usually starts in Madrid, with fights each Sunday until the middle of October.

September 14 or 15 — There will usually be fights or novilladas at Jerez de la Frontera, Aranda de Duero, Castuera, and Aracena.

On the 15th or 16th there will usually be fights at San Clemente, Mora, Trujillo, and Tomelloso.

On either the 18th, 19th, or 20th, depending on where the Sunday comes in the month, three days of successive fights start for the feria of Valladolid. The town is easy to reach by rail or road. These are often good fights and the public is intelligent. On one of these three days fights are usually given for the ferias of Oviedo, Olivenza, and Zalamea la Real.

On the 21st of September a three-day bullfight feria starts at Logroño. This is the easiest of the September ferias to reach from the French frontier via Hendaye and Irun. The fights are usually of a high standard.

On the 21st, 22nd, or 23rd there will ordinarily be one fight at Talavera de la Reina, Fregenal de la Sierra, Soria, and Requena.

On the third Sunday in September, if the weather has been good in the north and visitors plenty, there will sometimes be a fight at San Sebastian. There will nearly always be a fight at Tarrogona, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Malaga, Bilbao, and Cordoba. These were usually formerly held on the Feast of the Blessed Virgin.

Between September 25 and 28 there will usually be one fight at Quintanar de la Orden, Torrijos, Hellín, and Béjar.

On September 28 is the first fight of the two-fight feria of San Miguel in Sevilla. These two fights are usually much better than the spring feria corridas.

Fights may be given on the last three days of September in Caravaca, Ubeda, Jaen, Almendralejo, and Belmonte.

The most important ferias in September are those of Salamanca, Calatayud, Albacete, Valladolid, Logroño, and Sevilla. All of these are worth going to.

OCTOBER

On the first, second, and usually third Sundays in October there will be fights at Madrid and Barcelona, and usually Valencia.

October 1 and 2 — Ubeda, feria.

October 3 — Soria, feria.

Between October 2 and 4 — Zafra, feria.

Usually there will be a fight during the first week in October at Aranjuez.

On either the 12th or 13th of October commences the feria of Pilar in Zaragoza, consisting of four to five fights. This is the last important feria of the season.

Between the 15th and 20th there will be a feria at Guadalajara, with one fight, and on the 18th and 19th another at Jaén, with two. On either the 18th or 19th there will sometimes be fights at Gandia and Játiva.

The last Sunday in October there will be fights at Barcelona and Valencia if the weather has been good, and occasionally a fight on the last day of October at Gerona.

The great feria of the month is that of Pilar at Zaragoza.

Toward the middle of October the formal bullfight season starts in Mexico City and throughout the country.

NOVEMBER

In case of good weather bullfights may be given the first week of November in Barcelona or Valencia. They will be given each Sunday in Mexico City and in various Mexican cities, bullfighters contracted for Mexico usually leaving immediately after the feria of Pilar at Zaragoza.

The last fight in Spain is usually at Ondara, in the province of Alicante, between the 16th and 20th of November.

DECEMBER

The second big month of the Mexican season, with fights every Sunday in Mexico City and frequently in various other Mexican cities.

In Lima (Peru), Caracas (Venezuela), and Bogotá (Colombia) the bullfight season commences around the middle of December, usually with Spanish matadors in addition to whatever local phenomenons are in fashion. In Venezuela there are occasional fights in Valencia and Maracaibo, as well as more or less serious occasional bullfights in Panama and Guatemala. To see bullfights in November or December, Mexico City is the place.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For a list of 2077 books and pamphlets in Spanish dealing with or touching on tauromaquia, to the authors of all of which the writer of this book wishes to acknowledge his deep indebtedness and to apologize for his intrusion, the reader who wishes to make a study of the history of the Spanish bullfight is referred to Libros y Folletos de Toros, Bibliografia Taurina, Compuesta Con Vista de la Biblioteca Taurómaca de Don José Luis de Ybarra y Lopez de Calle por Graciano Diaz Arquer and published in Madrid at the Library of Pedro Vindel.

The present volume, Death in the Afternoon, is not intended to be either historical or exhaustive. It is intended as an introduction to the modern Spanish bullfight and attempts to explain that spectacle both emotionally and practically. It was written because there was no book which did this in Spanish or in English. The writer asks the indulgence of competent aficionados for his technical explanations. When a volume of controversy may be written on the execution of a single suerte one man’s arbitrary explanation is certain to be unacceptable to many.

E. H.

GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA

CONTENTS

PART I. PURSUIT AND CONVERSATION

CHAPTER ONE

PART II. PURSUIT REMEMBERED

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

PART III. PURSUIT AND FAILURE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

PART IV. PURSUIT AS HAPPINESS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

The first edition

Dear Mr. J. P.

Just tell them you are a fictional character and it is your bad luck to have a writer put such language in your speeches. We all know how prettily the best brought up people speak but there are always those not quite out of the top drawer who have an ‘orrid fear of vulgarity. You will know, too, how to deal with anyone who calls you Pop. Remember you weren’t written of as Pop. It was all this fictional character. Anyway the book is for you and we miss you very much.

E. H.

PART I. PURSUIT AND CONVERSATION

CHAPTER ONE

We were sitting in the blind that Wanderobo hunters had built of twigs and branches at the edge of the salt-lick when we heard the motor-lorry coming. At first it was far away and no one could tell what the noise was. Then it was stopped and we hoped it had been nothing or perhaps only the wind. Then it moved slowly nearer, unmistakable now, louder and louder until, agonizing in a clank of loud irregular explosions, it passed close behind us to go on up the road. The theatrical one of the two trackers stood up.

‘It is finished,’ he said.

I put my hand to my mouth and motioned him down.

‘It is finished,’ he said again and spread his arms wide. I had never liked him and I liked him less now.

‘After,’ I whispered. M’Cola shook his head. I looked at his bald black skull and he turned his face a little so that I saw the thin Chinese hairs at the corners of his mouth.

‘No good,’ he said. ‘Hapana m’uzuri.’

‘Wait a little,’ I told him. He bent his head down again so that it would not show above the dead branches and we sat there in the dust of the hole until it was too dark to see the front sight on my rifle; but nothing more came. The theatrical tracker was impatient and restless. A little before the last of the light was gone he whispered to M’Cola that it was now too dark to shoot.

‘Shut up, you,’ M’Cola told him. ‘The Bwana can shoot after you cannot see.’

The other tracker, the educated one, gave another demonstration of his education by scratching his name, Abdullah, on the black skin of his leg with a sharp twig. I watched without admiration and M’Cola looked at the word without a shadow of expression on his face. After a while the tracker scratched it out.

Finally I made a last sight against what was left of the light and saw it was no use, even with the large aperture.

M’Cola was watching.

‘No good,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, in Swahili. ‘Go to camp?’

‘Yes.’

We stood up and made our way out of the blind and out through the trees, walking on the sandy loam, feeling our way between trees and under branches, back to the road. A mile along the road was the car. As we came alongside, Kamau, the driver, put the lights on.

The lorry had spoiled it. That afternoon we had left the car up the road and approached the salt-lick very carefully. There had been a little rain, the day before, though not enough to flood the lick, which was simply an opening in the trees with a patch of earth worn into deep circles and grooved at the edges with hollows where the animals had licked the dirt for salt, and we had seen long, heart-shaped, fresh tracks of four greater kudu bulls that had been on the salt the night before, as well as many newly pressed tracks of lesser kudu. There was also a rhino who, from the tracks and the kicked-up mound of strawy dung, came there each night. The blind had been built at close arrow-shot of the lick, and sitting, leaning back, knees high, heads low, in a hollow half full of ashes and dust, watching through the dried leaves and thin branches I had seen a lesser kudu bull come out of the brush to the edge of the opening where the salt was and stand there, heavy-necked, grey, and handsome, the horns spiralled against the sun while I sighted on his chest and then refused the shot, wanting not to frighten the greater kudu that should surely come at dusk. But before we ever heard the lorry the bull had heard it and run off into the trees, and everything else that had been moving, in the bush on the flats, or coming down from the small hills through the trees, coming toward the salt, had halted at that exploding, clanking sound. They would come, later, in the dark; but then it would be too late.

So now, going along the sandy track of the road in the car, the lights picking out the eyes of night birds that squatted close on the sand until the bulk of the car was on them and they rose in soft panic; passing the fires of the travellers that all moved to the westward by day along this road, abandoning the famine country that was ahead of us; me sitting, the butt of my rifle on my foot, the barrel in the crook of my left arm, a flask of whisky between my knees, pouring the whisky into a tin cup and passing it over my shoulder in the dark for M’Cola to pour water into it from the canteen, drinking this, the first one of the day, the finest one there is, and looking at the thick bush we passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa, I was altogether happy.

Then ahead we saw a big fire and as we came up and passed, I made out a lorry beside the road. I told Kamau to stop and go back and as we backed into the firelight there was a short, bandy-legged man with a Tyrolese hat, leather shorts, and an open shirt standing before an unhooded engine in a crowd of natives.

‘Can we help?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Unless you are a mechanic. It has taken a dislike to me. All engines dislike me.’

‘Do you think it could be the timer? It sounded as though it might be a timing knock when you went past us.’

‘I think it is much worse than that. It sounds to be something very bad.’

‘If you can get to our camp we have a mechanic.’

‘How far is it?’

‘About twenty miles.’

‘In the morning I will try it. Now I am afraid to make it go farther with that noise of death inside. It is trying to die because it dislikes me. Well, I dislike it too. But if I die it would not annoy it.’

‘Will you have a drink?’ I held out the flask. ‘Hemingway is my name.’

‘Kandisky,’ he said and bowed. ‘Hemingway is a name I have heard. Where? Where have I heard it? Oh, yes. The dichter. You know Hemingway the poet?’

‘Where did you read him?’

‘In the Querschnitt.’

‘That is me,’ I said, very pleased. The Querschnitt was a German magazine I had written some rather obscene poems for, and published a long story in, years before I could sell anything in America.

‘This is very strange,’ the man in the Tyrolese hat said. ‘Tell me, what do you think of Ringelnatz?’

‘He is splendid.’

‘So. You like Ringelnatz. Good. What do you think of Heinrich Mann?’

‘He is no good.’

‘You believe it?’

‘All I know is that I cannot read him.’

‘He is no good at all. I see we have things in common. What are you doing here?’

‘Shooting.’

‘Not ivory, I hope.’

‘No. For kudu.’

‘Why should any man shoot a kudu? You, an intelligent man, a poet, to shoot kudu.’

‘I haven’t shot any yet,’ I said. ‘But we’ve been hunting them hard now for ten days. We would have got one to-night if it hadn’t been for your lorry.’

‘That poor lorry. But you should hunt for a year. At the end of that time you have shot everything and you are sorry for it. To hunt for one special animal is nonsense. Why do you do it?’

‘I like to do it.’

‘Of course, if you like to do it. Tell me, what do you really think of Rilke?’

‘I have read only the one thing.’

‘Which?’

‘The Cornet.’

‘You liked it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have no patience with it. It is snobbery. Valéry, yes. I see the point of Valéry; although there is much snobbery too. Well at least you do not kill elephants.’

‘I’d kill a big enough one.’

‘How big?’

‘A seventy-pounder. Maybe smaller.’

‘I see there are things we do not agree on. But it is a pleasure to meet one of the great old Querschnitt group. Tell me what is Joyce like? I have not the money to buy it. Sinclair Lewis is nothing. I bought it. No. No. Tell me to-morrow. You do not mind if I am camped near? You are with friends? You have a white hunter?’

‘With my wife. We would be delighted. Yes, a white hunter.’

‘Why is he not out with you?’

‘He believes you should hunt kudu alone.’

‘It is better not to hunt them at all. What is he? English?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bloody English?’

‘No. Very nice. You will like him.’

‘You must go. I must not keep you. Perhaps I will see you to-morrow. It was very strange that we should meet.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Have them look at the lorry to-morrow. Anything we can do?’

‘Good night,’ he said. ‘Good trip.’

‘Good night,’ I said. We started off and I saw him walking toward the fire waving an arm at the natives. I had not asked him why he had twenty up-country natives with him, nor where he was going. Looking back, I had asked him nothing. I do not like to ask questions, and where I was brought up it was not polite. But here we had not seen a white man for two weeks, not since we had left Babati to go south, and then to run into one on this road where you met only an occasional Indian trader and the steady migration of the natives out of the famine country, to have him look like a caricature of Benchley in Tyrolean costume, to have him know your name, to call you a poet, to have read the Querschnitt, to be an admirer of Joachim Ringelnatz and to want to talk about Rilke, was too fantastic to deal with. So, just then, to crown this fantasy, the lights of the car showed three tall, conical, mounds of something smoking in the road ahead. I motioned to Kamau to stop, and putting on the brakes we skidded just short of them. They were from two to three feet high and when I touched one it was quite warm.

‘Tembo,’ M’Cola said.

It was dung from elephants that had just crossed the road, and in the cold of the evening you could see it steaming. In a little while we were in camp.

Next morning I was up and away to another salt-lick before daylight. There was a kudu bull on the lick when we approached through the trees and he gave a loud bark, like a dog’s but higher in pitch and sharply throaty, and was gone, making no noise at first, then crashing in the brush when he was well away; and we never saw him. This lick had an impossible approach. Trees grew around its open area so that it was as though the game were in the blind and you had to come to them across the open. The only way to make it would have been for one man to go alone and crawl and then it would be impossible to get any sort of a close shot through the interlacing trees until you were within twenty yards. Of course once you were inside the protecting trees, and in the blind, you were wonderfully placed, for anything that came to the salt had to come out in the open twenty-five yards from any cover. But though we stayed until eleven o’clock nothing came. We smoothed the dust of the lick carefully with our feet so that any new tracks would show when we came back again and walked the two miles to the road. Being hunted, the game had learned to come only at night and leave before daylight. One bull had stayed and our spooking him that morning would make it even more difficult now.

This was the tenth day we had been hunting greater kudu and I had not seen a mature bull yet. We had only three days more because the rains were moving north each day from Rhodesia and unless we were prepared to stay where we were through the rains we must be out as far as Handeni before they came. We had set February 17th as the last safe date to leave. Every morning now it took the heavy, woolly sky an hour or so longer to clear and you could feel the rains coming, as they moved steadily north, as surely as though you watched them on a chart.

Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, out-manœuvred, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one. It is not the way hunting should be. It is too much like those boys who used to be sent to Paris with two years in which to make good as writers or painters, after which, if they had not made good, they could go home and into their fathers’ businesses. The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colours and canvas, and to write as long as you can live and there is pencil and paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the season, and by the running out of our money, so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing. So, coming in at noon, up since two hours before daylight, with only three days left, I was starting to be nervous about it, and there, at the table under the dining tent fly, talking away, was Kandisky of the Tyrolese pants. I had forgotten all about him.

‘Hello. Hello,’ he said. ‘No success? Nothing doing? Where is the kudu?’

‘He coughed once and went away,’ I said. ‘Hello, girl.’

She smiled. She was worried too. The two of them had been listening since daylight for a shot. Listening all the time, even when our guest had arrived; listening while writing letters, listening while reading, listening when Kandisky came back and talked.

‘You did not shoot him?’

‘No. Nor see him.’ I saw that Pop was worried too, and a little nervous. There had evidently been considerable talking going on.

‘Have a beer, Colonel,’ he said to me.

‘We spooked one,’ I reported. ‘No chance of a shot. There were plenty of tracks. Nothing more came. The wind was blowing around. Ask the boys about it.’

‘As I was telling Colonel Phillips,’ Kandisky began, shifting his leather-breeched behind and crossing one heavy-calved, well-haired, bare leg over the other, ‘you must not stay here too long. You must realize the rains are coming. There is one stretch of twelve miles beyond here you can never get through if it rains. It is impossible.’

‘So he’s been telling me,’ Pop said. ‘I’m a Mister, by the way. We use these military titles as nicknames. No offence if you’re a colonel yourself.’ Then to me, ‘Damn these salt-licks. If you’d leave them alone you’d get one.’

‘They ball it all up,’ I agreed. ‘You’re so sure of a shot sooner or later on the lick.’

‘Hunt the hills too.’

‘I’ll hunt them, Pop.’

‘What is killing a kudu, anyway?’ Kandisky asked. ‘You should not take it so seriously. It is nothing. In a year you kill twenty.’

‘Best not say anything about that to the game department, though,’ Pop said.

‘You misunderstand,’ Kandisky said. ‘I mean in a year a man could. Of course no man would wish to.’

‘Absolutely,’ Pop said. ‘If he lived in kudu country, he could. They’re the commonest big antelope in this bush country. It’s just that when you want to see them you don’t.’

‘I kill nothing, you understand,’ Kandisky told us. ‘Why are you not more interested in the natives?’

‘We are,’ my wife assured him.

‘They are really interesting. Listen ...’ Kandisky said, and he spoke on to her.

‘The hell of it is,’ I said to Pop, ‘when I’m in the hills I’m sure the bastards are down there on the salt. The cows are in the hills but I don’t believe the bulls are with them now. Then you get there in the evening and there are the tracks. They have been on the lousy salt. I think they come any time.’

‘Probably they do.’

‘I’m sure we get different bulls there. They probably only come to the salt every couple of days. Some are certainly spooked because Karl shot that one. If he’d only killed it clean instead of following it through the whole damn countryside. Christ, if he’d only kill any damn thing clean. Other new ones will come in. All we have to do is to wait them out, though. Of course they can’t all know about it. But he’s spooked this country to hell.’

‘He gets so very excited,’ Pop said. ‘But he’s a good lad. He made a beautiful shot on that leopard, you know. You don’t want them killed any cleaner than that. Let it quiet down again.’

‘Sure. I don’t mean anything when I curse him.’

‘What about staying in the blind all day?’

‘The damned wind started to go round in a circle. It blew our scent every direction. No use to sit there broadcasting it. If the damn wind would hold. Abdullah took an ash can to-day.’

‘I saw him starting off with it.’

There wasn’t a bit of wind when we stalked the salt and there was just light to shoot. He tried the wind with the ashes all the way. I went alone with Abdullah and left the others behind and we went quietly. I had on these crêpe-soled boots and it’s soft cotton dirt. The bastard spooked at fifty yards.

‘Did you ever see their ears?’

‘Did I ever see their ears? If I can see his ears, the skinner can work on him.’

‘They’re bastards,’ Pop said. ‘I hate this salt-lick business. They’re not as smart as we think. The trouble is you’re working on them where they are smart. They’ve been shot at there ever since there’s been salt.’

‘That’s what makes it fun,’ I said. ‘I’d be glad to do it for a month. I like to hunt sitting on my tail. No sweat. No nothing. Sit there and catch flies and feed them to the ant lions in the dust. I like it. But what about the time?’

‘That’s it. The time.’

‘So,’ Kandisky was saying to my wife. ‘That is what you should see. The big ngomas. The big native dance festivals. The real ones.’

‘Listen,’ I said to Pop. ‘The other lick, the one I was at last night, is fool-proof except for being near that bloody road.’

‘The trackers say it is really the property of the lesser kudu. It’s a long way too. It’s eighty miles there and back.’

‘I know. But there were four big bull tracks. It’s certain. If it wasn’t for that lorry last night. What about staying there to-night! Then I’d get the night and the early morning and give this lick a rest. There’s a big rhino there too. Big track, anyway.’

‘Good,’ Pop said. ‘Shoot the rhino too.’ He hated to have anything killed except what we were after, no killing on the side, no ornamental killing, no killing to kill, only when you wanted it more than you wanted not to kill it, only when getting it was necessary to his being first in his trade, and I saw he was offering up the rhino to please me.

‘I won’t kill him unless he’s good,’ I promised.

‘Shoot the bastard,’ Pop said, making a gift of him.

‘Ah, Pop,’ I said.

‘Shoot him,’ said Pop. ‘You’ll enjoy it, being by yourself. You can sell the horn if you don’t want it. You’ve still one on your licence.’

‘So,’ said Kandisky. ‘You have arranged a plan of campaign? You have decided on how to outwit the poor animals?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How is the lorry?’

‘That lorry is finished,’ the Austrian said. ‘In a way I am glad. It was too much of a symbol. It was all that remained of my shamba. Now everything is gone and it is much simpler.’

‘What is a shamba?’ asked P.O.M., my wife. ‘I’ve been hearing about them for months. I’m afraid to ask about those words every one uses.’

‘A plantation,’ he said. ‘It is all gone except that lorry. With the lorry I carry labourers to the shamba of an Indian. It is a very rich Indian who raises sisal. I am a manager for this Indian. An Indian can make a profit from a sisal shamba.’

‘From anything,’ Pop said.

‘Yes. Where we fail, where we would starve, he makes money. This Indian is very intelligent, however. He values me. I represent European organization. I come now from organizing recruitment of the natives. This takes time. It is impressive. I have been away from my family for three months. The organization is organized. You do it in a week as easily, but it is not so impressive.’

‘And your wife?’ asked mine.

‘She waits at my house, the house of the manager, with my daughter.’

‘Does she love you very much?’ my wife asked.

‘She must, or she would be gone long ago.’

‘How old is the daughter?’

‘She is thirteen now.’

‘It must be very nice to have a daughter.’

‘You cannot know how nice it is. It is like a second wife. My wife knows now all I think, all I say, all I believe, all I can do, all that I cannot do and cannot be. I know also about my wife — completely. But now there is always someone you do not know, who does not know you, who loves you in ignorance and is strange to you both. Some one very attractive that is yours and not yours and that makes the conversation more — how shall I say? Yes, it is like — what do you call — having here with you — with the two of you — yes there — it is the Heinz Tomato Ketchup on the daily food.’

‘That’s very good,’ I said.

‘We have books,’ he said. ‘I cannot buy new books now but we can always talk. Ideas and conversation are very interesting. We discuss all things. Everything. We have a very interesting mental life. Formerly, with the shamba, we had the Querschnitt. That gave you a feeling of belonging, of being made a part of, to a very brilliant group of people. The people one would see if one saw whom one wished to see. You know all of those people? You must know them.’

‘Some of them.’ I said. ‘Some in Paris. Some in Berlin.’

I did not wish to destroy anything this man had, and so I did not go into those brilliant people in detail.

‘They’re marvellous,’ I said, lying.

‘I envy you to know them,’ he said. ‘And tell me, who is the greatest writer in America?’

‘My husband,’ said my wife.

‘No. I do not mean for you to speak from family pride. I mean who really? Certainly not Upton Sinclair. Certainly not Sinclair Lewis. Who is your Thomas Mann? Who is your Valéry?’

‘We do not have great writers,’ I said. ‘Something happens to our good writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore you.’

‘Please explain,’ he said. ‘This is what I enjoy. This is the best part of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.’

‘You haven’t heard it yet,’ I said.

‘Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your tongue.’

‘It’s loose,’ I told him. ‘It’s always too loose. But you don’t drink anything.’

‘No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But tell me. Please tell me.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things, can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it, praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in which is not there.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the dynamo.’

‘Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the dynamo driving?’

‘So. Go on.’

‘I’ve forgotten.’

‘No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.’

‘Did you ever get up before daylight ...’

‘Every morning,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

‘All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of Unitarians; men of letters; Quakers with a sense of humour.’

‘Who were these?’

‘Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language. Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice, dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that you ask for it.’

‘Go on.’

‘There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau. I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary. Naturalists should all work alone and some one else should correlate their findings for them. Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle. They do not want to be lonesome. They are afraid to be alone in their beliefs and no woman would love any of them enough so that they could kill their lonesomeness in that woman, or pool it with hers, or make something with her that makes the rest unimportant.’

‘But what about Thoreau?’

‘You’ll have to read him. Maybe I’ll be able to later. I can do nearly everything later.’

‘Better have some more beer, Papa.’

‘All right.’

‘What about the good writers?’

‘The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.’

‘Mark Twain is a humorist. The others I do not know.’

‘All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.’

‘What about the others?’

‘Crane wrote two fine stories. The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. The last one is the better.’

‘And what happened to him?’

‘He died. That’s simple. He was dying from the start.’

‘But the other two?’

‘They both lived to be old men but they did not get any wiser as they got older. I don’t know what they really wanted. You see we make our writers into something very strange.’

‘I do not understand.’

‘We destroy them in many ways. First, economically. They make money. It is only by hazard that a writer makes money although good books always make money eventually. Then our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. It is slop not on purpose but because it is hurried. Because they write when there is nothing to say or no water in the well. Because they are ambitious. Then, once they have betrayed themselves, they justify it and you get more slop. Or else they read the critics. If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes not so good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all. The critics have made them impotent.’

‘Who are these writers?’

‘Their names would mean nothing to you and by now they may have written, become frightened, and be impotent again.’

‘But what is it that happens to American writers? Be definite.’

‘I was not here in the old days so I cannot tell you about them, but now there are various things. At a certain age the men writers change into Old Mother Hubbard. The women writers become Joan of Arc without the fighting. They become leaders. It doesn’t matter who they lead. If they do not have followers they invent them. It is useless for those selected as followers to protest. They are accused of disloyalty. Oh, hell. There are too many things happen to them. That is one thing. The others try to save their souls with what they write. That is an easy way out. Others are ruined by the first money, the first praise, the first attack, the first time they find they cannot write, or the first time they cannot do anything else, or else they get frightened and join organizations that do their thinking for them. Or they do not know what they want. Henry James wanted to make money. He never did, of course.’

‘And you?’

‘I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.’

‘And what do you want?’

‘To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life.’

‘Hunting kudu?’

‘Yes. Hunting kudu and many other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘Plenty of other things.’

‘And you know what you want?’

‘Yes.’

‘You really like to do this, what you do now, this silliness of kudu?’

‘Just as much as I like to be in the Prado.’

‘One is not better than the other?’

‘One is as necessary as the other. There are other things, too.’

‘Naturally. There must be. But this sort of thing means something to you, really?’

‘Truly.’

‘And you know what you want?’

‘Absolutely, and I get it all the time.’

‘But it takes money.’

‘I could always make money, and besides I have been very lucky.’

‘Then you are happy?’

‘Except when I think of other people.’

‘Then you think of other people?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘But you do nothing for them?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Maybe a little.’

‘Do you think your writing is worth doing — as an end in itself?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You are sure?’

‘Very sure.’

‘That must be very pleasant.’

‘It is,’ I said. ‘It is the one altogether pleasant thing about it.’

‘This is getting awfully serious,’ my wife said.

‘It’s a damned serious subject.’

‘You see, he is really serious about something,’ Kandisky said. ‘I knew he must be serious on something besides kudu.’

‘The reason everyone now tries to avoid it, to deny that it is important, to make it seem vain to try to do it, is because it is so difficult. Too many factors must combine to make it possible.’

‘What is this now?’

‘The kind of writing that can be done. How far prose can be carried if anyone is serious enough and has luck. There is a fourth and fifth dimension that can be gotten.’

‘You believe it?’

‘I know it.’

‘And if a writer can get this?’

‘Then nothing else matters. It is more important than anything he can do. The chances are, of course, that he will fail. But there is a chance that he succeeds.’

‘But that is poetry you are talking about.’

‘No. It is much more difficult than poetry. It is a prose that has never been written. But it can be written, without tricks and without cheating. With nothing that will go bad afterwards.’

‘And why has it not been written?’

‘Because there are too many factors. First, there must be talent, much talent. Talent such as Kipling had. Then there must be discipline. The discipline of Flaubert. Then there must be the conception of what it can be and an absolute conscience as unchanging as the standard meter in Paris, to prevent faking. Then the writer must be intelligent and disinterested and above all he must survive. Try to get all these in one person and have him come through all the influences that press on a writer. The hardest thing, because time is so short, is for him to survive and get his work done. But I would like us to have such a writer and to read what he would write. What do you say? Should we talk about something else?’

‘It is interesting what you say. Naturally I do not agree with everything.’

‘Naturally.’

‘What about a gimlet?’ Pop asked. ‘Don’t you think a gimlet might help?’

‘Tell me first what are the things, the actual, concrete things that harm a writer?’

I was tired of the conversation which was becoming an interview. So I would make it an interview and finish it. The necessity to put a thousand intangibles into a sentence, now, before lunch, was too bloody.

‘Politics, women, drink, money, ambition. And the lack of politics, women, drink, money and ambition,’ I said profoundly.

‘He’s getting much too easy now,’ Pop said.

‘But drink. I do not understand about that. That has always seemed silly to me. I understand it as a weakness.’

‘It is a way of ending a day. It has great benefits. Don’t you ever want to change your ideas?’

‘Let’s have one,’ Pop said. ‘M’Wendi!’

Pop never drank before lunch except as a mistake and I knew he was trying to help me out.

‘Let’s all have a gimlet,’ I said.

‘I never drink,’ Kandisky said. ‘I will go to the lorry and fetch some fresh butter for lunch. It is fresh from Kandoa, unsalted. Very good. To-night we will have a special dish of Viennese dessert. My cook has learned to make it very well.’

He went off and my wife said: ‘You were getting awfully profound. What was that about all these women?’

‘What women?’

‘When you were talking about women.’

‘The hell with them,’ I said. ‘Those are the ones you get involved with when you’re drunk.’

‘So that’s what you do.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t get involved with people when I’m drunk.’

‘Come, come,’ said Pop. ‘We’re none of us ever drunk. My God, that man can talk.’

‘He didn’t have a chance to talk after B’wana M’Kumba started.’

‘I did have verbal dysentery,’ I said.

‘What about his lorry? Can we tow it in without ruining ours?’

‘I think so,’ Pop said. ‘When ours comes back from Handeni.’

At lunch under the green fly of the dining-tent, in the shade of a big tree, the wind blowing, the fresh butter much admired, Grant’s gazelle chops, mashed potatoes, green corn, and then mixed fruit for dessert, Kandisky told us why the East Indians were taking the country over.

‘You see, during the war they sent the Indian troops to fight here. To keep them out of India because they feared another mutiny. They promised the Aga Khan that because they fought in Africa, Indians could come freely to settle and for business afterwards. They cannot break that promise and now the Indians have taken the country over from the Europeans. They live on nothing and they send all the money back to India. When they have made enough to go home they leave, bringing out their poor relations to take over from them and continue to exploit the country.’

Pop said nothing. He would not argue with a guest at table.

‘It is the Aga Khan,’ Kandisky said. ‘You are an American. You know nothing of these combinations.’

‘Were you with Von Lettöw?’ Pop asked him.

‘From the start,’ Kandisky said. ‘Until the end.’

‘He was a great fighter,’ Pop said. ‘I have great admiration for him.’

‘You fought?’ Kandisky asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I do not care for Lettöw,’ Kandisky said. ‘He fought, yes. No one ever better. When we wanted quinine he would order it captured. All supplies the same. But afterwards he cared nothing for his men. After the war I am in Germany. I go to see about indemnification for my property. “You are an Austrian,” they say. “You must go through Austrian channels.” So I go to Austria. “But why did you fight?” they ask me. “You cannot hold us responsible. Suppose you go to fight in China. That is your own affair. We cannot do anything for you.”

‘“But I went as a patriot,” I say, very foolishly. “I fight where I can because I am an Austrian and I know my duty.” “Yes,” they say. “That is very beautiful. But you cannot hold us responsible for your noble sentiments.” So they passed me from one to the other and nothing. Still I love the country very much. I have lost everything here but I have more than anyone has in Europe. To me it is always interesting. The natives and the language. I have many books of notes on them. Then too, in reality, I am a king here. It is very pleasant. Waking in the morning I extend one foot and the boy places the sock on it. When I am ready I extend the other foot and he adjusts the other sock. I step from under the mosquito bar into my drawers which are held for me. Don’t you think that is very marvellous?’

‘It’s marvellous.’

‘When you come back another time we must take a safari to study the natives. And shoot nothing, or only to eat. Look, I will show you a dance and sing a song.’

Crouched, elbows lifting and falling, knees humping, he shuffled around the table, singing. Undoubtedly it was very fine.

‘That is only one of a thousand,’ he said. ‘Now I must go for a time. You will be sleeping.’

‘There’s no hurry. Stay around.’

‘No. Surely you will be sleeping. I also. I will take the butter to keep it cool.’

‘We’ll see you at supper,’ Pop said.

‘Now you must sleep. Good-bye.’

After he was gone, Pop said: ‘I wouldn’t believe all that about the Aga Khan, you know.’

‘It sounded pretty good.’

‘Of course he feels badly,’ Pop said. ‘Who wouldn’t. Von Lettöw was a hell of a man.’

‘He’s very intelligent,’ my wife said. ‘He talks wonderfully about the natives. But he’s bitter about American women.’

‘So am I,’ said Pop. ‘He’s a good man. You better get some shut-eye. You’ll need to start about three-thirty.’

‘Have them call me.’

Molo raised the back of the tent, propping it with sticks, so the wind blew through and I went to sleep reading, the wind coming in cool and fresh under the heated canvas.

When I woke it was time to go. There were rain clouds in the sky and it was very hot. They had packed some tinned fruit, a five-pound piece of roast meat, bread, tea, a tea pot, and some tinned milk in a whisky box with four bottles of beer. There was a canvas water bag and a ground cloth to use as a tent. M’Cola was taking the big gun out to the car.

‘There’s no hurry about getting back,’ Pop said. ‘We’ll look for you when we see you.’

‘All right.’

‘We’ll send the lorry to haul that sportsman into Handeni. He’s sending his men ahead walking.’

‘You’re sure the lorry can stand it? Don’t do it because he’s a friend of mine.’

‘Have to get him out. The lorry will be in to-night.’

‘The Memsahib’s still asleep,’ I said. ‘Maybe she can get out for a walk and shoot some guineas?’

‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about us. Oh, I hope you get them.’

‘Don’t send out to look for us along the road until day after to-morrow,’ I said. ‘If there’s a good chance we’ll stay.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Good luck, sweet. Good-bye, Mr. J. P.’

CHAPTER TWO

We were out from under the shade of camp and along the sandy river of a road, driving into the western sun, the bush thick to the edge of the sand, solid as a thicket, the little hills rising above it, and all along the road we passed groups of people making their way to the westward. Some were naked except for a greasy cloth knotted over one shoulder, and carried bows and sealed quivers of arrows. Others carried spears. The wealthy carried umbrellas and wore draped white cloth and their women walked behind them, with their pots and pans. Bundles and loads of skins were scattered along ahead on the heads of other natives. All were travelling away from the famine. And in the heat, my feet out over the side of the car to keep them away from the heat of the engine, hat low over the eyes against the sun, watching the road, the people, and all clearings in the bush for game, we drove to the westward.

Once we saw three lesser kudu cows in an open place of broken bush. Grey, big bellied, long necked, small headed, and with big ears, they moved quickly into the woods and were gone. We left the car and tracked them but there was no bull track.

A little beyond there a flock of guineas quick-legged across the road running steady-headed with the motion of trotters. As I jumped from the car and sprinted after them they rocketed up, their legs tucked close beneath them, heavy-bodied, short wings drumming, cackling, to go over the trees ahead. I dropped two that thumped hard when they fell and as they lay, wings beating, Abdullah cut their heads off so they would be legal eating. He put them in the car where M’Cola sat laughing; his old man’s healthy laugh, his making-fun-of-me laugh, his bird-shooting laugh that dated from a streak of raging misses one time that had delighted him. Now when I killed, it was a joke, as when we shot a hyena; the funniest joke of all. He laughed always to see the birds tumble and when I missed he roared and shook his head again and again.

‘Ask him what the hell he’s laughing about?’ I asked Pop once.

‘At B’wana,’ M’Cola said, and shook his head, ‘at the little birds.’

‘He thinks you’re funny,’ Pop said.

‘Goddam it. I am funny. But the hell with him.’

‘He thinks you’re very funny,’ Pop said. ‘Now the Memsahib and I would never laugh.’

‘Shoot them yourself.’

‘No, you’re the bird shot. The self-confessed bird shot,’ she said.

So bird shooting became this marvellous joke. If I killed, the joke was on the birds and M’Cola would shake his head and laugh and make his hands go round and round to show how the bird turned over in the air. And if I missed, I was the clown of the piece and he would look at me and shake with laughing. Only the hyenas were funnier.

Highly humorous was the hyena obscenely loping, full belly dragging, at daylight on the plain, who, shot from the stern, skittered on into speed to tumble end over end. Mirth provoking was the hyena that stopped out of range by an alkali lake to look back and, hit in the chest, went over on his back, his four feet and his full belly in the air. Nothing could be more jolly than the hyena coming suddenly wedge-headed and stinking out of high grass by a donga, hit at ten yards, who raced his tail in three narrowing, scampering circles until he died.

It was funny to M’Cola to see a hyena shot at close range. There was that comic slap of the bullet and the hyena’s agitated surprise to find death inside of him. It was funnier to see a hyena shot at a great distance, in the heat shimmer of the plain, to see him go over backwards, to see him start that frantic circle, to see that electric speed that meant that he was racing the little nickeled death inside him. But the great joke of all, the thing M’Cola waved his hands across his face about, and turned away and shook his head and laughed, ashamed even of the hyena; the pinnacle of hyenic humour, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself until he pulled his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating them with relish.

‘Fisi,’ M’Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at there being such an awful beast. Fisi, the hyena, hermaphroditic, self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept, sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul, with jaws that crack the bones the lion leaves, belly dragging, loping away on the brown plain, looking back, mongrel dog-smart in the face; whack from the little Mannlicher and then the horrid circle starting. ‘Fisi,’ M’Cola laughed, ashamed of him, shaking his bald black head. ‘Fisi. Eats himself. Fisi.’

The hyena was a dirty joke but bird shooting was a clean joke. My whisky was a clean joke. There were many variations of that joke. Some we come to later. The Mohammedans and all religions were a joke. A joke on all the people who had them. Charo, the other gun bearer, was short, very serious and highly religious. All Ramadan he never swallowed his saliva until sunset and when the sun was almost down I’d see him watching nervously. He had a bottle with him of some sort of tea and he would finger it and watch the sun and I would see M’Cola watching him and pretending not to see. This was not outrightly funny to him. This was something that he could not laugh about openly but that he felt superior to and wondered at the silliness of it. The Mohammedan religion was very fashionable and all the higher social grades among the boys were Mohammedans. It was something that gave caste, something to believe in, something fashionable and god-giving to suffer a little for each year, something that made you superior to other people, something that gave you more complicated habits of eating, something that I understood and M’Cola did not understand, nor care about, and he watched Charo watch for the sun to set with that blank look on his face that it put on about all things that he was not a part of. Charo was deadly thirsty and truly devout and the sun set very slowly. I looked at it, red over the trees, nudged him and he grinned. M’Cola offered me the water bottle solemnly. I shook my head and Charo grinned again. M’Cola looked blank. Then the sun was down and Charo had the bottle tilted up, his Adam’s apple rising and falling greedily and M’Cola looking at him and then looking away.

In the early days, before we became good friends, he did not trust me at all. When anything came up he went into this blankness. I liked Charo much better then. We understood each other on the question of religion and Charo admired my shooting and always shook hands and smiled when we had killed anything particularly good. This was flattering and pleasing. M’Cola looked on all this early shooting as a series of lucky accidents. We were supposed to shoot. We had not yet shot anything that amounted to anything and he was not really my gun bearer. He was Mr. Jackson Phillip’s gun bearer and he had been loaned to me. I meant nothing to him. He did not like me nor dislike me. He was politely contemptuous of Karl. Who he liked was Mama.

The evening we killed the first lion it was dark when we came in sight of camp. The killing of the lion had been confused and unsatisfactory. It was agreed beforehand that P.O.M. should have the first shot but since it was the first lion any of us had ever shot at, and it was very late in the day, really too late to take the lion on, once he was hit we were to make a dogfight of it and anyone was free to get him. This was a good plan as it was nearly sundown and if the lion got into cover, wounded, it would be too dark to do anything about it without a mess. I remember seeing the lion looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby looking tree in a patch of orchard bush and P.O.M. kneeling to shoot and wanting to tell her to sit down and make sure of him. Then there was the short-barrelled explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging, cat run. I hit him with the Springfield and he went down and spun over and I shot again, too quickly, and threw a cloud of dirt over him. But there he was, stretched out, on his belly, and, with the sun just over the top of the trees, and the grass very green, we walked up on him like a posse, or a gang of Black and Tans, guns ready and cocked, not knowing whether he was stunned or dead. When we were close M’Cola threw a stone at him. It hit him in the flank and from the way it hit you could tell he was a dead animal. I was sure P.O.M. had hit him but there was only one bullet hole, well back, just below the spine and ranging forward to come to the surface under the skin of the chest. You could feel the bullet under the skin and M’Cola made a slit and cut it out. It was a 220-grain solid bullet from the Springfield and it had raked him, going through lungs and heart.

I was so surprised by the way he had rolled over dead from the shot after we had been prepared for a charge, for heroics, and for drama, that I felt more let down than pleased. It was our first lion and we were very ignorant and this was not what we had paid to see. Charo and M’Cola both shook P.O.M.’s hand and then Charo came over and shook hands with me.

‘Good shot, B’wana,’ he said in Swahili. ‘Piga m’uzuri.’

‘Did you shoot, Karl?’ I asked.

‘No. I was just going to when you shot.’

‘You didn’t shoot him, Pop?’

‘No. You’d have heard it.’ He opened the breech and took out the two big ·450 No. 2’s.

‘I’m sure I missed him,’ P.O.M. said.

‘I was sure you hit him. I still think you hit him,’ I said.

‘Mama hit,’ M’Cola said.

‘Where?’ Charo asked.

‘Hit,’ said M’Cola. ‘Hit.’

‘You rolled him over,’ Pop said to me. ‘God, he went over like a rabbit.’

‘I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Mama piga,’ M’Cola said. ‘Piga Simba.’

As we saw the camp fire in the dark ahead of us, coming in that night, M’Cola suddenly commenced to shout a stream of high-pitched, rapid, singing words in Wakamba ending in the word ‘Simba’. Someone at the camp shouted back one word.

‘Mama!’ M’Cola shouted. Then another long stream. Then ‘Mama! Mama!’

Through the dark came all the porters, the cook, the skinner, the boys, and the headman.

‘Mama!’ M’Cola shouted. ‘Mama piga Simba.’

The boys came dancing, crowing, and beating time and chanting something from down in their chests that started like a cough and sounded like ‘Hey la Mama! Hay la Mama! Hey la Mama!’

The rolling-eyed skinner picked P.O.M. up, the big cook and the boys held her, and the others pressing forward to lift and if not to lift to touch and hold, they danced and sang through the dark around the fire and to our tent.

‘Hey la Mama! huh! huh! huh! Hay la Mama! huh! huh! huh!’ they sang the lion dance with that deep, lion asthmatic cough in it. Then at the tent they put her down and everyone, very shyly, shook hands, the boys saying ‘m’uzuri, Memsahib,’ and M’Cola and the porters all saying ‘m’uzuri, Mama’ with much feeling in the accenting of the word ‘Mama’.

Afterwards in the chairs in front of the fire, sitting with the drinks, Pop said, ‘You shot it. M’Cola would kill anyone who said you didn’t.’

‘You know, I feel as though I did shoot it,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I don’t believe I’d be able to stand it if I really had shot it. I’d be too proud. Isn’t triumph marvellous?’

‘Good old Mama,’ Karl said.

‘I believe you did shoot him,’ I said.

‘Oh, let’s not go into that,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I feel so wonderful about just being supposed to have killed him. You know people never used to carry me on their shoulders much at home.’

‘No one knows how to behave in America,’ Pop said. ‘Most uncivilized.’

‘We’ll carry you in Key West,’ Karl said. ‘Poor old Mama.’

‘Let’s not talk about it,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I like it too much. Shouldn’t I maybe distribute largess?’

‘They didn’t do it for that,’ Pop said. ‘But it is all right to give something to celebrate.’

‘Oh, I want to give them all a great deal of money,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Isn’t triumph simply marvellous?’

‘Good old Mama,’ I said. ‘You killed him.’

‘No, I didn’t. Don’t lie to me. Just let me enjoy my triumph.’

Anyway M’Cola did not trust me for a long time. Until P.O.M.’s licence ran out, she was his favourite and we were simply a lot of people who interfered and kept Mama from shooting things. Once her licence was out and she was no longer shooting, she dropped back into non-combatant status with him and as we began to hunt kudu and Pop stayed in camp and sent us out alone with the trackers, Karl with Charo and M’Cola and I together, M’Cola dropped Pop visibly in his estimation. It was only temporary of course. He was Pop’s man and I believe his working estimations were only from day to day and required an unbroken series of events to have any meaning. But something had happened between us.

PART II. PURSUIT REMEMBERED

CHAPTER ONE

It dated back to the time of Droopy, after I had come back from being ill in Nairobi and we had gone on a foot safari to hunt rhino in the forest. Droopy was a real savage with lids to his eyes that nearly covered them, handsome, with a great deal of style, a fine hunter and a beautiful tracker. He was about thirty-five, I should think, and wore only a piece of cloth knotted over one shoulder, and a fez that some hunter had given him. He always carried a spear. M’Cola wore an old U.S. Army khaki tunic, complete with buttons, that had originally been brought out for Droopy, who had been away somewhere and had missed getting it. Twice Pop had brought it out for Droopy and finally M’Cola had said, ‘Give it to me’.

Pop had let him have it and M’Cola had worn it ever since. It, a pair of shorts, his fuzzy wool curler’s cap, and a knitted army sweater he wore when washing the tunic, were the only garments I ever saw on the old man until he took my bird-shooting coat. For shoes he used sandals cut from old motor-car tyres. He had slim, handsome legs with well-turned ankles on the style of Babe Ruth’s and I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw him with the tunic off and noticed how old his upper body was. It had that aged look you see in photographs of Jeffries and Sharkey posing thirty years after, the ugly, old-man biceps and the fallen pectoral muscles.

‘How old is M’Cola?’ I asked Pop.

‘He must be over fifty,’ Pop said. ‘He’s got a grown-up family in the native reserve.’

‘How are his kids?’

‘No good, worthless. He can’t handle them. We tried one as a porter. But he was no good.’

M’Cola was not jealous of Droopy. He simply knew that Droopy was a better man than he was. More of a hunter, a faster and a cleaner tracker, and a great stylist in everything he did. He admired Droopy in the same way we did and being out with him, it made him realize that he was wearing Droopy’s tunic and that he had been a porter before he became a gun bearer and suddenly he ceased being an old timer and we were hunting together; he and I hunting together and Droopy in command of the show.

That had been a fine hunt. The afternoon of the day we came into the country we walked about four miles from camp along a deep rhino trail that graded through the grassy hills with their abandoned orchard-looking trees, as smoothly and evenly as though an engineer had planned it. The trail was a foot deep in the ground and smoothly worn and we left it where it slanted down through a divide in the hills like a dry irrigation ditch and climbed, sweating, the small, steep hill on the right to sit there with our backs against the hilltop and glass the country. It was a green, pleasant country, with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of a mountain, and it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the thick timber on the mountain. Fingers of the forest came down on to the head of some of the slopes and it was there, at the forest edge, that we watched for rhino to come out. If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.

We all lay there on the hillside and watched the country carefully for rhino. Droopy was on the other side of the hilltop, squatted on his heels, looking, and M’Cola sat below us. There was a cool breeze from the east and it blew the grass in waves on the hillsides. There were many large white clouds and the tall trees of the forest on the mountain side grew so closely and were so foliaged that it looked as though you could walk on their tops. Behind this mountain there was a gap and then another mountain and the far mountain was dark blue with forest in the distance.

Until five o’clock we did not see anything. Then, without the glasses, I saw something moving over the shoulder of one of the valleys toward a strip of the timber. In the glasses it was a rhino, showing very clear and minute at the distance, red-coloured in the sun, moving with a quick waterbug-like motion across the hill. Then there were three more of them that came out of the forest, dark in the shadow, and two that fought, tinily, in the glasses, pushing head-on, fighting in front of a clump of bushes while we watched them and the light failed. It was too dark to get down the hill, across the valley and up the narrow slope of mountain side to them in time for a shot. So we went back to the camp, down the hill in the dark, edging down on our shoes and then feeling the trail smooth under foot, walking along that deep trail, that wound through the dark hills, until we saw the firelight in the trees.

We were excited that night because we had seen the three rhino and early the next morning while we were eating breakfast before starting out, Droopy came in to report a herd of buffalo he had found feeding at the edge of the forest not two miles from camp. We went there, still tasting coffee and kippers in the early morning heart-pounding of excitement, and the native Droopy had left watching them pointed where they had crossed a deep gulch and gone into an open patch of forest. He said there were two big bulls in a herd of a dozen or more. We followed them in, moving very quietly on the game trails, pushing the vines aside and seeing the tracks and the quantities of fresh dung, but though we went on into the forest, where it was too thick to shoot and made a wide circle, we did not see or hear them. Once we heard the tick birds and saw them flying, but that was all. There were numbers of rhino trails there in the woods and many strawy piles of dung, but we saw nothing but the green wood-pigeons and some monkeys, and when we came out we were wet to our waists from the dew, and the sun was quite high. The day was very hot, now before the wind had gotten up, and we knew whatever rhino and buffalo had been out would have gone back deep into the forest to rest out of the heat.

The others started back to camp with Pop and M’Cola. There was no meat in camp, and I wanted to hunt back in a circle with Droopy to see if we could kill a piece. I was beginning to feel strong again after the dysentery and it was a pleasure to walk in the easy rolling country, simply to walk, and to be able to hunt, not knowing what we might see and free to shoot for the meat we needed. Then, too, I liked Droopy and liked to watch him walk. He strode very loosely and with a slight lift, and I liked to watch him and to feel the grass under my soft-soled boots and the pleasant weight of the rifle, held just back of the muzzle, the barrel resting on my shoulder, and the sun hot enough to sweat you well as it burned the dew from the grass; with the breeze starting and the country like an abandoned New England orchard to walk through. I knew that I was shooting well again and I wanted to make a shot to impress Droopy.

From the top of one rise we saw two kongoni showing yellow on a hillside about a mile away and I motioned to Droop that we would go after them. We started down and in a ravine jumped a waterbuck bull and two cows. Waterbuck was the one animal we might get that I knew was worthless as meat and I had shot a better head than this one carried. I had the sights on the buck as he tore away, remembered about the worthless meat, and having the head, and did not shoot.

‘No shoot kuro?’ Droopy asked in Swahili. ‘Doumi sana. A good bull.’

I tried to tell him that I had a better one and that it was no good to eat.

He grinned.

‘Piga kongoni m’uzuri.’

‘Piga’ was a fine word. It sounded exactly as the command to fire should sound or the announcement of a hit. ‘M’uzuri’, meaning good, well, better, had sounded too much like the name of a state for a long time, and walking I used to make up sentences in Swahili with Arkansas and M’usuri in them, but now it seemed natural, no longer to be italicized, just as all the words came to seem the proper and natural words and there was nothing odd or unseemly in the stretching of the ears, in the tribal scars, or in a man carrying a spear. The tribal marks and the tattooed places seemed natural and handsome adornments and I regretted not having any of my own. My own scars were all informal, some irregular and sprawling, others simply puffy welts. I had one on my forehead that people still commented on, asking if I had bumped my head; but Droop had handsome ones beside his cheekbones and others, symmetrical and decorative, on his chest and belly. I was thinking that I had one good one, a sort of embossed Christmas tree, on the bottom of my right foot that only served to wear out socks, when we jumped two reedbuck. They went off through the trees and then stood at sixty yards, the thin, graceful buck looking back, and I shot him high and a touch behind the shoulder. He gave a jump and went off very fast.

‘Piga.’ Droopy smiled. We had both heard the whunk of the bullet.

‘Kufa,’ I told him. ‘Dead.’

But when we came up to him, lying on his side, his heart was still beating strongly, although to all appearances he was dead. Droopy had no skinning knife and I had only a penknife to stick him with. I felt for the heart behind the foreleg with my fingers and feeling it beating under the hide slipped the knife in but it was short and pushed the heart away. I could feel it, hot and rubbery against my fingers, and feel the knife push it, but I felt around and cut the big artery and the blood came hot against my fingers. Once bled, I started to open him, with the little knife, still showing off to Droopy, and emptying him neatly took out the liver, cut away the gall, and laying the liver on a hummock of grass, put the kidneys beside it.

Droopy asked for the knife. Now he was going to show me something. Skilfully he slit open the stomach and turned it inside, tripe side, out, emptying the grass in it on the ground, shook it, then put the liver and kidneys inside it and with the knife cut a switch from the tree the buck lay under and sewed the stomach together with the withe so that the tripe made a bag to carry the other delicacies in. Then he cut a pole and put the bag on the end of it, running it through the flaps, and put it over his shoulder in the way tramps carried their property in a handkerchief on the end of a stick in Blue Jay corn plaster advertisements when we were children. It was a good trick and I thought how I would show it to John Staib in Wyoming some time and he would smile his deaf man’s smile (you had to throw pebbles at him to make him stop when you heard a bull bugle), and I knew what John would say. He would say, ‘By Godd, Urnust, dot’s smardt’.

Droop handed me the stick, then took off his single garment, made a sling and got the buck up on his back. I tried to help him and suggested by signs that we cut a pole and sling him, carrying him between us, but he wanted to carry him alone. So we started for camp, me with the tripe bag on the end of a stick over my shoulder, my rifle slung, and Droopy staggering steadily ahead, sweating heavily, under the buck. I tried to get him to hang him in a tree and leave him until we could send out a couple of porters, and to that end we put him in the crotch of a tree. But when Droopy saw that I meant to go off and leave him there rather than simply allow him to drain he got him down on to his shoulders again and we went on into camp, the boys, around the cooking fire, all laughing at the tripe bag over my shoulder as we came in.

This was the kind of hunting that I liked. No riding in cars, the country broken up instead of the plains, and I was completely happy. I had been quite ill and had that pleasant feeling of getting stronger each day. I was underweight, had a great appetite for meat, and could eat all I wanted without feeling stuffy. Each day I sweated out whatever we drank sitting at the fire at night, and in the heat of the day, now, I lay in the shade with a breeze in the trees and read with no obligation and no compulsion to write, happy in knowing that at four o’clock we would be starting out to hunt again. I would not even write a letter. The only person I really cared about, except the children, was with me, and I had no wish to share this life with anyone who was not there, only to live it, being completely happy and quite tired. I knew that I was shooting well and I had that feeling of well-being and confidence that is so much more pleasant to have than to hear about.

As it turned out, we started soon after three to be on the hill by four. But it was nearly five before we saw the first rhino come bustling short-leggedly across the ridge of hill in almost the same place we had seen the rhino the night before. We sat where he went into the edge of the forest near where we had seen the two fighting and then took a course that would lead us down the hill, across the grown-over gully at the bottom, and up the steep slope to where there was a thorn tree with yellow blossoms that marked the place where we had seen the rhino go in.

Coming straight up the slope in sight of the thorn tree, the wind blowing across the hill, I tried to walk as slowly as I could and put a handkerchief inside the sweatband of my hat to keep the perspiration out of my glasses. I expected to shoot at any minute and I wanted to slow up enough so my heart would not be pounding. In shooting large animals there is no reason ever to miss if you have a clear shot and can shoot and know where to shoot, unless you are unsteady from a run or a climb or fog your glasses, break them or run out of cloth or paper to wipe them clean. The glasses were the biggest hazard and I used to carry four handkerchiefs and change them from the left to the right pocket when they were wet.

We came up to the yellow blossomed tree very carefully, like people walking up to a bevy of quail the dogs have pointed, and the rhino was not in sight. We went all through the edge of the forest and it was full of tracks and fresh rhino sign, but there was no rhino. The sun was setting and it was getting too dark to shoot, but we followed the forest around the side of the mountain, hoping to see a rhino in the open glades. When it was almost too dark to shoot, I saw Droopy stop and crouch. With his head down he motioned us forward. Crawling up, we saw a large rhino and a small one standing chest deep in brush, facing us across a little valley.

‘Cow and calf,’ Pop said softly. ‘Can’t shoot her. Let me look at her horn.’ He took the glasses from M’Cola.

‘Can she see us?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘No.’

‘How far are they?’

‘Must be nearly five hundred yards.’

‘My God, she looks big,’ I whispered.

‘She’s a big cow,’ Pop said. ‘Wonder what became of the bull?’ He was pleased and excited by the sight of game. ‘Too dark to shoot unless we’re right on him.’

The rhinos had turned and were feeding. They never seemed to move slowly. They either bustled or stood still.

‘What makes them so red?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘Rolling in the mud,’ Pop answered. ‘We better get along while there’s light.’

The sun was down when we came out of the forest and looked down the slope and across to the hill where we had watched from with our glasses. We should have back-tracked and gone down, crossed the gulch, and climbed back up the trail the way we had come, but we decided, like fools, to grade straight across the mountainside below the edge of the forest. So in the dark, following this ideal line, we descended into steep ravines that showed only as wooded patches until you were in them, slid down, clung to vines, stumbled and climbed and slid again, down and down, then steeply, impossibly, up, hearing the rustle of night things and the cough of a leopard hunting baboons; me scared of snakes, and touching each root and branch with snake fear in the dark.

To go down and up two hands-and-knee climbing ravines and then out into the moonlight and the long, too-steep shoulder of mountain that you climbed one foot up to the other, one foot after the other, one stride at a time, leaning forward against the grade and the altitude, dead tired and gun weary, single file in the moonlight across the slope, on up and to the top where it was easy, the country spread in the moonlight, then up and down and on, through the small hills, tired but now in sight of the fires and on into camp.

So then you sit, bundled against the evening chill, at the fire, with a whisky and soda, waiting for the announcement that the canvas bath had been a quarter filled with hot water.

‘Bathi, B’wana.’

‘Goddamn it, I could never hunt sheep again,’ you say.

‘I never could,’ says P.O.M. ‘You all made me.’

‘You climbed better than any of us.’

‘Do you suppose we could hunt sheep again, Pop?’

‘I wonder,’ Pop said. ‘I suppose it’s merely condition.’

‘It’s riding in the damned cars that ruins us.’

‘If we did that walk every night we could come back in three nights from now and never feel it.’

‘Yes. But I’d be as scared of snakes if we did it every night for a year.’

‘You’d get over it.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They scare me stiff. Do you remember that time we touched hands behind the tree?’

‘Rather,’ said Pop. ‘You jumped two yards. Are you really afraid of them, or only talking?’

‘They scare me sick,’ I said. ‘They always have.’

‘What’s the matter with you men?’ P.O.M. said. ‘Why haven’t I heard anything about the war to-night?’

‘We’re too tired. Were you in the war, Pop?’

‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Where is that boy with the whisky?’ Then calling in that feeble, clowning falsetto, ‘Kayti . . . Katy-ay!’

‘Bathi,’ said Molo again softly, but insistently.

‘Too tired.’

‘Memsahib bathi,’ Molo said hopefully.

‘I’ll go,’ said P.O.M. ‘But you two hurry up with your drinking. I’m hungry.’

‘Bathi,’ said Kayti severely to Pop.

‘Bathi yourself,’ said Pop. ‘Don’t bully me.’

Kayti turned away in fire-lit slanting smile.

‘All right. All right,’ said Pop. ‘Going to have one?’ he asked.

‘We’ll have just one,’ I said, ‘and then we’ll bathi.’

‘Bathi, B’wana M’Kumba,’ Molo said. P.O.M. came toward the fire wearing her blue dressing-gown and mosquito boots.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You can have another when you come out. There’s nice, warm, muddy water.’

‘They bully us,’ Pop said.

‘Do you remember the time we were sheep hunting and your hat blew off and nearly fell on to the ram?’ I asked her, the whisky racing my mind back to Wyoming.

‘Go take your bathi,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’m going to have a gimlet.’

In the morning we were dressed before daylight, ate breakfast, and were hunting the forest edge and the sunken valleys where Droop had seen the buffalo before the sun was up. But they were not there. It was a long hunt and we came back to camp and decided to send the lorries for porters and move with a foot safari to where there was supposed to be water in a stream that came down out of the mountain beyond where we had seen the rhinos the night before. Being camped there we could hunt a new country along the forest edge and we would be much closer to the mountain.

The trucks were to bring in Karl from his kudu camp where he seemed to be getting disgusted, or discouraged, or both, and he could go down to the Rift Valley the next day and kill some meat and try for an oryx. If we found good rhino we would send for him. We did not want to fire any shots where we were going except at rhino in order not to scare them, and we needed meat. The rhino seemed very shy and I knew from Wyoming how the shy game will all shift out of a small country, a country being an area, a valley or range of hills, a man can hunt in, after a shot or two. We planned this all out, Pop consulting with Droopy, and then sent the lorries off with Dan to recruit porters.

Late in the afternoon they were back with Karl, his outfit, and forty M’Bulus, good-looking savages with a pompous headman who wore the only pair of shorts among them. Karl was thin now, his skin sallow, his eyes very tired looking and he seemed a little desperate. He had been eight days in the kudu camp in the hills, hunting hard, with no one with him who spoke any English, and they had only seen two cows and jumped a bull out of range. The guides claimed they had seen another bull but Karl had thought it was kongoni, or that they said it was a kongoni, and had not shot. He was bitter about this and it was not a happy outfit.

‘I never saw his horns. I don’t believe it was a bull,’ he said. Kudu hunting was a touchy subject with him now and we let it alone.

‘He’ll get an oryx down there and he’ll feel better,’ Pop said. ‘It’s gotten on his nerves a little.’

Karl agreed to the plan for us to move ahead into the new country, and for him to go down for meat.

‘Whatever you say,’ he said. ‘Absolutely whatever you say.’

‘It will give him some shooting,’ Pop said. ‘Then he’ll feel better.’

‘We’ll get one. Then you get one. Whoever gets his first can go on down after oryx. You’ll probably get an oryx to-morrow anyway when you’re hunting meat.’

‘Whatever you say,’ Karl said. His mind was bitterly revolving eight blank days of hill climbing in the heat, out before daybreak, back at dark, hunting an animal whose Swahili name he could not then remember, with trackers in whom he had no confidence, coming back to eat alone, no one to whom he could talk, his wife nine thousand miles and three months away, and how was his dog and how was his job, and god-damn it where were they and what if he missed one when he got a shot, he wouldn’t, you never missed when it was really important, he was sure of that, that was one of the tenets of his faith, but what if he got excited and missed, and why didn’t he get any letters, what did the guide say kongoni for that time, they did, he knew they did, but he said nothing of all that, only, ‘Whatever you say’, a little desperately.

‘Come on, cheer up, you bastard,’ I said.

‘I’m cheerful. What’s the matter with you?’

‘Have a drink.’

‘I don’t want a drink. I want a kudu.’

Later Pop said, ‘I thought he’d do well off by himself with no one to hurry him or rattle him. He’ll be all right. He’s a good lad.’

‘He wants someone to tell him exactly what to do and still leave him alone and not rattle him,’ I said. ‘It’s hell for him to shoot in front of everybody. He’s not a damned show-off like me.’

‘He made a damned fine shot at that leopard,’ Pop said.

‘Two of them,’ I said. ‘The second was as good as the first. Hell, he can shoot. On the range he’ll shoot the pants off of any of us. But he worries about it and I rattle him trying to get him to speed up.’

‘You’re a little hard on him sometimes,’ Pop said.

‘Hell, he knows me. He knows what I think of him. He doesn’t mind.’

‘I still think he’ll find himself off by himself,’ Pop said. ‘It’s just a question of confidence. He’s really a good shot.’

‘He’s got the best buff, the best waterbuck, and the best lion, now,’ I said. ‘He’s got nothing to worry about.’

‘The Memsahib has the best lion, brother. Don’t make any mistake about that.’

‘I’m glad of that. But he’s got a damned fine lion and a big leopard. Everything he has is good. We’ve got plenty of time. He’s got nothing to worry about. What the hell is he so gloomy about?’

‘We’ll get an early start in the morning so we can finish it off before it gets too hot for the little Memsahib.’

‘She’s in the best shape of any one.’

‘She’s marvellous. She’s like a little terrier.’

We went out that afternoon and glassed the country from the hills and never saw a thing. That night after supper we were in the tent. P.O.M. disliked intensely being compared to a little terrier. If she must be like any dog, and she did not wish to be, she would prefer a wolfhound, something lean, racy, long-legged and ornamental. Her courage was so automatic and so much a simple state of being that she never thought of danger; then, too, danger was in the hands of Pop and for Pop she had a complete, clear-seeing, absolutely trusting adoration. Pop was her ideal of how a man should be, brave, gentle, comic, never losing his temper, never bragging, never complaining except in a joke, tolerant, understanding, intelligent, drinking a little too much as a good man should, and, to her eyes, very handsome.

‘Don’t you think Pop’s handsome?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Droopy’s handsome.’

‘Droopy’s beautiful. But don’t you really think Pop’s handsome?’

‘Hell, no. I like him as well as any man I’ve ever known, but I’m damned if he’s handsome.’

‘I think he’s lovely looking. But you understand about how I feel about him, don’t you?’

‘Sure. I’m as fond of the bastard myself.’

‘But don’t you think he’s handsome, really?’

‘Nope.’

Then, a little later:

‘Well, who’s handsome to you?’

‘Belmonte and Pop. And you.’

‘Don’t be patriotic,’ I said. ‘Who’s a beautiful woman?’

‘Garbo.’

‘Not any more. Josie is. Margot is.’

‘Yes, they are. I know I’m not.’

‘You’re lovely.’

‘Let’s talk about Mr. J. P. I don’t like you to call him Pop. It’s not dignified.’

‘He and I aren’t dignified together.’

‘Yes, but I’m dignified with him. Don’t you think he’s wonderful?’

‘Yes, and he doesn’t have to read books written by some female he’s tried to help get published saying how he’s yellow.’

‘She’s just jealous and malicious. You never should have helped her. Some people never forgive that.’

‘It’s a shame, though, with all that talent gone to malice and nonsense and self-praise. It’s a goddamned shame, really. It’s a shame you never knew her before she went to pot. You know a funny thing; she never could write dialogue. It was terrible. She learned how to do it from my stuff and used it in that book. She had never written like that before. She never could forgive learning that and she was afraid people would notice it, where she’d learned it, so she had to attack me. It’s a funny racket, really. But I swear she was nice before she got ambitious. You would have liked her then, really.’

‘Maybe, but I don’t think so,’ said P.O.M. ‘We have fun though, don’t we? Without all those people.’

‘God damn it if we don’t. I’ve had a better time every year since I can remember.’

‘But isn’t Mr. J. P. wonderful? Really?’

‘Yes. He’s wonderful.’

‘Oh, you’re nice to say it. Poor Karl.’

‘Why?’

‘Without his wife.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Poor Karl.’

CHAPTER TWO

So in the morning, again, we started ahead of the porters and went down and across the hills and through a deeply forested valley and then up and across a long rise of country with high grass that made the walking difficult, and on and up and across, resting sometimes in the shade of a tree, and then on and up and down and across, all in high grass now, that you had to break a trail in, and the sun was very hot. The five of us in single file, Droop and M’Cola with a big gun apiece, hung with musettes and water bottles and the cameras, we all sweating in the sun, Pop and I with guns and the Memsahib trying to walk like Droopy, her Stetson tilted on one side, happy to be on a trip, pleased about how comfortable her boots were, we came finally to a thicket of thorn trees over a ravine that ran down from the side of a ridge to the water and we leaned the guns against the trees and went in under the close shade and lay on the ground. P.O.M. got the books out of one of the musettes and she and Pop read while I followed the ravine down to the little stream that came out of the mountainside, and found a fresh lion track and many rhino tunnels in the tall grass that came higher than your head. It was very hot climbing back up the sandy ravine and I was glad to lean my back against the tree trunk and read in Tolstoy’s Sevastopol. It was a very young book and had one fine description of fighting in it, where the French take the redoubt, and I thought about Tolstoy and about what a great advantage an experience of war was to a writer. It was one of the major subjects and certainly one of the hardest to write truly of, and those writers who had not seen it were always very jealous and tried to make it seem unimportant, or abnormal, or a disease as a subject, while, really, it was just something quite irreplaceable that they had missed. Then Sevastopol made me think of the Boulevard Sevastopol in Paris, about riding a bicycle down it in the rain on the way home from Strassburg and the slipperiness of the rails of the tram cars and the feeling of riding on greasy, slippery asphalt and cobble stones in traffic in the rain, and how we had nearly lived on the Boulevard du Temple that time, and I remembered the look of that apartment, how it was arranged, and the wall paper, and instead we had taken the upstairs of the pavilion in Notre Dame des Champs in the courtyard with the sawmill (and the sudden whine of the saw, the smell of sawdust and the chestnut tree over the roof with a mad woman downstairs), and the year worrying about money (all of the stories back in the post that came in through a slit in the saw-mill door, with notes of rejection that would never call them stories, but always anecdotes, sketches, contes, etc. They did not want them, and we lived on poireaux and drank cahors and water), and how fine the fountains were at the Place de L’Observatoire (water sheen rippling on the bronze of horses’ manes, bronze breasts and shoulders, green under thin-flowing water), and when they put up the bust of Flaubert in the Luxembourg on the short cut through the gardens on the way to the rue Soufflot (one that we believed in, loved without criticism, heavy now in stone as an idol should be). He had not seen war but he had seen a revolution and the Commune, and a revolution is much the best if you do not become bigoted because every one speaks the same language. Just as civil war is the best war for a writer, the most complete. Stendhal had seen a war and Napoleon taught him to write. He was teaching everybody then; but no one else learned. Dostoevski was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. He seemed sad, really, like Carnera. Tolstoy was a small man. Joyce was of medium height and he wore his eyes out. And that last night, drunk, with Joyce and the thing he kept quoting from Edgar Quinet, ‘Fraîche et rose comme au jour de la bataille’. I didn’t have it right I knew. And when you saw him he would take up a conversation interrupted three years before. It was nice to see a great writer in our time.

What I had to do was work. I did not care, particularly, how it all came out. I did not take my own life seriously any more, any one else’s life, yes, but not mine. They all wanted something that I did not want and I would get it without wanting it, if I worked. To work was the only thing, it was the one thing that always made you feel good, and in the meantime it was my own damned life and I would lead it where and how I pleased. And where I had led it now pleased me very much. This was a better sky than Italy. The hell it was. The best sky was in Italy and Spain and Northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba. You could beat this sky; but not the country.

All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already.

Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone, because if you have ever really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always; no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards, it makes no difference. Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly. I have loved country all my life; the country was always better than the people. I could only care about people a very few at a time.

P.O.M. was sleeping. She was always lovely to look at asleep, sleeping quietly, close curled like an animal, with nothing of the being dead look that Karl had asleep. Pop slept quietly too, you could see his soul was close in his body. His body no longer housed him fittingly. It had gone on and changed, thickening here, losing its lines, bloating a little there, but inside he was young and lean and tall and hard as when he galloped lion on the plain below Wami, and the pouches under his eyes were all outside, so that now I saw him asleep the way P.O.M. saw him always. M’Cola was an old man asleep, without history and without mystery. Droopy did not sleep. He sat on his heels and watched for the safari.

We saw them coming a long way off. At first the boxes just showed above the high grass, then a line of heads, then they were in a hollow, and there was only the point of a spear in the sun, then they came up a rise of ground and I could see the strung out line coming towards us. They had gone a little too far to the left and Droopy waved to signal them toward us. They made camp, Pop warning them to be quiet, and we sat under the dining tent and were comfortable in the chairs and talked. That night we hunted and saw nothing. The next morning we hunted and saw nothing and the next evening the same. It was very interesting but there were no results. The wind blew hard from the east and the ground was broken in short ridges of hills coming down close from the forest so you could not get above it without sending your scent on ahead of you on the wind to warn everything. You could not see into the sun in the evening, nor on the heavy shadowed hillsides to the west, beyond which the sun was setting at the time the rhino would be coming out of the forest; so all the country to the westward was a loss in the evening and in the country we could hunt we found nothing. Meat came in from Karl’s camp by some porters we sent back. They came in carrying quarters of tommy, grant, and wildebeeste, dusty, the meat seared dry by the sun, and the porters were happy, crouched around their fires roasting the meat on sticks. Pop was puzzled why the rhino were all gone. Each day we had seen less and we discussed whether it could be the full moon, that they fed out at night and were back in the forest in the morning before it was light, or that they winded us, or heard the men, and were simply shy and kept in the forest, or what was it? Me putting out the theories, Pop pricking them with his wit, sometimes considering them from politeness, sometimes with interest, like the one about the moon.

We went to bed early and in the night it rained a little, not a real rain but a shower from the mountains, and in the morning we were up before daylight and had climbed up to the top of the steep grassy ridge that looked down on to the camp, on to the ravine of the river bed, and across to the steep opposite bank of the stream, and from where we could see all the hilly slopes and the edge of the forest. It was not yet light when some geese flew overhead and the light was still too grey to be able to see the edge of the forest clearly in the glasses. We had scouts out on three different hill tops and we were waiting for it to be light enough for us to see them if they signalled.

Then Pop said, ‘Look at that son of a bitch’, and shouted at M’Cola to bring the rifles. M’Cola went jumping down the hill, and across the stream, directly opposite us, a rhino was running with a quick trot along the top of the bank. As we watched he speeded up and came, fast trotting, angling down across the face of the bank. He was a muddy red, his horn showed clearly, and there was nothing ponderous in his quick, purposeful movement. I was very excited at seeing him.

‘He’ll cross the stream,’ Pop said. ‘He’s shootable.’

M’Cola put the Springfield in my hand and I opened it to make sure I had solids. The Rhino was out of sight now but I could see the shaking of the high grass.

‘How far would you call it?’

‘All of three hundred.’

‘I’ll bust the son of a bitch.’

I was watching, freezing myself deliberately inside, stopping the excitement as you close a valve, going into that impersonal state you shoot from.

He showed, trotting into the shallow, boulder-filled stream. Thinking of one thing, that the shot was perfectly possible, but that I must lead him enough, must get ahead, I got on him, then well ahead of him, and squeezed off. I heard the whonk of the bullet and, from his trot, he seemed to explode forward. With a whooshing snort he smashed ahead, splashing water and snorting. I shot again and raised a little column of water behind him, and shot again as he went into the grass; behind him again.

‘Piga,’ M’Cola said. ‘Piga!’

Droopy agreed.

‘Did you hit him?’ Pop said.

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got him.’

Droopy was running and I re-loaded and ran off after him. Half the camp was strung out across the hills waving and yelling. The rhino had come in right below where they were and gone on up the valley towards where the forest came close down into the head of the valley.

Pop and P.O.M. came up. Pop with his big gun and M’Cola carrying mine.

‘Droopy will get the tracks,’ Pop said. ‘M’Cola swears you hit him.’

‘Piga!’ M’Cola said.

‘He snorted like a steam engine,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Didn’t he look wonderful going along there?’

‘He was late getting home with the milk,’ Pop said. ‘Are you sure you hit him? It was a godawful long shot.’

‘I know I hit him. I’m pretty sure I’ve killed him.’

‘Don’t tell any one if you did,’ Pop said. ‘They’ll never believe you. Look! Droopy’s got blood.’

Below, in the high grass, Droop was holding up a grass blade towards us. Then, stooped, he went on trailing fast by the blood spoor.

‘Piga,’ M’Cola said. ‘M’uzuri!’

‘We’ll keep up above where we can see if he makes a break,’ Pop said. ‘Look at Droopy.’

Droop had removed his fez and held it in his hand.

‘That’s all the precautions he needs,’ Pop said. ‘We bring up a couple of heavy guns and Droopy goes in after him with one article less of clothing.’

Below us Droopy and his partner who was trailing with him had stopped. Droopy held up his hand.

‘They hear him,’ Pop said. ‘Come on.’

We started toward them. Droopy came toward us and spoke to Pop.

‘He’s in there,’ Pop whispered. ‘They can hear the tick birds. One of the boys says he heard the faro, too. We’ll go in against the wind. You go ahead with Droopy. Let the Memsahib stay behind me. Take the big gun. All right.’

The rhino was in high grass, somewhere in there behind some bushes. As we went forward we heard a deep, moaning sort of groan. Droopy looked around at me and grinned. The noise came again, ending this time like a blood-choked sigh. Droopy was laughing. ‘Faro,’ he whispered and put his hand palm open on the side of his head in the gesture that means to go to sleep. Then in a jerky-flighted, sharp-beaked little flock we saw the tick birds rise and fly away. We knew where he was and, as we went slowly forward, parting the high grass, we saw him. He was on his side, dead.

‘Better shoot him once to make sure,’ Pop said. M’Cola handed me the Springfield he had been carrying. I noticed it was cocked, looked at M’Cola, furious with him, kneeled down and shot the rhino in the sticking place. He never moved. Droopy shook my hand and so did M’Cola.

‘He had that damned Springfield cocked,’ I said to Pop. The cocked gun, behind my back, made me black angry.

That meant nothing to M’Cola. He was very happy, stroking the rhino’s horn, measuring it with his fingers spread, looking for the bullet hole.

‘It’s on the side he’s lying on,’ I said.

‘You should have seen him when he was protecting Mama,’ Pop said. ‘That’s why he had the gun cocked.’

‘Can he shoot?’

‘No,’ Pop said. ‘But he would.’

‘Shoot me in the pants,’ I said. ‘Romantic bastard.’ When the whole outfit came up, we rolled the rhino into a sort of kneeling position and cut away the grass to take some pictures. The bullet hole was fairly high in the back, a little behind the lungs.

‘That was a hell of a shot,’ Pop said. ‘A hell of a shot. Don’t ever tell any one you made that one.’

‘You’ll have to give me a certificate.’

‘That would just make us both liars. They’re a strange beast, aren’t they?’

There he was, long-hulked, heavy-sided, prehistoric looking, the hide like vulcanized rubber and faintly transparent looking, scarred with a badly healed horn wound that the birds had pecked at, his tail thick, round, and pointed, flat many-legged ticks crawling on him, his ears fringed with hair, tiny pig eyes, moss growing on the base of his horn that grew out forward from his nose. M’Cola looked at him and shook his head. I agreed with him. This was the hell of an animal.

‘How is his horn?’

‘It isn’t bad,’ Pop said. ‘It’s nothing extra. That was a hell of a shot you made on him though, brother.’

‘M’Cola’s pleased with it,’ I said.

‘You’re pretty pleased with it yourself,’ P.O.M. said.

‘I’m crazy about it,’ I said. ‘But don’t let me start on it. Don’t worry about how I feel about it. I can wake up and think about that any night.’

‘And you’re a good tracker, and a hell of a fine bird shot, too,’ Pop said. ‘Tell us the rest of that.’

‘Lay off me. I only said that once when I was drunk.’

‘Once,’ said P.O.M. ‘Doesn’t he tell us that every night?’

‘By God, I am a good bird shot.’

‘Amazing,’ said Pop. ‘I never would have thought it. What else is it you do?’

‘Oh, go to hell.’

‘Mustn’t ever let him realize what a shot that was or he’ll get unbearable,’ Pop said to P.O.M.

‘M’Cola and I know,’ I said.

M’Cola came up. ‘M’uzuri, B’wana,’ he said. ‘M’uzuri sana.’

‘He thinks you did it on purpose,’ Pop said.

‘Don’t you ever tell him different.’

‘Piga m’uzuri,’ M’Cola said. ‘M’uzuri.’

‘I believe he feels just the way you do about it,’ Pop said.

‘He’s my pal.’

‘I believe he is, you know,’ Pop said.

On our way back across country to our main camp I made a fancy shot on a reedbuck at about two hundred yards, offhand, breaking his neck at the base of the skull. M’Cola was very pleased and Droopy was delighted.

‘We’ve got to put a stop to him,’ Pop said to P.O.M. ‘Where did you shoot for, really?’

‘In the neck,’ I lied. I had held full on the centre of the shoulder.

‘It was awfully pretty,’ P.O.M. said. The bullet had made a crack when it hit like a bat swung against a fast ball and the buck had collapsed without a move.

‘I think he’s a damned liar,’ Pop said.

‘None of us great shots is appreciated. Wait till we’re gone.’

‘His idea of being appreciated is for us to carry him on our shoulders,’ Pop said. ‘That rhino shot has ruined him.’

‘All right. You watch from now on. Hell, I’ve shot well the whole time.’

‘I seem to remember a grant of some sort,’ Pop was teasing. So did I remember him. I’d followed a fine one out of the country missing shot after shot all morning after a series of stalks in the heat, then crawled up to an ant hill to shoot one that was not nearly as good, taken a rest on the ant hill, missed the buck at fifty yards, seen him stand facing me, absolutely still, his nose up, and shot him in the chest. He went over backwards and as I went up to him he jumped up and went off, staggering. I sat down and waited for him to stop and when he did, obviously anchored, I sat there, using the sling, and shot for his neck, slowly and carefully, missing him eight times straight in a mounting, stubborn rage, not making a correction but shooting exactly for the same place in the same way each time, the gun bearers all laughing, the truck that had come up with the outfit holding more amused niggers, P.O.M. and Pop saying nothing, me sitting there cold, crazy-stubborn-furious, determined to break his neck rather than walk up and perhaps start him off over that heat-hazy, baking, noontime plain. Nobody said anything. I reached up my hand to M’Cola for more cartridges, shot again, carefully, and missed, and on the tenth shot broke his damned neck. I turned away without looking toward him.

‘Poor Papa,’ P.O.M. said.

‘It’s the light and the wind,’ Pop said. We had not known each other very well then. ‘They were all hitting the same place. I could see them throw the dust.’

‘I was a bloody, stubborn fool,’ I said.

Anyway, I could shoot now. So far, and aided by flukes, my luck was running now.

We came on into sight of camp and shouted. No one came out. Finally Karl came out of his tent. He went back as soon as he saw us, then came out again.

‘Hey, Karl,’ I yelled. He waved and went back in the tent again. Then came toward us. He was shaky with excitement and I saw he had been washing blood off his hands.

‘What is it?’

‘Rhino,’ he said.

‘Did you get in trouble with him?’

‘No. We killed him.’

‘Fine. Where is he?’

‘Over there behind that tree.’

We went over. There was the newly severed head of a rhino that was a rhino. He was twice the size of the one I had killed. The little eyes were shut and a fresh drop of blood stood in the corner of one like a tear. The head bulked enormous and the horn swept up and back in a fine curve. The hide was an inch thick where it hung in a cape behind the head and was as white where it was cut as freshly sliced coco-nut.

‘What is he? About thirty inches?’

‘Hell, no,’ said Pop. ‘Not thirty inches.’

‘But he iss a very fine one, Mr. Jackson,’ Dan said.

‘Yes. He’s a fine one,’ Pop said.

‘Where did you get him?’

‘Just outside of camp.’

‘He wass standing in some bush. We heard him grunt.’

‘We thought he was a buffalo,’ Karl said.

‘He iss a very fine one,’ Dan repeated.

‘I’m damned glad you got him,’ I said.

There we were, the three of us, wanting to congratulate, waiting to be good sports about this rhino whose smaller horn was longer than our big one, this huge, tear-eyed marvel of a rhino, this dead, head-severed dream rhino, and instead we all spoke like people who were about to become seasick on a boat, or people who had suffered some heavy financial loss. We were ashamed and could do nothing about it. I wanted to say something pleasant and hearty, instead, ‘How many times did you shoot him?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. We didn’t count. Five or six, I guess.’

‘Five, I think,’ said Dan.

Poor Karl, faced by these three sad-faced congratulators, was beginning to feel his pleasure in the rhino drained away from him.

‘We got one too,’ said P.O.M.

‘That’s fine,’ said Karl. ‘Is he bigger than this one?’

‘Hell, no. He’s a lousy runt.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Karl said. He meant it, simply and truly.

‘What the hell have you got to be sorry about with a rhino like that? He’s a beauty. Let me get the camera and take some pictures of him.’

I went after the camera. P.O.M. took me by the arm and walked close beside me.

‘Papa, please try to act like a human being,’ she said. ‘Poor Karl. You’re making him feel dreadfully.’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘I’m trying not to act that way.’

There was Pop. He shook his head. ‘I never felt more of a four-letter man,’ he said. ‘But it was like a kick in the stomach. I’m really delighted, of course.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I’d rather have him beat me. You know that. Truly. But why couldn’t he just get a good one, two or three inches longer? Why did he have to get one that makes mine ridiculous? It just makes ours silly.’

‘You can always remember that shot.’

‘To hell with that shot. That bloody fluke. God, what a beautiful rhino.’

‘Come on, let’s pull ourselves together and try to act like white people with him.’

‘We were awful,’ P.O.M. said.

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘And all the time I was trying to be jolly. You know I’m delighted he has it.’

‘You were certainly jolly. Both of you,’ P.O.M. said.

‘But did you see M’Cola,’ Pop asked. M’Cola had looked at the rhino dismally, shaken his head and walked away.

‘He’s a wonderful rhino,’ P.O.M. said. ‘We must act decently and make Karl feel good.’

But it was too late. We could not make Karl feel good and for a long time we could not feel good ourselves. The porters came into camp with the loads and we could see them all, and all of our outfit, go over to where the rhino head lay in the shade. They were all very quiet. Only the skinner was delighted to see such a rhino head in camp.

‘M’uzuri sana,’ he said to me. And measured the horn with shiftings of his widespread hand. ‘Kubwa sana!’

‘N’Dio. M’uzuri sana,’ I agreed.

‘B’wana Kabor shoot him?’

‘Yes.’

‘M’uzuri sana.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘M’uzuri sana.’

The skinner was the only gent in the outfit. We had tried, in all the shoot, never to be competitive. Karl and I had each tried to give the other the better chance on everything that came up. I was, truly, very fond of him and he was entirely unselfish and altogether self-sacrificing. I knew I could outshoot him and I could always outwalk him and, steadily, he got trophies that made mine dwarfs in comparison. He had done some of the worst shooting at game I had ever seen and I had shot badly twice on the trip, at that grant and at a bustard once on the plain, still he beat me on all the tangible things we had to show. For a while we had joked about it and I knew everything would even up. But it didn’t even up. Now, on this rhino hunt, I had taken the first crack at the country. We had sent him after meat while we had gone into a new country. We had not treated him badly, but we had not treated him too well, and still he had beaten me. Not only beaten, beaten was all right. He had made my rhino look so small that I could never keep him in the same small town where we lived. He had wiped him out. I had the shot I had made on him to remember and nothing could take that away except that it was so bloody marvellous I knew I would wonder, sooner or later, if it was not really a fluke in spite of my unholy self-confidence. Old Karl had put it on us all right with that rhino. He was in his tent now, writing a letter.

Under the dining tent fly Pop and I talked over what we had better do.

‘He’s got his rhino anyway,’ Pop said. ‘That saves us time. Now you can’t stand on that one.’

‘No.’

‘But this country is washed out. Something wrong with it. Droopy claims to know a good country about three hours from here in the lorries and another hour or so on with the porters. We can head for there this afternoon with a light outfit, send the lorries back, and Karl and Dan can move on down to M’uto Umbu and he can get his oryx.’

‘Fine.’

‘He has a chance to get a leopard on that rhino carcass this evening, too, or in the morning. Dan said they heard one. We’ll try to get a rhino out of this country of Droopy’s and then you join up with them and go on for kudu. We want to leave plenty of time for them.’

‘Fine.’

‘Even if you don’t get an oryx. You’ll pick one up somewhere.’

‘Even if I don’t get one at all, it’s all right. We’ll get one another time. I want a kudu, though.’

‘You’ll get one. You’re sure to.’

‘I’d rather get one, a good one, than all the rest. I don’t give a damn about these rhino outside of the fun of hunting them. But I’d like to get one that wouldn’t look silly beside that dream rhino of his.’

‘Absolutely.’

So we told Karl and he said: ‘Whatever you say. Sure. I hope you get one twice as big.’ He really meant it. He was feeling better now and so were we all.

CHAPTER THREE

Droopy’s country, when we reached it that evening, after a hot ride through red-soiled, bush-scrubby hills, looked awful. It was at the edge of a belt where all the trees had been girdled to kill the tsetse flies. And across from camp was a dusty, dirty native village. The soil was red and eroded and seemed to be blowing away, and camp was pitched in a high wind under the sketchy shade of some dead trees on a hillside overlooking a little stream and the mud village beyond. Before dark we followed Droopy and two local guides up past the village and in a long climb to the top of a rock-strewn ridge that overlooked a deep valley that was almost a canyon. Across on the other side, were broken valleys that sloped steeply down into the canyon. There were heavy growths of trees in the valleys and grassy slopes on the ridges between, and above there was the thick bamboo forest of the mountain. The canyon ran down to the Rift Valley, seeming to narrow at the far end where it cut through the wall of the rift. Beyond, above the grassy ridges and slopes, were heavily forested hills. It looked a hell of a country to hunt.

‘If you see one across there you have to go straight down to the bottom of the canyon. Then up one of those timber patches and across those damned gullies. You can’t keep him in sight and you’ll kill yourself climbing. It’s too steep. Those are the kind of innocent-looking gullies we got into that night coming home.’

‘It looks very bad,’ Pop agreed.

‘I’ve hunted a country just like this for deer. The south slope of Timber Creek in Wyoming. The slopes are all too steep. It’s hell. It’s too broken. We’ll take some punishment to-morrow.’

P.O.M. said nothing. Pop had brought us here and Pop would bring us out. All she had to do was see her boots did not hurt her feet. They hurt just a little now, and that was her only worry.

I went on to dilate on the difficulties the country showed and we went home to camp in the dark all very gloomy and full of prejudice against Droopy. The fire flamed brightly in the wind and we sat and watched the moon rise and listened to the hyenas. After we had a few drinks we did not feel so badly about the country.

‘Droopy swears it’s good,’ Pop said. ‘This isn’t where he wanted to go though, he says. It was another place farther on. But he swears this is good.’

‘I love Droopy,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I have perfect confidence in Droopy.’

Droopy came up to the fire with two spear-carrying natives.

‘What does he hear?’ I asked.

There was some talk by the natives, then Pop said: ‘One of these sportsmen claims he was chased by a huge rhino to-day. Of course nearly any rhino would look huge when he was chasing him.’

‘Ask him how long the horn was.’

The native showed that the horn was as long as his arm. Droopy grinned.

‘Tell him to go,’ said Pop.

‘Where did all this happen?’

‘Oh, over there somewhere,’ Pop said. ‘You know. Over there. Way over there. Where these things always happen.’

‘That’s marvellous. Just where we want to go.’

‘The good aspect is that Droopy’s not at all depressed,’ Pop said. ‘He seems very confident. After all, it’s his show.’

‘Yes, but we have to do the climbing.’

‘Cheer him up, will you?’ Pop said to P.O.M. ‘He’s getting me very depressed.’

‘Should we talk about how well he shoots?’

‘Too early in the evening. I’m not gloomy. I’ve just seen that kind of country before. It will be good for us all right. Take some of your belly off, Governor.’

The next day I found that I was all wrong about that country.

We had breakfast before daylight and were started before sunrise, climbing the hill beyond the village in single file. Ahead there was the local guide with a spear, then Droopy with my heavy gun and a water bottle, then me with the Springfield, Pop with the Mannlicher, P.O.M. pleased, as always to carry nothing, M’Cola with Pop’s heavy gun and another water bottle, and finally two local citizens with spears, water bags, and a chop box with lunch. We planned to lay up in the heat of the middle of the day and not get back until dark. It was fine climbing in the cool fresh morning and very different from toiling up this same trail last evening in the sunset with all the rocks and dirt giving back the heat of the day. The trail was used regularly by cattle and the dust was powdered dry and, now, lightly moistened from the dew. There were many hyena tracks and, as the trail came on to a ridge of grey rock so that you could look down on both sides into a steep ravine, and then went on along the edge of the canyon, we saw a fresh rhino track in one of the dusty patches below the rocks.

‘He’s just gone on ahead,’ Pop said. ‘They must wander all over here at night.’

Below, at the bottom of the canyon, we could see the tops of high trees and in an opening see the flash of water. Across were the steep hillside and the gullies we had studied last night. Droopy and the local guide, the one who had been chased by the rhino, were whispering together. Then they started down a steep path that went in long slants down the side of the canyon.

We stopped. I had not seen P.O.M. was limping, and in sudden whispered family bitterness there was a highly-righteous-on-both-sides clash, historically on unwearable shoes and boots in the past, and imperatively on these, which hurt. The hurt was lessened by cutting off the toes of the heavy short wool socks worn over ordinary socks, and then, by removing the socks entirely, the boots made possible. Going down-hill steeply made these Spanish shooting boots too short in the toe and there was an old argument, about this length of boot and whether the bootmaker, whose part I had taken, unwittingly first, only as interpreter, and finally embraced his theory patriotically as a whole and, I believed, by logic, had overcome it by adding on to the heel. But they hurt now, a stronger logic, and the situation was unhelped by the statement that men’s new boots always hurt for weeks before they became comfortable. Now, heavy socks removed, stepping tentatively, trying the pressure of the leather against the toes, the argument past, she wanting not to suffer, but to keep up and please Mr. J. P., me ashamed at having been a four-letter man about boots, at being righteous against pain, at being righteous at all, at ever being righteous, stopping to whisper about it, both of us grinning at what was whispered, it all right now, the boots too, without the heavy socks, much better, me hating all righteous bastards now, one absent American friend especially, having just removed myself from that category, certainly never to be righteous again, watching Droopy ahead, we went down the long slant of the trail toward the bottom of the canyon where the trees were heavy and tall and the floor of the canyon, that from above had been a narrow gash, opened to a forest-banked stream.

We stood now in the shade of trees with great smooth trunks, circled at their base with the line of roots that showed in rounded ridges up the trunks like arteries; the trunks the yellow green of a French forest on a day in winter after rain. But these trees had a great spread of branches and were in leaf and below them, in the stream bed in the sun, reeds like papyrus grass grew thick as wheat and twelve feet tall. There was a game trail through the grass along the stream and Droopy was bent down looking at it. M’Cola went over and looked and they both followed it a little way, stooped close over it, then came back to us.

‘Nyati,’ M’Cola whispered. ‘Buffalo.’ Droopy whispered to Pop and then Pop said, softly in his throaty, whisky whisper, ‘They’re buff gone down the river. Droop says there are some big bulls. They haven’t come back.’

‘Let’s follow them,’ I said. ‘I’d rather get another buff than rhino.’

‘It’s as good a chance as any for rhino, too,’ Pop said.

‘By God, isn’t it a great looking country?’ I said.

‘Splendid,’ Pop said. ‘Who would have imagined it?’

‘The trees are like André’s pictures,’ P.O.M. said. ‘It’s simply beautiful. Look at that green. It’s Masson. Why can’t a good painter see this country?’

‘How are your boots?’

‘Fine.’

As we trailed the buffalo we went very slowly and quietly. There was no wind and we knew that when the breeze came up it would be from the east and blow up the canyon toward us. We followed the game trail down the river-bed and as we went the grass was much higher. Twice we had to get down to crawl and the reeds were so thick you could not see two feet into them. Droop found a fresh rhino track, too, in the mud. I began to think about what would happen if a rhino came barging along this tunnel and who would do what. It was exciting but I did not like it. It was too much like being in a trap and there was P.O.M. to think about. Then as the stream made a bend and we came out of the high grass to the bank I smelled game very distinctly. I do not smoke, and hunting at home I have several times smelled elk in the rutting season before I have seen them, and I can smell clearly where an old bull has lain in the forest. The bull elk has a strong musky smell. It is a strong but pleasant odour and I know it well, but this smell I did not know.

‘I can smell them,’ I whispered to Pop. He believed me.

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know but it’s plenty strong. Can’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Ask Droop.’

Droopy nodded and grinned.

‘They take snuff,’ Pop said. ‘I don’t know whether they can scent or not.’

We went on into another bed of reeds that were high over our heads, putting each foot down silently before lifting the other, walking as quietly as in a dream or a slow motion picture. I could smell whatever it was clearly now, all of the time, sometimes stronger than at others. I did not like it at all. We were close to the bank now, and ahead, the game trail went straight out into a long slough of higher reeds than any we had come through.

‘I can smell them close as hell,’ I whispered to Pop. ‘No kidding. Really.’

‘I believe you,’ Pop said. ‘Should we get up here on to the bank and skirt this bit? We’ll be above it.’

‘Good.’ Then, when we were up, I said. ‘That tall stuff had me spooked. I wouldn’t like to hunt in that.’

‘How’d you like to hunt elephant in that?’ Pop whispered.

‘I wouldn’t do it.’

‘Do you really hunt elephant in grass like that?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘Get up on somebody’s shoulders to shoot.’

Better men than I am do it, I thought. I wouldn’t do it.

We went along the grassy right bank, on a sort of shelf, now in the open, skirting a slough of high dry reeds. Beyond on the opposite bank were the heavy trees and above them the steep bank of the canyon. You could not see the stream. Above us, on the right, were the hills, wooded in patches of orchard bush. Ahead, at the end of the slough of reeds the banks narrowed and the branches of the big trees almost covered the stream. Suddenly Droopy grabbed me and we both crouched down. He put the big gun in my hand and took the Springfield. He pointed and around a curve in the bank I saw the head of a rhino with a long, wonderful-looking horn. The head was swaying and I could see the ears forward and twitching, and see the little pig eyes. I slipped the safety catch and motioned Droopy down. Then I heard M’Cola saying, ‘Toto! Toto!’ and he grabbed my arm. Droopy was whispering, ‘Manamouki! Manamouki! Manamouki!’ very fast and he and M’Cola were frantic that I should not shoot. It was a cow rhino with a calf, and as I lowered the gun she gave a snort, crashed in the reeds, and was gone. I never saw the calf. We could see the reeds swaying where the two of them were moving and then it was all quiet.

‘Damn shame,’ Pop whispered. ‘She had a beautiful horn.’

‘I was all set to bust her,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t tell she was a cow.’

‘M’Cola saw the calf.’

M’Cola was whispering to Pop and nodding his head emphatically.

‘He says there’s another rhino in there,’ Pop said. ‘That he heard him snort.’

‘Let’s get higher, where we can see them if they break, and throw something in,’ I said.

‘Good idea,’ Pop agreed. ‘Maybe the bull’s there.’

We went a little higher up the bank where we could look out over the lake of high reeds and, with Pop holding his big gun ready and I with the safety off mine, M’Cola threw a club into the reeds where he had heard the snort. There was a wooshing snort and no movement, not a stir in the reeds. Then there was a crashing farther away and we could see the reeds swaying with the rush of something through them toward the opposite bank, but could not see what was making the movement. Then I saw the black back, the wide-swept, point-lifted horns and then the quick-moving, climbing rush of a buffalo up the other bank. He went up, his neck up and out, his head horn-heavy, his withers rounded like a fighting bull, in fast strong-legged climb. I was holding on the point where his neck joined his shoulder when Pop stopped me.

‘He’s not a big one,’ he said softly. ‘I wouldn’t take him unless you want him for meat.’

He looked big to me and now he stood, his head up, broadside, his head swung toward us.

‘I’ve got three more on the licence and we’re leaving their country,’ I said.

‘It’s awfully good meat,’ Pop whispered. ‘Go ahead then. Bust him. But be ready for the rhino after you shoot.’

I sat down, the big gun feeling heavy and unfamiliar, held on the buff’s shoulder, squeezed off and flinched without firing. Instead of the sweet clean pull of the Springfield with the smooth, unhesitant release at the end, this trigger came to what, in a squeeze, seemed metal stuck against metal. It was like when you shoot in a nightmare. I couldn’t squeeze it and I corrected from my flinch, held my breath, and pulled the trigger. It pulled off with a jerk and the big gun made a rocking explosion out of which I came, seeing the buffalo still on his feet, and going out of sight to the left in a climbing run, to let off the second barrel and throw a burst of rock dust and dirt over his hind quarters. He was out of shot before I could reload the double-barrelled ·470 and we had all heard the snorting and the crashing of another rhino that had gone out of the lower end of the reeds and on under the heavy trees on our side without showing more than a glimpse of his bulk in the reeds.

‘It was the bull,’ Pop said. ‘He’s gone down the stream.’

‘N’Dio. Doumi! Doumi!’ Droopy insisted it was a bull.

‘I hit the damned buff,’ I said. ‘God knows where. To hell with those heavy guns. The trigger pull put me off.’

‘You’d have killed him with the Springfield,’ Pop said.

‘I’d know where I hit him anyway. I thought with the four-seven I’d kill him or miss him,’ I said. ‘Instead, now we’ve got him wounded.’

‘He’ll keep,’ Pop said. ‘We want to give him plenty of time.’

‘I’m afraid I gut-shot him.’

‘You can’t tell. Going off fast like that he might be dead in a hundred yards.’

‘The hell with that four-seventy,’ I said. ‘I can’t shoot it. The trigger’s like the last turn of the key opening a sardine can.’

‘Come on,’ Pop said. ‘We’ve got God knows how many rhino scattered about here.’

‘What about the buff?’

‘Plenty of time for him later. We must let him stiffen up. Let him get sick.’

‘Suppose we’d been down there with all that stuff coming out.’

‘Yes,’ said Pop.

All this in whispers. I looked at P.O.M. She was like someone enjoying a good musical show.

‘Did you see where it hit him?’

‘I couldn’t tell?’ she whispered. ‘Do you suppose there are any more in there?’

‘Thousands,’ I said. ‘What do we do, Pop?’

‘That bull may be just around the bend,’ Pop said. ‘Come on.’

We went along the bank, our nerves cocked, and as we came to the narrow end of the reeds there was another rush of something heavy through the tall stalks. I had the gun up waiting for whatever it was to show. But there was only the waving of the reeds. M’Cola signalled with his hand not to shoot.

‘The calf,’ Pop said. ‘Must have been two of them. Where’s the bloody bull?’

‘How the hell do you see them?’

‘Tell by the size.’

Then we were standing looking down into the stream bed, into the shadows under the branches of the big trees, and off ahead down the stream when M’Cola pointed up the hill on our right.

‘Faro,’ he whispered and reached me the glasses.

There on the hillside, head-on, wide, black, looking straight towards us, ears twitching and head lifted, swaying as the nose searched for the wind, was another rhino. He looked huge in the glasses. Pop was studying him with his binoculars.

‘He’s no better than what you have,’ he said softly.

‘I can bust him right in the sticking place,’ I whispered.

‘You have only one more,’ Pop whispered. ‘You want a good one.’

I offered the glasses to P.O.M.

‘I can see him without,’ she said. ‘He’s huge.’

‘He may charge,’ Pop said. ‘Then you’ll have to take him.’

Then, as we watched, another rhino came into sight from behind a wide feathery-topped tree. He was quite a bit smaller.

‘By God, it’s a calf,’ Pop said. ‘That one’s a cow. Good thing you didn’t shoot her. She bloody well may charge too.’

‘Is it the same cow?’ I whispered.

‘No. That other one had a hell of a horn.’

We all had the nervous exhilaration, like a laughing drunk, that a sudden over-abundance, idiotic abundance of game makes. It is a feeling that can come from any sort of game or fish that is ordinarily rare and that, suddenly, you find in a ridiculously unbelievable abundance.

‘Look at her. She knows there’s something wrong. But she can’t see us or smell us.’

‘She heard the shots.’

‘She knows we’re here. But she can’t make it out.’

The rhino looked so huge, so ridiculous, and so fine to see, and I sighted on her chest.

‘It’s a nice shot.’

‘Perfect,’ Pop said.

‘What are we going to do?’ P.O.M. said. She was practical.

‘We’ll work around her,’ Pop said.

‘If we keep low I don’t believe our scent will carry up there once we’re past.’

‘You can’t tell,’ Pop said. ‘We don’t want her to charge.’

She did not charge, but dropped her head, finally, and worked up the hill followed by the nearly full-grown calf.

‘Now,’ said Pop, ‘we’ll let Droop go ahead and see if he can find the bull’s tracks. We might as well sit down.’

We sat in the shade and Droopy went up one side of the stream and the local guide the other. They came back and said the bull had gone on down.

‘Did any one ever see what sort of horn he had?’ I asked.

‘Droop said he was good.’

M’Cola had gone up the hill a little way. Now he crouched and beckoned.

‘Nyati,’ he said with his hand up to his face.

‘Where?’ Pop asked him. He pointed, crouched down, and as we crawled up to him he handed me the glasses. They were a long way away on the jutting ridge of one of the steep hillsides on the far side of the canyon, well down the stream. We could see six, then eight buffalo, black, heavy necked, the horns shining, standing on the point of a ridge. Some were grazing and others stood, their heads up, watching.

‘That one’s a bull,’ Pop said, looking through the glasses.

‘Which one?’

‘Second from the right.’

‘They all look like bulls to me.’

‘They’re a long way away. That one’s a good bull. Now we’ve got to cross the stream and work down toward them and try to get above them.’

‘Will they stay there?’

‘No. Probably they’ll work down into this stream bed as soon as it’s hot.’

‘Let’s go.’

We crossed the stream on a log and then another log and on the other side, half way up the hillside, there was a deeply worn game trail that graded along the bank under the heavily leafed branches of the trees. We went along quite fast, but walking carefully, and below us, now, the stream bed was covered solidly with foliage. It was still early in the morning but the breeze was rising and the leaves stirred over our heads. We crossed one ravine that came down to the stream, going into the thick bush to be out of sight and stooping as we crossed behind trees in the small open place, then, using the shoulder of the ravine as protection, we climbed so that we might get high up the hillside above the buffalo and work down to them. We stopped in the shelter of the ridge, me sweating heavily and fixing a handkerchief inside the sweatband of my Stetson, and sent Droop ahead to look. He came back to say they were gone. From above we could see nothing of them, so we cut across the ravine and the hillside thinking we might intercept them on their way down into the river bed. The next hillside had been burned and at the bottom of the hill there was a burned area of bush. In the ash dust were the tracks of the buffalo as they came down and into the thick jungle of the stream bed. Here it was too overgrown and there were too many vines to follow them. There were no tracks going down the stream so we knew they were down in the part of the stream bed we had looked down on from the game trail. Pop said there was nothing to do about them in there. It was so thick that if we jumped them we could not get a shot. You could not tell one from another, he said. All you could see would be a rush of black. An old bull would be grey but a good herd bull might be as black as a cow. It wasn’t any good to jump them like that.

It was ten o’clock now and very hot in the open, the sun pegged and the breeze lifted the ashes of the burned-over ground as we walked. Everything would be in the thick cover now. We decided to find a shady place and lie down and read in the cool; to have lunch and kill the hot part of the day.

Beyond the burned place we came toward the stream and stopped, sweating, in the shadow of some very large trees. We unpacked our leather coats and our raincoats and spread them on the grass at the foot of the trees so that we could lean back against the trunks. P.O.M. got out the books and M’Cola made a small fire and boiled water for tea.

The breeze was coming up and we could hear it in the high branches. It was cool in the shade, but if you stirred into the sun, or as the sun shifted the shadow while you read so that any part of you was out of the shadow, the sun was heavy. Droopy had gone on down the stream to have a look, and as we lay there, reading, I could smell the heat of the day coming, the drying up of the dew, the heat on the leaves, and the heaviness of the sun over the stream.

P.O.M. was reading Spanish Gold, by George A. Birmingham, and she said it was no good. I still had the Sevastopol book of Tolstoy and in the same volume I was reading a story called ‘The Cossacks’ that was very good. In it were the summer heat, the mosquitoes, the feel of the forest in the different seasons, and that river that the Tartars crossed, raiding, and I was living in that Russia again.

I was thinking how real that Russia of the time of our Civil War was, as real as any other place, as Michigan, or the prairie north of town and the woods around Evan’s game farm, of how, through Turgenev, I knew that I had lived there, as I had been in the family Buddenbrooks, and had climbed in and out of her window in Le Rouge et Le Noir, or the morning we had come in the gates of Paris and seen Salcède torn apart by the horses at the Place de Grèves. I saw all that. And it was me they did not break on the rack that time because I had been polite to the executioner the time they killed Coconas and me, and I remember the Eve of St. Bartholomew’s and how we hunted Huguenots that night, and when they trapped me at her house that time, and no feeling more true than finding the gate of the Louvre being closed, nor of looking down at his body in the water where he fell from the mast, and always, Italy, better than any book, lying in the chestnut woods, and in the fall mist behind the Duomo going across the town to the Ospedale Maggiore, the nails in my boots on the cobbles, and in the spring sudden showers in the mountains and the smell of the regiment like a copper coin in your mouth. So in the heat the train stopped at Dezenzano and there was Lago de Garda and those troops are the Czech Legion, and the next time it was raining, and the next time it was in the dark, and the next time you passed it riding in a truck, and the next time you were coming from somewhere else, and the next time you walked to it in the dark from Sermione. For we have been there in the books and out of the books — and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been. A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable. People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them. Also it is very hard to do. So what? So I would go on reading about the river that the Tartars came across when raiding, and the drunken old hunter and the girl and how it was then in the different seasons.

Pop was reading Richard Carvell. We had bought what there was to buy in Nairobi and we were pretty well to the end of the books.

‘I’ve read this before,’ Pop said. ‘But it’s a good story.’

‘I can just remember it. But it was a good story then.’

‘It’s a jolly good story, but I wish I hadn’t read it before.’

‘This is terrible,’ P.O.M. said. ‘You couldn’t read it.’

‘Do you want this one?’

‘Don’t be ornamental,’ she said. ‘No, I’ll finish this.’

‘Go on. Take it.’

‘I’ll give it right back.’

‘Hey, M’Cola,’ I said. ‘Beer?’

‘N’Dio,’ he said with great force, and from the chop box one of the natives had carried on his head produced, in its straw casing, a bottle of German beer, one of the sixty-four bottles Dan had brought from the German trading station. Its neck was wrapped in silver foil and on its black and yellow label there was a horseman in armour. It was still cool from the night and opened by the tin-opener it creamed into three cups, thick-foamed, full-bodied.

‘No,’ said Pop. ‘Very bad for the liver.’

‘Come on.’

‘All right.’

We all drank and when M’Cola opened the second bottle Pop refused, firmly.

‘Go on. It means more to you. I’m going to take a nap.’

‘Poor old Mama?’

‘Just a little.’

‘All for me,’ I said. M’Cola smiled and shook his head at this drinking. I lay back against the tree and watched the wind bringing the clouds and drank the beer slowly out of the bottle. It was cooler that way and it was excellent beer. After a while Pop and P.O.M. were both asleep and I got back the Sevastopol book and read in ‘The Cossacks’ again. It was a good story.

When they woke up we had lunch of cold sliced tenderloin, bread, and mustard, and a can of plums, and drank the third, and last, bottle of beer. Then we read again and all went to sleep. I woke thirsty and was unscrewing the top from a water bottle when I heard a rhino snort and crash in the brush of the river bed. Pop was awake and heard it too and we took our guns, without speaking, and started toward where the noise had come from. M’Cola found the tracks. The rhino had come up the stream, evidently he had winded us when he was only about thirty yards away, and had gone on up. We could not follow the tracks the way the wind was blowing so we circled away from the stream and back to the edge of the burned place to get above him and then hunted very carefully against the wind along the stream through very thick bush, but we did not find him. Finally Droopy found where he had gone up the other side and on into the hills. From the tracks it did not seem a particularly large one.

We were a long way from camp, at least four hours as we had come, and much of it up-hill going back, certainly there would be that long climb out of the canyon; we had a wounded buffalo to deal with, and when we came out on the edge of the burned country again, we agreed that we should get P.O.M. and get started. It was still hot, but the sun was on its way down and for a good way we would be on the heavily shaded game trail on the high bank above the stream. When we found P.O.M. she pretended to be indignant at our going off and leaving her alone but she was only teasing us.

We started off, Droop and his spearsman in the lead, walking along the shadow of the trail that was broken by the sun through the leaves. Instead of the cool early morning smell of the forest there was a nasty stink like the mess cats make.

‘What makes the stink?’ I whispered to Pop.

‘Baboons,’ he said.

A whole tribe of them had gone on just ahead of us and their droppings were everywhere. We came up to the place where the rhinos and the buff had come out of the reeds and I located where I thought the buff had been when I shot. M’Cola and Droopy were casting about like hounds and I thought they were at least fifty yards too high up the bank when Droop held up a leaf.

‘He’s got blood,’ Pop said. We went up to them. There was a great quantity of blood, black now on the grass, and the trail was easy to follow. Droop and M’Cola trailed one on each side, leaving the trail between them, pointing to each blood spot formally with a long stem of grass. I always thought it would be better for one to trail slowly and the other cast ahead but this was the way they trailed, stooped heads, pointing each dried splash with their grass stems and occasionally, when they picked up the tracks after losing them, stooping to pluck a grass blade or a leaf that had the black stain on it. I followed them with the Springfield, then came Pop, with P.O.M. behind him. Droop carried my big gun and Pop had his. M’Cola had P.O.M.’s Mannlicher slung over his shoulder. None of us spoke and everyone seemed to regard it as a pretty serious business. In some high grass we found blood, at a pretty good height on the grass leaves on both sides of the trail where the buff had gone through the grass. That meant he was shot clean through. You could not tell the original colour of the blood now, but I had a moment of hoping he might be shot through the lungs. But farther on we came on some droppings in the rocks with blood in them and then for a while he had dropped dung wherever he climbed and all of it was blood-spotted. It looked, now, like a gut shot or one through the paunch. I was more ashamed of it all the time.

‘If he comes don’t worry about Droopy or the others,’ Pop whispered. ‘They’ll get out of his way. Stop him.’

‘Right up the nose,’ I said.

‘Don’t try anything fancy,’ Pop said. The trail climbed steadily, then twice looped back on itself and for a time seemed to wander, without plan, among some rocks. Once it lead down to the stream, crossed a rivulet of it and then came back up on the same bank, grading up through the trees.

‘I think we’ll find him dead,’ I whispered to Pop. That aimless turn had made me see him, slow and hard hit, getting ready to go down.

‘I hope so,’ Pop said.

But the trail went on, where there was little grass now, and trailing was much slower and more difficult. There were no tracks now that I could see, only the probable line he would take, verified by a shiny dark splatter of dried blood on a stone. Several times we lost it entirely and, the three of us making casts, one would find it, point and whisper ‘Damu’, and we would go on again. Finally it led down from a rocky hillside with the last of the sun on it, down into the stream bed where there was a long, wide patch of the highest dead reeds that we had seen. These were higher and thicker even than the slough the buff had come out of in the morning and there were several game trails that went into them.

‘Not good enough to take the little Memsahib in there,’ Pop said.

‘Let her stay here with M’Cola,’ I said.

‘It’s not good enough for the little Memsahib,’ Pop repeated. ‘I don’t know why we let her come.’

‘She can wait here. Droop wants to go on.’

‘Right you are. We’ll have a look.’

‘You wait here with M’Cola,’ I whispered over my shoulder.

We followed Droopy into the thick, tall grass that was five feet above our heads, walking carefully on the game trail, stooping forward, trying to make no noise breathing. I was thinking of the buff the way I had seen them when we had gotten the three that time, how the old bull had come out of the bush, groggy as he was, and I could see the horns, the boss coming far down, the muzzle out, the little eyes, the roll of fat and muscle on his thin-haired, grey, scaly-hided neck, the heavy power and the rage in him, and I admired him and respected him, but he was slow, and all the while we shot I felt that it was fixed and that we had him. This was different, this was no rapid fire, no pouring it on him as he comes groggy into the open, if he comes now I must be quiet inside and put it down his nose as he comes with the head out. He will have to put the head down to hook, like any bull, and that will uncover the old place the boys wet their knuckles on and I will get one in there and then must go sideways into the grass and he would be Pop’s from then on unless I could keep the rifle when I jumped. I was sure I could get that one in and jump if I could wait and watch his head come down. I knew I could do that and that the shot would kill him but how long would it take? That was the whole thing. How long would it take? Now, going forward, sure he was in here, I felt the elation, the best elation of all, of certain action to come, action in which you had something to do, in which you can kill and come out of it, doing something you are ignorant about and so not scared, no one to worry about and no responsibility except to perform something you feel sure you can perform, and I was walking softly ahead watching Droopy’s back and remembering to keep the sweat out of my glasses when I heard a noise behind us and turned my head. It was P.O.M. with M’Cola coming on our tracks.

‘For God’s sake,’ Pop said. He was furious.

We got her back out of the grass and up on to the bank and made her realize that she must stay there. She had not understood that she was to stay behind. She had heard me whisper something but thought it was for her to come behind M’Cola.

‘That spooked me,’ I said to Pop.

‘She’s like a little terrier,’ he said. ‘But it’s not good enough.’

We were looking out over that grass.

‘Droop wants to go still,’ I said. ‘I’ll go as far as he will. When he says no that lets us out. After all, I gut-shot the son of a bitch.’

‘Mustn’t do anything silly, though.’

‘I can kill the son of a bitch if I get a shot at him. If he comes he’s got to give me a shot.’

The fright P.O.M. had given us about herself had made me noisy.

‘Come on,’ said Pop. We followed Droopy back in and it got worse and worse, and I do not know about Pop but about half-way I changed to the big gun and kept the safety off and my hand over the trigger guard and I was plenty nervous by the time Droopy stopped and shook his head and whispered ‘Hapana’. It had gotten so you could not see a foot ahead and it was all turns and twists. It was really bad and the sun was only on the hillside now. We both felt good because we had made Droopy do the calling off and I was relieved as well. What we had followed him into had made my fancy shooting plans seem very silly and I knew all we had in there was Pop to blast him over with the four-fifty number two after I’d maybe miss him with that lousy four-seventy. I had no confidence in anything but its noise any more.

We were back trailing when we heard the porters on the hillside shout and we ran crashing through the grass to try to get a high enough place to see to shoot. They waved their arms and shouted that the buffalo had come out of the reeds and gone past them and then M’Cola and Droopy were pointing, and Pop had me by the sleeve trying to pull me to where I could see them and then, in the sunlight, high up on the hillside against the rocks I saw two buffalo. They shone very black in the sun and one was much bigger than the other and I remember thinking this was our bull and that he had picked up a cow and she had made the pace and kept him going. Droop had handed me the Springfield and I slipped my arm through the sling and sighting, the buff now all seen through the aperture, I froze myself inside and held the bead on the top of his shoulder and as I started to squeeze he started running and I swung ahead of him and loosed off. I saw him lower his head and jump like a bucking horse as he comes out of the chutes and as I threw the shell, slammed the bolt forward and shot again, behind him as he went out of sight, I knew I had him. Droopy and I started to run and as we were running I heard a low bellow. I stopped and yelled at Pop, ‘Hear him? I’ve got him, I tell you!’

‘You hit him,’ said Pop. ‘Yes.’

‘Goddamn it, I killed him. Didn’t you hear him bellow?’

‘No.’

‘Listen!’ We stood listening and there it came, clear, a long, moaning, unmistakable bellow.

‘By God,’ Pop said. It was a very sad noise.

M’Cola grabbed my hand and Droopy slapped my back and all laughing we started on a running scramble, sweating, rushing, up the ridge through the trees and over rocks. I had to stop for breath, my heart pounding, and wiped the sweat off my face and cleaned my glasses.

‘Kufa!’ M’Cola said, making the word for dead almost explosive in its force. ‘N’Dio! Kufa!’

‘Kufa!’ Droopy said grinning.

‘Kufa!’ M’Cola repeated and we shook hands again before we went on climbing. Then, ahead of us, we saw him, on his back, throat stretched out to the full, his weight on his horns, wedged against a tree. M’Cola put his finger in the bullet hole in the centre of the shoulder and shook his head happily.

Pop and P.O.M. came up, followed by the porters.

‘By God, he’s a better bull than we thought,’ I said.

‘He’s not the same bull. This is a real bull. That must have been our bull with him.’

‘I thought he was with a cow. It was so far away I couldn’t tell.’

‘It must have been four hundred yards. By God, you can shoot that little pipsqueak.’

‘When I saw him put his head down between his legs and buck I knew we had him. The light was wonderful on him.’

‘I knew you had hit him, and I knew he wasn’t the same bull. So I thought we had two wounded buffalo to deal with. I didn’t hear the first bellow.’

‘It was wonderful when we heard him bellow,’ P.O.M. said. ‘It’s such a sad sound. It’s like hearing a horn in the woods.’

‘It sounded awfully jolly to me,’ Pop said. ‘By God, we deserve a drink on this. That was a shot. Why didn’t you ever tell us you could shoot?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘You know he’s a damned good tracker, too, and what kind of a bird shot?’ he asked P.O.M.

‘Isn’t he a beautiful bull?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘He’s a fine one. He’s not old but it’s a fine head.’

We tried to take pictures but there was only the little box camera and the shutter stuck, and there was a bitter argument about the shutter while the light failed, and I was nervous now, irritable, righteous, pompous about the shutter and inclined to be abusive because we could get no picture. You cannot live on a plane of the sort of elation I had felt in the reeds and having killed, even when it is only a buffalo, you feel a little quiet inside. Killing is not a feeling that you share and I took a drink of water and told P.O.M. I was sorry I was such a bastard about the camera. She said it was all right and we were all right again looking at the buff with M’Cola making the cuts for the headskin and we standing close together and feeling fond of each other and understanding everything, camera and all. I took a drink of the whisky and it had no taste and I felt no kick from it.

‘Let me have another,’ I said. The second one was all right.

We were going on ahead to camp with the chased-by-a-rhino spearman as guide and Droop was going to skin out the head and they were going to butcher and cache the meat in trees so the hyenas would not get it. They were afraid to travel in the dark and I told Droopy he could keep my big gun. He said he knew how to shoot so I took out the shells and put on the safety and handing it to him told him to shoot. He put it to his shoulder, shut the wrong eye, and pulled hard on the trigger, and again, and again. Then I showed him about the safety and had him put it on and off and snap the gun a couple of times. M’Cola became very superior during Droopy’s struggle to fire with the safety on and Droopy seemed to get much smaller. I left him the gun and two cartridges and they were all busy butchering in the dusk when we followed the spearsman and the tracks of the smaller buff, which had no blood on them, up to the top of the hill and on our way toward home. We climbed around the tops of valleys, went across gulches, up and down ravines and finally came on to the main ridge, it dark and cold in the evening, the moon not yet up, we plodded along, all tired. Once M’Cola, in the dark, loaded with Pop’s heavy gun and an assortment of water bottles, binoculars, and a musette bag of books, sung out a stream of what sounded like curses at the guide who was striding ahead.

‘What’s he say?’ I asked Pop.

‘He’s telling him not to show off his speed. That there is an old man in the party.’

‘Who does he mean, you or himself?’

‘Both of us.’

We saw the moon come up, smoky red over the brown hills, and we came down through the chinky lights of the village, the mud houses all closed tight, and the smells of goats and sheep, and then across the stream and up the bare slope to where the fire was burning in front of our tents. It was a cold night with much wind.

In the morning we hunted, picked up a track at a spring and trailed a rhino all over the high orchard country before he went down into a valley that led, steeply, into the canyon. It was very hot and the tight boots of the day before had chafed P.O.M.’s feet. She did not complain about them but I could see they hurt her. We were all luxuriantly, restfully tired.

‘The hell with them,’ I said to Pop. ‘I don’t want to kill another one unless he’s big. We might hunt a week for a good one. Let’s stand on the one we have and pull out and join Karl. We can hunt oryx down there and get those zebra hides and get on after the kudu.’

We were sitting under a tree on the summit of a hill and could see off over all the country and the canyon running down to the Rift Valley and Lake Manyara.

‘It would be good fun to take porters and a light outfit and hunt on ahead of them down through that valley and out to the lake,’ Pop said.

‘That would be swell. We could send the lorries around to meet us at what’s the name of the place?’

‘Maji-Moto.’

‘Why don’t we do that?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘We’ll ask Droopy how the valley is.’

Droopy didn’t know but the spearman said it was very rough and bad going where the stream came down through the rift wall. He did not think we could get the loads through. We gave it up.

‘That’s the sort of trip to make, though,’ Pop said. ‘Porters don’t cost as much as petrol.’

‘Can’t we make trips like that when we come back?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘But for a big rhino you want to go up on Mount Kenya. You’ll get a real one there. Kudu’s the prize here. You’d have to go up to Kalal to get one in Kenya. Then if we get them, we’ll have time to go on down in that Handeni country for sable.’

‘Let’s get going,’ I said without moving.

Since a long time we had all felt good about Karl’s rhino. We were glad he had it and all of that had taken on a correct perspective. Maybe he had his oryx by now. I hoped so. He was a fine fellow, Karl, and it was good he got these extra fine heads.

‘How do you feel, poor old Mama?’

‘I’m fine. If we are going I’ll be just as glad to rest my feet. But I love this kind of hunting.’

‘Let’s get back, eat, break camp, and get down there to-night.’

That night we got into our old camp at M’utu-Umbu, under the big trees, not far from the road. It had been our first camp in Africa and the trees were as big, as spreading, and as green, the stream as clear and fast flowing, and the camp as fine as when we had first been there. The only difference was that now it was hotter at night, the road in was hub-deep in dust, and we had seen a lot of country.

CHAPTER FOUR

We had come down to the Rift Valley by a sandy red road across a high plateau, then up and down through orchard-bushed hills, around a slope of forest to the top of the rift wall where we could look down and see the plain, the heavy forest below the wall, and the long, dried-up edged shine of Lake Manyara rose-coloured at one end with a half million tiny dots that were flamingoes. From there the road dropped steeply along the face of the wall, down into the forest, on to the flatness of the valley, through cultivated patches of green corn, bananas, and trees I did not know the names of, walled thick with forest, past a Hindu’s trading store and many huts, over two bridges where clear, fast-flowing streams ran, through more forest, thinning now to open glades, and into a dusty turn-off that led into a deeply rutted, dust-filled track through bushes to the shade of M’utu-Umbu camp.

That night after dinner we heard the flamingoes flighting in the dark. It was like the sound the wings of ducks make as they go over before it is light, but slower, with a steady beat, and multiplied a thousand times. Pop and I were a little drunk and P.O.M. was very tired. Karl was gloomy again. We had taken the edge from his victories over rhino and now that was past anyway and he was facing possible defeat by oryx. Then, too, they had found not a leopard but a marvellous lion, a huge, black-maned lion that did not want to leave, on the rhino carcass when they had gone there the next morning and could not shoot him because he was in some sort of forest reserve.

‘That’s rotten,’ I said and I tried to feel bad about it but I was still feeling much too good to appreciate any one else’s gloom, and Pop and I sat, tired through to our bones, drinking whisky and soda and talking.

The next day we hunted oryx in the dried-up dustiness of the Rift Valley and finally found a herd way off at the edge of the wooded hills on the far side above a Masai village. They were like a bunch of Masai donkeys except for the beautiful straight-slanting black horns and all the heads looked good. When you looked closely two or three were obviously better than the others and sitting on the ground I picked what I thought was the very best of the lot and as they strung out I made sure of this one. I heard the bullet smack and watched the oryx circle out away from the others, the circle quickening, and knew I had it. So I did not shoot again.

This was the one Karl had picked, too. I did not know that, but had shot, deliberately selfish, to make sure of the best this time at least, but he got another good one and they went off in a wind-lifted cloud of grey dust as they galloped. Except for the miracle of their horns there was no more excitement in shooting them than if they had been donkeys, and after the lorry came up and M’Cola and Charo had skinned the heads out and cut up the meat we rode home in the blowing dust, our faces grey with it, and the valley one long heat mirage.

We stayed at that camp two days. We had to get some zebra hides that we had promised friends at home and it needed time for the skinner to handle them properly. Getting the zebra was no fun; the plain was dull, now that the grass had dried, hot and dusty after the hills, and the picture that remains is of sitting against an ant hill with, in the distance, a herd of zebra galloping in the grey heat haze, raising a dust, and on the yellow plain, the birds circling over a white patch there, another beyond, there a third, and looking back, the plume of dust of the lorry coming with the skinners and the men to cut up the meat for the village. I did some bad shooting in the heat on a Grant’s gazelle that the volunteer skinners asked me to kill them for meat, wounding him in a running shot after missing him three or four times, and then following him across the plain until almost noon in that heat until I got within range and killed him.

But that afternoon we went out along the road that ran through the settlement and past the corner of the Hindu’s general store, where he smiled at us in well-oiled, unsuccessful-storekeeping, brotherly humanity, and hopeful salesmanship, turned the car off to the left on to a track that went into the deep forest, a narrow brush-bordered track through the heavy timber, that crossed a stream on an unsound log and pole bridge and went on until the timber thinned and we came out into a grassy savannah that stretched ahead to the reed-edged, dried-up bed of the lake with, far beyond, the shine of the water and the rose-pink of the flamingoes. There were some grass huts of fishermen in the shade of the last trees and ahead the wind blew across the grass of the savannah and the dried bed of the lake showed a white-grey with many small animals humping across its baked surface as our car alarmed them. They were reed buck and they looked strange and awkward as they moved in the distance but trim and graceful as you saw them standing close. We turned the car out through the thick, short grass and on to the dried lake floor and everywhere, to the left and to the right, where the streams flowed out into the lake and made a reedy marsh that ran down toward the receded lake, cut by canals of water, ducks were flying and we could see big flocks of geese spread over the grassy hummocks that rose above the marsh. The dried bed was hard and firm and we drove the car until it commenced to look moist and soft ahead, then left the motor car standing there, and, Karl taking Charo and I, M’Cola, to carry shells and birds, we agreed to work one on one side and one the other of the marsh and try to shoot and keep the birds moving while Pop and P.O.M. went into the edge of the high reeds on the left shore of the lake where another stream made a thick marsh to which we thought the ducks might fly.

We saw them walk across the open, a big bulky figure in a faded corduroy coat and a very small one in trousers, grey khaki jacket, boots, and a big hat, and then disappear as they crouched in a point of dried reeds before we started. But as we went out to reach the edge of the stream we soon saw the plan was no good. Even watching carefully for the firmest footing you sunk down in the cool mud to the knees, and, as it became less mucky and there were more hummocks broken by water, sometimes I went in to the waist. The ducks and geese flew up out of range and after the first flock had swung across toward where the others were hidden in the reeds and we heard the sharp, small, double report of P.O.M.’s 28-gauge and saw the ducks wheel off and go out toward the lake, the other scattered flocks and the geese all went toward the open water. A flock of dark ibises, looking, with their dipped bills, like great curlews, flew over from the marsh on the side of the stream where Karl was and circled high above us before they went back into the reeds. All through the bog were snipe and black and white godwits and finally, not being able to get within range of the ducks, I began to shoot snipe to M’Cola’s great disgust. We followed the marsh out and then I crossed another stream, shoulder high, holding my gun and shooting coat with shells in the pocket above my head and finally trying to work toward where P.O.M. and Pop were, found a deep flowing stream where teal were flying, and killed three. It was nearly dark now and I found Pop and P.O.M. on the far bank of this stream at the edge of the dried lake bed. It all looked too deep to wade and the bottom was soft but finally I found a heavily worn hippo trail that went into the stream and treading on this, the bottom fairly firm under foot, I made it, the water coming just under my armpits. As I came out on the grass and stood dripping a flock of teal came over very fast, and, crouching to shoot in the dusk at the same time Pop did, we cut down three that fell hard in a long slant ahead in the tall grass. We hunted carefully and found them all. Their speed had carried them much farther than we expected and then, almost dark now, we started for the car across the grey dried mud of the lake bed, me soaked and my boots squashing water, P.O.M. pleased with the ducks, the first we’d had since the Serengetti, we all remembering how marvellous they were to eat, and ahead we could see the car looking very small and beyond it a stretch of flat, baked mud and then the grassy savannah and the forest.

Next day we came in from the zebra business grey and sweat-caked with dust that the car raised and the wind blew over us on the way home across the plain. P.O.M. and Pop had not gone out, there was nothing for them to do and no need for them to eat that dust, and Karl and I out on the plain in the too much sun and dust had gone through one of those rows that starts like this, ‘What was the matter?’

‘They were too far.’

‘Not at the start.’

‘They were too far, I tell you.’

‘They get hard if you don’t take them.’

‘You shoot them.’

‘I’ve got enough. We only want twelve hides altogether. You go ahead.’

Then someone, angry, shooting too fast to show he was being asked to shoot too fast, getting up from behind the ant hill and turning away in disgust, walking towards his partner, who says, smugly, ‘What’s the matter with them?’

‘They’re too damned far, I tell you,’ desperately.

The smug one, complacently, ‘Look at them’.

The zebra that had galloped off had seen the approaching lorry of the skinners and had circled and were standing now, broadside, in easy range.

The one looks, says nothing, too angry now to shoot. Then says, ‘Go ahead. Shoot’.

The smug one, more righteous now than ever, refuses. ‘Go ahead,’ he says.

‘I’m through,’ says the other. He knows he is too angry to shoot and he feels he has been tricked. Something is always tricking him, the need to do things other than in a regular order, or by an inexact command in which details are not specified, or to have to do it in front of people, or to be hurried.

‘We’ve got eleven,’ says smug face, sorry now. He knows he should not hurry him, that he should leave him alone, that he only upsets him by trying to speed him up, and that he has been a smugly righteous bastard again. ‘We can pick up the other one any time. Come on, Bo, we’ll go in.’

‘No, let’s get him. You get him.’

‘No, let’s go in.’

And as the car comes up and you ride in through the dust the bitterness goes and there is only the feeling of shortness of time again.

‘What you thinking about now?’ you ask. ‘What a son of a bitch I am, still?’

‘About this afternoon,’ he says and grins, making wrinkles in the caked dust on his face.

‘Me too,’ you say.

Finally the afternoon comes and you start.

This time you wear canvas ankle-high shoes, light to pull out when you sink, you work out from hummock to hummock, picking a way across the marsh and wade and flounder through the canals and the ducks fly as before out to the lake, but you make a long circle to the right and come out into the lake itself and find the bottom hard and firm and walking knee deep in the water get outside the big flocks, then there is a shot and you and M’Cola crouch, heads bent, and then the air is full of them, and you cut down two, then two again, and then a high one straight overhead, then miss a fast one straight and low to the right, then they come whistling back, passing faster than you can load and shoot, you brown a bunch to get cripples for decoys and then take only fancy shots because you know now you can get all that we can use or carry. You try the high one, straight overhead and almost leaning backward, the coup de roi, and splash a big black duck down beside M’Cola, him laughing, then, the four cripples swimming away, you decide you better kill them and pick up. You have to run in water to your knees to get in range of the last cripple and you slip and go face down and are sitting, enjoying being completely wet finally, water cool on your behind, soaked with muddy water, wiping off glasses, and then getting the water out of the gun, wondering if you can shoot up the shells before they will swell, M’Cola delighted with the spill. He, with the shooting coat now full of ducks, crouches and a flock of geese pass over in easy range while you try to pump a wet shell in. You get a shell in, shoot, but it is too far, or you were behind, and at the shot you see the cloud of flamingoes rise in the sun, making the whole horizon of the lake pink. Then they settle. But after that each time after you shoot you turn and look out into the sun on the water and see that quick rise of the unbelievable cloud and then the slow settling.

‘M’Cola,’ you say and point.

‘N’Dio,’ he says, watching them. ‘M’uzuri!’ and hands you more shells.

We all had good shooting but it was best out on the lake and for three days afterward, travelling, we had cold teal, the best of ducks to eat, fine, plump, and tender, cold with Pan-Yan pickles, and the red wine we bought at Babati, sitting by the road waiting for the lorries to come up, sitting on the shady porch of the little hotel at Babati, then late at night when the lorries finally came in and we were at the house of an absent friend of a friend high up in the hills, cold at night, wearing coats at the table, having waited so long for the broken-down lorry to come that we all drank much too much and were unspeakably hungry, P.O.M. dancing with the manager of the coffee shamba, and with Karl, to the gramophone, me shot full of emetine and with a ringing headache drowning it successfully in whisky-soda with Pop on the porch, it dark and the wind blowing a gale, and then those teal coming on the table, smoking hot and with fresh vegetables. Guinea hen were all right, and I had one now in the lunch box in the back of the car that I would eat to-night; but those teal were the finest of all.

From Babati we had driven through the hills to the edge of a plain, wooded in a long stretch of glade beyond a small village where there was a mission station at the foot of a mountain. Here we had made a camp to hunt kudu which were supposed to be in the wooded hills and in the forests on the flats that stretched out to the edge of the open plain.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was a hot place to camp, under trees that had been girdled to kill them so that the tsetse fly would leave, and there was hard hunting in the hills, which were steep, brushy, and very broken, with a hard climb before you got up into them, and easy hunting on the wooded flats where you wandered as though through a deer park. But everywhere were tsetse flies, swarming around you, biting hard on your neck, through your shirt, on arms, and behind the ears. I carried a leafy branch and swished away at the back of my neck as we walked and we hunted five days, from daylight until dark, coming home after dark, dead tired but glad of the coolness and of the darkness that stopped the tsetse from biting. We took turns hunting the hills and the flats and Karl became steadily gloomier although he killed a very fine roan antelope. He had gotten a very complicated personal feeling about kudu and, as always when he was confused, it was someone’s fault, the guides, the choice of beat, the hills; these all betrayed him. The hills punished him and he did not believe in the flats. Each day I hoped he would get one and that the atmosphere would clear but each day his feelings about the kudu complicated the hunting. He was never a climber and took real punishment in the hills. I tried to take the bulk of the hill beats to relieve him but I could see, now that he was tired he felt they probably were in the hills and he was missing his chance.

In the five days I saw a dozen or more kudu cows and one young bull with a string of cows. The cows were big, grey, striped-flanked antelope with ridiculously small heads, big ears, and a soft, fast-rushing gait that moved them in big-bellied panic through the trees. The young bull had the start of a spiral on his horns but they were short and dumpy and as he ran past us at the end of a glade in the dusk, third in a string of six cows, he was no more like a real bull than a spike elk is like a big, old, thick-necked, dark-maned, wonder-horned, tawny-hided, beer-horse-built bugler of a bull-elk.

Another time, headed home as the sun went down along a steep valley in the hills, the guides pointed to two grey, white-striped, moving animals, against the sun at the top of the hill, showing only their flanks through the trunks of the trees and said they were kudu bulls. We could not see the horns and when we got up to the top of the hill the sun was gone and on the rocky ground we could not find their tracks. But from the glimpse we had they looked higher in the legs than the cows we saw and they might have been bulls. We hunted the ridges until dark but never saw them again nor did Karl find them the next day when we sent him there.

We jumped many waterbuck and once, still hunting along a ridge with a steep gully below, we came on a waterbuck that had heard us, but not scented us, and as we stood, perfectly quiet, M’Cola holding his hand on mine, we watched him, only a dozen feet away, standing, beautiful, dark, full-necked, a dark ruff on his neck, his horns up, trembling all over as his nostrils widened searching for the scent. M’Cola was grinning, pressing his fingers tight on my wrist and we watched the big buck shiver from the danger that he could not locate. Then there was the distant, heavy boom of a native black powder gun and the buck jumped and almost ran over us as he crashed up the ridge.

Another day, with P.O.M. along, we had hunted all through the timbered flat and come out to the edge of the plain where there were only clumps of bush and sanseviera when we heard a deep, throaty, cough. I looked at M’Cola.

‘Simba,’ he said, and did not look pleased.

‘Wapi?’ I whispered. ‘Where?’

He pointed.

I whispered to P.O.M., ‘It’s a lion. Probably the one we heard early this morning. You go back to those trees.’

We had heard a lion roaring just before daylight when we were getting up.

‘I’d rather stay with you.’

‘It wouldn’t be fair to Pop,’ I said. ‘You wait back there.’

‘All right. But you will be careful.’

‘I won’t take anything but a standing shot and I won’t shoot unless I’m sure of him.’

‘All right.’

‘Come on,’ I said to M’Cola.

He looked very grave and did not like it at all.

‘Wapi Simba?’ I whispered.

‘Here,’ he said dismally and pointed at the broken islands of thick, green spiky cover. I motioned to one of the guides to go back with P.O.M. and we watched them go back a couple of hundred yards to the edge of the forest.

‘Come on,’ I said. M’Cola shook his head without smiling but followed. We went forward very slowly, looking into and trying to see through the senseviera. We could see nothing. Then we heard the cough again, a little ahead and to the right.

‘No!’ M’Cola whispered. ‘Hapana, B’wana!’

‘Come on,’ I said. I pointed my forefinger into my neck and wriggled the thumb down. ‘Kufa,’ I whispered, meaning that I would shoot the lion in the neck and kill him dead. M’Cola shook his head, his face grave and sweating. ‘Hapana!’ he whispered.

There was an ant-hill ahead and we climbed the furrowed clay and from the top looked all around. We could not make out anything in the green cactus-like cover. I had believed we might see him from the ant-hill and after we came down we went on for about two hundred yards into the broken cactus. Once again we heard him cough ahead of us and once, a little farther on, we heard a growl. It was very deep and very impressive. Since the ant heap my heart had not been in it. Until that had failed I had believed I might have a close and good shot and I knew that if I could kill one alone, without Pop along, I would feel good about it for a long time. I had made up my mind absolutely not to shoot unless I knew I could kill him, I had killed three and knew what it consisted in, but I was getting more excitement from this one than the whole trip. I felt it was perfectly fair to Pop to take it on as long as I had a chance to call the shot but what we were getting into now was bad. He kept moving away as we came on, but slowly. Evidently he did not want to move, having fed, probably, when we had heard him roaring in the early morning, and he wanted to settle down now. M’Cola hated it. How much of it was the responsibility he felt for me to Pop and how much was his own acute feeling of misery about the dangerous game I did not know. But he felt very miserable. Finally he put his hand on my shoulder, put his face almost into mine and shook his head violently three times.

‘Hapana! Hapana! Hapana! B’wana!’ he protested, sorrowed, and pleaded.

After all, I had no business taking him where I could not call the shot and it was a profound personal relief to turn back.

‘All right,’ I said. We turned around and came back out the same way we had gone in, then crossed the open prairie to the trees where P.O.M. was waiting.

‘Did you see him?’

‘No,’ I told her. ‘We heard him three or four times.’

‘Weren’t you frightened?’

‘Pea-less,’ I said, ‘at the last. But I’d rather have shot him in there than any damned thing in the world.’

‘My, I’m glad you’re back,’ she said. I got the dictionary out of my pocket and made a sentence in pigeon Swahili. ‘Like’ was the word I wanted.

‘M’Cola like Simba?’

M’Cola could grin again now and the smile moved the Chinese hairs at the corner of his mouth.

‘Hapana,’ he said, and waved his hand in front of his face. ‘Hapana!’

‘Hapana’ is a negative.

‘Shoot a kudu?’ I suggested.

‘Good,’ said M’Cola feelingly in Swahili. ‘Better. Best. Tendalla, yes. Tendalla.’

But we never saw a kudu bull out of that camp and we left two days later to go into Babati and then down to Kondoa and strike across country toward Handeni and the coast.

I never liked that camp, nor the guides, nor the country. It had that picked-over, shot-out feeling. We knew there were kudu there and the Prince of Wales had killed his kudu from that camp, but there had been three other parties in that season, and the natives were hunting, supposedly defending their crops from baboons, but on meeting a native with a brass-bound musket it seemed odd that he should follow the baboons ten miles away from his shamba up into the kudu hills to have a shot at them, and I was all for pulling out and trying the new country toward Handeni where none of us had ever been.

‘Let’s go then,’ Pop said.

It seemed this new country was a gift. Kudu came out into the open and you sat and waited for the more enormous ones and selecting a suitable head, blasted him over. Then there were sable and we agreed that whoever killed the first kudu should move on in the sable country. I was beginning to feel awfully good and Karl was very cheerful at the prospect of this new miraculous country where they were so unsophisticated that it was really a shame to topple them over.

We left, soon after daylight, ahead of the outfit, who were to strike camp and follow in the two lorries. We stopped in Babati at the little hotel overlooking the lake and bought some more Pan-Yan pickles and had some cold beer. Then we started south on the Cape to Cairo road, here well graded, smooth, and carefully cut through wooded hills overlooking the long yellow stretch of plains of the Masai Steppes, down and through farming country, where the dried-breasted old women and the shrunken-flanked, hollow-ribbed old men hoed in the cornfields, through miles and dusty miles of this, and then into a valley of sun-baked, eroded land where the soil was blowing away in clouds as you looked, into the tree-shaded, pretty, whitewashed, German model-garrison town of Kandoa-Irangi.

We left M’Cola at the crossroads to hold up our lorries when they came, put the car into some shade and visited the military cemetery. We intended to call on the D.O. but they were at lunch, and we did not want to bother them, so after the military cemetery, which was a pleasant, clean, well-kept place and as good as another to be dead in, we had some beer under a tree in shade that seemed liquid cool after the white glare of a sun that you could feel the weight of on your neck and shoulders, started the car and went out to the crossroads to pick up the lorries and head to the east into the new country.

CHAPTER SIX

It was a new country to us but it had the marks of the oldest countries. The road was a track over shelves of solid rock, worn by the feet of the caravans and the cattle, and it rose in the boulder-strewn un-roadliness through a double line of trees and into the hills. The country was so much like Aragon that I could not believe that we were not in Spain until, instead of mules with saddle bags, we met a dozen natives bare-legged and bare-headed dressed in white cotton cloth they wore gathered over the shoulder like a toga; but when they had passed, the high trees beside the track over those rocks was Spain and I had followed this same route forged on ahead and following close behind a horse one time watching the horror of the flies scuttling around his crupper. They were the same camel flies we found here on the lions. In Spain if one got inside your shirt you had to get the shirt off to kill him. He’d go inside the neckband, down the back, around and under one arm, make for the navel and the belly band, and if you did not get him he would move with such intelligence and speed that, scuttling flat and uncrushable he would make you undress completely to kill him.

That day of watching the camel flies working under the horse’s tail, having had them myself, gave me more horror than anything I could remember except one time in a hospital with my right arm broken off short between the elbow and the shoulder, the back of the hand having hung down against my back, the points of the bone having cut up the flesh of the biceps until it finally rotted, swelled, burst, and sloughed off in pus. Alone with the pain in the night in the fifth week of not sleeping I thought suddenly how a bull elk must feel if you break a shoulder and he gets away and in that night I lay and felt it all, the whole thing as it would happen from the shock of the bullet to the end of the business and, being a little out of my head, thought perhaps what I was going through was a punishment for all hunters. Then, getting well, decided if it was a punishment I had paid it and at least I knew what I was doing. I did nothing that had not been done to me. I had been shot and I had been crippled and gotten away. I expected, always, to be killed by one thing or another and I, truly, did not mind that any more. Since I still loved to hunt I resolved that I would only shoot as long as I could kill cleanly and as soon as I lost that ability I would stop.

If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream, will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-coloured, white-flecked; ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student’s exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing — the stream.

So, in the front seat, thinking of the sea and of the country, in a little while we ran out of Aragon and down to the bank of a sand river, half a mile wide, of golden-coloured sand, shored by green trees and broken by islands of timber and in this river the water is underneath the sand and the game comes down at night and digs in the sand with sharp-pointed hoofs and water flows in and they drink. We cross this river and by now it was getting to be afternoon and we passed many people on the road who were leaving the country ahead where there was a famine and there were small trees and close brush now beside the road, and then it commenced to climb and we came into some blue hills, old, worn, wooded hills with trees like beeches and clusters of huts with fire smoking and cattle home driven, flocks of sheep and goats and patches of corn and I said to P.O.M., ‘It’s like Galicia’.

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘We’ve been through three provinces of Spain to-day.’

‘Is it really?’ Pop asked.

‘There’s no difference,’ I said. ‘Only the buildings. It was like Navarre in Droopy’s country too. The limestone outcropping in the same way, the way the land lies, the trees along the watercourses and the springs.’

‘It’s damned strange how you can love a country,’ Pop said.

‘You two are very profound fellows,’ P.O.M. said. ‘But where are we going to camp?’

‘Here,’ said Pop. ‘As well as any place. We’ll just find some water.’

We camped under some trees near three big wells where native women came for water and, after drawing lots for location, Karl and I hunted in the dusk around two of the hills across the road above the native village.

‘It’s all kudu country,’ Pop said. ‘You’re liable to jump one anywhere.’

But we saw nothing but some Masai cattle in the timber and came home, in the dark, glad of the walk after a day in the car, to find camp up, Pop and P.O.M. in pyjamas by the fire, and Karl not yet in.

He came in, furious for some reason, no kudu possibly, pale, and gaunt looking and speaking to nobody.

Later, at the fire, he asked me where we had gone and I said we had hunted around our hill until our guide had heard them; then cut up to the top of the hill, down, and across country to camp.

‘What do you mean, heard us?’

‘He said he heard you. So did M’Cola.’

‘I thought we drew lots for where we would hunt.’

‘We did,’ I said. ‘But we didn’t know we had gotten around to your side until we heard you.’

‘Did you hear us?’

‘I heard something,’ I said. ‘And when I put my hand up to my ear to listen the guide said something to M’Cola and M’Cola said, “B’wana”. I said, “What B’wana?” and he said, “B’wana Kabor”. That’s you. So we figured we’d come to our limit and went up to the top and came back.’

He said nothing and looked very angry.

‘Don’t get sore about it,’ I said.

‘I’m not sore. I’m tired,’ he said. I could believe it because of all people no one can be gentler, more understanding, more self-sacrificing, than Karl, but the kudu had become an obsession to him and he was not himself, nor anything like himself.

‘He better get one pretty quick,’ P.O.M. said when he had gone into his tent to bathe.

‘Did you cut in on his country?’ Pop asked me.

‘Hell, no,’ I said.

‘He’ll get one where we’re going,’ Pop said. ‘He’ll probably get a fifty-incher.’

‘All the better,’ I said. ‘But by God, I want to get one too.’

‘You will, Old Timer,’ Pop said. ‘I haven’t a thought but what you will.’

‘What the hell! We’ve got ten days.’

‘We’ll get sable too, you’ll see. Once our luck starts to run.’

‘How long have you ever had them hunt them in a good country?’

‘Three weeks and leave without seeing one. And I’ve had them get them the first half day. It’s still hunting, the way you hunt a big buck at home.’

‘I love it,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want that guy to beat me. Pop, he’s got the best buff, the best rhino, the best water-buck . . .’

‘You beat him on oryx,’ Pop said.

‘What’s an oryx?’

‘He’ll look damned handsome when you get him home.’

‘I’m just kidding.’

‘You beat him on impalla, on eland. You’ve got a first-rate bushbuck. Your leopard’s as good as his. But he’ll beat you on anything where there’s luck. He’s got damned wonderful luck and he’s a good lad. I think he’s off his feed a little.’

‘You know how fond I am of him. I like him as well as I like anyone. But I want to see him have a good time. It’s no fun to hunt if we get that way about it.’

‘You’ll see. He’ll get a kudu at this next camp and he’ll be on top of the wave.’

‘I’m just a crabby bastard,’ I said.

‘Of course you are,’ said Pop. ‘But why not have a drink?’

‘Right,’ I said.

Karl came out, quiet, friendly, gentle, and understandingly delicate.

‘It will be fine when we get to that new country,’ he said.

‘It will be swell,’ I said.

‘Tell me what it’s like, Mr. Phillips,’ he said to Pop.

‘I don’t know,’ said Pop. ‘But they say it’s very pleasant hunting. They’re supposed to feed right out in the open. That old Dutchman claims there are some remarkable heads.’

‘I hope you get a sixty-incher, kid,’ Karl said to me.

‘You’ll get a sixty-incher.’

‘No,’ said Karl. ‘Don’t kid me. I’ll be happy with any kudu.’

‘You’ll probably get a hell of a one,’ Pop said.

‘Don’t kid me,’ Karl said. ‘I know how lucky I’ve been. I would be happy with any kudu. Any bull at all.’

He was very gentle and he could tell what was in your mind, forgive you for it, and understand it.

‘Good old Karl,’ I said, warmed with whisky, understanding, and sentiment.

‘We’re having a swell time, aren’t we?’ Karl said. ‘Where’s poor old Mama?’

‘I’m here,’ said P.O.M. from the shadow. ‘I’m one of those quiet people.’

‘By God if you’re not,’ Pop said. ‘But you can puncture the old man quick enough when he gets started.’

‘That’s what makes a woman a universal favourite,’ P.O.M. told him. ‘Give me another compliment, Mr. J.’

‘By God, you’re brave as a little terrier.’ Pop and I had both been drinking, it seemed.

‘That’s lovely.’ P.O.M. sat far back in her chair, holding her hands clasped around her mosquito boots. I looked at her, seeing her quilted blue robe in the firelight now, and the light on her black hair. ‘I love it when you all reach the little terrier stage. Then I know the war can’t be far away. Were either of you gentlemen in the war by any chance?’

‘Not me,’ said Pop. ‘Your husband, one of the bravest bastards that ever lived, an extraordinary wing shot and an excellent tracker.’

‘Now he’s drunk, we get the truth,’ I said.

‘Let’s eat,’ said P.O.M. ‘I’m really frightfully hungry.’

We were out in the car at daylight, out on to the road and beyond the village and, passing through a stretch of heavy bush, we came to the edge of a plain, still misty before the sunrise, where we could see, a long way off, eland feeding, looking huge and grey in the early morning light. We stopped the car at the edge of the bush and getting out and sitting down with the glasses saw there was a herd of kongoni scattered between us and the eland and with the kongoni a single bull oryx, like a fat, plum-coloured, Masai donkey with marvellous long, black, straight, back-slanting horns that showed each time he lifted his head from feeding.

‘You want to go after him?’ I asked Karl.

‘No. You go on.’

I knew he hated to make a stalk and to shoot in front of people and so I said, ‘All right’. Also I wanted to shoot, selfishly, and Karl was unselfish. We wanted meat badly.

I walked along the road, not looking toward the game, trying to look casual, holding the rifle slung straight up and down from the left shoulder away from the game. They seemed to pay no attention but fed away steadily. I knew that if I moved toward them they would at once move off out of range so, when from the tail of my eye I saw the oryx drop his head to feed again, and, the shot looking possible, I sat down, slipped my arm through the sling and as he looked up and started to move off, quartering away, I held for the top of his back and squeezed off. You do not hear the noise of the shot on game but the slap of the bullet sounded as he started running across and to the right, the whole plain back-grounding into moving animals against the rise of the sun, the rocking-horse canter of the long-legged, grotesque kongoni, the heavy swinging trot into gallop of the eland, and another oryx I had not seen before running with the kongoni. This sudden life and panic all made background for the one I wanted, now trotting, three-quartering away, his horns held high now and I stood to shoot running, got on him, the whole animal miniatured in the aperture and I held above his shoulders, swung ahead and squeezed and he was down, kicking, before the crack of the bullet striking bone came back. It was a very long and even more lucky shot that broke a hind leg.

I ran toward him, then slowed to walk up carefully, in order not to be blown if he jumped and ran; but he was down for good. He had gone down so suddenly and the bullet had made such a crack as it landed that I was afraid I had hit him on the horns but when I reached him he was dead from the first shot behind the shoulders high up in the back and I saw it was cutting the leg from under him that brought him down. They all came up and Charo stuck him to make him legal meat.

‘Where did you hold on him the second time?’ Karl asked.

‘Nowhere. A touch above and quite a way ahead and swung with him.’

‘It was very pretty,’ Dan said.

‘By evening,’ Pop said, ‘he’ll tell us that he broke that off leg on purpose. That’s one of his favourite shots, you know. Did you ever hear him explain it?’

While M’Cola was skinning the head out and Charo was butchering out the meat, a long, thin Masai with a spear came up, said good morning, and stood, on one leg, watching the skinning. He spoke to me at some length, and I called to Pop. The Masai repeated it to Pop.

‘He wants to know if you are going to shoot something else,’ Pop said. ‘He would like some hides but he doesn’t care about oryx hide. It is almost worthless, he says. He wonders if you would like to shoot a couple of kongoni or an eland. He likes those hides.’

‘Tell him on our way back.’

Pop told him solemnly. The Masai shook my hand.

‘Tell him he can always find me around Harry’s New York Bar,’ I said.

The Masai said something else and scratched one leg with the other.

‘He says why did you shoot him twice?’ Pop asked.

‘Tell him in the morning in our tribe we always shoot them twice. Later in the day we shoot them once. In the evening we are often half shot ourselves. Tell him he can always find me at the New Stanley or at Torr’s.’

‘He says what do you do with the horns?’

‘Tell him in our tribe we give the horns to our wealthiest friends. Tell him it is very exciting and sometimes members of the tribe are chased across vast spaces with empty pistols. Tell him he can find me in the book.’

Pop told the Masai something and we shook hands again, parting on a most excellent basis. Looking across the plain through the mist we could see some other Masai coming along the road; earth-brown skins, and knee-ing forward stride and spears thin in the morning light.

Back in the car, the oryx head wrapped in a burlap sack, the meat tied inside the mudguards, the blood drying, the meat dusting over, the road of red sand now, the plain gone, the bush again close to the edge of the road, we came up into some hills and through the little village of Kibaya where there was a white rest house and a general store and much farming land. It was here Dan had sat on a haystack one time waiting for a kudu to feed out into the edge of a patch of mealy-corn and a lion had stalked Dan while he sat and nearly gotten him. This gave us a strong historical feeling for the village of Kibaya and as it was still cool and the sun had not yet burned off the dew from the grass I suggested we drink a bottle of that silver-paper-necked, yellow-and-black-labelled German beer with the horseman in armour on it in order that we might remember the place better and even appreciate it more. This done, full of historical admiration for Kibaya, we learned the road was possible ahead, left word for the lorries to follow on to the eastward and headed on toward the coast and the kudu country.

For a long time, while the sun rose and the day became hot we drove through what Pop had described, when I asked him what the country was like to the south, as a million miles of bloody Africa, bush close to the road that was impenetrable, solid, scrubby-looking undergrowth.

‘There are very big elephant in there,’ Pop said. ‘But it’s impossible to hunt them. That’s why they’re very big. Simple, isn’t it?’

After a long stretch of the million-mile country, the country began to open out into dry, sandy, bush-bordered prairies that dried into a typical desert country with occasional patches of bush where there was water, that Pop said was like the northern frontier province of Kenya. We watched for gerenuk, that long-necked antelope that resembles a praying mantis in its way of carrying itself, and for the lesser kudu that we knew lived in this desert bush, but the sun was high now and we saw nothing. Finally the road began to lift gradually into the hills again, low, blue, wooded hills now, with miles of sparse bush, a little thicker than orchard bush, between, and ahead a pair of high, heavy, timbered hills that were big enough to be mountains. These were on each side of the road and as we climbed in the car where the red road narrowed there was a herd of hundreds of cattle ahead being driven down to the coast by Somali cattle buyers; the principal buyer walked ahead, tall, good-looking in white turban and coast clothing, carrying an umbrella as a symbol of authority. We worked the car through the herd, finally, and coming out wound our way through pleasant looking bush, up and out into the open between the two mountains and on, half a mile, to a mud and thatched village in the open clearing on a little low plateau beyond the two mountains. Looking back, the mountains looked very fine and with timber up their slopes, outcroppings of limestone and open glades and meadows above the timber.

‘Is this the place?’

‘Yes,’ said Dan. ‘We will find where the camping place is.’

A very old, worn, and faded black man, with a stubble of white beard, a farmer, dressed in a dirty once-white cloth gathered at the shoulder in the manner of a Roman toga, came out from behind one of the mud and wattle huts, and guided us back down the road and off it to the left to a very good camp site. He was a very discouraged-looking old man and after Pop and Dan had talked with him he went off, seeming more discouraged than before, to bring some guides whose names Dan had written on a piece of paper as being recommended by a Dutch hunter who had been here a year ago and who was Dan’s great friend.

We took the seats out of the car to use as a table and benches, and spreading our coats to sit on had a lunch in the deep shade of a big tree, drank some beer, and slept or read while we waited for the lorries to come up. Before the lorries arrived the old man came back with the skinniest, hungriest, most unsuccessful looking of Wanderobos who stood on one leg, scratched the back of his neck and carried a bow and quiver of arrows and a spear. Queried as to whether this was the guide whose name we had, the old man admitted he was not and went off more discouraged than ever, to get the official guides.

When we woke next the old man was standing with the two official and highly-clothed-in-khaki guides and two others, quite naked, from the village. There was a long palaver and the head one of the two khaki-panted guides showed his credentials, a To Whom It May Concern, stating the bearer knew the country well and was a reliable boy and capable tracker. This was signed by so and so, professional hunter. The khaki-clothed guide referred to this professional hunter as B’wana Simba and the name infuriated us all.

‘Some bloke that killed a lion once,’ Pop said.

‘Tell him I am B’wana Fisi, the hyena slaughterer,’ I told Dan. ‘B’wana Fisi chokes them with his naked hands.’

Dan was telling them something else.

‘Ask them if they would like to meet B’wana Hop-Toad, the inventor of the hoptoads and Mama Tziggi, who owns all these locusts.’

Dan ignored this. It seemed they were discussing money. After ascertaining their customary daily wage, Pop told them if either of us killed a kudu the guide would receive fifteen shillings.

‘You mean a pound,’ said the leading guide.

‘They seem to know what they’re up to,’ Pop said. ‘I must say I don’t care for this sportsman in spite of what B’wana Simba says.’

B’wana Simba, by the way, we later found out to be an excellent hunter with a wonderful reputation on the coast.

‘We’ll put them into two lots and you draw from them,’ Pop suggested, ‘one naked one and one with breeches in each lot. I’m all for the naked savage, myself, as a guide.’

On suggesting to the two testimonial-equipped, breeched guides that they select an unclothed partner, we found this would not work out. Loud Mouth, the financial and, now, theatrical, genius who was giving a gesture-by-gesture reproduction of How B’wana Simba Killed His Last Kudu interrupted it long enough to state he would only hunt with Abdullah. Abdullah, the short, thick-nosed, educated one, was His Tracker. They always hunted together. He himself did not track. He resumed the pantomime of B’wana Simba and another character known as B’wana Doktor and the horned beasts.

‘We’ll take the two savages as one lot and these two Oxonians as the other,’ Pop said.

‘I hate that theatrical bastard,’ I said.

‘He may be marvellous,’ Pop said doubtfully. Anyway, you’re a tracker, you know. The old man says the other two are good.’

‘Thank you. Go to hell. Will you hold the straws?’

Pop arranged two grass stems in his fist. ‘The long one is for David Garrick and his pal,’ he explained. ‘The short one is the two nudist sportsmen.’

‘Do you want to draw first?’

‘Go ahead,’ Karl said.

I drew David Garrick and Abdullah.

‘I got the bloody tragedian.’

‘He may be very good,’ Karl said.

‘Do you want to trade?’

‘No. He may be a marvel.’

‘Now we’ll draw for choice of beats. The long straw gets first choice,’ Pop explained.

‘Go ahead and draw.’

Karl drew the short one.

‘What are the beats?’ I asked Pop.

There was a long conversation in which our David simulated the killing of half a dozen kudu from different types of ambush, surprise, stalks in the open, and jumping them in the bush.

Finally Pop said, ‘It seems there’s some sort of a salt-lick where they come to lick salt and thousands are slain. Then sometimes you just stroll around the hill there and pot the poor beggars in the open. If you’re feeling frightfully fit, you climb for them and up in the crags you knock them over as they stroll out to feed.’

‘I’ll take the salt-lick.’

‘Mind you only shoot the very biggest sort,’ Pop said.

‘When do we start?’ Karl asked.

‘The salt-lick is supposed to be an early morning-show,’ Pop told us. ‘But Old Hem might as well have a look at it to-night. It’s about five miles down the road before you start to walk. He’ll start first and take the car. You can start back in the hills any time after the sun gets a little farther down.’

‘What about the Memsahib?’ I asked. ‘Should she go with me?’

‘I don’t think it’s advisable,’ Pop said seriously. ‘The fewer people when you’re after kudu the better.’

M’Cola, Theatre Business, Abdullah, and I came back that evening late in the cool of the night and full of excitement as we came up to the fire. The dust of the salt-lick had been cut up and printed deep with fresh kudu tracks and there were several big bull tracks. The blind made a marvellous ambush and I was as confident and as sure of a shot at kudu the next morning as I would be sure of a shot at ducks from a good blind, with a fine stock of decoys out, cold weather, and the certainty of a flight on.

‘It’s airtight. It’s foolproof. It’s even a shame. What’s his name, Booth, Barrett, McCullough — you know who I mean . . .’

‘Charles Laughton,’ said Pop, pulling on his pipe.

‘That’s the one. Fred Astaire. Society’s hoofer and the world’s. He’s an ace. Found the blind and everything. Knew where the salt-lick was. Could tell which way the wind blew by simply scattering dust. He’s a marvel. B’wana Simba trains ‘em, pal. Pop, we have them in the container. It’s only a question of not spoiling the meat and selecting the more rugged specimens. I’ll kill you two to-morrow on that lick. Citizens, I feel very well.’

‘What have you been drinking?’

‘Not a damned thing, really. Call Garrick. Tell him I’ll put him in the cinema. Got a part for him. Little thing I thought up on the way home. It may not work out but I like the plot. Othello or The Moor of Venice. D’you like it? It’s got a wonderful idea. You see this jig we call Othello falls in love with this girl who’s never been around at all so we call her Desdemona. Like it? They’ve been after me to write it for years but I drew the colour line. Let him go out and get a reputation, I told them. Harry Wills, hell. Paulino beat him. Sharkey beat him. Dempsey beat Sharkey. Carnera knocked him out. What if nobody saw the punch? Where the hell were we, Pop? Harry Greb is dead you know.’

‘We were just coming into Town,’ Pop said. ‘Chaps were throwing things at you and we couldn’t find out why.’

‘I remember,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Why didn’t you make him draw the colour line, Mr. J. P.?’

‘I was frightfully tired,’ Pop said.

‘You’re very distinguished looking, though,’ P.O.M. said. ‘What are we going to do with this goofy?’

‘Throw a drink into the brute and see if he’ll quiet down.’

‘I’m quiet now,’ I said. ‘But, by God, I feel awfully good about to-morrow.’

Just then who should come into camp but old Karl with his two naked savages and his half-size, very devout Mohammedan gun bearer, Charo. In the firelight old Karl looked a greyish, yellowish white in the face and he took off his Stetson.

‘Well, did you get one?’ he asked.

‘No. But they’re there. What did you do?’

‘Walked along a goddamned road. How do they expect to find kudu along a road with nothing but cattle and huts and people?’

He did not look like himself and I thought he must be ill. But coming in like a death’s head when we had been clowning made me behave badly again and I said, ‘We drew lots, you know’.

‘Of course,’ he said bitterly. ‘We hunted along a road. What would you expect to see? Does that seem the way to hunt kudu to you?’

‘But you’ll get one on the salt-lick in the morning,’ P.O.M. told him very cheerfully.

I drank off the glass of whisky and soda and heard my voice say very cheerfully, ‘You’ll be sure to get one on the salt-lick in the morning’.

‘You’re hunting it in the morning,’ Karl said.

‘No. You’re hunting it. I had it to-night. We’re changing off. That’s been understood. Isn’t it, Pop?’

‘Quite,’ Pop said. No one was looking at anyone else.

‘Have a whisky and soda, Karl,’ P.O.M. said.

‘All right,’ Karl said.

We had one of those quiet meals. In bed in the tent, I said, ‘What in God’s name prompted you to say that about him having the lick in the morning?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think that’s what I meant to say. I got mixed up. Let’s not talk about it.’

‘I won the damned thing drawing lots. You can’t go against lots. That’s the only way the luck has a chance to even up, ever.’

‘Don’t let’s talk about it.’

‘I don’t think he’s well now and he doesn’t feel himself. The damned things have gotten his goat and he’s liable to blow that salt-lick higher than a kite in the state he’s in.’

‘Please stop talking about it.’

‘I will.’

‘Good.’

‘Well, we made him feel good anyway.’

‘I don’t know that we did. Please stop talking about it.’

‘I will.’

‘Good.’

‘Good night,’ she said.

‘The hell with it,’ I said. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the morning Karl and his outfit started for the salt-lick and Garrick, Abdullah, M’Cola and I crossed the road, angled behind the village up a dry watercourse and started climbing the mountains in a mist. We headed up a pebbly, boulder-filled, dry stream bed overgrown with vines and brush so that, climbing, you walked, stooping, in a steep tunnel of vines and foliage. I sweated so that I was soaked through my shirt and undergarments and when we came out on the shoulder of the mountain and stood, looking down at the bank of clouds quilting over the entire valley below us, the morning breeze chilled me and I had to put on my raincoat while we glassed the country. I was too wet with sweat to sit down and I signed Garrick to keep on going. We went around one side of the mountain, doubled back on a higher grade and crossed over, out of the sun that was drying my wet shirt and along the top of a series of grassy valleys, stopping to search each one thoroughly with the field glasses. Finally we came to a sort of amphitheatre, a bowl-like valley of very green grass with a small stream down the middle and timber along the far side and all the lower edge. We sat in the shadow against some rocks, out of any breeze, watching with the glasses as the sun rose and lighted the opposite slopes, seeing two kudu cows and a calf feed out from the timber, moving with the quickly browsing, then head lifted, long-staring vigilance of all browsing animals in a forest. Animals on a plain can see so far that they have confidence and feed very differently from animals in the woods. We could see the vertical white stripes on their grey flanks and it was very satisfying to watch them and to be high in the mountain that early in the morning. Then, while we watched, there was a boom, like a rockslide. I thought at first it was a boulder falling, but M’Cola whispered.

‘B’wana Kibor! Piga!’ We listened for another shot but we did not hear one and I was sure Karl had his kudu. The cows we were watching had heard the shot and stood, listening, then went on feeding. But they fed into the timber. I remembered the old saying of the Indian in camp, ‘One shot, meat. Two shots, maybe. Three shots, heap s — t,’ and I got out the dictionary to translate it for M’Cola. However it came out seemed to amuse him and he laughed and shook his head. We glassed that valley until the sun came on to us, then hunted around the other side of the mountain and in another fine valley saw the place where the other B’wana, B’wana Doktor he still sounded like, had shot a fine bull kudu, but a Masai walked down the centre of the valley while we were glassing it and when I pretended I was going to shoot him Garrick became very dramatic insisting it was a man, a man, a man!

‘Don’t shoot men?’ I asked him.

‘No! No! No!’ he said putting his hand to his head. I took the gun down with great reluctance, clowning for M’Cola who was grinning, and it very hot now, we walked across a meadow where the grass was knee high and truly swarming with long, rose-coloured, gauze-winged locusts that rose in clouds about us, making a whirring like a mowing machine, and climbing small hills and going down a long steep slope, we made our way back to camp to find the air of the valley drifting with flying locusts and Karl already in camp with his kudu.

Passing the skinner’s tent he showed me the head which looked, body-less and neck-less, the cape of hide hanging loose, wet and heavy from where the base of the skull had been severed from the vertebral column, a very strange and unfortunate kudu. Only the skin running from the eyes down to the nostrils, smooth grey and delicately marked with white, and the big, graceful ears were beautiful. The eyes were already dusty and there were flies around them and the horns were heavy, coarse, and instead of spiralling high they made a heavy turn and slanted straight out. It was a freak head, heavy and ugly.

Pop was sitting under the dining tent smoking and reading.

‘Where’s Karl?’ I asked him.

‘In his tent, I think. What did you do?’

‘Worked around the hill. Saw a couple of cows.’

‘I’m awfully glad you got him,’ I told Karl at the mouth of his tent. ‘How was it?’

‘We were in the blind and they motioned me to keep my head down and then when I looked up there he was right beside us. He looked huge.’

‘We heard you shoot. Where did you hit him?’

‘In the leg first, I think. Then we trailed him and finally I hit him a couple of more times and we got him.’

‘I heard only one shot.’

‘There were three or four,’ Karl said.

‘I guess the mountain shut off some if you were gone the other way trailing him. He’s got a heavy beam and a big spread.’

‘Thanks,’ Karl said. ‘I hope you get a lot better one. They said there was another one but I didn’t see him.’

I went back to the dining tent where Pop and P.O.M. were. They did not seem very elated about the kudu.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ I asked.

‘Did you see the head?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘Sure.’

‘It’s awful looking,’ she said.

‘It’s a kudu. He’s got another one still to go.’

‘Charo and the trackers said there was another bull with this one. A big bull with a wonderful head.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll shoot him.’

‘If he ever comes back.’

‘It’s fine he has one,’ P.O.M. said.

‘I’ll bet he’ll get the biggest one ever known, now,’ I said.

‘I’m sending him down with Dan to the sable country,’ Pop said. ‘That was the agreement. The first to kill a kudu to get first crack at the sable.’

‘That’s fine.’

‘Then as soon as you get your kudu we’ll move down there too.’

‘Good.’

PART III. PURSUIT AND FAILURE

CHAPTER ONE

That all seemed a year ago. Now, this afternoon in the car, on the way out to the twenty-eight-mile salt-lick, the sun on our faces, just having shot the guinea fowl, having, in the last five days, failed on the lick where Karl shot his bull, having failed in the hills, the big hills and the small hills, having failed on the flats, losing a shot the night before on this lick because of the Austrian’s lorry, I knew there were only two days more to hunt before we must leave. M’Cola knew it too, and we were hunting together now, with no feeling of superiority on either side any more, only a shortness of time and our disgust that we did not know the country and were saddled with these farcical bastards as guides.

Kamau, the driver, was a Kikuyu, a quiet man of about thirty-five who, with an old brown tweed coat some shooter had discarded, trousers heavily patched on the knees and ripped open again, and a very ragged shirt, managed always to give an impression of great elegance. Kamau was very modest, quiet, and an excellent driver, and now, as we came out of the bush country and into an open, scrubby, desert-looking stretch, I looked at him, whose elegance, achieved with an old coat and a safety pin, whose modesty, pleasantness and skill I admired so much now, and thought how, when we first were out, he had very nearly died of fever, and that if he had died it would have meant nothing to me except that we would be short a driver; while now whenever or wherever he should die I would feel badly. Then abandoning the sweet sentiment of the distant and improbable death of Kamau, I thought what a pleasure it would be to shoot David Garrick in the behind, just to see the look on his face, sometime when he was dramatizing a stalk, and, just then, we put up another flock of guineas. M’Cola handed me the shotgun and I shook my head. He nodded violently and said, ‘Good. Very Good’, and I told Kamau to go on. This confused Garrick who began an oration. Didn’t we want guineas? Those were guineas. The finest kind. I had seen by the speedometer that we were only about three miles from the salt and had no desire to spook a bull off of it, by a shot, to frighten him in the way we had seen the lesser kudu leave the salt when he heard the lorry noise while we were in the blind.

We left the lorry under some scrubby trees about two miles from the lick and walked along the sandy road towards the first salt place which was in the open to the left of the trail. We had gone about a mile keeping absolutely quiet and walking in single file, Abdullah the educated tracker leading, then me, M’Cola, and Garrick, when we saw the road was wet ahead of us. Where the sand was thin over the clay there was a pool of water and you could see that a heavy rain had drenched it all on ahead. I did not realize what this meant but Garrick threw his arms wide, looked up to the sky and bared his teeth in anger.

‘It’s no good,’ M’Cola whispered.

Garrick started to talk in a loud voice.

‘Shut up, you bastard,’ I said, and put my hand to my mouth. He kept on talking in above normal tones and I looked up ‘shut up’ in the dictionary while he pointed to the sky and the rained-out road. I couldn’t find ‘shut up’ so I put the back of my hand against his mouth with some firmness and he closed it in surprise.

‘‘Cola,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said M’Cola.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Salt no good.’

‘Ah.’

So that was it. I had thought of the rain only as something that made tracking easy.

‘When the rain?’ I asked.

‘Last night,’ M’Cola said.

Garrick started to talk and I placed the back of my hand against his mouth.

‘‘Cola.’

‘Yes.’

‘Other salt,’ pointing in the direction of the big lick in the woods, which I knew was a good bit higher because we went very slightly up hill through the brush to reach it. ‘Other salt good?’

‘Maybe.’

M’Cola said something in a very low voice to Garrick who seemed deeply hurt but kept his mouth shut and we went on down the road, walking around the wet places, to where, sure enough, the deep depression of the salt-lick was half filled with water. Garrick started to whisper a speech here but M’Cola shut him up again.

‘Come on,’ I said, and, M’Cola ahead, we started trailing up the damp, sandy, ordinarily dry watercourse that led through the trees to the upper lick.

M’Cola stopped dead, leaned over to look at the damp sand, then whispered, ‘Man’, to me. There was the track.

‘Shenzi,’ he said, which meant a wild man.

We trailed the man, moving slowly through the trees and stalking the lick carefully, up and into the blind. M’Cola shook his head.

‘No good,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

We went over to the lick. There it was all written plainly. There were the tracks of three big bull kudu in the moist bank beyond the lick where they had come to the salt. Then there were the sudden, deep, knifely-cut tracks where they made a spring when the bow twanged and the slashing heavily cut prints of their hoofs as they had gone off up the bank and then, far-spaced, the tracks running into the bush. We trailed them, all three, but no man’s track joined theirs. The bow-man missed them.

M’Cola said, ‘Shenzi!’ putting great hate into the word. We picked up the shenzi’s tracks and saw where he had gone on back to the road. We settled down in the blind and waited there until it was dark and a light rain began to fall. Nothing came to the salt. In the rain we made our way back to the lorry. Some wild-man had shot at our kudu and spooked them away from the salt and now the lick was being ruined.

Kamau had rigged a tent out of a big canvas ground cloth, hung my mosquito net inside, and set up the canvas cot. M’Cola brought the food inside the shelter tent.

Garrick and Abdullah built a fire and they, Kamau and M’Cola cooked over it. They were going to sleep in the lorry. It rained drizzlingly and I undressed, got into mosquito boots and heavy pyjamas and sat on the cot, ate a breast of roast guinea hen and drank a couple of tin cups of half whisky and water.

M’Cola came in, grave, solicitous, and very awkward inside a tent and took my clothes out from where I had folded them to make a pillow and folded them again, very un-neatly, and put them under the blankets. He brought three tins to see if I did not want them opened.

‘No.’

‘Chai?’ he asked.

‘The hell with it.’

‘No chai?’

‘Whisky better.’

‘Yes,’ he said feelingly. ‘Yes.’

‘Chai in the morning. Before the sun.’

‘Yes, B’wana M’Kumba.’

‘You sleep here. Out of the rain.’ I pointed to the canvas where the rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear. It was a lovely sound, even though it was bitching us.

‘Yes.’

‘Go on. Eat.’

‘Yes. No chai?’

‘The hell with tea.’

‘Whisky?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Whisky finish.’

‘Whisky,’ he said confidently.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Go eat,’ and pouring the cup half and half with water got in under the mosquito bar, found my clothes and again made them into a pillow, and lying on my side drank the whisky very slowly, resting on one elbow, then dropped the cup down under the bar on to the ground, felt under the cot for the Springfield, put the searchlight beside me in the bed under the blanket, and went to sleep listening to the rain. I woke when I heard M’Cola come in, make his bed and go to sleep, and I woke once in the night and heard him sleeping by me; but in the morning he was up and had made the tea before I was awake.

‘Chai,’ he said, pulling on my blanket.

‘Bloody chai,’ I said, sitting up still asleep.

It was a grey, wet morning. The rain had stopped but the mist hung over the ground and we found the salt-lick rained out and not a track near it. Then we hunted through the wet scrub on the flat hoping to find a track in the soaked earth and trail a bull until we could see him. There were no tracks. We crossed the road and followed the edge of the scrub around a moor-like open stretch. I hoped we might find the rhino but while we came on much fresh rhino dung there were no tracks since the rain. Once we heard tick birds and looking up saw them in jerky flight above us headed to the northward over the heavy scrub. We made a long circle through there but found nothing but a fresh hyena track and a cow kudu track. In a tree M’Cola pointed out a lesser kudu skull with one beautiful, long, curling horn. We found the other horn below in the grass and I screwed it back on to its bone base.

‘Shenzi,’ M’Cola said and imitated a man pulling a bow. The skull was quite clean but the hollow horns had some damp residue in them, smelled unbearably foul and, giving no sign of having noticed the stench, I handed them to Garrick who promptly, without sign gave them to Abdullah. Abdullah wrinkled the edge of his flat nose and shook his head. They really smelled abominably. M’Cola and I grinned and Garrick looked virtuous.

I decided a good idea might be to drive along the road in the car, watching for kudu, and hunt any likely-looking clearings. We went back to the car and did this, working several clearings with no luck. By then the sun was up and the road was becoming populous with travellers, both white-clothed and naked, and we decided to head for camp. On our way in, we stopped and stalked the other salt-lick. There was an impalla on it looking very red where the sun struck his hide in the patches between the grey trees and there were many kudu tracks. We smoothed them over and drove on into camp to find a sky full of locusts passing over, going to the westward, making the sky, as you looked up, seem a pink dither of flickering passage, flickering like an old cinema film, but pink instead of grey. P.O.M. and Pop came out and were very disappointed. No rain had fallen in camp and they had been sure we would have something when we came in.

‘Did my literary pal get off?’

‘Yes,’ Pop said. ‘He’s gone into Handeni.’

‘He told me all about American women,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Poor old Poppa, I was sure you’d get one. Damn the rain.’

‘How are American women?’

‘He thinks they’re terrible.’

‘Very sound fellow,’ said Pop. ‘Tell me just what happened to-day.’

We sat in the shade of the dining tent and I told them.

‘A Wanderobo,’ Pop said. ‘They’re frightful shots. Bad luck.’

‘I thought it might be one of those travelling sportsmen you see with their bows slung going along the road. He saw the lick by the road and trailed up to the other one.’

‘Not very likely. They carry those bows and arrows as protection. They’re not hunters.’

‘Well, whoever it was put it on us.’

‘Bad luck. That, and the rain. I’ve had scouts out here on both the hills but they’ve seen nothing.’

‘Well, we’re not bitched until to-morrow night. When do we have to leave?’

‘After to-morrow.’

‘That bloody savage.’

‘I suppose Karl is blasting up the sable down there.’

‘We won’t be able to get into camp for the horns. Have you heard anything?’

‘No.’

‘I’m going to give up smoking for six months for you to get one,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’ve started already.’

We had lunch and afterwards I went into the tent and lay down and read. I knew we still had a chance on the lick in the morning and I was not going to worry about it. But I was worried and I did not want to go to sleep and wake up feeling dopey so I came out and sat in one of the canvas chairs under the open dining tent and read somebody’s life of Charles the Second and looked up every once in a while to watch the locusts. The locusts were exciting to see and it was difficult for me to take them as a matter of course.

Finally I went to sleep in the chair with my feet on a chop-box and when I woke there was Garrick, the bastard, wearing a large, very floppy, black and white ostrich-plume head-dress.

‘Go away,’ I said in English.

He stood smirking proudly, then turned so I could see the head-dress from the side.

I saw Pop coming out of his tent with a pipe in his mouth. ‘Look what we have,’ I called to him.

He looked, said, ‘Christ’, and went back into the tent.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll just ignore it.’

Pop came out, finally, with a book and we took no notice of Garrick’s head-dress at all, sitting and talking, while he posed with it.

‘Bastard’s been drinking, too,’ I said.

‘Probably.’

‘I can smell it.’

Pop, without looking at him, spoke a few words to Garrick in a very soft voice.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘To go and get dressed properly and be ready to start.’

Garrick walked off, his plumes waving.

‘Not the moment for his ostrich plumes,’ Pop said.

‘Some people probably like them.’

‘That’s it. Start photographing them.’

‘Awful,’ I said.

‘Frightful,’ Pop agreed.

‘On the last day if we don’t get anything, I’m going to shoot Garrick in the behind. What would that cost me?’

‘Might make lots of trouble. If you shoot one, you have to shoot the other, too.’

‘Only Garrick.’

‘Better not shoot then. Remember it’s me you get into trouble.’

‘Joking, Pop.’

Garrick, un-head-dressed and with Abdullah, appeared and Pop spoke with them.

‘They want to hunt around the hill a new way.’

‘Splendid. When?’

‘Any time now. It looks like rain. You might get going.’

I sent Molo for my boots and a raincoat, M’Cola came out with the Springfield; and we walked down to the car. It had been heavily cloudy all day although the sun had come through the clouds in the forenoon for a time and again at noon. The rains were moving up on us. Now it was starting to rain and the locusts were no longer flying.

‘I’m dopey with sleep,’ I told Pop. ‘I’m going to have a drink.’

We were standing under the big tree by the cooking fire with the light rain pattering in the leaves. M’Cola brought the whisky flask and handed it to me very solemnly.

‘Have one?’

‘I don’t see what harm it can do.’

We both drank and Pop said, ‘The hell with them.’

‘The hell with them.’

‘You may find some tracks.’

‘We’ll run them out of the country.’

In the car we turned to the right on the road, drove on up past the mud village and turned off the road to the left on to a red, hard, clay track that circled the edge of the hills and was close bordered on either side with trees. It was raining fairly hard now and we drove slowly. There seemed to be enough sand in the clay to keep the car from slipping. Suddenly, from the back seat, Abdullah, very excited, told Kamau to stop. We stopped with a skid, all got out, and walked back. There was a freshly cut kudu track in the wet clay. It could not have been made more than five minutes before as it was sharp-edged and the dirt, that had been picked up by the inside of the hoof, was not yet softened by the rain.

‘Doumi,’ Garrick said and threw back his head and spread his arms wide to show horns that hung back over his withers. ‘Kubwa Sana!’ Abdullah agreed it was a bull; a huge bull.

‘Come on,’ I said.

It was easy tracking and we knew we were close. In rain or snow it is much easier to come up close to animals and I was sure we were going to get a shot. We followed the tracks through thick brush and then out into an open patch. I stopped to wipe the rain off my glasses and blew through the aperture in the rear sight of the Springfield. It was raining hard now, and I pulled my hat low down over my eyes to keep my glasses dry. We skirted the edge of the open patch and then, ahead, there was a crash and I saw a grey, white-striped animal making off through the brush. I threw the gun up and M’Cola grabbed my arm, ‘Manamouki!’ he whispered. It was a cow kudu. But when we came up to where it had jumped there were no other tracks. The same tracks we had followed led, logically and with no possibility of doubt, from the road to that cow.

‘Doumi Kubwa Sana!’ I said, full of sarcasm and disgust to Garrick and made a gesture of giant horns flowing back from behind his ears.

‘Manamouki Kubwa Sana,’ he said very sorrowfully and patiently. ‘What an enormous cow.’

‘You lousy ostrich-plumed punk,’ I told him in English. ‘Manamouki! Manamouki! Manamouki!’

‘Manamouki,’ said M’Cola and nodded his head.

I got out the dictionary, couldn’t find the words, and made it clear to M’Cola with signs that we would circle back in a long swing to the road and see if we could find another track. We circled back in the rain, getting thoroughly soaked, saw nothing, found the car, and as the rain lessened and the roads still seemed firm decided to go on until it was dark. Puffs of cloud hung on the hillside after the rain and the trees dripped but we saw nothing. Not in the open glades, not in the fields where the bush thinned, not on the green hillsides. Finally it was dark and we went back to camp. The Springfield was very wet when we got out of the car and I told M’Cola to clean it carefully and oil it well. He said he would and I went on and into the tent where a lantern was burning, took off my clothes, had a bath in the canvas tub and came out to the fire comfortable and relaxed in pyjamas, dressing-gown and mosquito boots.

P.O.M. and Pop were sitting in their chairs by the fire and P.O.M. got up to make me a whisky and soda.

‘M’Cola told me,’ Pop said from his chair by the fire.

‘A damned big cow,’ I told him. ‘I nearly busted her. What do you think about the morning?’

‘The lick I suppose. We’ve scouts out to watch both of these hills. You remember that old man from the village? He’s on a wild-goose chase after them in some country over beyond the hills. He and the Wanderobo. They’ve been gone three days.’

‘There’s no reason why we shouldn’t get one on the lick where Karl shot his. One day is as good as another.’

‘Quite.’

‘It’s the last damned day though and the lick may be rained out. As soon as it’s wet there’s no salt. Just mud.’

‘That’s it.’

‘I’d like to see one.’

‘When you do, take your time and make sure of him. Take your time and kill him.’

‘I don’t worry about that.’

‘Let’s talk about something else,’ P.O.M. said. ‘This makes me too nervous.’

‘I wish we had old Leather Pants,’ Pop said. ‘God, he was a talker. He made the old man here talk too. Give us that spiel on modern writers again.’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Why don’t we have some intellectual life?’ P.O.M. asked. ‘Why don’t you men ever discuss world topics? Why am I kept in ignorance of everything that goes on?’

‘World’s in a hell of a shape,’ Pop stated.

‘Awful.’

‘What’s going on in America?’

‘Damned if I know! Some sort of Y.M.C.A. show. Starry eyed bastards spending money that somebody will have to pay. Everybody in our town quit work to go on relief. Fishermen all turned carpenters. Reverse of the Bible.’

‘How are things in Turkey?’

‘Frightful. Took the fezzes away. Hanged any amount of old pals. Ismet’s still around though.’

‘Been in France lately?’

‘Didn’t like it. Gloomy as hell. Been a bad show there just now.’

‘By God,’ said Pop, ‘it must have been if you can believe the papers.’

‘When they riot they really riot. Hell, they’ve got a tradition.’

‘Were you in Spain for the revolution?’

‘I got there late. Then we waited for two that didn’t come. Then we missed another.’

‘Did you see the one in Cuba?’

‘From the start.’

‘How was it?’

‘Beautiful. Then lousy. You couldn’t believe how lousy.’

‘Stop it,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I know about those things. I was crouched down behind a marble-topped table while they were shooting in Havana. They came by in cars shooting at everybody they saw. I took my drink with me and I was very proud not to have spilled it or forgotten it. The children said, “Mother, can we go out in the afternoon to see the shooting?” They got so worked up about revolution we had to stop mentioning it. Bumby got so bloodthirsty about Mr. M. he had terrible dreams.’

‘Extraordinary,’ Pop said.

‘Don’t make fun of me. I don’t want to just hear about revolutions. All we see or hear is revolutions. I’m sick of them.’

‘The old man must like them.’

‘I’m sick of them.’

‘You know, I’ve never seen one,’ Pop said.

‘They’re beautiful. Really. For quite a while. Then they go bad.’

‘They’re very exciting,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’ll admit that. But I’m sick of them. Really, I don’t care anything about them.’

‘I’ve been studying them a little.’

‘What did you find out?’ Pop asked.

‘They were all very different but there were some things you could co-ordinate. I’m going to try to write a study of them.’

‘It could be damned interesting.’

‘If you have enough material. You need an awful lot of past performances. It’s very hard to get anything true on anything you haven’t seen yourself because the ones that fail have such a bad press and the winners always lie so. Then you can only really follow anything in places where you speak the language. That limits you of course. That’s why I would never go to Russia. When you can’t overhear it’s no good. All you get are handouts and sight-seeing. Any one who knows a foreign language in any country is damned liable to lie to you. You get your good dope always from the people and when you can’t talk with people and can’t overhear you don’t get anything that’s of anything but journalistic value.’

‘You want to knuckle down on your Swahili then.’

‘I’m trying to.’

‘Even then you can’t overhear because they’re always talking their own language.’

‘But if I ever write anything about this it will just be landscape painting until I know something about it. Your first seeing of a country is a very valuable one. Probably more valuable to yourself than to anyone else, is the hell of it. But you ought to always write it to try to get it stated. No matter what you do with it.’

‘Most of the damned Safari books are most awful bloody bores.’

‘They’re terrible.’

‘The only one I ever liked was Streeter’s. What did he call it? Denatured Africa. He made you feel what it was like. That’s the best.’

‘I liked Charlie Curtis’s. It was very honest and it made a fine picture.’

‘That man Streeter was damned funny though. Do you remember when he shot the kongoni?’

‘It was very funny.’

‘I’ve never read anything, though, that could make you feel about the country the way we feel about it. They all have Nairobi fast life or else rot about shooting beasts with horns half an inch longer than someone else shot. Or muck about danger.’

‘I’d like to try to write something about the country and the animals and what it’s like to someone who knows nothing about it.’

‘Have a try at it. Can’t do any harm. You know I wrote a diary of that Alaskan trip.’

‘I’d love to read it,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I didn’t know you were a writer, Mr. J. P.’

‘No bloody fear,’ said Pop. ‘If you’d read it, though, I’ll send for it. You know it’s just what we did each day and how Alaska looked to an Englishman from Africa. It’d bore you.’

‘Not if you wrote it,’ P.O.M. said.

‘Little woman’s giving us compliments,’ Pop said.

‘Not me. You.’

‘I’ve read things by him,’ she said. ‘I want to read what Mr. J. P. writes.’

‘Is the old man really a writer?’ Pop asked her. ‘I haven’t seen anything to prove it. You’re sure he doesn’t support you by tracking and wing shooting?’

‘Oh, yes. He writes. When he’s going well he’s awfully easy to get along with. But just before he gets going he’s frightful. His temper has to go bad before he can write. When he talks about never writing again I know he’s about to get started.’

‘We ought to get more literary conversation from him,’ Pop said. ‘Leather Breeches was the lad. Give us some literary anecdotes.’

‘Well, the last night we were in Paris I’d been out shooting at Ben Gallagher’s in the Sologne the day before and he had a fermée, you know, they put up a low fence while they’re out feeding, and shot rabbits in the morning and in the afternoon we had several drives and shot pheasants and I shot a chevreuil.’

‘That isn’t literary.’

‘Wait. The last night Joyce and his wife came to dinner and we had a pheasant and a quarter of the chevreuil with the saddle and Joyce and I got drunk because we were off for Africa the next day. God, we had a night.’

‘That’s a hell of a literary anecdote,’ Pop said. ‘Who’s Joyce?’

‘Wonderful guy,’ I said. ‘Wrote Ulysses.’

‘Homer wrote Ulysses,’ Pop said.

‘Who wrote Æschylus?’

‘Homer,’ said Pop. ‘Don’t try to trap me. D’you know many more literary anecdotes?’

‘Ever heard of Pound?’

‘No,’ said Pop. ‘Absolutely no.’

‘I know some good ones about Pound.’

‘Suppose you and he ate some funny-sounding beast and then got drunk.’

‘Several times,’ I said.

‘Literary life must be awfully jolly. Think I’d make a writer?’

‘Rather.’

‘We’re going to chuck all this,’ Pop told P.O.M., ‘and both be writers. Give us another anecdote.’

‘Ever heard of George Moore?’

‘Chap that wrote “But before I go, George Moore, here’s a last long health to you?”’

‘That’s him.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘That’s a damned dismal anecdote. You can do better than that.’

‘I saw him in a book-shop once.’

‘That’s better. See how lively he can make them?’

‘I went to call on him once in Dublin,’ P.O.M. said. ‘With Clara Dunn.’

‘What happened?’

‘He wasn’t in.’

‘By God. I tell you the literary life’s the thing,’ Pop said. ‘You can’t beat it.’

‘I hate Clara Dunn,’ I said.

‘So do I,’ said Pop. ‘What did she write?’

‘Letters,’ I said. ‘You know Dos Passos?’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He and I used to drink hot kirsch in the winter time.’

‘What happened then?’

‘People objected, finally.’

‘Only writer I ever met was Stewart Edward White,’ Pop said. ‘Used to admire his writing no end. Damned good, you know. Then I met him. Didn’t like him.’

‘You’re coming on,’ I said. ‘See. There’s no trick to a literary anecdote.’

‘Why didn’t you like him?’ P.O.M. asked.

‘Do I have to tell? Isn’t the anecdote complete? It’s just like the old man tells them.’

‘Go ahead and tell.’

‘Too much the old timer about him. Eyes used to vast distances and that sort of thing. Killed too many bloody lions. No credit kill so many lions. Gallop ‘em, yes. Couldn’t kill that many. Lion kill you instead. Writes damned fine things in The Saturday Evening Post about, what’s the bloke’s name, Andy Burnett. Oh, damned fine. Took an awful dislike to him, though. See him in Nairobi with his eyes used to vast distances. Wore his oldest clothes in town. Hell of a fine shot, everybody says.’

‘Why you’re a literary bastard,’ I said. ‘Look at that for an anecdote.’

‘He’s marvellous,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Aren’t we ever going to eat?’

‘Thought by God we’d eaten,’ Pop said. ‘Start these anecdotes. No end to ‘em.’

After dinner we sat by the fire a little while and then went to bed. One thing seemed to be on Pop’s mind and before I went in the tent he said, ‘After you’ve waited so long, when you get a shot take it easy. You’re fast enough so you can take your time, remember. Take it easy.’

‘All right.’

‘I’ll have them get you up early.’

‘All right. I’m plenty sleepy.’

‘Good night, Mr. J. P.,’ P.O.M. called from the tent.

‘Good night,’ Pop said. He moved toward his tent carrying himself with comic stiffness, walking in the dark as carefully as though he were an opened bottle.

CHAPTER TWO

Molo waked me by pulling on the blanket in the morning and I was dressing, dressed, and out washing the sleep out of my eyes before I was really awake. It was still very dark and I could see Pop’s back shadowed against the fire. I walked over holding the early morning cup of hot tea and milk in my hand waiting for it to be cool enough to drink.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘Morning,’ he answered in that husky whisper.

‘Sleep?’

‘Very well. Feeling fit?’

‘Sleepy is all.’

I drank the tea and spat the leaves into the fire.

‘Tell your bloody fortune with those,’ Pop said.

‘No fear.’

Breakfast in the dark with a lantern, cool juice-slippery apricots, hash, hot-centred, brown, and catsup spread, two fried eggs and the warm promise-keeping coffee. On the third cup Pop, watching, smoking his pipe, said, ‘Too early for me to face it yet.’

‘Get you?’

‘A little.’

‘I’m getting exercise,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘Bloody anecdotes,’ Pop said. ‘Memsahib must think we’re silly beggars.’

‘I’ll think up some more.’

‘Nothing better than drinking. Don’t know why it should make you feel bad.’

‘Are you bad?’

‘Not too.’

‘Take a spot of Eno’s?’

‘It’s this damned riding in cars.’

‘Well, to-day’s the day.’

‘Remember to take it very easy.’

‘You’re not worried about that, are you?’

‘Just a touch.’

‘Don’t. It never worries me a minute. Truly.’

‘Good. Better get going.’

‘Have to make a trip first.’

Standing in front of the canvas circle of the latrine I looked, as each morning, at that fuzzy blur of stars that the romanticists of astronomers called the Southern Cross. Each morning at this moment I observed the Southern Cross in solemn ceremony.

Pop was at the car. M’Cola handed me the Springfield and I got in the front. The tragedian and his tracker were in the back. M’Cola climbed in with them.

‘Good luck,’ Pop said. Someone was coming from towards the tents. It was P.O.M. in her blue robe and mosquito boots. ‘Oh, good luck,’ she said. ‘Please, good luck.’

I waved and we started, the headlights showing the way to the road.

There was nothing on the salt when we came up to it after leaving the car about three miles away and making a very careful stalk. Nothing came all morning. We sat with our heads down in the blind, each covering a different direction through openings in the thatched withes, and always I expected the miracle of a bull kudu coming majestic and beautiful through the open scrub to the grey, dusty opening in the trees where the salt lick was worn, grooved, and trampled. There were many trails to it through the trees and on any one a bull might come silently. But nothing came. When the sun was up and we were warmed after the misty cold of the morning I settled my rump deeper in the dust and lay back against the wall of the hole, resting against the small of my back and my shoulders, and still able to see out through the slit in the blind. Putting the Springfield across my knees I noticed that there was rust on the barrel. Slowly I pulled it along and looked at the muzzle. It was freshly brown with rust.

‘The bastard never cleaned it last night after that rain,’ I thought, and, very angry, I lifted the lug and slipped the bolt out. M’Cola was watching me with his head down. The other two were looking out through the blind. I held the rifle in one hand for him to look through the breech and then put the bolt back in and shoved it forward softly, lowering it with my finger on the trigger so that it was ready to cock rather than keeping it on the safety.

M’Cola had seen the rusty bore. His face had not changed and I had said nothing but I was full of contempt and there had been indictment, evidence, and condemnation without a word being spoken. So we sat there, he with his head bent so only the bald top showed, me leaning back and looking out through the slit, and we were no longer partners, no longer good friends, and nothing came to the salt.

At ten o’clock the breeze, which had come up in the east, began to shift around and we knew it was no use. Our scent was being scattered in all directions around the blind as sure to frighten any animals as though we were revolving a searchlight in the dark. We got up out of the blind and went over to look in the dust of the lick for tracks. The rain had moistened it but it was not soaked and we saw several kudu tracks, probably made early in the night and one big bull track, long, narrow, heart-shaped; clearly, deeply cut.

We took the track and followed it on the damp reddish earth for two hours in thick bush that was like second-growth timber at home. Finally we had to leave it in stuff we could not move through. All this time I was angry about the uncleaned rifle and yet happy and eager with anticipation that we might jump the bull and get a snap at him in the brush. But we did not see him and now, in the big heat of noon, we made three long circles around some hills and finally came out into a meadow full of little, humpy Masai cattle and, leaving all shade behind, trailed back across the open country under the noon sun to the car.

Kamau, sitting in the car, had seen a kudu bull pass a hundred yards away. He was headed toward the salt-lick at about nine o’clock when the wind began to be tricky, had evidently caught our scent and gone back into the hills. Tired, sweating, and feeling more sunk than angry now, I got in beside Kamau and we headed the car toward camp. There was only one evening left now, and no reason to expect we would have any better luck than we were having. As we came to camp, and the shade of the heavy trees, cool as a pool, I took the bolt out of the Springfield and handed the rifle, boltless, to M’Cola without speaking or looking at him. The bolt I tossed inside the opening of our tent on to my cot.

Pop and P.O.M. were sitting under the dining tent.

‘No luck?’ Pop asked gently.

‘Not a damn bit. Bull went by the car headed toward the salt. Must have spooked off. We hunted all over hell.’

‘Didn’t you see anything?’ P.O.M. asked. ‘Once we thought we heard you shoot.’

‘That was Garrick shooting his mouth off. Did the scouts get anything?’

‘Not a thing. We’ve been watching both hills.’

‘Hear from Karl?’

‘Not a word.’

‘I’d like to have seen one,’ I said. I was tired out and slipping into bitterness fast. ‘God damn them. What the hell did he have to blow that lick to hell for the first morning and gut-shoot a lousy bull and chase him all over the son-of-a-bitching country spooking it to holy bloody hell?’

‘Bastards,’ said P.O.M., staying with me in my unreasonableness. ‘Sonsabitches.’

‘You’re a good girl,’ I said. ‘I’m all right. Or I will be.’

‘It’s been awful,’ she said. ‘Poor old Poppa.’

‘You have a drink,’ Pop said. ‘That’s what you need.’

‘I’ve hunted them hard, Pop. I swear to God I have. I’ve enjoyed it and I haven’t worried up until to-day. I was so damned sure. Those damned tracks all the time — what if I never see one? How do I know we can ever get back here again?’

‘You’ll be back,’ Pop said. ‘You don’t have to worry about that. Go ahead. Drink it.’

‘I’m just a lousy belly-aching bastard but I swear they haven’t gotten on my nerves until to-day.’

‘Belly-ache,’ said Pop. ‘Better to get it out.’

‘What about lunch?’ asked P.O.M. ‘Aren’t you frightfully hungry?’

‘The hell with lunch. The thing is, Pop, we’ve never seen them on the salt in the evening and we’ve never seen a bull in the hills. I’ve only got to-night. It looks washed up. Three times I’ve had them cold and Karl and the Austrian and the Wanderobo beat us.’

‘We’re not beaten,’ said Pop. ‘Drink another one of those.’

We had lunch, a very good lunch, and it was just over when Kati came and said there was someone to see Pop. We could see their shadows on the tent fly, then they came around to the front of the tent. It was the old man of the first day, the old farmer, but now he was gotten up as a hunter and carried a long bow and a sealed quiver of arrows.

He looked older, more disreputable and tireder than ever and his get-up was obviously a disguise. With him was the skinny, dirty, Wanderobo with the slit and curled up ears who stood on one leg and scratched the back of his knee with his toes. His head was on one side and he had a narrow, foolish, and depraved-looking face.

The old man was talking earnestly to Pop, looking him in the eye and speaking slowly, without gestures.

‘What’s he done? Gotten himself up like that to get some of the scout money?’ I asked.

‘Wait,’ Pop said.

‘Look at the pair of them,’ I said. ‘That’s goofy Wanderobo and that lousy old fake. What’s he say, Pop?’

‘He hasn’t finished,’ Pop said.

Finally the old man was finished and he stood there leaning on his property bow. They both looked very tired but I remember thinking they looked a couple of disgusting fakes.

‘He says,’ Pop began, ‘they have found a country where there are kudu and sable. He has been there three days. They know where there is a big kudu bull and he has a man watching him now.’

‘Do you believe it?’ I could feel the liquor and the fatigue drain out of me and the excitement come in.

‘God knows,’ said Pop.

‘How far away is the country?’

‘One day’s march. I suppose that’s three or four hours in the car if the car can go.’

‘Does he think the car can get in?’

‘None ever has been in but he thinks you can make it.’

‘When did they leave the man watching the kudu?’

‘This morning.’

‘Where are the sable?’

‘There in the hills.’

‘How do we get in?’

‘I can’t make out except that you cross the plain, go around that mountain and then south. He says no one has ever hunted there. He hunted there when he was young.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘Of course natives lie like hell, but he tells it very straight.’

‘Let’s go.’

‘You’d better start right away. Go as far as you can in the car and then use it for a base and hunt on from there. The Memsahib and I will break camp in the morning, move the outfit and go on to where Dan and Mr. T. are. Once the outfit is over that black cotton stretch we’re all right if the rain catches us. You come on and join us. If you’re caught we can always send the car back by Kandoa, if worst comes, and the lorries down to Tanga and around.’

‘Don’t you want to come?’

‘No. You’re better off alone on a show like this. The more people the less game you’ll see. You should hunt kudu alone. I’ll move the outfit and look after the little Memsahib.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘And I don’t have to take Garrick or Abdullah?’

‘Hell, no. Take M’Cola, Kamau and these two. I’ll tell Molo to pack your things. Go light as hell.’

‘God damn it, Pop. Do you think it could be true?’

‘Maybe,’ said Pop. ‘We have to play it.’

‘How do you say sable?’

‘Tarahalla.’

‘Valhalla, I can remember. Do the females have horns?’

‘Sure, but you can’t make a mistake. The bull is black and they’re brown. You can’t go wrong.’

‘Has M’Cola ever seen one?’

‘I don’t think so. You’ve got four on your licence. Any time you can better one, go ahead.’

‘Are they hard to kill?’

‘They’re tough. They’re not like a kudu. If you’ve got one down be careful how you walk up to him.’

‘What about time?’

‘We’ve got to get out. Make it back to-morrow night if you can. Use your own judgment. I think this is the turning point. You’ll get a kudu.’

‘Do you know what it’s like?’ I said. ‘It’s just like when we were kids and we heard about a river no one had ever fished out on the huckleberry plain beyond the Sturgeon and the Pigeon.’

‘How did the river turn out?’

‘Listen. We had a hell of a time to get in and the night we got there, just before dark, and saw it, there was a deep pool and a long straight stretch and the water so cold you couldn’t keep your hand in it and I threw a cigarette butt in and a big trout hit it and they kept snapping it up and spitting it out as it floated until it went to pieces.’

‘Big trout?’

‘The biggest kind.’

‘God save us,’ said Pop. ‘What did you do then?’

‘Rigged up my rod and made a cast and it was dark, and there was a nighthawk swooping around and it was cold as a bastard and then I was fast to three fish the second the flies hit the water.’

‘Did you land them?’

‘The three of them.’

‘You damned liar.’

‘I swear to God.’

‘I believe you. Tell me the rest when you come back. Were they big trout?’

‘The biggest bloody kind.’

‘God save us,’ said Pop. ‘You’re going to get a kudu. Get started.’

In the tent I found P.O.M. and told her.

‘Not really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk. Get started.’

I found raincoat, extra boots, socks, bathrobe, bottle of quinine tablets, citronella, note book, a pencil, my solids, the cameras, the emergency kit, knife, matches, extra shirt and undershirt, a book, two candles, money, the flask . . .

‘What else?’

‘Have you got soap? Take a comb and a towel. Got handkerchiefs?’

‘All right.’

Molo had everything packed in a rucksack and I found my field glasses, M’Cola taking Pop’s big field glasses, a canteen with water and Kati sending a chop-box with food. ‘Take plenty of beer,’ Pop said. ‘You can leave it in the car. We’re short on whisky but there’s a bottle.’

‘How will that leave you?’

‘All right. There’s more at the other camp. We sent two bottles on with Mr. K.’

‘I’ll only need the flask,’ I said. ‘We’ll split the bottle.’

‘Take plenty of beer then. There’s any amount of it.’

‘What’s the bastard doing?’ I said, pointing at Garrick who was getting into the car.

‘He says you and M’Cola wont be able to talk with the natives there. You’ll have to have some one to interpret.’

‘He’s poison.’

‘You will need someone to interpret whatever they speak into Swahili.’

‘All right. But tell him he’s not running the show and to keep his bloody mouth shut.’

‘We’ll go to the top of the hill with you,’ Pop said and we started off, the Wanderobo hanging to the side of the car. ‘Going to pick the old man up in the village.’

Everyone in camp was out to watch us go.

‘Have we plenty of salt?’

‘Yes.’

Now we were standing by the car on the road in the village waiting for the old man and Garrick to come back from their huts. It was early afternoon and the sky was clouding over and I was looking at P.O.M., very desirable, cool, and neat-looking in her khaki and her boots, her Stetson on one side of her head, and at Pop, big, thick, in the faded corduroy sleeveless jacket that was almost white now from washing and the sun.

‘You be a good girl.’

‘Don’t ever worry. I wish I could go.’

‘It’s a one-man show,’ Pop said. ‘You want to get in fast and do the dirty and get out fast. You’ve a big load as it is.’

The old man appeared and got into the back of the car with M’Cola who was wearing my old khaki sleeveless, quail-shooting coat.

‘M’Cola’s got the old man’s coat,’ Pop said.

‘He likes to carry things in the game pockets,’ I said.

M’Cola saw we were talking about him. I had forgotten about the uncleaned rifle. Now I remembered it and said to Pop, ‘Ask him where he got the new coat’.

M’Cola grinned and said something.

‘He says it is his property.’

I grinned at him and he shook his old bald head and it was understood that I had said nothing about the rifle.

‘Where’s that bastard Garrick?’ I asked.

Finally he came with his blanket and got in with M’Cola and the old man behind. The Wanderobo sat with me in front beside Kamau.

‘That’s a lovely-looking friend you have,’ P.O.M. said. ‘You be good too.’

I kissed her good-bye and we whispered something.

‘Billing and cooing,’ Pop said. ‘Disgusting.’

‘Good-bye, you old bastard.’

‘Good-bye, you damned bullfighter.’

‘Good-bye, sweet.’

‘Good-bye and good luck.’

‘You’ve plenty of petrol and we’ll leave some here,’ Pop called.

I waved and we were starting down hill through the village on a narrow track that led down and on to the scrubby dry plain that spread out below the two great blue hills.

I looked back as we went down the hill and saw the two figures, the tall thick one and the small neat one, each wearing big Stetson hats, silhouetted on the road as they walked back toward camp, then I looked ahead at the dried-up, scrubby plain.

PART IV. PURSUIT AS HAPPINESS

CHAPTER ONE

The road was only a track and the plain was very discouraging to see. As we went on we saw a few thin Grant’s gazelles showing white against the burnt yellow of the grass and the grey trees. My exhilaration died with the stretching out of this plain, the typical poor game country, and it all began to seem very impossible and romantic and quite untrue. The Wanderobo had a very strong odour and I looked at the way the lobes of his ear were stretched and then neatly wrapped on themselves and at his strange un-negroid, thin-lipped face. When he saw me studying his face he smiled pleasantly and scratched his chest. I looked around at the back of the car. M’Cola was asleep. Garrick was sitting straight up, dramatizing his awakeness, and the old man was trying to see the road.

By now there was no more road, only a cattle track, but we were coming to the edge of the plain. Then the plain was behind us and ahead there were big trees and we were entering a country the loveliest that I had seen in Africa. The grass was green and smooth, short as a meadow that has been mown and is newly grown, and the trees were big, high-trunked, and old with no undergrowth but only the smooth green of the turf like a deer park and we drove on through shade and patches of sunlight following a faint trail the Wanderobo pointed out. I could not believe we had suddenly come to any such wonderful country. It was a country to wake from, happy to have had the dream and, seeing if it would clown away, I reached up and touched the Wanderobo’s ear. He jumped and Kamau snickered. M’Cola nudged me from the back seat and pointed and there, standing in an open space between the trees, his head up, staring at us, the bristles on his back erect, long, thick, white tusks upcurving, his eyes showing bright, was a very large wart-hog boar watching us from less than twenty yards. I motioned to Kamau to stop and we sat looking at him and he at us. I put the rifle up and sighted on his chest. He watched and did not move. Then I motioned to Kamau to throw in the clutch and we went on and made a curve to the right and left the wart-hog, who had never moved, nor showed any fright at seeing us.

I could see that Kamau was excited and, looking back, M’Cola nodded his head up and down in agreement. None of us had ever seen a wart-hog that would not bolt off, fast-trotting, tail in air. This was a virgin country, an un-hunted pocket in the million miles of bloody Africa. I was ready to stop and make camp anywhere.

This was the finest country I had seen but we went on, winding along through the big trees over the softly rolling grass. Then ahead and to the right we saw the high stockade of a Masai village. It was a very large village and out of it came running long-legged, brown, smooth-moving men who all seemed to be of the same age and who wore their hair in a heavy club-like queue that swung against their shoulders as they ran. They came up to the car and surrounded it, all laughing and smiling and talking. They all were tall, their teeth were white and good, and their hair was stained a red brown and arranged in a looped fringe on their foreheads. They carried spears and they were very handsome and extremely jolly, not sullen, nor contemptuous like the northern Masai, and they wanted to know what we were going to do. The Wanderobo evidently said we were hunting kudu and were in a hurry. They had the car surrounded so we could not move. One said something and three or four others joined in and Kamau explained to me that they had seen two kudu bulls go along the trail in the afternoon.

‘It can’t be true,’ I said to myself. ‘It can’t be.’

I told Kamau to start and slowly we pushed through them, they all laughing and trying to stop the car, making it all but run over them. They were the tallest, best-built, handsomest people I had ever seen and the first truly light-hearted happy people I had seen in Africa. Finally, when we were moving, they started to run beside the car smiling and laughing and showing how easily they could run and then, as the going was better, up the smooth valley of a stream, it became a contest and one after another dropped out of the running, waving and smiling as they left until there were only two still running with us, the finest runners of the lot, who kept pace easily with the car as they moved long-legged, smoothly, loosely, and with pride. They were running too, at the pace of a fast miler, and carrying their spears as well. Then we had to turn to the right and climb out of the putting-green smoothness of the valley into a rolling meadow and, as we slowed, climbing in first gear, the whole pack came up again, laughing and trying not to seem winded. We went through a little knot of brush and a small rabbit started out, zigzagging wildly and all the Masai behind now in a mad sprint. They caught the rabbit and the tallest runner came up with him to the car and handed him to me. I held him and could feel the thumping of his heart through the soft, warm, furry body, and as I stroked him the Masai patted my arm. Holding him by the ears I handed him back. No, no, he was mine. He was a present. I handed him to M’Cola. M’Cola did not take him seriously and handed him to one of the Masai. We were moving and they were running again now. The Masai stooped and put the rabbit on the ground and as he ran free they all laughed. M’Cola shook his head. We were all very impressed by these Masai.

‘Good Masai,’ M’Cola said, very moved. ‘Masai many cattle. Masai no kill to eat. Masai kill man.’

The Wanderobo patted himself on the chest.

‘Wanderobo . . . Masai,’ he said, very proudly, claiming kin. His ears were curled in the same way theirs were. Seeing them running and so damned handsome and so happy made us all happy. I had never seen such quick disinterested friendliness, nor such fine-looking people.

‘Good Masai,’ M’Cola repeated, nodding his head emphatically. ‘Good, good Masai.’ Only Garrick seemed impressed in a different way. For all his khaki clothes and his letter from B’wana Simba, I believe these Masai frightened him in a very old place. They were our friends, not his. They certainly were our friends though. They had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.

So now there were only the two of them left again, running, and it was hard going and the machine was beating them. They were still running well and still loose and long but the machine was a cruel pacemaker. So I told Kamau to speed it up and get it over with because a sudden burst of speed was not the humiliation of a steady using. They sprinted, were beaten, laughed, and then we were leaning out, waving, and they stood leaning on their spears and waved. We were still great friends but now we were alone again and there was no track, only the general direction to follow around clumps of trees and along the run of this green valley.

After a little the trees grew closer and we left the idyllic country behind and now were picking our way along a faint trail through thick second-growth. Sometimes we came to a dead halt and had to get out and pull a log out of the way or cut a tree that blocked the body of the car. Sometimes we had to back out of bush and look for a way to circle around and come upon the trail again, chopping our way through with the long brush knives that are called pangas. The Wanderobo was a pitiful chopper and Garrick was little better. M’Cola did everything well in which a knife was used and he swung a panga with a fast yet heavy and vindictive stroke. I used it badly. There was too much wrist in it to learn it quickly; your wrist tired and the blade seemed to have a weight it did not have. I wished that I had a Michigan double-bitted axe, honed razor-sharp, to chop with instead of this sabring of trees.

Chopping through when we were stopped, avoiding all we could, Kamau driving with intelligence and a sound feeling for the country, we came through the difficult going and out into another open-meadow stretch and could see a range of hills off to our right. But here there had been a recent heavy rain and we had to be very careful about the low parts of the meadow where the tyres cut in through the turf to mud and spun in the slick greasiness. We cut brush and shovelled out twice and then, having learned not to trust any low part, we skirted the high edge of the meadow and then were in timber again. As we came out, after several long circles in the woods to find places where we could get the car through, we were on the bank of a stream, where there was a sort of brushy bridging across the bed built like a beaver dam and evidently designed to hold back the water. On the other side was a thorn-brush-fenced cornfield, a steep, stump-scattered bank with corn planted all over it and some abandoned looking corrals or thorn-bush-fenced enclosures with mud and stick buildings and to the right there were cone-shaped grass huts projecting above a heavy thorn fence. We all got out, for this stream was a problem, and, on the other side, the only place we could get up the bank led through the stump-filled maize field.

The old man said the rain had come that day. There had been no water going over the brushy dam when they had passed that morning. I was feeling fairly depressed. Here we had come through a beautiful country of virgin timber where kudu had been once seen walking along the trail to end up stuck on the bank of a little creek in someone’s cornfield. I had not expected any cornfield and I resented it. I thought we would have to get permission to drive through the maize, provided we could make it across the stream and up the bank and I took off my shoes and waded across the stream to test it underfoot. The brush and saplings on the bottom were packed hard and firm and I was sure we could cross if we took it fairly fast. M’Cola and Kamau agreed and we walked up the bank to see how it would be. The mud of the bank was soft but there was dry earth underneath and I figured we could shovel our way up if we could get through the stumps. But we would need to unload before we tried it.

Coming toward us, from the direction of the huts, were two men and a boy. I said ‘Jambo’, as they came up. They answered ‘Jambo’, and then the old man and the Wanderobo talked with them. M’Cola shook his head at me. He did not understand a word. I thought we were asking permission to go through the corn. When the old man finished talking the two men came closer and we shook hands.

They looked like no negroes I had ever seen. Their faces were a grey brown, the oldest looked to be about fifty, had thin lips, an almost Grecian nose, rather high cheekbones, and large, intelligent eyes. He had great poise and dignity and seemed to be very intelligent. The younger man had the same cast of features and I took him for a younger brother. He looked about thirty-five. The boy was as pretty as a girl and looked rather shy and stupid. I had thought he was a girl from his face for an instant when he first came up, as they all wore a sort of Roman toga of unbleached muslin gathered at the shoulder that revealed no line of their bodies.

They were talking with the old man, who, now that I looked at him standing with them, seemed to bear a sort of wrinkled and degenerate resemblance to the classic-featured owner of the shamba; just as the Wanderobo-Masai was a shrivelled caricature of the handsome Masai we had met in the forest.

Then we all went down to the stream and Kamau and I rigged ropes around the tyres to act as chains while the Roman elder and the rest unloaded the car and carried the heaviest things up the steep bank. Then we crossed in a wild, water-throwing smash and, all pushing heavily, made it halfway up the bank before we stuck. We chopped and dug out and finally made it to the top of the bank but ahead was that maize field and I could not figure where we were to go from there.

‘Where do we go?’ I asked the Roman elder.

They did not understand Garrick’s interpreting and the old man made the question clear.

The Roman pointed toward the heavy thorn-bush fence to the left at the edge of the woods.

‘We can’t get through there in the car.’

‘Campi,’ said M’Cola, meaning we were going to camp there.

‘Hell of a place,’ I said.

‘Campi,’ M’Cola said firmly and they all nodded.

‘Campi! Campi!’ said the old man.

‘There we camp,’ Garrick announced pompously.

‘You go to hell,’ I told him cheerfully.

I walked toward the camp site with the Roman who was talking steadily in a language I could not understand a word of. M’Cola was with me and the others were loading and following with the car. I was remembering that I had read you must never camp in abandoned native quarters because of ticks and other hazards and I was preparing to hold out against this camp. We entered a break in the thorn-bush fence and inside was a building of logs and saplings stuck in the ground and crossed with branches. It looked like a big chicken coop. The Roman made us free of this and of the enclosure with a wave of his hand and kept on talking.

‘Bugs,’ I said to M’Cola in Swahili, speaking with strong disapproval.

‘No,’ he said, dismissing the idea. ‘No bugs.’

‘Bad bugs. Many bugs. Sickness.’

‘No bugs,’ he said firmly.

The no-bugs had it and with the Roman talking steadily, I hoped on some congenial topic, the car came up, stopped under a huge tree about fifty yards from the thorn-bush fence and they all commenced carrying the necessities in for the making of camp. My ground-sheet tent was slung between a tree and one side of the chicken coop and I sat down on a petrol case to discuss the shooting situation with the Roman, the old man, and Garrick, while Kamau and M’Cola fixed up a camp and the Wanderobo-Masai stood on one leg and let his mouth hang open.

‘Where were kudu?’

‘Back there,’ waving his arm.

‘Big ones?’

Arms spread to show hugeness of horns and a torrent from the Roman.

Me, dictionary-ing heavily, ‘Where was the one they were watching?’

No results on this but a long speech from the Roman which I took to mean they were watching them all.

It was late afternoon now and the sky was heavy with clouds. I was wet to the waist and my socks were mud soaked. Also I was sweating from pushing on the car and from chopping.

‘When do we start?’ I asked.

‘To-morrow,’ Garrick answered without bothering to question the Roman.

‘No,’ I said. ‘To-night.’

‘To-morrow,’ Garrick said. ‘Late now. One hour light.’ He showed me one hour on my watch.

I dictionaried. ‘Hunt to-night. Last hour best hour.’

Garrick implied that the kudu were too far away. That it was impossible to hunt and return, all this with gestures, ‘Hunt to-morrow’.

‘You bastard,’ I said in English. All this time the Roman and the old man had been standing saying nothing. I shivered. It was cold with the sun under the clouds in spite of the heaviness of the air after rain.

‘Old man,’ I said.

‘Yes, Master,’ said the old man. Dictionary-ing carefully, I said, ‘Hunt kudu to-night. Last hour best hour. Kudu close?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Hunt now?’

They talked together.

‘Hunt to-morrow,’ Garrick put in.

‘Shut up, you actor,’ I said. ‘Old man. Little hunt now?’

‘Yes,’ said the old man and Roman nodded. ‘Little while.’

‘Good,’ I said, and went to find a shirt and undershirt and a pair of socks.

‘Hunt now,’ I told M’Cola.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘M’uzuri.’

With the clean feeling of dry shirt, fresh socks and a change of boots I sat on the petrol case and drank a whisky and water while I waited for the Roman to come back. I felt certain I was going to have a shot at kudu and I wanted to take the edge off so I would not be nervous. Also I wanted not to catch a cold. Also I wanted the whisky for itself, because I loved the taste of it and because, being as happy as I could be, it made me feel even better.

I saw the Roman coming and I pulled the zippers up on my boots, checked the cartridges in the magazine of the Springfield, took off the foresight protector and blew through the rear aperture. Then I drank what was left in the tin cup that was on the ground by the box and stood up, checking that I had a pair of handkerchiefs in my shirt pockets.

M’Cola came carrying his knife and Pop’s big glasses.

‘You stay here,’ I said to Garrick. He did not mind. He thought we were silly to go out so late and he was glad to prove us wrong. The Wanderobo wanted to go.

‘That’s plenty,’ I said, and waved the old man back and we started out of the corral with the Roman ahead, carrying a spear, then me, then M’Cola with glasses and the Mannlicher, full of solids, and last the Wanderobo-Masai with another spear.

It was after five when we struck off across the maize field and down to the stream, crossing where it narrowed in a high grass a hundred yards above the dam and then, walking slowly and carefully, went up the grassy bank on the far side, getting soaked to the waist as we stooped going through the wet grass and bracken. We had not been gone ten minutes and were moving carefully up the stream bank, when, without warning, the Roman grabbed my arm and pulled me bodily down to the ground as he crouched; me pulling back the bolt to cock the rifle as I dropped. Holding his breath he pointed and across the stream on the far bank at the edge of the trees was a large, grey animal, white stripes showing on his flanks and huge horns curling back from his head as he stood, broadside to us, head up, seeming to be listening. I raised the rifle, but there was a bush in the way of the shot. I could not shoot over the bush without standing.

‘Piga,’ whispered M’Cola. I shook my finger and commenced to crawl forward to be clear of the bush, sick afraid the bull would jump while I was trying to make the shot certain, but remembering Pop’s ‘Take your time’. When I saw I was clear I got on one knee, saw the bull through the aperture, marvelling at how big he looked, and then, remembering not to have it matter, that it was the same as any other shot, I saw the bead centred exactly where it should be just below the top of the shoulder and squeezed off. At the roar he jumped and was going into the brush, but I knew I had hit him. I shot at a show of grey between the trees as he went in and M’Cola was shouting, ‘Piga! Piga!’ meaning ‘He’s hit! He’s hit!’ and the Roman was slapping me on the shoulder, then he had his toga up around his neck and was running naked, and the four of us were running now, full speed, like hounds, splashing across the stream, tearing up the bank, the Roman ahead, crashing naked through the brush, then stooping and holding up a leaf with bright blood, slamming me on the back, M’Cola saying, ‘Damu! Damu!’ (blood, blood), then the deep cut tracks off to the right, me reloading, we all trailing in a dead run, it almost dark in the timber, the Roman, confused a moment by the trail, making a cast off to the right, then picking up blood once more, then pulling me down again with a jerk on my arm and none of us breathing as we saw him standing in a clearing a hundred yards ahead, looking to me hard-hit and looking back, wide ears spread, big, grey, white-striped, his horns a marvel, as he looked straight toward us over his shoulder. I thought I must make absolutely sure this time, now, with the dark coming and I held my breath and shot him a touch behind the fore-shoulder. We heard the bullet smack and saw him buck heavily with the shot. M’Cola shouted, ‘Piga! Piga! Piga!’ as he went out of sight and as we ran again, like hounds, we almost fell over something. It was a huge, beautiful kudu bull, stone-dead, on his side, his horns in great dark spirals, widespread and unbelievable as he lay dead five yards from where we stood when I had just that instant shot. I looked at him, big, long-legged, a smooth grey with the white stripes and the great curling, sweeping horns, brown as walnut meats, and ivory pointed, at the big ears and the great, lovely heavy-maned neck, the white chevron between his eyes and the white of his muzzle and I stooped over and touched him to try to believe it. He was lying on the side where the bullet had gone in and there was not a mark on him and he smelled sweet and lovely like the breath of cattle and the odour of thyme after rain.

Then the Roman had his arms around my neck and M’Cola was shouting in a strange high sing-song voice and Wanderobo-Masai kept slapping me on the shoulder and jumping up and down and then one after the other they all shook hands in a strange way that I had never known in which they took your thumb in their fist and held it and shook it and pulled it and held it again, while they looked you in the eyes, fiercely.

We all looked at him and M’Cola knelt and traced the curve of his horns with his finger and measured the spread with his arms and kept crooning, ‘Oo-oo-eee-eee’, making small high noises of ecstasy and stroking the kudu’s muzzle and his mane.

I slapped the Roman on the back and we went through the thumb-pulling again; me pulling his thumb too. I embraced the Wanderobo-Masai and he, after a thumb-pulling of great intensity and feeling, slapped his chest and said very proudly, ‘Wanderobo-Masai wonderful guide’.

‘Wanderobo-Masai wonderful Masai,’ I said.

M’Cola kept shaking his head, looking at the kudu and making the strange small noises. Then he said, ‘Doumi, Doumi, Doumi! B’wana Kabor Kidogo, Kidogo’. Meaning this was a bull of bulls. That Karl’s had been a little one, a nothing.

We all knew we had killed the other kudu that I had mistaken for this one, while this first one was lying dead from the first shot, and it seemed of no importance beside the miracle of this kudu. But I wanted to see the other.

‘Come on, kudu,’ I said.

‘He’s dead,’ said M’Cola. ‘Kufa!’

‘Come on.’

‘This one best.’

‘Come on.’

‘Measure,’ M’Cola pleaded. I ran the steel tape around the curve of one horn, M’Cola holding it down. It was well over fifty inches. M’Cola looked at me anxiously.

‘Big! Big!’ I said. ‘Twice as big as B’wana Kabor.’

‘Eee-eee,’ he crooned.

‘Come on,’ I said. The Roman was off already.

We cut for where we saw the bull when I shot and there were the tracks with blood breast high on the leaves in the brush from the start. In a hundred yards we came on him absolutely dead. He was not quite as big as the first bull. The horns were as long, but narrower, but he was as beautiful, and he lay on his side, bending down the brush where he fell.

We all shook hands again, using the thumb which evidently denoted extreme emotion.

‘This askari,’ M’Cola explained. This bull was the policeman or bodyguard for the bigger one. He had evidently been in the timber when we had seen the first bull, had run with him, and had looked back to see why the big bull did not follow.

I wanted pictures and told M’Cola to go back to camp with the Roman and bring the two cameras, the Graflex and the cinema camera and my flashlight. I knew we were on the same side of the stream and above the camp and I hoped the Roman could make a short cut and get back before the sun set.

They went off and now, at the end of the day, the sun came out brightly below the clouds and the Wanderobo-Masai and I looked at this kudu, measured his horns, smelled the fine smell of him, sweeter than an eland even, stroked his nose, his neck, and his shoulder, marvelling at his great ears, and the smoothness and cleanness of his hide, looked at his hooves, that were built long, narrow, and springy, so he seemed to walk on tip-toe, felt under his shoulder for the bullet-hole and then shook hands again while the Wanderobo-Masai told what a man he was and I told him he was my pal and gave him my best four-bladed pocket knife.

‘Let’s go look at the first one, Wanderobo-Masai,’ I said in English.

The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, understanding perfectly, and we trailed back to where the big one lay in the edge of the little clearing. We circled him, looking at him and then the Wanderobo-Masai, reaching underneath while I held the shoulder up, found the bullet hole and put his finger in. Then he touched his forehead with the bloody finger and made the speech about ‘Wanderobo-Masai wonderful guide!’

‘Wanderobo-Masai king of guides,’ I said. ‘Wanderobo-Masai my pal.’

I was wet through with sweat and I put on my raincoat that M’Cola had been carrying and left behind and turned the collar up around my neck. I was watching the sun now and worrying about it being gone before they got up with the cameras. In a little while we could hear them coming in the brush and I shouted to let them know where we were. M’Cola answered and we shouted back and forth and I could hear them talking and crashing in the brush while I would shout and watch the sun which was almost down. Finally I saw them and I shouted to M’Cola, ‘Run, run’, and pointed to the sun, but there was no run left in them. They had made a fast trip uphill, through heavy brush, and when I got the camera, opened the lens wide and focused on the bull the sun was only lighting the tops of the trees. I took half a dozen exposures and used the cinema while they all dragged the kudu to where there seemed to be a little more light, then the sun was down and, obligation to try to get a picture over, I put the camera into its case and settled, happily, with the darkness into the unresponsibility of victory; only emerging to direct M’Cola in where to cut to make a full enough cape when skinning out the head-skin. M’Cola used a knife beautifully and I liked to watch him skin-out, but to-night, after I had shown him where to make the first cut, well down on the legs, around the lower chest where it joined the belly and well back over the withers, I did not watch him because I wanted to remember the bull as I had first seen him, so I went, in the dusk, to the second kudu and waited there until they came with the flashlight and then, remembering that I had skinned-out or seen skinned-out every animal that I had ever shot, yet remembered every one exactly as he was at every moment, that one memory does not destroy another, and that the not-watching idea was only laziness and a form of putting the dishes in the sink until morning, I held the flashlight for M’Cola while he worked on the second bull and, although tired, enjoyed as always his fast, clean, delicate scalpeling with the knife, until, the cape all clear and spread back he nocked through the connection of the skull and the spine and then, twisting with the horns, swung the head loose and lifted it, cape and all, free from the neck, the cape hanging heavy and wet in the light of the electric torch that shone on his red hands and on the dirty khaki of his tunic. We left the Wanderobo-Masai, Garrick, the Roman, and his brother with a lantern to skin out and pack in the meat and M’Cola with a head, the old man with a head, and me with the flashlight and the two guns, we started in the dark back for camp.

In the dark the old man fell flat and M’Cola laughed; then the cape unrolled and came down over his face and he almost choked and we both laughed. The old man laughed too. Then M’Cola fell in the dark and the old man and I laughed. A little farther on I went through the covering on some sort of game pit and went flat on my face and got up to hear M’Cola chuckling and choking and the old man giggling.

‘What the hell is this? A Chaplin comedy?’ I asked them in English. They were both laughing under the heads. We got to the thorn-bush fence, finally, after a nightmare march through the brush and saw the fire at the camp and M’Cola seemed to be delighted when the old man fell going through the thorns and got up cursing and seeming barely able to lift the head as I shone the flash ahead of him to show him the opening.

We came up to the fire and I could see the old man’s face bleeding as he put the head down against the stick and mud cabin. M’Cola put his head down, pointed at the old man’s face and laughed and shook his head. I looked at the old man. He was completely done-in, his face was badly scratched, covered with mud and bleeding, and he was chuckling happily.

‘B’wana fell down,’ M’Cola said and imitated me pitching forward. They both chuckled.

I made as though to take a swing at him and said, ‘Shenzi!’

He imitated me falling down again and then there was Kamau shaking hands very gently and respectfully and saying, ‘Good, B’wana! Very good, B’wana!’ and then going over to the heads, his eyes shining and kneeling, stroking the horns and feeling the ears and crooning the same, sighing, ‘Ooo-ooo! Eee-eee!’ noises M’Cola had made.

I went into the dark of the tent, we had left the lantern with the meat bringers, and washed, took off my wet clothes and feeling in the dark in my rucksack found a pair of pyjamas and a bath-robe. I came out to the fire wearing these and mosquito boots. I brought my wet things and my boots to the fire and Kamau spread them on sticks, and put the boots, each one leg-down, on a stick and back far enough from the blaze where the fire would not scorch them.

In the firelight I sat on a petrol box with my back against a tree and Kamau brought the whisky flask and poured some in a cup and I added water from the canteen and sat drinking and looking in the fire, not thinking, in complete happiness, feeling the whisky warm me and smooth me as you straighten the wrinkled sheet in a bed, while Kamau brought tins from the provisions to see what I would eat for supper. There were three tins of Christmas special mincemeat, three tins of salmon, and three of mixed fruit, there were also a number of cakes of chocolate and a tin of Special Christmas Plum Pudding. I sent these back wondering what Kati had imagined the mincemeat to be. We had been looking for that plum pudding for two months.

‘Meat?’ I asked.

Kamau brought a thick, long chunk of roast Grant gazelle tenderloin from one of the Grant Pop had shot on the plain while we had been hunting the twenty-five-mile salt-lick, and some bread.

‘Beer?’

He brought one of the big German litre bottles and opened it.

It seemed too complicated sitting on the petrol case and I spread my raincoat on the ground in front of the fire where the ground had been dried by the heat and stretched my legs out, leaning my back against the wooden case. The old man was roasting meat on a stick. It was a choice piece he had brought with him wrapped in his toga. In a little while they all began to come in carrying meat and the hides and then I was stretched out drinking beer and watching the fire and all around they were talking and roasting meat on sticks. It was getting cold and the night was clear and there was the smell of the roasting meat, the smell of the smoke of the fire, the smell of my boots steaming, and, where he squatted close, the smell of the good old Wanderobo-Masai. But I could remember the odour of the kudu as he lay in the woods.

Each man had his own meat or collection of pieces of meat on sticks stuck around the fire, they turned them and tended them, and there was much talking. Two others that I had not seen had come over from the huts and the boy we had seen in the afternoon was with them. I was eating a piece of hot broiled liver I had lifted from one of the sticks of the Wanderobo-Masai and wondering where the kidneys were. The liver was delicious. I was wondering whether it was worth while getting up to get the dictionary to ask about the kidneys when M’Cola said, ‘Beer?’

‘All right.’

He brought the bottle, opened it, and I lifted it and drank half of it off to chase down that liver.

‘It’s a hell of a life,’ I told him in English.

He grinned and said, ‘More beer?’ in Swahili.

My talking English to him was an acceptable joke.

‘Watch,’ I said, and tipped the bottle up and let it all go down. It was an old trick we learned in Spain drinking out of wine skins without swallowing. This impressed the Roman greatly. He came over, squatted down by the raincoat and started to talk. He talked for a long time.

‘Absolutely,’ I told him in English. ‘And furthermore he can take the sleigh.’

‘More beer?’ M’Cola asked.

‘You want to see the old man tight, I suppose?’

‘N’Dio,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ pretending to understand the English.

‘Watch it, Roman.’ I started to let the beer go down, saw the Roman following the motion with his own throat, started to choke, barely recovered, and lowered the bottle.

‘That’s all. Can’t do it more than twice in an evening. Makes you liverish.’

The Roman went on talking in his language. I heard him say Simba twice.

‘Simba here?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Over there,’ waving at the dark, and I could not make out the story. But it sounded very good.

‘Me plenty Simba,’ I said. ‘Hell of a man with Simba. Ask M’Cola.’ I could feel that I was getting the evening braggies but Pop and P.O.M. weren’t here to listen. It was not nearly so satisfactory to brag when you could not be understood, still it was better than nothing. I definitely had the braggies, on beer, too.

‘Amazing,’ I told the Roman. He went on with his own story. There was a little beer in the bottom of the bottle.

‘Old Man,’ I said. ‘Mzee.’

‘Yes, B’wana,’ said the old man.

‘Here’s some beer for you. You’re old enough, so it can’t hurt you.’

I had seen the old man’s eyes while he watched me drink and I knew he was another of the same. He took the bottle, drained it to the last bit of froth and crouched by his meat sticks holding the bottle lovingly.

‘More beer?’ asked M’Cola.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And my cartridges.’

The Roman had gone on steadily talking. He could tell a longer story even than Carlos in Cuba.

‘That’s mighty interesting,’ I told him. ‘You’re a hell of a fellow, too. We’re both good. Listen.’ M’Cola had brought the beer and my khaki coat with the cartridges in the pocket. I drank a little beer, noted the old man watching and spread out six cartridges. ‘I’ve got the braggies,’ I said. ‘You have to stand for this, look!’ I touched each of the cartridges in turn, ‘Simba, Simba, Faro, Nyati, Tendalla, Tendalla. What do you think of that? You don’t have to believe it. Look, M’Cola!’ and I named the six cartridges again. ‘Lion, lion, rhino, buffalo, kudu, kudu.’

‘Ayee!’ said the Roman excitedly.

‘N’Dio,’ said M’Cola solemnly. ‘Yes, it is true.’

‘Ayee!’ said the Roman and grabbed me by the thumb.

‘God’s truth,’ I said. ‘Highly improbable, isn’t it?’

‘N’Dio,’ said M’Cola, counting them over himself. ‘Simba, Simba, Faro, Nyati, Tendalla, Tendalla!’

‘You can tell the others,’ I said in English. ‘That’s a hell of a big piece of bragging. That’ll hold me for to-night.’

The Roman went on talking to me again and I listened carefully and ate another piece of the broiled liver. M’Cola was working on the heads now, skinning out one skull and showing Kamau how to skin out the easy part of the other. It was a big job to do for the two of them, working carefully around the eyes and the muzzle and the cartilage of the ears, and afterwards flesh all of the head skins so they would not spoil, and they were working at it very delicately and carefully in the firelight. I do not remember going to bed, nor if we went to bed.

I remember getting the dictionary and asking M’Cola to ask the boy if he had a sister and M’Cola saying, ‘No, No’, to me very firmly and solemnly.

‘Nothing tendacious, you understand. Curiosity.’

M’Cola was firm. ‘No,’ he said and shook his head. ‘Hapana,’ in the same tone he used when we followed the lion into the sanseviera that time.

That disposed of the opportunities for social life and I looked up kidneys and the Roman’s brother produced some from his lot and I put a piece between two pieces of liver on a stick and started it broiling.

‘Make an admirable breakfast,’ I said out loud. ‘Much better than mincemeat.’

Then we had a long talk about sable. The Roman did not call them Tarahalla and that name meant nothing to him. There was some confusion about buffalo because the Roman kept saying ‘nyati’, but he meant they were black like the buff. Then we drew pictures in the dust of ashes from the fire and what he meant were sable all right. The horns curved back like scimitars, way back over their withers.

‘Bulls?’ I said.

‘Bulls and cows.’

With the old man and Garrick interpreting, I believed I made out that there were two herds.

‘To-morrow.’

‘Yes,’ the Roman said. ‘To-morrow.’

‘‘Cola,’ I said. ‘To-day, kudu. To-morrow, sable, buffalo, Simba.’

‘Hapana, buffalo!’ he said and shook his head. Hapana, Simba!’

‘Me and the Wanderobo-Masai buffalo,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said the Wanderobo-Masai excitedly. ‘Yes.’

‘There are very big elephants near here,’ Garrick said.

‘To-morrow, elephants,’ I said, teasing M’Cola.

‘Hapana elephants!’ He knew it was teasing but he did not even want to hear it said.

‘Elephants,’ I said. ‘Buffalo, Simba, leopard.’

The Wanderobo-Masai was nodding excitedly. ‘Rhino,’ he put in.

‘Hapana!’ M’Cola said shaking his head. He was beginning to suffer.

‘In those hills many buffalo,’ the old man interpreted for the now very excited Roman who was standing and pointing beyond where the huts were.

‘Hapana! Hapana! Hapana!’ M’Cola said definitely and finally. ‘More beer?’ putting down his knife.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m just kidding you.’

M’Cola was crouched close talking, making an explanation. I heard Pop’s title and I thought it was that Pop would not like it. That Pop would not want it.

‘I was just kidding you,’ I said in English. Then in Swahili, ‘To-morrow, sable?’

‘Yes,’ he said feelingly. ‘Yes.’

After that the Roman and I had a long talk in which I spoke Spanish and he spoke whatever it was he spoke and I believe we planned the entire campaign for the next day.

CHAPTER TWO

I do not remember going to bed nor getting up, only being by the fire in the grey before daylight, with a tin cup of hot tea in my hand and my breakfast, on the stick, not looking nearly so admirable and very over-blown with ashes. The Roman was standing making an oration with gestures in the direction where the light was beginning to show and I remember wondering if the bastard had talked all night.

The head skins were all spread and neatly salted and the skulls with the horns were leaning against the log and stick house. M’Cola was folding the head skins. Kamau brought me the tins and I told him to open one of fruit. It was cold from the night and the mixed fruit and the cold syrupy juice sucked down smoothly. I drank another cup of tea, went in the tent, dressed, put on my dry boots and we were ready to start. The Roman had said we would be back before lunch.

We had the Roman’s brother as guide. The Roman was going, as near as I could make out, to spy on one of the herds of sable and we were going to locate the other. We started out with the brother ahead, wearing a toga and carrying a spear, then me with the Springfield slung and my small Zeiss glasses in my pocket, then M’Cola with Pop’s glasses, slung on one side, water canteen on the other, skinning knife, whetstone, extra box of cartridges, and cakes of chocolates in his pockets, and the big gun over his shoulder, then the old man with the Graflex, Garrick with the movie camera, and the Wanderobo-Masai with a spear and bow and arrows.

We said good-bye to the Roman and started out of the thorn-bush fence just as the sun came through the gap in the hills and shone on the cornfield, the huts and the blue hills beyond. It promised to be a fine clear day.

The brother led the way through some heavy brush that soaked us all; then through the open forest, then steeply uphill until we were well up on the slope that rose behind the edge of the field where we were camped. Then we were on a good smooth trail that graded back into these hills above which the sun had not yet risen. I was enjoying the early morning, still a little sleepy, going along a little mechanically and starting to think that we were a very big outfit to hunt quietly, although everyone seemed to move quietly enough, when we saw two people coming towards us.

They were a tall, good-looking man with features like the Roman’s, but slightly less noble, wearing a toga and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows, and behind him, his wife, very pretty, very modest, very wifely, wearing a garment of brown tanned skins and neck ornament of concentric copper wire circles and many wire circles on her arms and ankles. We halted, said ‘Jambo’, and the brother talked to this seeming tribesman who had the air of a business man on the way to his office in the city and, as they spoke in rapid question and answer, I watched the most freshly brideful wife who stood a little in profile so that I saw her pretty pear-shaped breasts and the long, clean niggery legs and was studying her pleasant profile most profitably until her husband spoke to her suddenly and sharply, then in explanation and quiet command, and she moved around us, her eyes down, and went on along the trail that we had come, alone, we all watching her. The husband was going on with us, it seemed. He had seen the sable that morning and, slightly suspicious, obviously displeased at leaving that now out-of-sight wife of wives that we all had taken with our eyes, he led us off and to the right along another trail, well-worn and smooth, through woods that looked like fall at home and where you might expect to flush a grouse and have him whirr off to the other hill or pitch down in the valley.

So, sure enough we put up partridges and, watching them fly, I was thinking all the country in the world is the same country and all hunters are the same people. Then we saw a fresh kudu track beside the trail and then, as we moved through the early morning woods, no undergrowth now, the first sun coming through the tops of the trees, we came on the ever miracle of elephant tracks, each one as big around as the circle you make with your arms putting your hands together, and sunk a foot deep in the loam of the forest floor, where some bull had passed, travelling after rain. Looking at the way the tracks graded down through the pleasant forest I thought that we had the mammoths too, a long time ago, and when they travelled through the hills in southern Illinois they made these same tracks. It was just that we were an older country in America and the biggest game was gone.

We kept along the face of this hill on a pleasant sort of jutting plateau and then came out to the edge of the hill where there was a valley and a long open meadow with timber on the far side and a circle of hills at its upper end where another valley went off to the left. We stood in the edge of the timber on the face of this hill looking across the meadow valley which extended to the open out in a steep sort of grassy basin at the upper end where it was backed by the hills. To our left there were steep, rounded, wooded hills, with outcroppings of limestone rock that ran, from where we stood, up to the very head of the valley, and there formed part of the other range of hills that headed it. Below us, to the right, the country was rough and broken in hills and stretches of meadow and then a steep fall of timber that ran to the blue hills we had seen to the westward beyond the huts where the Roman and his family lived. I judged camp to be straight down below us and about five miles to the north-west through the timber.

The husband was standing, talking to the brother and gesturing and pointing out that he had seen the sable feeding on the opposite side of the meadow valley and that they must have fed either up or down the valley. We sat in the shelter of the trees and sent the Wanderobo-Masai down into the valley to look for tracks. He came back and reported there were no tracks leading down the valley below us and to the westward, so we knew they had fed on up the meadow valley.

Now the problem was to so use the terrain that we might locate them, and get up and into range of them without being seen. The sun was coming over the hills at the head of the valley and shone on us while everything at the head of the valley was in heavy shadow. I told the outfit to stay where they were in the woods, except for M’Cola and the husband who would go with me, we keeping in the timber and grading up our side of the valley until we could be above and see into the pocket of the curve at the upper end to glass it for the sable.

You ask how this was discussed, worked out, and understood with the bar of language, and I say it was as freely discussed and clearly understood as though we were a cavalry patrol all speaking the same language. We were all hunters except, possibly, Garrick, and the whole thing could be worked out, understood, and agreed to without using anything but a forefinger to signal and a hand to caution. We left them and worked very carefully ahead, well back in the timber to get height. Then, when we were far enough up and along, we crawled out on to a rocky place and, being behind rock, shielding the glasses with my hat so they would not reflect the sun, M’Cola nodding and grunting as he saw the practicability of that, we glassed the opposite side of the meadow around the edge of the timber, and up into the pocket at the head of the valley; and there they were. M’Cola saw them just before I did and pulled my sleeve.

‘N’Dio,’ I said. Then I held my breath to watch them. All looked very black, big necked, and heavy. All had the back-curving horns. They were a long way away. Some were lying down. One was standing. We could see seven.

‘Where’s the bull?’ I whispered.

M’Cola motioned with his left hand and counted four fingers. It was one of those lying down in the tall grass and the animal did look much bigger and the horns much more sweeping. But we were looking into the morning sun and it was hard to see well. Behind them a sort of gully ran up into the hill that blocked the end of the valley.

Now we knew what we had to do. We must go back, cross the meadow far enough down so we were out of sight, get into the timber on the far side and work along through the timber to get above the sable. First we must try to make sure there were no more of them in the timber or the meadow that we must work through before we made our stalk.

I wet my finger and put it up. From the cool side it seemed as though the breeze came down the valley. M’Cola took some dead leaves and crumpled them and tossed them up. They fell a little toward us. The wind was all right and now we must glass the edge of the timber and check on it.

‘Hapana,’ M’Cola said finally. I had seen nothing either and my eyes ached from the pull of the eight-power glasses. We could take a chance on the timber. We might jump something and spook the sable but we had to take that chance to get around and above them.

We made our way back and down and told the others. From where they were we could cross the valley out of sight of its upper end and bending low, me with my hat off, we headed down into the high meadow grass and across the deeply cut watercourse that ran down through the centre of the meadow, across its rocky shelf, and up the grassy bank on the other side, keeping under the edge of a fold of the valley into the shelter of the woods. Then we headed up through the woods, crouched, in single file, to try to get above the sable.

We went forward making as good time as we could and still move quietly. I had made too many stalks on big horn sheep only to find them fed away and out of sight when you came round the shoulder of the mountain to trust these sable to stay where they were and, since once we were in the timber we could no longer see them, I thought it was important that we come up above them as fast as we could without getting me too blown and shaky for the shooting.

M’Cola’s water bottle made a noise against the cartridges in his pocket and I stopped and had him pass it to the Wanderobo-Masai. It seemed too many people to be hunting with, but they all moved quietly as snakes, and I was over-confident anyway. I was sure the sable could not see us in the forest, nor wind us.

Finally I was certain we were above them and that they must be ahead of us, and past where the sun was shining in a thinning of the forest, and below us, under the edge of the hill. I checked on the aperture in the sight being clean, cleaned my glasses and wiped the sweat from my forehead remembering to put the used handkerchief in my left pocket so I would not fog my glasses wiping them with it again. M’Cola and I and the husband started to work our way to the edge of the timber; finally crawling almost to the edge of the ridge. There were still some trees between us and the open meadow below and we were behind a small bush and a fallen tree when, raising our heads, we could see them in the grassy open, about three hundred yards away, showing big and very dark in the shadow. Between us was scattered open timber full of sunlight and the openness of the gulch. As we watched two got to their feet and seemed to be standing looking at us. The shot was possible but it was too long to be certain and as I lay, watching, I felt somebody touch me on the arm and Garrick, who had crawled up, whispered throatily, ‘Piga! Piga, B’wana! Doumi! Doumi!’ saying to shoot, that it was a bull. I glanced back and there were the whole outfit on their bellies or hands and knees, the Wanderobo-Masai shaking like a bird dog. I was furious and motioned them all down.

So that was a bull, eh, well there was a much bigger bull that M’Cola and I had seen lying down. The two sable were watching us and I dropped my head, I thought they might be getting a flash from my glasses. When I looked up again, very slowly, I shaded my eyes with my hand. The two sable had stopped looking and were feeding. But one looked up again nervously and I saw the dark, heavy-built antelope with scimitar-like horns swung back staring at us.

I had never seen a sable. I knew nothing about them, neither whether their eyesight was keen, like a ram who sees you at whatever distance you see him, or like a bull elk who cannot see you at two hundred yards unless you move. I was not sure of their size either, but I judged the range to be all of three hundred yards. I knew I could hit one if I shot from a sitting position or prone, but I could not say where I would hit him.

Then Garrick again, ‘Piga, B’wana, Piga!’ I turned on him as though to slug him in the mouth. It would have been a great comfort to do it. I truly was not nervous when I first saw the sable, but Garrick was making me nervous.

‘Far?’ I whispered to M’Cola who had crawled up and was lying by me.

‘Yes.’

‘Shoot?’

‘No. Glasses.’

We both watched, using the glasses guardedly. I could only see four. There had been seven. If that was a bull that Garrick pointed out, then they were all bulls. They all looked the same colour in the shadow. Their horns all looked big to me. I knew that with mountain sheep the rams all kept together in bunches until late in the winter when they went with the ewes; that in the late summer you found bull elk in bunches too, before the rutting season, and that later they herded up together again. We had seen as many as twenty impalla rams together upon the Serenea. All right, then, they could all be bulls, but I wanted a good one, the best one, and I tried to remember having read something about them, but all I could remember was a silly story of some man seeing the same bull every morning in the same place and never getting up on him. All I could remember was the wonderful pair of horns we had seen in the Game Warden’s office in Arusha. And here were sable now, and I must play it right and get the best one. It never occurred to me that Garrick had never seen a sable and that he knew no more about them than M’Cola or I.

‘Too far,’ I said to M’Cola.

‘Yes.’

‘Come on,’ I said, then waved the others down, and we started crawling up to reach the edge of the hill.

Finally we lay behind a tree and I looked around it. Now we could see their horns clearly with the glasses and could see the other three. One, lying down, was certainly much the biggest and the horns, as I caught them in silhouette, seemed to curve much higher and farther back. I was studying them, too excited to be happy as I watched them, when I heard M’Cola whisper ‘B’wana.’

I lowered the glasses and looked and there was Garrick, taking no advantage of the cover, crawling on his hands and knees out to join us. I put my hand out, palm toward him, and waved him down but he paid no attention and came crawling on, as conspicuous as a man walking down a city street on hands and knees. I saw one sable looking toward us, toward him, rather. Then three more got to their feet. Then the big one got up and stood broadside with head turned toward us as Garrick came up whispering, ‘Piga, B’wana! Piga! Doumi! Doumi! Kubwa Sana.’

There was no choice now. They were definitely spooked and I lay out flat on my belly, put my arm through the sling, got my elbows settled and my right toe pushing the ground and squeezed off on the centre of the bull’s shoulder. But at the roar I knew it was bad. I was over him. They all jumped and stood looking, not knowing where the noise came from. I shot again at the bull and threw dirt all over him and they were off. I was on my feet and hit him as he ran and he was down. Then he was up and I hit him again and he took it and was in the bunch. They passed him and I shot and was behind him. Then I hit him again and he was trailing slowly and I knew I had him. M’Cola was handing me cartridges and I was shoving shells down into the damned-to-hell, lousy, staggered, Springfield magazine watching the sable making heavy weather of it crossing the watercourse. We had him all right. I could see he was very sick. The others were trailing up into the timber. In the sunlight on the other side they looked much lighter and the one I’d shot looked lighter, too. They looked a dark chestnut and the one I had shot was almost black. But he was not black and I felt there was something wrong. I shoved the last shell in and Garrick was trying to grab my hand to congratulate me when, below us across the open space where the gully that we could not see opened on to the head of the valley, sable started to pass at a running stampede.

‘Good God,’ I thought. They all looked like the one I had shot and I was trying to pick a big one. They all looked about the same and they were crowding running and then came the bull. Even in the shadow he was a dead black and shiny as he hit the sun, and his horns swept up high, then back, huge and dark, in two great curves nearly touching the middle of his back. He was a bull all right. God, what a bull.

‘Doumi,’ said M’Cola in my ear. ‘Doumi!’

I hit him and at the roar he was down. I saw him up, the others passing, spreading out, then bunching. I missed him. Then I saw him going almost straight away up the valley in the tall grass and I hit him again and he went out of sight. The sable now were going up the hill at the head of the valley, up the hill at our right, up the hill in the timber across the valley, spread out and travelling fast. Now that I had seen a bull I knew they all were cows including the first one I had shot. The bull never showed and I was absolutely sure that we would find him where I had seen him go down in the long grass.

The outfit were all up and I shook off handshaking and thumb pulling before we started down through the trees and over the edge of the gully and to the meadow on a dead run. My eyes, my mind, and all inside of me were full of the blackness of that sable bull and the sweep of those horns and I was thanking God I had the rifle reloaded before he came out. But it was excited shooting, all of it, and I was not proud of it. I had gotten excited and shot at the whole animal instead of the right place and I was ashamed; but the outfit now were drunk excited. I would have walked but you could not hold them, they were like a pack of dogs as we ran. As we crossed the meadow opening where we had first seen the seven and went beyond where the bull had gone out of sight, the grass suddenly was high and over our heads and every one slowed down. There were two washed-out concealed ravines ten or twelve feet deep that ran down to the watercourse and what had looked a smooth grass-filled basin was very broken, tricky country with grass that was from waist-high to well above our heads. We found blood at once and it led off to the left, across the watercourse and up the hillside on the left toward the head of the valley. I thought that was the first sable but it seemed a wider swing than he had seemed to make when we watched him going from above in the timber. I made a circle to look for the big bull but I could not pick his track from the mass of tracks and in the high grass and the broken terrain it was difficult to figure just where he had gone.

They were all for the blood spoor and it was like trying to make badly-trained bird dogs hunt a dead bird when they are crazy to be off after the rest of the covey.

‘Doumi! Doumi!’ I said. ‘Kubwa Sana! The bull. The big bull.’

‘Yes,’ everybody agreed. ‘Here! Here!’ The blood spoor that crossed the watercourse.

Finally I took that trail thinking we must get them one at a time, and knowing this one was hard hit and the other would keep. Then, too, I might be wrong and this might be the big bull, he might possibly have turned in the high grass and crossed here as we were running down. I had been wrong before, I remembered.

We trailed fast up the hillside, into the timber, the blood was splashed freely; made a turn toward the right, climbing steeply, and at the head of the valley in some large rocks jumped a sable. It went scrambling and bounding off through the rocks. I saw in an instant that it was not hit and knew that, in spite of the back-swung dark horns, it was a cow from the dark chestnut colour. But I saw this just in time to keep from shooting. I had started to pull when I lowered the rifle.

‘Manamouki,’ I said. ‘It’s a cow.’

M’Cola and the two Roman guides agreed. I had very nearly shot. We went on perhaps five yards and another sable jumped. But this one was swaying its head wildly and could not clear the rocks. It was hard hit and I took my time, shot carefully, and broke its neck.

We came up to it, lying in the rocks, a large, deep chestnut-brown animal, almost black, the horns black and curving handsomely back, there was a white patch on the muzzle and back from the eye, there was a white belly; but it was no bull.

M’Cola, still in doubt, verified this and feeling the short, rudimentary teats said ‘Manamouki’, and shook his head sadly.

It was the first big bull that Garrick had pointed out.

‘Bull down there,’ I pointed.

‘Yes,’ said M’Cola.

I thought that we would give him time to get sick, if he were only wounded, and then go down and find him. So I had M’Cola make the cuts for taking off the head skin and we would leave the old man to skin out the head while we went down after the bull.

I drank some water from the canteen. I was thirsty after the run and the climb, and the sun was up now and it was getting hot. Then we went down the opposite side of the valley from that we had just come up trailing the wounded cow, and below, in the tall grass, casting in circles, commenced to hunt for the trail of the bull. We could not find it.

The sable had been running in a bunch as they came out and any individual track was confused or obliterated. We found some blood on the grass stems where I had first hit him, then lost it, then found it again where the other blood spoor turned off. Then the tracks had all split up as they had gone, fan-wise, up the valley and the hills and we could not find it again. Finally I found blood on a grass blade about fifty yards up the valley and I plucked it and held it up. This was a mistake. I should have brought them to it. Already everyone but M’Cola was losing faith in the bull.

He was not there. He had disappeared. He had vanished. Perhaps he had never existed. Who could say he was a real bull? If I had not plucked the grass with the blood on it I might have held them. Growing there with blood on it, it was evidence. Plucked, it meant nothing except to me and to M’Cola. But I could find no more blood and they were all hunting half-heartedly now. The only possible way was to quarter every foot of the high grass and trace every foot of the gullies. It was very hot now and they were only making a pretence of hunting.

Garrick came up. ‘All cows,’ he said. ‘No bull. Just biggest cow. You killed biggest cow. We found her. Smaller cow get away.’

‘You wind-blown son of a bitch,’ I said, then, using my fingers. ‘Listen. Seven cows. Then fifteen cows and one bull. Bull hit. Here.’

‘All cows,’ said Garrick.

‘One big cow hit. One bull hit.’

I was so sure sounding that they agreed to this and searched for a while but I could see they were losing belief in the bull.

‘If I had one good dog,’ I thought. ‘Just one good dog.’

Then Garrick came up. ‘All cows,’ he said. ‘Very big cows.’

‘You’re a cow,’ I said. ‘Very big cow.’

This got a laugh from the Wanderobo-Masai, who was getting to look a picture of sick misery. The brother half believed in the bull, I could see. Husband, by now, did not believe in any of us. I didn’t think he even believed in the kudu of the night before. Well, after this shooting, I did not blame him.

M’Cola came up. ‘Hapana,’ he said glumly. Then, ‘B’wana, you shot that bull?’

‘Yes,’ I said. For a minute I began to doubt whether there ever was a bull. Then I saw again his heavy, high-withered blackness and the high rise of his horns before they swept back, him running with the bunch, shoulder higher than them and black as hell and as I saw it, M’Cola saw it again too through the rising mist of the savage’s unbelief in what he can no longer see.

‘Yes,’ M’Cola agreed. ‘I see him. You shoot him.’

I told it again. ‘Seven cows. Shoot biggest. Fifteen cows, one bull. Hit that bull.’

They all believed it now for a moment and circled, searching, but the faith died at once in the heat of the sun and the tall grass blowing.

‘All cows,’ Garrick said. The Wanderobo-Masai nodded, his mouth open. I could feel the comfortable lack of faith coming over me too. It was a damned sight easier not to hunt in that sun in that shadeless pocket and in the sun on that steep hillside. I told M’Cola we would hunt up the valley on both sides, finish skinning out the head, and he and I would come down alone and find the bull. You could not hunt them against that unbelief. I had had no chance to train them; no power to discipline. If there had been no law I would have shot Garrick and they would all have hunted or cleared out. I think they would have hunted. Garrick was not popular. He was simply poison.

M’Cola and I came back down the valley, quartered it like bird dogs, circled and followed and checked track after track. I was hot and very thirsty. The sun was something serious by now.

‘Hapana,’ M’Cola said. We could not find him. Whatever he was, we had lost him.

‘Maybe he was a cow. Maybe it was all goofy,’ I thought, letting the unbelief come in as a comfort. We were going to hunt up the hill side to the right and then we would have checked it all and would take the cow head into camp and see what the Roman had located. I was dead thirsty and drained the canteen. We would get water in camp.

We started up the hill and I jumped a sable in some brush. I almost loosed off at it before I saw it was a cow. That showed how one could be hidden, I thought. We would have to get the men and go over it all again; and then, from the old man, came a wild shouting.

‘Doumi! Doumi!’ in a high, screaming shout.

‘Where?’ I shouted, running across the hill toward him.

‘There! There!’ he shouted, pointing into the timber on the other side of the head of the valley. ‘There! There! There he goes! There!’

We came on a dead run but the bull was out of sight in the timber on the hillside. The old man said he was huge, he was black, he had great horns, and he came by him ten yards away, hit in two places, in the gut and high up in the rump, hard hit but going fast, crossing the valley, through the boulders and going up the hillside.

I gut-shot him, I thought. Then as he was going away I laid that one on his stern. He lay down and was sick and we missed him. Then, when we were past, he jumped.

‘Come on,’ I said. Everyone was excited and ready to go now and the old man was chattering about the bull as he folded the head skin and put the head upon his own head and we started across through the rocks and up, quartering up on to the hillside. There, where the old man had pointed, was a very big sable track, the hoof marks spread wide, the tracks grading up into the timber and there was blood, plenty of it.

We trailed him fast, hoping to jump him and have a shot, and it was easy trailing in the shade of the trees with plenty of blood to follow. But he kept climbing, grading up around the hill, and he was travelling fast. We kept the blood bright and wet but we could not come up on him. I did not track but kept watching ahead thinking I might see him as he looked back, or see him down, or cutting down across the hill through the timber, and M’Cola and Garrick were tracking, aided by every one but the old man who staggered along with the sable skull and head skin held on his own grey head. M’Cola had hung the empty water bottle on him, and Garrick had loaded him with the cinema camera. It was hard going for the old man.

Once we came on a place where the bull had rested and watched his back track, there was a little pool of blood on a rock where he had stood, behind some bushes, and I cursed the wind that blew our scent on ahead of us. There was a big breeze blowing now and I was certain we had no chance of surprising him, our scent would keep everything moving out of the way ahead of us as long as anything could move. I thought of trying to circle ahead with M’Cola and let them track but we were moving fast, the blood was still bright on the stones and on the fallen leaves and grass and the hills were too steep for us to make a circle. I did not see how we could lose him.

Then he took us up and into a rocky, ravine-cut country where the trailing was slow and the climbing difficult. Here, I thought, we would jump him in a gully but the spatters of blood, not so bright now, went on around the boulders, over the rocks and up and up and left us on a rim-rock ledge. He must have gone down from there. It was too steep above for him to have gone over the top of the hill. There was no other way to go but down, but how had he gone, and down which ravine? I sent them looking down three possible ways and got out on the rim to try to sight him. They could not find any spoor, and then the Wanderobo-Masai called from below and to the right that he had blood and, climbing down, we saw it on a rock and then followed it in occasional drying splatters down through a steep descent to the meadow below. I was encouraged when he started down hill and in the knee-high, heavy grass of the meadow trailing was easy again, because the grass brushed against his belly and while you could not see tracks clearly without stooping double and parting the grass to look, yet the blood spoor was plain on the grass blades. But it was dry now and dully shiny and I knew we had lost much time on him when he rim-rocked us on the hill.

Finally his trail crossed the dry watercourse about where we had first come in sight of the meadow in the morning and led away into the sloping, sparsely-wooded country on the far side. There were no clouds and I could feel the sun now, not just as heat but as a heavy deadly weight on my head and I was very thirsty. It was very hot but it was not the heat that bothered. It was the weight of the sun.

Garrick had given up tracking seriously and was only contributing theatrical successes of discovering blood when M’Cola and I were checked. He would do no routine tracking any more, but would rest and then track in irritating spurts. The Wanderobo-Masai was useless as a blue-jay and I had M’Cola give him the big rifle to carry so that we would get some use out of him. The Roman’s brother was obviously not a hunter and the husband was not very interested. He did not seem to be a hunter either. As we trailed, slowly, the ground, hard now as the sun had baked it, the blood only black spots and splatters on the short grass, one by one the brother, Garrick, and the Wanderobo-Masai dropped out and sat in the shade of the scattered trees.

The sun was terrific and as it was necessary to track with heads bent down and stooping, in spite of a handkerchief spread over my neck I had a pounding ache in my head.

M’Cola was tracking slowly, steadily, and absolutely absorbed in the problem. His bare, bald head gleamed with sweat and when it ran down in his eyes he would pluck a grass stem, hold it with each hand and shave the sweat off his forehead and bald black crown with the stem.

We went on slowly. I had always sworn to Pop that I could out-track M’Cola but I realized now that in the past I had been giving a sort of Garrick performance in picking up the spoor when it was lost and that in straight, steady trailing, now in the heat, with the sun really bad, truly bad so that you could feel what it was doing to your head, cooking it to hell, trailing in short grass on hard ground where a blood spot was a dry, black blister on a grass blade, difficult to see; that you must find the next little black spot perhaps twenty yards away, one holding the last blood while the other found the next, then going on, one on each side of the trail; pointing with a grass stem at the spots to save talking, until it ran out again and you marked the last blood with your eye and both made casts to pick it up again, signalling with a hand up, my mouth too dry to talk, a heat shimmer over the ground now when you straightened up to let your neck stop aching and looked ahead, I knew M’Cola was immeasurably the better man and the better tracker. Have to tell Pop, I thought.

At this point M’Cola made a joke. My mouth was so dry that it was hard to talk.

‘B’wana,’ M’Cola said, looking at me when I had straightened up and was leaning my neck back to get the crick out of it.

‘Yes?’

‘Whisky?’ and he offered me the flask.

‘You bastard,’ I said in English, and he chuckled and shook his head.

‘Hapana whisky?’

‘You savage,’ I said in Swahili.

We started tracking again, M’Cola shaking his head and very amused, and in a little while the grass was longer and it was easier again. We crossed all that semi-open country we had seen from the hillside in the morning and going down a slope the tracks swung back into high grass. In this higher grass I found that by half shutting my eyes I could see his trail where he had shouldered through the grass and I went ahead fast without trailing by the blood, to M’Cola’s amazement, but then we came out on very short grass and rock again and now the trailing was the hardest yet.

He was not bleeding much now; the sun and the heat must have dried the wounds and we found only an occasional small starry splatter on the rocky ground.

Garrick came up and made a couple of brilliant discoveries of blood spots, then sat down under a tree. Under another tree I could see the poor old Wanderobo-Masai holding his first and last job as gun-bearer. Under another was the old man, the sable head beside him like some black-mass symbol, his equipment hanging from his shoulders. M’Cola and I went on trailing very slowly and laboriously across the long stony slope and back and up into another tree-scattered meadow, and through it, and into a long field with piled up boulders at the end. In the middle of this field we lost the trail completely and circled and hunted for nearly two hours before we found blood again.

The old man found it for us below the boulders and to the right half a mile away. He had gone ahead down there on his own idea of what the bull would have done. The old man was a hunter.

Then we trailed him very slowly, on to hard stony ground a mile away. But we could not trail from there. The ground was too hard to leave a track and we never found blood again. Then we hunted on our various theories of where the bull would go, but the country was too big and we had no luck.

‘No good,’ M’Cola said.

I straightened up and went over to the shade of a big tree. It felt cool as water and the breeze cooled my skin through the wet shirt. I was thinking about the bull and wishing to God I had never hit him. Now I had wounded him and lost him. I believe he kept right on travelling and went out of that country. He never showed any tendency to circle back. To-night he would die and the hyenas would eat him, or, worse, they would get him before he died, hamstringing him and pulling his guts out while he was alive. The first one that hit that blood spoor would stay with it until he found him. Then he would call up the others. I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all. We ate the meat and kept the hides and horns. But I felt rotten sick over this sable bull. Besides, I wanted him, I wanted him damned badly, I wanted him more than I would admit. Well, we had played our string out with him. Our chance was at the start when he was down and we missed him. We had lost that. No, our best chance, the only chance a rifleman should ever ask, was when I had a shot and shot at the whole animal instead of calling the shot. It was my own lousy fault. I was a son of a bitch to have gut-shot him. It came from over-confidence in being able to do a thing and then omitting one of the steps in how it is done. Well, we had lost him. I doubted if there was a dog in the world could trail him now in that heat. Still that was the only chance. I got out the dictionary and asked the old man if there were any dogs at the Roman’s place.

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘Hapana.’

We made a very wide circle and I sent the brother and the husband out in another circle. We found nothing, no trace, no tracks, no blood, and I told M’Cola we would start for camp. The Roman’s brother and the husband went up the valley to get the meat of the sable cow we had shot. We were beaten.

M’Cola and I ahead, the other following, we went across the long heat haze of the open country, down to cross the dry watercourse, and up and into the grateful shade of the trail through the woods. As we were going along through the broken sunlight and shadow, the floor of the forest smooth and springy where we cut across to save distance from the trail, we saw, less than a hundred yards away, a herd of sable standing in the timber looking at us. I pulled back the bolt and looked for the best pair of horns.

‘Doumi,’ Garrick whispered. ‘Doumi kubwa sana!’

I looked where he pointed. It was a very big cow sable, dark chestnut, white marks on the face, white belly, heavy built and with a fine curving pair of horns. She was standing broadside to us with her head turned, looking. I looked carefully at the whole lot. They were all cows; evidently the bunch whose bull I had wounded and lost, and they had come over the hill and herded up again together here.

‘We go to camp,’ I said to M’Cola.

As we started forward the sable jumped and ran past us, crossing the trail ahead. At every good pair of cow horns, Garrick said, ‘Bull, B’wana. Big, big bull. Shoot, B’wana. Shoot, oh shoot!’

‘All cows,’ I said to M’Cola when they were past, running in a panic through the sun-splashed timber.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘Old man,’ I said. The old man came up.

‘Let the guide carry that,’ I said.

The old man lowered the cow sable head.

‘No,’ said Garrick.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Bloody well yes.’

We went on through the woods toward camp. I was feeling better, much better. All through the day I had never thought once of the kudu. Now we were coming home to where they were waiting.

It seemed much longer coming home although, usually, the return over a new trail is shorter. I was tired all the way into my bones, my head felt cooked, and I was thirstier than I had ever been in my life. But suddenly, walking through the woods, it was much cooler. A cloud had come over the sun.

We came out of the timber and down on to the flat and in sight of the thorn fence. The sun was behind a bank of clouds now and then in a little while the sky was covered completely and the clouds looked heavy and threatening. I thought perhaps this had been the last clear hot day; unusual heat before the rains. First I thought: if it had only rained, so that the ground would hold a track, we could have stayed with that bull for ever; then, looking at the heavy, woolly clouds that so quickly had covered all the sky, I thought that if we were going to join the outfit, and get the car across that ten-mile stretch of black cotton road on the way to Handeni, we had better start. I pointed to the sky.

‘Bad,’ M’Cola agreed.

‘Go to the camp of B’wana M’Kubwa?’

‘Better.’ Then, vigorously, accepting the decision, ‘N’Dio. N’Dio.’

‘We go,’ I said.

Arrived at the thorn fence and the hut, we broke camp fast. There was a runner there from our last camp who had brought a note, written before P.O.M. and Pop had left, and bringing my mosquito net. There was nothing in the note, only good luck and that they were starting. I drank some water from one of our canvas bags, sat on a petrol tin and looked at the sky. I could not, conscientiously, chance staying. If it rained here we might not even be able to get out to the road. If it rained heavily on the road, we would never get out to the coast that season. Both the Austrian and Pop had said that, I had to go.

That was settled, so there was no use to think how much I wanted to stay. The day’s fatigue helped make the decision easy. Everything was being loaded into the car and they were all gathering up their meat from the sticks around the ashes of the fire.

‘Don’t you want to eat, B’wana?’ Kamau asked me.

‘No,’ I said. Then in English, ‘Too bloody tired.’

‘Eat. You are hungry.’

‘Later, in the car.’

M’Cola went by with a load, his big, flat face completely blank again. It only came alive about hunting or some joke. I found a tin cup by the fire and called to him to bring the whisky, and the blank face cracked at the eyes and mouth into a smile as he took the flask out of his pocket.

‘With water better,’ he said.

‘You black Chinaman.’

They were all working fast and the Roman’s women came over and stood a little way away watching the carrying and the packing of the car. There were two of them, good-looking, well built, and shy, but interested. The Roman was not back yet. I felt very badly to go off like this with no explanation to him. I liked the Roman very much and had a high regard for him.

I took a drink of the whisky and water and looked at the two pairs of kudu horns that leaned against the wall of the chicken coop hut. From the white, cleanly picked skulls the horns rose in slow spirals that spreading made a turn, another turn, and then curved delicately into those smooth, ivory-like points. One pair was narrower and taller against the side of the hut. The other was almost as tall but wider in spread and heavier in beam. They were the colour of black walnut meats and they were beautiful to see. I went over and stood the Springfield against the hut between them and the tips reached past the muzzle of the rifle. As Kamau came back from carrying a load to the car I told him to bring the camera and then had him stand beside them while I took a picture. Then he picked them up, each head a load, and carried them over to the car.

Garrick was talking loudly and in a roostery way to the Roman’s women. As near as I could make out he was offering them the empty petrol boxes in exchange for a piece of something.

‘Come here,’ I called to him. He came over still feeling smart.

‘Listen,’ I told him in English. ‘If I get through this safari without socking you it’s going to be a bloody marvel. And if I ever hit you I’ll break your mucking jaw. That’s all.’

He did not understand the words but the tone made it clearer than if I had got something out of the dictionary to tell him. I stood up and motioned to the women that they could have the petrol tins and the cases. I was damned if I could not have anything to do with them if I would let Garrick make any passes.

‘Get in the car,’ I told him. ‘No,’ as he started to make delivery of one of the petrol tins, ‘in the car.’ He went over to the car.

We were all packed now and ready to go. The horns were curling out the back of the car, tied on to the loads. I left some money for the Roman and one of the kudu hides with the boy. Then we got in the car. I got in the front seat with the Wanderobo-Masai. Behind were M’Cola, Garrick, and the runner, who was a man from the old man’s village by the road. The old man was crouched on top of the loads at the back, close under the roof.

We waved and started, passing more of the Roman’s household, the older and uglier part, roasting up piles of meat by a log fire beside the trail that came up from the river through the maize field. We made the crossing all right, the creek was down and the banks had dried and I looked back at the field, the Roman’s huts, and the stockade where we had camped, and the blue hills, dark under the heavy sky, and I felt very badly not to have seen the Roman and explain why we had gone off like this.

Then we were going through the woods, following our trail and trying to make time to get out before dark. We had trouble, twice, at boggy places and Garrick seemed to be in a state of great hysteria, ordering people about when we were cutting brush and shovelling, until I was certain I would have to hit him. He called for corporal punishment the way a showing-off child does for a spanking. Kamau and M’Cola were both laughing at him. He was playing the victorious leader home from the chase now. I thought it was really a shame that he could not have his ostrich plumes.

Once when we were stuck and I was shovelling and he was stooping over in a frenzy of advice and command-giving, I brought the handle of the shovel, with manifest un-intention, up hard into his belly and he sat down, backwards. I never looked toward him, and M’Cola, Kamau, and I could not look at each other for fear we would laugh.

‘I am hurt,’ he said in astonishment, getting to his feet.

‘Never get near a man shovelling,’ I said in English. ‘Damned dangerous.’

‘I am hurt,’ said Garrick holding his belly.

‘Rub it,’ I told him and rubbed mine to show him how. We all got into the car again and I began to feel sorry for the poor, bloody, useless, theatrical bastard, so I told M’Cola I would drink a bottle of beer. He got one out from under the loads in the back, we were going through the deer-park-looking country now, opened it, and I drank it slowly. I looked around and saw Garrick was all right now, letting his mouth run freely again. He rubbed his belly and seemed to be telling them what a hell of a man he was and how he had never felt it. I could feel the old man watching me from up under the roof as I drank the beer.

‘Old man,’ I said.

‘Yes, B’wana.’

‘A present,’ and I handed what was left in the bottle back. There wasn’t much left but the foam and a very little beer.

‘Beer?’ asked M’Cola.

‘By God, yes,’ I said. I was thinking about beer and in my mind was back to that year in the spring when we walked on the mountain road to the Bains de Alliez and the beer-drinking contest where we failed to win the calf and came home that night around the mountain with the moonlight on the fields of narcissi that grew on the meadows, and how we were drunk and talked about how you would describe that light on that paleness, and the brown beer sitting at the wood tables under the wistaria vine at Aigle when we came in across the Rhone Valley from fishing the Stockalper with the horse chestnut trees in bloom, and Chink and I again discussing writing and whether you could call them waxen candelabras. God, what bloody literary discussions we had; we were literary as hell then just after the war, and later there was the good beer at Lipp’s at midnight after Mascart-Ledoux at the Cirque de Paris or Routis-Ledoux, or after any other great fight where you lost your voice and were still too excited to turn in; but beer was mostly those years just after the war with Chink and in the mountains. Flags for the Fusilier, crags for the Mountaineer, for English poets beer, strong beer for me. That was Chink then, quoting Robert Graves, then. We outgrew some countries and we went to others but beer was still a bloody marvel. The old man knew it too. I had seen it in his eye the first time he saw me take a drink.

‘Beer,’ said M’Cola. He had it open, and I looked out at that park-like country, the engine hot under my boots, the Wanderobo-Masai as strong as ever beside me, Kamau watching the grooves of the tyre tracks in the green turf, and I hung my booted legs over the side to let my feet cool and drank the beer and wished old Chink was along. Captain Eric Edward Dorman-Smith, M.C., of His Majesty’s Fifth Fusiliers. Now if he were here we could discuss how to describe this deer-park country and whether deer-park was enough to call it. Pop and Chink were much alike. Pop was older and more tolerant for his years and the same sort of company. I was learning under Pop, while Chink and I had discovered a big part of the world together and then our ways had gone a long way apart.

But that damned sable bull. I should have killed him; but it was a running shot. To hit him at all I had to use him all as a target. Yes, you bastard, but what about the cow you missed twice, prone, standing broadside? Was that a running shot? No. If I’d gone to bed last night I would not have done that. Or if I’d wiped out the bore to get the oil out she would not have thrown high the first time. Then I would not have pulled down and shot under her the second shot. Every damned thing is your own fault if you’re any good. I thought I could shoot a shot-gun better than I could and I had lost plenty of money backing my opinion, but I knew, coldly, and outside myself, that I could shoot a rifle on game as well as any son of a bitch that ever lived. Like hell I could. So what? So I gut-shot a sable bull and let him get away. Could I shoot as well as I thought I could? Sure. Then why did I miss on that cow? Hell, everybody is off sometime. You’ve got no bloody business to be off. Who the hell are you? My conscience? Listen, I’m all right with my conscience. I know just what kind of a son of a bitch I am and I know what I can do well. If I hadn’t had to leave and pull out I would have got a sable bull. You know the Roman was a hunter. There was another herd. Why did I have to make a one-night stand? Was that any way to hunt? Hell, no. I’d make some money some way and when we came back we would come to the old man’s village in lorries, then pack in with porters so there wouldn’t be any damned car to worry about, send the porters back, and make a camp in the timber up the stream above the Roman’s and hunt that country slowly, living there and hunting out each day, sometimes laying off and writing for a week, or writing half the day, or every other day, and get to know it as I knew the country around the lake where we were brought up. I’d see the buffalo feeding where they lived, and when the elephants came through the hills we would see them and watch them breaking branches and not have to shoot, and I would lie in the fallen leaves and watch the kudu feed out and never fire a shot unless I saw a better head than this one in the back, and instead of trailing that sable bull, gut-shot to hell, all day, I’d lie behind a rock and watch them on the hillside and see them long enough so they belonged to me for ever. Sure, if Garrick didn’t take his B’wana Simba car in there and shoot the country out. But if he did I’d go on down beyond those hills and there would be another country where a man could live and hunt if he had time to live and hunt. They’d gone in wherever a car could go. But there must be pockets like this all over, that no one knows of, that the cars pass all along the road. They all hunt the same places.

‘Beer?’ asked M’Cola.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Sure, you couldn’t make a living. Everyone had explained that. The locusts came and ate your crops and the monsoon failed, and the rains did not come, and everything dried up and died. There were ticks and fly to kill the stock, and the mosquitoes gave you fever and maybe you got blackwater. Your cattle would die and you would get no price for your coffee. It took an Indian to make money from sisal and on the coast every coconut plantation meant a man ruined by the idea of making money from copra. A white hunter worked three months out of the year and drank for twelve and the Government was ruining the country for the benefit of the Hindu and the natives. That was what they told you. Sure. But I did not want to make money. All I wanted was to live in it and have time to hunt. Already I had had one of the diseases and had experienced the necessity of washing a three-inch bit of my large intestine with soap and water and tucking it back where it belonged an unnumbered amount of times a day. There were remedies which cured this and it was well worth going through for what I had seen and where I had been. Besides I caught that on the dirty boat out from Marseilles. P.O.M. hadn’t been ill a day. Neither had Karl. I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go. Then, in my grandfather’s time, Michigan was a malaria ridden state. They called it fever and ague. And in Tortugas, where I’d spent months, a thousand men once died of yellow fever. New continents and islands try to frighten you with disease as a snake hisses. The snake may be poisonous too. You kill them off. Hell, what I had a month ago would have killed me in the old days before they invented the remedies. Maybe it would and maybe I would have got well.

It is easier to keep well in a good country by taking simple precautions than to pretend that a country which is finished is still good.

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out, and next it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited. A country wears out quickly unless man puts back in it all his residue and that of all his beasts. When he quits using beasts and uses machines the earth defeats him quickly. The machine can’t reproduce, nor does it fertilize the soil, and it eats what he cannot raise. A country was made to be as we found it. We are the intruders and after we are dead we may have ruined it but it will still be there and we don’t know what the next changes are. I suppose they all end up like Mongolia.

I would come back to Africa but not to make a living from it. I could do that with two pencils and a few hundred sheets of the cheapest paper. But I would come back to where it pleased me to live; to really live. Not just to let my life pass. Our people went to America because that was the place to go then. It had been a good country and we had made a mess of it and I would go, now, somewhere else as we had always had the right to go somewhere else and as we had always gone. You could always come back. Let the others come to America who did not know that they had come too late. Our people had seen it at its best and fought for it when it was well worth fighting for. Now I would go somewhere else. We always went in the old days and there were still good places to go.

I knew a good country when I saw one. Here there was game, plenty of birds, and I liked the natives. Here I could shoot and fish. That, and writing, and reading, and seeing pictures was all I cared about doing. And I could remember all the pictures. Other things I liked to watch but they were what I liked to do. That and ski-ing. But my legs were bad now and it was not worth the time you spent hunting good snow any more. You saw too many people ski-ing now.

Now, the car making a turn around a bank and crossing a green, grassy field, we came in sight of the Masai village.

When the Masai saw us they started running and we stopped, surrounded by them, just below the stockade. There were the young warriors who had run with us, and now their women and the children all came out to see us. The children were all quite young and the men and women all seemed the same age. There were no old people. They all seemed to be our great friends and we gave a very successful party with refreshments in the shape of our bread which they all ate with much laughing, the men first, then the women. Then I had M’Cola open the two cans of mincemeat and the plum pudding and I cut these into rations and passed them out. I had heard and read that the Masai subsisted only on the blood of their cattle mixed with milk, drawing the blood off from a wound in a vein of the neck made by shooting an arrow at close range. These Masai, however, ate bread, cold mincemeat, and plum pudding with great relish and much laughter and joking. One very tall and handsome one kept asking me something that I did not understand and then five or six more joined in. Whatever this was they wanted it very badly. Finally the tallest one made a very strange face and emitted a sound like a dying pig. I understood finally: he was asking if we had one of those, and I pressed the button of the klaxon. The children ran screaming, the warriors laughed and laughed, and then as Kamau, in response to popular demand, pressed the klaxon again and again, I watched the look of utter rapture and ecstasy on the women’s faces and knew that with that klaxon he could have had any woman in the tribe.

Finally we had to go and after distributing the empty beer bottles, the labels from the bottles, and finally the bottle caps, picked up by M’Cola from the floor, we left, klaxoning the women into ecstasy, the children into panic, and the warriors into delight. The warriors ran with us for a good way but we had to make time, the going was good through the park-like country and, in a little while, we waved to the last of them standing straight and tall, in their brown skin garments, their clubbed pig-tails hanging, their faces stained a red-brown, leaning on their spears, looking after us and smiling.

The sun was almost down and as I did not know the road I had the runner get up in front to sit with the Wanderobo-Masai and help direct Kamau and I sat in the back with M’Cola and Garrick. We were out of the park country and on to the dry bush-spattered plain before the sun went down and I had another bottle of the German beer and, watching the country, saw, suddenly, that all the trees were full of white storks. I did not know whether they were there in migration or were following the locusts but, in the twilight, they were lovely to see and, deeply moved by them, I gave the old man a good two fingers of beer that was left in the bottom of the bottle.

On the next bottle I forgot and drank it all before I remembered the old man. (There were still storks in the trees and we saw some Grant’s gazelles feeding off to the right. A jackal, like a grey fox, trotted across the road.) So I told M’Cola to open another bottle and we were through the plain and climbing the long slope toward the road and the village, the two mountains in sight now, and it almost dark and quite cold when I handed the bottle to the old man, who took it where he was crouched up under the roof, and nursed it tenderly.

At the village we stopped in the road in the dark, and I paid the runner the amount it said to give him in the note he had brought. I paid the old man the amount Pop said to pay him and a bonus. Then there was a big dispute among them all. Garrick was to go to the main camp to get his money. Abdullah insisted upon going along. He did not trust Garrick. The Wanderobo-Masai insisted pitifully that he go. He was sure the others would cheat him out of his share and I was fairly sure they would, too. There was petrol that had been left for us to use in case we were short and for us to bring in any event. We were overloaded and I did not know how the road was ahead. But I thought we might carry Abdullah and Garrick and squeeze in the Wanderobo-Masai. There was no question of the old man going. He had been paid off and had agreed to the amount, but now he would not leave the car. He crouched on top of the load and hung on to the ropes saying, ‘I am going with B’wana’.

M’Cola and Kamau had to break his handholds and pull him off to re-load, him shouting, ‘I want to go with B’wana!’

While they were loading in the dark he held on to my arm and talked very quietly in a language that I could not understand.

‘You have the shillings,’ I said.

‘Yes, B’wana,’ he said. That was not what it was about. The money was all right.

Then, when we started to get in the car he broke away and started to climb up through the back and on to the loads. Garrick and Abdullah pulled him down.

‘You can’t go. There isn’t room.’

He talked to me softly again, begging and pleading.

‘No, there is no room.’

I remembered I had a small penknife and I got it out of my pocket and put it in his hand. He pushed it back in my hand.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

He was quiet then and stood by the road. But when we started, he started to run after the car and I could hear him in the dark screaming, ‘B’wana! I want to go with B’wana!’

We went on up the road, the headlights making it seem like a boulevard after where we had been. We drove fifty-five miles on that road in the dark night without incident. I stayed awake until after we were through the bad part, a long plain of deeply rutted black cotton where the headlights picked out the trail through bushes and then, when the road was better, I went to sleep, waking occasionally to see the headlights shining on a wall of tall trees, or a naked bank, or when we ground in low gear up a steep place, the light slanting up ahead.

Finally, when the speedometer showed fifty miles, we stopped and woke a native in his hut and M’Cola asked about the camp. I slept again and then woke as we were turning off the road and on a track through trees with the fires of the camp showing ahead. Then as we came to where our lights shone on the green tents I shouted and we all commenced to shout and blew the klaxon and I let the gun off, the flame cutting up into the dark and it making a great noise. Then we were stopped and out from Pop’s tent I saw him coming, thick and heavy in his dressing-gown, and then he had his arms around my shoulders and said, ‘You god damned bull fighter’, and I was clapping him on the back.

And I said, ‘Look at them, Pop’.

‘I saw them,’ he said. ‘The whole back of the car’s full of them.’

Then I was holding P.O.M. tight, she feeling very small inside the quilted bigness of the dressing-gown, and we were saying things to each other.

Then Karl came out and I said, ‘Hi, Karl’.

‘I’m so damned glad,’ he said. ‘They’re marvellous.’

M’Cola had the horns down by now and he and Kamau were holding them so they could all see them in the light of the fire.

‘What did you get?’ I asked Karl.

‘Just another one of those. What do you call them? Tendalla.’

‘Swell,’ I said. I knew I had one no one could beat and I hoped he had a good one too. ‘How big was he?’

‘Oh, fifty-seven,’ Karl said.

‘Let’s see him,’ I said, cold in the pit of my stomach.

‘He’s over there,’ Pop said, and we went over. They were the biggest, widest, darkest, longest-curling, heaviest, most unbelievable pair of kudu horns in the world. Suddenly, poisoned with envy, I did not want to see mine again; never, never.

‘That’s great,’ I said, the words coming out as cheerfully as a croak. I tried it again. ‘That’s swell. How did you get him?’

‘There were three,’ Karl said. ‘They were all as big as that. I couldn’t tell which was the biggest. We had a hell of a time. I hit him four or five times.’

‘He’s a wonder,’ I said. I was getting so I could do it a little better but it would not fool anybody yet.

‘I’m awfully glad you got yours,’ Karl said. ‘They’re beauties. I want to hear all about them in the morning. I know you’re tired to-night. Good night.’

He went off, delicate as always, so we could talk about it if we wanted to.

‘Come on over and have a drink,’ I called.

‘No thanks, I think I better go to bed. I’ve got a sort of headache.’

‘Good night, Karl.’

‘Good night. Good night, Poor Old Mamma,’

‘Good night,’ we all said.

By the fire, with whisky and soda, we talked and I told them about it all.

‘Perhaps they’ll find the bull,’ Pop said. ‘We’ll offer a reward for the horns. Have them sent to the Game Department. How big is your biggest one?’

‘Fifty-two.’

‘Over the curve?’

‘Yes. Maybe he’s a little better.’

‘Inches don’t mean anything,’ Pop said. ‘They’re damned wonderful kudu.’

‘Sure. But why does he have to beat me so bloody badly?’

‘He’s got the luck,’ Pop said. ‘God, what a kudu. I’ve only seen one head killed over fifty in my life before. That was up on Kalal.’

‘We knew he had it when we left the other camp. The lorry came in and told us,’ P.O.M. said. ‘I’ve spent all my time praying for you. Ask Mr. J. P.’

‘You’ll never know what it meant to see that car come into the firelight with those damned horns sticking out,’ Pop said. ‘You old bastard.’

‘It’s wonderful,’ P.O.M. said. ‘Let’s go and look at them again.’

‘You can always remember how you shot them. That’s what you really get out of it,’ Pop said. ‘They’re damned wonderful kudu.’

But I was bitter and I was bitter all night long. In the morning, though, it was gone. It was all gone and I have never had it again.

Pop and I were up and looking at the heads before breakfast. It was a grey, overcast morning and cold. The rains were coming.

‘They’re three marvellous kudu,’ he said.

‘They look all right with the big one this morning,’ I said. They did, too, strangely enough. I had accepted the big one now and was happy to see him and that Karl had him. When you put them side by side they looked all right. They really did. They all were big.

‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ Pop said. ‘I’m feeling better myself.’

‘I’m really glad he has him,’ I said truly. ‘Mine’ll hold me.’

‘We have very primitive emotions,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible not to be competitive. Spoils everything, though.’

‘I’m all through with that,’ I said. ‘I’m all right again. I had quite a trip, you know.’

‘Did you not,’ said Pop.

‘Pop, what does it mean when they shake hands and get hold of your thumb and pull it?’

‘It’s on the order of blood brotherhood but a little less formal. Who’s been doing that to you?’

‘Everybody but Kamau.’

‘You’re getting to be a hell of a fellow,’ Pop said. ‘You must be an old timer out here. Tell me, are you much of a tracker and bird shot?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘M’Cola has been doing that with you too?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, well,’ said Pop. ‘Let’s get the little Memsahib and have some breakfast. Not that I’m feeling up to it.’

‘I am,’ I said. ‘I haven’t eaten anything since day before yesterday.’

‘Drank some beer though, didn’t you?’

‘Ah, yes.’

‘Beer’s a food,’ Pop said.

We got the little Memsahib and old Karl and had a very jolly breakfast.

A month later P.O.M., Karl, and Karl’s wife who had come out and joined us at Haifa, were sitting in the sun against a stone wall by the Sea of Galilee eating some lunch and drinking a bottle of wine and watching the grebes out on the lake. The hills made shadows on the water, which was flat calm and rather stagnant looking. There were many grebes, making spreading wakes in the water as they swam, and I was counting them and wondering why they never were mentioned in the Bible. I decided that those people were not naturalists.

‘I’m not going to walk on it,’ Karl said, looking out at the dreary lake. ‘It’s been done already.’

‘You know,’ P.O.M. said, ‘I can’t remember it. I can’t remember Mr. J. P.’s face. And he’s beautiful. I think about him and think about him and I can’t see him. It’s terrible. He isn’t the way he looks in a photograph. In a little while I won’t be able to remember him at all. Already I can’t see him.’

‘You must remember him,’ Karl said to her.

‘I can remember him,’ I said. ‘I’ll write you a piece some time and put him in.’

NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

CONTENTS

Articles for the Kansas City Star

Kerensky, The Fighting Flea

Battle of Raid Squads

At the End of the Ambulance Run

Throng at Smallpox Case

Laundry Car over Cliff

Six Men Become Tankers

Big Day for Navy Drive

Navy Desk Jobs to Go

Would ‘Treat ‘em Rough’

Recruits for the Tanks

Daredevil Joins Tanks

Mix War, Art and Dancing

Articles for the Toronto Star

Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris

Harington Won’t Demand Evacuation

Paris is Full of Russians

Tchitcherin Wants Japan Excluded

Italian Premier

Articles for the Kansas City Star

Kerensky, The Fighting Flea

December 16, 1917

Somehow, although he is the smallest office boy around the place, none of the other lads pick on him. Scuffling and fighting almost has ceased since Kerensky came to work. That’s only one of the nicknames of Leo Kobreen, and was assigned to him because of a considerable facial resemblance to the perpetually fleeing Russian statesman, and, too, because both wore quite formal standing collars.

In size, Leo is about right for spanking. But that never will happen to Leo. Although he is inches short of five feet, there is a bulkiness about his shoulders that gains respect even from those Cossacks of the business world, the messenger boys.

In fact, it was a messenger, coming in blusteringly, who first made it known that Leo possessed a reputation. Almost politely the cocky young fellow handed a yellow envelope to the office bantam.

“Why it’s Kid Williams,” he said, “Are you going to fight at the club Saturday night, Kid?”

“I should have known it,” the boss said, “Kerensky has all the characteristics of a prize fighter. After a short round of work doesn’t he retire to a corner and sit down?”

Then some of them remembered Kid Williams in preliminary bouts...One of those boys who scrap three rounds before the big fighters enter the ring. That’s Kerensky.

You may have thrown some loose change into the ring at the final gong. How you laughed to see the two bantams push each other about and scramble fiercely each to pick up the most. Sometimes they couldn’t wait to get their gloves off. All the fight fans roared at them trying to pick up thin dimes in their padded fists.

“That’s all hippodrome stuff,” Kerensky says. “The men like to see us quarrel over the money, but win or lose, we split it fifty-fifty. My half of the pickup runs form $1.50 to $2.50.”

The worst thing about the fight game, take it from Kerensky, is the smoke. He has even considered retiring from the ring because it is so upsetting to take a deep breath of tobacco fumes.

“But of course I haven’t quit,” he explains. “Right now if I knew some of the clubs downtown had a smoker on and they offered me $2, of course I’d get in and fight.”

How would Kerensky advise a young man to open a pugilistic career? Well, he just picked up his skill. For several years he sold papers, and you know how one thing leads to another. There is a newsboy rule that if one boy installs himself on a corner no other can sell there. A full grown man used to cry the headlines on a certain Grand Avenue crossing. Poachers bothered him.

“It wouldn’t look right for a big fellow to hit a little kid,” says Kerensky, “so he let me sell there, too, and sicked me on all the strange boys. I always ran them away. He liked me and called me Kid Williams, after the bantamweight champion.”

Kerensky’s last street fight was to a big gate. A newsboy of larger growth was the victim. They clinched and fell to the sidewalk. A crowd gathered, but the crossing patrolman turned his back till the battle was over. Then he came over and said: “Leo, I guess you’ll have to cut this out.”

After that, when Leo wanted to fight, somebody had to hire a hall. He began going into the gymnasiums to sell papers. There he watched the big men train for their Convention Hall bouts. Sometimes the proprietors would let him come in and work out beside Thorpe or Chavez for nothing. It costs the ordinary citizen a dime, Leo says, to get in and work at the pulleys and weights at times like these.

His opportunity came to go on in a newsboy bout at a smoker in Cutler’s gymnasium. The kid glows yet at the mention of that bout.

“It was the best fight of my career,” he says. “I went in mad, and gave the fans their money’s worth. But I was awful green, and was almost knocked out in the last round. Now I know how to study’em, and I don’t have to work as hard.”

After hard days in old Russia, the life is full of joy for Leo, and who can say that he is not making the most of his opportunities? When he talks of the past it is of a program. That Christmas season the workmen in a sugar refinery near Kiev made a cross of ice and set it up on the frozen river. It fell over and they blamed the Jews. Then the workmen rioted, breaking into stores and smashing windows. Leo and his family hid on the roof for three days, and his sister fell ill of pneumonia. One studies to change the subject and asks:

“Leo, do they ever match you with a bigger boy?”

“Oh no,” he says, “the crowd wouldn’t stand for that. But sometimes I catch one on the street.”

Battle of Raid Squads

January 6, 1918

John M. Tully and Albert Raithel, revenue officers from St. Louis, may die, and two city detectives narrowly escaped injury as a result of a revolver battle yesterday through a case of mistaken identity.

Tully and Raithel had gone to raid a house at 2743 Mercier street, reported to be a rendezvous for drug users. Edward Kritser and Paul Conrad, city detectives, arrived a few minutes later on the same mission. Each party of officers mistook the other for drug peddlers.

Tully was shot in the right leg, left arm and lower abdomen. Raithel was wounded in the abdomen and left wrist. Both will recover. The two detectives were uninjured, but both had bullet holes through their clothing.

The wounded men were taken to the General Hospital. Later they were removed to the Swedish Hospital.

While on the surface the shooting of the two government officers appeared to be a case of mistaken identity, elements of a mysterious nature which Francis M. Wilson, United States district attorney, refused to make public, crept into the case last night.

At 11 o’clock last night the district attorney took a statement from Tully. He said he could not disclose its contents. It was admitted by another government official there was “something back of the whole affair.”

It was said all of the evidence with regard to the shooting and developments leading to the affair will be placed before Hunt C. Moore, prosecutor. Senator Wilson said the government would co-operate with the prosecutor. The district attorney conferred two hours last night with Chief Flahive and John Halpin, police commissioner. At the close Senator Wilson said he felt certain the prosecuting attorney would do his duty in the case.

Tully gave this story of the shooting:

“Raithel and I received information that there was a nest of drug addicts at a house at 2743 Mercier Street. We secured a search warrant from S.O. Hargis, assistant United States district attorney, and went out. In the house was an old woman. We ques tioned her and could learn nothing, so left to watch the house and question a few of the neighbors. We were standing across the street when a motor car drove up and two men and a girl got out. One of the men carried a handbag. Raithel and I thought they were `dope heads.’ I w ent to the front door and Raithel to the rear. Inside the door I saw Bernie Lamar’s girl. She said, `Hello Jack.’ Then a man stepped out of the next room. I walked up to him and touched him on the shoulder, saying, `Hold on a minute, I’m an officer.’ Then he started shooting. He got me in the arm. I shot twice and then got out the door. I got across the street and fell in front of a house. Then the other man shot me again. I emptied my revolver and then staggered over to a garage acro ss the road.”

Raithel was operated on as soon as he was taken to the hospital and was unable to make a statement.

The two detectives told a different story. According to them the battle was the culmination of a feud between a gang of drug addicts and government agents.

About seven months ago Bernard Abe, a notorious police character, was sent to the Fort Leavenworth prison for drug peddling. John Tully had secured the evidence that convicted Aberer. His wife, Rose Aberer, alias Rose Fuqua, known as Rose Lamar, has been living here with a man named William “Irish” Rogers, also a drug addict and holder of a police record. When Tully arrested Aberer the government secured a large quantity of narcotics. Lately the federal officials here have been trailing Rose Fuqua, trying to locate the rest of the big supply of drugs which she was believed to have hidden. Two special agents were sent from the St. Louis office to aid in the work.

Friday night Rose Fuqua and Williams were shadowed to the Stratford Hotel, 616 East Eighth Street, where they registered as Mr. and Mrs. William Sullivan. Yesterday the revenue office obtained two detectives from police headquarters to aid in raiding the room at the Stratford. Kritser and Conrad were assigned. Rose, a man named Richard C. Adams, and Rogers were arrested in the room and a quantity of narcotics found. The woman confessed to the government agents that the missing drugs were hidden in her mother’s home at 2743 Mercier Street. The city detectives took her and Rodgers out to the address.

Conrad and Kritzer found a sack containing a quantity of heroin, morphine, opium and two complete “hop smoking” outfits hidden in the house. Conrad says he was talking to Rose Fuqua in the front room of the 5-room frame house when he heard a knock o n the door. A man entered. The woman said, “Hello, Jack, how are you?” Conrad said in a sworn statement.

“I concluded from the familiar way he spoke to her that he was a member of the gang,” the detective said. “The man turned to me and said `Who are you?’ reached for his revolver and reached for my shoulder. I drew my revolver and fired twice. He sho t at me three times. One bullet went through my coat, another grazed the side of my face. My shot struck him and he reeled out of the front door. Another man (Raithel) shot at me through the window. I fired three times and then went behind a door to reload my gun.

“I heard someone shooting in the rear of the house and saw Kritser shooting at a man across the street. I stepped around and exchanged shots with a man shooting from behind a grocery wagon. I thought we were fighting a gang of dope fiends and rushed to the next house on the north, firing as I went. Kritser and I both shot at a man firing across the street. The small man dropped. Someone yelled, `They’re government men.’ We stopped firing. Neither one of them said anything about being officers to me.”

Kritser’s story and that told by Rose Fuqua agreed with Conrad’s. Rose Fuqua and Rogers escaped in the fight, but later gave themselves up.

Buddie, a dog owned by Rogers, was shot in the leg and is being taken care of by a neighbor. Adams, Rogers, and Rose Fuqua are being held at police headquarters for investigation.

At the End of the Ambulance Run

January 20, 1918

The night ambulance attendants shuffled down the long, dark corridors at the General Hospital with an inert burden on the stretcher. They turned in at the receiving ward and lifted the unconscious man to the operating table. His hands were calloused and he was unkempt and ragged, a victim of a street brawl near the city market. No one knew who he was, but a receipt, bearing the name of George Anderson, for $10 paid on a home out in a little Nebraska town served to identify him.

The surgeon opened the swollen eyelids. The eyes were turned to the left. “A fracture on the left side of the skull,” he said to the attendants who stood about the table. “Well, George, you’re not going to finish paying for that home of yours.”

“George” merely lifted a hand as though groping for something. Attendants hurriedly caught hold of him to keep him from rolling from the table. But he scratched his face in a tired, resigned way that seemed almost ridiculous, and placed his hand ag ain at his side. Four hours later he died.

It was merely one of the many cases that come to the city dispensary from night to night — and from day to day for that matter; but the night shift, perhaps, has a wider range of the life and death tragedy — and even comedy, of the city. When “Geo rge” comes in on the soiled, bloody stretcher and the rags are stripped off and his naked, broken body lies on the white table in the glare of the surgeon’s light, and he dangles on a little thread of life, while the physicians struggle grimly, it is all in the night’s work, whether the thread snaps or whether it holds so that George can fight on and work and play.

Here comes another case. This time a small man limps in, supported by an ambulance man and a big policeman in uniform. “Yes, sir, we got a real robber this time — a real one — just look at him!” the big officer smiled. “He tried to hold up a dru g store, and the clerks slipped one over on him. It was a—”

“Yes, but they was three of ‘em, an’ they was shootin’ all at once,” the prisoner explained. Since there was no use in attempting to deny the attempted robbery, he felt justified in offering an alibi for his frustrated prowess. “It looks like I oug htta got one of ‘em, but then, maybe, I’ll do better next time.

“Say, you’d better hurry up and get these clothes off of me, before they get all bloody. I don’t want ‘em spoiled.” He was thoroughly defeated and dejected, and the red handkerchief he used for a mask still hung from his neck.

He rolled a cigarette, and as the attendants removed his clothes, a ball of lead rattled to the floor. “Whee! It went clear through, didn’t it? Say, I’ll be out before long, won’t I, doc?”

“Yes — out of the hospital,” the physician replied significantly.

Out on Twenty-seventh street a drug clerk — the one of the three who used the .38 — has a .38 bullet dangling from his watch chain.

* * * * *

One night they brought in a negro who had been cut with a razor. It is not a mere joke about negroes using the razor — they really do it. The lower end of the man’s heart had been cut away and there was not much hope for him.

Surgeons informed his relatives of the one chance that remained, and it was a very slim one. They took some stitches in his heart and the next day he had improved sufficiently to be seen by a police sergeant.

“It was just a friend of mine, boss,” the negro replied weakly to questioning. The sergeant threatened and cajoled, but the negro would not tell who cut him. “Well, just stay there and die, then,” the officer turned away exasperated.

But the negro did not die. He was out in a few weeks, and the police finally learned who his assailant was. He was found dead — his vitals opened by a razor.

“It’s razor wounds in the African belt and slugging in the wet block. In Little Italy they prefer the sawed-off shotgun. We can almost tell what part of the city a man is from just by seeing how they did him up,” one of the hospital attendants comme nted.

* * * * *

But it is not all violence and sudden death that comes to the attention of the emergency physicians. They attend the injuries and ills of charity patients. Here is a laborer who burned his foot one morning when he used too much kerosene in building the fire, and over there is a small boy brought in by his mother, who explains there is something the matter with his nose. An instrument is inserted into the nostril of the squirming youngster and is drawn forth. A grain of corn, just sprouted, dangles at the end of the steel.

One day an aged printer, his hand swollen from blood poisoning, came in. Lead from the type metal had entered a small scratch. The surgeon told him they would have to amputate his left thumb.

“Why, doc? You don’t mean it do you? Why, that’d be worsen sawing the periscope off of a submarine! I’ve just gotta have that thumb. I’m an old-time swift. I could set my six galleys a day in my time — that was before the linotypes came in. Even now , they need my business, for some of the finest work is done by hand.

And you go and take that finger away from me and — well, it’d mighty interesting to know how I’d ever hold a `stick’ in my hand again. Why, doc!—”

With face drawn, and heard bowed, he limped out the doorway. The French artist who vowed to commit suicide if he lost his right hand in battle, might have understood the struggle the old man had alone in the darkness. Later that night the printer retu rned. He was very drunk.

“Just take the damn works, doc, take the whole damn works,” he wept.

* * * * *

At one time a man from out in Kansas, a fairly likable and respectable sort of man to look at him, went on a little debauch when he came to Kansas City. It was just a little incident that the folks in the home town would never learn about. The ambulance b rought him from a wine room, dead from a stroke of heart disease. At another time (it happens quite often) a young girl took poison. The physicians who saved her life seldom speak of the case. It she had died her story might have been told — but she has to live.

And so the work goes on. For one man it means a clean bed and prescriptions with whisky in it, possibly, and for another, it is a place in the potters’ field. The skill of the surgeon is exercised just the same, no matter what the cause of the injury or t he deserts of the patient.

* *

The telephone bell is ringing again. “Yes, this the receiving ward,” says the desk attendant. “No. 4 Police Station, you say? A shooting scrape? All right they’ll be right over.” And the big car speeds down the Cherry Street hill, the headlights borin g a yellow funnel into the darkness.

Throng at Smallpox Case

February 18, 1918

While the chauffeur and male nurse on the city ambulance devoted to the carrying of smallpox cases drove from the General Hospital to the municipal garage on the North Side today to have engine trouble “fixed” a man, his face and hands covered with smallpox pustules, lay in one of the entrances to the Union Station. One hour and fifteen minutes after having been given the call the chauffeur and nurse reported at the hospital with the man, G.T. Brewer, 926 West Forty-second St reet. The ambulance had been repaired.

Behind that vehicle was an ambulance from the Emergency Hospital, ordered to get the patient by Dr. James Tyree, in charge of contagious diseases, after repeated calls from the station.

Brewer, a life insurance agent, arrived from Cherryvale, Kas., this morning. At 9 o’clock James McManus, officer in charge of the police station at the depot, found him lying in the west entrance to the lobby. Streams of persons, hurrying past, eddied about Brewer while solicitous passersby asked the trouble. At 9:50 McManus placed a policeman near the sick man to keep persons away.

McManus says he called the contagious department of the hospital immediately after finding Brewer. An ambulance was promised. Two calls were sent the hospital later and each time, so McManus says, he was told the ambulance was on the way. Doctor Tyree once insisted McManus take the sick man into the police office there, but McManus refused, saying more persons would be exposed. Doctor Tyree also said the ambulance would be there “right away.”

When the ambulance did reach the station at 10:15, the driver explained it had been broken down while out on another call.

Doctor Tyree explained later that the regular sick ambulance, No. 90, was wrecked last night. When the call first was received at the receiving ward of the General Hospital at 9:05 o’clock ambulance No. 92, the smallpox carrier, was dispatched, he sa id.

“But the ambulance had motor trouble,” Doctor Tyree continued. “The chauffeur and the male nurse in charge decided to go to the municipal garage and get the trouble fixed.”

The garage, on the North Side, is about as far from the hospital as the distance from the hospital to the Union Station and return.

Doctor Tyree criticized the police for failure to remove Brewer to an isolated place instead of leaving him “where scores of travelers came in contact and were exposed to smallpox.”

Laundry Car over Cliff

March 6, 1918

Laundry strike sympathizers drove a Walker Laundry Company motor truck over Cliff Drive hill at Hardesty Avenue late this afternoon, after capturing the car and routing the driver and two special officers at Fourteenth Street and Euclid Avenue. One of the special officers fired a shot into the crowd before fleeing from the rain of bricks and stones. No one was injured.

Homer Maze, 5106 East Twenty-fourth Street, was driving the laundry truck. Guarding him were two special officers, Sam Seaman, 2700 East Twenty-seventh Street, and C.L. Winner, 717 East Eleventh Street.

Maze was making a delivery at Fourteenth street and Euclid Avenue when a crowd of about twenty-five man and women approached from the west and opened fire of rocks and stones on the standing car. Maze came from the house and made a run to join the sp ecial officers. After several minutes of fusillading stones, the officers and Maze deserted the car and reported the disturbance at the Flora Avenue Police Station. Seaman, one of the special officers, told of firing a shot toward the crowd, attempting to disperse the strike sympathizers. Re-enforcements joining the attacking party seemed to arrive steadily, they said, so they gave up the car to the crowd.

When the police arrived at the scene of the disturbance a part of the crowd was yet there. Six men and one woman were arrested. The men could not be identified by Maze or the special officers as having thrown stones. The woman, Julia Anderson, 1711 We st Prospect Place, was identified by them and was held on a $51 cash bond. She denies having thrown anything.

The truck was found after a search, but is practically demolished.

A second ``wrecking party was reported from Eleventh Street and Chestnut Avenue. B. L. Ferguson, 6424 Lee Street, driver of a Kansas City Laundry Company truck, and a special officer, Salvator Schira, 1911 Missouri Avenue, were attacked by fifteen men and twelve women. A stone thrown by one of the striking laundry workers struck Ferguson on the cheek, another on the right hand. His injuries are not severe.

Six Men Become Tankers

April 17, 1918

Six men were accepted today for the new tank corps by Lieut. Frank E. Cooter, who arrived from Washington yesterday to recruit men for the special service. The men were selected from a crowd of twenty that appeared at the army recruiting office at Twelfth Street and Grand Avenue today. Men of various occupations, from bookkeepers to motor operators, applied for service today. Those accepted are:

Elvin L. Loyd, 1711 Penn Street, a tractor driver.

Harold E. McEachron, Atlanta, Ga., a machinist.

Kenneth C. Dills, 3939 Agnes Avenue, stenographer.

Robert E. Watson, 1317 West Thirteenth Street, stenographer.

Albert F. Henne, 207 East Twelfth Street.

Lewis M. Dean, Chicago, Ill.

The men of the tank corps enlist in a dangerous branch of the service, but it is thrilling work and, like aviation, has long periods of rest and inactivity between the short, concentrated spells of action.

All the men taken were of draft age and were given a letter from Col. I.C. Welborn of the tank corps, authorizing any local board to immediately induct them into service.

A returned officer from the western front now training recruits at the national tank training camp at Gettysburg, Pa., tells the inside story of one of the land ships in action.

For several days the men prepare for the coming offensive. The tanks are brought up behind the first line trenches under cover of darkness and the crews crawl into the close, oily smelling steel shells. The machine gunners, artillerymen and engineers get into their cramped quarters, the commander crawls into his seat, the engines clatter and pound and the great steel monster clanks lumberingly forward. The commander is the brains and the eyes of the tank. He sits crouched close under the fore turret and has a view of the jumbled terrain of the battle field through a narrow slit. The engineer is the heart of the machine, for he changes the tank from a mere protection into a living, moving fighter.

The constant noise is the big thing in a tank attack. The Germans have no difficulty seeing the big machine as it wallows forward over the mud and a constant stream of machine gun bullets plays on the armour, seeking any crevice. The machine gun bullets do no harm except to cut the camouflage paint from the sides.

The tank lurches forward, climbs up, and then slides gently down like an otter on an ice slide. The guns are roaring inside and the machine guns making a steady typewriter clatter. Inside the tank the atmosphere becomes intolerable for want of fresh air and reeks with the smell of burnt oil, gas fumes, engine exhaust and gunpowder.

The crew inside work the guns while the constant clatter of bullets on the armour sounds like rain on a tin roof. Shells are bursting close to the tank, and a direct hit rocks the monster. But the tank hesitates only a moment and lumbers on. Barb wire is crunched, trenches crossed and machine gun parapets smothered into the mud.

Then a whistle blows, the rear door of the tank is opened and the men, covered with grease, their faces black with the smoke of the guns, crowd out of the narrow opening to cheer as the brown waves of the infantry sweep past. Then its back to barracks and rest.

“We want fighters for the tank service,” said Lieutenant Cooter today. “Real men that want to see action. No mollycoddles need apply.” Men from 18 to 40 years old are being enlisted at the army recruiting station, Twelfth Street and Grand Avenue. Men of nearly all mechanical trades may enlist if they pass the personal inspection and mental test given by Lieutenant Cooter.

Big Day for Navy Drive

April 17, 1918

The second day of the naval drive for recruits for immediate duty took sixty-one men into the recruiting office at Eighth and Walnut streets. Thirty-eight were accepted, the largest number enlisted any day this year. Men enlist ed were of all ratings, seventeen seamen, five firemen, two radio men, two hospital apprentices, five carpenter’s mates and three painter’s mates.

Carpenters and painters are offered special inducements to enroll in the Naval Reserve under the new pay schedule. Both are enlisted in three classes, first, second and third class carpenter’s mates. Artisans must have at least three years’ experience in their trades before they may qualify for any of the ratings. A third class carpenter’s mate receives $41 a month, second class $46 and first class $52. Carpenters are given a separation allowance, clothing allowance, subsistence allowance and medical attention without extra charge.

Lieut. Ralph B. Campbell, in charge of the recruiting here, has compiled figures to show a third class carpenter, the lowest paid rating, receives the equivalent of $150 a month. Reservists now are being sent to the Great Lakes Training Station as fas t as they are enlisted. Fifty left last night. Radio reserve men are under command of Commandant Moffett of Great Lakes and are being called alphabetically. The letter S was reached in the call today.

Navy Desk Jobs to Go

April 18, 1918

There will be no more desk warriors of draft age in the naval reserve as soon as an order issued by the bureau of navigation this morning goes into effect. By the order, all naval reservists of draft age who have had six months’ training are at once ordered to sea duty unless they are physically disqualified. Reservists on recruiting duty, holding publicity jobs, doing any inland work, must leave at once for sea service.

Eight men will be lost from the naval recruiting station at Eighth and Walnut streets by the new order, Lieut. Ralph Campbell, head of naval recruiting here, said today.

Marguerite Clark, motion picture idol, who recently enrolled as a yeowoman in the naval reserve, will not be affected by the order, Lieutenant Campbell said, as it has not yet been extended to women.

The Great Lakes station has been called on to furnish a quota of six men a week to be sent to the engineer officers’ section of the officers’ material school at Pelham Bay Park, N.Y. Men enrolling in the reserve now will have a chance to qualify for the technical instruction at Pelham Bay. Men completing the course are commissioned ensigns and made junior deck officers.

Men now taking a course in technical school may enroll in the reserve to be sent to the Pelham Bay school on the completion of their college work. Eight students from the Kansas State Agricultural College arrived here today to enroll in the reserve for officers material. Four are in the junior class and four in the senior.

The seniors will go to the school on graduation. The juniors will be given a chance to qualify at this summer vacation.

Would ‘Treat ‘em Rough’

April 18, 1918

Four men stood outside the army recruiting office at Twelfth Street and Grand Avenue at 7:45 o’clock this morning when the sergeant opened up. A stout, red faced man wearing a khaki shirt was the first up the stairs.

“I’m the treat ‘em rough man,” he bawled. “That cat in the poster has nothing on me. Where do you join the tankers?”

“Have to wait for Lieutenant Cooter,” said the sergeant. “He decides whether you’ll treat ‘em rough or not.”

The fat man waited outside the door. By 9 o’clock thirty men crowded the third floor hallway. The stout man was nearest the door. Just behind him was a gray haired man wearing a derby, a well cut gray suit, a purple tie, socks to match and a silk handkerchief with a light purple border peeping from his vest pocket.

“I’m over draft age and it doesn’t matter what my profession is,” he said. “I never really wanted to get into this war before, but the tanks are different. I guess I can treat ‘em rough.”

The crowd grew steadily. By 10 o’clock there were forty applicants. Some of the men were humming, others talking among themselves. The stout man, perspiration pouring down his face, held his place next the door. He tried to whistle, but his lips woul dn’t pucker. He stood on one foot, then the other. He mopped his face with a handkerchief, and finally bolted out through the crowd.

“He looked pretty hot but he got cold feet,” a mechanic in overalls commented.

After the fat man left there was a slight exodus. A high school boy with a geometry book decided in favor of school. Two flashily dressed youths said, “Aw, let’s get a beer.” One man, saying nothing, slipped away.

Can’t stand the gaff,” said the mechanic.

But most of the applicants stayed. A youth wearing an army shirt explained: “It’s my girl. I belonged to the home guards and she kind of kidded me. Nobody’s going to kid a tanker, I guess.”

The opinion of most of the men was voiced by a clerk. “I don’t know anything about tractors or machinery, but I can learn to work a machine gun and I want to get across. Gee, I hope I get in.”

A little man with double lens glasses said: “I don’t suppose they’ll take me. Guess I’m pretty useless. But I want to try. It’s about my last chance. They all throw me down.” When Lieut. Frank E. Cooter, special tank recruiting officer, appeared, the crowd formed a line outside the door. The men were admitted one at a time. Moistening their lips, they entered the little room and stated their qualifications.

John R. Ecklund, 27 years old, was one of the first admitted. “What mechanical experience have you had?” he was asked. “None. I’m an attorney for the Kansas City Street Railways Company,” he replied.

“Why do you want to join?”

“I want to see action and get over in a hurry.”

Lieutenant Cooter accepted him.

“That is the type of all of them,” the lieutenant said. “That is what brings men here. Not promises of high pay or easy service, but telling the truth about quick action and danger. `To know and yet to dare,’ would be a good slogan. Quick service, quick promotion and action, action, is what brings them. They are the finest type of men for soldiers.”

Besides Ecklund six other men were accepted for service up to noon.

Recruits for the Tanks

April 18, 1918

A line of men wound from the front room of the third floor of the Army recruiting station, Twelfth and Grand Avenue, through the hall and half way downstairs. Some of the men were jostling and laughing, others looked sober and looked thoughtfully at the posters on the wall. Mechanics in overalls, bookkeepers, stenographers, school teachers who would have difficulty with the physical examination, and athletic college students, all were in line.

The head of the line stopped at the door of a room where a freckled faced young second lieutenant sat at a desk. He nodded, a man was admitted, asked a few questions, sized up by the lieutenant and then either told he was not wanted or given a card to sign.

“It’s the spirit of adventure which brings them up here,” said Lieut. Frank E. Cooter, of the Tank Corps, the latest branch of the United States Army. “Every man in line there is a potential crusader. They may not have realized it until today. Then they came up to enlist. We do not offer anything easy. The tank corps is no place for those that want noncombatant jobs and desk soldiers needn’t apply. But we guarantee quick action, active service, a good chance for a commission and adventure. The tank work is dangerous, of course, but men will always apply for clean, dangerous work with a chance for quick advancement.”

More than fifty men applied at the recruiting office yesterday and Lieutenant Cooter recommended the enlistment of eighteen. Men of mechanical skill are wanted especially but an order from Col. I.C. Welborn, of the tank corps authorized Lieutenant Cooter to accept any men “qualified by soldierly qualities.”

Arthur McKnight and Albert Findley, Kansas City newspapermen, enlisted in the new service yesterday. The other men enlisted ranged in occupation from truck drivers to school teachers. Letters and telegrams of application were received from all over the Middle West yesterday.

Daredevil Joins Tanks

April 21, 1918

“Have you ever had any gas engine experience?” asked Lieut. Frank E. Cooter, special tank officer at the army recruiting station, Twelfth Street and Grand Avenue, yesterday.

“Well, you might call it that,” replied William A. Whitman, 914 East Ninth Street. “I’ve driven a Blitzen-Benz at the Chicago, New York, Cincinnati and Los Angeles speedways for the last four years. You might call my race with Ralph Mulford at Reno a gas engine experience. Or the time the old boat got up to 111 miles an hour at the Sheepshead Bay track, or when Bob Burman was killed on the big board oval and I piled up right behind him. Those were gas engine experiences.”

“But have you had any military experience?” asked Lieutenant Cooter.

“Well, not regular military. I held a lieutenant’s commission in the Nicaraugan army in the war against Honduras in 1909. I was also a machine gun captain with Madero when he put Diaz out. First American to get into Juarez. Ask Pancho Villa, he knows . But none of those were very military. I had a commission in a couple of Central American revolutions, too. Nothing very military there, either.”

Lieutenant Cooter shoved a blank toward him. “Sign on the dotted line, man,” he said. “You’re too good to be true!”

“Well, I haven’t raced since September at Sheepshead Bay, and I may be a little out of practice, but you don’t have to go so fast in a tank. Besides, I’ve got a little difficulty with my teeth. But I sure want to sign for the tanks.”

Lieutenant Cooter has wired Washington requesting waivers as to the teeth.

Besides the regular quota of mechanics, barbers, motor car salesmen, bartenders and college students who applied yesterday, Maynard Bush, 38 years old, instructor in journalism at Polytechnic Junior College, made out an application. He will not be enlisted until next week, so he may arrange for a successor.

Letters were received from several Kansas University students who wish to enter. The Sigma Alpha Epsilon Chapter at Manhattan, Kas., wrote that several of its members wished to enlist. Telegrams and letters came throughout yesterday in regard to the t ank service.

One hundred and sixteen men were accepted by Lieutenant Cooter during the week for immediate service. Nineteen were taken yesterday.

Mix War, Art and Dancing

April 21, 191

Outside a woman walked along the wet street-lamp lit sidewalk through the sleet and snow.

Inside in the Fine Arts Institute on the sixth floor of the Y.W.C.A. Building, 1020 McGee Street, a merry crowd of soldiers from Camp Funston and Fort Leavenworth fox trotted and one-stepped with girls from the Fine Arts School while a sober faced you ng man pounded out the latest jazz music as he watched the moving figures. In a corner a private in the signal corps was discussing Whistler with a black haired girl who heartily agreed with him. The private had been a member of the art colony at Chicago before the war was declared.

Three men from Funston were wandering arm in arm along the wall looking at the exhibition of paintings by Kansas City artists. The piano player stopped. The dancers clapped and cheered and he swung into “The Long, Long Trail Awinding”. An infantry corporal, dancing with a swift moving girl in a red dress, bent his head close to hers and confided something about a girl in Chautauqua, Kas. In the corridor a group of girls surrounded a tow-headed young artilleryman and applauded his imitation of his p al Bill challenging the colonel, who had forgotten the password. The music stopped again and the solemn pianist rose from his stool and walked out into the hall for a drink.

A crowd of men rushed up to the girl in the red dress to plead for the next dance. Outside the woman walked along the wet lamp lit sidewalk.

It was the first dance for soldiers to be given under the auspices of the War Camp Community Service. Forty girls of the art school, chaperoned by Miss Winifred Sexton, secretary of the school and Mrs. J. F. Binnie were the hostesses. The idea was formulated by J. P. Robertson of the War Camp Community Service, and announcements were sent to the commandants at Camp Funston and Fort Leavenworth inviting all soldiers on leave. Posters made by the girl students were put up at Leavenworth on the interurb an trains.

The first dance will be followed by others at various clubs and schools throughout the city according to Mr. Robertson.

The pianist took his seat again and the soldiers made a dash for partners. In the intermission the soldiers drank to the girls in fruit punch. The girl in red, surrounded by a crowd of men in olive drab, seated herself at the piano, the men and the gi rls gathered around and sang until midnight. The elevator had stopped running and so the jolly crowd bunched down the six flights of stairs and rushed waiting motor cars. After the last car had gone, the woman walked along the wet sidewalk through the sle et and looked up at the dark windows of the sixth floor.

Articles for the Toronto Star

Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris

February 4, 1922 Paris.

 — Paris in the winter is rainy, cold, beautiful and cheap. It is also noisy, jostling, crowded and cheap. It is anything you want-and cheap.

The dollar, either Canadian or American, is the key to Paris. With the US dollar worth twelve and a half francs and the Canadian dollar quoted as something over eleven francs, it is a very effective key.

At the present rate of exchange, a Canadian with an income of one thousand dollars a year can live comfortably and enjoyably in Paris. If exchange were normal, the same Canadian would starve to death. Exchange is a wonderful thing.

Two of us are living in a comfortable hotel in the Rue Jacob, it is just back of the Academy of the Beaux Arts and a few minutes’ walk from the Tuileries. Our room costs twelve francs a day for two. It is clean, light, well heated, has hot and cold running water and a bathroom on the same floor. That makes a cost for rent of thirty dollars a month.

Breakfast costs us both two francs and ahalf. That totals seventy-five francs a month, or about six dollars and three or four cents. At the corner of the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue Jacob there is a splendid restaurant where the prices are a la carte. Soups cost sixty centimes, and a fish is 1.20 francs. The meals are roast beef, veal cutlet, lamb, mutton and thick steaks served with potatoes prepared as only the French can cook them. These cost 2.40 francs an order. Brussels sprouts in butter, creamed spinach, beans, sifted peas and cauliflower vary in pnrice from forty to eighty-five centimes. Salad is sixty centimes. Desserts are seventy-five centimes and sometimes as much as a franc. Red wine is sixty centimes a bottle and beer is forty centimes a glass.

My wife and I have an excellent meal there, equal in cooking and quality of food to the best restaurants in America, for fifty cents apiece. After dinner you can go anywhere on the subway for four cents in American money or take a bus to the farthest part of the city for the same amount. It sounds unbelievable but it is simply a case of prices not having advanced in proportion to the increased value of the dollar.

All of Paris is not so cheap, however, for the big hotels located around the Opera and the Madeline are more expensive than ever. We ran into two girls from New York the other day in the Luxembourg Gardens. All of us crossed on the same boat, and they had gone to one of the big, highly-advertised hotels. Their rooms were costing them sixty francs a day apiece, and other charges in proportion. For two days and three nights at their hotel, they received a bill for five hundred francs, or forty-two dollars. They are now located in a hotel on the left bank of the Seine, where five hundred francs will last two weeks instead of two days, and are as comfortable as they were at the tourist hotel.

It is from tourists who stop at the large hotels that the reports come that living in Paris is very high. The big hotelkeepers charge all they think the traffic can bear. But there are several hundred small hotels in all parts of Paris where an American or Canadian can live comfortably, eat at attractive restaurants and find amusement for a total expenditure of two and one half to three dollars a day.

Harington Won’t Demand Evacuation

October 2, 1922 Constantinople.

British general headquarters here today issued a denial of a report origiating in England that General Harington would demand the evacuation of the shores of the Dardanelles by Turkish troops within twenty-four hours. That question, it was stated, would be discussed at Mudania.

The Allied generals will leave for Mudania tonight. The are General Harington for Great Britain, General Sharpi for France and General Membelli for Italy.

Paris is Full of Russians

February 25, 1922 Paris.

Paris is full of Russians at present. The Russian ex-aristocracy are scattered all over Europe, running restaurants in Rome, tearooms on Capri, working as hotel porters in Nice and Marseilles and as laborers along the Mediterranean shipping centers. But those Russians who managed to bring some money or possessions with them seem to have flocked to Paris.

They are drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopefulness that things will somehow be all right, which is quite charming when you first encounter it and rather maddening after a few months. No one knows just how they live except it is by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that they brought with them to France when they fled before the revolution.

According to the manager of a great jewel house on the Rue de la Paix, pearls have come down in price because of the large numbers of beautiful pearls that have been sold to Parisian jewel buyers by the Russian refugees. It is true that many Russians are living fairly lavishly in Paris at present on the sale of jewels they have brought with them in their exile.

Just what the Russian colony in Paris will do when all the jewels are sold and all the valuables pawned is somewhat of a question. It is usually impossible for a large body of people to support themselves indefinitely by borrowing money, although a few people enjoy a great success at it for a time. Of course things may change in Russia, something wonderful might happen to aid the Russian colony. There is a cafe on the Boulevard Montparnasse where a great number of Russians gather every day for this something wonderful to happen and then, eventually, like all the rest of the world, the Russians of Paris may have to go to work. It seems a pity, they are such a charming lot.

Tchitcherin Wants Japan Excluded

April 11, 1922

Genoa. The economic conference is proceeding amicably after the stormy scene at the opening session between Louis Barthou of France and Tchitcherin, head of the Russian Soviet delegation.

Tchitcherin caused another diversion today when he protested against the presence of Japan and Rumania. Count Ishii of the Japanese delegation retorted that Japan was here to stay, whether Tchitcherin liked it or not.

The commission appointed to consider the question of Russia consists of seven great powers and Switzerland, Sweden, Poland and Rumania. Ten delegates are to be elected to represent the balance of the states, including Canada.

Italian Premier

April 10, 1922

Genoa. “The spirit of the Washington arms conference must inspire this gathering,” Premier Facta said in his opening address. “The cloud that hung over the Pacific already has disappeared as a result of the limitation of arms conference,” the Italian statesman declared amid applause. “We at Genoa must now work for the peace of Europe in the same way.”

The Autobiographies

Hemingway, 1950

HEMINGWAY, THE WILD YEARS

CONTENTS

WHEN TRUTH WAS MORE EXCITING THAN FICTION

Part One. MANNERS AND MORALS

TAKING A CHANCE FOR A FREE SHAVE

HOW TO BE POPULAR IN PEACE THOUGH A SLACKER IN WAR

LOTS OF WAR MEDALS FOR SALE BUT NOBODY WILL BUY THEM

THE MARK’S LAST STAND

SPORTING MAYOR

WEIRD, WILD ADVENTURES OF AMATEUR IMPOSTORS

GRAVEYARDS OF STYLE

OUR CONFIDENTIAL VACATION GUIDE

POACHDALE INN, ONTARIO.

BEAUTIFUL LAKE FLYBLOW.

SMILING LAKE WAH WAH.

BEAUTIFUL BOZO BEACH.

PICTURESQUE BUM VIEW.

ON WEDDYNGE GYFTES

Part Two. GANGSTERS AND PROHIBITION

CHICAGO GANG WAR

PLAIN AND FANCY KILLINGS, $400 UP

WAR BETWEEN BANK BUILDERS AND BANK BLOWERS

TWO-TEN

BOOKMAKERS AND BETTORS

SMUGGLING CANADIAN WHISKEY INTO THE U. S.

CHICAGO NEVER WETTER THAN IT IS TODAY

Part Three. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

AMERICAN BOHEMIANS IN PARIS A WEIRD LOT

SO THIS IS PARIS!

THE MYTH OF FRENCH POLITENESS

PARISIAN FASHIONS

PARISIAN HATS

THE PARIS-STRASBOURG SHUTTLE

FRENCH POLITICS

THE GREAT “APERITIF” SCANDAL

Part Four. IN DEFEATED GERMANY

GETTING INTO GERMANY QUITE A JOB

IN DEFEATED GERMANY

A FOREIGNER IN GERMANY

AT A GERMAN INN

AMATEUR STARVERS

RIOTS

THE GERMAN MARK — IN TROUBLE

EPISODE IN THE BLACK FOREST

THE GERMAN HATER

IT’S EASY TO SPEND A MILLION

Part Five. THE TROUBLED RUHR

THE COMMERCIAL WAR

A VICTORY WITHOUT PEACE

HATE IN OCCUPIED ZONE A REAL, CONCRETE THING

THE FRENCH PRESS

Part Six. EUROPEAN MISCELLANY

EUROPEAN NIGHT LIFE — A DISEASE

KING BUSINESS ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

TOURIST IN SWITZERLAND

PROFITEERS, SHEEP AND WOLVES

THE LUGE

HOW’D YOU LIKE TO TIP THE POSTMAN EVERY TIME?

OLD CONSTAN

Part Seven. TRAGEDY AT GENOA

JUST LIKE A TEA FIGHT

THE SOVIET DELEGATION

THE FATE OF PEACE

Part Eight. ITALY TURNS RIGHT

REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION

THE CLASS WAR

ITALY’S FASCISTS

Part Nine. POLITICS AND WAR IN THE ORIENT

CONSTANTINOPLE

THE MAN WITH HIS SHIRT TUCKED IN

RUSSIAN THREAT TO THE ORIENT

KEMAL

THE SILENT, GHASTLY PEOPLE

BETRAYAL, DEFEAT.. THEN REVOLT

AFGHAN POLITICS

Part Ten. MEN OF LAUSANNE

THE TURK GENERAL AND THE ITALIAN DICTATOR

THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER

Part Eleven. BULLFIGHTING

FIRST VISIT TO THE BULL RING

PAMPLONA: WORLD SERIES OF BULLFIGHTING

Part Twelve. OUTDOORS — AT HOME AND ABROAD

FIGHT WITH A 20-POUND TROUT

THE BEST RAINBOW TROUT FISHING IN THE WORLD

FISHING FOR TROUT IN A SPORTING WAY

TROUT FISHING ON THE CONTINENT

THERE ARE GREAT FISH IN THE RHONE CANAL

OFF THE SPANISH COAST — IT’S TUNA

HUNTING ON THE CONTINENT

CAMPING OUT

SKEETER DOPE

ALPINE AVALANCHES

WHEN TRUTH WAS MORE EXCITING THAN FICTION

Before Ernest Hemingway turned to writing fiction, he already had become one of the great reporters of our time.

Here — in the inimitable Hemingway style — is Paris at her most glorious... Italy and Germany in their darkest hours... the bloody birth pangs of new nations in the Near East... the explosive excitement of Pamplona and the stark drama of the bull ring... the virile pleasures of fishing and hunting in the American north woods... and much, much more.

Here it all is. All very fresh. All very good. All — HEMINGWAY

Part One. MANNERS AND MORALS

Toronto after the Great War was not much different from Atlanta or Denver. It had rejoiced in victory, mourned its dead, then turned to the problems of a postwar world. It was the same in Canada as in the United States. Peace had been bought with a promise. Tomorrow glittered. But the realities of today were flat.

Toronto had its recession, its inflation, its own housing shortage. And, always, there were the restless ranks of embittered ex-servicemen. They sunned themselves on the benches at Riverdale Zoo, strolled across the tailored greens of Exhibition Park. Their day was fast ending. The city on the north shore of Lake Ontario had begun to stir, breathing again after four years of war, and the plight of a handful of veterans gradually took on the vapidity of yesterday’s news.

It was today’s news which counted and, for the 400,000 citizens of Toronto, today’s news meant the Star. With a range of interests as broad as that of any newspaper in North America, the Toronto Star had in 1920 set its type to the pulse of the world. Expanding columns on corruption in Chicago and riots in Berlin crowded against date lines from Ottawa and Toronto.

On one day each week, Sunday, the Star became a ritual of reading for many hundreds of thousands. Known as the Toronto Star Weekly, it was an inch-thick edition priced at ten cents, and its reading time, front to back, was over five hours. The Weekly drew an audience extending far beyond me confines of Toronto; thousands of copies went to Montreal and Windsor, to Detroit, Buffalo and Chicago. Here was an omnibus of newsprint, fashioned with something for everyone. It was news and editorials and features, but most of all it was entertainment — comment, comics and criticism, and fiction and poetry. Hundreds of writers shaped that entertainment. Some belonged to the Star’s regular staff, many were free-lance, attracted by the paper’s insatiable demands for new and fresh material. Contributors included Americans as well as Canadians. Among these there was a small group of writers whose inexperience was offset by a vigor; of style and a glimmer of promise.

A young American not long out of the war became one of this group. His association with the Star began in the offices of the editor, James Cranston.

His name meant nothing to Cranston. Still he had had experience of sorts, and he had been well-recommended by an old friend. But steady jobs on a newspaper were few, and there were none for the novice. Still a bargain was struck. To Cranston writing meant production at the typewriter, a touch of talent, a heavy measure of sweat, nothing more or less. The editor told the young man he could write as he wished on topics of his own choosing. Pay, however, would be forthcoming only for articles accepted by the paper.

The American sent in his first work. Cranston bought it and the story was printed in the next Sunday edition. Later there were others, stories with a sting, a sharpness, that Cranston liked. The young man was versatile and capable. He could report, produce background pieces, even turn a hand at fiction. Sometimes his work would be carved with the sharp cutting edge of satire; sometimes with the clean, forceful blade of criticism. He worked well and he worked hard and his writings began to appear with increasing frequency in the pages of the Star Weekly.

This was in the first years of the nineteen twenties. These years saw a young writer coming of age. The pay was one-half cent a word and the by-line was Ernest Hemingway. His subject here is the manners and morals of an unforgettable era...

TAKING A CHANCE FOR A FREE SHAVE

The land of the free and the home of the brave is the modest phrase used by certain citizens of the republic to the south of us to designate the country they live in. They may be brave — but there is nothing free. Free lunch passed some time ago and on attempting to join the Free Masons you are informed that it will cost you seventy-five dollars.

The true home of the free and the brave is the barber college. Everything is free there. And you have to be brave. If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and haircuts go to the barber college, but take your courage with you.

For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don’t believe it, go to the beginners’ department of the barber’s college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did.

As you enter the building you come into a well-appointed barber shop on the main floor. This is where the students who will soon graduate work. Shaves cost five cents, haircuts fifteen.

“Next,” called one of the students. The others looked expectant.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m going upstairs.”

Upstairs is where the free work is done by the beginners.

A hush fell over the shop. The young barbers looked at one another significantly. One made an expressive gesture, with his forefinger across his throat.

“He’s going upstairs,” said a barber in a hushed voice.

“He’s going upstairs!” the others echoed him and looked at one another.

I went upstairs.

Upstairs there was a crowd of young fellows standing around in white jackets and a line of chairs ran down the wall. As I entered the room two or three went over and stood by their chairs. The others remained where they were.

“Come on, you fellows, here’s another one,” called one of the white coats by the chairs.

“Let those work that want to,” replied one of the group.

“You wouldn’t talk that way if you were paying for your course,” returned the industrious one.

“Shut up. The Government sends me here,” replied the non-worker and the group went on with their talking.

I seated myself in the chair attended by a red haired young fellow.

“Been here long?” I asked to keep from thinking about the ordeal.

“Not very,” he grinned.

“How long before you will go downstairs?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve been downstairs,” he said, lathering my face.

“Why did you come back up here?” said I.

“I had an accident,” he said, going on with the lathering.

Just then one of the non-workers came over and looked down at me.

“Say, do you want to have your throat cut?” he inquired pleasantly.

“No,” said I.

“Haw! Haw!” said the non-worker.

Just then I noticed that my barber had his left hand bandaged.

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“Darn near sliced my thumb off with the razor this morning,” he replied amiably.

The shave wasn’t so bad. Scientists say that hanging is really a very pleasant death. The pressure of the rope on the nerves and arteries of the neck produces a sort of anesthesia. It is waiting to be hanged that bothers a man.

According to the red haired barber there are sometimes as many as one hundred men on some days who come for free shaves.

“They are not all ‘bums’ either. A lot of them take a chance just to get something for nothing.”

Free barbering is not the only free service to be obtained in Toronto. The Royal College of Dental Surgeons does dental work for all who come to the college at Huron and College streets. The only charge made is for materials used.

Approximately one thousand patients are treated, according to Dr. F. S. Jarman, D.D.S., head of the examination department of the clinic. All the work is done by the senior students under the direction of dental specialists.

Teeth are extracted free if only a local anesthetic is used, but a charge of two dollars is made for gas. According to Dr. Jarman dentists in general practice charge three dollars to extract a single tooth. At the Dental College you can have twenty-five teeth extracted for two dollars! That should appeal to the bargain hunters.

Prophylaxis, or thorough cleaning of the teeth, is done at the college for from fifty cents to a dollar. In private practice this would cost from a dollar to ten dollars.

Teeth are filled if the patient defrays the cost of the gold. Usually from a dollar to two dollars. Bridge work is done under the same system.

No patients are refused at the Dental College. If they are unable to defray the cost of the materials used they are cared for just the same. The person who is willing to take a chance can surely save money on dentistry.

At Grace Hospital, across Huron street from the Dental College, there is a free dispensary for the needy poor that gives free medical attention to an average of 1,241 patients a month.

This service is only for the “needy” poor. Those of us who are poor and are not adjudged needy by the social service nurse in charge, have to pay for the medical service. According to the figures at the Grace Hospital, over half of the cases treated last month were of Jewish nationality. The others were a conglomeration of English, Scotch, Italian, Macedonian and people of unknown origin.

Free meals were formerly served at the Fred Victor Mission, Queen and Jarvis streets. But the authorities at the mission state that there is almost no demand now. Prohibition and the war solved the “bum” problem and where formerly there was a long queue of “down-and-outs” lined up to receive free meal tickets, there is now only an occasional supplicant.

If you wish to secure free board, free room, and free medical attention there is one infallible way of obtaining it. Walk up to the biggest policeman you can find and hit him in the face.

The length of your period of free board and room will depend on how Colonel Denison is feeling. And the amount of your free medical attention will depend on the size of the policeman.

HOW TO BE POPULAR IN PEACE THOUGH A SLACKER IN WAR

During the late friction with Germany a certain number of Torontonians of military age showed their desire to assist in the conduct of the war by emigrating to the States to give their all to laboring in munition plants. Having amassed large quantities of sheckels through their patriotic labor they now desire to return to Canada and gain fifteen per cent on their United States money.

Through a desire to aid these morally courageous souls who supplied the sinews of war we have prepared a few hints on “How to Be Popular Although a Slacker.”

It were wise, of course, for the returning munitioneer to come back to a different town than the one he left. Citizens of his own city might have misunderstood his motives in exposing himself to the dangers of the munition works.

The first difficulty to be surmounted will be the C.E.F. [Canadian Expeditionary Force] overseas badge. This is easily handled, however. If anyone asks you why you do not wear your button reply haughtily: “I do not care to advertise my military service!”

This reply will make the man who was out since Mons and is brazenly wearing his button feel very cheap.

When you are asked by a sweet young thing at a dance if you ever met Lieut. Smithers, of the R.A.F., in France or if you happened to run into Maj. MacSwear, of the C.M.R.’s, merely say “No,” in a distant tone. That will put her in her place, and, besides, it is all that any of us can say.

A good plan is to go to one of the stores handling secondhand army goods and purchase yourself a trench coat. A trench coat worn in wintertime is a better advertisement of military service than an M.C. [Military Cross]. If you cannot get a trench coat buy a pair of army shoes. They will convince everyone you meet on a street car that you have seen service.

The trench coat and the army issue shoes will admit you at once into that camaraderie of returned men which is the main result we obtained from the war. Your far-seeing judgment in going to the States is now vindicated, you have all the benefits of going to war and none of its drawbacks.

A very good plan would be to learn the tunes of “Mademoiselle from Armentieres” and “Madelon.” Whistle these religious ballads as you stand in the back platform of the street car and you will be recognized by all as a returned man. Unless you are of hardy temperament do not attempt to learn the words of either of those two old hymns.

Buy or borrow a good history of the war. Study it carefully and you will be able to talk intelligently on any part of the front. In fact, you will more than once be able to prove the average returned veteran a pinnacle of inaccuracy if not unveracity. The average soldier has a very abominable memory for names and dates. Take advantage of this. With a little conscientious study you should be able to prove to the man who was at first and second Ypres that he was not there at all. You, of course, are aided in this by the similarity of one day to another in the army. This has been nobly and fittingly expressed by the recruiting sergeant in these words: “Every day in the army is like Sunday on the farm.”

Now that you have firmly established by suggestion your status as an ex-army man and possible hero the rest is easy. Be modest and unassuming and you will have no trouble. If anyone at the office addresses you as “major” wave your hand, smile deprecatingly and say, “No; not quite major.”

After that you will be known to the office as captain.

Now you have service at the front, proven patriotism and a commission firmly established there is only one thing left to do. Go to your room alone some night. Take your bank book out of your desk and read it through. Put it back in your desk.

Stand in front of your mirror and look yourself in the eye and remember that there are fifty-six thousand Canadians dead in France and Flanders. Then turn out the light and go to bed.

LOTS OF WAR MEDALS FOR SALE BUT NOBODY WILL BUY THEM

What is the market price of valor?

In a medal and coin shop on Adelaide street the clerk said: “No, we don’t buy them. There isn’t any demand.”

“Do many men come in to sell medals?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. They come in every day. But we don’t buy medals from this war.”

“What do they bring in?”

“Victory medals mostly, 1914 stars, a good many M.M.’s, and once in a while a D.C.M. or an M.C. We tell them to go over to the pawnshops, where they can get their medal back if they get any money for it.”

So the reporter went up to Queen Street and walked west past the glittering windows of cheap rings, junk shops, two-bit barber shops, second-hand clothing stores, and street hawkers, in search of the valor mart.

Inside the pawnshop it was the same story.

“No, we don’t buy them,” a young man with shiny hair said from behind a counter of unredeemed pledges. “There is no market for them at all. Oh, yes. They come in here with all sorts. Yes, M.C.’s. And I had a man in here the other day with a D.S.O. I send them over to the secondhand stores on York street. They buy anything.”

“What would you give me for an M.C.?” asked the reporter.

“I’m sorry, Mac. We can’t handle it.”

Out on to Queen Street went the reporter, and into the first second-hand shop he encountered. On the window was a sign, “We Buy and Sell Everything.”

The opened door jangled a bell. A woman came in from the back of the shop. Around the counter were piled broken door bells, alarm clocks, rusty carpenters’ tools, old iron keys, kewpies, crap shooters’ dice, a broken guitar and other things.

“What do you want?” said the woman.

“Got any medals to sell?” the reporter asked.

“No. We don’t keep them things. What you want to do? Sell me things?”

“Sure,” said the reporter. “What’ll you give me for an M.C.?”

“What’s that?” asked the woman suspiciously, tucking her hands under her apron.

“It’s a medal,” said the reporter. “It’s a silver cross.”

“Real silver?” asked the woman.

“I guess so,” the reporter said.

“Don’t you know?” the woman said. “Ain’t you got it with you?”

“No,” answered the reporter.

“Well, you bring it in. If it’s real silver maybe I’ll make you a nice offer on it.” The woman smiled. “Say,” she said, “it ain’t one of them war medals, is it?”

“Sort of,” said the reporter.

“Don’t you bother with it, then. Them things are no good.”

In succession the reporter visited five more second-hand stores. None of them handled medals. No demand.

In one store the sign outside said, “We Buy and Sell Everything of Value. Highest Prices Paid.”

“What you want to sell?” snapped the bearded man back of the counter.

“Would you buy any war medals?” the reporter queried.

“Listen. Maybe those medals were all right in the war. I ain’t saying they weren’t, you understand? But with me business is business. Why should I buy something I can’t sell?”

The merchant was being very gentle and explanatory.

“What will you give me for that watch?” asked the reporter.

The merchant examined it carefully, opened the case and looked in the works. Turned it over in his hand and listened to it.

“It’s got a good tick,” suggested the reporter.

“That watch now,” said the heavily bearded merchant judicially, laying it down on the counter. “That watch, now, is worth maybe sixty cents.”

The reporter went on down York Street. There was a second-hand shop every door or so now. The reporter got, in succession, a price on his coat, another offer of seventy cents on his watch, and a handsome offer of 40 cents for his cigarette case. But no one wanted to either buy or sell medals.

“Every day they come in to sell those medals. You’re the first man ever ask me about buying them for years,” a junk dealer said.

Finally, in a dingy shop, the searcher found some medals for sale. The woman in charge brought them out from the cash till.

They were a 1914-15 star, a general service medal and a victory medal. All three were fresh and bright in the boxes they had arrived in. All bore the same name and number. They had belonged to a gunner in a Canadian battery.

The reporter examined them.

“How much are they?” he asked.

“I only sell the whole lot,” said the woman, defensively.

“What do you want for the lot?”

‘Three dollars.”

The reporter continued to examine the medals. They represented the honor and recognition his King had bestowed on a certain Canadian. The name of the Canadian was on the rim of each medal.

“Don’t worry about those names, Mister,” the woman urged. “You could easy take off the names. Those would make you good medals.”

“I’m not sure these are what I’m looking for,” the reporter said.

“You won’t make no mistake if you buy these medals, Mister,” urged the woman, fingering them. “You couldn’t want no better medals than them.”

“No. I don’t think they’re what I want,” the reporter demurred.

“Well, you make me an offer on them.”

“No.”

“Just make me an offer. Make me any offer you feel like.”

“Not today.”

“Make me any kind of an offer. Those are good medals, Mister. Look at them. Will you give me a dollar for all the lot?”

Outside the shop the reporter looked in the window. You could evidently sell a broken alarm clock. But you couldn’t sell an M.C.

You could dispose of a second-hand mouth-organ. But there was no market for a D.C.M.

You could sell your old military puttees. But you couldn’t find a buyer for a 1914 Star.

So the market price of valor remained undetermined.

THE MARK’S LAST STAND

“Now if any gentleman needs his quarter for a meal or a bed—”

The barker stood in a narrow alley opposite Osgoode Hall, Toronto. In front of him was a soap box with a few envelopes of foreign money.

In front of the soap box stood a crowd of out-of-workers, shifting from foot to foot in the mud and listening dulleyed to the spellbinder.

“As I say,” went on the barker, moistening his lips under his gray mustache, “if a gentleman has an immediate need for his quarter, I don’t want it. But if he is prepared to make an investment I am offering him the chance to make himself rich for life.

“Only a quarter, gentlemen. Just one Canadian quarter, and Russia is bound to come back. A quarter buys this 250,000 Soviet ruble note. Who’ll buy one?”

Nobody seemed on the point of buying. But they all listened to him perfectly seriously.

It was the Russian ruble, the Austrian kronen and German mark, not worth the paper they are printed on, making a last stand as serious money in Toronto’s Ward.

“In normal times this note I hold here is worth about $125,000. Suppose it goes up to where the ruble is worth only one cent. You will have $2,500. You can walk right into a bank and get $2,500 for this one note.”

One man’s eyes shone and he moistened his lips.

The barker lifted the little pink bit of worthless paper up and looked at it lovingly.

“And Russia is coming back, gentlemen. Every day her money gets more valuable. Don’t let anyone tell you Russia isn’t coming back. Once a country gets to be a republic she stays that way, gentlemen. Look at France. She’s been a republic a long time.”

A man in the front row in an old army coat nodded. Another man scratched his neck.

The barker drew out a big blue-green bill and laid it alongside the Russian ruble note.

No one explained to the listening men that the cheap looking Russian money had been printed in million-ruble denominations as fast as the presses could work in order to wipe out the value of the old imperial money and in consequence the money holding class. Now the Soviet has issued rubles backed by gold. None of these are in the hands of the barkers.

“To the first man that pays a quarter for this 250,000 ruble note I am going to give free this German mark note for 10,000 marks.”

The barker held both bills up for inspection.

“Don’t ever think that Germany is through. You saw in the paper this morning that Poincare is weakening. He’s weakening, and the mark will come back, too.”

He was Couéizing the crowd. A man pulled out a quarter.

“Gimme one.”

He took the two bills, folded them and put them in his inside coat pocket. He smiled as the spieler went on. He had a stake in Europe again.

The foreign news would never be dry to him now.

Four or five more men bought a half-million rubles for a quarter. The rubles are not even quoted on the exchange any more — yet they and the worthless German marks have been sold all over Canada as investments.

Then the money seller leaned over and picked up an envelope of thousand mark notes. They were the well printed prewar notes that were in common use in Germany until the exchange tumbled from 20,000 marks to the dollar this spring down the toboggan to the point where you can almost name the number of billions you want for a dollar and get them. None of these marks are worth any more than any others. Except as pieces of paper for wall papering or soap wrappers.

“These are special,” the money seller said. “I’m selling these at a dollar apiece. They used to be fifty cents. Now I’ve raised the price. Nobody has to buy them that doesn’t want them. They’re the real prewar marks.”

He fondled them. The real prewar marks.

Worth 15 cents a trillion before the New York banks refused to quote them any more last week.

“What makes them any better than those marks you gave away?” asked a gaunt man leaning against the wall in the alley. He was one of those who had invested a quarter in Europe and was jealous of this new mark being sprung on him.

“They’re all signed for in the treaty of Vairsails,” the barker said confidentially. “Every one of these is signed for in the peace treaty. Germany has thirty years to redeem them at par.”

The men standing in front of the soap box looked respectfully at the marks that were signed for in the treaty. They were obviously out of reach of investors. But it was something to be near them.

On the wall of the one-story shack that bounded the alley, the tall youth who smoked a pipe and stood in the background while the vendor of money talked had tacked a number of clippings and samples of foreign money.

The clippings were mostly about the economic comeback made by Soviet Russia and various other foreign despatches of an optimistic tone.

With his forefinger the money vendor traced out the story of a dollar loan to some Austrian bank.

“Now, who wants to buy 10,000 Austrian kronen for a dollar?” he asked the crowd, holding up one of the big purple bills of the old Hapsburg currency.

In the banks today the Austrian crown is worth.0014 1/4cents. In other words, about 14 cents for 10,000 kronen. At one dollar for 10,000 the men in the alley were invited to take a flyer in Austrian currency.

“Now, personally, I only keep enough Canadian money to pay my bills,” the spellbinder went on. “You can’t tell what is going to happen to Canadian money. Look at these different currencies today. A wise plan is to keep a little Russian money, a little German money, a little Austrian money, and a little British money.”

Most of the men looked as though even the smallest amount of Canadian money would be exceedingly welcome. But they listened on, and every lot offered, after the spellbinder had talked long enough, found a quarter produced by somebody, and the hope of getting rich quick implanted in some man.

“Take these Austrian bills, for example” the money seller went on. “There’s a bill I sold for $2.00. Now I’m selling it for only a dollar. And I’ll give a million-ruble Soviet note away with it.”

At this announcement some of those who had bought the rubles for two bits a quarter-million looked sullen.

“Oh, these are a different ruble,” the vendor assured them. “There are some of these rubles here I wouldn’t take $10 for. Let some gentleman offer me ten dollars and see if he can get them.”

No gentleman offered.

“I won’t deny I have rivals,” the spieler proceeded. “They try and undersell me. They cut prices on me. But now I’m going to cut prices on them. My big rival asks 40 cents for a million-ruble note. I’m going to undercut him to the limit. He’s started this competition. Let’s see if he can stick in it. Gentlemen, I will give this million-ruble note away with an Austrian note for 10,000 crowns. All for $1.00.”

No one seemed to have a dollar. So the reporter bought.

“There’s a gentleman that can size up an investment,” the spieler said. “Now, you other gentlemen. You know Austria is coming back. She’s got to come back. Say the Austrian crown gets up to only a half a cent in value. You have $50 right off the bat.”

But a dollar was out of the class of the investors present.

Reluctantly the soap box merchant went back to the more moderate amounts.

“Now if a man wants to invest a quarter,” he commenced, and held up one of the pink paper quarter-million ruble notes.

Again his audience was with him. This was all right. There were still a few quarters to be invested. What was just one more meal in the face of a chance for a quarter-million dollars?

SPORTING MAYOR

Mayor Church is a keen lover of all sporting contests. He is an enthusiast over boxing, hockey and all the manly sports. Any sporting event that attracts voters as spectators numbers his Worship as one of its patrons. If marbles, leap frog, and tit-tat-toe were viewed by citizens of voting age, the Mayor would be enthusiastically present. Due to the youth of the competitors the Mayor reluctantly refrains from attending all the above sports.

The other night the Mayor and I attended the boxing bouts at [Toronto’s] Massey Hall. No; we didn’t go together, but we were both there.

The Mayor’s entrance was very impressive. He remained standing for some time bowing to his friends and the people who knew him.

“Who is that?” asked the man next to me.

‘That’s the Mayor,” I replied.

“Down in front!” called out the man next to me.

The Mayor enjoyed the boxing bout hugely. During it he shook hands with everyone around him. He did not seem to know when the bout stopped as he was still shaking hands while the bell rang for the end of the round.

Between the rounds the Mayor stood up and looked out over the crowd.

“What is he doing — counting the house?” asked the man next to me.

“No. He is letting the sport-minded people look at their sport-minded Mayor,” I said.

“Down in front!” shouted the man next to me in a rude voice.

During the next two bouts the Mayor recognized a number of his acquaintances in the crowd. He waved to all of them. He also shook hands with all the soldiers in uniform present, shaking hands with some of them two or three times to make sure.

Scotty Lisner was taking a bad beating in the next bout. The Mayor’s eyes never strayed to the ring, but he applauded vociferously — whenever the crowd did.

He turned to his right hand neighbor.

“Lisner is beating him, isn’t he?” said the Mayor.

His neighbor looked at him piteously.

“I thought Lisner was the better fighter,” said the Mayor, satisfied, looking eagerly around for someone to shake hands with.

At the end of the fight the referee consulted with the judges and hoisted the hand of Lisner’s opponent as a sign of victory. The Mayor stood up.

“I’m glad Lisner won!” he remarked enthusiastically.

“Is that really the Mayor?” asked the man next to me.

“That man is his Worship, the Sporting Mayor,” I replied.

“Down in front!” yelled the man next to me, in a rough voice.

It looked as though the Mayor enjoyed the last bout best of all. Of course, he didn’t see it, but he discovered several people he had not shaken hands with, and also there was a great deal of booing and cheering. Sometimes the Mayor would absent-mindedly boo when the crowd cheered, but he always righted himself instinctively at once. He seemed able to shift a boo into a cheer with the ease and grace of one shoving a Ford into low gear.

At the close of the fights the Mayor absent-mindedly said, “Meeting’s dismissed,” and dashed for his motor car, thinking that he was at a City Council meeting.

The Mayor is just as interested in hockey as he is in boxing. If cootie fighting, or Swedish pinochle, or Australian boomerang hurling are ever taken up by the voters, count the Mayor to be there in a ringside seat. For the Mayor loves all sports.

WEIRD, WILD ADVENTURES OF AMATEUR IMPOSTORS

Last September in Montreal I chanced to go to a prize fight. The fights were not much.

None of the fighters got much of a hand. But there was one popular figure.

“Gentlemen and Ladies, allow me to introduce to you Kid Lavigne, former lightweight champion of the world,” the announcer bellowed. The Kid, short, middle-aged, looking like a pocket edition of Gentleman Jim Corbett under the lights, bowed at ease, his hands on the ropes. “One of the greatest fighters of all time,” finished the foghorn voice. Crash! came the applause.

“Kid Lavigne, ladies and gentlemen, has consented to referee the next bout,” megaphoned the announcer.

More applause.

I felt that even if the bouts were dull I had at least seen Kid Lavigne. It is something to see a champion of the world. So he was stored away in memory, a short, competent-looking little man, the lights above the ring shining on his smoothly brushed hair.

A few weeks ago came the announcement in the paper that the former lightweight champion of the world, Kid Lavigne, had been granted a marriage license in Detroit. Mr. Lavigne, the despatch stated, was employed in the Ford plant.

That seemed funny.

Last week a wire from Montreal brought the information that a referee’s license which had been issued to a man posing as Kid Lavigne had been canceled upon the discovery that the former lightweight champion was in reality living in Detroit and working at the Ford plant. The man claiming to be Kid Lavigne had photographs, letters and clippings to prove he was the real Kid, but his story had been discredited by sportsmen who had seen the real Saginaw Kid in action in the old days.

Why do they do it?

What is the impulse in a man that makes him pass himself off as someone else, often to make himself believe he is someone else, facing in the end almost sure detection?

This article does not deal with the bad check passers, the fakers, the sordid swindlers, but with the amateur impostor, that strange type of man who has some queer kink in his imagination that makes him give himself the personality and adventures of some other person. This kink may be the same that in another man would make a Joseph Conrad or a great painter.

You encounter these amateur impostors often enough. One summer we were playing baseball in northern Michigan. A slight-built young fellow appeared one day in front of the grandstand out at the Petoskey fair grounds and started to warm up with the regular pitchers. He was Dixie Davis of the St. Louis Browns, he told the gang.

Naturally, he obtained plenty of attention. He threw a nice curve ball and seemed to have plenty of stuff. He wasn’t cutting loose, he explained. He was up in Petoskey because he had disputed one of Umpire Billy Evans’ decisions and been suspended. It was too hot in St. Louis and he was taking a vacation during his suspension.

On the following Sunday we played Traverse City at our home grounds in Charlevoix. I was assigned to persuade Dixie Davis to pitch for us. It was not a very difficult task. He would be glad of the work-out. Sure. He’d be there all right. It would help him keep in shape.

All we had to do was send a motor car to drive him over and get him a uniform.

We sent the car. But at the hotel they declared he had already left to go to Charlevoix.

“He’s pitching there this afternoon,” the hotel clerk said. “I wish I could have got off for the game.”

Dixie didn’t show up. Two days later we read in the Chicago papers that Dixie Davis had shut out the New York Yankees that very same Sunday in St. Louis.

It may seem a long jump from an imitation Dixie Davis back to George Psalmanazar. But the line runs straight back to 1704 in the city of London. On its way back it takes in Jacques Richtor, of the Great North. Jacques is too recent a memory to need explanation.

George with the funny last name arrived in London, a dark, swarthy young man, obviously a foreigner. He could speak no word of English, but learned quickly.

As soon as he could speak any English he started enlisting the aid of England for his native land of Formosa, from which he had come by many perilous adventures. He wanted missionaries sent there. The Bishop of London was one of his most ardent supporters.

He published a book which was received with great acclaim. It was called A Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa. It recounted the habits, language, dress and characteristics of the inhabitants of that distant land. It also described the Formosan scenery, buildings, wars, politics, poets and statesmen. There was no doubt about it. It was an important work.

Psalmanazar filled his books with drawings of the Formosan royal family and illustrations of its buildings. He constructed a language and a grammar and taught English students to understand them. He appeared before scientists and gave lectures on the Formosan language at Oxford.

This wonderful book was dedicated to the Bishop of London. Formosa was as much the topic of conversation then as King Tut’s tomb was last year.

When the crash finally came Psalmanazar admitted he was a native of Languedoc, France. He had come to England as an immigrant. He was exposed by a few hardy doubters who had mistrusted him from the start.

Dr. Cook was a piker beside Psalmanazar, although many people feel that the doctor’s mountain climbing adventures in the west, including his ascent of Mount McKinley, were much more finished and delicate bits of work than the North Pole business.

Captain J. A. Lawson was a splendid forerunner to Cook and Richtor. The captain wrote Wanderings in New Guinea in 1875. There was nothing coarse about this work. Deftly and one by one the navigator got rid of his traveling companions. You hardly notice they have gone until you reach the last page and there is no one to return with the adventurous captain.

Toolo the lascar goes mad and shoots himself with Captain Lawson’s rifle by putting the muzzle in his mouth and pulling the trigger with his toe. Hostile natives slay Joe, the splendid young Australian. Danang, the courageous Papuan, dies by the same hands. Aboo, another guide, disappears a little later. Billy, the Australian aborigine, the last survivor, deserts the captain at Singapore.

There is only the courageous captain. And what a welcome he received. He deserved it. He had been to the top of the world on Mount Hercules, a mile higher than Mount Everest. Everest, you remember, was unscalable to a British exploring party last year. They could not get sufficient oxygen.

Lawson, as he neared the summit of Mount Hercules, also encountered difficulty. “The cold now became excessive,” he wrote. “My hands were so numb I could not feel whether I had fingers or not. The water in our bottle was a mass of ice. We had very little extra clothing with the exception of our blankets. Aboo became quite lethargic, and several times sat down and fell asleep.”

Still they climbed.

Poor Lawson’s downfall came when a certain Captain Moresby, a British naval officer, who at the time of publication of the captain’s book happened to be out in his old stamping ground. The gallant captain gave certain latitudes and longitudes in his book. Captain Moresby had charted those waters and was able to prove that the explorer’s principal village was situated in the middle of the Torres Strait.

No one ever learned whether Captain Lawson had ever been in New Guinea or not. He wouldn’t tell.

Two years ago Louis de Rougemont died in a London poorhouse. To the poorhouse authorities he was plain Louis Redmond. But Louis was one of the greatest of them all.

The year the Boer War started the Wide World Magazine announced with pride the publication in serial form of the “Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont,” as recounted by himself. Louis had just arrived in London on a vessel straight from New Zealand. He talked with conviction. His story still makes good reading.

Louis was no piker. For thirty years he had wandered among the cannibals. It started in the West Indies in a pearling expedition. There was action from the start. After a thrilling battle with an octopus, who had sucked down a native diver, Louis is left alone on board the pearler one day and blown out to sea.

He is cast away on a sandy island and makes himself a sort of super Emperor Jones. He acquires the wonderful Wamba. There was never anyone so wonderful as that dusky spouse.

She fights with him and nurses him. Louis was a fighter, too. His wonderful charge on stilts when he routs a tribe of cannibals is an epic. He wields a hefty spear as well as a long bow.

Toward the last of the narrative two girls from the homeland are washed up on the island. Like Louis they are castaways. They like Louis, too.

Whether Wamba became jealous is not stated but the good old sea takes the girls for its own. It is a sad loss. But Louis has Wamba to console him.

Then comes the cry of “A Sail! A Sail!” And the long homeward voyage. Thus it was that the great story of thirty years among the cannibals came to be told.

It sounds fishy? But De Rougemont was invited to tell the story to a British scientific society.

The Daily Chronicle, which exposed Dr. Cook, burst Louis de Rougemont’s bubble. His thirty years with the cannibals had been spent with Swiss bankers. His tropical islands had been the dull streets of London. Louis’s thirty years had been spent in the routine of a London banking house.

Still at the age of 67 he made a comeback and married a brilliant young woman who tells how he entertained her for some time with his wonderful imagination.

There is one case in the annals of great impostors where the impostor was honestly deceived.

While the science of geology was still in the hands of its earliest pioneers Professor Beringer lectured at the University of Wurtzburg. In his old class were a number of bright young men who knew the haunts of the genial old man in his hunt for fossils that would develop his theories about the origins of life. These students paid nocturnal visits to the Professor’s favorite hunting grounds.

Shortly after the professor’s hammer and bright eye discovered evidence of a totally new kind of extinct life. He found fossil frogs, snakes, and insects galore.

The students were inspired by his enthusiasm.

There was almost nothing the professor couldn’t find. One day he found the cast of a spider in its web with not a strand disturbed although it had come through the grinding of hundreds of thousands of years. Then came another fossil of a spider in the act of catching a fly.

The professor went around like a man who has seen a vision. He was exalted in his class room. Finally he unearthed a rock on which was inscribed the Hebrew word for Jehovah. “No,” said Professor Beringer, “I am right. My opponents who uphold the false doctrine of slow evolution are wrong. All life is the work of a creator. He has not only been kind enough to leave evidences here but has appended his signature to make it official.”

On this basis the professor published his book, profusely illustrated. The title page presented a pyramid of the fossils surmounted by the stone with Jehovah written on it. He dedicated the book to the Prince of Wurtzburg.

When one of the students raised the shout of derision that grew and swept Germany when the book appeared the poor professor destroyed all the copies of his book he could reach, tried to buy up the others and died shortly after of a broken heart.

There is no record of any other exposed impostors dying of a broken heart from Count Berty Gregory, who posed in Toronto years ago as an Austrian nobleman and was discovered to have been a stable groom, down to Jacques Richtor, the boy wanderer of the north, who duped reporters and bush authorities with his tale until he was unmasked as a runaway lad from the States. They don’t die of broken hearts, these impostors.

For there is some strange force inside of them that forces them to be impostors. They might die of a broken heart if they could not live their lives of the imagination.

GRAVEYARDS OF STYLE

Big department stores cannot obtain insurance against changes of styles. If they did not devise some scheme to protect themselves against shifts in the public taste merchandisers would be constantly in danger of being crowded with unsalable “Hyline” coats, “Pinchback” suits or other passing favorites.

Anyone who has tried to purchase a particular model of coat which happened to be suitable, but at present is out of style, knows that it is impossible to do so in the big city stores. Do the departmentals and men’s furnishing houses sell all the goods they buy? What becomes of the old styles, and the unsuccessful styles? Those are the questions the would-be purchaser asks.

The answer is that all good styles when they die go to the country. Because they cannot get insurance against the changing fancy of the city public every large furnishing house has an outlet established in some smaller city in the mining district, bush or country.

In some town like Sudbury a furnishing house advertises that all their goods are direct from Toronto. They are, too, but the Sudburian or Cobaltese who imagines he is buying the latest Toronto models is really purchasing all the unsalable clothes of one of our furnishing houses.

In towns as near as Sudbury clothes would only be a little way out of style. Far back in the wilds is where the real old-timers will be vended.

There you will see a little false-front store advertising a New York, Toronto, or Chicago connection, whose very latest creations will be, “Mack Mackinaw, the Kind They Are Wearing on Broadway,” or “Be in Style. Wear Peg Top Trousers.”

Those little stores on the edge of things are the real graveyard of dead styles.

OUR CONFIDENTIAL VACATION GUIDE

Any steady reader of obituaries is familiar with this phrase.

“He had not taken a vacation in twenty years.”

Of course there is no iron bound rule about the period. It may be that the dead man had not taken a vacation in ten years, in thirty years, during all the time he was mayor or during his entire lifetime. It all points toward the same false moral. It seems obvious that if the poor chap had only accepted the vacation his employers kept forcing on him, he might be alive today.

This is very wrong. The trouble is that newspapers do not make a practice of printing as a cause of death this statement. “He spent every summer at Lake Milkitossup.” Or, “The deceased was in the habit of spending the month of August at Lake Wah Wah.”

A few statements like these would clear up matters. Newspaper readers would then realize that the reason the first man lived twenty years was because he had carefully preserved his health through abstaining from vacations. The reason that the other splendid fellows had dropped like ripened grapefruit at the end of their thirty years, mayoralty terms, or lifetimes was the fact that they had never visited such places as Lake Screaming Water or picturesque Bum View. Just a few seasons at Giggling Perch Inn or the New Nokomis, American Plan, would have cut them off like flies in the pride of their young manhood.

If you must take a vacation, read this confidential guide on places to avoid. It has been compiled at great labor and is available here for the first time. It means a longer life and happier to stay away from the following:

POACHDALE INN, ONTARIO.

How to reach Poachdale Inn — this is not important.

How to get away from Poachdale Inn — Bounce in a hurdling Ford through five miles of sand. Wait at the railway till the train comes. There is no train on Sunday. Try not to be hysterical when the train comes in sight.

BEAUTIFUL LAKE FLYBLOW.

Beautiful Lake Flyblow nestles like a plague spot in the heart of the great north woods. All around it rises the majestic hills. Above it towers the majestic sky. On every side of it is the majestic shore. The shore is lined with majestic dead fish — dead of loneliness.

SMILING LAKE WAH WAH.

Smiling Lake Wah Wah is always smiling. It is smiling at the people who stalk along its shores grim and unsmiling. Smiling Wah Wah knows that the people are from Giggling Perch Inn. Wah Wah sees that the people are undernourished. She sees their gaunt faces and the feverish eager light in their eyes as they wave off the clouds of mosquitoes. Smiling Wah Was knows what is in their minds as they walk along her shores. They are waiting for the two weeks to end.

BEAUTIFUL BOZO BEACH.

Beautiful Bozo Beach nestles next to the largest inland body of fresh water on the American continent. Arm yourself with a boat hook and Bozo Beach is an ideal place for the little ones. They can play in the sands of Beautiful Bozo Beach to their little hearts content. After their little hearts are contented they will rub the sand in their eyes and chase one another screaming into the largest inland body of fresh water on the American continent. You can usually bring the little ones back from the largest inland body of fresh water with the boat hooks.

PICTURESQUE BUM VIEW.

Bum View is one of the quieter resorts in the States on Lake Erie, where you go for a good solid rest. That’s the big thing about Bum View, the solid comfort and the quiet. It is run by S. A. Jarvis.

Every morning at 3 am the Jarvis’s rooster announces that it will soon be daylight. All the other roosters give him their endorsement. Then the Jarvis’s rooster announces that it is daylight. Thousands of other roosters bear him out. There is a great clattering in the kitchen as the hired help start the day. The pump squeaks as Jim, the hired man, pumps the water. The Putnam twins are up early and their childish voices rise above the sound of the phonograph they start playing.

By this time the sun is shining so hotly on the wall of your room that it is becoming as hot as a bake oven. The rosin begins to melt in the knots in the hemlock boarding of the room walls. You had no sleep the first part of the night — the mosquitoes. Your head begins to ache with the heat. You dress and come downstairs to breakfast. There is a pale green hard slice of melon on the plate. The eggs are brought in, fried to a cold rubbery consistency. There are white spots in the bacon. The toast is cold and rancid. The beautiful day is before you.

It is too hot at Bum View to do anything except read. The heat beats down and forces everyone into the shade of the porch. That is all the shade there is. Facilities have been provided for reading. These are: A hammock — a large, weak hammock which someone else is occupying — and several uncomfortable chairs. A library of books including Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, an illustrated history of the Japanese-Russian war, the Canadian almanac for 1919, a small red set of volumes of the world’s best stories arranged according to nationality and an illustrated book on the wild flowers of Palestine.

It is too hot in the house. It is too hot anywhere but on the porch. In the afternoon it is too hot on the porch. When it is too hot on the porch the guest goes to the back of the house where a shadow is beginning to start and lies down on the grass. In a short time he is asleep. Thousands of weird shaped insects climb carefully down from the grass stems and up on the sleeper. He sleeps on. More insects abandon the grass stems to come and climb on him. He still sleeps. He will sleep all afternoon — then he will lie awake all night. Then the Jarvis’s rooster will crow again and it will be another day. He has thirteen more to go till he gets back to his office.

Will he last it? Or will the vacation kill him?

ON WEDDYNGE GYFTES

Three traveling clocks

Tick

On the mantlepiece

Comma

But the young man is starving.

That is the beginning of a poem in the best of the late 1921 rhythms. The rest of it will never be finished. It is too tragic. It deals with a subject too tragic for this typewriter to chatter about. It is a poem about wedding gifts.

A day will come when I shall be able to hear the words “wedding gift” spoken without suffering the acute nervous sensation of a man who steps unconsciously upon the tail of a large and hitherto silent cat, at the same time thrusting his hand unknowingly into a mass of closely-curled rattlesnakes. That day is not yet here.

It started with our rich friends. In common with most other poor people, we have a few rich friends. A rich friend is a wonderful potentiality. You always have a vague sort of feeling that when your very rich and very close friend decides to join his very rich ancestors in one of the more exclusive Elysian residential districts, he may do something very handsome for you in the way of a bequest. You also have a feeling that when you marry your richest friends may do something very fitting about it all.

All our rich friends did. They all gave us traveling clocks. Now one traveling clock is a delight; two traveling clocks are a pleasure; three traveling clocks are unnecessary, and four traveling clocks are ridiculous. The traveling clock is evidently the dernier cri in wedding gifts. We have four of them. That ought to be the dernier shout.

There are a number of things we need badly, and a large assortment of things we could use. We need towels, spoons, to replace the “furnished” ones that are constantly becoming rusty and scratching the mouths of careless guests, and we need a great deal of money.

When an assortment of checks came from old family friends and relatives at first, it seemed a bit sad that the blue slips of paper should be the only reminders of their personalities. Later, when we discovered that large, blue, iridescent fruit bowls were to be the only reminders of the personalities of 80 per cent of our friends, we changed our minds. Of course, I have a few friends who remind me of large, blue, iridescent punch bowls, but their number is limited.

I once had a friend who reminded me of a large, blue, iridescent traveling brewery, but I recall no friend who reminds me of a suede-leather traveling clock. And while I have had a number of friends who were perfect pictures, I have never had a friend who was a perfect picture frame. The gift as an expression of personality is a huge fallacy. What personalities are to be suggested to us by a handsome soup ladle, or a Sheffield silver vegetable dish? Even the checks only suggest the personalities of the landlord, the milk man, the telephone company and the grocer.

This all may sound like a cold-blooded lack of appreciation, but while written in a personal way, it is an unpersonal protest against wedding gifts as an institution. Some conference on limitation ought to restrict the giving of wedding gifts to the immediate parents of the bride and the immediate parents of the groom.

There are our stairs, for instance. Our landlord, a romanticist, when he rented the apartment, described it as a “third floor apt.” That was taking a very romantic view of it. Our landlord would probably refer to a villa on the extreme top of Mount Vesuvius as “an ideal location, well heated, reached by a pleasant climb, only 28 minutes from the heart of Naples.”

The first floor in the apartment is called an English Basement The second floor, I believe, is a Mezzanine. After those two flights the floors proper begin. Ours is on the third floor proper.

Expressmen leave their packages at the English Basement They do this to the accompaniment of a jovial shout of “One-eighty-nine!” That cabalistic cry means that you must pay the expressman one dollar and eighty-nine cents, “very considerable sum. Personally I have never seen a wedding gift that I would pay one dollar and eighty-nine cents for in cold blood. That, however, is a matter of opinion.

After you settle with the expressman you stagger up five flights of stairs with the box. The box is always large and heavy. The first flight is comparatively easy; you take it in your stride and think of alpine climbers, mountaineers and the nobility of toil. On the second flight you think of Mount Everest, the white man’s burden and how heavy the box is. After the second flight you just climb.

When you finally open the box, with the aid of a kitchen knife, you find it to be full of excelsior. You make some joke about excelsior. The excelsior spills all over the rug. You plunge into the excelsior in search of the present. It like going into the center of a hay-cock in search of an egg. Lifting out a jumble-shaped package, you open it and find a beautiful, broken bowl. It represents Uncle George. You drop Uncle George gently into the ash can and try to get in a little more work before the bell rings again.

Twenty-two boxes came yesterday, forwarded from a distant city, collect. One of them contained two handsome towels They were not broken, nor packed in excelsior nor an enormous wooden box. Every little while I go over and fondle them lovingly. I do not know whose personality they represent, but I am sure it must be a very lovely one.

Part Two. GANGSTERS AND PROHIBITION

Peace after World War I was only temporary. Following a brief period called “readjustment,” the battle lines were once again drawn in a colorful, no-holds-barred slugging match that raged across North America. A picturesque, brutal class of men filled the principal roles in this melodrama, men who wore dark fedora hats and tight coats with an odd-sized bulge under the left armpit. They moved about in high-powered touring cars, peered through bulletproof glass and used machine guns to stitch a fantastic legend into the annals of history.

This war began precisely at one minute after twelve on January 17, 1920. The Volstead Act had gone into force. The nation had gone dry while a goodly percentage of its citizens remained thirsty. Inspired by the unwritten law of supply and demand, an unknown named Johnny Torrio went into business in Chicago. He fathered the speakeasy but is better remembered as the temporary employer of an ambitious young hoodlum called Alphonse Capone. Torrio and Capone began tapping a bountiful source of easy money, a project which was not to go unnoticed for long. Other businessmen entered into competition: Dion O’Banion, “Legs” Diamond, and countless more. Soon rivalries multiplied and tempers flared as hundreds of greedy men plunged into this novel but profitable trade.

The struggle over the fast buck and the right to quench man’s thirst was not destined to be settled amicably. What began as a peaceful, uncomplicated bit of lawbreaking quickly mushroomed into a full-scale war. It was a three-cornered affair: the police fought the mobs, prohibition agents fought the mobs, the mobs fought other mobs. Still the piles of dollars mounted faster even than the number of corpses, and the prohibition-spawned gangster skyrocketed to an undreamed-of position of wealth and power. Aided and abetted by a parched public, encouraged by a legion of corrupt officials, the mobs expanded into prostitution, gambling and robbery. Crime had gone modern, had become organized, and its influence spread until powerful underworld empires took root in every major American city.

It was with no little amount of fascination that Canadians viewed these startling developments in their sister nation. The trials and tribulations of the dry American were of more than passing interest to the still wet Canadian, however. America’s struggle over the bottle was bringing a flourish of prosperity to the north shores of the Great Lakes. Millions of dollars flowed in, while thousands of speedboats, brim-loaded with cases and kegs, shuttled southward. Not only was Canada responsible for two-thirds of all whisky smuggled into the United States, but this illegal passage of contraband was also to set a record of a kind, when in October 1921, the first airplane joined with the boat, auto and truck as an accepted means of bootlegging.

Nonetheless, the by-product of prohibition and mob rule was not entirely a boon to the Canadian. American gangsters were not slow to export their talents, nor was a special segment of Canadians averse to learning the tactics and techniques of organized crime. Alcohol was no source of unlawful funds, but white slavery and gambling and bank robbery were, and it was not long before cities north of the U. S. border floundered under a major crime wave of their own.

By background Ernest Hemingway should have been an ideal candidate to tell this story to the Canadian public. He had smelled the stench of crime in earlier days while working as a journeyman police reporter for the Kansas City Star; he had come to know death and killing during the war. The young American was also a sometime resident of Chicago — the wellspring of all this evil — and was familiar with the curious habits and customs of the citizenry of that city. That he touched only lightly on gangsters and prohibition in his writings was due probably more to timing than anything else. Hemingway witnessed only the beginnings of this social malady, turning his pen and his mind to Europe several years before the full impact of the speakeasy and mobster was felt on the American scene.

And yet Ernest Hemingway was not unaware of the newsworthiness of this subject. His roving eye settled on the topic of crime and liquor on more than one occasion during the first years of the nineteen twenties.

Here are his accounts — vivid caricatures of people and events cast from a time when gangsters and prohibition darkened the land...

CHICAGO GANG WAR

Anthony d’Andrea, pale and spectacled, defeated candidate for alderman of the 19th ward, Chicago, stepped out of the closed car in front of his residence and, holding an automatic pistol in his hand, backed gingerly up the steps.

Reaching back with his left hand to press the door bell, he was blinded by two red jets of flame from the window of the next apartment, heard a terrific roar and felt himself clouted sickeningly in the body with the shock of the slugs from the sawed-off shot gun.

It was the end of the trail that had started with a whitefaced boy studying for the priesthood in a little Sicilian town. It was the end of a trail that had wound from the sunlit hills of Sicily across the sea and into the homes of Chicago’s nouveau riche. A trail that led through the penitentiary and out into the deadliest political fight Chicago has ever known.

But it was not quite the end. For the pale-faced D’Andrea, his body torn and huddled, his horn-rimmed spectacles broken, but hooked on, pulled himself to his knees and looking with his near-sighted eyes into the darkness jerked five shots out of his automatic pistol in the direction of the shot gun that had roared his death warrant.

For months D’Andrea had been entering his home, gun in hand, in the expectation of such a death. He knew he was doomed — but he wanted to protest the verdict. It is all part of the unfinished story of the gunman’s political war that is raging in Chicago at present.

Anthony d’Andrea, who is dead in Jefferson Park Hospital today with 12 slugs in his body, was educated at the University of Palermo. He renounced a career in the church and went to the States.

In Chicago he became a foreign language teacher to some of the wealthiest families of the city, numbering among his pupils many of the newer members of society. D’Andrea became an American citizen in 1899, and in subsequent years embarked on various commercial enterprises. In a small way he was a real estate dealer, macaroni manufacturer and banker.

Secret service agents raided his home in 1902 on a tip that D’Andrea was the man who was flooding Chicago with spurious ten-cent pieces. Counterfeit coins were found by the government operatives at both D’Andrea s home and his macaroni factory. He was tried, pleaded guilty and sentenced to Joliet penitentiary. After serving thirteen months he was pardoned by President Roosevelt.

After coming out of the penitentiary he became an Italian labor leader and shortly announced his intention of entering politics. His first venture in politics was in 1914, when he was defeated as candidate for county commissioner.

In 1916 he first contested the seat of Alderman John Powers, who has been alderman from the 19th ward for twenty-five years. Although D’Andrea proved that he was not disfranchised due to his pardon by President Roosevelt, his past record defeated him.

His power over the Italians continued to grow, however, and the first of the murders that have marked the Powers-D’Andrea feud occurred when Frank Lombardi, a strong Powers adherent, was killed in his saloon.

This last election started off with the bombing of Alderman Powers’ home. Then D’Andrea’s headquarters was bombed while a meeting was in progress and many of his henchmen badly wounded.

Alderman Powers, who is known to the Italians as “Johnny de Pow,” won the election of last November by about 400 votes. Immediately D’Andrea announced a contest — and a series of killings commenced.

Gaetano Esposito, a strong Powers worker, was -tossed out of a speeding motor car, in the heart of the city, his body riddled with bullets.

Paul A. Labriola, municipal court bailiff, who many believed was being groomed by Powers to take his place, was shot by five men who cornered him on his way to court. After he had fallen, one of his assassins bent over him and fired five times into his back.

The same day Harry Raimondi, a fellow Sicilian of D’Andrea’s and another strong Powers worker, was shot while in his own grocery store.

Police were informed that twenty-five Powers workers were on a proscription list. All were marked for death. No Powers man in the ward has felt sure of his life. Then came the first threat of reprisal and vengeance.

“D’Andrea is a dying man,” Alderman Powers is reported to have said, “I can no longer keep my men in check.”

Everything quieted down — and then D’Andrea was shot on May 11.

But the war in the 19th ward of Chicago is not yet over. There are hints, there are rumors, and there are whispers in the saloons and cafes and the question that is being whispered is, “Who will be the next man to die?”

There are many answers.

PLAIN AND FANCY KILLINGS, $400 UP

Gunmen from the United States are being imported to do killings in Ireland. That is an established fact from Associated Press despatches.

According to underworld gossip in New York and Chicago, every ship that leaves for England carries its one or two of these weasels of death bound for where the hunting is good. The underworld says that the gunmen are first shipped to England, where they lose themselves in the waterfronts of cities like Liverpool and then slip over to Ireland.

In the Red Island they do their job of killing, collect their contract price and slip back to England. It is said that the price for a simple killing, such as a marked policeman or member of the “Black and Tans,” is four hundred dollars. It may seem exorbitant, when you remember that the old prewar price in New York was one hundred dollars, but the gunman is a specialist and his prices, like those demanded by prize-fighters, have advanced.

For killing a well-guarded magistrate or other official as much as one thousand dollars is demanded. Such a price, for even a fancy killing is ridiculous, according to an exgunman I talked with in Chicago.

“Some of those birds are sure grabbing off the soft dough in Ireland. It’s mush to pull a job in that country, but trust the boys to get theirs. One job means a trip to Paris.”

It is a fact that there have been more American underworld characters in Paris this summer and fall than ever before. They say that if you throw a stone into a crowd in front of one of the mutuel booths at the famous Longchamps race course outside of Paris you would hit an American gunman, pickpocket or strong-arm artist.

Most of the blood money from Ireland went to back some pony or other. For the gunman believes in taking a chance. He believes that if he can make enough of a stake he can settle down and quit the business. But it is hard for him to quit, for there are very few other professions outside of prize-fighting that pay so well.

The retired shuffler off of mortal coils who honors me with his acquaintance is about thirty-eight. Perhaps it were better not to describe him too closely, because he might run on to a Toronto paper. But he is about as handsome as a ferret, has fine hands, and looks like a jockey a little overweight.

He quit gunning when the quitting was good — when the country went dry and liquor running became the best paying outdoor occupation.

After his principal customers discovered that it was altogether better and cheaper to ship whisky up from the big warehouses in Kentucky than to take the chance of running it across the imaginary line that separates the U. S. and Canada he retired.

Now he is a man about town, and bond salesmen call on him. When I talked with him he kept steering the subject away from gunning and the Irish situation to ask my honest opinion on some Japanese Government bonds that will pay eleven per cent interest.

In the course of an afternoon I learned a number of things about the trade. Yes, there were American “bump-off” artists in Ireland. Yes, he knew some that were there personally. Well, he didn’t know who was in the right in Ireland. No, it didn’t matter to him. He understood it was all managed out of New York. Then you worked out of Liverpool. No, he wouldn’t care particularly about killing Englishmen. But, then, they gotta die sometime.

He’s heard that most of the guns were Wops — Dagos, that is. Most gunmen were Wops, anyway. A Wop made a good gun. They usually worked in pairs. In the U. S. A. they nearly always worked out of a motor car, because that made the getaway much easier. That was the big thing about doing a job. The getaways. Anybody can do a job. It’s the getaway that counts. A car made it much easier. But, there was always the chauffeur.

Had I noticed, he went on, that most of the jobs that fell through were the fault of the chauffeur? The police traced the car and then got the chauffeur and he squealed. That was what was bad about a car, he said. “You can’t trust any of them.”

That’s the type of mercenary that is doing the Irishmen’s killings for them. He isn’t a heroic or even a dramatic figure. He just sits hunched over his whisky glass, worries about how to invest his money, lets his weasel mind run on and wishes the boys luck. The boys seem to be having it.

WAR BETWEEN BANK BUILDERS AND BANK BLOWERS

Shortly after midnight on a Sunday morning five mounted bandits rode into the little town of Ville Marie on the Quebec side of Lake Temiskaming, twenty-five miles south of Haileybury.

They rode in wild west style, shooting out the lights as they galloped up the main street, and putting the citizens of the town into a panic.

It was just like the movies. Except it was deadly real.

Two young clerks named Damonte and Chener were sleeping over the Quebec branch when the masked riders pulled up and began shooting into the building.

In their nightclothes the two young clerks escaped from the building and rushed to the Bayview Hotel. When the proprietor of the hotel tried to call Haileybury on the phone to give the alarm he found there was no answer. The telephone was dead.

As they rode into town the bandits had cut the telephone and telegraph wires. Ville Marie was isolated from the outside world.

While two robbers worked inside the bank three others kept guard outside armed with rifles.

The hotel proprietor, two guests and the bank manager ran toward the bank but the masked men standing in the doorway with their rifles warned them back.

A woman showed a lamp in a window opposite the bank building and a shot extinguished the lamp.

Inside the bank there was a muffled roar. But the men inside did not come out. The guards at the door were nervous. They did not know what was keeping their pals. The town was rousing. In a deer country men have rifles and the bandits did not know how long it would be before they would have to face a posse.

Then there was a terrific explosion. A burst of flame out-lined the whole scene in a sudden glare of white and black and the men inside came running out. The bank building was on fire. All the men mounted and rode out of the town.

As the two men who had been working inside at blowing the safe swung into their saddles, the horses were jumpy from the smell of the smoke from the burning building. A twelve-year-old boy ran toward them. Afraid he would be able to identify them from the glare of the building which was beginning to flare up, they shot him twice. Both bullets went into the boy’s ankle. No one else came out and the bandits rode away through the town.

But what had happened inside the bank?

The desperadoes had blown open the vault door. But when they attempted to blow open the safe they had blown it clear out through the back of the bank building. There it was found, unopened, by the citizens of Ville Marie when they came out in the glare of the burning bank building to look at the scene of the crime. Next day, June 26, 1916, the safe was brought across the lake to Haileybury. The robbers had obtained a few thousand dollars worth of bonds, which prove more of a liability than an asset to yeggmen, from the vault. All the cash was in the safe. And they didn’t get any of it.

With variations this robbery has appeared again and again through the annals of Canadian crime.

It is the story of unsuccessful safe-blowing. Safe-blowing is supposed to be a thing easy to accomplish. But year after year it becomes increasingly hard.

There have been great bank robberies in Canada and Toronto has recently suffered. But they are an altogether different thing. The “stick-up” or payroll jobs.

In them the banks have been attacked at the weakest link in their chain of money-guarding. The time when their money must be temporarily exposed for the purpose of transferring large sums through messengers.

There is no mechanical device that can protect them there except the pistol or the sawed-off shotgun. And opposed to them is a very efficient mechanical device that has changed the entire aspect of crime. That device is the automobile. It plays its part in nearly every robbery, holdup or crime of violence in Canada.

But while the banks must expose their funds occasionally during a transference they take good care that there should be no chance of any robbery during the time that the funds are in the care of the bank itself.

There are electrical systems installed in banks that automatically give the alarm to the police and set off a siren and gong outside to give a local alarm if any burglary is attempted.

This system is not altogether popular with Toronto banks.

An officer of one Toronto bank told The Star Weekly that people were in almost every day with some safety system or other.

A favorite system they have to sell is one whereby the teller steps on a button if anyone comes in to hold him up. That sets off an alarm immediately. The idea is for the button to be where the teller can reach it in his usual position if he is ordered to throw up his hands. As a result it is usually under his feet and he is setting it off all the time. “We can’t afford to cry wolf in a bank,” the bank officer explained.

Then there was the rumor that a certain Toronto bank was protected by machine guns. Just how the machine guns were to be cut loose on the robbers was never explained.

The origins of this rumor are the two German Maxims, war souvenirs, that flank the entrance to the vault of the Canadian Bank of Commerce.

In many banks there are supposed to be secret watching places built into the building near the eaves where an armed guard can observe every move made below and himself remain unseen.

“That is a very primitive measure,” a Toronto bank officer told The Star Weekly. “When I was young I once had the job of watching through a hole in the floor down into the vault below, In those days too, a vault was once protected from burglars by an iron bar that fitted into the door from another vault and the place of entrance covered with plaster. That was in the real old days.”

In those days the hours when the bank was shut and the cash and bonds locked in the vault were the most dangerous of all. Now they are the safest.

It is the wonderful super-vaults and mammoth safes that guard the money of Canadians that have made the head offices of all the banks absolutely cracksman proof. A safe builder told The Star Weekly that no head office of a Canadian bank ever had its safe blown. A bank officer confirms this statement.

To break into a modem big safe and yegg-proof vault the burglar would need a motor truck load of tools and a college graduate in engineering to handle them.

When banks are robbed and the safes blown it is always a little branch that suffers. Then even when the robbers cut the communications and give themselves a free hand, they are often foiled.

Take the attempted bank robbery last year in Carleville, Saskatchewan.

On August 23rd three robbers entered the bank, held up the clerks, tied them up, and fired seven charges of nitroglycerine in the safe. But they couldn’t open it. Finally they gave it up and went off in a motor car.

On September 17th, 1920, a gang of safe-blowers attempted to use an oxy-acetylene blow torch and other modern steel cutting equipment to break into the Merchants’ Bank at Beachville, Ontario. The equipment was so bulky it had to be transported by truck and the men fled when a young employee of the bank who was inside awakened and fired his revolver through the window. The equipment was left behind.

How safes were brought to the point of perfection where cracksmen if they are to enter must use tools that it would be almost impossible for them to transport and the dramatic history of the constant struggle between the safe-builder and the safe-blower is told in an article by Edward H. Smith, published in The Scientific American, from which the following extracts were taken:

On a memorable Monday morning in 1878 — October 28, to be precise — the cashier of the old Manhattan Savings Institution turned his key in the lock of the street door, walked nonchalantly into the banking room and fainted. Men will do stranger things in the face of miracles, and one had been wrought here. The door of the great iron vault gaped open, torn and twisted on its hinges, as though a Titan had wrenched it with the weight of mountains and the power of tides. On the floor was a litter of papers, account books, coins, pieces of shattered iron and ends of broken tools. From the interior of the huge metal box, long considered beyond the strength and ingenuity of men, was missing a total of $2,747,700 in cash and bonds. The greatest bank robbery in history had been committed between Saturday night and that sickly dawn.

The cashier revived, summoned the other officers in haste, closed the doors and put up a sign relating that the bank had been forced to suspend because of robbery. Policemen came in droves; crowds gathered and tried to storm the entrance; the news spread through the city and across the country; runs on other banks began and were checked with difficulty. The corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street, where the bank stood, was obstructed for many days with crowds of curious people who had come to see where this outstanding thing had taken place. The doings of a small gang of cracksmen became a piece of history.

To this burglary, just forty-five years ago, is to be traced the beginning of modern developments in the protection of our great banks against criminal attack, so it may be worth while to glance at some of the facts concerning it.

A gang of notorious professional bank burglars headed by the famous Jimmie Hope, had laid plans for the attack on the Manhattan Savings Institution and consumed all of three years in working out their scheme. They had eventually corrupted one Michael Shevelin, the bank watchman, gained entrance to the place with his collusion and worked on the vault door with wedges, powerful jackscrews and explosives, through the nights of Saturday and Sunday, finally reaching the bonds and cash at about 3:30 o’clock on Monday morning. Their loot consisted of $2,506,700 in registered bonds, $73,000 in coupon bonds and a fortune in cash. To save the bank from disaster and foil the robbers, the Congress and the state legislature passed acts canceling the stolen registered bonds and causing fresh securities to be engraved and issued in their stead. To such lengths the nation had to go to protect its finances against a few bold and clever men.

It must not be assumed that such a burglarious raid as that on the Manhattan Savings Institution had happened without precedent or that the banks had not done what they could to prepare for such attacks. The burglary of large banks was an old story in 1878, and great quantities of inventive energy and of bank money had then already been expended in the quest of some method of vault construction that could be relied upon. It is interesting to note some of the ideas then applied.

The vault of the old National Park Bank, when it was finally dismantled some years ago, to make room for a modem substitute, was found to have been built of solid slabs of granite, closely fitted together. The edges of each such slab had been incised with a series of hemispherical depressions, which fitted precisely to similar scoopings from the adjoining granite blocks, thus forming globular holes, five or six inches in diameter. Into each of these holes a cannon ball had been placed, so that if a burglar tried to enter the vault by digging at the joints of the stones, he would encounter the loose cast-iron balls.

It must be remembered that nitro-glycerine was then unknown and that the burglar had to drill holes, to get at the tumblers of the locks or to blow in the gunpowder which was then his only explosive agent.

But all such precautions were not of much avail, for the reason that the better bank burglars of the day understood how to attack the strongest vault doors then in existence. Invention had provided nothing better than heavy close-fitting doors of cast-iron, chilled and later case hardened, but iron doors after all. We shall have a word to say about the evolution of the vault door. For the present it is enough to observe how burglars, without such weapons as they now possess, ripped their way through the no doubt formidable defenses of the old banks.

Another New York City feat of the same Jimmie Hope will illuminate the matter. In the fall of 1868, Hope rented a basement under the rooms of the Ocean National Bank at the corner of Fulton and Greenwich streets, and opened a carpet business. In front was his show room; in the rear his workroom. To divide these and keep passersby from intruding on his privacy, he had a partition erected, dividing the two parts of the establishment. In reality, this ceiling-high screen was put in place to mask his operations against the bank, whose vault he had carefully studied.

On the night of June 27, 1869, nine years before his greater feat at the Manhattan bank, Hope and several assistants, including the famous old robbers, Ned Lyons, Mark Shinburn and George Bliss, reached the banking rooms by means of a hole they had been slowly cutting through the ceiling of their carpet store and the floor of the bank. They went to work on the door of the vault with wedges. First a fine wedge, no thicker than the blade of a knife, was hammered into the crack of the door near the lock. A slightly thicker wedge was next pounded into place with sledges, and then a still heavier tool took its place. Gradually the burglars worked their way up to wedges two or more inches thick at the base. These were forced home with big jackscrews, which got their purchase from heavy iron bands or cables which had been passed around the vault or secured to its back by heavy hooks. Gradually the jacks were turned until the thick wedges forced their way in and pried the door from its iron jamb. The bolts were now forced back and the work was done. Explosives and heavy crowbars were then used on the inner iron door. This robbery totaled $1,200,000, of which, fortunately, the larger part was in non-negotiable bonds.

As a consequence of this mode of attack, the construction of doors came to be the matter of chief concern with the vault builder. The first heavy doors in use had been straight-edged, like the end of a square-sawed board. Then, in order to get a door that would close more tightly, came the beveled or sloping edge, the inner face of the door being narrower than the outer. But the wedges of the burglars soon put this pleasant scheme to rout. Then came the stepped edge, which is still in use on all ordinary office safes. The steps were designed to stop the wedges from penetrating beyond an inch or two. Wedges backed by powder formed the burglar’s answer to this scheme. Then came the tongue-and-groove edge, which did good service until nitroglycerine came along. The grooves now proved to be a happy circumstance for the cracksman. His liquid explosive lodged in them and he got wonderful results from a minimum of “soup.” Faced with this peril, the vault builders went back to a battleship or armor-plate door, which was soon found worthless.

The construction of such doors is one of the marvels of modem vault engineering. Entirely aside from its complicated multiple time-locks, its numerous powerful bolts, its intricate inner locking devices and its other mechanical intricacies, such a door is a first-class piece of engineering. It seems to the eye to be a solid piece, yet it consists of many layers; it is a composite in more than one sense. The layers, to mention only some of them, are ordinary strain resisting steel; reinforced concrete, used against fire; heat resisting metal, to delay burglars operating with the cutter-burner torch; tool resisting metals; at least one and often two layers containing the wires and foils of electric burglar alarm systems, and so on.

The J. P. Morgan and Company door weighs about 50 tons and that of the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank, the thickest if not the largest ever built, is said by its makers to achieve a total weight of almost two hundred thousand pounds.

The vaults must be designed to foil any possible or conceivable method of assault. In addition, they must be constructed to resist fire and the tremendous heat likely to be developed when a great building comes into conflagration. In consideration of this risk, the roofs or tops of the big vaults of today must be even stronger than the floor, sides and front or door, for the roof must be additionally reinforced against the impact of falling bodies from above, in case of the collapse of a building through fire or earthquake.

What kind of engineering is required for the achievement of such prodigious strengths may be guessed when the dimensions of the really big bank vaults are understood. For instance, in the new Federal Reserve Bank in New York there are three such vaults, one on top of the other. Each vault measures about 125 feet in depth and about 55 feet in average width. The bottom of the nethermost room rests on bedrock and the walls of the vaults are in part under the waters of the harbor. The main door of each of these vaults weighs about 90 tons and each of the three rooms has a second or emergency door, used for ventilation during business hours. The vault doors of this bank are not of the plug type, another and unique design having been employed to suit the needs of the building in which the vaults were placed.

In describing the structure of the walls, floor and roofs of our great vaults, it is to be remembered that no standard has yet been arrived at, that a number of engineers entertain conflicting ideas about certain details of construction and that experiment is constantly being carried forward. Again, the chief difficulty in arriving at a perfected type of vault, and one that is not likely to be overcome in the future, is the matter of the constant development of tools useful in attacks on such constructions. There has not been a successful burglary committed upon the vault of any great metropolitan bank since 1878. Nevertheless, industry and the arts have gone ahead and perfected a number of tools which might at any time be employed by burglars of sufficient skill and daring to seize the opportunity. To this class belong the electric arc, the electric and pneumatic chisel, the electric drill and the oxy-acetylene torch in its latest development.

This last named tool is of special peril and interest. I have previously written of its effectiveness against the safes and vaults employed in rural or suburban banks and the defeats met by manufacturers of strong boxes for this clientele. It now appears that the cutter-burner tool, as it is preferably called by vault engineers, is a decided menace even to the great banks and their ponderous equipment, so that much reconstruction and endless experiments are in progress. To date nothing has been found that can be called a genuinely effective resistant.

The effort to find metals which would foil the withering flame of the torch is not without its note of romance. When the oxy-acetylene cutter-burner was first employed there was a great scamper after heat resisting metals and a number of compositions were produced which withstood the fiery tongue of the torch fairly well.

TWO-TEN

If you enter a department store carrying a bag of candy, an umbrella or wheeling a baby carriage you become an object of suspicion. After you have entered if a clerk or floor-walker calls out “Two-Ten” you may know that the suspicion has crystallized and that you are regarded as a potential shop-lifter.

Shop-lifting or unorganized stealing by amateur thieves is one of the big problems of the merchandiser, according to the head of one of the biggest department stores in Toronto. Department stores lose three per cent of their sales through thieving from the counters, this merchant states.

The candy bag, umbrella and baby carriage tricks are some of the standard schemes of the shop-lifter. The facility with which they can be worked makes anyone possessing the properties for the trick a suspicious character to the department store clerk.

In the operation of the candy bag for obtaining merchandise a woman stands along the counter displaying rings or cheap jewelry as though she were waiting for someone and dips into her candy bag. Her hand goes from the bag to her mouth. But on the downward trip something from the counter goes into the bag. The movement is so simple and unsuspicious that it is almost impossible of detection. Hence the lynx-eyed manner in which the candy bag toter is scanned.

There is nothing subtle about the umbrella method. It merely consists in entering the store with an empty umbrella and leaving it with a full one.

Two women, a baby and a baby carriage are requisites for the success of the baby carriage trick.

One woman wheels the baby carriage and does a bit of shopping. The other removes articles from the counter telling the clerk she wishes to show them to another woman who is with her. Whatever is taken is placed in the baby cab under the baby, who is an unconscious accessory both before and after the fact.

The woman returns to the counter while the clerk’s attention is distracted and says that she has replaced the article. Flat bolts of lace are the things most often taken in this way. With a pile of them on the counter the clerk cannot tell if they have been replaced. With baby seated happily on the loot it is calmly rolled out of the store.

“Two-Ten,” which sounds to the uninitiated like the call for a cash girl, clerk or floor-walker, is the signal given by anyone in the store when they see a suspicious-looking person enter. It means “Keep your eyes on her ten fingers.”

In addition to amateur merchandise stealers the big shopkeepers are confronted with the problem of organized gangs of thieves who work department stores throughout the States and the Dominion. Four is the usual number for a shop-lifting team.

They arrive in a town and wait until clerks are advertised for by some big store. Two of the quartet take positions as clerks and the rest is easy. It is simply a matter of how much of the contents of the store they can deliver to the outsiders who play the role of customers.

These professionals have such a variety of artifices that they are very successful. The great success of their scheme, however, lies in its essential simplicity.

Floor-walkers and store managers have one almost infallible way of detecting theft among the clerks. It is an application of the old platitude, “A guilty conscience needeth no accuser.” If a clerk follows the floor-walker with her eyes it almost invariably develops that she is stealing. She must watch the floor-walker to prevent his surprising her in some irregularity — and if she does watch him she is gone.

Although women make up the majority of the offenders at amateur shop-lifting, boys also do quite a bit of thieving. Pocket knives and perfumes are the most common articles taken by the younger generation. They are readily vendable.

It is interesting to note, too, that the head of the Toronto Juvenile Court recently asked one of the Toronto stores to take Ford ignition keys off their counters. Boys were buying them and then unlocking parked Ford cars and taking them for joy rides.

‘There are no such people as kleptomaniacs,” said the department head. “At least we have never run into a genuine klep. All of the people who steal from us have stolen the stuff because they wanted it or the money it would bring.

“The thieving is divided into two classes, amateur and professional. The amateurs are usually given another chance and released. We try to send the professionals to prison. But never in all my experience with thousands of shop-lifters have I encountered a kleptomaniac.”

BOOKMAKERS AND BETTORS

On the Mexican border there is a tough dusty town. It has saloons, “queer” hotels, gambling houses and short order restaurants on both sides of a dusty street. High-powered motor cars stand wheel to wheel at the curb with battered Fords and Mexican ponies hitched in between.

On the edge of this tough town is a tough race track where twelve horses are standing, taut, jerky and nervous, in front of an elastic barrier while a jockey tries to bring up a horse that is wearing a strange looking hood like a Ku-Kluxer to his place in the line facing the elastic.

“Come on, son. Bring that thing with the blinders up,” the starter orders from his perch overlooking the line of horses restlessly footing in the sand.

“Bring him up, I tell you. Move over. Don’t crowd there. Hey, you! It’s you I’m talking to. Move that dog over. Move him. Now bring him up, son. Now!”

The barrier snaps up in its awkwardly angled jerk. A bell rings. And the horses are off in a pounding mass topped with color that stretches out into a race as they line out at the first turn.

The horse with the hood on, that made all the trouble at the barrier, is running last, hopelessly beaten and going steadily back in the dust while the race pulls away ahead of him and the jockey flogs with his whip in disgust.

Another good thing has gone wrong.

“Ten on The Dictator in the Sixth at Juarez,” he says to a neighbor in a bowler hat.

“On the nose?” asks the man in the Christie without turning around.

“On the nose,” says the man with the racing paper.

Two thousand miles to the north a group of men stand against the wall of a building across the street from the City Hall in Toronto. One man is reading a racing paper.

Two thousand miles to the south at that very moment The Dictator is galloping doggedly through the dust that is raised in a cloud by the twelve horses that are far out ahead of him. His jockey is saying to himself, “This is a swell skate. This is the thing Charley said he’d put a nice bet on for me if I’d ride him.”

Meantime in Toronto bets will continue to be placed on The Dictator, or Flying Frog or Runyan’s Onion or whatever the particular good thing’s name happens to be until some time after the horse has been led back to the stall.

The particular form of betting that has been described is called betting on the nod. It requires no apparatus, receipts, betting slips or tickets. All it requires is confidence, feeling of mutual trust between the bettor and the bet taker. It goes on year in and year out to the extent of thousands of dollars a day in Toronto’s regular betting public, and it is almost impossible to check. There is no evidence.

But the small bettors on the nod are the smallest part of the public that have been hit by The Dictator’s defalcation. They form one per cent of Toronto’s betting public.

A well known Toronto horseman who is on the inside in racing affairs states that there are 10,000 people in Toronto who bet on the races every day, month in and month out.

A former bookmaker puts the figure at from nine to ten thousand. Both men know their business.

Over $100,000 is played each day in Toronto with bookmakers the year around according to one of these men. For years Toronto has been known all over the world as the biggest betting town in North America.

“But that is changing now,” the horseman states. “The big money players are leaving. They are driven out by the pari-mutuel machines and the government tax.”

Ten or fifteen years ago A. M. Orpen’s place operated in the Coffin Block, opposite the Peacock Hotel. With Moylett and Baillie’s it was the biggest of the old Toronto betting places. Commissions of $5,000 were not uncommon in those golden days of Toronto betting.

Now there is no bookmaker in Toronto who will handle a $5,000 bet. But you can still lay a bet of $1,000 or $2,000 although the bookmaker will place it out of town. Practically all the big money bet in Toronto is wired to Montreal according to those in the know.

The man who bets with a bookmaker in Toronto is up against a stiff game. The bookmakers pay the pari-mutuel prices as telegraphed in from the outside tracks — with a limit. When you read in the paper that O’Grady’s Lady won at the odds of $52.50 for a $2.00 ticket at Latonia you may have registered the wish that you had a bet on the Lady and idly wondered how it was done.

But no matter how much you had bet on the estimable female you could not have collected more than $15.00 for your $2.00 bet.

The bookmakers have a working agreement that they will make a limit of $15.00 to win, on a $1.00 bet, $6.00 to place, and $3.00 to show, no matter what the horse pays. If the horse you bet on won at 200 to 1 you could not collect more than $30 on a $2.00 bet in Toronto.

As a matter of fact if you only bet $2.00 you would have to deal with one of the smaller bookmakers and these have a $10.00, $4.00, and $2.00 limit.

The bookie’s answer to any protest on this limit is that nobody has to bet if he doesn’t want to. You can accept the conditions or leave them. As a result really long shots are absolutely eliminated.

In addition the bettor is up against the handicap of not being able to bet an entry. In other words when two or more horses are coupled in the betting the man who is betting must name the horse he expects to win with. If any other horses in the entry win he has lost his bet.

A bettor cannot play the Field either. No bookmaker in Toronto accepts bets on the Field. If he places a bet on a horse which is in the Field and a Field horse other than the one he has named wins he loses his money even though he would have to accept reduced odds if his horse should win.

It is a rocky road for the bettor. But the bookmakers are more or less organized, they are doing an illegal business with constant risk and they figure on making things as much in their favor as they can. And as they say, “Nobody has to bet with us that doesn’t want to.”

Some bookmakers have been known to relax some of their rules in favor of old clients, or men prominent in betting who object to the Entry and Field rules as absolutely unjust.

Who are the 10,000 regular bettors of Toronto?

According to the men who know they are of all classes. Professional men, doctors, lawyers, clerks, secretaries, truck drivers, office boys, business men and laborers.

Toronto bookmakers have few women customers. The old hackneyed cliche: “You know stenographers are the bookmakers’ biggest clients,” does not apply here. If it applies anywhere.

“Women are heavy bettors at the Woodbine,” a man high up in racing affairs told me. “But they do not like to bet on the horses when they are out of town.”

Few Toronto bookmakers like to handle bets from women. None of the big commission men who handle bets for Montreal books will accept a bet from a woman.

Most of the big operators in Toronto at present are commission men. They work on the basis of two and one-half per cent commission on the bet. Eighty per cent of these commissions are placed in Montreal.

Ninety-nine per cent of the betting that is done in Toronto today is done on a cash basis, the old halcyon days of Abe Orpen and Moylett and Baillie, when bookmakers’ statements were only rendered once a week on Monday morning, are gone.

“Of course, I could still get a $500 bet down in five minutes without putting up a cent,” a widely-known turfman explained to me. “But the old credit days are gone. It would be done to me as a favor. Not as a matter of business.”

It is a great web of wire that stretches from the southern race tracks all over North America at this time of year. It has been estimated that more men are employed in the betting business in North America than work in the steel business. And it all goes on under the surface.

Toronto is a famous betting town. But if you do not follow the races you never see any betting. If you happen to be a bettor you see betting everywhere. That is, if you look for it. Rather, you see signs of betting.

At the corner of Adelaide and Bay streets, a shiny sedan stops against the curb. The driver sits unconcernedly at the wheel. Beside him on the front seat is a lantern-jawed man in a soft hat. They are evidently waiting for someone.

If you watch long enough you will see a man detach himself from the passing lunch hour crowd and step up to the window of the sedan. He steps away and goes on. Another man steps up, then hurries along.

Perhaps fifteen people pay the car a visit. Then it moves along to another corner. There the process is repeated.

That is the rolling bookmaker. He has done and still does a good business in Toronto. But it is a piker’s business, and the police have spotters out who take the car numbers. A number of these betting shops on wheels have been arrested during the last year.

Then there are the bookmakers who operate behind the cigar counters of certain restaurants, in certain cigar stores, ice cream parlors and pool rooms. These men are mostly accepting commissions for larger bookmakers.

The bulk of the bookmaking betting done in Toronto is done right in the offices, factories or stores. Every office or building where any number of men are employed has its own bookmaker’s agent. He is an employee in the building and gets a commission of two and a half to five per cent on every bet he accepts.

When a bookmaker’s agent accepts a bet he gives a receipt for it and then telephones the bet in to the bookmaker, who at present, if he is an operator of any magnitude, is probably located in a private house where he can conduct his business undisturbed.

Sometimes an agent for a bookmaker calls at an office or a factory regularly each day. But oftener the agent is an employee. That cuts down overhead expenses. They are the bane of the bookie.

New Orleans is the track where most Toronto people play their money.

“That is because you have the books there and the prices are much better than on the mutuel machines,” an old-time turfman who has the reputation of being one of the shrewdest horsemen in Canada, stated.

“Toronto bettors are nearly all form players. In the old days this had the reputation of being the town where the most short-priced winners came in of any in the country. It is the money that is bet that makes them favorites. This has always been a shrewd betting town,” continued the man on the inside.

“How many of Toronto’s betting public have made money on this last year’s wagering, then?” I asked.

“None of them,” he answered positively. “Not a one makes money on the year. They can’t do it.”

“How about racing information?” I asked.

“It is almost entirely fake,” he answered. “I have had the people who are putting out sure tip information come to me at the Woodbine [Race Track] and ask me for the winning horse in a certain race.”

This reporter was able to discover there is no one selling tips on races in Toronto at present. Toronto bettors like to do their own selecting.

There are plenty of touts after Toronto trade, though. Their usual form of procedure is to write a letter to some person whose name they have obtained. The letter says that the writer has a brother in the So-an-So stable and this stable has a real horse that is going to be sent out for the money in a field of palsied selling-platers some day next week. The man who gets the letter is urged to play $10 for the writer on this certainty.

On the day of the race a wire comes giving the horse’s name. The tout usually has at least three horses in the same race and sends out about thirty wires.

The trick has varying forms, but the principle is the same — get somebody else to bet money for you just because you tell them to. There is always someone willing to do it.

All big betting is doomed in Ontario, according to the horseman quoted before.

“Three years from now there won’t be a fifty-dollar machine at the Woodbine,” this man said sadly. “The big tax of ten and a half per cent is putting the big bettors right out of business. They can’t buck it. Attendance at the Windsor track has fallen off forty per cent. Money bet has fallen off fifty per cent, and the handbooks in Detroit have increased a hundred per cent.”

Racing for the big bettor, the man who bets his hundreds and thousands at a crack, seems to be doomed in Ontario. The giants of the old days are passing. But the 10,000 remain faithful in spite of what they are up against.

SMUGGLING CANADIAN WHISKEY INTO THE U. S.

A man living in a small town in Iowa recently paid two hundred and fifty dollars a case for ten cases of Canadian whiskey. They were delivered by motor truck from Detroit. He has more ordered.

Canadian whiskey can be bought by the case from bootleggers in almost all of the Michigan border towns for one hundred and twenty dollars a case. Single quarts cost fifteen dollars. There is plenty of liquor and there are plenty of purchasers and the price seems to be no deterrent.

It is no wonder that the question that is most often asked of an American returning to the States from Canada is, “how long are they going to be able to ship grog out of Canada?”

There is both organized and unorganized rum running across the border on an unbelievably large scale. Fortunes are being made by the bootleggers who have the liquor shipped to their carefully established residences at Windsor and nearby towns, and then run it across the river to the States. That short trip across the river is one of the most expensive in the world. A case of whiskey which retails at forty-eight dollars in Windsor, is ferried over to the United States side in a skiff — but as soon as it touches the alien shore its minimum value is automatically one hundred and twenty dollars.

On the train from Toronto to Windsor, I talked with a man who was bringing twenty cases of whiskey to Windsor. He estimated that his profits on the liquor when it was deposited on the Detroit side would be fourteen hundred and fifty dollars.

“It’s a little risky,” he said; “we run it all at night in small boats. The revenue agents have motor boat patrols, but we keep out of their way pretty well.”

According to this bootlegger the recent story about the electrical torpedo which was said to be shot from Canada to the States filled with liquor is a pipe dream of some overworked newspaper man. “It is either a straight newspaper fake or else the revenue men started the yarn,” declared this man who ought to know. “There is so much booze coming into Detroit that the Revenue gang have to have an alibi somewhere, so they may have framed the torpedo story.”

Another bootlegger in Detroit quizzed me about the length of time importation of liquor between the Provinces would be allowed.

“I’m afraid of that referendum. The farmers are liable to cut us off. But if we can have six months more of this even if I get pinched a couple of times, I’ll be able to retire.”

All the rum running is not confined to the cities. You hear tales of lonely shacks along the rocky north shore of Lake Superior, where hundreds of cases of whiskey are stored. You hear of the trapper who invested the savings of a life time in liquor that he plans to smuggle into the States this summer. You hear stories of mackinaw boats manned by Ojibway Indians from around the Garden River district, which stop in at Upper Peninsula ports after dark and are gone in the morning.

You hear of cities like Grand Marais in upper Michigan, which have been dead for twenty years that are coming back to a furtive, silent, non-existence since the passage of the eighteenth amendment.

In the cities you see the evidences that there is a liquor traffic between Canada and the States. I saw a slack-lipped, white-faced kid being supported on either side by two scared looking boys of his own age in an alley outside a theater in Detroit. His face was pasty and his eyes stared unseeingly. He was deathly sick, his arms hanging loosely.

“Where’d he get it?” I asked one of the scared kids.

“Blew in his week’s pay for a quart of Canuck bootlegged.” The two boys hauled him up the alley. “Come on, we got to get him out of here before the cops see him.”

If the people who talk about “good liquor” could see a kid drunk — but this isn’t a sermon. It is merely a few facts on the way liquor is coming into the United States from Canada.

It is coming in in large quantities in as widely divergent places as New York City and Minneapolis. The other day in New York a schooner from Halifax successfully smuggled in enough liquor to make its owner a fortune. Twenty-five dollars a quart is the price for the cheapest whiskey in New York.

There is a long unguarded frontier between Canada and the States and as long as liquor is allowed to be shipped to border Provinces that are supposedly dry it will find its way into the States. What interests the people of the United States, both bootleggers and the people who voted the States dry, is, how long is the liquor going to come in? They are watching for the result of Ontario’s referendum on prohibition.

CHICAGO NEVER WETTER THAN IT IS TODAY

For a time after prohibition set in there was a romantic aura about obtaining liquor in Chicago. The wily hooch-seeker was accustomed to make various cabalistic signs to the watchful bartender. The cult of the lifted finger and the tugged ear flourished. There was that certain pride in being “known.”

That has all passed.

Now anyone wanting a drink in Chicago goes into a bar and gets it. Known or unknown he will obtain it if he has seventy-five cents. It is safe to say that no one in Chicago is ever more than three blocks away from a saloon where whiskey and gin are sold openly over the bar.

Visitors from other parts of the States are astonished and amazed. It seems unbelievable. But the explanation is very simple.

In Chicago the city police take no part in enforcing the 18th amendment. Chicago always voted wet, and Chicago police, with the splendid bovine mind of the American “Bull,” still consider it wet.

There are eight federal prohibition enforcement officers in Chicago. Four of them are doing office work, the other four are guarding a warehouse. And the city is, except for the price of liquor, as it was before prohibition became a reality over the rest of the country.

Then there is beer. St. Louis was the greatest brewery city in the States. When prohibition came into effect the St. Louis breweries believed that the end had come to the brewery business, and at once turned their big plants into soft-drink factories. Chicago breweries saw the handwriting on the brewery wall, but they didn’t believe it for a moment. They shut down for a little while and then commenced making beer again — reel beer — with a greater percentage of alcohol than had been allowed for a long time before the 18 th amendment.

Now we have the interesting spectacle of the St. Louis breweries fighting to have prohibition enforced. For the tremendous flow of real beer from the Chicago breweries that have been running full blast is killing the demand for near beer.

When the breweries first started on their old preprohibition schedule of production, there was a great deal of beer to be had in the city, but it cost fifty cents a stein. Then some bars and restaurants started cutting prices and now real beer can be had all over the city for thirty cents a stein — fifteen cents a glass or fifty dollars a barrel.

The other day in a Loop restaurant I saw three mounted policemen seated at a table with tall steins of beer before them. Their horses were hitched outside the restaurant. As we sat at our table, the head waiter came up and requested that we excuse him just a moment while he moved the table. We rose, the table was pushed to one side, and a trap door opened. Out from the trap door four white-uniformed bartenders rolled twelve barrels of beer. As they were rolled across the floor past the policemen’s table the three looked lovingly at the big brown casks.

“It’s the real old stuff, Bill,” said one appreciatively, “the real good old stuff.”

So much for police enforcement of prohibition.

Of course, there are shakedowns. Every bartender who runs openly has to pay his bit for police protection, and that keeps the price going up. To combat this nasty evil and to thwart the paying of a high tariff new places for drinking have appeared. The so-called “Athletic Club” has been typical of this institution. Its reason for existence is to eliminate the weekly slush fund for the police. So far it is highly successful.

Passing a lynx-eyed, derby-hatted, red-faced observer who stands with his hand toying with an electric bell at the entrance, you climb three flights of stairs to the club rooms. Entrance is barred by a chain lock, and is only effected by presenting a blue card bearing your name and number, and the name of the club. After the card is scrutinized, you are admitted to the club rooms.

Furnishings of the Nowata Club consist of a number of tables and chairs. As soon as you are seated a Negro waiter appears with a number of drinks equal to the number of men in the party. The charge is only fifty cents a drink and the whiskey is slightly older than that bought over at the adjacent bars.

“Fred,” the waiter is instructed, “there are some gentlemen here who want to become members of the club.”

“Yassuh?” Fred is very dignified. “If they will be so kind as to write theah names on this slip of papah, I will be honohed to tendah them membehship cahds.”

In short time the membership cards are brought to the members of the party and the Nowata Club’s membership is again increased.

There has never been any record of anyone being blackballed at the Nowata Club. Its membership is well over a thousand now and it bids fair to be the largest club in Chicago.

Brokers, board of trade operators, and men from La Salle Street bond houses form the bulk of its membership.

Present conditions cannot last in Chicago. The government will send more prohibition agents or there will be a less liberal administration, but for the present any stranger is at home, and any drink can be had in the city of Chicago.

Part Three. AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

Paris in the nineteen twenties clung tenaciously to the gracious unhurried ways of the past. Only the noisy red taxis scuttling about the broad boulevards and the hum of the metro signaled the encroaching age of the machine. Elsewhere evidences of change were few. The pace was slow, the living pleasant, the joys many and varied.

Day after day the stolid little houses with their bold, protruding gables stood quietly. The sun warmed the dull brown roofs, trickled through a thousand wrought-iron balconies, then spent itself on a thousand half-hidden courtyards. In the morning the old men followed the narrow cobblestone streets that twisted toward the Seine. They filled the hours with dreams of yesteryear, sunning themselves along the river’s grassy banks, or resting in the shade of the ancient chestnut trees. At midday the middle-aged came, bartering for food and browsing through books at the stalls dotting the Left Bank. They ate and read, and afterward the unwanted remains of their appetites and diversions littered the walls of the quay.

Something of Paris belonged to those in aged and middle years. But the city had become most of all the mistress of the young. The young had seized its heart: the Montparnasse, a dozen square blocks isolated by spirit and custom from the metropolitan area. It was a village of writers, artists and students, of prostitutes and wastrels, and of cafes. Wine, coffee and bread were cheap at the Cafe de la Rotonde; more costly at the Cafe du Dome. And there were others where a few sous would buy a whole meal. The type of cafe was not important to those of the Montparnasse, what was important was the studied ritual of cafe living.

That ritual was practiced twice daily at the tables on the street in front of the cafe. At eleven in the morning and again at four in the afternoon the citizens would crowd the tables, argue over coffee or aperitif or beer and appraise the legs and walk of the women parading by. Between hours they retreated to the darkened interiors to play chess on stained, cracked boards, or watch a poker game with cards and francs and sous shuttling across creaky, wooden tables.

At midnight the winners went to the Boeuf Cafe to dance, or toured the Montmartre, drinking and staggering or cursing through the bars and night clubs surrounding the Place Pigalle. Some got sick and went to bed, some took a girl and went to bed, while those not yet broke or drunk, or both, advanced on the Champs-Elysees. On stage was “La Revue Negre,” and the citizens shouted and cheered at Josephine Baker whose shining black hair plastered flat with tar, whose long legs, whose talent and vitality, had taken the night people of Paris. With dawn, the men and women of the Montparnasse turned toward their rooms and flats. Some slept; others began to work on books and plays and paintings.

The young who ruled Paris in the nineteen twenties were not all Frenchmen. Soldiers had discovered the city during the war; a few returned after the fighting. Others quickly followed, and within a year or two, the expatriate colony of Paris was born. Its members had cut all ties with their mother countries. Many had run away; from themselves or their families or their lives. Others, tired of conventions and the false morality of the times, had come solely for fun.

By 1920 several hundred expatriates lived in Paris; three years later the colony numbered in the thousands. Most spent their lives and funds furiously, accomplishing nothing more than their own finish. They forgot the work they had come to do, or had never intended to do anyway, preferring instead the opiate existence of the cafes. They remained the “flaming youth,” transplanted, yet not different from the country club set back home.

Among the ranks of expatriates was a handful to whom Paris was something more than a fast toboggan to ruin. It was a city where the living was cheap, where the demands of society were few, and where there was time to work and create. Some were already famous. Sherwood Anderson occupied a little hotel facing Montparnasse Boulevard; Sinclair Lewis lived not far away. Most of the writers, however, had still to make their mark. One was that complete expatriate Ezra Pound; others were James Joyce and Louis Bromfield. It was a small, select group, perhaps no more than a hundred that had captured the soul of Paris. They were to hold it for only a few years.

Later, toward the middle of the nineteen twenties, this era would end. Paris then would become the mecca for society and the tourist. With their coming, the writers and artists would go, and the golden age of a city would pass.

A chance meeting in the winter of 1920 turned Ernest Hemingway’s thoughts toward Paris. A new friend, Sherwood Anderson, had only recently returned from there, and the older writer painted an intriguing picture of the city with its growing colony of artists and writers. Hemingway’s appetite was whetted and, during the next year, he became increasingly more dissatisfied with his life in North America. Disturbed most by his failure in selling fiction, he pondered a change. Needed was a new, more creative atmosphere, and he intended to search for that atmosphere in Paris.

Ernest Hemingway’s opportunity came in the person of John Bone, managing editor of the Toronto Daily Star. Impressed with the quality of the young American’s work, Bone offered Hemingway a job as a roving overseas correspondent with headquarters in Paris. There would be no salary, but he would get paid regular space rates and the Star would cover all expenses incurred while getting the news.

On December 8, 1921, accompanied by his wife of two months, Ernest Hemingway set sail for Europe. Except for brief periods, he lived and wrote in Paris during its greatest years. Here are his accounts of the pulse beat of that city...

AMERICAN BOHEMIANS IN PARIS A WEIRD LOT

The scum of Greenwich Village, New York, has been skimmed off and deposited in large ladles full on that section of Paris adjacent to the Cafe Rotonde. New scum, of course, has risen to take the place of the old, but the oldest scum, the thickest scum, and the scummiest scum has come across the ocean, somehow, and with its afternoon and evening levees has made the Rotonde the leading Latin Quarter show place for tourists in search of atmosphere.

It is a strange-acting and strange-looking breed that crowd the tables of the Cafe Rotonde. They have all striven so hard for a careless individuality of clothing that they have achieved a sort of uniformity of eccentricity. A first look into the smoky, high-ceilinged, table-crammed interior of the Rotonde gives the same feeling that hits you as you step into the bird house at the zoo. There seems to be a tremendous, raucous, many-pitched squawking going on, broken up by many waiters who fly around through the smoke like so many black and white magpies. The tables are full — they are always full — someone is moved down and crowded together, something is knocked over, more people come in at the swinging door, another black and white waiter pivots between tables toward the door and, having shouted your order at his disappearing back, you look around at individual people.

You can only see a certain number of individuals at the Rotonde at one night. When you have reached your quota you are quite aware that you must go. There is a perfectly definite moment when you know you have seen enough of the Rotonde inmates and must leave. If you want to know how definite it is, try and eat your way through a jug of soured molasses. To some people the feeling that you cannot go on will come at the first mouthful. Others are hardier. But there is a limit for all normal people. For the people who crowd together around the tables of the Cafe Rotonde do something very definite to that premier seat of the emotions, the stomach.

For the first dose of Rotonde individuals you might observe a short, dumpy woman with newly-blond hair cut Old Dutch Cleanser fashion, a face like a pink enameled ham and fat fingers that reach out of the long blue silk sleeves of a Chinese-looking smock. She is sitting hunched forward over the table, smoking a cigarette in a two-foot holder, and her flat face is absolutely devoid of any expression.

She is looking flatly at her masterpiece that is hung on the white plaster wall of the cafe, along with some 3,000 others, as part of the Rotonde’s salon for customers only. Her masterpiece looks like a red mince pie descending the stairs, and the adoring, though expressionless, painter spends every afternoon and evening seated at the table before it in a devout attitude.

After you have finished looking at the painter and her work you can turn your head a little and see a big, lighthaired woman sitting at a table with three young men. The big woman is wearing a picture hat of the “Merry Widow” period and is making jokes and laughing hysterically. The three young men laugh whenever she does. The waiter brings the bill, the big woman pays it, settles her hat on her head with slightly unsteady hands, and she and the three young men go out together. She is laughing again as she goes out of the door. Three years ago she came to Paris with her husband from a little town in Connecticut, where they had lived and he had painted with increasing success for ten years. Last year he went back to America alone.

Those are two of the twelve hundred people who jam into the Rotonde. You can find anything you are looking for at the Rotonde — except serious artists. The trouble is that the people who go on a tour of the Latin Quarter look in at the Rotonde and think they are seeing an assembly of the real artists of Paris. I want to correct that in a very public manner, for the artists of Paris who are turning out creditable work resent and loathe the Rotonde crowd.

The fact that there are twelve francs for a dollar brought over the Rotonders, along with a good many other people, and if the exchange ever gets back to normal they will all have to go back to America. They are nearly all loafers expending the energy that an artist puts into his creative work in talking about what they are going to do and condemning the work of all artists who have gained any degree of recognition. By talking about art they obtain the same satisfaction that the real artist does in his work. That is very pleasant, of course, but they insist upon posing as artists.

Since the good old days when Charles Baudelaire led a purple lobster on a leash through the same old Latin Quarter, there has not been much good poetry written in cafes. Even then I suspect that Baudelaire parked the lobster with the concierge down on the first floor, put the chloroform bottle corked on the washstand and sweated and carved at the Fleurs du Mal alone with his ideas and his paper as all artists have worked before and since. But the gang that congregates at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail have no time to work at anything else; they put in a full day at the Rotonde.

SO THIS IS PARIS!

After the cork has popped on the third bottle and the jazz band has brayed the American suit and cloak buyer into such a state of exaltation that he begins to sway slightly with the glory of it all, he is liable to remark thickly and profoundly: “So this is Paris!”

There is some truth in the remark. It is Paris. It is a Paris bounded by the buyers’ hotel, the Folies Bergere and the Olympia, traversed by the Grands Boulevards, monumented with Maxim’s and the So-Different, and thickly blotched with the night life resorts of Montmartre. It is an artificial and feverish Paris operated at great profit for the entertainment of the buyer and his like who are willing to pay any prices for anything after a few drinks.

The buyer demands that Paris be a super-Sodom and a grander-Gommorah and once alcohol loosens his strong racial grasp on his pocketbook he is willing to pay for his ideal. He does pay for it too, for the prices charged at the various Parisian resorts that begin to liven up around midnight are such that only a war profiteer, a Brazilian millionaire, or an American on a spree can pay.

Champagne, that can be bought anywhere in the afternoon for 18 francs a bottle, automatically increases in price after ten o’clock to 85 to 150 francs. Other prices are in proportion. An evening at a fashionable dancing cafe will cut into a foreigner’s pocketbook to the extent of at least 800 francs. If the pleasure-seeker includes a supper in his program he will be lucky to get out without spending a thousand francs. And the people he is with will do it all so gracefully that he will, after the first bottle, consider it a privilege until the next morning when he contemplates the damaged bank roll.

From the taxi driver who automatically cranks up five francs on his meter as soon as he picks up an American, either north or south, from in front of a fashionable hotel, to the last waiter in the last place he visits who has no change under five francs, the study of rooking the rich foreigner in search of pleasure has been reduced to a fine art. The trouble is that no matter how much he pays for it the tourist is not seeing what he really wants.

He wants to see the night life of Paris and what he does see is a special performance by a number of bored but well paid people of a drama that has run many thousands of nights and is entitled, “Fooling the Tourist.” While he is buying champagne and listening to a jazz band, around the corner somewhere there is a little Bal Musette where the apaches, the people he thinks he is seeing, hang out with their girls, sit at long benches in the little smoky room, and dance to the music of a man with an accordion who keeps time with the stamping of his boots.

On gala nights there is a drummer at the Bal Musette, but the accordion player wears a string of bells around his ankle, and these, with the stamping of his boots as he sits swaying on a dais above the dancing floor, give the accent to the rhythm. The people that go to the Bal Musette do not need to have the artificial stimulant of the jazz band to force them to dance. They dance for the fun of it and they occasionally hold someone up for the fun of it, and because it is easy and exciting and pays well. Because they are young and tough and enjoy life, without respecting it, they sometimes hit too hard, or shoot too quick, and then life becomes a very grim matter with an upright machine that casts a thin shadow and is called a guillotine at the end of it.

Occasionally the tourist does come in contact with the real night life. Walking down the quiet hill along some lonely street in a champagne haze about two o’clock in the morning he sees a pair of hard-faced kids come out of an alley. They are nothing like the sleek people he has just left. The two kids look around down the street to see if there is a policeman in sight and then close in on the night walking tourist. Their closing in and a sudden dreadful jar are all that he remembers.

It is a chop back of the ear with a piece of lead pipe wrapped in the Matin that does the trick and the tourist has at last made contact with the real night life he has spent so much money in seeking.

“Two hundred francs? The pig!” Jean says in the darkness of the basement lit by the match which Georges struck to look at the contents of the wallet.

“The Red Mill holds him up worse than we did, not so, my old?”

“But yes. And he would have a headache tomorrow morning anyway,” says Jean. “Come on back to the Bal.”

THE MYTH OF FRENCH POLITENESS

The days of Alphonse and Gaston are over. French politeness has gone the way of absinthe, prewar prices, and other legendary things. It has become so bad that French newspapers have carried columns of discussion on the question of how the French can regain the position they once held as the politest people in the world.

There is such pushing in the Paris subway, cheating women of their seats in crowded buses, violent rows over prices, bare-faced demands for tips in the once polite city, that the person who knew Paris in the days before the war would turn away in horror. It is a very different Paris from the old days when the French people enjoyed a world reputation for pleasant gentleness, affability and instinctive kind attention.

Cab drivers, of course, always have been discourteous. They are so because they expect never to see their fare again, in a city of tens of thousands of drifting cabs, and have one object: to see how much they can get out of their trip.

It is a safe generalization that no non-French-speaking person ever paid the fare shown on the cab meter and supplemented it with a ten per cent tip without having the cabby follow him into his destination, cursing and raving that he has been cheated. It is simply a case of the cab driver having found that there is as much money in doing that as in driving a cab.

The Paris buses provide the worst instances of the new rudeness. You rise in a bus to offer a lady your seat and a walrus mustached Frenchman plops into it, leaving you and the lady standing. If you say anything to him, he will roar something like this at you: “Eject me if you dare. Try it! Lay just one finger on me and I will have you before the police!”

As a matter of fact, he is in a strongly entrenched position. No matter what the provocation, a foreigner must keep his temper in France. The French engage in some terrific battles with each other, but they are entirely verbal. Once you put a finger on a man, no matter how aggravating the circumstances, you are guilty of assault and go to jail for a term running upward from six months.

Next to the buses and subways, the minor government officials give the most offense to courtesy. These are the door men in parks and museums, not the police; for the police, through the most trying times, have remained courteous, polite and obliging.

For instance, there is the reptile house in the Jardin des Plantes; the great Paris zoological gardens. People were coming out of the door of the reptile house when I went up to it. It was placarded as being open from eleven to three o’clock. It was twelve o’clock when I tried to enter.

“Is the reptile house closed?” I asked.

“Ferme!” the guard said.

“Why is it closed at this hour?” I asked.

“Ferme!” shouted the guard.

“Can you tell when it will be open?” I queried, still polite.

The guard gave me a snarl and said nothing.

“Can you tell me when it will be open?” I asked again.

“What business is that of yours?” said the guard, and slammed the door.

Then there is the office where you go to get your passports stamped in order to leave Paris. There is a large sign on the wall saying the employees are paid and that it is forbidden to tip them. The visa costs two francs forty centimes. I gave the clerk, back of the long board counter, five francs. He made no move to give me any change, and when I stood there he sneered at me and said, “Oh, you want the change do you?” and slammed it down on the counter angrily.

Those are all samples of the type of thing one encounters daily in Paris. Marcel Boulanger, writing in the Figaro, holds out hope for the future.

“But I believe that the soul of good society is still fine enough and at bottom — clear at the bottom, alas — sufficiently gracious,” he says, after deploring the present state of politeness in France.

“Three centuries of civilization and of the spirit of the salon are not to be lost in four or five years. Nothing good is done without trouble. Observe the fashion in which, except in the homes of the newly rich, one introduces the son of a celebrity. One never says in a breath, ‘Monsieur So and So, son of the illustrious Monsieur So and So,’ as if the only reason the son had to exist were to carry the name of his famous father. On the contrary, one shades the introduction in spite of himself: ‘Monsieur So and So,’ says one. Then after an instant, and smiling gently: ‘Monsieur So and So is the son of the illustrious Monsieur So and So.’ Thanks to the pause, the remark takes on the air ‘of a courtesy between you, as if you were congratulating the father’ on having such a son.

“A thousand precautions of taste still are part of the current conversation and may be reinstated. They form a powerful arm which in ordinary times a man carries against wretchedness.”

PARISIAN FASHIONS

At last the balloon-shaped, narrow at the bottom, trousers of the French workman are explained. People have wondered for years why the French workingman wanted to get himself up in great billowy trousers that were so tight at the cuffs as to hardly be able to pull them over his feet. Now it is out. He doesn’t. His wife buys them for him.

Recently at the noon hour in French factories there has been a great trading of clothing by the men. They exchange coats, trousers, hats and shoes. It is a revolt against feminism. For the wife of a French workingman from time immemorial has bought all her husband’s clothes, and now the Frenchman is beginning to protest against it.

Two Frenchmen who served in the same regiment together and had not seen each other since the demobilization, aired their grievance in a bus the other day when they met.

“Your hair, Henri!” said one.

“My wife, old one, she cuts it. But your hair also? It is not too chic!”

“My wife too. She cuts it also. She says barbers are dirty pigs, but at the finish I must give her the same tip as I would give the barber.”

“Ah, the hair is a small matter. Regard these shoes.”

“My poor old friend! Such shoes. It is incredible.”

“It is my wife’s system. She goes into the shoe shop and says, ‘I want a pair of shoes for mon mari. Not expensive. Mon man’s feet are this much longer than mine, I believe, and about this much wider. That will do nicely. Wrap them up.’ Old one, it is terrible!”

“But me also. I am clothed in bargains. What matter if they do not fit? They are bon marche. Still she is a wonderful cook. She is a cook beyond any comparison. My old one, it would take one of your understanding to appreciate what a treasure among cooks she is.”

“Mine also. A cook beyond all price. A jewel of the first water of cooks. What do clothes matter after all?”

It is true. Truly it is true! They are a small matter.”

So in spite of the trading which has been going on in the factories and sporadic outbreaks of protest, the reign of feminism will probably continue.

PARISIAN HATS

Parisian milliners have at last discovered a use for the English sparrow. The sparrow hat has made its appearance on the boulevards and the unpopular little bird has come into its own.

The new hat, of which milliners assure me they are having a big sale, is a brown, mushroom-shaped affair with a girdle of stuffed English sparrows. The sparrows look as though they were nestling against the band of the hat and there are about fifteen of them to a headpiece.

So far the French are resisting the new mode very well, although the milliners are pushing the sparrow creation strongly. Still, you never can tell, it took monkey fur a long time to catch on but the only thing that will ever end the monkey fur rule now is for the monkeys to give out. The peculiar, long-furred monkey has to be imported from Africa and South America and is becoming noticeably scarcer. There will not be that trouble with sparrows at any rate.

THE PARIS-STRASBOURG SHUTTLE

We were sitting in the cheapest of all the cheap restaurants that cheapen that very cheap and noisy street, the Rue des Petite Champs in Paris.

We were Mrs Hemingway, William E. Nash, Mr. Nash’s little brother, and myself. Mr. Nash announced, somewhere between the lobster and the fried sole, that he was going to Munich the next day and was planning to fly from Paris to Strasbourg. Mrs. Hemingway pondered this until the appearance of the rognons sautes aux champignons when she asked, “Why don’t we ever fly anywhere? Why is everybody else always flying and we always staying home?”

That being one of those questions that cannot be answered by words, I went with Mr. Nash to the office of the Franco-Rumanian Aero Company and bought two tickets, half price for journalists, for 120 francs, good for one flight from Paris to Strasbourg. The trip is ten hours and a half by best express train, and takes two hours and a half by plane.

My natural gloom at the prospect of flying, having flown once, was deepened when I learned that we flew over the Vosges Mountains and would have to be at the offices of the company, just off the Avenue de l’Opera, at five o’clock in the morning. The name Rumanian in the title of the firm was not encouraging, but the clerk behind the counter assured me there were no Rumanian pilots.

At five o’clock the next morning we were at the office. We had to get up at four, pack and dress and wake the proprietor of the only taxi in the neighborhood by pounding on his door in the dark, to make it. The proprietor augments his income by doubling at nights as an accordion player in a bal musette and it took a good stiff pounding to wake him.

While he changed a tire we waited in the street and joked with the boy who runs the charcuterie at the corner and who had gotten up to meet the milkman. The grocery boy made us a couple of sandwiches, told us he had been a pilot during the war, and asked me about the first race at Enghien. The taxi driver asked us into his house to have a drink of coffee, being careful to inquire if we preferred white wine, and with the coffee warming us and munching the pate sandwiches, we drove in state down the empty, gray, early morning streets of Paris.

The Nashes were waiting at the office for us, having lugged two heavy suitcases a couple of miles on foot because they did not know any taxi drivers personally. The four of us rode out to Le Bourget, the ugliest ride in Paris, in a big limousine and had some more coffee in a shed there outside the flying field. A Frenchman in an oily jumper took our tickets, tore them in two and told us that we were going in two different planes. Out of the window of the shed we could see them standing, small, silver-painted, taut and shining in the early morning sun in front of the airdrome. We were the only passengers.

Our suitcase was stowed aboard under a seat beside the pilot’s place. We climbed up a couple of steps into a stuffy little cabin and the mechanic handed us some cotton for our ears and locked the door. The pilot climbed into his seat back of the enclosed cockpit where we sat, a mechanic pulled down on the propeller and the engine began to roar. I looked around at the pilot. He was a short little man, his cap backward on his head, wearing an oil-stained sheep-skin coat and big gloves. Then the plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air.

We headed almost straight east of Paris, rising in the air as though we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted slowly by some giant, and the ground began to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand cubist painting.

Sometimes we came down quite low and could see bicyclists on the road looking like pennies rolling along a narrow, white strip. At other times we would lift up and the whole landscape would contract. Always we were bounded by a smoky, purple horizon that made all the earth look flat and uninteresting. And always there was the strong, plugged-out roaring, the porthole windows to look out of, and back of us the open cockpit with the bridge of the pilot’s broad nose and his sheep-skin coat visible with his dirty glove moving the joy stick from side to side or up and down.

We went over great forests that looked as soft as velvet, passed over Bar le Duc and Nancy, gray, red-roofed towns, over St. Mihiel and the front and in an open field I could see the old trenches zig-zagging through a field pocked with shell holes. I shouted to Mrs. Hemingway to look but she didn’t seem to hear me. Her chin was sunk forward into the collar of her new fur coat that she had wanted to christen with a plane trip. She was sound asleep. Five o’clock had been too much.

Beyond the old 1918 front we ran into a storm that made the pilot fly close down to the ground and we followed a canal that we could see below us through the rain. Then after a long stretch of flat, dull looking country we crossed the foothills of the Vosges that seemed to swell up to meet us and moved over the forest-covered mountains that looked as though they rose up and fell away under the plane in the misty rain.

The plane headed high out of the storm into the bright sunlight and we saw the flat, treelined, muddy ribbon of the Rhine off on our right. We climbed higher, made a long left turn and a fine long swoop down that brought our hearts up into our mouths like falling in an elevator and then just as we were above the ground zoomed up again, then settled in another swoop and our wheels touched, bumped, touched, bumped, and then we were roaring along the smooth flying field up to the hangar like any motorcycle.

There was a limousine to meet us to take us in to Strasbourg and we went into the passenger shed to wait for the other plane. The man at the bar asked us if we were going on to Warsaw. It was all very casual and very pleasant. An annoying smell of castor oil from the engine had been the only drawback. Because the plane was small and fast and because we were flying early in the morning, there had been no airsickness.

“When did you have your last accident?” I asked the man back of the refreshment bar.

“The middle of last July,” he said. “Three killed.”

But that very morning in the south of France a slow moving pilgrim train had slipped back from the top of a steep grade and telescoped itself on another train climbing the grade, making matchwood of two coaches and killing over thirty people. There had been a big falling off in business on the Paris-Strasbourg line after the July accident. But the same number of people seem to ride on railway trains.

FRENCH POLITICS

Raymond Poincare is a changed man. Until a few months ago the little white-bearded Lorraine lawyer in his patent leather shoes and his gray gloves dominated the French chamber of deputies with his methodical accountant’s mind and his spitfire temper. Now he sits quietly and forlornly while fat, white-faced Leon Daudet shakes his finger at him and says, “France will do this. France will do that.”

Leon Daudet, son of old Alphonse Daudet, the novelist, is the leader of the Royalist party. He is also editor of l’Action Francaise, the royalist paper, and author of L’Entremetteuse or The Procuress, a novel whose plot could not even be outlined in any newspaper printed in English.

The royalist party is perhaps the most solidly organized in France today. That is a surprising statement to those who think of France as a republic with no thought of ever being anything else. The royalist headquarters are in Nimes in the south of France and Provence is almost solidly royalist. The royalists have the solid support of the Catholic church. It being an easily understood fact that the church of Rome thrives better under European monarchies than under the French republic.

Philippe, the Due of Orleans, is the royalist’s candidate for king. Philippe lives in England, is a big, good-looking man and rides very well to hounds. He is not allowed by law to enter France.

There is a royalist fascisti called the Camelots du Roi. They carry black loaded canes with salmon colored handles and at twilight you can see them in Montmartre swaggering along the streets with their canes, a little way ahead and behind a newsboy who is carrying l’Action Francaise in the radical quarter of the old Butte. Newsboys who carry l’Action Francaise into radical districts without the protecting guard of Camelots are badly beaten up by the communists and socialists.

In the past year the royalists have received a tremendous impetus in some mysterious way. It has come on so rapidly and suddenly that from being more or less of a joke they are now spoken of as one of the very strongest parties. In fact Daudet is marked for assassination by the extreme radicals and men are not assassinated until they are considered dangerous. An attempt on his life was made by an anarchist a month or so ago. The girl assassin killed his assistant, Marius Plateau, by mistake.

General Mangin, the famous commander of attack troops, nicknamed “The Butcher,” is a royalist. He was the only great French general who was not made a marshal. He can always be seen in the chamber of deputies when Leon Daudet is to speak. It is the only time he comes.

Now the royalist party wants no reparations from Germany. Nothing would frighten them more than if Germany should be able to pay in full tomorrow. For that would mean that Germany was becoming strong. What they want is a weak Germany, dismembered if possible, a return to the military glories and conquests of France, the return of the Catholic church, and the return of the king. But being patriotic as all Frenchmen they first want to obtain security by weakening Germany permanently. Their plan to accomplish this is to have the reparations kept at such a figure that will be unpayable and then seize German territory to be held “only until the reparations are paid.”

The very sinister mystery is how they obtained the hold over M. Poincare to force him to fall in with their plan and refuse to even discuss the German industrialists’ proposal to take over the payment of reparations if they were reduced to a reasonable figure. The German industrialists have money, have been making money ever since the armistice, have profited by the fall of the mark to sell in pounds and dollars and pay their workers in useless marks, and have most of those pounds and dollars salted away. But they did not have enough money to pay the reparations as they were listed, no five European nations could, and they wanted to make some sort of a final settlement with the French.

Now, we must get back to little white-whiskered Raymond Poincare, who has the smallest hands and feet of any man I have ever seen, sitting in the chair at the chamber of deputies while the fat, white-faced Leon Daudet, who wrote the obscene novel and leads the royalists and is marked for assassination, shakes his finger at him and says, “France will do this. France will do that.”

To understand what is going on we must remember that French politics are unlike any other. It is a very intimate politics, a politics of scandal. Remember the duels of Clemenceau, the Calmette killing, the figure of the last president of the French republic standing in a fountain at the Bois and saying: “Oh, don’t let them get me. Don’t let them get me.”

A few days ago M. Andre Berthon stood up in the chamber of deputies and said: “Poincaré, you are the prisoner of Leon Daudet. I demand to know by what blackmail he holds you. I do not understand why the government of M. Poincaré submits to the dictatorship of Leon Daudet, the royalist.”

“Tout d’un piece,” all in one piece, as the Matin described it, Poincare jumped up’ and said: “You are an abominable gredin, monsieur.” Now you cannot call a man anything worse than a gredin, although it means nothing particularly bad in English. The chamber rocked with shouts and catcalls. It looked like the free fight in the cigarette factory when Geraldine Farrar first began to play Carmen. Finally it quieted down sufficiently for M. Poincare, trembling and gray with rage, to say: “The man who stands in the Tribune dares to say that there exist against me or mine abominable dossiers which I fear to have made public. I deny it.”

M. Berthon said very sweetly: “I have not mentioned any dossiers.” Dossier is literally a bundle of papers. It is the technical name for the French system of keeping all the documents on the case in a big manila folder. To have a dossier against you is to have all the official papers proving a charge held by someone with the power to use them.

In the end M. Berthon was asked to apologize. “I apologize for any outrageous words I may have used.” He did so very sweetly. It took this form: “I only say, M. le President, that M. Leon Daudet exercises a sort of pressure on your politics.”

This apology was accepted. Poincare, goaded out of his depression to deny the existence of papers that had not been mentioned, is back in his forlornness. You cannot make charges in France unless you hold the papers in your hands and those that do hold dossiers know how to use them.

Last July in a confidential conversation with a number of British and American newspaper correspondents, Poincare, discussing the Ruhr situation, said: “Occupation would be futile and absurd. Obviously Germany can only pay now in goods and labor.” He was a more cheerful Poincare in those days.

Meantime the French government has spent 160 million francs (official) on the occupation and Ruhr coal is costing France $200 a ton.

THE GREAT “APERITIF” SCANDAL

The great “aperitif” scandal that is agitating Paris has struck at the roots of one of the best-loved institutions of France.

Aperitifs, or appetizers, are those tall, bright red or yellow drinks that are poured from two or three bottles by hurried waiters during the hour before lunch and the hour before dinner, when all Paris gathers at the cafes to poison themselves in a cheerful, pre-eating glow. The “aperitifs” are all patented mixtures, contain a high percentage of alcohol and bitters, have a basic taste like a brass doorknob, and go by such names as Amourette, Anis Delloso, Amer Picon, Byrhh, Tommysette and twenty others. Now aperitifs blossom in Paris as new cigarettes do in Toronto. It is simply a matter of advertising and the ratio of the number of persons anxious to try anything new.

The first scandal came when the police discovered that absinthe, which was abolished six years ago, was being sold in great quantities under the name of Anis Delloso. Instead of producing the beautiful green color that minor poets have celebrated to the driest corners of the world, the absinthe manufacturers were turning it out in quantity production as a pale-yellow syrup. It had the familiar licorice taste, however, and turned milky when water was added — and it had the slow, culminating wallop that made the boulevardier want to get up and jump on his new straw hat in ecstasy after the third Delloso.

One loud, glad cry was uttered on the boulevards and in a few days word-of-mouth advertising made Anis Delloso the most popular beverage in the city. It continued until the police suppressed the manufacture of absinthe.

Anis Delloso is still being manufactured. It still has the licorice taste — but the boulevardier waits in vain for the feeling that makes him want to shimmy rapidly up the side of the Eiffel Tower. For it is not absinthe any more.

Now the big scandal is concerned with the fourteenth of July. Bastille Day is the great French holiday. This year it started on Wednesday night, the thirteenth of July, and continued unabated all Wednesday night, all day Thursday, all night Thursday, all day Friday, all night Friday, all day Saturday, all night Saturday, all day Sunday and all night Sunday. All big places of business, department stores and banks were closed from Wednesday afternoon till noon on Monday. It would take about eight columns of closely set type to do justice in any way to that holiday.

Every two blocks there was a street ball where the people of that quarter danced. The street was decorated with colored lanterns and flags and music furnished by the municipality. That all sounds very tame and quiet, but it was not. Orders were given that neither buses nor taxicabs could go down streets where a ball was in progress. As a result there was no traffic.

The music for the ball in the street below our apartment consisted of an accordion, two drummers, a bag-piper and a cornetist. These four courageous and tireless men sat in a wagon box that was placed on four huge wine casks in the street and bowered with branches broken, I believe, from trees in the park. In this sylvan bower they sat, drank, ate, relayed one another on the instruments and played from nine o’clock at night until eight o’clock the next morning, while the crowd polkaed round and round!

This happened on four consecutive nights, while the inhabitants of the quarter had a little sleep in the daytime and the rest of the time jammed the street to dance. It was a wonderful thing to watch between twenty and thirty couples dancing hilariously in the street at seven o’clock in the morning after having danced all night. These were not students or artists or such crazy people, mind you, but shop girls, butchers, bakers and laborers, tram conductors and laundresses, and bookmakers. It was a very great party — but it couldn’t have occurred on water.

Enter the “aperitif” scandal. The government spent some millions of francs on the party. It was all considered wisely spent money in the cause of encouraging patriotism. French flags were everywhere, fireworks went off at all times, there was a great military review at Longchamps at eight o’clock in the morning attended by thousands of people who had danced all night, and went to sleep on the grass. An unbalanced young communist in the last stages of tuberculosis took a shot at a prefect of police by mistake for M. Poincare and the patriotic crowd mobbed him. Everyone agreed that M. Poincare’s life was undoubtedly saved by the fourteenth of July because who could be expected to hit anyone they shot at after such a night as all Paris had just spent? It was a fine celebration.

The scandal consisted in the fact that above all the dancing places, over the heads of the musicians, where the government had placed the French flags and spent money for the music and decorations, were enormous banners advertising the different brands of aperitifs. Over one ball, flanked by the tricolor, would be a great sign Drink Amourette. At another the people of the quartier would be dancing in an ecstasy of patriotism under the legend Vive Anis Dellosso — the Finest Aperitif in the World.

No one seemed to notice the signs to any great extent during the evenings, but once the dancing was over a big inquiry was ordered to investigate why the government spent over two million francs to give the aperitif manufacturers about a million dollars worth of publicity. Several large newspapers have come out against there ever being such a July fourteenth again. There is a real scandal on and the inquiry on the aperitif signs still continues.

Part Four. IN DEFEATED GERMANY

“The Boche have destroyed the flower of France,” Clemenceau had cried. And he was not wrong. Endless, rows of white crosses now spread from Flanders fields south to the banks of the Marne. Six million men, 73 per cent of the French Army, had become casualties in the war. This was reason enough to put the old Tiger into a revengeful mood; reason enough for him to demand a punishment equal to the enormity of the crime.

But crime and punishment were not the only forces at work in the design of a peace treaty for defeated Germany. Fear, hatred and greed shaped history as the Allies maneuvered to rearrange Germany’s place on the map of Europe. After eighteen months of bickering the scene was set. It was June 1919. The stage was the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles.

Unconsulted during the preparation of the peace treaty, the German delegation at Versailles was expected to sign, not argue. The Allies had no inclination to consider changes in the terms. The thick document of Versailles touched mainly on the division of the spoils of war. In melonlike slices, whole provinces, cities, corridors and all of Germany’s overseas colonies were parceled out to the Allies. Cash, raw materials and products would also make up for losses suffered. The term was reparations, and the sum to be repayed was later set at an astronomical 132 billion gold marks.

News of the rigid penalties imposed at Versailles was bitterly received in Germany. The German people had accepted the humility of defeat, not responsibility for the war, and they viewed the peace treaty as a brutal burden. The war had meant suffering and death and yet it seemed almost a lesser evil than the troubles which marked the first years of peace. Kaiser Wilhelm had fled, and the monarchy had crumbled away under the crush of revolution. Into the vacuum stepped a moderate, untried political party — the Social Democrats. Encouraged by the Allies, Germany began its republican experiment.

They named it the Weimar Republic after a town in the picturesque Thuringen forests of central Germany. Weimar was the cultural heartland of the German nation, and it was fitting that the republic should be born in the shadow of Goethe’s garden and that its first laws should be formulated in rooms lined with the books once owned by the philosopher Schiller. The republic’s first president was a former saddler who had come into prominence as a trade union leader. President Friedrich Ebert was honest and hard working, but he was as yet unskilled in the arts of statecraft and his middle-of-the-road government got off to a shaky start. The country was exhausted and the treasury was bankrupt and the economy sagged beneath the twin curses of inflation and unemployment.

The economic paralysis hit all Germans, but it struck hardest at the major supporters of the republic — the middle class. The skidding value of the mark depleted savings and liquidated the cash reserves and stocks of the small businessmen. Rising unemployment emptied the stores and the retail shops shuttered their doors. The disintegration of the German middle class ate away at the very foundations of the Weimar Republic. Ultimately, it would mean the end of a democratic Germany.

As hunger mounted and savings and jobs diminished, the German people lost purpose. As the vestiges of hope vanished, they vented their frustrations on the occupation troops, on the Allies and eventually on the new republic itself. Some turned to the right, hoping to recapture the glory of the past. They longed for the empire of Bismarck and the days of the monarchy. Others, encouraged by Red victory in Russia, looked to the left, seeking a solution to their dilemma in the fables of Marx and Lenin. The rising storm clouds broke. Yet President Ebert and his republic managed somehow to weather the first onslaught.

No sooner had the Communist-led rebellions been put down than the extreme right-wing dissidents took their turn. They captured Berlin in 1920. However, the republic was saved by a general strike which brought the life of the city to a halt and drove the revolutionaries from control. Other attempts followed. One happened in Munich in 1923 where ultra-nationalists battled police in the streets, only to have their success frustrated by the failure of monarchist sympathizers to join the battle. The leader of this “beer-hall putsch” was Adolf Hitler, and he got five years in jail for his trouble.

For six years, from 1919 to 1925, President Ebert clung to his office. And during that time Germany sank into an ever-deepening morass of despair. The Versailles Treaty, drafted in the name of justice, had been saddled on a sick nation and an unhappy, directionless people. This was the soil from which would spring the seedlings of fascism and another, even more terrible, world war.

Ernest Hemingway visited Germany twice during the first years of the German Republic: once in 1922, again in 1923. He went reluctantly, for he hated the Germans. He held them responsible for the war and, indirectly, for his own battle wounds. But the undercurrent of scorn and distrust reflected in his early articles was later to be tempered with a certain pity born from the tragedy he found.

Although Hemingway reported almost nothing on the politics of Germany, he sensed the disaster that lay ahead. He caught a glimpse of it written on the hate-etched faces of the people, felt it in the riot-torn streets, and saw it burn in the eyes of hungry women and children.

Here are Ernest Hemingway’s reports. Here is the story of a nation and its people — trapped between hell and fury...

GETTING INTO GERMANY QUITE A JOB

In Paris they said it was very difficult to get into Germany. No tourists allowed. No newspaper men wanted. The German consulate will not visa a passport without a letter from a consulate or chamber of commerce in Germany saying, under seal, it is necessary for the traveler to come to Germany for a definite business transaction. The day I called at the consulate it had been instructed to amend the rules to permit invalids to enter for the “cure” if they produced a certificate from the doctor of the health resort they were to visit showing the nature of their ailment.

“We must preserve the utmost strictness,” said the German consul and reluctantly and suspiciously after much consultation of files gave me a visa good for three weeks.

“How do we know you will not write lies about Germany?” he said before he handed back the passport.

“Oh, cheer up,” I said.

To get the visa. I had given him a letter from our embassy, printed on stiff crackling paper and bearing an enormous red seal which informed “whom it may concern,” that Mr. Hemingway, the bearer, was well and favorably known to the embassy and had been directed by his newspaper, The Toronto Star, to proceed to Germany and report on the situation there. These letters do not take long to get, commit the embassy to nothing, and are as good as diplomatic passports.

The very gloomy German consular attache was folding the letter and putting it away.

“But you cannot have the letter. It must be retained to show cause why the visa was given.”

“But I must have the letter.”

“You cannot have the letter.”

A small gift was made and received.

The German, slightly less gloomy, but still not happy: “But tell me why was it you wanted the letter so?”

Me, ticket in pocket, passport in pocket, baggage packed, train not leaving till midnight, some articles mailed, generally elated. “It is a letter of introduction from Sarah Bernhardt, whose funeral you perhaps witnessed today, to the Pope. I value it.”

German, sadly and slightly confused: “But the Pope is not in Germany.”

Me, mysteriously, going out the door: “One can never tell.”

IN DEFEATED GERMANY

In the cold, gray, street-washing, milk-delivering, shutters-coming-off-the-shops, early morning, the midnight train from Paris arrived in Strasbourg. There was no train running from Strasbourg into Germany. The Munich Express, the Orient Express, the Direct for Prague? They had all gone. According to the porter I might get a tram across Strasbourg to the Rhine and then walk across into Germany and there at Kehl get a military train for Offenburg. There would be a train for Kehl sooner or later, no one quite knew, but the tram was much better.

On the front platform of the street car, with a little ticket window opening into the car through which the conductor accepted a franc for myself and two bags, we clanged along through the winding streets of Strasbourg in the early morning. There were sharp peaked plastered houses criss-crossed with great wooden beams, the river wound and rewound through the town and each time we crossed it there were fishermen on the banks, there was the wide modern street with modern German shops with big glass show windows and new French names over their doors, butchers were unshuttering their shops and with their assistants hanging the big carcasses of beeves and horses outside the doors, a long stream of carts was coming in to market from the country, streets were being flushed and washed. I caught a glimpse down a side street of the great red stone cathedral. There was a sign in French and another in German forbidding anyone to talk to the motor-man and the motorman chatted in French and German to his friends who got on the car as he swung his levers and checked or speeded our progress along the narrow streets and out of the town.

In the stretch of country that lies between Strasbourg and the Rhine the tram track runs along a canal and a big blunt nosed barge with Lusitania painted on its stern was being dragged smoothly along by two horses ridden by the bargeman’s two children while breakfast smoke came out of the galley chimney and the bargeman leaned against the sweep. It was a nice morning.

At the ugly iron bridge that runs across the Rhine into Germany the tram stopped. We all piled out. Where last July at every tram there had formed a line like the queue outside an arena hockey match there were only four of us. A gendarme looked at the passports. He did not even open mine. A dozen or so French gendarmes were loafing about. One of these came up to me as I started to carry my bags across the long bridge over the yellow, flooded, ugly, swirling Rhine and asked: “How much money have you?”

I told him one hundred and twenty-five dollars “Americain” and in the neighborhood of one hundred francs.

“Let me see your pocketbook.”

He looked in it, grunted and handed it back. The twenty-five five-dollar bills I had obtained in Paris for mark-buying made an impressive roll. “No gold money?”

“Mais non, monsieur.”

He grunted again and I walked, with the two bags, across the long iron bridge, past the barbed wire entanglement with its two French sentries in their blue tin hats and their long needle bayonets, into Germany.

Germany did not look very cheerful. A herd of beef cattle were being loaded into a box car on the track that ran down to the bridge. They were entering reluctantly with much tail-twisting and whacking of their legs. A long wooden custom’s shed with two entrances, one marked Nach Frankreich and one Nach Deutschland, stood next to the track. A German soldier was sitting on an empty gasoline tin smoking a cigarette. A woman in an enormous black hat with plumes and an appalling collection of hat boxes, parcels and bags was stalled opposite the cattleloading process. I carried three of the bundles for her into the shed marked Toward Germany.

“You are going to Munich too?” she asked, powdering her nose.

“No. Only Offenburg.”

“Oh, what a pity. There is no place like Munich. You have never been there?”

“No, not yet.”

“Let me tell you. Do not go anywhere else. Anywhere else in Germany is a waste of time. There is only Munich.”

A gray-headed German customs inspector asked me where I was going, whether I had anything dutiable, and waved my passport away. “You go down the road to the regular station.”

The regular station had been the important customs junction on the direct line between Paris and Munich. It was deserted. All the ticket windows closed. Everything covered with dust. I wandered through it to the track and found four French soldiers of the 170th Infantry Regiment, with full kit and fixed bayonets.

One of them told me there would be a train at 11:15 for Offenburg, a military train: it was about half an hour to Offenburg, but this droll train would get there about two o’clock. He grinned. Monsieur was from Paris? What did monsieur think about the match Criqui-Zjawnny Kilbane? Ah. He had thought very much the same. He had always had the idea that he was no fool, this Kilbane. The military service? Well, it was all the same. It made no difference where one did it. In two months now he would be through. It was a shame he was not free, perhaps we could have a talk together. Monsieur had seen this Kilbane box? The new wine was not bad at the buffet. But after all he was on guard. The buffet is straight down the corridor. If monsieur leaves the baggage here it will be all right.

In the buffet was a sad-looking waiter in a dirty shirt and soup-and-beer-stained evening clothes, a long bar and two forty-year-old French second lieutenants sitting at a table in the corner. I bowed as I entered, and they both saluted.

“No,” the waiter said, “there is no milk. You can have black coffee, but it is ersatz coffee. The beer is good.”

The waiter sat down at the table. “No, there is no one here now,” he said. “All the people you say you saw in July cannot come now. The French will not give them passports to come into Germany.”

“All the people that came over here to eat don’t come now?” I asked.

“Nobody. The merchants and restaurant keepers in Strasbourg got angry and went to the police because everybody was coming over here to buy and eat so much cheaper, and now nobody in Strasbourg can get passports to come here.”

“How about all the Germans who worked in Strasbourg?” Kehl was a suburb of Strasbourg before the peace treaty, and all their interests and industries were the same.

“That is all finished. Now no Germans can get passports to go across the river. They could work cheaper than the French, so that is what happened to them. All our factories here are shut down. No coal. No trains. This was one of the biggest and busiest stations in Germany. Now nix. No trains, except the military trains, and they run when they please.”

Four poilus came in and stood up at the bar. The waiter greeted them cheerfully in French. He poured out their new wine, cloudy and golden in their glasses, and came back and sat down.

“How do they get along with the French here in town?”

“No trouble. They are good people. Just like us. Some of them are nasty sometimes, but they are good people. Nobody hates, except profiteers. They had something to lose. We haven’t had any fun since 1914. If you make any money it gets no good, and there is only to spend it. That is what we do. Someday it will be over. I don’t know how. Last year I had enough money saved up to buy a gasthaus in Hernberg; now that money wouldn’t buy four bottles of champagne.”

I looked up at the wall where the prices were:

Beer, 350 marks a glass.

Red wine, 500 marks a glass.

Sandwich, 900 marks.

Lunch, 3,500 marks.

Champagne, 38,000 marks.

I remembered that last July I stayed at a de luxe hotel with Mrs. Hemingway for 600 marks a day.

“Sure,” the waiter went on. “I read the French papers. Germany debases her money to cheat the allies. But what do I get out of it?”

There was a shrill peep of a whistle outside. I paid and shook hands with the waiter, saluted the two forty-year-old second lieutenants, who were now playing checkers at their table, and went out to take the military train to Offenburg.

A FOREIGNER IN GERMANY

Traveling in Germany now is exactly as much fun as strap hanging in an Avenue road car [Toronto bus] during the crest of the rush hour.

The railways lose money with every train they run, and as a result the minimum of cars hold the maximum of passengers jammed in the corridors like nails in a keg. Yesterday in Frankfurt at six o’clock in the morning there was a crowd of people big enough to fill any ordinary train, strung out along the track waiting for the Amsterdam express which was switching in the yards. When the express pulled in, the passengers debarked, and the crowd was allowed to board the train, the corridors were still packed and every seat taken. But they all jammed in somehow or other.

No matter what your views on the reparations problem may be, nor how much you may see the necessity for allowing Germany to recover into a prosperous nation in order to assure the stability of Europe, you cannot admire the way German men treat their wives. In order to not indict a whole people for the acts of a few that sentence is amended to read “the German men I have seen in the last four weeks in various parts of Germany.”

Here is an example. The kellner comes through the train announcing the third service in the dining car. A German gentleman in the compartment rises, hands the illustrated papers he has been reading to his wife, and disappears toward the dining car. He returns an hour and a half later bearing a very beery breath and parts of rolls stuffed with bits of cheese. These he hands to his wife, who munches them avidly. German gentleman resumes the illustrated papers. The family has dined.

There was the other German gentleman who reached for his rucksack. The rucksack fell from the luggage rack striking his wife on the head. Tears came into the wife’s eyes. The German gentleman looked annoyed. “You’re not hurt,” he said to the wife. Probably he was afraid that if he didn’t check that sort of thing right at the start the wife might get to feeling that there was something the matter with her and be unable to carry the rucksack.

Then of course, there was the other German gentleman who was determined to obtain a seat in a fully occupied, first-class compartment. There are three places on each side of a first-class compartment. This distinguishes it from the second class, which has four, the third class, with six, and the fourth class, which seats eight on a side.

In this particular case all the places were occupied, but an old lady who sat next to the window was standing up and looking out. We were stalled. Part of the train had run off the track. The German gentleman entered, followed by his wife, and sat down in the old lady’s place. The old lady next sat down and being very near-sighted and not knowing that someone had appropriated her place, sat down on the German gentleman’s lap.

His face never moved. He just sat there. The old lady jumped up and looked at him in terror. The German gentleman’s wife blushed and went out of the compartment.

He just sat there, his face as stolid as a ham, and the old lady looked out of the window, her lips trembling.

I thought of the Niagara of words a Frenchwoman would have turned loose, the way she would have torn into the big sulky looking beast. But there was no outbreak. The old lady was simply frightened. She had evidently been through this sort of affair before.

In the present state of things in Germany foreigners do not start rows. They spend most of their time swallowing insults in order to avoid being mobbed. My own theory had been that if the Germans had no scruples about killing Rathenau they would have even less about killing me — and I have trod very softly. But things in the compartment had reached the point where I was wondering what sort of weapon a tennis racket in its frame would really make and rehearsing the eleven variations, of the one best Way to cripple a man.

Of course the obvious way to bring on the trouble was to get up and give the old lady my seat. That is always regarded as a casus belli by every seated male in a German street car. Just then the wife opened the compartment door and said that she had found him a seat further up the train. The German gentleman remained seated a few minutes longer, just to show that he could if he wished, and then went out. The old lady sat down very thankfully.

German home life is supposed to be a very fine and perfect thing. It has such beautiful features as the mother and father and little children all gathering to drink beer together, and the little children are allowed such touching and rare intimacies as fetching father’s slippers, lighting father’s pipe, etc. But the part of it that appears in public conveyances has somehow lost its charm.

AT A GERMAN INN

We came slipping and sliding down the steep, rocky trail through the shadowed light of the pine trees and out into a glaring clearing where a saw mill and a white plastered gasthaus baked in the sun.

A German police dog barked at us, a man stuck his head out of the door of the gasthaus and looked at us. We were not sure this was the place we had been sent to, so we walked a little way down the road that ran through the clearing to see if there was another inn in sight. There was nothing but the valley, the white road, the river and the steep wooded hills. We had been walking since early in the morning and we were hungry.

Inside the inn Bill Bird and I found the proprietor and his wife sitting at a table eating onion soup.

“Please can we get two double rooms?” Bill asked.

The proprietor’s wife started to answer and the proprietor glared at her while onion soup dribbled through his mustache. “You can’t get rooms here today or tomorrow or any other time, Auslanders,” he snarled.

“Herr Trinckler in Triberg recommended us to come here for the fishing,” Bill said trying to mollify him.

“Trinckler?” His lower lip reached up and swept a ration of soup out of the mustache. “Trinckler, eh? Trinckler is not the man who runs this place.” He went back to the soup.

Bill and I each had a wife out in the clearing. Said wives had begun to be hungry about four miles back up the trail over the mountain. I, myself, was so hungry that my stomach was beginning to rumble and turn over on itself. Bill is built on the lean and graceful lines of an early Italian primitive. Any food he eats shows up on him at once like an ostrich swallowing a baseball. He looked leaner than ever. So we were very polite.

“We are very hungry,” Bill said, and I can state that he looked it. “How far is it to the next gasthaus?”

The proprietor pounded on the table. “You’ll have to find that out for yourselves.”

We found it at the end of four miles of hot, white road and it wasn’t much to look at. Like most Schwartzwald inns it was named Gasthaus zum Roessle or Inn of the Pony. The pony is the favorite symbol of the Black Forest inn keeper but there are plenty of Adlers (eagles) and Sonnes (suns).

All these inns are white plastered and clean looking outside and uniformly neat and dirty inside. The sheets are short, the feather beds are lumpy, the mattresses are bright red, the beer is good, the wine is bad, dinner is at noon, you have to select your slice of black bread carefully to make sure you are missing a sour one, the proprietor never understands what you say, his wife twists her apron strings and shakes her head, there are workmen with their suspenders over their undershirts eating hunks of black bread they carve off the loaf with a pocket knife and wash down with sour wine, the beams of the ceiling are dark and smoky, chickens scratch in the front yard and the manure pile smokes below the bedroom windows.

The particular pony inn we stopped at had all these attributes and a few more. It had a good meal of fried veal, potatoes, lettuce salad, and apple pie served by the proprietor who looked as stolid as an ox and sometimes stopped with a plate of soup in his hand to stare vacantly out of the window. His wife had a face like a camel. That peculiar lift of the head and look of utter stupidity that belongs only to the Bactrian and the South German peasant woman.

It was a hot day outside but the inn was cool and dim and we ate a big dinner with our rucksacks piled in a corner. A table of Germans in the corner kept glancing over at us. When we were on the second bottle of beer and the last of the washbowl full of salad, a tall, dark-haired woman came over to our table and asked us if we were not speaking English.

That was not very hard to answer and it developed that she was an American singer studying opera in Berlin. She looked about forty-five, but like all good singers she had at last discovered that all her life she had been on the wrong track, had been the victim of bad teachers and now she was at last on the right track. Elsa Sembry was teaching her and she was really teaching her. It was Sembry’s great secret. Something about the glottis or the epiglottis. I could not make out quite which. But it makes all the difference in the world. You depress one and elevate the other and that is all there is to it.

Mrs. Hemingway and Mrs. Bird went upstairs into one of the little white-washed rooms to go to sleep on the squeaky beds after their fifteen-mile walk. Mrs. Hemingway’s and Mrs. Bird’s walk, not the bed’s walk; and Bill and I went on down the road to find the town of Oberprechthal and try and get fishing licenses. We were sitting in front of the Gasthaus zur Sonne engaged in an intense conversation with the proprietor, which was proceeding very well as long as I kept my German out of it, when the singer appeared. She was carrying a notebook under her arm. She was in a confiding mood.

Her voice it seemed — you understand she was telling us all this in the absolutely impersonal manner with which all singers discuss their voices — was a coloratura soprano that had been favorably compared with Melba’s and Patti’s.

“Gatti-Cazzaza said I needed just a little more seasoning,” she explained. “That’s why I’m here. But you ought to here me trill” — she trilled softly and through her nose— “I never thought much of Galli-Curci. She’s not really a singer, you know. Listen to this.” She trilled again, a little louder and a little more through her nose. I was impressed. I had never heard anyone trill so softly through their nose or so loudly and clearly through their nose. It was an experience.

She then told us that Mary Garden could not sing, that Yvonne Gall was a burn, that Tetrazzini was a washout, that Mabel Garrison was a flat tire. After demolishing these impostors she again spoke in a cool impersonal manner of her own indistinguishability from Patti and Melba. We then went back up the road to our inn.

At dinner that night we ran into our second example of German nastiness — and there have only been two examples encountered in two weeks in the Black Forest. The trip isn’t over yet, but those two are plenty.

Our table was set for five, the singer had joined us, and when we came into the dining room of the inn to sit down we found there were two blond-haired Germans sitting at the end of the table placed very close to ours. To avoid disturbing them my wife walked all the way around the table. They then changed their seats, and Mrs. Bird had to walk all the way around the other side of the table. While we were eating they kept up a fire of comment in German on us Auslanders. Then they got up to go. They started to come past our end of the table and I moved my chair forward to let them by. The space was too narrow. There was a perfectly clear way for them to get out around the other end of the table. Instead, they grabbed my chair and pushed it. I stood up and let them through, and have regretted it ever since.

Early in married life I discovered that the secret of marital happiness did not lie in engaging in brawls in a public house.

“We are Germans,” announced one of the two sneeringly.

“Du bist ein schweinhund,” I said, which was undoubtedly ungrammatical but seemed understandable. Bill grabbed a bottle by the neck. It looked like the beginning of an international incident.

They stood in the door a minute, but the odds evidently looked too even and workingmen at the next table seemed to be siding with us.

“Schieber!” one of them said, looking up at the two sport-clothed, round heads in the door. Schieber means profiteer.

The door closed. They went out.

“If I could only speak German,” I lamented. It is bad to possess a fairly extensive vocabulary and to have a feeling of being dumb when someone is cursing you out.

“Do you know what you ought to have said to them?” said the singer, in an instructive manner. “You ought to have asked them who won the war? Or have said, ‘Yes it is easy to see that you are Germans.’ I wish I had thought to say the things I thought of.”

That continued for some time. Then she began to trill. She trilled a great many operas while we sat in the smoky inn. However, that night we all went out walking up the road between the black pine hills with a thin fingernail paring of a moon in the sky, and the singer stepped in a puddle. The next morning the singer had a hoarse voice and she couldn’t sing very well. But she did the best she could at demonstrating the use of glottis to Mrs. Bird and the rest of us all went fishing.

AMATEUR STARVERS

Traveling on fast trains, stopping at the hotels selected for him by the Messrs. Cook, usually speaking no language but his own, the tourist sees no suffering in Europe.

If he comes to Germany, even traveling quite extensively, he will see no suffering. There are no beggars. No horrible examples on view. No visible famine sufferers or hungry children that besiege the railway stations.

The tourist leaves Germany wondering what all this starving business is about. The country looks prosperous. On the contrary in Naples he has seen crowds of ragged, filthy beggars, sore-eyed children, a hungry looking horde. Tourists see the professional beggars, but they do not see the amateur starvers.

For every ten professional beggars in Italy there a hundred amateur starvers in Germany. An amateur starver does not starve in public.

On the contrary no one knows the amateur is starving until they find him. They usually find him in bed. A very hungry person does not walk the streets after a certain length of time. It sharpens that feeling that is dulled by bed. In writing of amateur starvers no reference is meant to the inhabitants of bread lines, soup kitchens or rescue missions. They have violated their strictly amateur standing.

A few case histories of amateur starvers are appended.

No. 1: Frau B. is the widow of the owner of an apothecary shop, who died before the war. She has a yearly income of 26,400 marks, the interest on mortgages. Before the war this yielded her $100 a week. Her 29-year-old daughter is suffering from lung trouble and cannot work. Her 21-year-old son passed the final examination at the grammar school, but cannot go to the university, and is earning his living as a miner. Another 13-year-old boy is in school. The family was formerly very well to do. Today their income for one year is the minimum for the existence of a family of four persons for a period of two weeks.

No. 2: The married couple P., 64 years old, who have been blind for the last ten years, receive from their capital, which they earned by hard work, an income of 3,400 marks a year. They were formerly able to live comfortably on this income. Today it represents half a week’s wages of an unskilled laborer.

No. 3: Frau B., widow of an architect, is obliged to live with her two children of 9 and 6 years, on a yearly income of 2,400 marks. This represents less than two days’ earnings of a laborer.

No. 4: The married couple K. receive 500 marks a month from the rent of their house. The husband, formerly a farmer, is suffering from heart trouble. A short time ago he was in bed a number of weeks as a result of poisoning. For six weeks the wife has been almost completely paralyzed. The medicines necessary for their illness cost more than their income. In normal times the income derived from the rent would have afforded these people a comfortable existence.

No. 5: The widow H., 48 years old, has four children, three of whom still attend school. She has a capital of 100,- 000 marks. This gives her 15,000 marks yearly. On this the family can live for one week.

These cases are not exceptional or isolated. They are typical of the situation of those people of the middle class in Germany who are dependent on a fixed income from savings. Neither are they German propaganda cases. All are taken from an appeal for the starving of Cologne signed by Mr. J. I. Piggott, commissioner. The Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission and Mr. D. W. P. Thurston, C.M. G., H.M. consul general, Cologne.

Cologne itself looks prosperous. The shop windows are brilliant. Streets are clean. British officers and men move smartly along through the crowds. The green-uniformed German police salute the British officers rigidly.

In the evening the brilliant red or the dark blue of the officer’s formal mess kit that is compulsory for those officers who dine in Cologne, colors the drab civilian crowds. Outside in the street German children dance on the pavement to the music that comes from the windows of the ball room of the officers’ club.

Coming down the broad flood of the Rhine on a freight boat from Wiesbaden through the gloomy brown hills with their ruined castles, that look exactly like the castles in gold fish bowls, in 14 hours on the river, we only passed 15 loaded coal barges. All were flying the French flag.

Last September, in an express passenger boat, we passed an endless succession of them moving up the river toward the canal mouth that would take them, by a network of quiet waterways, to feed the Lorraine furnaces. Then France was getting the hundreds of barges of coal as part of German reparation payment. Now the fifteen barges we passed were part of the thin stream of coal that trickles out of the Ruhr through the mazes of arrested industry and military occupation.

RIOTS

British officers back from Silesia tell how British troops had to escort the French troops out of the country after the plebiscite in order to prevent attacks that would have brought on bloody fighting.

The British guard over the departing French troops prevented an outbreak, but the Germans’ hatred of the French was so great that they exacted reprisals on their own people who had been over-friendly with the occupying army. German women who had been seen in public with French officers were seized, their heads were shaved and they were hooted around the streets. Other German girls known to have closer relationship with French officers, had their clothes torn off, their heads shaved, and were driven out of their towns.

The enormous equestrian statue of William Hohenzollern that stands at the Cologne side of the beautiful Hohenzollern bridge across the Rhine, bears the marks of another recent occasion when the German showed what he is still capable of being. Both spurs on William’s giant iron boots were broken off and the blade of his sword is gone. These were smashed off in an attempt by some of the Cologne citizenry to overthrow the big statue in a brawl that started to be a revolution and ended in a small-sized riot.

During the attack on the statue a policeman appeared and tried to quiet the mob. The mob threw the policeman into the river. In the cold, swift, swirl of the Rhine against the base of the bridge, the policeman hung on to one of the abutments and shouted up that he knew who was in the mob and would see that they were all punished. So the mob swarmed down and tried to push the policeman loose into the current. It meant drowning for the policeman to let go — and he hung on. Then the mob chopped his fingers loose from the stone with the hatchet with which they had been attacking the statue.

It was a German policeman and a German mob. And all over Germany conflict goes on between German police and German mobs. In the north there are riots against the high cost of living, that are quelled by the police with machine guns. In the south there are riotous demonstrations in favor of Hindenburg, Ludendorff and a return to the monarchy in Munich at which the police quell the dissenting republicans with clubs.

Meantime, in order that the profiteers on both sides shall not allow any of the money being spent to get out of their hands, Herr Stinnes and a group of French contractors have concluded an agreement that all material supplied by Germany to France for reconstruction shall come through Herr Hugo Stinnes.

Stinnes is to receive six per cent by the agreement on everything that passes through his hands. It is the final refinement of the whole profiteering business, whereby the profiteers of both countries get together and form a profiteers’ trust, so that nothing can get away from them at either end. And the great reconstructed-devastated-regions scandal, which is beginning to be talked about under their breath by many people as a coming blow-up that will make the Panama canal scandal and the famous Marconi scandal pale into nothing in comparison, gets nearer and nearer.

THE GERMAN MARK — IN TROUBLE

The German people, according to their temperaments, are watching the plunge to worthlessness of their currency with dogged sullenness or hysterical desperation.

Last November the Austrian crown stood where the German mark does today — at 800 to the dollar. Now it has dropped to 27,000 to the dollar. That is the reason the German newspapers publish the daily price of the mark in black type in the most important place on their front pages.

The debacle of the mark has made a significant change in the attitude of the Germans toward foreigners. A year ago, with the mark at 130 to the dollar, British, Canadian and American correspondents were accorded all sorts of special facilities by the German foreign office. The Germans hated the French and tried to make things as hard for them as possible, but the other nations were regarded as Germany’s possible friends in the future. Now there are no privileges for anyone. All foreigners are outlanders and enemies. For Germany is going down to ruin and her only satisfaction is that she will probably take a nation or two, now supposedly in fairly sound financial shape, with her.

One of the strange results of the depreciation of German money is the money shortage. The more money is printed the more is needed. As a result banks are frequently out of money since a factory owner with a weekly pay roll to meet may come in and take out three bushels of marks. Every store has to have great packages of fifty and hundred-mark notes for making change. The government to meet the shortage has printed five-hundred-mark “temporary” notes that are simply government I.O.U.’s printed on plain, white bank-note paper saying that in January, 1923, the holder of this note will receive a real five hundred-mark note.

There is said to be wild spending because Germans have tired of seeing their money lose its purchasing power by half again and again and are buying jewels, fur coats, motor cars and other things that will have a certain amount of real value when the marks that bought them are being used for soap wrappers.

These spending orgies, which you read about in the German papers but never encounter, are confined to Berlin, Hamburg and other places that were always more or less orgy centers. In a little town like Freiburg Im Breisgau you run into a sort of dogged, blind resistance by the merchants to the fact that the mark is tobogganing which keeps prices from going up in any sort of proportion to the fall of the currency.

Four of us stayed four days in a Freiburg hotel and the bill amounted to 2,200 marks, or about twenty cents a day apiece. The terrific taxes that you read so much about totaled less than fifteen cents on the entire stay. Tips were included.

Freiburg seemed to be going on very well. Every room in every hotel in town was filled. There were strings of German hikers with rucksacks on their backs going through the town all day long, bound for the Black Forest. Streams of clear water flowed in the deep gutters on each side of the clean, scrubbed-looking streets. The red stone gothic spire of the red stone cathedral stuck up above the red-tiled roofs of the houses. The market place was jammed on Saturday morning with women with white handkerchiefs over their heads selling the fruit and vegetables they had brought in ox carts from the country. All the shops were open and prices were very low. It looked peaceful, happy and comfortable.

We saw a girl in a coffee shop eating a breakfast of ice cream and pretzels, sitting across the table from an officer in full uniform with an iron cross on his chest, his flat back even more impressive than his lean, white face, and we saw mothers feeding their rosy faced children beer out of the big half liter steins.

We saw no evidence of panic, republicanism or malnutrition. Everyone looked well fed, no one seemed panicky, although no one seemed happy, and there were pictures of Frederick, King of Baden, and his queen on the walls of every inn and pub.

The alarming part of the business, and the reason that Germany has so far defied all the economic laws that indicated a complete collapse, is the way the German merchants are selling their goods. They are selling goods now at retail prices that are less than half of what the goods would cost them to buy again wholesale.

“But what can we do?” a storekeeper said to me. “If we charged any higher prices the people would not buy. We have to sell.”

It is a solution to a problem that would start the average economist gibbering. He could have a good gibber at the problem and then the German’s solution of it would intensify his gibber into the finest product of the gibberer’s art. If you have nothing else to do you might figure out what will happen to the German storekeeper when they have to replenish the stocks they are selling at half under future cost price.

The great national fire sale cannot last forever. While it is going on, however, the German storekeeper takes out his wrath on the foreigners who buy from him by acting as nastily as he can without forcing them out of the shop. He believes they are the cause of the fire, but he seems to feel he is in the position of a shopkeeper who is forced to sell goods at a fire sale to the men who set his shop on fire. That is his attitude, and he manages to be pretty nasty about it.

The man in a Strasbourg motor agency where we went to make some inquiries about crossing the frontier, said, “Oh, yes. It’s easy to get over into Germany. All you have to do is go across the bridge.”

“Don’t you need any visa?” I asked.

“No. Just a permit stamp to go from the French.” He? took his passport out of his pocket and showed the back covered with rubber stamps. “See? I live there now because it is so much cheaper. It’s the way to make money.”

It is all right.

It is a three-mile street car ride from the center of Strasbourg out to the Rhine and when you get to the end of the line the car stops and everyone piles out to herd into a long picket-fenced pen that leads to the bridge. A French soldier with a fixed bayonet loafs back and forth across the road and watches the girls in the passport pen from under his steel blue helmet. There is an ugly brick custom house at the left of the bridge and a wooden shed at the right where a French official sits behind a counter and stamps passports.

The Rhine is swift, yellow and muddy, runs between low, green banks, and swirls and sucks at the concrete abutments of the long, iron bridge. At the other end of the bridge you see the ugly little town of Kehl looking like some dreary section of Dundas.

If you are a French citizen with a French passport the man back of the counter simply stamps your passport sortie Pont du Kehl and you go across the bridge into occupied Germany. If you are a citizen of some other of the allied countries the official looks at you suspiciously, asks you where you are from, what you are going to Kehl for, how long you are going to stay, and then stamps your passport with the same sortie. If you should happen to be a citizen of Kehl who has been in Strasbourg on business and is returning to dinner — and as Kehl’s interests are bound up in Strasbourg’s as all suburbs are to the city they are attached to, you would be bound to have to go to Strasbourg on business if you had any kind of a business at all — you are held in line for fifteen to twenty minutes, your name looked up in a card index to see if you have ever spoken against the French regime, your pedigree taken, questions put to you, and finally you too are given the same old sortie. Everyone can cross the bridge, but the French make it very nasty for the Germans.

Once across the muddy Rhine you are in Germany and the German end of the bridge is guarded by a couple of the meekest and most discouraged-looking German soldiers you have ever seen. Two French soldiers, with fixed bayonets, walk up and down and the two German soldiers, unarmed, lean against a wall and look on. The French soldiers are in full equipment and steel helmets, but the Germans wear the old loose tunics and high-peaked, peace-time caps.

I asked a Frenchman the functions and duties of the German guard.

“They stand there,” he answered.

There were no marks to be had in Strasbourg, the mounting exchange had cleaned the bankers out days ago, so we changed some French money in the railway station at Kehl. For ten francs I received 670 marks. Ten francs amounted to about ninety cents in Canadian money. That ninety cents lasted Mrs. Hemingway and me for a day of heavy spending and at the end of the day we had one hundred and twenty marks left!

Our first purchase was from a fruit stand beside the main street of Kehl where an old woman was selling apples, peaches and plums. We picked out five very good-looking apples and gave the old woman a fifty-mark note. She gave us back thirty-eight marks in change. A very nice-looking, white-bearded old gentleman saw us buy the apples and raised his hat.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said, rather timidly, in German, “how much were the apples?”

I counted the change and told him twelve marks.

He smiled and shook his head. “I can’t pay it. It is too much.”

He went up the street walking very much as white-bearded old gentlemen of the old regime walk in all countries, but he had looked very longingly at the apples. I wish I had offered him some. Twelve marks, on that day, amounted to a little under two cents. The old man, whose life’s savings were probably, as most of the non-profiteer classes are, invested in German prewar and war bonds, could not afford a twelve-mark expenditure. He is a type of the people whose income does not increase with the falling purchasing value of the mark and the krone.

With marks at 800 to the dollar, or eight to the cent we priced articles in the windows of the different Kehl shops. Peas were 18 marks a pound, beans 16 marks, a pound of Kaiser coffee, there are still many “Kaiser” brands in the German republic, could be had for 34 marks. Gersten coffee, which is not coffee at all but roasted grain, sold for 14 marks a pound. Fly paper was 150 marks a package. A scythe blade cost 150 marks, too, or seven and three-quarter cents! Beer was ten marks a stein or one cent and a quarter.

Kehl’s best hotel, which is a very well-turned-out place, served a five-course table d’hote meal for 120 marks, which amounts to fifteen cents in our money. The same meal could not be duplicated in Strasbourg, three miles away, for a dollar.

Because of the customs regulations which are very strict on persons returning from Germany, the French cannot come over to Kehl and buy up all the cheap goods they would like to. But they can come over and eat. It is a sight every afternoon to see the mob that storms the German pastry shops and tea places. The Germans make very good pastries, wonderful pastries, in fact, that, at the present tumbling mark rate, the French of Strasbourg can buy for a less amount apiece than the smallest French coin, the one-sou piece. This miracle of exchange makes a swinish spectacle where the youth of the town of Strasbourg crowd into the German pastry shops to eat themselves sick and gorged on fluffy cream-filled slices of German cake at five marks the slice. The contents of a pastry shop are swept clear in half an hour.

In a pastry shop we visited, a man in an apron, wearing blue glasses, appeared to be the proprietor. He was assisted by a typical “boche”-looking German with close-cropped head. The place was jammed with French people of all ages and descriptions, all gorging cakes, while a young girl in a pink dress, silk stockings, with a pretty, weak face and pearl earrings in her ears took as many of their orders for fruit and vanilla ices as she could fill.

She didn’t seem to care very much whether she filled the orders or not. There were soldiers in town and she kept going over to look out of the window.

The proprietor and his helper were surly and didn’t seem particularly happy when all the cakes were sold. The mark was falling faster than they could bake. Meanwhile out in the street a funny little train jolted by, carrying the workmen with their dinner pails home to the outskirts of the town, profiteers’ motor cars tore by, raising a cloud of dust that settled over the trees and the fronts of all the buildings, and inside the pastry shop young French hoodlums swallowed their last cakes and French mothers wiped the sticky mouths of their children. It gave you a new aspect on exchange.

As the last of the afternoon tea-ers and pastry-eaters went Strasbourgward across the bridge the first of the exchange pirates coming over to raid Kehl for cheap dinners began to arrive. The two streams passed each other on the bridge and the two disconsolate-looking German soldiers looked on. As the boy in the motor agency said, “It’s the way to make money.”

EPISODE IN THE BLACK FOREST

If you want to go fishing in the Black Forest you want to get up about four hours before the first Schwartzwald rooster begins to shift from one leg to the other and decides that it’s time to crow. You need at least that much time to get through the various legal labyrinths in order to get on to the stream before dark.

In the first place the Black Forest is not the sweep of black forest that its name suggests. It is a chain of mountains cut up by railroads, valleys full of rank potato crops, pasture land, brown chalets and gravel-bottomed trout streams, broken out all over with enormous hotels run by Germanized Swiss who have mastered the art of making four beefsteaks grow where only one was cut by the butcher and where you wake up in the morning to find that the falling mark has cut your hotel bill to $3.75 a week and that the price of James E. Pepper Kentucky rye whiskey is 90 cents a bottle.

A Swiss hotel keeper can raise prices with the easy grace of a Pullman car poker shark backing a pat full house, but the mark can fall faster than ever a Swiss in good training can hoist the cost of living. A properly run off race between a well-conditioned Swiss hotel keeper and a fast-falling mark would provide an international financial spectacle that would bring the finance fans to their feet as one man, but my last kronen would go on the mark. In spite of it being the monetary medium that is in daily use in the Einstein household, the mark still seems affected by the laws of gravitation.

All of which and none of which has anything to do with the trout fishing in the Black Forest. Triberg consists of a single steep street lined by steep hotels. It is in a steep valley and a cool breeze is said to blow down the valley in the wintertime. No one has ever been in Triberg in the wintertime to verify this legend but eight hundred sweltering vacationists would gladly lay their right hands over where their hearts ought to be, if their hearts are in the right place, and swear there has never been a breeze of any kind in Triberg in the summertime.

We landed in Triberg after a five-hour train ride from Freiburg. We had originally planned to walk across the Black Forest but we gave this up when we saw the crowd of German tourists pouring in and out of all the roads leading into the woods. Our first disappointment was in finding that the Black Forest was no forest but just a lot of wooded hills and highly cultivated valleys, and our second was in discovering that you couldn’t go fifteen yards along any of the wilder and more secluded roads without running into between six and eight Germans, their heads shaved, their knees bare, cock feathers in their hats, sauerkraut on their breath, the wanderlust in their eyes and a collection of aluminum cooking utentils clashing against their legs as they walked.

As I may have said, we landed in Triberg. It was the end of a five-hour ride with two changes and four hours of standing up in the aisle while large and unhappy Germans and their large and marcelled wives pushed by us again and again with profuse apologies, and I don’t know what aims.

“The proprietor will fix it up for you,” said the head porter of the hotel. “He has a friend who has a fishing.”

We went into the bar, where the friend who had the fishing, and six of his friends were sitting at a table and playing a game that looked like pinochle. The proprietor talked with the friend, who has one of the porcupine quill haircuts that are all the rage this year, and the friend pounded on the table with his fist while the rest of the table roared and laughed.

The proprietor came over to our table.

“They all make jokes,” he said. “He says if you pay him two dollars you can fish all you want to for the rest of your life.”

Now we are all very familiar with the German when he starts to make jokes about the dollar, and suggests that he be paid for such and such in dollars. It is a foul and nefarious habit. If it were allowed to go unchecked it would soon force all Canadians and Americans back to Sarnia, Ontario, or Kokomo, Indiana. It is a habit that needs to be sat on with all severity.

There was a lot of dickering. The friend and his friends ceased laughing. We grew stern and strong and silent. The porter grew placatory. The atmosphere grew tense. We finally compromised by agreeing to pay 1,200 marks for the fishing unseen. We went to bed happy. We were the owner of a fishing in the Black Forest. We turned over in our thirty-seven-cents-a-night bed in the regal suite of the largest hotel in Triberg, and kicked the eiderdown quilt on to the floor. After all, there seemed to be some justice in the world.

In the morning we got our tackle together and went down to breakfast. The porter, who is another Swiss passing as German, came up.

“I have news for you. It is not so easy. You must first obtain the permit of the police. You must get a fishenkarte.”

I pass over the next two days. They were spent in the offices of the Kingdom of Baden, now doing business as a republic of sorts, and consisted in conversations like the following:

We enter an office where a number of clerks are sitting around while stern-looking soldiers scratch the small of their backs with the pommels of their swords, or is it only saddles that have pommels?

We, Mr. Bird and myself, speak, “Vere ist der burgomeister?”

The clerks eye us and go on writing. The soldiers look out of the window at the large stone monument to the war of 1879. Finally a clerk looks up and points to an inner door. There is a line of people outside. We are at the end of the line and finally get in.

Us, Mr. Bird, who is the European manager of the Consolidated Press, and myself, speak: “Bitte, Herr Burgomeister. We wollen der fish karten. We wollen to gefishen goen.”

The burgomeister looks at us and says, “Nix. Nein.” That is the only understandable point of his discourse.

“Das fishen karten,” we explain sweetly.

“Nix,” he says, “nein,” and points to the door.

We go out. This continues indefinitely.

When we finally, by tracing the person who owned it down at his factory where he makes lightning rods or hair brushes, found where the fishing was located we were informed by another group of fine-looking burgomeisters that we would have to give up our attempts at getting a fishing license in Triberg altogether and go to Nussbach. We didn’t know where Nussbach was. It looked hopeless. We resolved to fish instead.

The stream was a beauty. The friend who owned it was evidently so busy making hair tonic or shoe buttons in his factory that he never fished himself and the trout bit as fast as you could wet a line. We took all we wanted and repeated the next day. On the third day my conscience bothered me.

“We ought to go to Nussbach and get that permit to fish,”

I suggested.

We went to Nussbach with the dial of a map. No one seemed to know where the burgomeister’s office was. Finally we found him in a little shed across from the church yard where a group of school boys were being given squad drill. We had been informed of the dire penalties that were waiting for those who fished without a Badischer permit. Poaching was rigorously punished.

Mr. Bird, who answers to the name of Bill, can talk German. But he doesn’t think he can. I, on the contrary, cannot talk German at all, but I think I can. Therefore, I usually dominate the conversation. Mr. Bird says that my system of talking German is to pronounce English with an Italian accent.

“Ve wishen der fishen karten,” I said, bowing low.

The burgomeister looked at me over his steel-rimmed spectacles.

“Ja?” he said.

“Ve wishen der fishen karten comme sa,” I said very firmly, showing him the yellow card the friend had loaned us to locate the water.

“Ja,” he said, examining the card. “Das ist gut wasser.”

“Can ve gefishen in it?” I asked.

“Ja, ja,” answered the burgomeister.

“Come on, Bill,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We have been fishing the water ever since. No one has stopped us. Some day, doubtless, we will be arrested. I shall appeal to the burgomeister of Nussbach. He is a splendid man. But I remember distinctly his having told us that we could fish all the good water.

THE GERMAN HATER

On the frontier between Baden and Wurttemberg I found my first Hater. It was all the fault of the Belgian lady who would insist on speaking French. In the roaring dark of going through a tunnel the Belgian lady had shouted something at me. I didn’t understand and she repeated, this time in French: “Please close the door.”

When we came out of the tunnel the Belgian lady beamed an enormous beam and began talking French. She talked French rapidly and interestingly for the next eight hours in a country where to say one French word is to invite an attack.

During those eight hours we changed trains six times. Sometimes we stood on a platform at a little junction like Schiltach with a crowd of at least six hundred people waiting for the train to come. There would be four places vacant in the train. We always got two of them. That was the Belgian lady.

“You wait with the baggage,” the Belgian lady would say as the train came in sight down the track. “I will go in ahead of these boche and get two places. I will open the window and you throw the bags through. We will be comfortable.”

That was exactly the way it happened. The train stopped. The Belgian lady would go through “these boche” like the widely-advertised Mr. Lionel Conacher through the line of scrimmage. Four hundred perspiring and worthy Germans would be assaulting the door. A window would fly open. The smiling face of the Belgian lady, would emerge triumphantly shouting, “Void, monsieur! The baggage. Quick!”

Some way or other I would get aboard a platform of the train and in half an hour of apologetic threading my way, get through the sardine-packed aisles of the cars to where the Belgian lady was saving my “platz.”

“Where have you been, monsieur?” she would ask anxiously and loudly in French. Everyone in the car would look at us blackly. I would tell her I had been making my way through the crowd.

The Belgian lady would snort a terrific Belgian snort.

“Where would you be if you did not have me to take care of you. I ask you? Where would you be?” Never mind. I am here and I will look after you.”

So guided and guarded by the brave Belgian lady I crossed Baden, Wurttemberg and the Rhenish provinces in safety.

As we crossed the frontier in Wurttemberg a tall, distinguished-looking man with gray mustaches, came into the car. “Good day,” he said and looked around keenly. Then asked politely but severely: “Is there an Auslander in this car?”

I thought my time had come. There are at least four special visas that no one ever bothers to get in Germany, for the lack of which you can be thrown into jail and fined anything up to a million marks. It is much better to have these visas, but if you take the time to get them you will spend eight out of every twenty-four hours in police and passport control offices, and these officials will discover that you lack nine other special and highly necessary visas that you have never heard of and throw you into the jug on general principles.

The gray mustached man took my passport and luckily opened it to a page covered with Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, and other incomprehensible official stampings. It was simply too much of a mess for him. He was too much of a gentleman to go into that sort of thing. He folded the passport and handed it back with courtly gesture, first carefully identifying the brave Belgian lady, from the picture of Mrs. Hemingway in the back of the passport, as my wife.

The lady whose picture appears in the passport has bobbed hair and has just finished a very successful season of tennis on the Riviera. I will not attempt to describe her, being prejudiced. The brave Belgian lady weighs, perhaps, 180 pounds, has a face like a composite Rodin group of the Burghers of Calais waiting to be hanged, and sets this face off by a series of accordion type double chins. This evidence is offered in the case of The People vs. Passports.

It was just after the passage of the knightly official that the Hater got into action. The Hater sat directly opposite us. He had been listening to our conversation in French, and some time back had begun to mutter. He was a small man, the Hater, with his head shaved, rosy cheeks, a big face culminating in a toothbrush mustache. The strain of his rapidly increasing hate was telling on him. It was obvious he could not hold out much longer. Then he burst.

It was just like the time a bath heater blew up on me at Genoa. I could not catch the first eight hundred words. They came too fast. The Hater’s little blue eyes were just like a wild boar’s. When my ears got tuned to his sending speed the conversation was going something like this:

“Dirty French swine. Rotten French hyenas. Baby killers. Filthy attackers of defenseless populations. War swine. Swine hounds, etc.”

The brave Belgian lady leaned forward into the zone of the Hater’s fire and placed one of her twelve-pound fists on the Hater’s knee.

“The Herr is not a Frenchman,” she shouted at the Hater in German, “I am not French. We talk French because it is the language of civilized people. Why don’t you learn to talk French? You can’t even talk German. All you can talk is profanity. Shut up!”

It seemed as though we ought to have been mobbed. But nothing happened. The Hater shut up. He muttered for a time like a subsiding geyser, but he gradually shut up and sat there hating the brave Belgian lady. Once more he broke out as he got up to leave the train at Karlsruhe. He was always too fast for me and I didn’t get it.

“Qu’es-ce que c’est, ca?” I asked the brave Belgian lady.

She snorted, her most devastating Belgian snort. “He makes some charge against France. But it is not important.”

The B. B. lady was traveling through Germany without a passport. She avowed that she didn’t need a passport anywhere. She and her “mari” were on the same passport and he was in Switzerland on business. If anyone demanded a passport she could always tell them that she was going to meet her husband at Mannheim.

“My husband is a Jew,” she said, “but he is tres gentil. One time in Frankfurt they would not let us stop the night at a hotel because he was a Jew. I showed them. We stayed there a week.”

We talked finance for a long time. The B. B. lady wanted me to tell her confidentially whether the dollar was going to rise or fall in France. She said it would be extremely important if her husband could know that, and she wanted me to tell her so she could tell her husband. I did my best. Luckily she hadn’t my address if I am wrong.

Then we talked about the war. I asked the B. B. lady if she had been in Belgium under the occupation.

“Yes,” she said.

“How was it? Pretty bad?” I asked.

The B. B. lady snorted, her most powerful Belgian snort.

“I did not suffer at all.” —

I believe her. In fact, having traveled with the brave Belgian lady, I am greatly surprised and unable to understand how the Germans ever got into Belgium at all.

IT’S EASY TO SPEND A MILLION

One hundred and twenty-five dollars in Germany today buys two million and a half marks.

A year ago it would have taken a motor lorry to haul this amount of money. Twenty thousand marks then made into packets of ten of the thick, heavy, hundred-mark notes, filled your overcoat pockets and part of a suit case. Now the two million and a half fits easily into your pocket-book as twenty-five slim, crisp, 100,000 mark bills.

When I was a small boy I remember being very curious about millionaires and being finally told to shut me up that there was no such thing as a million dollars, there wouldn’t be a room big enough to hold it, and that even if there was, a person counting them a dollar at a time would die before he finished. All of that I accepted as final.

The difficulty of spending a million dollars was further brought home to me by seeing a play in which a certain Brewster if he spent a million dollars foolishly was to receive six million from the will of some splendid uncle or other. Brewster, as I recall it, after insurmountable difficulties, finally conceived the idea of falling in love, at which the million disappeared almost at once only for poor Brewster to discover that his uncle was quite penniless having died at the foundling’s home or something of the sort, whereupon Brewster, realizing it was all for the best, went to work and eventually became president of the local chamber of commerce.

Such bulwarks of my early education have been shattered by the fact that, in ten days in Germany, for living expenses alone, I have spent, with practically no effort at all, something over a million marks.

During this time I have only once stopped at a de luxe hotel. After a week in fourth-class railway coaches, village inns, country and small-town gasthofs, finishing with a seven-hour ride standing up in the packed corridor of a y second-class railway car, I decided that I would investigate how the profiteers lived.

On the great glass door of the Frankfurter Hof, was a black lettered sign, FRENCH AND BELGIANS NOT ADMITTED. At the desk the clerk told me a single room would be 51,000 marks “with taxes, of course, added.” In the oriental lobby, out of big chairs, I could see heavy Jewish faces looking at me through blue cigar smoke. I registered as from Paris. “We don’t enforce that anti-French rule, of course,” said the clerk very pleasantly.

Up in the room there was a list of the taxes. First, there was a 40 per cent town tax, then 20 per cent for service, then a charge of 8,000 marks for heating, then an announcement that the visitors who did not eat breakfast in the hotel would be charged 6,000 marks extra. There were some other charges. I stayed that night and half the next day. The bill was 145,000 marks.

In a little railway junction in Baden a girl porter put my two very heavy bags on to the train. I wanted to help her with them. She laughed at me. She had a tanned face, smooth blond hair and shoulders like an ox.

“How much?” I asked her.

“Fifty marks,” she said.

At Mannheim a porter carried my bags from one track to another in the station. When I asked him how much, he demanded a thousand marks. The last porter I had seen had been the girl in Baden so I protested.

“A bottle of beer costs fifteen hundred marks here,” he replied, “a glass of schnapps, twelve hundred.”

That is the way the prices fluctuate all over Germany. It all depends on whether the prices went up to the top when the mark had its terrific fall last winter to around 70,000 to the dollar. If the prices went up they never came down. In the big cities, of course, they went up. A full meal in the country costs 2,000 marks. On the train a ham sandwich costs 3,000 marks.

Last week, investigating the actual living conditions, I talked to, among others, a small factory owner, several workmen, a hotelkeeper and a high school professor.

The factory owner said: “We have enough coal and coke for a few weeks longer, but are short on all raw materials. We cannot pay the prices they ask now. We sold to exporters. They got the dollar prices. We didn’t. We can buy coal from Czechoslovakia, where they have German mines they got under the peace treaty, but they want pay in Czech money, which is at par, and we can’t afford to pay. We are starting to lay off workmen, and as they have nothing saved there is liable to be trouble.”

A workman said: “I cannot keep my family on the money that I am making now. I have mortgaged my house to the bank and the bank charges me 40 per cent interest on the loan. You see workmen who have plenty of money to spend, but they are the young men who are living at home. They get their board and room free and their laundry. Maybe they pay a little something on their board. They are the men you see around the wine and beerstubes. Maybe their father has some property in the country, a farm, then they are all right. All the farmers have money.”

The hotelkeeper said: “All summer the hotel was full. We had a good season. I worked all summer in the high season from six o’clock in the morning until midnight. Every room was crowded. We had people sleeping in the billiard room on cots. It was the best year we ever had. In October the mark started to fall, and in December all the money we had taken in all summer was not enough to buy our preserves and jelly for next season. I have a little capital in Switzerland, otherwise we would have had to close. Every other summer hotel in this town has closed for good. The proprietor of the big hotel on the hill there committed suicide last week.”

The high school professor said: “I get 200,000 marks a month. That sounds like a good salary. But there is no way I can increase it. One egg costs 4,000 marks. A shirt costs 85,000 marks. We are living now, our family of four, on two meals a day. We are very lucky to have that. I owe the bank money.

“People here in town cannot change their marks into dollars and Swiss francs so as to have them when the mark falls again, as it will as soon as they settle this Ruhr affair. The banks will not give out any dollars or Swiss or Dutch money. They hang on to all they can get. The people can’t do anything.

“The merchants have no confidence in the money, and will not bring their prices down. The wealthy people are the farmers who got the high prices for their crops which were marketed just after the mark fell last fall, and the big manufacturers. The big manufacturers sell abroad for foreign money, and pay their labor in marks. And the banks. The banks are always wealthy. The banks are like the government. They get good money for bad, and hang on to the good money.”

The schoolteacher was a tall, thin man with thin, nervous hands. For pleasure he played the flute. I had heard him playing as I came to his door. His two children did not look undernourished, but he and his frayed looking wife did.

“But how will it all come out?” I asked him.

“We can only trust in God,” he said. Then he smiled. “We used to trust in God and the government, we Germans. Now I no longer trust the government.”

“I heard you playing very beautifully on the flute when I came to the door,” I said rising to go.

“You know the flute? You like the flute? I will play for you.”

“If it would not be asking too much.”

So we sat in the dusk in the ugly little parlor and the schoolmaster played very beautifully on the flute. Outside people were going by in the main street of the town. The children came in silently and sat down. After a time the schoolmaster stopped and stood up very embarrassedly.

“It is a very nice instrument, the flute,” he said.

Part Five. THE TROUBLED RUHR

France had gathered in its share of territorial booty from a defeated Germany. Alsace and Lorraine, provinces that had changed hands a dozen times in centuries past, once again became French. The industrial Saar basin as well was pinched off, to be administered in trust for fifteen years. These concessions did not cool French passions, and the tensions between the two countries were to multiply with each new year of peace.

French politics after the war had swung to the right. Plagued by many social and economic ills, the people took comfort in the easy Valhalla of extreme nationalism. In 1919, Clemenceau was turned out of office for being “too moderate” at Versailles, and succeeding premiers escaped criticism for unsolved problems at home by focusing attention on a still dangerous, still untrustworthy Germany. Most expert at lancing the sores left by the war was a confirmed German-hater, Raymond Poincare, who became premier of France in 1922.

Once in office, Premier Poincare wasted no time in rupturing the already strained relations between Germany and France. Germany had agreed to meet a portion of its reparations payments with coal from the Ruhr, but production was low and its own demands were heavy, and Germany began falling behind. In 1922 the Reparations Commission declared Germany in default. Premier Poincare had found his issue. In January 1923, French troops supported by Belgian forces marched into the Ruhr.

The Germans protested. President Ebert appealed to the League of Nations. But the cries went ignored. Unable to offer armed opposition, Ebert retaliated with the few weapons at his disposal. He renounced all war reparations payments to the Allies, then called on the three million citizens of the Ruhr to wage a passive resistance against the occupation troops.

The Ruhr became locked in a stalemate. French troops met everywhere with sabotage, strikes and slowdowns. The flow of coal dwindled. Nonetheless the French stayed. Poincare had staked his political life on the Ruhr issue and he would not admit to defeat. The occupation dragged on until finally the French public wearied of it, forcing the resignation of Premier Poincare. His successor, Herriot, ordered the French troops home in July 1925, thirty-one months after the occupation had begun.

France lost much from the Ruhr episode, but the German nation suffered most. A disillusioned German people blamed the occupation on their weak, ineffectual republic. The government’s inability to drive foreign troops from German soil caused more and more Germans to seek solace in the preachings of the political right wing. Not the least of these were the German industrialists. The Ruhr-based Krupp and Thyssen empires had suffered serious financial losses, and their owners would remember the occupation. They would remember it well eight years later when, in 1933, the Ruhr tragedy weighed heavily in their decision to throw moral and monetary support behind Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party.

The Ruhr issue drew Ernest Hemingway away from Paris in the spring of 1923. After viewing the occupation first-hand, he returned to France, seeking the motives which led the French into the occupation. This is his story — of France and a tragedy in the Ruhr.,.

THE COMMERCIAL WAR

Offenburg is the southern limit of the French occupation of Germany. It is a clean, neat little town with the hills of the Black Forest rising on one side and the Rhine plain stretching off on the other.

The French seized Offenburg in order to keep the great international railway line open. This line runs straight north from Basle in Switzerland through Freiburg, Offenburg, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dusseldorf, to Holland. It was the main artery of communication and commerce in Germany.

According to the French their occupation was to ensure the safe passage of coal trains on the main line between the Ruhr and Italy. They feared the Germans might shunt the cars off at Offenburg and ship them on a branch line up into the Black Forest, and eventually back into the industrial district of what French papers refer to as “unoccupied Germany.”

Germany denounced the occupation of Offenburg, located in the Duchy of Baden in the far south of Germany, some hundreds of miles from the Ruhr, as a breach of the treaty of Versailles. The French replied by expelling the burgomaster and some two hundred citizens who had signed the protest, from the town. The Germans then informed the French that no more trains would run through Offenburg on the great main Rhineland railway.

For almost two months now not a train has run through Offenburg. I stood on the bridge over the right of way and looked at the four wide-gauge tracks stretching to Switzerland in one direction, and Holland in the other, red with rust. Trains stop three miles each way from Offenburg, north and south. Passengers get out with their baggage, and, if they are Germans, can ride into Offenburg in a motor bus and get another bus to take them the three miles the other side of the town where they can continue their journey. If they are French they are allowed to walk, carrying their baggage.

No coal has gone through since the town was seized. Now the French face the problem — if they want to control the Rhine railway — of occupying every town along the whole length of it at an expenditure of at least four hundred thousand men, and then running the trains themselves. Otherwise the Germans say they will run trains to just outside the limit of the French occupation, and then stop them. It is their answer to the strategists who put their fingers on the map and said, “It is very simple. We will take this town here and that will control this railway. It will only take a few men, etc.”

The Franco-German commercial war has settled down to a question of which government goes absolutely broke first. All the Germans I have talked to say, “We could not do anything without our government. The government pays all the people who lose their jobs through the occupation. It pays all those who are expelled from the town. It pays the unemployed.”

The German government is now using up the gold to stabilize the mark that it ordinarily paid over to the reparations commission. It is using these marks that it buys at the fixed price of 20,800 to the dollar to fight the occupation. It is also already using a good portion of its hoarded gold. When through the crippling of German industries and the exhaustion of the gold supply the German government is no longer able to fight the occupation by putting the government resources back of the individuals who suffer by the occupation, and making good their loss with government money, the French will have won the struggle of attrition. But Germany’s gold will have been used up before she quits, her industries ruined, and she will be as profitable to France as a squeezed lemon.

On the day before I left Paris M. Poincare asked the chamber of deputies for 192,000,000 francs for the expenses of the first four months’ occupation of the Ruhr. Four months more of that, and if the German government goes under, the French government will have won a commercial victory at the cost of biting off its own nose to spite Germany’s face.

From Offenburg to Ortenberg, where there was a train, I rode in a motor truck. The driver was a short, blond German with sunken cheeks and faded blue eyes. He had been badly gassed at the Somme. We were riding along a white, dusty road through green fields forested with hop poles, their tangled wires flopping. We crossed a wide, swift, clearly pebbled stream with a flock of geese resting on a gravel island. A manure spreader was busily clicking in the field. In the distance were the blue Schwartzwald hills.

“My brother,” said the driver, guiding the big wheel with one arm half wrapped around it. “He had hard luck.”

“So?”

“Ja. He never had no luck, my brother.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was signal man on the railroad from Kehl. The French put him out. All the signal men. The day they came to Offenburg they gave them all twenty-four hours.”

“But the government pays him, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, yes. They pay him. But he can’t live on it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, he’s got seven kids.”

I pondered this. The driver went on in his drawling south German. “They pay him what he got, but the prices are up and where he was signal man he had a little garden. A nice garden. It makes a difference when you got a garden.”

“What’s he do now?” I asked.

“He tried working in the sawmill at Hausach, but he can’t work good inside. He’s got the gas like me. Ja. He’s got no luck, my brother.”

We passed another lovely clear stream that curved alongside the road. It had clear, gravel-bottomed ripples and then deep holes along the bank.

“Trout?” I asked.

“Not any more,” the driver laughed. “When we had the revolution nobody knew what to do. It was in the papers and it was posted up. They sang in the streets and said ‘Down with the Kaiser,’ and ‘Hoch the republic,’ and there was nothing more to do. But they had to do something, so because it was always trouble to get fishen karten (fishing licenses), they went out to the stream with hand grenades and killed the trout and everybody had trout to eat. Then the police came and made them stop and put some in jail and the revolution was over.”

“Herr Canada,” said the driver, “how long do you think the French will stay in Offenburg?”

“Three or four months maybe. Who knows?”

The driver looked ahead up the white road that we were turning to dust behind us. “There will be trouble then. Bad trouble. The working people will make trouble. Already the factories are shutting down all around here.”

“It won’t be like the other revolution?” I asked.

The driver laughed, a hollow-cheeked, skin-drum-tight, hollow-eyed laugh. “No, they won’t throw any grenades at the trout then.” The thought amused him very much. He laughed again.

A VICTORY WITHOUT PEACE

To write about Germany you must begin by writing about France. There is a magic in the name France. It is a magic like the smell of the sea or the sight of blue hills or of soldiers marching by. It is a very old magic.

France is a broad and lovely country. The loveliest country that I know. It is impossible to write impartially about a country when you love it. But it is possible to write impartially about the government of that country. France refused in 1917 to make a peace without victory. Now she finds that she has a victory without peace. To understand why this is so we must take a look at the French government.

France at present is governed by a chamber of deputies elected in 1919. It was called the “horizon blue” parliament and is dominated by the famous “bloc national” or war time coalition. This government has two years more to run.

The liberals, who were the strongest group in France, were disgraced when Clemenceau destroyed their government in 1917 on the charge that they were negotiating for peace without victory from the Germans. Caillaux, admittedly the best financier in France, the Liberal premier, was thrown into prison. There were almost daily executions by firing squads of which no report appeared in the papers. Very many enemies of Clemenceau found themselves standing blindfolded against a stone wall at Versailles in the cold of the early morning while a young lieutenant nervously moistened his lips before he could give the command.

This Liberal group is practically unrepresented in the chamber of deputies. It is the great, unformed, unled opposition to the “bloc national” and it will be crystalized into form at the next election in 1924. You cannot live in France any length of time without having various people tell you in the strictest confidence that Caillaux will be Prime minister again in 1924. If the occupation of the Ruhr fails he has a very good chance to be. There will be the inevitable reaction against the present government. The chance is that it will swing even further to the left and pass over Caillaux entirely to exalt Marcel Cachin, the Communist leader.

The present opposition to the “bloc national in the chamber of deputies is furnished by the left. When you read of the Right and the Left in continental politics it refers to the way the members are seated in parliament. The Conservatives are on the right, the monarchists are on the extreme right of the floor. The radicals are on the left The extreme communists are on the outside seats of the extreme left.

The French communist party has twelve seats in chamber out of 600. Marcel Cachin, editor with a circulation of 200,000 is the leader of the party. Vaillant Coutourier, a young subaltern of Chasseurs who was one of the most decorated men in France, is his lieutenant. The communists lead the opposition to M. Poincare They charge him with having brought on the war, with having desired the war, they always refer to him as Poincare la guerre.” They charge him with being under the domination of Leon Daudet and the royalists. They charge him with being under the domination of the iron kings, the coal kings; they charge him with many things, some of them very ridiculous.

M. Poincare sits in the chamber with his little hands and little feet and his little white beard and when the communists insult him too far, spits back at them like an angry cat. When it looks as though the communists had uncovered any real dirt and members of the government begin to look doubtfully at M. Poincare, Rene Viviani makes a speech. Monsieur Viviani is the greatest orator of our times. You have only to hear M. Viviani pronounce the words, la gloire de France” to want to rush out and get into uniform.

The next day after he has made his speech you find it pasted up on posters all over the city.

Moscow has recently “purified” the French communist party. According to the Russian communists the French party was mawkishly patriotic and weak willed. All members who refused to place themselves directly under orders from the central party in Moscow were asked to turn in their membership cards. A number did. The rest are now considered purified. But I doubt if they remain for long. The Frenchman is not a good internationalist.

The “bloc national” is made up of honest patriots, and representatives of the great steel trust, the coal trust, the wine industry, other smaller profiteers, ex-army officers, professional politicians, careerists, and the royalists.

While it may seem fantastic to think of France having a king again, the royalist party is extremely well organized, is very strong in certain parts of the south of France, controls several newspapers, including l’Action Francaise and has organized a sort of Fascisti called the Camelots de Roi. It has a hand in everything in the government and was the greatest advocate of the advance into the Ruhr and the further occupation of Germany.

There, briefly, are the political parties in France and the way they line up. Now we must see the causes that forced France into the Ruhr.

France has spent eighty billion francs on reparations. Forty-five billion francs have been spent on reconstructing the devastated regions. There is a very great scandal talked in France about how that forty-five billions were spent. Deputy Inghles of the department of the Nord, said the other day in the chamber of deputies that twenty-five billions of it went for graft. He offered to present the facts at any time the chamber would consent to hear him. He was hushed up. At any rate forty-five billions were spent wildly and rapidly and there are very many new “devastated region millionaires” in the chamber of deputies. The deputies asked for as much money as they wanted for their own districts and got it and a good part of the regions are still devastated.

The point is that the eighty billions have been spent and are charged up as collectible from Germany. They stand on the credit side of the ledger.

If at any time the French government admits that any part of those eighty billion francs are not collectible they must be moved over to the bad side of the ledger and listed as a loss rather than an asset. There are only thirty billions of paper francs in circulation today. If France admits that any part of the money spent and charged to Germany is uncollectible she must issue paper francs to pay the bonds she floated to raise the money she has spent. That means inflation of her currency, resulting in starting the franc on the greased skid the Austrian kronen and German mark traveled down.

When Aristide Briand, former prime minister, who looks like a bandit, and is the natural son of a French dancer and a cafe keeper of St. Nazaire, agreed at the Cannes conference to a reduction in reparations in return for Lloyd George’s defense pact, his ministry was overthrown almost before he could catch the train back to Paris. The weaseleyed M. Arago, leader of the bloc national, and Monsieur Barthou, who looks like the left hand Smith Brother, were at Cannes watching every move of Briand and when they saw he was leaning toward a reduction of reparations, they prepared to skid him out and get Poincare in — and accomplished the coup before Briand knew what was happening to him. The bloc national cannot afford to have anyone cutting down on reparations because it does not want any inquiry as to how the money was spent. The memory of the Panama canal scandal is still fresh.

Poincare came into office pledged to collect every sou possible from Germany. The story of how he was led to refuse the offer of the German industrialists to take over the payment of reparations if it was reduced to a reasonable figure, and the sinister tale that is unfolding day by day in the French chamber of deputies about how Poincare was forced into the Ruhr, against his own will and judgment, is a strange story of the rise of the royalists in France and their influence on the present government.

HATE IN OCCUPIED ZONE A REAL, CONCRETE THING

You feel the hate in the Ruhr as an actual concrete thing. It is as definite as the unswept, cinder-covered sidewalks of Dusseldorf or the long rows of grimy brick cottages, each one exactly like the next, where the workmen of Essen live.

It is not only the French that the Germans hate. They look away when they pass the French sentries in front of the postoffice, the town hall and the Hotel Kaiserhof in Essen, and look straight ahead when they pass poilus in the street. But when Nationalists and workers meet they look each other in the face or look at each other’s clothes with a hatred as cold and final as the towering slag heaps back of Frau Bertha Krupp’s foundries.

Most of the workers of the Ruhr district are Communists. The Ruhr has always been the reddest part of Germany. It was so red, in fact, that before the war troops were never garrisoned there, both because the government did not trust the temper of the population and feared that the troops would become contaminated with the Communist atmosphere. Consequently, when the French moved in they had no barracks to occupy, and had a very difficult time billeting.

At the start of the occupation all of the Ruhr united solidly to back the government against the French. The night of the demonstration when Thyssen came home from his trial at Mayence, a German newspaper man told me he identified over a hundred men in the mob, singing patriotic songs and shouting for the government, who had been officers or non-coms in the Red army during the Ruhr rebellion. It was a great revival of national feeling that molded the country into a whole in its opposition to France.

“It was most uplifting,” an old German woman told me. “You should have been here. Never have I been so uplifted since the great days of the victories. Oh, how they sang. Ach, it was wonderful.”

That is finished now. The leaders of the workers are saying that the government has no policy, except passive resistance, and they are sick of passive resistance. Their newspapers are demanding that the German government start negotiations with the French. The French have seized millions of marks of unemployment doles, and as soon as the unemployment pay doesn’t come in the workers begin grumbling.

It was beginning to look as though the workers would not hold out in the passive resistance, and the industrialists were extremely anxious to provoke an incident between the workmen and the troops. Something to stir up a little trouble and revive the old patriotic fervor. They ordered the sirens blown to summon the workers for a passive resistance demonstration whenever French troops appeared for requisitionings.

On the Saturday before Easter the incident occurred. It cost the lives of thirteen workmen. It would not have happened, perhaps, if the young officer in charge of the platoon that came to requisition motor trucks had not been nervous. But it did happen.

I have heard at least fifteen different accounts of what actually happened. At least twelve of them sounded like lies. The crowd was very thick and pressed tight around the soldiers. It was in a big courtyard. Those that were in the front rank of the crowd were killed or wounded. You are not allowed to talk to the wounded. The troops are not giving interviews. In fact, they were sent a very long way away very soon after the last ambulance load of wounded had gone. Hearsay evidence is worthless, and there are plenty of wild stories.

Two things stand out. The French had no reason to make any bloodshed and wanted none. On the contrary, they had every reason to avoid any sort of conflict, as they were making every effort to win over the workers from their employers. The industrialists, on the other hand, had been provoking incidents and advising the men to resist.

Twenty different workmen swore to me that there were Nationalist agitators, former German “Green police,” in the crowd. The workmen say these men egged on the workers and told them they could swarm over the French, disarm them, and kick them out of the courtyard.

All the workmen said the crowd ran at the first volley, which was fired over their heads. They had all served in the army and had no desire to attack armed troops unarmed once they saw they meant business and would really shoot. It is there that the question arises whether or not the lieutenant proceeded to fire unnecessarily. I do not know. All the men I have talked to swear they were running after the first volley and did not see anything. After the first volley the troops fired independently.

The funeral at Essen was delayed the last time because the French and German doctors could not agree on the nature of the bullet wounds. The Germans claimed eleven of the workmen were shot in the back. The French surgeon claims that four were shot in the front, five bullets entered from the side and two in the back. I do not know the claims on the two men who died since the argument started.

At present the Ruhr workmen are feeling decidedly unpatriotic. They believe that sooner or later negotiations will start, their steadily dwindling unemployment pay will stop, the mark will plunge down again, and that they will not be able to work full time, due to various sabotages and the general disorganization. None of them have any illusions that the government will be able to pay them unemployment pay indefinitely and they are demanding that the government start something.

The French seem to run the administration of the occupation admirably. The troops are kept out of sight as much as possible, and there is a minimum of interference with Germans going through from unoccupied to occupied Germany. They are all required to have red card passes, but the examination of these passes is purely perfunctory. A noncom sees the red card, says, “Bon,” and the line of Germans passes through the barrier.

They run the military end smoothly, but are only able to move six trains of the one hundred and thirty-three from Essen each day. In three months of occupation France has obtained the same amount of coal she had been getting each week from Germany for nothing before the Ruhr seizure.

M. Loucheur, the millionaire ex-minister of the devastated regions under Briand, went to London and felt out public opinion on his own hook, although he told Poincare he was going, and reported to him on his return. Poincare was reported furious at Loucheur’s trip, which he regarded as a first step in a Loucheur drive for the premiership when the Chamber of Deputies again sits in May. Loucheur suffers in France from being called the French Winston Churchill, and has a record for brilliant performance and brilliant failure. His very sound credentials for the premiership will be that he has always opposed the Ruhr venture.

Aristide Briand is now working on a speech that he hopes will return him to power. He is planning to attack Poincare by stating the number of millions Briand got out of the Germans in reparations while he was prime minister and compare them with the money Poincare has lost since he came into office.

The Caillaux Liberal camp have started a new paper in Paris. Leon Daudet, the royalist, says the first thing he will ask the chamber when it reopens is why M. Loucheur was permitted to go to England as an alleged representative of the government against the wishes of the government, etc.

Andre Tardieu has announced an attack on the Ruhr policy as it has been carried out. Things are beginning to boil.

The end of the Ruhr venture looks very near. It has weakened Germany, and so has pleased M. Daudet and M. Poincare. It has stirred up new hates and revived old hates. It has caused many people to suffer. But has it strengthened France?

THE FRENCH PRESS

What do the French people think about the Ruhr and the whole German question? You will not find out by reading the French press.

French newspapers sell their news columns just as they do their advertising space. It is quite open and understood.

As a matter of fact it is not considered very chic to advertise in the small advertising section of a French daily. The news item is supposed to be the only real way of advertising.

So the government pays the newspapers a certain amount to print government news. It is considered government advertising and every big French daily like the Matin, Petit Parisian, Echo de Paris, L’lntransigeant, Le Temps, receives a regular amount in subsidy for printing government news. Thus the government is the newspapers’ biggest advertising client. The railroads are the next biggest. But that is all the news on anything the government is doing that the readers of the paper get.

When the government has any special news, as it has at such a time as the occupation of the Ruhr, it pays the papers extra. If any of these enormously circulated daily papers refuse to print the government news or criticize the government standpoint the government withdraws its subsidy — and the paper loses its biggest advertiser. Consequently the big Paris dailies are always for the government, any government that happens to be in.

When one of them refuses to print the news furnished by the government and begins attacking its policy you may be sure of one thing. That it has not accepted the loss of its subsidy without receiving the promise of a new one and a substantial advance, from some government that it is absolutely sure will get into power shortly. And it has to be awfully sure it is coming off before it turns down its greatest client. Consequently when one of these papers whose circulation mounts into millions starts an attack on the government it is time for the politicians in power to get out their overshoes and put up the storm windows.

All of these things are well known and accepted facts. The government’s attitude is that the newspapers are not in business for their health and that they must pay for the news they get like any other advertiser. The newspapers have confirmed the government in this attitude.

Le Temps is always spoken of as “semi-official.” That means that the first column on the first page is written in the foreign office at the Quai d’Orsai, the rest of the columns are at the disposal of the various governments of Europe. A sliding scale of rates handles them. Unimportant governments can get space cheap. Big governments come high. All European governments have a special fund for newspaper publicity that does not have to be accounted for.

This sometimes leads to amusing incidents, as a year ago when the facts were published showing how the Temps was receiving subsidies for running propaganda from two different Balkan governments who were at loggerheads and printing the despatches as their own special correspondence on alternate days. No matter how idealistic European politics may be, a trusting idealist is about as safe in their machinery as a blind man stumbling about in a saw mill. One of my best friends was in charge of getting British propaganda printed in the Paris press at the close of the war. He is as sincere and idealistic a man as one could know — but he certainly knows where the buzz saws are located and how the furnace is stoked.

In spite of the fact that great Paris dailies, which are so widely quoted in the States and Canada as organs of public opinion, say that the people of France are solidly backing the occupation of the Ruhr, it is nevertheless true. France always backs the government in anything it does against a foreign foe once the government has started. It is that really wonderful patriotism of the French. All Frenchmen are patriotic — and nearly all Frenchmen are politicians. But the absolute backing of the government only lasts a certain length of time. Then after his white heat has cooled, the Frenchman looks the situation over, the facts begin to circulate around, he discovers that the occupation is not a success — and overthrows the government. The Frenchman feels he must be absolutely loyal to his government but that he can overthrow it and get a new government to be loyal to at any time.

Marshal Foch, for example, was opposed to the Ruhr occupation. He washed his hands of it absolutely. But once it was launched he did not come out against it. He sent Gen. Weygand, his chief of staff, to oversee it and do the best he could. But he does not wish to be associated with it in any way.

Similarly Loucheur, the former minister of the liberated regions, and one of the ablest men in France, opposed the occupation. Loucheur is a man who does not mince words. During the period when France was pouring out money for reconstruction with seemingly no regard as to how it was spent or for what, Loucheur did all he could to control it. It was Loucheur who told the mayor of Rheims: “Monsieur, you are asking exactly six times the cost of this reconstruction.”

A few days ago M. Loucheur said to me in conversation, “I was always opposed to the occupation. It is impossible to get any money that way. But now that they have gone in, now that the flag of France is unfurled, we are all Frenchmen and we must loyally support the occupation.”

M. Andre Tardieu, who headed the French mission to the United States during the war and is Clemenceau’s lieutenant, opposed the advance into the Ruhr in his paper, the Echo National, up until the day it started. Now he is denouncing it as ill run, badly managed, wishy washy and not strong enough. M. Tardieu, who looks like a bookmaker, foresees the failure of the present government with the failure of the occupation but he wants to be in a position to catch the reaction in the bud and say: “Give us a chance at it. Let us show that properly handled it can be a success.” For M. Tardieu is a very astute politician and that is very nearly his only chance of getting back into power for some time.

Eduard Herriot, mayor of Lyons, a member of the cabinet during the war, and dark horse candidate for next premier of France, after supporting the occupation in the same way that Loucheur is doing, has now sponsored a resolution in the Lyons city council protesting the occupation and demanding consideration of a financial and economic entente with Germany. This demand of Herriot may be the first puff of the wind that is bound to rise and blow the Poincare government out of power.

Now why are these, and many other intelligent Frenchmen, opposed to the occupation although they want to get every cent possible from Germany? It is simply because of the way it is going. It is losing France money instead of making it and from the start it was seen by the long-headed financiers that it would only cripple Germany’s ability to pay further reparations, unite her as a country and reflame her hatred against France — and cost more money than it would ever get out.

Before the occupation a train of twelve or more cars of coal or coke left the Ruhr for France every twenty eight minutes. Now there are only two trains a day. A train of twelve cars now is split up into four trains to pad the figures and make the occupation look successful.

When there is a shipment of coal to be gotten out, four or five tanks, a battalion of infantry, and fifty workmen go and do the job. The soldiers are to prevent the inhabitants beating up the workmen. The official figures on the amount of coal and coke that has been exported from the Ruhr and the money that has already been given by the chamber of deputies for the first months of the occupation show that the coal France was receiving on her reparations account is now costing her a little over $200 a ton. And she isn’t getting the coal.

At the start of the occupation certain correspondents wrote that it would be easy for France to run the Ruhr profitably, all she would have to do would be to bring in cheap labor — Italian or Polish labor is always cheap — and just get the stuff out. The other day I saw some of this cheap labor locked in a car at the Gare du Nord bound for Essen. They were a miserable lot of grimy, unfit-looking men, the sort that could not get work in France or anywhere else. They were all drunk, some shouting, some asleep on the floor of the car, some sick. They looked more like a shanghaied ship’s crew than anything else. And they were all going to be paid double wages and work half time under military protection. No workmen will go into the Ruhr for less than double wages — and it has been almost impossible to get workmen for that. The Poles and Italians will not touch the job. If you want any further information on the way it works out economically ask any businessman, or any street railway head who has ever had a strike, how much money his corporation made during the time it was employing strike breakers.

Part Six. EUROPEAN MISCELLANY

The Grand Tour, once the luxury of royalty, had been usurped in the years after the war by Thomas Cook & Son. Cook’s folders highlighted the romance of a continent, and millions of sight-seers and fun-seekers, caught up by the urge to travel, flocked to the European wonderland. American and Canadian tourists vied with the families of British shopkeepers and French war profiteers for hotel suites formerly reserved for kings. They filled Vienna’s cafes, skiied in the Alps and tanned their bodies on the white sands bordering the Mediterranean. It was the nineteen twenties and vacationing in Europe was the thing to do.

Tens of thousands of North Americans dreamed of that once-in-a-lifetime journey to the far side of the Atlantic. They pored over the newspapers, ferreting out bits and pieces of atmosphere and commentary on the pleasure capitals of the continent. With their copy set to the war of circulation, editors responded in kind. Since the age of the specialized travel writer had not yet dawned, the job of satisfying these exotic needs was added to the duties of the overseas correspondents.

Although primarily a serious reporter, Ernest Hemingway was always ready to write on the people and places which shared his newsbeat. Vacations in Switzerland were followed by stories ranging from the strange breed of tourists frequenting Swiss lodges, to the even stranger forms of transportation popular in that land. While covering the Greek-Turkish War, he found time to work up an excellent piece on Constantinople, the city we know today as Istanbul. Hemingway observed the continent between assignments from an apartment in Paris, reporting on topics as diverse as the habits of Spanish postmen and the fate of prewar royalty.

What follows is the best of this. Here is Hemingway writing on the lighter side of Europe...

EUROPEAN NIGHT LIFE — A DISEASE

Night life in Europe is not simply a list of cafes. It is a sort of strange disease, always existent, that has been fanned into a flame since the war. Its flame is burning an entire generation.

Paris night life is the most highly civilized and amusing. Berlin is the most sordid, desperate and vicious. Madrid is the dullest, and Constantinople is, or was, the most exciting.

Paris goes to bed the earliest of any big town in the world. Promptly at twelve-thirty o’clock the last omnibuses leave on their cross-town trips, the last subway train roars along the Metro, and the streets around the Opera empty as though a curfew had sounded. Taxis leave the streets to drive home, and the final trains are jammed with Parisians on their way home. Paris is dead.

Hours before shutters have been up and the residential quarters tight asleep. There remain only the night-hawks. Where do they go?

There are three oases of light in the tight-shuttered darkness of a Paris night.

One of them is Montparnasse. Here the Latin quarter cafes keep open a couple of hours more. There is no place in the world deader than a Montparnasse cafe unless you know the crowd. If you know the people, it is a club, a center for gossip, a common meeting place.

But supposing you were just arrived in Paris; all you would see would be a broad terrace covered with tables and chairs. A couple of sleepy waiters gradually piling the chairs on the tables; young men, young women, old men, a few older women sitting at the tables over coffee, beer, and strange-colored mixtures, talking and smoking. A kid selling roasted peanuts. It is not exciting to the newcomer.

Where is the really gay Paris night life we hear so much about? Where are the young people who never go to bed at night? The people that do not exist before ten o’clock at night?

They are probably packed into a little place around the corner from the Hotel Crillon in the staidest, most respectable, un-Bohemian quarter of Paris. In the Rue Boissy d’Anglais is the cafe of the Boeuf sur le Toit or the Bull-on-the-roof, Jean Cocteau’s bar and dancing, where everyone in Paris who believes that the true way to burn the candle is by igniting it at both ends goes. By eleven o’clock the Boeuf is so crowded that there is no more room to dance. But all the world is there. Sitting at tables, talking and drinking while the jazz plays.

But French night life is so civilized that it is not exciting to the outsider. Night life is a sort of state of mind. Either you are in it or you are out of it. It is in Cocteau’s bar that night life in the highest sense — that of living at night — is brought to the boiling point.

The Boeuf, though, closes at two in the morning. Sometimes before. And two in the morning is when the true night-lifer is just getting under way. So in a taxi the night-lifer starts up the slopes of Montmartre.

Montmartre is the famous Paris place for night activity. It is compounded of the garish tourist traps around the Place de Clichy, with red painted doors and thousands of electric light globes. These have fantastic names and fake artists who are hired to come in and sit at the tables to give a Bohemian atmosphere. They are run for the purpose of getting Americans, both north and south, to buy champagne.

Champagne is the great symbol of night life to the uninitiated. And the tourist traps make the most of it. They sell champagne and champagne only. If the visitor tries to order anything else he is given the choice of champagne or the street door. It ranges in price from six to eight dollars a bottle. While it is being drunk the tourist can look around at other tourists and the hired artists who are dressed in Greenwich Village costumes.

Champagne, by the way, is a sacred name in France. The only wine allowed by law to be called champagne comes from a certain defined district around Rheims in the Champagne province. Other fake champagnes must be labeled Epernay, Mousseaux or whatever district they come from. There is a terrific fine for selling these wines from just outside the champagne district as the veritable wine. The real champagne vintners have important government connections.

A patriotic-minded French journalist heard that a certain Montmartre resort was selling Mousseaux as champagne. With a witness he went into the place and ordered a single glass of champagne. He was served a sparkling liquid, the bubbles hopping and jumping to the surface. He paid a champagne price. The waiter went away.

The journalist tasted the glass. “Mousseaux!” he shouted. “The camel has served me with Mousseaux, and I ordered champagne. What an outrage! Not only an outrage, but a breaking of the law. Bring the proprietor. Bring the proprietor instantly before I send for the police.”

The proprietor is reported to have settled the case for 20,000 francs.

Numberless other journalists and men about town ordered glasses of champagne after that, hoping for such a chance, but the Mousseaux sellers were wise. It was not worth the chance. It is costly business mistaking a Frenchman for a tourist.

The famous Moulin Rouge on Montmartre is an enormous dancing place where shop girls, their gentlemen friends, and a certain number of tourists go to dance on a large and slippery floor in the glare cast by a spot light that is supposed to give romance through different colored celluloid disks that make a red, orange, or green glow. It is cheerful and innocuous, and one of the few places in Paris where the foreigners come into contact with French people taking their pleasure.

The real night life places do not open up until after three o’clock in the morning. At present the two most notable of these are the Caucasian, a very smart Russian place, and Florence’s. Florence is an American Negress who has made a tremendous vogue for herself in Paris as a dancer.

When I first met her some time ago she was a typical Negro dancer, jolly, funny, and wonderful on her feet. Until you had seen Florence dance to “Everybody Steps,” you had seen nothing.

Then a section of the French nobility took her up. She danced at the home of the Princesse de This and the Comtesse de That. Late last summer we wandered into Florence’s dancing place to get some corn-beef hash with poached egg and buckwheat cakes at two-thirty in the morning. It was absolutely dead. No one had come in yet. The Negro staff were not overeager to serve us. They thought we ought to buy champagne.

Now the mark of a real student of night life is that he should be considered so much of an asset to a place that the compulsory consumption of champagne rule should be suspended in his favor.

“We’re old friends of Florence,” I explained.

“Suah, boss. What’ll youahl have? Beeah? Anythin’ you say, boss.”

We had a good meal, and then Florence came in. Florence was changed. She had acquired an English accent and a languid manner.

“Oh, hulloa,” she said. “Yes, I’m dawncing private now. But do drop in on us some time heah. So jolly to see you again.”

It wasn’t jolly at all. Another of the really amusing aftermidnight places had been ruined by prosperity.

“Miss Flawnce she ain’t a niggah no mo. No suh. She done tell customahs mammy’s an Indian lady fum Canada,” a waiter explained. “Ah’m luhnin’ to talk that English way, too. Ah’m goin’ tuh tell people my mammy’s an Indian lady fuhm Noble Scotia. Yes, suh. We’ll all be Indiums this tahm nex’ yeah. Yes, suh.”

There are other famous nocturnal places in Paris — Zelli’s, where the newspaper men all used to go, the very dressy dancings in the Rue Caumartin, where one would find Peggy Joyce and other famous ladies of the front page, and sleek-haired Chileans and Argentinians dancing to American jazz music.

Berlin night life is a great contrast to that of Paris. Berlin is a vulgar, ugly, sullenly dissipated city. After the war it plunged into an orgy that the Germans called the death-dance. There is nothing attractive or gay about the night life of Berlin. It is altogether revolting.

If champagne is the deus ex machina of the after-hours existence of Paris, cocaine takes its place in the German capital. Cocaine peddlers get short shrift from the Paris police. But in Berlin they sell their wares openly all over the city. In some cafes cocaine is served at the tables by the waiters.

Berlin is the home of the night club. Riding or walking along the street at night a ragged-looking man will run up to your cab and try to get you to go to a night club. A fine new night club. All the night life of the city.

There is no night club in Berlin that is not disgusting, heavy, dull and hopeless. The gaiety is as forced as it is real in Paris on the 14th of July, when the entire city dances in the street for two nights steady and the streets are roped off to shut out taxis and auto-buses.

If anyone has any doubt that the Germans lost the war and realize they lost it, all they need would be a session of after-midnight Berlin.

Madrid is another business. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid. On the other hand, they don’t do anything to amuse themselves. They just stay up and talk.

All of the downtown district of Madrid is at its very busiest at two o’clock in the morning. Cafes are crowded. The streets are jammed with people. Theaters start in Madrid at ten o’clock at night. Matinees commence at 6:30 in the afternoon.

There are two big downtown dancing places. One called Maxim’s. The other, two or three doors up the street, I have forgotten the name of. It makes no difference. They are both alike.

Always beware of a place called Maxim’s. It means imitation Paris. Now Paris is a very fine thing. But it doesn’t imitate well. And there are Maxim’s all over the world.

Even the original Maxim’s in Paris is a dull enough place. It has a bar as you go in and then a big room full of tables, with a dancing floor at the far end. It is always full of profiteers, American buyers, and the inevitable sprinkling of South Americans. The music plays loudly and the prices are high. The lights are bright. It is a good place to get a headache.

All the imitation Maxim’s are reproductions on a small scale of the original.

In Madrid I asked a bullfighter where the really gay life of the city was. Where he went himself, for example.

“Me? I go to bed,” he smiled shyly. “I don’t like to talk and I don’t like to drink. Since I have learned to read I read a little every night in bed before I go to sleep.”

“What do you read?” I asked.

“Oh, the bullfighting papers,” he said.

He is a very serious young man, makes $15,000 a year, and probably has half the girls in Madrid in love with him. But he doesn’t believe in night life.

Constantinople before the Mudania armistice was probably the most hectic town in the world. Mustapha Kemal had announced that when he came into the town it was going to be shut tight up — and everybody believed him. He had done everything he ever said he would up till then.

Nobody slept much during the day and nobody slept at all during the night. No good restaurants opened up before ten at night and the theaters opened at midnight. The followers of the prophet spent their waking hours in trying to make absolutely sure there would be none of the product of Constantinople’s Bavarian breweries left to dump into the Golden Horn when Kemal arrived.

The breweries tried to keep pace with the Moslem demand. It was a great race. Along toward evening the crews of the British, American, Spanish, Italian and French fleets would come ashore and rush to the aid of the Mohammedans in their struggle with the breweries. It was a great battle, with the brewers always a little ahead. In spite of their smaller numbers their organization was better.

As the evening advanced fights would break out among the sailors of the different nationalities in the various Galata beer emporiums. This no doubt slowed up their efficiency. Especially when there were shootings or knifings, which occasionally resulted in pitched battles.

All of Constantinople was in a feverish sort of wildness. It had nothing of the sullen ugliness of the Berlin pleasure resorts.

There is the famous incident of the captain of a cruiser of a neutral nation, not the United States, whose vessel was anchored in the Bosporus. This incident came very near to being of tremendous international gravity.

One night at three o’clock in the morning the commander came aboard his ship. His manner was distrait. His eyes were rolling.

“Clear the ship for action,” he commanded.

The commander paced restlessly up and down the bridge. The ship was as busy as only a warship with its crew suddenly roused at three a in can be. Men rushed in every direction. Guns were trained for a broadside.

“Commence firing on the city,” the captain shouted down his telephone from the bridge. “War has been declared.”

Somebody had sense enough to grab him and take him below. Constantinople had been a little too much for him.

The captain was said to have been drinking douzico straight. It has a faculty of making people go crazy at odd times. It is prepared with some sort of strange Turkish ingredients, but its base is grain alcohol imported from the United States in large steel drums. It was never served without some crackers, cheese or radishes to give it something to work on in addition to the lining of the stomach.

From Stamboul across the Golden Horn to the high barren plain at the top of Pera, Constan stayed up all night. Every big newspaper story that broke came after midnight in the night clubs of Pera. It was in one of these, the Pele Mele, in some way derived from Pall Mall, that an excited young officer just back on a destroyer from Mudania confided the news of the signing of the armistice to a Russian countess who was acting as a waitress.

The officer, who had been present at the signing, told the countess in greatest secrecy because he had to tell someone. He was so excited. She recognized the value of the story and told an American newspaper man whom she liked much better than she did the officer.

In an hour, through means of his own, the newspaperman verified the report, and put it on the cable to New York, where it arrived in time for the morning papers. The signing was not announced officially until next morning at eleven o’clock. By that time the correspondents of the other papers, whose correspondents did not know the countess, were getting cables from New York asking them why they were scooped on Mudania.

Italy is a strange country for night life. Night life must be taken to mean not dissipation or dancing places necessarily, but merely that strange, feverish something that keeps people up and about during the hours they would normally sleep.

Milan, the largest city in the north of Italy, with about 800,000 inhabitants, goes to bed almost as early as Toronto does. Verona, not a third as big, is alive and gay at two-thirty in the morning. I remember hiking into Verona with a pack long after midnight expecting to find everything closed tight, and finding the city as alive as Paris at 9:30 in the evening.

Turin is another late town, and a very pleasant town. Rome is very dull at night. Rome, to my mind, is very dull nearly all of the time. It is the last city in the world I would ever want to live in.

Marseilles has one of the most variegated, interesting and toughest night sides in Europe. Seville, too, is late to bed. So is Granada.

Night life is a funny thing. There seems to be no reason or rule that controls it. You can not find it when you want it. And you cannot get away from it when you don’t want it. It is a European product.

KING BUSINESS ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

The other day in Paris I ran into my old pal Shorty. Shorty is a film service movie operator. He takes the news films you see at the movies. Shorty was just back from Greece.

“Say,” said Shorty, “that George is a fine kid.”

“What George?” I asked.

“Why, the king,” said Shorty. “Didn’t you meet him? You know who I mean. The new one.”

“I never met him,” I said.

“Oh, he’s a white man,” Shorty said, signaling the waiter. “He’s a prince, that boy. Look at this.”

I looked at it. It was a sheet of note paper embossed with the royal arms of Greece, and written in English.

The King would be very pleased if Mr. Wornall would call either in the morning or in the afternoon. He will be expected all day. If he will be so good as to answer by the bearer a carriage will be sent to bring him to the royal palace. — (Signed) GEORGE.

“Oh, he’s a wonderful kid,” said Shorty, folding the paper carefully and putting it back into his wallet.

“Why, you know I went out there in the afternoon with my camera. We drove into the palace grounds past a lot of these big tall babies in ballet skirts with their rifles held at salute. I got out, and he came walking down the drive and shook hands and said: ‘Hello. How have you been, Mr. Wornall?’

“We went for a walk around the grounds and there was the queen clipping a rose bush. ‘This is the queen,’ said George. ‘How do you do?’ she said.”

“How long did you stay?” I asked.

“Oh, a couple of hours,” Shorty said. “The king was glad to have somebody to talk to. We had whiskey and soda at a table under a big tree. The king said it was no fun being shut up there. They hadn’t given him any money since the revolution, and wouldn’t let any of the Greek aristocracy visit him. They wouldn’t let him go outside the grounds.

“‘It’s frightfully dull, you know,’ he said. ‘Andrew was the lucky one. They banished him, you know, and now he can live in London or Paris or wherever he wants.’”

“What language did you talk with him?” I said.

“English, of course,” Shorty answered. “That’s what all the Greek royal family speak. Mrs. Leeds, you know. I ran off a lot of film of him and the queen all around the palace and out in the field. He wanted me to take him with an old binder they had out in one of the big fields inside the walls. This will look fine in America, won’t it?’ he said.”

“What’s the queen like?” I said.

“Oh, I didn’t get to know her very well,” Shorty answered. “I only stayed a couple of hours. I never like to stick around with them too long. Some Americans just abuse them. They get an invitation out to the palace, and then the king can’t get rid of them. But the queen’s nice, all right. When I left the king said: ‘Well, maybe we’ll meet in the States sometime.’ Like all the Greeks, he wants to get over to the States.”

George of Greece is the newest king in Europe, and probably the most uncomfortable. As Shorty says, he is a very nice boy, and he isn’t having any fun at all. He was put into the job by a revolutionary committee last fall, and he stays in just as long as they let him.

George is married to a Rumanian princess, daughter of Queen Marie and King Ferdinand of Rumania, and just now his mother-in-law is making a tour of the capitals of Europe to get George recognized — and, incidentally, her daughter recognized as queen.

Which brings us to Rumania, where the king business isn’t flourishing so well either.

King Ferdinand looks as worried as any man who hides his true expression behind a crop of choice upper Danube whiskers can look. Rumania is the one country that no one in Europe takes seriously. When the statesmen and their friends were living in the best hotels of Paris during the year 1919 and making the treaty that was designed to Europeanize the Balkans, and succeeded in Balkanizing Europe, the Rumanians had a choice collection of rapid talkers and historical precedent quoters massed for action.

When these talkers had finished and the treaties were signed it developed that Rumania had been given all the land of her neighbors in every direction that any Rumanian had mentioned. The treaty makers probably considered this a cheap price to pay to free themselves from the presence of the ardent Rumanian patriots. At any rate, Rumania now has to maintain one of the largest standing armies in Europe to keep down revolts of her new Rumanians whose one desire is to cease to be Rumanians.

Sooner or later large chunks of Rumania are going to break off and drift away like an ice floe when it hits the Gulf Stream. Queen Marie, who is a first-rate bridge player, a second-rate poetess, a very high-grade puller of European political strings, and who uses more make-up than all the rest of the European royal families combined, is making every effort to form such European alliances that this coming disintegration will be stopped. On the other side, Crown Prince Carol, who is a most charming, oh, most charming young man and president of the Prince Carol Film Company, which had the exclusive filming of the especially staged Rumanian coronation, does not appear to be greatly interested.

Meanwhile the officers of the Rumanian army, which will bear the brunt of Hungarian and Russian attacks sometime within the next ten years, use lipstick, rouge their faces, and wear corsets. This is no exaggeration. I have, with my own eyes, seen Rumanian officers, infantry officers, using lipsticks in a cafe. I have seen cavalry officers rouged like chorus men. I would not swear to the corsets. Appearances may be deceptive.

Working back from Rumania, we enter the realm of King Boris of Bulgaria. Boris is the son of Ferdinand the Fox. When the near-eastern front crumbled in 1918, and the Bulgarian troops came home with revolutionary committees at their heads, they released a large, rough, foul-mouthed ex-farmer named Stambuliski from the jail where he had been ever since he had tried to get Bulgaria into the war on the side of the allies. Stambuliski came out of jail like a bull coming from his dark pen into the bright glare of the bull ring. His first charge was toward King Ferdinand. Ferdinand left the country. Boris, his son, wanted to go, too. “If you attempt to leave the country I’ll have you shot,” Stambuliski roared.

Boris stayed. Stambuliski used to keep him in an anteroom and call him in when he wanted an interpreter to talk to people he wished to be especially polite to. Newspaper correspondents for example.

Boris is blond, pleasant and talkative. He heartily dislikes Bulgaria and wants to live in Paris. Now Stambuliski has been overthrown by the old pro-German army officers, grafters, intriguing politicians and Bulgarian intellectuals, which means in Bulgaria people who have absorbed sufficient learning as to be no longer honest, and killed like an escaping convict by the people who ruined the country he has been trying to save. Boris is still the king, but he is now controlled by the will of his father Ferdinand and the old fox’s advisers.

I have not seen him for over a year, but they say he is still as blond, but not as pleasant nor talkative. He is not married, but Queen Marie, the matchmaker, is grooming a daughter.

Next in line is Alexander, of Yugoslavia, or as the Yugoslavs insist it is, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Alexander is the son of King Peter of Serbia. He is no relation to the Croats and the Slovenes. I saw him one night in a Montmartre resort in Paris, where he had come incognito for a last visit to the capital before his marriage. There were a number of Serbs and several Frenchmen with him, all in evening dress. Various girls were at the table. It was a big night for the wine growers. Alexander was quite drunk and very happy.

Shortly after this trip the marriage was postponed, but eventually took place.

Victor Emmanuel of Italy is a very short, serious little man with a gray, goat-like beard and tiny hands and feet. His legs looked as thin but as sturdy as a jockey’s when he used to wear roll puttees with his uniform. His queen is almost a head taller than himself. The Italian king’s lack of stature is a characteristic of the ancient house of Savoy, the greatest of whose long heritage of rulers have been little taller than bantam-weight boxers.

Just at present the king of Italy is probably the most popular king in Europe. He has handed over his kingdom, his army and his navy to Mussolini. Mussolini handed them politely back with many protestations of loyalty to the house of Savoy. Then he decided to keep the army and navy himself. When he will ask for the kingdom no one knows.

I have talked to many Fascisti, the old original nucleus of the party, who have all sworn that they were republicans. “But we trust Mussolini,” they said. “Mussolini will know when the time is ripe.”

There is a chance, of course, that Mussolini will renounce his old republicanism just as Garibaldi did. He has done so temporarily, and he has a genius for making something that he is doing temporarily appear to be permanent.

But the Fascisti party to exist must have action. It is getting a little satisfaction now out of Corfu and the Adriatic. If it needed a republic to hold it together it would get a republic.

As a man and a human being there is probably no finer father or more democratic ruler on the continent than Victor Emmanuel.

The king of Spain has been king ever since he can remember. He was born king, and you can trace the evolution of his familiarly photographed under-jaw on the Spanish five-peseta pieces since 1886. It’s no treat for him to be king. He’s never been anything else. He was much handsomer as a baby, if the peseta pieces are accurate, but then we all were.

Alfonso is another king whose throne rests on a volcano. But it doesn’t seem to worry him much. He is an excellent polo player and the best amateur motor car driver in Spain.

Recently the king drove his car from Santander, a summer watering place in the north of Spain, to Madrid, over mountains, hills, and along precipices at an average speed of sixty miles an hour. There was a good deal of criticism in many of the Spanish papers. “If we have responsibilities to a king, does not a king have responsibilities to us to keep himself intact, etc.” The trip was not well received. But two weeks later the king opened the new motor racing track at San Sebastian by turning off two laps himself at well over one hundred kilometers an hour. His time was only four kilometers an hour behind the winner of the Grand Prix.

The day of the Grand Prix at San Sebastian there was another Spanish military disaster in Morocco in which the Spanish lost over 500 killed, there was a revolt in the barracks at Malaga, and two regiments of troops mutinied, refusing to leave Spain for the Moorish front. The desultory guerilla warfare that has been going on in Barcelona between the labor men and the government, and which has resulted in over two hundred assassinations in less than a year, continues. But there are no attempts on the life of the king. The people don’t take Alfonso too seriously. They have had him for a long time.

In the north live the respectable kings — Haakon of Norway, Gustavus of Sweden, and Christian of Denmark. They are so well situated that no one ever hears much about them. Except the king of Sweden, who is an ardent and very good tennis player and plays regularly with Suzanne Lenglen as his partner every winter at Cannes.

Albert of Belgium and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, everyone knows.

John II, of Liechtenstein, is a ruler who has had little publicity. Prince John has ruled over the Principality of Liechtenstein since 1858. He is eighty-three years old this year.

I have always thought of Liechtenstein as a manager of prize fighters that used to live in Chicago, but it seems there is a very prosperous country of that name ruled over by John the second. John the first was his father. They’ve kept the country very much in the family for over a hundred years. Liechtenstein is all of sixty-five square miles and lies on the border between Switzerland and Austria. It had been a dependency of Austria, but announced its independence on November 7th, 1918. Two years ago the gallant Liechtensteiners made a treaty with the Swiss to run their post and telegraph system for them. All of the 10,876 inhabitants were doing well at last report except Prince John who is having a little trouble with his teeth.

So far I have only mentioned the European kings who are still holding down their jobs. Ex-kings would take an article in themselves. I have never seen the Kaiser, or Harry K. Thaw, or Landru. A good many of my best friends, though, have climbed up the wall of the garden at Doom or attempted to gain admission disguised as bales of hay, cases of lager beer or Bavarian diplomats. Even when they have seen the Kaiser, however, they report the result as unsatisfactory.

TOURIST IN SWITZERLAND

Because the Swiss franc is still worth approximately twenty cents, the country is rapidly becoming impoverished. Tourists were always the principal Swiss source of income, and now tourists look at the exchange rates, see that they can get only five francs for a dollar, and stay away from Switzerland. As a result, parts of the country that were jammed with a tourist population before the war now look like the deserted boom towns of Nevada.

Hundreds of hotels are closed in Switzerland, and tourists are coming into the country in mere trickles of the streams that poured in before the war. The hotel men are desperate. Wealthy Swiss people, when they want a holiday, go into the Austrian Tyrol where their francs will buy a bushel basket full of kronen. French people are not coming to Switzerland at all.

“I wish the Swiss franc would drop to the same value as the French,” the manager of a big hotel said to me today, “then we might get our share of the flood of tourists coming to Europe now. Prices here are practically as low as similar resorts in the French Alps, but all the tourists want to get as many francs as they can for their dollars, so they stay away.”

As a matter of fact, the tourist would do as well in Switzerland as he would in France, for the big hotels in France and in Italy counteract the rate of exchange by raising their prices in proportion. Room and board in a good Swiss hotel cost the tourist 15 to 25 francs or three to five dollars. In a French hotel of the same class the rate would be 35 to 55 francs in French money, or three to five dollars.

The thing for tourists to remember is that all European hotelkeepers that have any clientele among tourists from America or England watch the exchange rates like hawks and make their room rates correspond to the prewar value in dollars. So Switzerland is as cheap as anywhere else. But the tourists do not know it and Switzerland is paying the price of neutrality in a quite unforeseen way.

PROFITEERS, SHEEP AND WOLVES

Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock school of architecture. Every place that the land goes sufficiently sideways a hotel is planted, and all the hotels look as though they had been cut out by the same man with the same scroll saw.

You walk along a wild-looking road through a sweep of dark forest that spreads over the side of a mountain. There are deer tracks in the snow and a big raven teeters back and forth on the high branch of a pine tree, watching you examine the tracks. Down below there is a snow-softened valley that climbs into white, jagged peaks with more splashes of pine forest on their flanks. It is as wild as the Canadian Rockies. Then you round a bend in the road and see four monstrous hotels, looking like mammoth children’s play-houses of the iron dog on the front lawn period of Canadian architecture, squatting on the side of the mountain. It does something to you.

The fashionable hotels of Switzerland are scattered over the country like billboards along the right of way of a railroad, and in winter are filled with utterly charming young men, with rolling white sweaters and smoothly brushed hair, who make a good living playing bridge. These young men do not play bridge with each other; not in working hours at least. They are usually playing with women who are old enough to be their mothers and who deal the cards with a flashing of platinum rings on plump fingers. I do not know just how it all is worked, but the young men look quite contented and the women can evidently afford to lose.

Then there are the French aristocracy. These are not the splendid aristocracy of toothless old women and white mustached old men that are making a final stand in the Faubourg St. Honore in Paris against ever increasing prices. The French aristocracy that comes to Switzerland consists of very young men who wear very old names and very tight in the knees riding breeches with equal grace. They are the few that have the great names of France who, through some holdings or other in iron or coal, were enriched by the war and are able to stop at the same hotels with the men who sold blankets and wine to the army. When the young men with the old names come into a room full of profiteers, sitting with their pre-money wives and postmoney daughters, it is like seeing a slim wolf walk into a pen of fat sheep. It seems to puncture the value of the profiteers’ titles. No matter what their nationality, they have a heavy, ill-at-ease look.

Beside the bridge-men who were the dancing men, and will be again, and the old and the new aristocracy, the big hotels house ruddy English families who are out all day on the ski slopes and bob-sled runs, pale-faced men who are living in the hotel because they know that when they leave it they will be a long time in the sanitarium, elderly women who fill a loneliness with the movement of the hotel life, and a good sprinkling of Americans and Canadians who are traveling for pleasure.

The Swiss makes no distinction between Canadians and citizens of the United States. I wondered about this, and asked a hotelkeeper if he didn’t notice any difference between the people from the two countries.

“Monsieur,” he said, “Canadians speak English and always stay two days longer at any place than Americans do.” So there you are.

Hotelkeepers, they say, are very wise. But all the Americans I have seen so far were very busy learning to talk English. Harvard was founded for that purpose, it is sometimes rumored, so if the people from the States ever slow up, the hotelkeepers may have to find some new tests.

THE LUGE

The luge is the Swiss flivver. It is also the Swiss canoe, the Swiss horse and buggy, the Swiss pram, and the Swiss combination riding-horse and taxi. Luge is pronounced looge, and is a short, stout sled of hickory built on the pattern of little girls’ sleds in Canada.

You realize the omnipotence of the luge when on a bright Sunday you see all of Switzerland, from old grandmothers to street children, coasting solemnly down the steep mountain roads, sitting on these little elevated pancakes with the same tense expression on all their faces. They steer with their feet stuck straight out in front and come down a twelve-mile run at a speed of from twelve to thirty miles an hour.

Swiss railroads run special trains for lugeurs between Montreux, at the edge of Lake Geneva, and the top of Col du Sonloup, a mountain 4,000 feet above sea level. Twelve trains a day are packed, on Sunday, with families and their sleds. They put up their lunch, buy an all-day ticket, good for any number of rides on the winding, climbing, Bernese Oberland railway, and then spend the day sliding gloriously down the long, icy mountain road.

Steering a luge takes about as long to learn as riding a bicycle. You get on the sled, lean far back and the luge commences to move down the icy road. If it starts to sheer off to the right you drop your left leg and if it goes too far to the left you let your right foot drag. Your feet are sticking straight out before you. That is all there is to steering, but there is a great deal more to keeping your nerve.

You go down a long, steep stretch of road flanked by a six hundred foot drop-off on the left and bordered by a line of trees on the right. The sled goes fast from the start and soon it is rushing faster than anything you have ever felt. You are sitting, absolutely unsupported, only ten inches above the ice and the road is feeding past you like a movie film. The sled you are sitting on is only just large enough to make a seat and is rushing at motor car speed toward a sharp curve. If you lean your body away from the curve and drop the right foot the luge will swing around the curve in a slither of ice and drop shooting down the next slope. If you upset on a turn you are hurled into a snow bank or go shooting down the road, lugeing along on various plane surfaces of your anatomy.

Additional hazards are provided for the lugeurs by hay sleds and wood sleds. These have long, curved up runners, and are used to haul the hay down from the mountain meadows where it was cut and cured in the summer, or to bring down great loads of firewood and fagots cut in the forests. They are big, slow-moving sledges and are pulled by their drivers, who haul them by the long, curved up runners and pull themselves up in front of their loads to coast down the steepest slopes.

Because there are many lugeurs, the men with the hay and wood sleds get tired of pulling their loads to one side when they hear a lugeur come shooting down; shouting for the right of way. A lugeur at thirty miles an hour, with no brakes but his feet, has the option of hitting the sleds ahead of him or shooting off the road. It is considered a very bad omen to hit a wood sled.

There is a British colony at Bellaria, near Vevey in the Canton of Vaud, on Lake Geneva. The two apartment buildings they live in are at the foot of the mountains and the British are nearly all quite rapid luguers. They can leave Bellaria, where there will be no snow and a mild, springlike breeze, and in half an hour by the train be up the mountain where there are fast, frozen roads and thirty inches of snow on the level. Yet the air is so dry and crisp and the sun shines so brightly that while the Bellarians are waiting for a train at Chamby, halfway up the mountain to Sonloup, they have tea out of doors in the afternoon in perfect comfort clad in nothing heavier than sport clothes.

The road from Chamby to Montreux is very steep and fairly dangerous for lugeing. It is however, one of the favorite runs of the Britons from Bellaria, who take it nightly on their way home to their comfortable apartment buildings just above the lake. This makes some very interesting pictures, as the road is only used by the most daring lugeurs.

One wonderful sight is to see the ex-military governor of Khartoum seated on a sled that looks about the size of a postage stamp, his feet stuck straight out at the sides, his hands in back of him, charging a smother of ice dust down the steep, high-walled road, with his muffler straight out behind him in the wind and a cherubic smile on his face while all the street urchins of Montreux spread against the walls and cheer him wildly as he passes.

It is easy to understand how the British have such a great Empire after you have seen them luge.

HOW’D YOU LIKE TO TIP THE POSTMAN EVERY TIME?

Tipping the postman is the only way to insure the arrival of your letters in certain parts of Spain.

The postman comes in sight down the street, waving a letter. “A letter for the Senor,” he shouts. He hands it to you.

“A splendid letter, is it not, Senor? I, the postman, brought it to you. Surely the good postman will be well rewarded for the delivery of such a splendid letter?”

You tip the postman. It is a little more than he had expected. He is quite overcome.

“Senor,” says the postman, “I am an honest man. Your generosity has touched my heart. Here is another letter. I had intended to save it for tomorrow to insure another reward from the always generous Senor. But here it is. Let us hope that it will be as splendid a letter as the first!”

The postman bows and departs. If you have been in Spain long enough you are able to hang on to your temper. It is the climate that does it, they say. The climate is so soft and gentle that it makes it seem not worth while to kill the postman. Life is mellow in Spain.

The conversation above actually occurred, and was brought back to Paris intact by an American who has been painting down in Majorca. All the American magazines that were sent to him had the illustrations cut out. They were excised to brighten the walls of the local postoffice.

When the artist asked the postman about the magazines he answered, “We have so little to read. It is such a dull town. Surely the Senor, who has so much, would not grudge us the mere pictures from his reviews?”

“And do you know?” the artist said. “After a while I got so that it didn’t bother me a bit. It’s funny the way things get you down there.”

It must certainly be the climate.

OLD CONSTAN

In the morning when you wake and see a mist over the Golden Horn with the minarets rising out of it slim and clean toward the sun and the Muezzin calling the faithful to prayer in a voice that soars and dips like an aria from a Russian opera, you have the magic of the east.

When you look from the window into the mirror and discover your face is covered with a mass of minute red speckles from the latest insect that discovered you last night, you have the east.

There may be a happy medium between the east of Pierre Loti’s stories and the east of everyday life, but it could only be found by a man who always looked with his eyes half shut, didn’t care what he ate, and was immune to the bites of insects.

No one knows how many people there are in Constan. Old timers always call it Constan, just as you are a tenderfoot if you call Gibraltar anything but Gib. There has never been a census. Estimates of the population give a million and a half inhabitants. This does not include hundreds of battered Fords, forty thousand Russian refugees in every uniform of the Czar’s army in all stages of dilapidation, and about an equal number of Kemalist troops in civilian clothes who have filtered into the city in order to make sure that Constantinople will go to Kemal no matter how the peace negotiations come out. All these have entered since the last estimate.

If it doesn’t rain in Constan the dust is so thick that a dog trotting along the road that parallels the Pera hillside kicks up a puff like a bullet striking every time his paws hit the ground. It is almost ankle deep on a man and the wind swirls it in clouds.

If it rains this is all mud. The sidewalks are so narrow that everyone has to walk in the street and the streets are like rivers. There are no traffic rules and motor cars, streetcars, horse cabs, and porters with enormous loads on their backs all jam up together. There are only two main streets and the others are alleys. The main streets are not much better than alleys.

Turkey is the national dish of Turkey. These birds live a strenuous life chasing grasshoppers over the sun-baked hills of Asia Minor and are about as tough as a race horse.

All the beef is bad because the Turk has practically no cattle. A sirloin steak may be either the last appearance of one of the black, muddy, sad-eyed buffalo with the turned back horns who sidle along the streets drawing carts, or the last charge of Kemal’s cavalry. My jaw muscles are beginning to bulge like a bulldog’s from chewing, or chawing, Turkish meat.

The fish is good, but fish is a brain food and anyone taking about three good doses of a brain food would leave Constan at once — even if he had to swim to do it.

There are one hundred and sixty-eight legal holidays in Constan. Every Friday is a Mohammedan holiday, every Saturday is a Jewish holiday, and every Sunday is a Christian holiday. In addition there are Catholic, Mohammedan and Greek holidays during the week, not to mention Yom Kippur and the other Jewish holidays. As a result every young Constaner’s life’s ambition is to go to work for a bank.

No one who makes any pretense of conforming to custom dines in Constantinople before nine o’clock at night. The theaters open at ten. The night clubs open at two, the more respectable night clubs, that is. The disreputable night clubs open at four in the morning.

All night hot sausage, fried potato and roast chestnut stands run their charcoal braziers on the sidewalk to cater to the long lines of cab men who stay up all night to solicit fares from the revelers. Constantinople is doing a sort of dance with death before the entree of Kemal Pasha, who has sworn to stop all booze, gambling, dancing and night clubs.

Galata, halfway up the hill from the port, has a district that is more unspeakably horrible than the foulest heyday of the old Barbary Coast. It festers there, trapping the soldiers and sailors of all the allies and of all nations.

Turks sit in front of the little coffee houses in the narrow, blind-alley streets at all hours, puffing on their bubble-bubble pipes and drinking douzico, the tremendously poisonous stomach-totting drink that has a greater kick than absinthe and is so strong that it is never consumed except with an hors d’oeuvre of some sort.

Before the sun rises in the morning you can walk through the black, smooth worn streets of Constan and rats will scuttle out of your way, a few stray dogs nose at the garbage in the gutters, and a bar of light comes through the crack in a shutter, letting out a streak of light and sound of drunken laughing. That drunken laughing is the contrast to the Muezzin’s beautiful, minor, soaring, swaying call to prayer, and the black, slippery, smelly, offal-strewn streets of Constantinople in the early morning are the reality of the Magic of the East.

Part Seven. TRAGEDY AT GENOA

In April 1922, statesmen from thirty-four nations converged on Genoa, Italy. On the agenda was a diplomatic squeeze play. The target was Russia, a former ally and now a country disgraced in war and scorned and distrusted in peace.

The conference at Genoa had its beginnings five years earlier, in 1917. The war against Germany had gone badly for the Russians. An unending string of defeats had contributed to the downfall of the Czar, and the new Bolshevik government brought the war to a quick, if unglorious, end. Even a desperate treaty with Germany did not finish the bloodshed and suffering. While White armies rose up in an anti-Red rebellion, three former allies — France, Great Britain and the United States — launched a half-hearted invasion of Russia’s Siberian territories.

The new Bolshevik government had not won the friendship of nations. It was the architect of Russia’s untimely withdrawal from the war, releasing a hundred German divisions for duty on the Western Front, and it had promptly followed that up by repudiating all war debts and foreign-held bonds, and by confiscating the property of non-Russians. While Moscow appealed for world revolution, Red-organized extremists began igniting the fires of rebellion across the continent. The non-communist world had reason enough to want the destruction of the Red regime.

But the communists held on and by 1920 the civil war ended. That year the Allied armies were evacuated; their meandering, poorly directed excursion onto Russian soil had accomplished nothing. The world promptly showed its scorn and frustration by ignoring the Bolsheviks, and for five years no nation recognized the new Soviet state. The pressure of economics, however, eventually proved more persuasive than political obstinacy. Defaulted Russian bonds and unpaid war debts represented a sizable source of capital — one not to be sacrificed lightly. With their national treasuries caught in a postwar squeeze, the European nations concluded the time ripe to maneuver the Soviets into acceptance of Czarist debts.

Thus the conference at Genoa, held under the flimsy pretext of establishing a ten-year nonaggression pact. Except for the United States, all the Allies were there, headed by Lloyd George of Britain and France’s Louis Barthou. On hand too were the defeated nations, also long-standing creditors of the Czar. Germany, still an outcast, still humbled, had come as had Austria and Hungary. And across the table, confidently facing thirty-three impatient creditors, sat the representatives of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Georgi Tchitcherin, who had succeeded Leon Trotsky as Commissar for Foreign Affairs, headed the Soviet delegation. By his side were Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krassin and Adolf Joffe. The Russians were under no misconception as to the real purpose of the meeting and, indeed, had even offered “to discuss” the repayment of old loans. They placed three conditions on the obligation, however. In return for Soviet agreement, all Russian war debts would be canceled, the Allies would pay heavy damages for the abortive occupation of Siberia and all nations involved would extend sizable cash credits — really new loans — to the Soviet government.

With the Russians willing to take back home much more than they gave, and the other nations wanting Soviet gold without concessions, the conference at Genoa looked to drag on indeterminately. Yet neither side despaired, each expecting to exert pressures and counterpressures until the opposition gave up or gave in. Such was the scene on the tenth of April 1922.

Hundreds of correspondents covered the Genoa diplomatic contest. Lincoln Steffens and Max Eastman rushed in from the United States while Ernest Hemingway took the train from Paris. His accounts on the preliminary skirmishing at Genoa appear here...

JUST LIKE A TEA FIGHT

The great hall of the Palazzo San Giorgio, where the sessions of the Genoa conference are held, is about half the size of Massey Hall and is overlooked by a marble statue of Columbus sitting on a pale marble throne sunk deep into the wall.

Columbus, and the press gallery at the other end of the hall, look down on a rectangle of green-covered tables arranged in the familiar shape of tables at banquets, lodges, Y.M.C.A. dinners and college reunions. There is a white pad of paper at each table that, from the press gallery, looks like a tablecloth, and for two hours before the conference opened a woman in a salmon-colored hat arranged and rearranged the ink-wells at the long rectangles of tables.

At the left of the statue of Columbus, a marble plaque twelve feet high is set into the wall bearing a quotation from Machiavelli’s history, telling of the founding of the Banco San Giorgio, site of the present palace, the oldest bank in the world. Machiavelli, in his day, wrote a book that could be used as a textbook by all conferences, and, from all results, is diligently studied.

To the left of the rather pompous marble Columbus is another plaque similar in size to the quotation from Machiavelli, on which is carved two letters from Columbus to the Queen of Spain and the Commune of Genoa. Both letters are highly optimistic in tone.

Delegates began to come into the hall in groups. They cannot find their places at the table, and stand talking. The rows of camp chairs that are to hold the invited guests begin to be filled with top-hatted, white mustached senators and women in Paris hats and wonderful, wealth-reeking fur coats. The fur coats are the most beautiful things in the hall.

There is an enormous chandelier, with globes as big as association footballs, hanging above the tables. It is made up of a tangled mass of griffons and unidentified beasts and when it switches on everyone in the press gallery is temporarily blinded. All around the wall of the hall are the pale marble effigies of the fine, swashbuckling pirates and traders that made Genoa a power in the old days when all the cities of Italy were at one another’s throats.

The press gallery fills up and the British and American correspondents light cigarettes and identify for one another the various bowing delegates as they enter the hall at the far end. The Poles and the Serbs are the first in; then they come in crowds carrying their eight-quart silk hats. Marcel Cashin, editor of Humanite, circulation 250,000, and leader of the French communist party, comes in and sits behind me. He has a drooping face, frayed red mustache and his black tortoiseshell spectacles are constantly on the point of sliding off the tip of his nose. He has a very rich wife and can afford to be a communist.

Next to him sits Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, who is doing a series of special articles for a New York paper and who looks like a big, jolly, middle-western college professor. He and Cashin converse with difficulty.

Movie men set up a camera under the nose of one of the niched-in Genoese heroes who looks down at it with a frozen marble expression of disapproval. The Archbishop of Genoa in wine-colored robes and a red skull cap stands talking with an old Italian general with a withered apple of a face and five wound stripes. The old general is General Gonzaga, commander of the cavalry corps; he looks a sunken-faced, kind-eyed Attila with his sweeps of mustache.

The hall is as noisy as a tea party. Journalists have filled the gallery, there is only room for 200 and there are 750 applicants and many late comers have to sit on the floor.

When the hall is nearly full, the British delegation enters. They have come in motor cars through the troop-lined streets and enter with elan. They are the best dressed delegation. Sir Charles Blair Gordon, head of the Canadian delegation, is blond, ruddy-faced and a little ill at ease. He is seated fourth from Lloyd George’s left at the long table.

Walter Rathenau, with the baldest bald head in the conference and a scientist’s face, comes in accompanied by Dr. Wirth, German chancellor, who looks like the tuba player in a German band. They are half way down one of the long tables. Rathenau is another wealthy socialist and considered the ablest man in Germany.

Prime Minister Facta of Italy takes the chair. So obscure has been his political career, until he came into light as a compromise premier when it looked as though Italy would be unable to form a cabinet, that biographies of him were issued to all the newspaper men by the Italian government.

Everyone is in the room but the Russians. The hall is crowded and sweltering and the four empty chairs of the Soviet delegation are the four emptiest looking chairs I have ever seen. Everyone is wondering whether they will not appear. Finally they come through the door and start making their way through the crowd. Lloyd George looks at them intently, fingering his glasses.

Litvinov, with a big, hamlike face is in the lead. He is wearing the red, rectangular insignia. After him comes Tchitcherin with his indeterminate face, his indefinite beard and his nervous hands. They blink at the light from the chandelier. Krassin is next. He has a mean face and a carefully tailored Vandyke beard and looks like a prosperous dentist. Joffe is last. He has a long, narrow, spade beard and wears gold-rimmed glasses.

A mass of secretaries follows the Russian delegates, including two girls with fresh faces, hair bobbed in the fashion started by Irene Castle, and modish tailored suits. They are far and away the best-looking girls in the conference hall.

The Russians are seated, someone hisses for silence, and Signor Facta starts the dreary round of speeches that sent the conference under way.

THE SOVIET DELEGATION

Genoa is crowded, a modem Babel with the corps of perspiring interpreters trying to bring the representatives of forty different countries together. The narrow streets flow with crowds kept orderly by thousands of Italian troops. The journalists, however, today deserted Genoa to see the Soviet delegation at Rapallo, a hot eighteen-mile ride, to interview Tchitcherin. Tchitcherin, blond and wearing new Berlin clothes with a large red rectangular badge, looks like a businessman. He speaks with a slight purr because of missing teeth.

He saw the flood of reporters in batches, speaking to them in their own languages. Hundreds of photographers tried to get past guards who examine their cameras for bombs.

Tchitcherin said to me, “Regarding all matters of debts we come with our hands free, without committing ourselves. The rights of foreign capital will be perfectly secured but Russia will resist all attempts by consortiums to make Russia a colony.”

Questioned about Soviet revolutionaries and moderate socialists now on trial, Tchitcherin said: “The social revolutionaries are not being persecuted. They are being prosecuted for real offenses, such as the blowing up of banks, shooting at Lenin, blowing up ammunition dumps, and attempting to dynamite Trotsky’s train. We are changing our penitentiary system to educate and reform criminals.

Questioned on the famine, Tchitcherin said: “Four years of blockade made the famine. The government is taxing all of Russia to aid the starving, and the transport system is working well.”

The eighty members of the Soviet delegation eat at a common table. The delegation is guarded by circles of soldiers, carabiniere and volunteer guards of Italian communists. The telephone service is horrible and the Soviets are dissatisfied with their quarters so distant from Genoa.

THE FATE OF PEACE

There was a sensation at the opening of the Genoa conference greater than Secretary Hughes’ naval scrapping speech at Washington — but it came when the scheduled speeches had been droned through and most of the newspaper men had left the hall to put their cut and dried reports of the opening on to the cable.

Suddenly into the fatigue-charged air of a crowded roomful of people who had heard speeches for four hours came an instantaneous electric thrill. Tchitcherin, head of the Soviet delegation, looking like a country grocery storekeeper, with a ragged, indefinite beard and a hissing, purr of a voice that was almost un-understandable in the press gallery, had just taken his seat at the green-covered rectangle of tables.

“Is there anyone else that would like to speak?” asked Signor Facta, president of the conference, in Italian.

“The president asks if there is anyone else that wants to speak,” translated the English interpreter, a square-faced woman with a high, theatrical voice.

M. Barthou, heading the French delegation, rose to his feet and launched into a passionate torrent of words. Barthou looks like the left-hand one of the Smith Brothers and waddles when he walks, but speaks with the impassioned vigor and earnestness of the French orator.

Suddenly the dull, sleepy atmosphere of the foul-aired conference hall was cut through as by a flash of summer lightning. The correspondents who had been sitting heavily in the press gallery began to make notes like mad. The delegates who had been leaning back in their chairs anticipating an adjournment of the conference, stiffened forward to attention. Tchitcherin’s hand began to tremble on the table and Lloyd George began to draw meaningless designs on the pad of paper before him.

All the “wise” journalists had left the hall when Tchitcherin stopped speaking. Only a few remained who believed in seeing a game through until the last man is out in the ninth inning.

Barthou stopped speaking and the interpreter who has officiated at every conference since the first session of the League of Nations started his translation into English in a ringing voice. “If this question of disarmament is brought up, France will absolutely, categorically and finally refuse to discuss it, either in plenary session or in any committee. In the name of France I make this definite protest—”

The interpreter went on with the speech. He finished.

Tchitcherin rose and his hands shaking spoke in French, in his queer, hissing accents, the result of an accident that knocked out half his teeth. The interpreter with the ringing voice translated. There was not a sound in the pauses except the clink of the mass of decorations on an Italian general’s chest as he shifted from one foot to another. It is an actual fact. You could hear the faint metallic clink of the hanging decorations.

“In regard to disarmament,” the interpreter said for Tchitcherin, “Russia took the attitude of France from M. Briand’s Washington speech. In this speech he said France must stay armed because of the danger of Russia’s great army. I, for Russia, want to remove this danger.

“In regard to a succession of conferences I am only quoting from Lloyd George’s speech to the British parliament. Monsieur Poincare has said that the aims of the Genoa conference have not been clearly outlined. There are several questions up for discussion here that were not in the Cannes agenda. If it is the collective will of the conference that disarmament should not be discussed, I will bow to the will of the conference. But disarmament is a capital question with Russia.”

The interpreter sat down and Lloyd George got up. The conference was in a turmoil. It looked as though the French might walk out any moment. Lloyd George, the greatest compromiser politics has ever seen, talked against time. He urged Tchitcherin in his suave manner not to overload the ship of Genoa with too many matters for discussion.

“Unless the Genoa conference leads to disarmament it will be a failure,” he said. “But we must prepare first. We must first settle other questions. I ask Mr. Tchitcherin to be calm. Let us bring this ship into port first before we start any other voyages. I suggest we drop the question of a universal conference at present. And so he continued talking against time and attempting to save the existence of the conference.

“The agenda of the Genoa conference was sent out in the two finest languages in the world — English and French!” he said in the course of his rambling and conciliatory speech, masterly in its soothing and soporific effect on most of the delegates. But at this slip the Italians looked black and all the effect of Lloyd George’s careful compliments earlier in the day was destroyed.

In the end Signor Facta adjourned the meeting, cutting off both Barthou and Tchitcherin who attempted to speak. “It is over. You have spoken. We must adjourn!” And the conference was saved from blowing up on the first day.

Part Eight. ITALY TURNS RIGHT

The conference of Genoa exploded in a diplomatic furor just seven days after it began. A thirty-three-nation bloc of creditors had counted on the weight of numbers to overwhelm the Soviet delegation, but had failed to foresee the sudden defection of one member. Shunted aside as a second-rate guest, and accorded only token participation in the meeting, Germany decided on a daring gamble. On April 16, Germany’s Walter Rathenau conferred in secret with Tchitcherin of Russia. They met sixteen miles away at the seacoast town of Rapallo. Already the Genoa conference was deadlocked, and tentative feelers put out by the German representatives were warmly received by the Russians. In a spurned Germany the Russians recognized the makings of a diplomatic victory.

That night the two nations signed a separate agreement. Both canceled all prewar debts as well as war claims. A trade treaty was signed and, in a masterful stroke, Germany was persuaded to become the first country to recognize the Soviet regime. News of the treaty at Rapallo stunned the remaining delegates. It was seen by the Allies as a German attempt to break the shackles forged at Versailles, and acknowledged as a Russian triumph in ending its diplomatic isolation without paying a price in gold.

The conference at Genoa limped along for another month, then resumed for a time at The Hague. Germany was warned against further dealings with Russia. An impassioned Lloyd George demanded that the Soviets face up to their obligations. The speeches and arguments were largely wasted. The German-Russian delegations had clearly brought off a diplomatic coup, dealing the conference a blow from which it would never recover.

Ernest Hemingway reported only on the opening of the Genoa meeting. Bored with the wrangling, he shifted his attention to Italy, a nation much changed from the land he remembered from the war. Victorious in the fighting, Italy had fared poorly thereafter. Rent with political strife, cursed with too many people and too few jobs, Italy in 1922 had reached a dangerous crossroads.

The king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel, was a ruler in name only. His government was run by a middle-of-the-road coalition, characterized by inexperienced leaders and inept underlings. Unable to cope with problems at home and abroad, the government soon found itself facing attacks by extremists from both the left and right. The Italian nation slipped toward chaos.

From this chaos one party emerged. It was headed by Benito Mussolini, a newspaperman and former socialist who had swung full circle, now standing as leader of Italy’s aggressive ultranationalists. In 1919 he welded disgruntled war veterans into the Fasci di Combattimento, a militant right-wing organization whose banners proclaimed the ruthless extermination of communism and socialism. Two years later, a groundswell of popular support carried Mussolini into parliament, whereupon he promptly reorganized the Fasci di Combattimento into the Fascist Party.

In the next months, the Fascisti engaged in open civil war with the communists. Armed and organized into military units, Mussolini’s blackshirt squadristi soon seized the upper hand and the communist mobs were routed and their party organization smashed. The government, foundering between indecision and fear, was powerless to intercede, and not even the Italian Army dared to contest the surging power of the Fascists. The time was close at hand for Benito Mussolini to pose as a strong-armed savior and plead for an opportunity to rescue Italy from anarchy.

This was the Italy seen by Ernest Hemingway in the spring of 1922. The reports which follow depict the men and forces stalking a tottering, bankrupt nation...

REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION

Italy realizes the danger of inviting the Soviet delegation to the Genoa conference, and has brought fifteen hundred picked military policemen from other parts of Italy into Genoa to crush any Red or anti-Red disturbance as soon as it starts.

This is a far-sighted move, for the Italian government remembers the hundreds of fatal clashes between the Fascisti and the Reds in the past two years, and are anxious that there should be as little civil war as possible while the conference is in progress. —

They face a very real danger. Sections of Italy, principally Tuscany and in the north, have seen bloody fighting, murders, reprisals and pitched battles in the last few months over communism. The Italian authorities accordingly fear the effect on the Reds of Genoa when they see the delegation of eighty representatives from Soviet Russia amicably received and treated with respect.

There is no doubt but that the Reds of Genoa — and they are about one-third of the population — when they see the Russian Reds, will be moved to tears, cheers, gesticulations, offers of wines, liqueurs, bad cigars, parades, vivas, proclamations to one another and the wide world and other kindred Italian symptoms of enthusiasm. There will also be kissings on both cheeks, gatherings in cafes, toasts to Lenin, shouts for Trotsky, attempts by three and four highly illuminated Reds to form a parade at intervals of two and three minutes, enormous quantities of chianti drunk and general shouts of “Death to the Fascisti!”

That is the way that all Italian Red outbreaks start. Closing the cafes usually stops them. Uninspired by the vinous products of their native land, the Italian communist cannot keep his enthusiasm up to the demonstration point for any length of time. The cafes close, the “Vivas” grow softer and less enthusiastic, the paraders put it off till another day, and the Reds who reached the highest pitch of patriotism too soon, roll under the tables of the cafes and sleep until the bartender opens up in the morning. Some of the Reds, going home in a gentle glow, chalk up on a wall in straggling letters, “VIVA LENIN! VIVA TROTSKY!” and the political crisis is over, unless of course they meet some Fascisti. If they happen to meet some Fascisti things are very different again.

The Fascisti are a brood of dragons’ teeth that were sown in 1920 when it looked as though Italy might go Bolshevik. Their name means organization, a unit of Fascisti is a fascio, and they are young ex-veterans formed to protect the existing government of Italy against any sort of Bolshevik plot or aggression. In short, they are counter-revolutionists, and in 1920 they crushed the Red uprising with bombs, machine guns, knives and the liberal use of kerosene cans to set the Red meeting places afire, and heavy iron-bound clubs to hammer the Reds over the head when they came out.

The Fascisti served a very definite purpose and they crushed what looked like a coming revolution. They were under the tacit protection of the government, if not its active support, and there is no question but that they crushed the Reds. But they had a taste of unpenalized lawlessness, unpunished murder, and the right to riot when and where they pleased. So now they have become almost as great a danger to the peace of Italy as the Reds ever were.

When the Fascisti hear that there is a Red demonstration on, and I have tried to indicate the casual and childish nature of ninety-seven out of every hundred Red demonstrations in Italy, they feel in honor bound as the ex-preservers of their country in time of peril to go out and put the Reds to the sword. Now the North Italian Red is father of a family and a good workman six days out of seven, on the seventh day he talks politics. His leaders have formally rejected Russian communism and he is Red as some Canadians are Liberals. He does not want to fight for it, or convert the world to it, he merely wants to talk about it, as he has from time immemorial.

The Fascisti make no distinction between socialists, communists, republicans or members of co-operative societies. They are all Reds and dangerous. So the Fascisti hear of the Reds meeting, put on their long, black, tasseled caps, strap on their trench knives, load up with bombs and ammunition at the fascio and march toward the Red meeting singing the Fascisti hymn, “Youth.” The Fascisti are young, tough, ardent, intensely patriotic, generally good-looking with the youthful beauty of the southern races, and firmly convinced that they are in the right. They have an abundance of the valor and intolerance of youth.

Marching down the street the Fascisti, marching as a platoon, come on three of the Reds chalking a manifesto on one of the high walls of the narrow street. Four of the young men in the black fezzes seize the Reds and in the scuffle one of the Fascisti gets stabbed. They kill the three prisoners and spread out in threes and fours through the streets looking for Reds.

A sobered Red snipes a Fascisto from an upper window. The Fascisti burn down the house.

You can read the reports in the papers every two or three weeks. The casualties given are usually from ten to fifteen Reds killed and twenty to fifty wounded. There are usually two or three Fascisti killed and wounded. It is a sort of desultory guerilla warfare that has been going on in Italy for well over a year. The last big battle was in Florence some months ago, but there have been minor outbreaks since.

To prevent any Fascisti-Red rows happening in Genoa, the fifteen hundred military police have been brought in. They are none of them natives of Genoa, so they can shoot either side without fear or favor. Italy is determined on order during the conference and the carabiniere, as the military police are called, wearing their three-cornered Napoleon hats, with carbines slung across their backs, with their fierce upturned mustaches and their record as the bravest troops and the best marksmen in the Italian army, stalk the streets in pairs, determined that there shall be order. And as the Fascisti fear the carabiniere, when they have orders to shoot, as much as the Reds fear the Fascisti, there is a pretty good chance that order will be kept.

THE CLASS WAR

The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-year-old pot shot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. Banks and large commercial houses, who contributed the funds that launched the Fascist movement as a protective measure against a threatened communist revolution, have withdrawn their support and the mass of the Italian press has turned solidly against the Fascisti. Meantime the Fascisti, solidly organized, are forming themselves into a political party and by a constant series of outrages keeping Italy in a state of class war.

On June 1st the Fascisti, as a demonstration of their strength, decided to capture the city of Bologna. The excuse was that the Prefect of Bologna was too friendly to radicals. Benito Mussolini, the renegade socialist, ex-editor of Avanti, the Socialist newspaper of Milan, duelist, war-hero and present member of the Italian chamber of deputies, gave the order for the occupation of the city from Rome. 15,000 Fascisti, averaging twenty years of age, “took” the town, burned the telegraph and postoffices, beat up any and everyone that objected to their seizure of Bologna and then withdrew, announcing that the next time they gave a demonstration they would be 50,000 instead of 15,000, and that they would kill instead of beating up.

It is that sort of demonstration, repeated in hundreds of other Italian towns, that has cost the Fascisti their old-time popularity. Trouble stirred up by Fascisti, with the consequent lack of political stability, is what is keeping the lira at its present low rate. That hits the businessmen in their pocketbooks and they would willingly pay more than they subscribed to found the bourgeois shock troops in order to buy them off now. In many cases they are now paying them blackmail to keep them from making trouble.

Their continued lawless tactics cost the Fascists a very real popularity too. After the war it was impossible for the wife of a merchant, a manufacturer, or a professional man to go about in any public places in northern Italy without being liable to insults of various kinds, from having her hat torn off and her face scratched to being hissed as a “borghese.” Anyone buying a first-or second-class seat in an Italian train was never sure that they would not be thrown out of it by some worker with his dinner pail who had decided that he would ride first-class on a third-class ticket. Gangs of hoodlums would swarm into a train as it stopped in some Northern Italian town and after throwing the “borghese” out of the first-class compartments would gaily enter and ride a few stations, cutting all the red plush out of the seats as souvenirs.

When Benito Mussolini organized the Fascisti as a sort of Ku-Klux-Klan against this sort of terrorism he was enthusiastically supported. The Fascisti were formed from all the excitement-loving youths of the middle and upper class families and set about a counter-campaign of terrorism against the workers. Wearing their black silk shirts, open at the neck, their black puttees, army breeches and black fezzes, and armed with clubs and revolvers, they fought some very gay battles with the workers and did some very effective raiding. The workers realized that the millennium, when a man could ride first-class on a third-class ticket, was still some distance off and settled down to work again. It looked as though the whole business was settled and that the Fascisti could go home and put their black silk shirts into moth balls.

A hitch came in the arrangements when the Fascisti refused to consider the matter settled. They had a taste of killing under police protection and they liked it. They enjoyed hunting live communists much more than going to school or working in their fathers’ offices — and they intended to keep right on. So the Fascisti have kept on fighting, burning, pillaging, anything resembling communism they could find. And as all of Northern Italy is tinged with communism in one shade or another, the Fascisti have taken on a life-time job.

The Fascisti leaders, seeing their well-organized gang, nave developed political ambitions and want to make a solid political party of their followers. The politicians of other parties fear this and would do anything to break up the movement. Meanwhile the communists, tiring of the fact that the Fascisti make no closed season on them, have organized Arditi Del Popolo or People’s Shock Troops. These are being put into red shirts to oppose the Fascisti black shirts and are being trained in street fighting. The businessmen are hoping by stopping their money supply to choke off the Fascisti and the government has formed a special corps called the Guardia Regia, made up of men from the mountains of Abruzzi and the South, to fight both sides in case of a civil war. The whole business has the quiet and peaceful look of a three-year-old child playing with a live Mills bomb.

ITALY’S FASCISTS

Benito Mussolini, head of the Fascisti movement, sits at his desk at the end of the fuse of the great powder magazine that he has laid through all Northern and Central Italy and occasionally fondles the ears of a wolf hound pup, looking like a short-eared jack rabbit, that plays with the papers on the floor beside his big desk. Mussolini is a big, brownfaced man with a high forehead, a slow-smiling mouth, and large, expressive hands.

“The Fascisti are now half a million strong,” he said to me. “We are a political party organized as a military force.”

Talking slowly in Italian and choosing his words in order that he might be sure that I understood everything he said, he went on to tell how the Fascisti have 250,000 troops organized into squads of camicie nere or black shirts, as shock troops of the political party. “Garibaldi had red shirts,” he smiled deprecatingly.

“We are not out to oppose any Italian government. We are not against the law,” Mussolini explained in carefully accented words, leaning back in his editorial chair and emphasizing his points with great brown hands. “But,” he enunciated very slowly and carefully, “we have force enough to overthrow any government that may try to oppose or destroy us.”

“How about the Guardia Regia?” I asked. (The Guardia Regia are the recently organized force of troops from the South of Italy formed by Ex-Premier Nitti to keep the peace in case of civil war.)

“The Guardia Regia will never fight us!” Mussolini said.

Now that situation needs a bit of examination and comparison. The Fascisti platform is one of extreme conservatism. Imagine the Conservative party of Canada with 250,000 men under arms, “a political party organized as a military force,” with their leader declaring that they had force enough to overthrow any Liberal or other government that might oppose them. It makes quite a picture, doesn’t it? At the same time imagine a special military police force having been created to prevent the Conservatives from battling in the streets with the Liberals, and you have a good angle of observation on the present Italian political situation.

Seeing Mussolini was a great surprise. He is not the monster he has been pictured. His face is intellectual, it is the typical Bersagliere face, with its large, brown, oval shape, dark eyes and big slow-speaking mouth. Mussolini is often described as a “renegade socialist,” but he seems to have had a very good reason for his renunciation of the party.

Born thirty-seven years ago in the Romagna in a little town called Foli, he started life in a hotbed of revolution. It was near his birthplace that the revolution of 1913 occurred, the “red wig” revolt in which Malatesta, the famous Italian anarchist, attempted to establish a republic. Mussolini began his career as a schoolteacher when he was under twenty. He drifted into journalism and made his first prominent appearance in Trento as an associate of Cesare Battisti on the Liberta. Cesare Battisti was the Italian hero who was captured wounded by the Austrians while he was an officer of Alpini, and hanged in the Castle of Trento because he was born in the part of Italy held by the Austrians.

When war broke out in 1914 Mussolini was editor of Avanti, the socialist daily paper of Milan. He worked for Italy going into the war on the side of the Allies so strongly that the management of his paper dispensed with his services and Mussolini founded his own paper Il Popolo d’ltalia, to set forth his views. He sank all his money in this enterprise and as soon as Italy entered the war enlisted in the crack “Bersagliere” corps as a private.

Severely wounded in the fighting on the Carso plateau and several times decorated for valor, Mussolini, a patriot above all things, saw what he regarded as the fruits of Italy’s victory being swept away from her in 1919 by a wave of communism that covered all of Northern Italy and threatened all private property rights. As a protest against this he organized the Fascisti or anti-communist shock troops. The history of their activities in the next two years has been told very often.

Now Mussolini stands at the head of an organization of 500,000 — members. It comprises men of almost every trade in Italy, several hundreds of thousand workers disgusted with communism, having turned to the Fascisti as an armed force who might do something for them. Fascism thus enters its third phase. First it was an organization of counter-attackers against the communist demonstrations, second it became a political party, and now it is a political and military party that is enlisting the workers of Italy and invading the field of the labor organizations. It is dominating Italy from Rome to the Alps.

The question is now, what does Mussolini, sitting at his desk in the office of the Popolo d’ltalia and fondling the ears of his wolf hound pup intend to do with his “political party organized as a military force”?

Part Nine. POLITICS AND WAR IN THE ORIENT

Unfolding in the Orient in the early postwar years was a great game. It was a high stakes contest where the many players bluffed or bet or called with hands backed by battleships and soldiers. The prize in this game of intrigue was the territorial remains of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire.

The time when the power of the Ottoman Turks reached north to the lush Vienna countryside and westward to the hold north of Constantinople. By treaty Thrace went to taken hold of the empire. Corruption had rusted its machinery just as the blood of its ruling house had been watered by centuries of luxury and idleness. Stripped of its distant lands through a series of disastrous campaigns, the Ottoman Empire staggered hesitantly into the twentieth century, only to be struck a mortal wound in the First World War.

More vulnerable than its former German partner, the defeated empire fell prey to a host of avaricious victors. Soldiers from three Allied nations occupied Constantinople with a purpose more devious than the maintenance of peace and order. In the balance hung domination of the Straits — the Dardanelles and Bosporus — a life line connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Even more coveted was the promise of the greatest treasure of the day — the oil-rich lands to the East. And the key to these riches lay in the exploitation of a beaten nation.

As Russia, Greece and France waited impatiently for their turn, England played the first trump. The Foreign Office engineered the bloodless capture of the throne of Sultan Muhammed VI. By manipulating the puppet strings of the Sultan, England thought itself in control of the empire’s destiny. But the British had underestimated the growing threat of a Turkish army officer named Mustapha Kemal. His was the name on the lips of an angered people. Defeated in war and degraded at the hands of the Allies, the Turkish people had begun to utter the first whispers of revolt. Kemal, as the leader of the newly born Nationalist Party, would provide them with the tool for that revolt.

In the first months of 1920, Sultan Muhammed journeyed to the town of Sevres in France. The occasion was a peace treaty formally ending the war. It was there that the Sultan agreed to the final liquidation of the Ottoman Empire, surrendering four-fifths of it to the Allies. Gone were vast regions: Palestine, Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Armenia, and even Thrace, the empire’s last foothold west of Constantinople. By treaty Thrace went to Greece. All that remained was Constantinople and the mountainous Anatolian peninsula across the Straits.

Sultan Muhammed’s submission at Sevres cost him the last trace of popular support. Even before the treaty could be signed, Kemal and his Nationalist Party renounced the sultanate, setting up an independent government at Ankara.

Now France played its hand. Outmaneuvered by the British at Constantinople, the French turned secretly to Ankara. Fed by French funds and weapons, an encouraged Kemal promptly marshaled an army. Although separated from the capital by British warships holding the Straits, Kemal’s army took command of the Anatolian peninsula. Sensing a shift in the tide of rule, Russia quickly stepped in to praise the Kemalist revolution. In a treaty of friendship, the Soviets returned to the Ankara government lands taken from the Turks after the war.

This unexpected turn of events caught England unaware. Isolated in Constantinople and supporting a Sultan whose authority extended no farther than the palace gates, the British felt the treasures of the Orient slipping from their grasp. England decided to risk all on one dangerous gambit.

It would push a pawn into war.

The British Foreign Office managed King Constantine of Greece as it did Sultan Muhammed. As the traditional foes of the Turks, the Greeks were a logical choice for dealing with the upstart Kemal. Promises of land, glory and Smyrna — the ancient center of Greek culture and principal port in Anatolia — were enough to start the Greek army marching. In 1921 Greek forces crossed the Straits, sweeping Kemal’s army back toward Ankara. After occupying Smyrna and the adjoining coast, the Greeks halted their advance. There followed a nervous truce. Still unprepared for a major battle, Kemal’s army spent its wrath in the winter of 1921 and spring of 1922 engaging in an undeclared holy war. Greek Christian minorities living in Anatolia furnished the victims. Forced deportations and mass executions were ordered by the Ankara government. These acts were met in kind by Greece, as Moslems residing in Thrace were shot or rooted from their homes.

The gray war between Greece and the Ankara Turks ended suddenly in August 1922 when the army of Kemal launched a surprise counter-offensive. So swift and crushing was the attack that the Greek army was completely routed. The lines of retreat tunneled toward Smyrna. Formerly a center of wealth and splendor, Smyrna was now the scene of death and despair. With Greek soldiers dying at the gates and thousands of refugees trapped behind the city’s walls, the enraged Turks captured and ravished the city, then put it to the torch.

In late September Kemal’s army started out in pursuit of the remnants of the Greek army. Ahead, across the Straits, lay the capital of the empire, Constantinople. Beyond that was Thrace, where fresh Greek troops were desperately throwing up a new defense line.

Ernest Hemingway arrived in Constantinople in October 1922, less than a month after the startling Turkish victory. He had come to cover the impending battle for Thrace. That battle was not to be fought, however. Shocked by the staggering defeat, the Greek people rebelled, forcing the abdication of King Constantine. He was replaced with the less aggressive Crown Prince George who hastily concluded an armistice with Kemal.

Hemingway reported on the tense situation in Constantinople, then analyzed the many power plays engaged in by nations on both sides. Afterward, he turned to the Greek evacuation of Thrace.

His accounts tell a story of politics and war, and of human misery in the Orient...

CONSTANTINOPLE

Constantinople is noisy, hot, hilly, dirty, and beautiful. It is packed with uniforms and rumors.

British troops have now arrived in sufficient force to prevent any Kemalist invasion.

Foreigners are nervous, however, remembering the fate of Smyrna, and have booked outgoing trains for weeks ahead.

THE MAN WITH HIS SHIRT TUCKED IN

Bismarck said all men in the Balkans who tuck their shirts into their trousers are crooks. The shirts of the peasants, of course, hang outside. At any rate, when I found Hamid Bey next to Kemal, perhaps the most powerful man in the Ankara government — in his Stamboul office where he directs the Kemalist government in Europe, while drawing a large salary as administrator of the Imperial Ottoman bank, a French capitalized concern — his shirt was tucked in, for he was dressed in a gray business suit.

Hamid Bey’s office is at the top of a steep hill beyond an old seraglio, and houses the Red Crescent — equivalent to our Red Cross — of which Hamid Bey is one of the leaders and where attendants in Red Crescent khaki carry out the orders of the Ankara government.

“Canada is anxious about the possibility of a massacre of Christians when Kemal enters Constantinople,” I said.

Hamid Bey, big and bulky, with gray mustaches, wing-collared and with a porcupine haircut, looked over his glasses and spoke French. “What have the Christians to fear?” he asked. “They are armed and the Turks have been disarmed. There will be no massacre. It is the Greek Christians who are massacring the Turks now in Thrace. That s why we must occupy Thrace now — to protect our people.

That is the only guarantee of protection Constantinople Christians have except the Allied police force, while toughs from the Crimea to Cairo are gathered in Constantinople hoping that the patriotic orgy of Kemal’s triumphant entry will bring a chance to start a fire to the tinder-dry, wooden tenements and begin killing and looting. The Allied police force is compact and efficient, but Constantinople is a great sprawling city of a million and a half, crowded with a desperate element.

The man who raises a thirst somewhere east of Suez is going to be unable to slake it in Constantinople once Kemal enters the city. A member of the Anatolian government tells me that Constantinople will be as dry as Asiatic Turkey where alcohol is not allowed to be imported, manufactured, or sold. Kemal has also forbidden card playing and backgammon and the cafes of Brusa are dark at eight o’clock.

This devotion to the laws of the prophet does not prevent Kemal himself and his staff from liking their liquor, as the American, who went Smyrnaward to protect American tobacco found when his eight bottles of cognac made him the most popular man in Asia Minor at Kemalist headquarters. —

Kemal’s edict will halt the great importation of American raw alcohol shipped to Constantinople in drums and marked “medicinal.” This is made into an absinthe-like drink and is sipped by the Turks as they sit in the coffee shops, puffing their bubble-bubble pipes.

RUSSIAN THREAT TO THE ORIENT

At Mudania, a hot, dusty, badly littered, second-rate seaport on the Sea of Marmora, the West met the East. In spite of towering gray deadliness of The Iron Duke, the British flagship that brought Allied generals to confer with Ismet Pasha, the West was coming to ask for peace — not to demand it or to dictate terms.

There were no newspaper men allowed to see the meeting because of the attitude of a certain lieutenant-colonel in charge of the press, who still believes that what the army decides as to the fate of the world is none of the world’s business. But even if no one was ever allowed to mention the meeting, if no one ever admitted that the West had come to the East to ask for peace, still the meeting would have the same significance, for it marks the beginning of the end of European domination in Asia.

Just now the Turkish Nationalists, who are the same thing as the Kemalists, are under French influence. This came about in a perfectly simple way. About two years ago Mustapha Kemal Pasha was denounced by the Earl of Balfour as a common bandit. He was, speaking in the broadest sense, for sale to the highest bidder. The French bought him. They supplied him with arms, ammunition, and money. In return it is rumored, they received certain oil concessions in Asia Minor.

The British wanted control in Asia Minor but Kemal did not look like a good buy to them. So they backed the Greeks. The Greeks looked an excellent bet. But, as several people have remarked in the House of Commons, Mr. Lloyd George backed the wrong horse.

Kemal whipped the Greeks as everyone knows. But when you realize that he was fighting a conscript army whose soldiers the barren country they were fighting to gain hated, who had been mobilized for nine years, who had no desire as men to conquer Asia Minor, and who were thoroughly fed up and becoming conscious that they were going into battle to die doing a cat’s paw job, it was not the magnificent military achievement that it is made out to be. Especially is that shown when you realize that Kemal’s troops were fanatical patriots, anxious to drive the invaders out of their country.

The ratio of effectiveness of well-trained, well-armed, highly fanatical patriots fighting in their own country against half-hearted, poorly officered, homesick conscript invaders is somewhere about ten to one. However, when Britain backed the Greeks she did not know the state of efficiency the Kemalists were going to reach.

Now in the victorious Kemal troops, French influence is at its height. I think it has reached the crest and will be on the downgrade from now on because of Kemal’s affiliations with Soviet Russia. It is that which will sooner or later bring him into difficulties with France, and it is that which, next to the conflict between Islam and Christianity, makes the greatest danger to the peace of the world.

If Russia is the next dominant influence over Turkey, and every sign points to the fact that she will be, there will be a great curving horn of pro-Soviet countries with the Soviet Republic of Georgia and South Russia at the base curving along the Black Sea, crossing the Straits and extending up into the heart of the Balkans with Bulgaria as its point; driving a wedge between Yugoslavia and Rumania. —

That, of course, is only about as dangerous to the peace of the Balkans, which has managed to pretty consistently mean the peace of Europe, as going to bed with a percussion-capped stick of dynamite between the mattress and the springs. It may not go off, of course, for some time. Still it is not oversecure.

The next danger is the Straits. The straits between the Black Sea and the Aegean are Russia’s great natural outlet. Constantinople, as you remember, was promised to Russia during the last war. There was once a war, of which no one remembers much except the charge of a certain British cavalry regiment and the work of a certain woman nurse, fought on the same question. There is not much difference, however, between Russia dominating the straits and Russia dominating Kemal who dominates the straits.

Sooner or later, under those circumstances, no matter how many statements Kemal may make saying he recognizes the principle of the freedom of the straits, unless England controls the straits she is going to find them shut against her. Then we will fight Gallipoli over again.

KEMAL

Mustapha Kemal Pasha a few months ago was regarded as a new Saladin by the Moslem world. He was to lead Islam into battle against Christianity and to spread a holy war through all the East. Now the East is beginning to distrust him. Mohammedans I have talked to say: “Kemal has betrayed us.” There is no talk now of the holy war.

This has happened because Kemal, the conquering general, has shown himself to be Kemal the businessman. He is now in something of the position Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins occupied in Ireland just before their death. That is, he is taking the tangible gains offered him, making what appear to the Pan-Islamites to be humiliating compromises, and trying to salt down his winnings — always planning to try for more when these are consolidated.

As yet his de Valera has not appeared. But if he continues to play a waiting game, there will be a de Valera sooner or later. And this possibility of a split in the Turkish forces may be the saving of the Western power in the Orient.

One thing that may bring it about is the report that is current that the heads of the Turkish nationalist movement, which it should always be remembered is the Kemalist party, are many of them atheists and French freemasons rather than good Mohammedans. That is the report that you get as gossip when the Mohammedans talk politics and it is bringing about the distrust that is growing up in regard to Kemal in the minds of those people who had regarded him as a conquering Messiah for the Mohammedan peoples.

The Jews claim that Kemal is a Jew. His thin, intense, rigid face does look Jewish. But the Jews also claim Gabriele D’Annunzio and Christopher Columbus and a thousand years or so from now may even be claiming Henry Ford. At any rate that rumor about Kemal is doing him no harm, and gaining very little credence; the charge of atheism is much more dangerous for that is the one crime that any Turk is prepared to believe any other Turk guilty of, and there is no blacker crime in the Mohammedan world.

The Kemalists have a treaty and an alliance with Bolshevist Russia. They also have a treaty and something very like an alliance with France. One of these alliances must go. Whichever alliance Turkey drops clears the air very little, because the one big aim of the Kemalists, the aim which they are being criticised now in their own circles for not having fulfilled, the aim which does not appear in any published pacts but that everyone in the country understands, is the possession of Mesopotamia. (Editors note: A cable despatch received yesterday says it is understood the Turks will claim Mesopotamia at the peace conference.) Turkey is bound to have Mesopotamia. If France is her ally when she goes after it, or if, having broken with France, she is backed by Russia, the situation is equally dangerous. If there is war in Mesopotamia between Great Britain and Turkey, and I give Mustapha Kemal twenty months to consolidate his present gains before he provokes such a war, it may be the blaze that will start the holy war that the Pan-Islamites are praying for to destroy all Western domination in the East. France, if she is Kemal’s ally at that time, will probably remain neutral. Russia might not remain neutral.

It is oil that Kemal and company want Mesopotamia for, and it is oil that Great Britain wants to keep Mesopotamia for, so the East that is disappointed in Kemal, the Saladin, because he shows no inclination to plunge into a fanatical holy war, may yet get their war from Kemal the businessman.

THE SILENT, GHASTLY PEOPLE

In a never-ending, staggering march the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads toward Macedonia. The main column crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.

This main stream is being swelled from all the back country. They don’t know where they are going. They left their farms, villages and ripe, brown fields and joined the main stream of refugees when they heard the Turk was coming. Now they can only keep their places in the ghastly procession while mud-splashed Greek cavalry herd them along like cow-punchers driving steers.

It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all they can do to keep moving. Their brilliant peasant costumes are soaked and draggled. Chickens dangle by their feet from the carts. Calves nuzzle at the draught cattle wherever a jam halts the stream. An old man marches bent under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labor in one of the carts to keep off the driving rain. She is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the procession keeps moving.

At Adrianople, where the main stream moves through, there is no Near East relief at all. They are doing very good work at Rodosto on the coast, but can only touch the fringe.

There are 250,000 Christian refugees to be evacuated from Eastern Thrace alone. The Bulgarian frontier is shut against them. There is only Macedonia and Western Thrace to receive the fruit of the Turk’s return to Europe. Nearly half a million refugees are in Macedonia now. How they are to be fed nobody knows, but in the next month all the Christian world will hear the cry: “Come over into Macedonia and help us!”

BETRAYAL, DEFEAT.. THEN REVOLT

As I write, the Greek troops are commencing their evacuation of Eastern Thrace. In their ill-fitting U.S. uniforms they are trekking across the country, cavalry patrols out ahead, the soldiers marching sullenly but occasionally grinning at us as we pass their strung-out, straggling columns. They have cut all the telegraph wires behind them; you see them dangling from the poles like Maypole ribbons. They have abandoned their thatched huts, their camouflaged gun positions, their machine gun nests, and all the heavily wired, strung out, fortified ridges where they had planned to make a last stand against the Turk.

Heavy wheeled baggage cars drawn by muddy flanked buffalo with slanted back horns drag along the dusty road. Some soldiers lie on top of the mounds of baggage, while others goad the buffalo along. Ahead and behind the baggage carts are strung out the troops. This is the end of the great Greek military adventure.

Might-have-beens are a sad business, and the end of the Greek military power is sad enough as it is, but there is no blame for it to be given to the Greek common soldier. Even in the evacuation the Greek soldiers looked like good troops. There was a sturdy doggedness about them that would have meant a hard time for the Turk if Kemal’s army would have had to fight for Thrace instead of having it handed to them as a gift at Mudania.

Captain Wittal of the Indian cavalry, who was attached to the Greek Army in Anatolia as an observer during the Greek war with Kemal, told me the inside story of the intrigue that led to the breakdown of the Greek army in Asia Minor.

“The Greek soldiers were first-class fighting men, Captain Wittal said. “They were well-officered by men who had served with the British and French at Salonika, and they outclassed the Kemalist army. I believe they would have captured Ankara and ended the war if they had not been betrayed.

“When Constantine came into power all the officers of the army in the field were suddenly scrapped, from the commander-in-chief down to platoon commanders. These officers had many of them been promoted from the ranks, were good soldiers and splendid leaders. They were removed and their places filled with new officers of the Tino party, most of whom had spent the war in exile in Switzerland or Germany and had never heard a shot fired. That caused a complete breakdown of the army and was responsible for the Greek defeat.”

Captain Wittal told me how artillery officers who had no experience at all took over the command of batteries and massacred their own infantry. He told about infantry officers who used powder, face powder, not gun powder, and rouge, and about staff work which was criminal in its ignorance and negligence.

“In the one show in Anatolia,” Captain Wittal said, “the Greek infantry were doing an absolutely magnificent attack and their artillery was doing them in. Major Johnson (the other British observer who later acted as liaison officer with the press at Constantinople) is a gunner, you know. He’s a fine gunner too. Well, Major Johnson cried at what those gunners were doing to their infantry. He was wild to take over the artillery. But he couldn’t do a thing. We had orders to preserve strict neutrality — and he couldn’t do a thing.”

That is the story of the Greek army’s betrayal by King Constantine. And that is the reason the revolution in Athens was not just a fake as many people have claimed. It was the rising of an army that had been betrayed against the man who had betrayed it.

The old Venezelist officers came back after the revolution and reorganized the army in Eastern Thrace. Greece looked on Thrace as a Marne where she must fight and make a final stand or perish. Troops were rushed in. Everybody was at white heat. Then the allies at Mudania handed Eastern Thrace over to the Turk and gave the Greek army three days to start getting out.

The army waited, not believing that their government would sign the Mudania convention, but it did, and the army, being soldiers, are getting out. All day I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers hiking along the trails across the brown, rolling, barren Thracian country. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.

In a comfortable train with the horror of the Thracian evacuation behind me it is already beginning to seem unreal. That is the boon of our memories.

I have described that evacuation from Adnanople it does no good to go over it again. The evacuation still keeps up No matter how long it takes this letter to get to Toronto, as you read this in The Star you may be sure that the same ghastly, shambling procession of people being driven from their homes is filing in unbroken line along the muddy road to Macedonia. A quarter of a million people take a long time to move. —

Adrianople itself is not a pleasant place. Dropping off the train at eleven o’clock at night I found the station a mud-hole crowded with soldiers, bundles, bedsprings, bedding, sewing machines, babies, broken carts, all in the mud and the drizzling rain. Kerosene flares lit up the scene. The station master told me he had shipped fifty-seven cars of retreating troops to Western Thrace that day. The telegraph wires were all cut. There were more troops piling up and no means to evacuate them.

Madame Marie’s, the station master said, was the only place in town where a man could sleep. A soldier guided me to Madame Marie’s down the dark side streets. We walked through mud puddles and waded around sloughs that were too deep to go through. Madame Marie’s was dark.

I banged on the door and a Frenchman in bare feet and trousers opened it. He had no room but I could sleep on the floor if I had my own blankets. It looked bad.

Then a car rolled up outside and two moving picture operators, with their chauffeur, came in. They had three cots and asked me to spread my blankets on one. The chauffeur slept in the car. We all turned in on the cots and the taller of the movie men who was called “Shorty” told me they had had an awful trip coming up from Rodosto on the sea of Marmora.

“Got some swell shots of a burning village today.” Shorty pulled off a boot. “Good show — a burning village. Like kickin’ over an ant hill.” Shorty pulled off the other boot. “Shoot it from two or three directions and it looks like a regular town on fire. Gee, I’m tired. This refugee business is hell all right. Man sure sees some awful things in this country.” In two minutes he was snoring.

I woke up about one o’clock in the morning with a bad chill, part of my Constantinople-acquired malaria, killed the mosquitoes who had supped too heavily to fly away from my face, waited out the chill, took a big dose of aspirin and quinine and went back to sleep. Repeated the process along toward morning. Then Shorty woke me.

“Say, boy, look at this film box.” I looked at it. It was crawling with lice. “Sure are hungry. Going after my film. Sure are hungry little fellows.”

The cots were alive with them. I have been lousy during the war, but I have never seen anything like Thrace. If you looked at any article of furniture, or any space on the wall, steadily for a moment you saw it crawl, not literally crawl, but move in greasy, minute specks.

“They wouldn’t hurt a man,” Shorty said. “They’re just little fellows.”

“These fellows are nothing. You ought to see the real grown-up variety at Lule Burgas.”

Madame Marie, a big slovenly Croatian woman, gave us some coffee and sour black bread in the bare room that served as dining room, salon, hotel office and parlor.

“Our room was lousy, madame,” I said cheerfully, to make table talk.

She spread out her hands. “It is better than sleeping in the road? Eh, monsieur? It is better than that?”

I agreed that it was, and we went out with madame standing looking after us.

Outside it was drizzling. At the end of the muddy side street we were on I could see the eternal procession of humanity moving slowly along the great stone road that runs from Adrianople across the Maritza valley to Karagatch and then divides into other roads that cross the rolling country into Western Thrace and Macedonia.

Shorty and Company were going a stretch along the road in their motor car en route back to Rodosto and Constantinople and gave me a lift along the stone road past the procession of refugees into Adrianople. All the stream of slow, big-wheeled bullock and buffalo carts, bobbing camel trains and sodden, fleeing peasantry were moving west on the road, but there was a thin counter-stream of empty carts driven by Turks in ragged, rain-soaked clothes and dirty fezzes which was working back against the main current. Each Turk cart had a Greek soldier in it, sitting behind the driver with his rifle between his knees and his cape up around his neck to keep the rain out. These carts had been commandeered by the Greeks to go back-country in Thrace, load up with the goods of refugees and help the evacuation. The Turks looked sullen and very frightened. They had reason to be.

At the fork of the stone road in Adrianople all the traffic was being routed to the left by a lone Greek cavalryman who sat on his horse with his carbine slung over his back and accomplished the routing by slashing dispassionately across the face with his quirt any horse or bullock that turned toward the right. He motioned one of the empty carts driven by a Turk to turn off to the right. The Turk turned his cart and prodded his bullocks into a shamble. This awoke the Greek soldier guard riding with him, and seeing the Turk turning off the main road, he stood up and smashed him in the small of the back with his rifle butt.

The Turk, he was a ragged, hungry-looking Turk farmer, fell out of the cart on to his face, picked himself up in terror and ran down the road like a rabbit. A Greek cavalry-man saw him running, kicked spurs into his horse and rode the Turk down. Two Greek soldiers and the cavalryman picked him up, smashed him in the face a couple of times, he shouting at the top of his voice all the time, and, he was led, bloody-faced and wild-eyed, not understanding what it was all about, back to his cart and told to drive on. Nobody in the line of march had paid any attention to the incident.

I walked five miles with the refugees’ procession along the road, dodging camels that swayed and grunted along, past flat-wheeled ox carts piled high with bedding, mirrors, furniture, pigs tied flat, mothers huddled under blankets with their babies, old men and women leaning on the back of the buffalo carts and just keeping their feet moving, their eyes on the road and their heads sunken; ammunition mules, mules loaded with stacks of rifles tied together like wheat sheaves, and an occasional battered Ford car with Greek staff officers, red eyed and grubby from lack of sleep, and always the slow, rain-soaked, shambling, trudging Thracian peasantry plodding along in the rain, leaving their homes behind.

When I had crossed the bridge over the Maritza, running a brick-red quarter-mile-wide flood, where yesterday had been a dry river bed covered with refugee carts, I turned off to the right and cut up side roads to Madame Marie’s to write a cable to The Star. All the wires were cut and I finally got an Italian colonel, who was returning to Constantinople with an Allied commission, to promise to file it for me at the telegraph office there the next day.

The fever was going strong and Madame Marie brought me a bottle of sickly sweet Thracian wine to take my quinine with.

“I won’t care when the Turks come,” Madame Marie said, sitting her great bulk down at the table and scratching her chin.

“Why not?”

“They’re all the same. The Greeks and the Turks and the Bulgars. They’re all the same.” She accepted a glass of the wine. “I’ve seen them all. They’ve all had Karagatch.”

“Who are the best?” I asked.

“Nobody. They’re all the same. The Greek officers sleep here now and then will come the Turk officers. Some day the Greek officers will come back again. They all pay me.” I filled up her glass.

“But the poor people that are out there in the road.” I couldn’t get the horror of that twenty-mile-long procession out of my mind, and I had seen some dreadful things that day.

“Oh, well.” Madame Marie shrugged. “It is always that way with the people. Toujours la meme chose. The Turk has a proverb, you know. He has many good proverbs. It is not only the fault of the ax but of the tree as well.’ That is his proverb.”

That is his proverb all right.

“I’m sorry about the lice, monsieur.” Madame Marie had forgiven me under the influence of the bottle. “But what do you expect? This is not Paris.” She stood up, big and slovenly and wise as people get wisdom in the Balkans. “Good-by, monsieur. Yes, I know one-hundred drachmas is too much for the bill. But I have the only hotel here. It is better than the street? Eh?”

AFGHAN POLITICS

Afghanistan is another weapon that is being forged against the British Empire by Kemal and his pan-Eastern friends. For over a year Kemalist officers have been training Afghan troops, getting them ready for the moment to strike. Now they are ready.

I happen to know something about the inside history of contemporary Afghanistan with its aims and hatreds. It came to me from Shere Mohamet Khan, who lived in Rome for a while, and is now Afghan minister for war.

Shere Mohamet — the Khan is the Afghan suffix meaning prince — was tall, dark-haired, hawk-faced, as straight as a lance, with the bird-of-prey eyes and the hooked nose that mark the Afghan. He looked like a man out of the Renaissance, though his breed are the original Semites and go back as an unconquered people to the days of the Medes and Persians.

The old Emir of Afghanistan was Abderahman Khan. All his life he hated the English, who were using Afghanistan as a buffer state between India and Russia, and who forbid them to have diplomatic relations with any country except England, runs Shere Mohamet’s story.

He was a great man, was Abderahman, a hard man, a far-seeing man and an Afghan. He spent his life consolidating Afghanistan into a strong nation, and in training his son.

His son was to carry on his work to make war on the English.

The old man died. The son, Habibullah Khan, became Emir. The English invited him to come down to India on a state visit, and he went to see what manner of people these English were. There the English got him. First they entertained him royally. They showed him many delights and they taught him to drink. I do not say he was not an apt learner. He was no longer a man and an Afghan.

He came back to Kabul, that was just after the armistice in 1918, and the Afghans killed him. He was assassinated. It was really an execution. Then there was a meeting of the great council in Kabul and Nasirullah Khan, the oldest grandson of the old Emir, was questioned.

“Will you defend Afghanistan if you are chosen king?” they asked him.

“I will defend Afghanistan,” he answered.

“Will you make war on the English?”

“I will try,” he answered.

They let him go out of the council room.

Aminullah, the next grandson, was brought in.

“What will you do if you are chosen king?” they asked him.

“I will do two things,” Aminullah answered. “I will defend Afghanistan — and I will make war on the English.”

So they chose him king, and a few weeks later he led his troops over the pass into India.

That is Shere Mohamet’s story.

Very few people even remember that there was an Afghan war just after the armistice. It was the Royal Air Force that won it by bombing out the Afghan cities back of the lines and destroying the mud forts where the hillmen, having had no experience with planes before, congregated. At any rate it was a British victory and so announced.

But when they signed the treaty of peace Great Britain gave up every right that she had always fought for in Afghanistan. Other countries were permitted by the treaty to have diplomatic and consular representatives in Afghanistan, arms were permitted to be imported, arms were even permitted to be imported through India. The war may have been a British victory but the peace was certainly an Afghan victory. The Afghans had always hated England but now they felt contempt for her.

So now there are Soviet Russian consulates in all the Afghan cities, the Afghans are armed with modern arms, and are trained by Kemalist officers. Aminullah, “my great King,” Shere Mohamet calls him, has not forsworn his oath to make war on the English — and he has not gone down to the fleshpots of India.

When Kemal attacks Mesopotamia, and sooner or later he will, there will be a well-equipped, well-trained, Afghan army come down the Khyber Pass that will not be the ill-equipped, unschooled band of hillmen that were defeated in 1919. They have an alliance with Mustapha Kemal now. They are elated over the Kemalist successes, and even their existence is a perpetual threat against the British rule in India that prevents her from drawing a single regiment from there in case of trouble elsewhere.

The Afghans will fight. It is their metier. Shere Mohamet Khan has a story that illustrates the Afghan spirit.

“When I came home to my house in Kabul from the council that decided on the last war, my wife and my daughter had my pistols and my sword and all my kit laid out for me.

“‘What is this?’ I said.

“‘Your things for the war. There is going to be a war, is there not?’ said my wife.

“‘Yes. But I am the minister of war. I do not go to this war. The minister of war does not go to the war itself.’

“My wife shook her head. ‘I do not understand it,’ she said very haughtily. ‘If you are this minister of war who cannot go to war, you must resign. That is all. We would be disgraced if you did not go.’”

That is the spirit the Kemalists trained and, that, armed by the Russians, makes another Eastern problem that does not look easy of solution.

Part Ten. MEN OF LAUSANNE

Kemal’s victory over the Greek army ended the rule of Sultan Muhammed and paved the way for a Turkish republic. But the crisis in the Orient was not yet over. Scimitar-rattling continued as the Turks threatened more wars unless the terms of the peace treaty of Sevres were changed. The Allies agreed. They had had enough of holy wars and oriental intrigue, and the European nations were ready to write a finish to a bad situation. The matter would be discussed on the shores of Lake Geneva in the Swiss resort of Lausanne.

An early meeting, convened in November 1922, fell apart quickly. Attempting to salvage something from their oriental venture, the Allies tried to barter their approval of modifications in the peace treaty in return for oil concessions. The Turks rejected the proposal and left. A second conference was arranged in the spring of 1923. This time the Allies met most of Kemal’s demands, formally recognizing the new republic and returning the Straits, Thrace and part of Syria. While Kemal got back only a fraction of Turkey’s prewar territory, Lausanne was his victory. Europe had been humiliated and its power over the Orient was no longer absolute. Clearly Lausanne had started the curtain ringing down on the West’s 200-year-old dominance in the Middle East.

The conference at Lausanne was held a year after the one in Genoa. Many of the statesmen who stole the lime light at Genoa were now gone. Responsibility for the fiasco at Constantinople had been fixed on Lloyd George, and he was replaced by Lord Curzon. Also missing was France’s Louis Barthou, succeeded by the new premier and foreign minister, Raymond Poincare. With his disastrous adventure in the Ruhr only beginning, Poincare was as yet over a year away from his political downfall.

Italy too was represented by a new premier. Six months earlier the Fascisti had marched on Rome. It was a show of force which proved startling in its success. No sooner had the Fascisti mobs thronged the streets than the frightened government resigned and in desperation King Victor Emmanuel called upon the Fascist leader from Milan to form a new government. Lausanne would be Premier Benito Mussolini’s international debut.

The Soviet delegation was one of the few unchanged between Genoa and Lausanne. Tchitcherin, Litvinov, Joffe and Krassin were there, supported by two alternates, Rakovsky and Vorovsky. The Soviets had triumphed at Genoa and they were more than satisfied with the results of the Lausanne agreement. The Russians had backed the Turks and by so doing had kept their grip on the Black Sea. With a friendly Turkey in command of the Straits, the Black Sea remained a private Soviet lake.

Diplomatic success, however, was not enough to save the Russian delegation from the most tragic fate of all. The first to go was Anton Vorovsky, shot down by an assassin while the conference was still in progress. The rest would fall victim later to the very government they had served so well.

These were some of the men at Lausanne. And it was these men rather than the issues which interested Ernest Hemingway in the spring of 1923. Of the delegates in attendance, Hemingway found three most fascinating: Ismet, Tchitcherin and Mussolini. It was his first look at the Turkish representative; his second at the Italian leader and the Soviet diplomat.

Ernest Hemingway’s profiles of these, the men at Lausanne, follow...

THE TURK GENERAL AND THE ITALIAN DICTATOR

In the Chateau de Ouchy, which is so ugly that it makes the Odd Fellows’ Hall of Petoskey, Michigan, look like the Parthenon, are held the sessions of the Lausanne Conference.

Ouchy is pronounced Ooshy, not Ouchy, and about sixty years ago was a little fishing village of weather-stained houses, a white-painted, pleasant inn with a shady front porch where Byron used to sit resting his bad leg on a chair while he looked out across the blue of Lake Geneva and waited for the supper bell to ring, at an old ruined tower that rose out of the reeds at the edge of the lake.

The Swiss have torn down the fishing buildings, nailed up a tablet on the inn front porch, hustled Byron’s chair into a museum, filled in the reedy shore with dirt from the excavations for the enormous, empty hotels that cover the slope up the hill to Lausanne, and built the ugliest building in Europe around the old tower. This building, of pressed gray stone, resembles one of the love-nests that sauerkraut kings used to build along the Rhine before the war as dream-homes for their sauerkraut queens and embodies all the worst phases of the iron-dog-on-the-lawn school of architecture. A steep hill runs up from the lake side to the town of Lausanne itself on the hill.

You can tell when the conference is in session by the rows of limousines parked along the Chateau facing the lake. These limousines each bear the flag of their delegation. The Bulgarian and Russian flags are missing. Premier Stambulisky, of Bulgaria, bulks out of the swinging door of the Chateau, looks suspiciously at the two helmeted Swiss policemen, scowls at the crowd and walks off up the hill to his hotel. Stambulisky cannot afford to ride in a limousine, even if he had the money, it would be reported to Sofia and his peasant government would demand an explanation. A few weeks ago he made an impassioned defense in the Bulgarian assembly to a charge by a group of his sheep-skin coated electors, that he had been wearing silk socks, not getting up until nine o’clock in the morning, drinking wine, and becoming corrupted by the slothful life of the city.

The Russian delegation never know when they are going to be invited to the conference and when excluded and decided early, in one of their after midnight family councils at the Hotel Savoy, that to keep a limousine all the time would be too expensive. A taxi comes up to the door and Arrens, the Cheka man and Bolshevist press agent, comes out, his heavy, dark face sneering and his one roving eye shooting away out of control, he is followed by Rakovsky and Tchitcherin. Rakovsky, the Ukranian, has the pale face, wonderfully modeled features, hawk-nosed and tight-lipped, of an old Florentine nobleman. Tchitcherin is not as he was at Genoa when he seemed to blink at the world as a man who has come out of darkness into too strong sunlight. He is more confident now, has a new overcoat, and a better groomed look, he has been living well in Berlin, and his face is fuller, although he looks the same as ever in profile with his wispy red beard and mustache and his furtive, old-clothes-man slouch.

Everyone wants to see Ismet Pasha, but once they have seen him they have no desire to see him again. He is a little dark man, absolutely without magnetism, looking as small and uninteresting as a man can look. He looks more like an Armenian lace-seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouselike about him. He seems to have a genius for being unrecognized. Mustapha Kemal has a face that no one can forget, and Ismet has a face no one can remember.

I think the solution is that Ismet has a good movie face. I have seen him, in pictures, look stern, commanding, forceful and, in a way, handsome. Anyone who has seen in real life the weak, petulant face of any one of a dozen movie stars who look beautiful on the screen, knows what I mean. Ismet’s face is not weak or petulant, it is simply plain and characterless. I remember seeing Ismet in the first days of the conference come in to the Hotel Savoy as a crowd of the newspaper correspondents were coming out from one of Tchitcherin’s famous “mass interviews.” Ismet, waiting for the lift, stood in the midst of this crowd of men who had been trying to get appointments to speak with him for days, and not one of them recognized him. He was too unobtrusive.

It was too good to spoil, but I stepped up and greeted him.

“It is very funny, this, Excellency,” I said as a couple of correspondents crowded him away from the door of the lift.

He smiled like a schoolgirl, shrugged his shoulders and raised his hands to his face in a mock gesture of shame. I laughed. He giggled.

“Get an appointment to come and talk with me,” he said, shook hands, stepped into the lift and grinned at me. The interview was over.

When I did interview him we got along very well, as we both spoke such bad French. Ismet conceals his defective knowledge of French, which is a disgrace to an educated Turk, as in Turkey a knowledge of French is as much a social necessity as it is in Russia, by pretending to be deaf.: He appreciates a joke, Ismet does, and he smiles delightedly to himself as he curls back in his chair and has the remarks of the great shouted into his ear in Turkish by his secretary.

The next time I saw Ismet, after I had interviewed him, he was sitting at a table in a jazz dancing palace in Montreux smiling delightedly at the dancers, a pair of large, gray-haired Turks sitting at his table with him looking morosely on while he ate quantities of cakes, drank three cups of tea and made countless jokes in bad French with the waitress who brought the tea. The waitress seemed delighted with Ismet and Ismet with her, they were having a wonderful time. Not a soul in the place had recognized him.

In contrast to Ismet there was Mussolini. Mussolini is the biggest bluff in Europe. If Mussolini would have me taken out and shot tomorrow morning I would still regard him as a bluff. The shooting would be a bluff. Get hold of a good photograph of Signor Mussolini some time and study it. You will see the weakness in his mouth which forces him to scowl the famous Mussolini scowl that is imitated by every nineteen-year-old Fascisto in Italy. Study his past record. Study the coalition that Fascismo is between capital and labor and consider the history of past coalitions. Study his genius for clothing small ideas in big words. Study his propensity for dueling. Really brave men do not have to fight duels, and many cowards duel constantly to make themselves believe they are brave. And then look at his black shirt and his white spats. There is something wrong, even histrionically, with a man who wears white spats with a black shirt.

There is not space here to go into the question of Mussolini as a bluff or as a great and lasting force. Mussolini may last fifteen years or he may be overthrown next spring by Gabriele D’Annunzio, who hates him. But let me give two true pictures of Mussolini at Lausanne.

The Fascist dictator had announced he would receive the press. Everybody came. We all crowded into the room. Mussolini sat at his desk reading a book. His face was contorted into his famous frown. He was registering Dictator. Being an ex-newspaper man himself he knew how many readers would be reached by the accounts the men in the room would write of the interview he was about to give. And he remained absorbed in his book. Mentally he was already reading the lines of the two thousand papers served by the two hundred correspondents. “As we entered the room the Black Shirt Dictator did not look up from the book he was reading, so intense was his concentration, etc.”

I tiptoed over behind him to see what the book was he was reading with such avid interest. It was a French-English dictionary — held upside down.

The other picture of Mussolini as Dictator was on the same day when a group of Italian women living in Lausanne came to his suite of rooms at the Beau-Rivage Hotel to present him with a bouquet of roses. There were six women of the peasant class, wives of workmen living in Lausanne, and they stood outside the door waiting to do honor to Italy’s new national hero who was their hero. Mussolini came out of the door in his frock coat, his gray trousers and his white spats. One of the women stepped forward and commenced her speech. Mussolini scowled at her, sneered, let his big-whited African eyes roll over the other five women and went back into the room. The unattractive peasant women in their Sunday clothes were left holding the roses. Mussolini had registered Dictator.

Half an hour later he met Claire Sheridan, who has smiled her way into many interviews, and had time for a half an hour’s talk with her.

Of course the newspaper correspondents of Napoleon’s time may have seen the same things in Napoleon, and the men who worked on the Giornale D’ltalia in Caesar’s day may have found the same discrepancies in Julius, but after an intimate study of the subject there seems to be a good deal more of Bottomley, an enormous, warlike, duel-fighting, successful, Italian Horatio Bottomley, in Mussolini than there does of Napoleon.

It isn’t really Bottomley though. Bottomley was a fool. Mussolini isn’t a fool and he is a great organizer. But it is a very dangerous thing to organize the patriotism of a nation if you are not sincere, especially when you work their patriotism to such a pitch that they offer to loan money to the government without interest. Once the Latin has sunk his money in a business he wants results and he is going to show Signor Mussolini that it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself.

A new opposition will rise, it is forming already, and it will be led by that old, bald-headed, perhaps a little insane but thoroughly sincere, divinely brave swashbuckler — Gabriele D’Annunzio.

THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER

Georgi Tchitcherin comes from a noble Russian family. He has a wispy red beard and mustache, big eyes, a high forehead and walks with a slouch like an old clothes man. He has plump, cold hands that lie in yours like a dead man’s and he talks both English and French with the same accent in a hissing, grating whisper.

Tchitcherin was an old Czarist diplomat and if Lenin is the Napoleon that made a dictatorship out of the Russian revolution, Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand. Their careers are both very similar. Both Tchitcherin and Talleyrand were diplomats under the monarchy that preceded their revolution, both were sent abroad as ambassadors under the revolution, both were refused by the countries they were sent to, both were in exile and both became the director of foreign affairs of the dictatorship that followed the revolution.

“We came to Lausanne with one program,” Tchitcherin said to me one afternoon. “And we will leave it with the same program. The straits, both the Dardanelles and the Bosporus, must be closed to warships.”

He spoke with the tired intensity of a man who is saying a thing for the hundredth time, who believes it and is as impassioned about it as the first time, but has become wearied from not being understood.

“As long as the straits are open to warships,” he went on, “Russia is at the mercy of any nation that sends a fleet into the Black Sea. We can have no safety, no freedom to develop, no security from invasion as long as battleships and dreadnaughts can enter the Black Sea. There is only one thing for Russia to do if warships are allowed to enter, and that is to arm. She must build battleships in order to have a great fleet in the Black Sea. That means the crippling of her productive power by diverting it to building a great navy. But she must do it.”

“How about naval disarmament?” I asked.

“Russia was not invited to the Washington conference.” Tchitcherin shrugged his shoulders. “And what has come of that conference? How near are we to naval disarmament now? We are dealing with facts, with conditions as they exist. Russia would be the first to accept an invitation to a naval disarmament conference, but until we have complete naval disarmament we can only keep warships out of the Black Sea in one way. That way is to have the straits closed to all warships and fortified by the Turks so they can enforce the closing.”

Tchitcherin was on his best ground now. He is an old Russian diplomat and he is soundest when he is fighting for the national aims of Russia. He sees that the problems of Soviet Russia, the territorial and national problems, are the same as they were under the Russian Empire. The world revolution did not come off and Russia faces the same problems she always faced. Tchitcherin knows those problems. He knows the rivalry between Russia and Great Britain in the East and he knows that as long as Russia is a nation, no matter who governs, and as long as there is a British Empire, their interests will conflict. Now he is trying to gain by treaties advantages and securities that later would have to be gained or lost by wars.

Tchitcherin knows that a Russian invasion of India through Afghanistan would be impossible as long as the Crimea was open to a counter invasion by the British Fleet. Lord Curzon knows that too. Tchitcherin knows that the Black Sea coast is the great thousand-mile Achilles tendon of Russia. Lord Curzon knows that too.

It was this daily, bitter struggle between the British Empire and the future Russian Empire with Curzon, a tall, cold, icicle of a man holding the whip hand with the British Fleet, and Tchitcherin fighting, fighting, with arguments, historical instances, facts, statistics and impassioned pleas and finally, seeing it was hopeless, simply talking for history, registering his objections for future generations to read, that made the Lausanne conference so interesting. It is this same unreconcilable difference between Russia and Great Britain that will run like a crack through any Near East treaty that is made in Lausanne and keep it from having permanence.

With his cold hands and his cold brain and his red wispy beard, his inhuman capacity for work, his dislike and distrust of women, his indifference to publicity, public opinion, money or anything except his work and Russia, Tchitcherin looked like a man without a weakness.

Tchitcherin, you must know, has never been a soldier. He is timid personally. He does not fear assassination, but he would turn pale if you shook your fist under his nose. Until he was twelve years old ids mother kept him in dresses. He is all brain and he simply feeds his body because it is a supporting part of his brain.

Several of us knew all this about him. Then one Sunday morning as the churches were emptying in Lausanne and the mountain goers were hiking down the streets with their skis and packs to catch the train to Aigle or the Diablerets a group of correspondents stopped in front of a photographer’s window. It was displaying photographs of Tchitcherin in uniform.

“They’re faked,” one man said. “Why, he’s never had a uniform on in his life.”

We all looked closely at the photographs.

“Nope. They’re not faked.” Someone said, “I can tell. They’re not faked. Let’s go and ask Slocombe.

We found George Slocombe, the correspondent of the London Daily Herald, who is Tchitcherin’s very good friend and sometimes his mouthpiece. George was sitting in the press room of the Lausanne Palace Hotel, his big black sombrero back on his head, his curling red beard sticking out at an angle, his pipe in his mouth.

“Yes,” he said, looking at the picture I showed him. “Aren’t they awful? I couldn’t believe it when I saw them. He had them taken himself, and now the photographer is selling them.” —

“But where does he get that awful uniform, George?’ I asked. “He looks like a combination of the headkeeper at Sing Sing and the concierge at the Crillon.”

“Isn’t it horrible?” George sucked his pipe. “All the commissars are automatically generals in the Red Army, and Tchitcherin is commissar for foreign affairs, you know. He got that uniform made in Berlin. He took it off the hanger last night in the closet in his room and showed it to me. He is dreadfully proud of it. You ought to see him in it.”

So that is Tchitcherin’s weakness. The boy who was kept in dresses until he was twelve years old always wanted to be a soldier. And soldiers make empires, and empires make wars.

Part Eleven. BULLFIGHTING

Bullfighting in its most primitive form dates back to the amphitheaters of ancient Rome. After the fall of the empire it disappeared for a time, only to show up next in Africa where it had become a favorite with the Moors. Some twelve hundred years ago the Moors brought the sport to Spain. There it took root and flourished, until today the running of the bulls is as much a part of Spanish life as the guitar and the flamenco dance.

Since the days of the Moors the rules and techniques of the fight have undergone great change. The Moors rode on horseback, chasing the bull to exhaustion and then piercing it with a lance. Only the Moorish nobility was wealthy enough to own a stable of horses and extravagant enough to kill bulls for pleasure, and it was they who interested the Spanish knights in the sport. The Spaniards hated the Moors but were as yet too weak to revolt, so their knights turned to bullfighting as a means of beating the conqueror at his own game.

According to tradition El Cid, the liberator, was the first Spaniard to kill a bull. The saga of El Cid tells of a dozen bulls dispatched in as many seconds, and of a score of Moorish nobles who, having failed to best El Cid in the ring, galloped off a cliff to perish in the sea. But this is legend and it is more likely that an otherwise undistinguished nobleman, Don Rodriguez Diaz de Vivar, holds the honor of the first kill in the year 1040.

‘ Sometime in the next five centuries man dismounted and began fighting the bull on foot. With the horse also went the lance as close-in attack now called for the use of the less cumbersome sword. Midway through the seventeenth century, the act of approaching, deceiving and killing the bull became more and more refined until it no longer resembled the sport introduced by the Moors. It developed into a ritual demanding skill and grace as well as courage. Since it took years of practice to become accomplished in this art, the amateur sportsmen gave way in the Spanish bull rings to the seasoned professional. In the past three hundred years, these professionals have acted out their stylized roles in a manner unchanged from that originated by their forefathers.

No one is sure how Ernest Hemingway became acquainted with bullfighting. If we are to believe Gertrude Stein, it was she who kindled the first spark of interest. Hemingway himself did not see fit to credit Gertrude Stein with this influence, and all we know today is that he watched his first bullfight in the fall of 1923.

Ernest Hemingway was to witness many, many more bullfights during his lifetime. Whatever the motives which regularly drove him back to the bull ring, Hemingway followed bullfighting with a passion seldom exceeded even by the Spanish aficionado. He studied the ballet-like ritual in the ring, made friends with picadors, banderilleros and matadors, and he became expert on everything about the art — from the breeding of brave bulls to the careful use of the cape in a tricky wind. Eventually he would write a book on the subject; it would be the best book on bullfighting in the English language.

In that fall of 1923, Ernest Hemingway witnessed his first fight. What follows are his vivid impressions of the drama of life and death in the bull ring...

FIRST VISIT TO THE BULL RING

It was spring in Paris and everything looked just a little too beautiful. Mike and I decided to go to Spain. Strater drew us a fine map of Spain on the back of a menu of the Strix restaurant. On the same menu he wrote the name of a restaurant in Madrid where the specialty is young suckling pig roasted, the name of a pensione in the Via San Jeronima where the bullfighters live, and sketched a plan showing where the Grecos are hung in the Prado.

Fully equipped with this menu and our old clothes, we started for Spain. We had one objective — to see bullfights.

We left Paris one morning and got off the train at Madrid the next noon. We saw our first bullfight at 4:30 that afternoon. It took about two hours to get tickets. We finally got them from scalpers for twenty-five pesetas apiece. The bull ring was entirely sold out. We had barrera seats. These the scalper explained in Spanish and broken French were the first row of the ringside, directly under the royal box, and immediately opposite where the bull would come out.

We asked him if he didn’t have any less distinguished seats for somewhere around twelve pesetas, but he was sold out. So we paid the fifty pesetas for the two tickets, and with the tickets in our pockets sat out on the sidewalk in front of a big cafe near the Puerto del Sol. It was very exciting sitting out in front of a cafe your first day in Spain with a ticket in your pocket that meant that rain or shine you were going to see a bullfight in an hour and a half. In fact, it was so exciting that we started out for the bull ring on the outskirts of the city in about half an hour.

The bull ring or Plaza de Toros was a big, tawny brick amphitheater standing at the end of a street in an open field. The yellow and red Spanish flag was floating over it. Carriages were driving up and people getting out of buses. There was a great crowd of beggars around the entrance. Men were selling water out of big terra cotta water bottles. Kids sold fans, canes, roasted salted almonds in paper spills, fruit and slabs of ice cream. The crowd was gay and cheerful but all intent on pushing toward the entrance. Mounted civil guards with patent leather cocked hats and carbines slung over their backs sat their horses like statues, and the crowd flowed through.

Inside they all stood around in the bull ring, talking and looking up in the grandstand at the girls in the boxes. Some of the men had field glasses in order to look better. We found our seats and the crowd began to leave the ring and set into the rows of concrete seats. The ring was circular that sounds foolish, but a boxing ring is square — with a sand floor. Around it was a red board fence, just high enough for a man to be able to vault over it. Between the board fence, which is called the barrera, and the first row of seats ran a narrow alley way. Then came the seats which were just like a football stadium except that around the top ran a double circle of boxes.

Every seat in the amphitheater was full. The arena was cleared. Then on the far side of the arena out of the crowd, four heralds in medieval costume stood up and blew a blast on their trumpets. The band crashed out, and from the entrance on the far side of the ring four horsemen in black velvet with ruffs around their necks rode out into the white glare of the arena. The people on the sunny side were baking in the heat and fanning themselves. The whole sol side was a flicker of fans.

Behind the four horsemen came the procession of the bullfighters. They had been all formed in ranks in the entrance way ready to march out, and as the music started they came. In the front rank walked the three espadas or toreros, who would have charge of the killing of the six bulls of the afternoon.

They came walking out in heavily brocaded yellow and black costumes, the familiar “toreador” suit, heavy with gold embroidery, cape, jacket, shirt and collar, knee breeches, pink stockings, and low pumps. Always at bullfights afterward the incongruity of those pink stockings used to strike me. Just behind the three principals — and after your first bullfight you do not look at their costumes but their faces — marched the teams of cuadrillas. They are dressed in the same way but not as gorgeously as the matadors.

Back of the teams ride the picadors. Big, heavy, brownfaced men in wide flat hats, carrying lances like long window poles. They are astride horses that make Spark Plug look as trim and sleek as a King’s Plate winner. Back of the pics come the gaily harnessed mule teams and the red-shirted monos or bull ring servants.

The bullfighters march in across the sand to the president’s box. They march with easy professional stride, swinging along, not in the least theatrical except for their clothes. They all have the easy grace and slight slouch of the professional athlete. From their faces they might be major league ball players. They salute the president’s box and then spread out along the barrera, exchanging their heavy brocaded capes for the fighting capes that have been laid along the red fence by the attendants.

We leaned forward over the barrera. Just below us the three matadors of the afternoon were leaning against the fence talking. One lighted a cigarette. He was a short, clear-skinned gypsy, Gitanillo, in a wonderful gold brocaded jacket, his short pig-tail sticking out under his black cocked hat.

“He’s not very fancy,” a young man in a straw hat, with obviously American shoes, who sat on my left, said. “But he sure knows bulls, that boy. He’s a great killer.”

“You’re an American, aren’t you?” asked Mike.

“Sure,” the boy grinned. “But I know this gang. That’s Gitanillo. You want to watch him. The kid with the chubby face is Chicuelo. They say he doesn’t really like bullfighting, but the town’s crazy about him. The one next to him is Villata. He’s the great one.”

I had noticed Villata. He was as straight as a lance and walked like a young wolf. He was talking and smiling at a friend who leaned over the barrera. Upon his tanned cheekbone was a big patch of gauze held on with adhesive tape.

“He got gored last week at Malaga,” said the American.

The American, whom later we were to learn to know and love as the Gin Bottle King, because of a great feast of arms performed at an early hour of the morning with a container of Mr. Gordon’s celebrated product as his sole weapon in one of the four most dangerous situations I have ever seen, said: “The show’s going to begin.”

Out in the arena the picadors had galloped their decrepit horses around the ring, sitting straight and stiff in their rocking chair saddles. Now all but three had ridden out of the ring. These three were huddled against the red painted fence of the barrera. Their horses backed against the fence, one eye bandaged, their lances at rest.

In rode two of the marshals in the velvet jackets and white ruffs. They galloped up to the president’s box, swerved and saluted, doffing their hats and bowing low. From the box an object came hurtling down. One of the marshals caught it in his plumed hat.

“The key to the bull pen,” said the Gin Bottle King.

The two horsemen whirled and rode across the arena. One of them tossed the key to a man in torero costume, they both saluted with a wave of their plumed hats, and had gone from the ring. The big gate was shut and bolted. There was no more entrance. The ring was complete.

The crowd had been shouting and yelling. Now it was dead silent. The man with the key stepped toward an iron barred, low, red door and unlocked the great sliding bar. He lifted it and stepped back. The door swung open. The man hid behind it. Inside it was dark.

Then, ducking his head as he came up out of the dark pen, a bull came into the arena. He came out all in a rush, big, black and white, weighing over a ton and moving with a soft gallop. Just as he came out the sun seemed to dazzle him for an instant. He stood as though he were frozen, his great crest of muscle up, firmly planted, his eyes looking around, his horns pointed forward, black and white and sharp as porcupine quills. Then he charged. And as he charged I suddenly saw what bullfighting is all about.

For the bull was absolutely unbelievable. He seemed like some great prehistoric animal, absolutely deadly and absolutely vicious. And he was silent. He charged silently and with a soft galloping rush. When he turned he turned on his four feet like a cat. When he charged the first thing that caught his eye was a picador on one of the wretched horses. The picador dug his spurs into the horse and they galloped away. The bull came on in his rush, refused to be shaken off, and in full gallop crashed into the animal from the side, ignored the horse, drove one of his horns nigh into the thigh of the picador, and tore him, saddle and all, off the horse’s back.

The bull went on without pausing to worry the picador lying on the ground. The next picador was sitting his horse braced to receive the shock of the charge, his lance ready. The bull hit him sideways on, and the horse and rider went high up in the air in a kicking mass and fell across the bull’s back. As they came down the bull charged into them. The dough-faced kid, Chicuelo, vaulted over the fence, ran toward the bull and flopped his cape into the bull’s face. The bull charged the cape and Chicuelo dodged backward and had the bull clear in the arena.

Without an instant’s hesitation the bull charged Chicuelo. The Kid stood his ground, simply swung back on his heels and floated his cape like a ballet dancer’s skirt into the bull’s face as he passed.

“Ole!” — pronounced Oh-Lay! — roared the crowd.

The bull whirled and charged again. Without moving, Chicuelo repeated the performance. His legs rigid, just withdrawing his body from the rush of the bull’s horns and floating the cape out with that beautiful swing.

Again the crowd roared. The Kid did this seven times. Each time the bull missed him by inches. Each time he gave the bull a free shot at him. Each time the crowd roared. Then he flopped the cape once at the bull at the finish of a pass, swung it around behind him and walked away from the bull to the barrera.

“He’s the boy with the cape all right,” said the Gin Bottle King. “That swing he did with the cape’s called a veronica.”

The chubby-faced Kid who did not like bullfighting and had just done the seven wonderful veronicas was standing against the fence just below us. His face glistened with sweat in the sun but was almost expressionless. His eyes were looking out across the arena where the bull was standing making up his mind to charge a picador. He was studying the bull because a few minutes later it would be his duty to kill him, and once he went out with his thin, red-hilted sword and his piece of red cloth to kill the bull in the final act it would be him or the bull. There are no drawn battles in bullfighting.

I am not going to describe the rest of that afternoon in detail. It was the first bullfight I ever saw, but it was not the best. The best was in the little town of Pamplona, high up in the hills of Navarre, and came weeks later. Up in Pamplona, where they have held six days of bullfighting each year since 1126 A.D., and where the bulls race through the streets of the town each morning at six o’clock with half of the town running ahead of them. Pamplona, where every man and boy in town is an amateur bullfighter and where there is an amateur fight each morning that is attended by 20,000 people in which the amateur fighters are all unarmed and there is a casualty list at least equal to a Dublin election. But Pamplona, with the best bullfight and the wild tale of the amateur fights, comes in the second chapter.

I am not going to apologize for bullfighting. It is a survival of the days of the Roman Coliseum. But it does need some explanation. Bullfighting is not a sport. It was never supposed to be. It is a tragedy. A very great tragedy. The tragedy is the death of the bull. It is played in three definite acts.

The Gin Bottle King — who, by the way, does not drink gin — told us a lot of this that first night as we sat in the upstairs room of the little restaurant that made a specialty of roast young suckling pig, roasted on an oak plank and served with a mushroom tortilla and vino rioja. The rest we learned later on at the bullfighters’ pensione in the Via San Jeronima, where one of the bullfighters had eyes exactly like a rattlesnake.

Much of it we learned in the sixteen fights we saw in different parts of Spain from San Sebastien to Granada.

At any rate bullfighting is not a sport. It is a tragedy, and it symbolizes the struggle between man and the beasts. There are usually six bulls to a fight. A fight is called a corrida de tores. Fighting bulls are bred like race horses, some of the oldest breeding establishments being several hundred years old. A good bull is worth about $2,000. They are bred for speed, strength and viciousness. In other words a good fighting bull is an absolutely incorrigible bad bull.

Bullfighting is an exceedingly dangerous occupation. In sixteen fights I saw there were only two in which there was no one badly hurt. On the other hand it is very remunerative. A popular espada gets $5,000 for his afternoon s work.

An unpopular espada though may not get $500. Both run the same risks. It is a good deal like Grand Opera for the really great matadors except that they run the chance of being killed every time they cannot hit high C.

No one in the fight can approach the bull at any time except directly from the front. That is where the danger comes. There are also all sorts of complicated passes that must be done with the cape, each requiring as much technique as a champion billiard player. And underneath it all is the necessity for playing the old tragedy in the absolutely custom bound, law-laid-down way. It must all be done gracefully, seemingly effortlessly and always with dignity. The worst criticism the Spaniards ever make of a bullfighter is that his work is “vulgar.”

The three absolute acts of the tragedy are first the entry of the bull when the picadors receive the shock of his attacks and attempt to protect their horses with their lances. Then the horses go out and the second act is the planting of the banderillos. This is one of the most interesting and difficult parts but among the easiest for a new bullfight fan to appreciate in technique. The banderillos are three-foot, gaily colored darts with a small fishhook prong in the end. The man who is going to plant them walks out into the arena alone with the bull. He lifts the banderillos at arm’s length and points them toward the bull. Then he calls ‘Toro! Toro!” The bull charges and the banderillero rises to his toes, bends in a curve forward and just as the bull is about to hit him drops the darts into the bull’s hump just back of his horns.

They must go in evenly, one on each side. They must not be shoved, or thrown or stuck in from the side. This is the first time the bull has been completely baffled, there is the prick of the darts that he cannot escape and there are no horses for him to charge into. But he charges the man again and again and each time he gets a pair of the long banderillos that hang from his hump by their tiny barbs and flop like porcupine quills.

Last is the death of the bull, which is in the hands of the matador who has had charge of the bull since his first attack. Each matador has two bulls in the afternoon. The death of the bull is most formal and can only be brought about in one way, directly from the front by the matador who must receive the bull in full charge and kill him with a sword thrust between the shoulders just back of the neck and between the horns. Before killing the bull he must first do a series of passes with the muleta, a piece of red cloth he carries about the size of a large napkin. With the muleta the torero must show his complete mastery of the bull, must make the bull miss him again and again by inches, before he is allowed to kill him. It is in this phase that most of the fatal accidents occur.

The word “Toreador” is obsolete Spanish and is never used. The torero is usually called an espada or swordsman. He must be proficient in all three acts of the fight. In the first he uses the cape and does veronicas and protects the picadors by taking the bull out and away from them when they are spilled to the ground. In the second act he plants the banderillos. In the third act he masters the bull with the muleta and kills him.

Few toreros excel in all three departments. Some, like young Chicuelo, are unapproachable in their cape work. Others like the late Joselito are wonderful banderilleros. Only a few are great killers. Most of the greatest killers are gypsies.

PAMPLONA: WORLD SERIES OF BULLFIGHTING

In Pamplona, a white-walled, sun-baked town high up in the hills of Navarre, is held in the first two weeks of July each year the World’s Series of bullfighting.

Bullfight fans from all Spain jam into the little town. Hotels double their prices and fill every room. The cafes under the wide arcades that run around the Plaza de la Constitucion have every table crowded, the tall, pilgrim-father sombreros of Andalusia sitting over the same table with straw hats from Madrid and the flat blue Basque caps of Navarre and the Basque country.

Really beautiful girls, gorgeous, bright shawls over their shoulders, dark, dark-eyed, black lace mantillas over their hair, walk with their escorts in the crowds that pass from morning until night along the narrow walk that runs between inner and outer belts of cafe tables under the shade of the arcade out of the white glare of the Plaza de la Constitucion. All day and all night there is dancing in the streets. Bands of blue-shirted peasants whirl and lift and swing behind a drum, fife and reed instruments in the ancient Basque Riau-Riau dances. And at night there is the throb of the big drums and the military band as the whole town dances in the great open square of the Plaza.

We landed at Pamplona at night. The streets were solid with people dancing. Music was pounding and throbbing. Fireworks were being set off from the big public square. All the carnivals I had ever seen paled down in comparison. A rocket exploded over our heads with a blinding burst and the stick came swirling and whishing down. Dancers, snapping their fingers and whirling in perfect time through the crowd, bumped into us before we could get our bags down from the top of the station bus. Finally I got the bags through the crowd to the hotel.

We had wired and written for rooms two weeks ahead. Nothing had been saved. We were offered a single room with a single bed opening on to the kitchen ventilator shaft for seven dollars a day apiece. There was a big row with the landlady, who stood in front of her desk with her hands on her hips and her broad Indian face perfectly placid, and told us in a few words of French and much Basque Spanish that she had to make all her money for the whole year in the next ten days. That people would come and that people would have to pay what she asked. She could show us a better room for ten dollars apiece. We said it would be preferable to sleep in the streets with the pigs. The landlady agreed that might be possible. We said we preferred it to such a hotel. All perfectly amicable. The landlady considered. We stood our ground. Mrs. Hemingway sat down on our rucksacks.

“I can get you a room in a house in the town. You can eat here,” said the landlady.

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

We started off through the dark, narrow, carnival-mad streets with a boy carrying our rucksacks. It was a lovely big room in an old Spanish house with walls thick as a fortress. A cool, pleasant room, with a red tile floor and two big, comfortable beds set back in an alcove. A window opened on to an iron grilled porch out over the street. We were very comfortable.

All night long the wild music kept up in the street below. Several times in the night there was a wild roll of drumming, and I got out of bed and across the tiled floor to the balcony. But it was always the same. Men, blue-shirted, bareheaded, whirling and floating in a wild, fantastic dance down the street behind the rolling drums and shrill fifes.

Just at daylight there was a crash of music in the street below. Real military music. Herself was up, dressed, at the window.

“Come on,” she said. “They’re all going somewhere. Down below the street was full of people. It was five o’clock in the morning. They were all going in one direction. I dressed in a hurry and we started after them.

The crowd was all going toward the great public square. People were pouring into it from every street and moving out of it toward the open country we could see through the narrow gaps in the high walls.

“Let’s get some coffee,” said Herself.

“Do you think we’ve got time? Hey, what’s going to happen?” I asked a newsboy.

“Encierro,” he said scornfully. “The encierro commences at six o’clock.”

“What’s the encierro?” I asked him.

“Oh, ask me tomorrow,” he said, and started to run. The entire crowd was running now. “I’ve got to have my coffee. No matter what it is,” Herself said.

The waiter poured two streams of coffee and milk into the glass out of his big kettles. The crowd was still running, coming from all the streets that feed into the Plaza.

“What is this encierro, anyway?” Herself asked, gulping the coffee.

“All I know is that they let the bulls out into the streets.” We started out after the crowd. Out of a narrow gate into a great yellow open space of country with the new concrete bull ring standing high and white and black with people. The yellow and red Spanish flag blowing in the early morning breeze. Across the open and once inside the bull ring, we mounted to the top, looking toward the town. It cost a peseta to go up to the top. All the other levels were free. There were easily twenty thousand people there. Everyone jammed on the outside of the big concrete amphitheater, looking toward the yellow town with the bright red roofs, where a long wooden pen ran from the entrance of the city gate across the open, bare ground to the bull ring.

It was really a double wooden fence, making a long entry way from the main street of the town into the bull ring itself. It made a runway about two hundred and fifty yards long. People were jammed solid on each side of it, looking up it toward the main street.

Then far away there was a dull report.

“They’re off,” everybody shouted.

“What is it?” I asked a man next to me who was leaning far out over the concrete rail.

“The bulls! They have released them from the corrals on the far side of the city. They are racing through the city.”

“Whew,” said Herself. “What do they do that for?” Then down the narrow fenced-in runway came a crowd of men and boys running. Running as hard as they could go. The gate feeding into the bull ring was opened and they all ran pell-mell under the entrance levels into the ring. Then there came another crowd. Running even harder. Straight up the long pen from the town.

“Where are the bulls?” asked Herself.

Then they came in sight. Eight bulls galloping along, full tilt, heavy set, black, glistening, sinister, their horns bare, tossing their heads. And running with them three steers with bells on their necks. They ran in a solid mass, and ahead of them sprinted, tore, ran and bolted the rear guard of the men and boys of Pamplona who had allowed themselves to be chased through the streets for a morning’s pleasure.

A boy in his blue shirt, red sash, white canvas shoes with the inevitable leather wine bottle hung from his shoulders, stumbled as he sprinted down the straightaway. The first bull lowered his head and made a jerky sideways toss. The boy crashed up against the fence and dropped there limp; the herd running solidly together passed him up. The crowd roared. —

Everybody made a dash for the inside of the ring, and we got into a box just in time to see the bulls come into the ring filled with men. The men ran in a panic to each side. The bulls, still bunched solidly together, ran straight with the trained steers across the ring and into the entrance that led to the pens.

That was the entry. Every morning during the bullfighting festival of San Firmin at Pamplona the bulls that are to fight in the afternoon are released from their corrals at six o’clock in the morning and race through the main street of the town for a mile and a half to the pen. The men who run ahead of them do it for the fun of the thing. It has been going on each year since a couple of hundred years before Columbus had his historic interview with Queen Isabella in the camp outside of Granada.

There are two things in favor of there being no accidents. First, that fighting bulls are not aroused and vicious when they are together. Second, that the steers are relied upon to keep them moving.

Sometimes things go wrong, a bull will be detached from the herd as they pile through into the pens and with his crest up, a ton of speed and viciousness, his needle-sharp horns lowered, will charge again and again into the packed mass of men and boys in the bull ring. There is no place for the men to get out of the ring. It is too jammed for them to climb over the barrera or red fence that rims the field. They have to stay in and take it. Eventually the steers get the bull out of the ring and into the pen. He may wound or kill thirty men before they can get him out. No armed men are allowed to oppose him. That is the chance the Pamplona bullfight fans take every morning during the Fiera. It is the Pamplona tradition of giving the bulls a final shot at everyone in town before they enter the pens they will not leave until they come out into the glare of the arena to die in the afternoon.

Consequently Pamplona is the toughest bullfight town in the world. The amateur fight that comes immediately after the bulls have entered the pens proves that. Every seat in the great amphitheater is packed. About three hundred men, with capes, odd pieces of cloth, old shifts, anything that will imitate a bullfighter’s cape, are singing and dancing in the arena. There is a shout, and the bull pen opens. Out comes a young bull just as fast he can come. On his horns are leather nobs to prevent his goring anyone. He charges and hits a man. Tosses him high in the air, and the crowd roars. The man comes down on the ground, and the bull goes for him, bumping him with his head. Worrying him with his horns. Several amateur bullfighters are flopping their capes in his face to make the bull charge and leave the man on the ground. Then the bull charges and bags another man. The crowd roars with delight.

Then the bull will turn like a cat and get somebody who has been acting very brave about ten feet behind him. Then he will toss a man over the fence. Then he picks out one man and follows him in a wild, twisting charge through the entire crowd until he bags him. The barrera is packed with men and boys sitting along the top, and the bull decides to clear them all off. He goes along, hooking carefully with his horn and dropping them off with a toss of his horns like a man pitching hay.

Each time the bull bags someone the crowd roars with joy. Most of it is home talent stuff. The braver the man has been or the more elegant pass he has attempted with his cape before the bull gets him the more the crowd roars. No one is armed. No one hurts or plagues the bull in any way. A man who grabbed the bull by the tail and tried to hang on was hissed and booed by the crowd and the next time he tried it was knocked down by another man in the bull ring. No one enjoys it all more than the bull.

As soon as he shows signs of tiring from his charges the two old steers, one brown and the other looking like a big Holstein, come trotting in and alongside the young bull who falls in behind them like a dog and follows them meekly on a tour of the arena and then out.

Another comes right in, and the charging and tossing, the ineffectual cape waving, and wonderful music are repeated right over again. But always different. Some of the animals in this morning amateur fight are steers. Fighting bulls from the best strain who had some imperfection or other in build so they could never command the high prices paid for combat animals, $2,000 to $3,000 apiece. But there is nothing lacking in their fighting spirit.

The show comes off every morning. Everybody in town turns out at five-thirty when the military bands go through the streets. Many of them stay up all night for it. We didn’t miss one, and it is quelque sporting event that will get us both up at five-thirty o’clock in the morning for six days running.

As far as I know we were the only English-speaking people in Pamplona during the Fiera of last year.

There were three minor earthquakes while we were there. Terrific cloudbursts in the mountains and the Ebro river flooded out Zaragossa. For two days the bull ring was under water and the Corrida had to be suspended for the first time in over a hundred years. That was during the middle of the fair. Everyone was desperate. On the third day it looked gloomier than ever, poured rain all morning, and then at noon the clouds rolled away up across the valley, the sun came out bright and hot and baking and that afternoon there was the greatest bullfight I will perhaps ever see.

There were rockets going up into the air and the arena was nearly full when we got into our regular seats. The sun was hot and baking. Over on the other side we could see the bullfighters standing ready to come in. All wearing their oldest clothes because of the heavy, muddy going in the arena. We picked out the three matadors of the afternoon with our glasses. Only one of them was new. Olmos, a chubby-faced, jolly looking man, something like Tris Speaker. The others we had seen often before. Maera, dark, spare and deadly looking, one of the very greatest toreros of all time. The third, young Algabeno, the son of a famous bullfighter, a slim young Andalusian with a charming Indian-looking face. All were wearing the suits they had probably started bullfighting with, too tight, old-fashioned, outmoded.

There was the procession of entrance, the wild bullfight music played, the preliminaries were quickly over, the picadors retired along the red fence with their horses, the heralds sounded their trumpets and the door of the bullpen swung open. The bull came out in a rush, saw a man standing near the barrera and charged him. The man vaulted over the fence and the bull charged the barrera. He crashed into the fence in full charge and ripped a two-by-eight plank solidly out in a splintering smash. He broke his horn doing it and the crowd called for a new bull. The trained steers trotted in, the bull fell in meekly behind them, and the three of them trotted out of the arena.

The next bull came in with the same rush. He was Maera’s bull and after perfect cape play Maera planted the banderillos. Maera is Herself’s favorite bullfighter. And if you want to keep any conception of yourself as a brave, hard, perfectly balanced, thoroughly competent man in your wife’s mind never take her to a real bullfight. I used to go into the amateur fights in the morning to try and win back a small amount of her esteem but the more I discovered that bullfighting required a very great quantity of a certain type of courage of which I had an almost complete lack the more it became apparent that any admiration that she might ever redevelop for me would have to be simply an antidote to the real admiration for Maera and Villata. You cannot compete with bullfighters on their own ground. If anywhere. The only way most husbands are able to keep any drag with their wives at all is that, first, there are only a limited number of bullfighters, second, there are only a limited number of wives who have ever seen bullfights.

Maera planted his first pair of banderillos sitting down on the edge of the little step up that runs around the barrera. He snarled at the bull and as the animal charged leaned back tight against the fence and as the horns struck on either side of him, swung forward over the brute’s head and planted the two darts in his hump. He planted the next pair the same way, so near to us we could have leaned over and touched him. Then he went out to kill the bull and after he had made absolutely unbelievable passes with the little red cloth of the muleta, drew up his sword and as the bull charged Maera thrust. The sword shot out of his hand and the bull caught him. He went up in the air on the horns of the bull and then came down. Young Algabeno flopped his cape in the bull’s face. The bull charged him and Maera staggered to his feet. But his wrist was sprained.

With his wrist sprained, so that every time he raised it to sight for a thrust it brought beads of sweat out on his face, Maera tried again and again to make his death thrust. He lost his sword again and again, picked it up with his left hand from the mud flood of the arena and transferred it to the right for the thrust. Finally he made it and the bull went over. The bull nearly got him twenty times. As he came in to stand under us at the barrera side his wrist was swollen to twice normal size. I thought of prize fighters I had seen quit because they had hurt their hands.

There was almost no pause while the mules galloped in and hitched on to the first bull and dragged him out and the second came in with a rush. The picadors took the first shock of him with their bulls lances. There was the snort and charge, the shock, and the mass against the sky, the wonderful defense by the picador with his lance that held off the bull, and then Rosario Olmos stepped out with his cape.

Once he flopped the cape at the bull and floated it around in an easy graceful swing. Then he tried the same swing, the classic “veronica,” and the bull caught him at the end of it. Instead of stopping at the finish the bull charged on in. He caught Olmos squarely with his horn, hoisted him high in the air. He fell heavily and the bull was on top of him, driving his horns again and again into him. Olmos lay on the sand, his head on his arms. One of his team mates was flopping his cape madly in the bull’s face. The bull lifted his head for an instant and charged and got his man. Just one terrific toss. Then he whirled and chased a man just in back of him toward the barrera.

The man was running full tilt and as he put his hand on the fence to vault it the bull had him and caught him with his horn, shooting him way up into the crowd. He rushed toward the fallen man he had tossed who was getting to his feet and all alone Algabeno grabbed him by the tail. He hung on until I thought he or the bull would break. The wounded man got to his feet and started away.

The bull turned like a cat and charged Algabeno and Algabeno met him with the cape. Once, twice, three times he made the perfect, floating, slow swing with the cape, perfectly graceful, debonair, back on his heels, baffling the bull. And he had command of the situation. There was never such a scene at any World’s Series game.

There are no substitute matadors allowed. Maera was finished. His wrist could not lift a sword for weeks. Olmos had been gored badly through the body. It was Algabeno’s bull. This one and the next five.

He handled them all. Did it all. Cape play easy, graceful, confident. Beautiful work with the muleta. And serious, deadly killing. Five bulls he killed, one after the other, and each one was a separate problem to be worked out with death. At the end there was nothing debonair about him it was only a question if he would last through or if the bulls would get him. They were all very wonderful bulls.

“He is a very great kid,” said Herself. “He is only twenty.”

“I wish we knew him,” I said.

“Maybe we will some day,” she said. Then considered a moment. “He will probably be spoiled by then.”

They make twenty thousand a year.

That was just three months ago. It seems in a different century now, working in an office. It is a very long way from the sun-baked town of Pamplona, where the men race through the streets in the mornings ahead of the bulls to the morning ride to work on a Bay-Caledonia car. But it is only fourteen days by water to Spain and there is no need for a castle. There is always that room at 5 Calle de Eslava, and a son, if he is to redeem the family reputation as a bullfighter, must start very early.

Part Twelve. OUTDOORS — AT HOME AND ABROAD

Not many writers of fiction loved the outdoors as did Ernest Hemingway. He spent nearly all his leisure hours hunting and fishing, and there are few places where he has not at one time or another wet a line or sighted down the barrel of a gun. In his middle years, Hemingway roamed the grasslands of Africa tracking lions and rhino; in later years he resided in Cuba, working in the morning light with his studio facing the sea, and each afternoon would find him in search of the big game fish that waited in the rich waters of the Caribbean.

Hemingway was a consistent man, and the attitudes of a lifetime would stay with him to the end. He would die violently facing the muzzle of his favorite hunting gun as had the animals he killed, and he would die at his lodge in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho within sight of trout rising in the Wood River and big, buck goats treading the ledges of the nearby Rockies. It was his wish to be buried there, to rest forever in the mountains, and to rest beside the grave of Beartracks Williams, his dearest hunting friend.

The beginnings of Ernest Hemingway’s life were not unlike the final hours — with all the graphic experiences coming from the woods and the streams. His father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, was an amateur naturalist and a rabid sportsman. At the age of three Ernest was learning to fish and skin fresh-killed game; at twelve, he would be expert at both rod and gun, spending every leisure hour hunting and fishing through the remote reaches of upper Michigan.

In his first months at home after the war, the pattern of his youth brought Ernest Hemingway back to northern Michigan. In the warm days of summer he fished and in the frost-bitten days of autumn he hunted; partly for pleasure, but also for therapy, driven as if by instinct to mend the physical and emotional wounds of battle in the clean outdoors.

When Hemingway joined the Toronto Star, he found a ready reception for first-hand accounts on outdoor life. Canadians by the millions hunted and fished, and they expected to read about their favorite pursuits in the press. Hemingway knew his audience and during his travels reported back on his experiences, contributing articles ranging from trout fishing in North America to hunting in Germany and skiing in the Swiss Alps.

Here are the writings. The author is a dedicated young sportsman, and the subject is the great outdoors — at home and abroad...

FIGHT WITH A 20-POUND TROUT

Now when the old fly rod is hanging by its tip in the garret, and the flies that remain of the bright legions that opened the season are tattered feathered veterans and the patched waders are put away in the closet and the new net is lost, it looks as though the fishing season is over.

But it isn’t. It is just under way. No, this doesn’t mean that they are fishing for trout in New Zealand, or the Andes or Lago di Garda. This yarn deals with the opening of the great indoor fishing season.

More fish are caught in clubs at this time of year than ever were taken from the Nipigon. Bigger trout are taken around the tables in King Street cafeterias than win the prizes offered by the sporting magazines. And more fish get away within the confines of Toronto than are lost in all the trout streams of Christendom.

That’s where indoor fishing has it on outdoor fishing. It is cheaper and the fish run bigger.

It’s a peculiar thing that no man likes to hear another man talk about his golf game. Of course, most men spend the majority of their working hours talking about their golf game to other men. But do the other men enjoy it? They do not. They loathe it. They are merely listening in the hope that that blithering idiot will stop and give them a chance to talk about their own game.

For a man’s golf game is self-contained within him. Outside influences haven’t much to do with it. He is really just talking about himself.

Fishing is different. One fisherman loves to hear another fisherman tell about his fishing. For the fishing is something altogether outside of the fisherman. And while the one fisherman is listening he is mentally taking notes. Where did this all happen? How far is it from Toronto? Could he find the place? Are there any more as big up there? And so on.

We were fishing for rainbow trout where a little river comes into a lake and cuts a channel alongside the bank. Into the mouth of this river and the bay it empties into big schools of rainbow trout come out of the big lake. They chase the shiners and young herring and you can see their back fins coming out of the water like porpoises with a shower of minnows shooting up into the air. Every once in a while a big trout will jump clear of the water with a noise like somebody throwing a bathtub into the lake.

These monster trout won’t touch a fly and we fish for them by casting out from the bank with minnows and letting them lie on the bottom of the channel. We use an Aberdeen number four hook, a six-foot leader and sixty-five yards of twenty-pound test line, a quadruple multiplying reel and a fly rod.

You cast your minnow out into the channel and let it sink to the bottom and there it waits until the trout grabs it. In the meantime you set the click on the reel and put a slab under the rod butt.

None of these lake rainbows run under four pounds and when one hits the minnow the reel buzzes, the rod tip jerks down and you grab the rod and strike and the fight is on. The point of this is that we have caught trout in this way over nine pounds in weight. We have never had one run out all the line and while we have lost many leaders we had never had a fish big enough to break the line.

One day in September I had just cast out the minnow into the channel, the rod was pointing up into the air and the click was set on the reel. I was about twenty-five yards down the shore getting some driftwood for a fire when the reel gave a shriek that mounted to about high C. Not the familiar bzzzzzzzz but a steady shriek. The rod jerked down so hard that it was flattened straight out on the water.

I raced for the rod the instant I heard the reel start. Just as I reached it the shriek of the reel stopped. There was a big wallowing explosion out in the lake, the line broke at the reel and the rod, the butt had been under a log and resting on another, shot up into the air. I jumped into the water but the line had vanished out into the lake.

Don’t ask me how big he was. But he was big enough to take out over forty yards of line in the time it takes me to cover sixty feet and he was big enough to break a brand new twenty-three-pound test line without an instant’s strain. As soon as his weight hit the direct pull of the line it snapped.

The other one I didn’t see. But one night Jock Pentecost came into camp wet to the skin, his rod broken at the second joint, his net gone and a story that made our eyes bug out.

It seems that he was fishing a particularly deep and difficult stretch of river when he hooked a trout that he claimed was as long as his arm. He went down river with him through a pretty sizable rapids where he lost his net. Sometimes the fish would sulk at the foot of a big boulder and Jock would have to throw pebbles at him to start him moving. He was afraid to pump him too much with his rod for fear of parting the leader.

At other times the fish would rush and jump until Jock’s heart would be somewhere in his gullet with each jump. Jock said that when the trout jumped he made a noise like a beaver diving into the water.

Of course it was a hopeless battle without a net and no other fisherman within two or three miles. Jock might have had a chance of beaching him if there had been any shallow places or patches of shingle. But the river runs waist deep and as fast as a mill race.

Jock claims that he fought the trout for an hour and a half and then the big fellow started down stream and something had to smash.

The enormous size of the fish and the length of time of the fight seemed unbelievable to us as it does to you. But Jock had the look of truth in his eyes.

Two weeks after the fish commission man netted some trout out below a dam on the river and put them upstream. They were too big to use the fish ladder. One of them was a rainbow weighing twenty-one pounds.

And what’s more no one has caught him and he’s still in the river.

THE BEST RAINBOW TROUT FISHING IN THE WORLD

Rainbow trout fishing is as different from brook fishing as prize fighting is from boxing. The rainbow is called salmo iridescens by those mysterious people who name the fish we catch and has recently been introduced into Canadian waters. At present the best rainbow trout fishing in the world is in the rapids of the Canadian Soo.

There the rainbow have been taken as large as fourteen pounds from canoes that are guided through the rapids and halted at the pools by Ojibway and Chippewa boatmen. It is a wild and nerve-frazzling sport and the odds are in favor of the big trout who tear off thirty or forty yards of line at a rush and then will sulk at the base of a big rock and refuse to be stirred into action by the pumping of a stout fly rod aided by a fluent monologue of Ojibwayan profanity. Sometimes it takes two hours to land a really big rainbow under those circumstances.

The Soo affords great fishing. But it is a wild nightmare kind of fishing that is second only in strenuousness to angling for tuna off Catalina Island. Most of the trout too take a spinner and refuse a fly and to the ninety-nine per cent pure fly fisherman, there are no one hundred per centers, that is a big drawback.

Of course the rainbow trout of the Soo will take a fly but it is rough handling them in that tremendous volume of water on the light tackle a fly fisherman loves. It is dangerous wading in the spots that can be waded too, for a misstep will take the angler over his head in the rapids. A canoe is a necessity to fish the very best water.

Altogether it is a rough, tough, mauling game, lacking in the meditative qualities of the Isaak Walton school of angling. What would make a fitting Valhalla for the good fisherman when he dies would be a regular trout river with plenty of rainbow trout in it jumping crazy for the fly.

There is such a one not forty miles from the Soo called the — well, called the river. It is about as wide as a river should be, and little deeper than a river ought to be and to get the proper picture you want to imagine in rapid succession the following fadeins:

A high pine-covered bluff that rises steep up out of the shadows. A short sand slope down to the river and a quick elbow turn with a little flood wood jammed in the bend and then a pool.

A pool where the moselle-colored water sweeps into a dark swirl and expanse that is blue-brown with depth and fifty feet across.

There is the setting.

The action is supplied by two figures that slog into the picture up the trail along the river bank with loads on their backs that would tire a pack horse. These loads are pitched over the heads onto the patch of ferns by the edge of the deep pool. That is incorrect. Really the figures lurch a little forward and the tump line loosens and the pack slumps onto the ground. Men don’t pitch loads at the end of an eight-mile hike.

One of the figures looks up and notes the bluff is flattened on top and that there is a good place to put a tent. The other is lying on his back and looking straight up in the air. The first reaches over and picks up a grasshopper that is stiff with the fall of the evening dew and tosses him into the pool.

The hopper floats spraddle legged on the water of the pool an instant, an eddy catches him and then there is a yard-long flash of flame, and a trout as long as your forearm has shot into the air and the hopper has disappeared.

“Did you see that?” gasped the man who had tossed in the grasshopper.

It was a useless question, for the other, who a moment before would have served for a model for a study entitled “Utter Fatigue,” was jerking his fly rod out of the case and holding a leader in his mouth.

We decided on a McGinty and a Royal Coachman for the flies and at the second cast there was a swirl like the explosion of a depth bomb, and line went taut and the rainbow shot two feet out of water. He tore down the pool and the line went out until the core of the reel showed. He jumped and each time he shot into the air we lowered the tip and prayed. Finally he jumped, and the line went slack and Jacques reeled in. We thought he was gone and then he jumped right under our faces. He had shot upstream toward us so fast that it looked as though he were off.

When I finally netted him and rushed him up the bank and could feel his huge strength in the tremendous muscular jerks he made when I held him flat against the bank it was almost dark. He measured twenty-six inches and weighed nine pounds and seven ounces.

That is rainbow trout fishing.

The rainbow takes the fly more willingly than he does bait. The McGinty, a fly that looks like a yellow jacket, is the best. It should be tied on a number eight or ten hook.

The smaller flies get more strikes — but are too small to hold the really big fish. The rainbow trout will live in the same streams with brook trout but they are found in different kinds of places. Brook trout will be forced into the shady holes under the bank and where alders hang over the banks and the rainbow will dominate the clear pools and the fast shallows.

Magazine writers and magazine covers to the contrary the brook or speckled trout does not leap out of water after he has been hooked. Given plenty of line he will fight a deep rushing fight. Of course, if you hold the fish too tight he will be forced by the rush of the current to flop on top of the water.

But the rainbow always leaps on a slack or tight line. His leaps are not mere flops either, but actual jumps out of and parallel with the water of from a foot to five feet. A five-foot jump by any fish sounds improbable, but it is true.

If you don’t believe it tie onto one in fast water and try and force him. Maybe if he is a five-pounder he will throw me down and only jump four feet eleven inches.

FISHING FOR TROUT IN A SPORTING WAY

Sporting magazines have fostered a popular fiction to the effect that no gentleman would catch a trout in any manner but on a fly on a nine-foot tapered leader attached to a double-tapered fly line cast from a forty-five dollar four and a half ounce rod.

There is a reason for this putting of trout fishing into the class of a rich man’s diversion. Outdoor magazines are supported by their advertising. The advertisers are putting out expensive goods suited to the understocked, over-fished streams of the Eastern United States where only fly fishing is allowed. So the sporting writers pound their typewriters in praise of the fine and far-off fishing of streams like the Beaverkill and Esopus, whose fame is built on the catches of twenty years ago and take every opportunity to stigmatize the bait fisherman.

The old-timer, firmly implanted in the seat of the scornful, reads the twaddle of the American trout fishing critics and smiles. He knows the comparative value of bait and fly. He knows that at certain seasons the fly is a far more killing lure than any natural bait. And he knows that on some streams the fly will catch only small trout. He also knows that bait fishing for trout with light tackle and a leader is as sportsmanlike as fly fishing, that it is the only practical method on thousands of streams and that day in and day out through the season it will catch infinitely larger trout in exactly as sportsmanlike a way as fly fishing.

Worms, grubs, beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers are some of the best trout baits. But worms and hoppers are those most widely used.

There are three kinds of earth worms. Two of them are good for trout fishing and the third is absolutely useless. The big night crawlers come out of their holes in the grass at night, and enough for a good canful can be easily picked up after dark with the aid of a flashlight. They are really too large and thick for trout bait and are much better for bass, but are far better than nothing.

Common angle worms are easy to get in the spring, but are sometimes impossible to find in a long dry spell in the summer. They can be dug after a rain and kept alive in a big box full of earth until they are needed. A large quantity of worms can be transported a long way by keeping them in a small tin pail full of moist coffee grounds. Coffee grounds stay moist and keep the worms much better than earth which dries and does not absorb the water evenly. Too much moisture will kill the garden hackles as quickly as not enough. Worms kept in coffee grounds will be clean and fresh for fishing.

Pale yellowish worms which are found under manure piles look like angle worms, but are really a distinct species. They have an offensive odor and taste and trout do not like them.

The novice at trout fishing with worms needs to know a few general rules, but in the main he must work out his own destiny as every stream differs. The following rules are applicable everywhere, however:

Always approach a hole cautiously so as not to frighten the trout.

Never let your shadow fall over a hole.

Use plenty of bait and keep the point and shank of your hook covered.

Remember that the most difficult places to get your bait into are the most likely to contain big trout. Other people will have fished the easy holes.

Watch the line at the tip of your rod. As soon as it straightens the least bit strike with your wrist. Don’t wait for a jerk before striking.

Always drop your bait a little before the head of a hole and then lower the tip of your rod so that the current will roll your bait naturally into the hole.

Little wrinkles like those make the difference between getting a small and foolish trout who will strike at anything out of a hole and fooling some big old-timer that will only strike at a bait that is absolutely natural.

Worms are best used on the small, brushy creeks, full of logs and deep holes that must be fished from the banks. They are superior to grasshoppers on streams that must be fished from the bank because if there are any hoppers in the grass along the stream they are stirred up by the fisherman and a number usually land in the stream. The trout will take a free hopper swirling down the current every time in preference to one attached to a leader.

On streams that can be waded grasshoppers are the premier bait. They are cast exactly as a fly, except that you try and minimize the snap to avoid whipping off the bait.

Trout rise to a hopper far more readily than they do to a fly, and they are bigger trout. If you want to insure catching big trout, put three good-sized hoppers on the hook. Put the hook in under the chin of the grasshopper and carry it back through the thorax. A triple hopper bait is too large for the smaller trout to hit, and tempts the old whangle berries.

The big difficulty about fishing with grasshoppers has always been the difficulty in catching them. The classic way is to get up early in the morning before the sun has dried the dew, and catch the hoppers while they are still stiff and cold and unable to hop more than a feeble foot or two. They are found under the side of logs in a clearing and along the grass stems.

Any fisherman who has chased a lively grasshopper in the heat of the day will appreciate the method of catching them invented by Jacques Pentecost, an old-time north shore trout fisher.

In a clearing or around an old lumber camp where hoppers usually abound, they can be obtained in plentiful quantities by the Pentecost method. Let two men each hold the end of a ten-yard strip of mosquito netting and run into the wind with it. The netting bellies out like a seine, and the grasshoppers flying down wind are soon swarming in the net seine, which is held only a few inches above the ground. Then you flop the netting together and pick the hoppers out and put them in your hopper bottles. This method takes all the labor out of hopper catching.

Grubs, beetles of all kinds, hornet grubs, trout fins, chunks of liver from a partridge or duck are all emergency baits that will catch trout when you are in the bush and cannot get worms or hoppers.

Muddlers or miller’s thumbs, little flat-headed minnows that look like miniature cat fish are very killing baits for big trout. They live under rocks in fast water, and are very difficult to catch.

The usual method is to go after them with a small dip net or a fork fastened to a stick, and try to spear them or scoop them up as they shoot out when you turn the rocks over.

An unfortunate experience wherein I speared my big toe by mistake for a muddler in the rapids of the Black River, has prejudiced me against them.

All those baits will catch trout. If you are fishing with a light rod and a leader, the trout has exactly as good a chance as though you were fly fishing. In addition, you at least are giving the trout something for his money — if he gets away he has a good meal instead of just a memory of tinsel and feathers. And when you are fishing with grasshoppers, you will find that unless you have a wrist that is two shades quicker than an otter trap, you will present the trout with a lot of free meals this summer.

TROUT FISHING ON THE CONTINENT

Bill Jones went to visit a French financier who lives near Deauville and has a private trout stream. The financier was very fat. His stream was very thin.

“Ah, Monsieur Zshones, I will show you the fishing.” The financier purred over the coffee. “You have the trout in Canada, is it not? But here! Here we have the really charming trout fishing of Normandy. I will show you. Rest yourself content. You will see it.”

The financier was a very literal man. His idea of showing Bill the fishing was for Bill to watch and the financier to fish. They started out. It was a trying sight.

If undressed and put back on the shelf piece by piece the financier would have stocked a sporting goods store. Placed end to end his collection of flies would have reached from Keokuk, Ill., to Paris, Ont. The price of his rod would have made a substantial dent in the inter-Allied debt or served to foment a central American revolution.

The financier flung a pretty poisonous fly, too. At the end of two hours one trout had been caught. The financier was elated. The trout was a beauty, fully five and a half inches long and perfectly proportioned. The only trouble with him was some funny black spots along his sides and belly.

“I don’t believe he’s healthy,” Bill said doubtfully.

“Healthy? You don’t think he’s healthy? That lovely trout? Why, he is a wonder. Did you not see the terrific fight he made before I netted him?” The financier was enraged. The beautiful trout lay in his large, fat hand.

“But what are those black spots?” Bill asked.

“Those spots? Oh, absolutely nothing. Perhaps worms. Who can say? All of our trout here have them at this season. But do not be afraid of that, Monsieur Zshones. Wait until you taste this beautiful trout for your breakfast!”

It was probably the proximity to Deauville that spoiled the financier’s trout stream. Deauville is supposed to be a sort of combination of Fifth Avenue, Atlantic City, and Sodom and Gomorrah. In reality it is a watering place that has become so famous that the really smart people no longer go to it and the others hold a competitive spending contest and mistake each other for duchesses, dukes, prominent pugilists, Greek millionaires and the Dolly sisters.

The real trout fishing of Europe is in Spain, Germany and Switzerland. Spain has probably the best fishing of all in Galicia. But the Germans and the Swiss are right behind.

In Germany the great difficulty is to get permission to fish. All the fishing water is rented by the year to individuals. If you want to fish you have first to get permission of the man who has rented the fishing. Then you go back to the township and get a permission, and then you finally get the permission of the owner of the land.

If you have only two weeks to fish, it will probably take about all of it to get these different permissions. A much easier way is simply to carry a rod with you and fish when you see a good stream. If anyone complains, begin handing out marks. If the complaints keep up, keep handing out marks. If this policy is pursued far enough the complaints will eventually cease and you will be allowed to continue fishing.

If, on the other hand, your supply of marks runs out before the complaints cease, you will probably go either to jail or the hospital. It is a good plan, on this account, to have a dollar bill secreted somewhere in your clothes. Produce the dollar bill. It is ten to one your assailant will fall to his knees in an attitude of extreme thanksgiving and on arising break all existing records to the nearest, deepest and wooliest German hand-knitted sock, the south German’s savings bank.

Following this method of obtaining fishing permits, we fished all through the Black Forest. With rucksacks and fly rods, we hiked across country, sticking to the high ridges and the rolling crests of the hills, sometimes through deep pine timber, sometimes coming out into a clearing and farmyards and again going for miles without seeing a soul except occasional wild-looking berry pickers. We never knew where we were. But we were never lost because at any time we could cut down from the high country into a valley and know we would hit a stream. Sooner or later every stream flowed into a river and a river meant a town.

At night we stopped in little inns or gasthofs. Some of these were so far from civilization that the innkeepers did not know the mark was rapidly becoming worthless and continued to charge the old German prices. At one place room and board, in Canadian money, were less than ten cents a day.

One day we started from Triberg and toiled up a long, steadily ascending hill road until we were on top of the high country and could look out at the Black Forest rolling away from us in every direction. Away off across country we could see a range of hills, and we figured that at their base must flow a river. We cut across the high, bare country, dipping down into valleys and walking through the woods, cool and dim as a cathedral on a hot August day. Finally, we hit the upper end of the valley at the foot of the hills we had seen.

In it flowed a lovely trout stream and there was not a farmhouse in sight. I jointed up the rod, and while Mrs. Hemingway sat under a tree on the hillside and kept watch both ways up the valley, caught four real trout. They averaged about three-quarters of a pound apiece. Then we moved down the valley. The stream broadened out and Herself took the rod while I found a look-out post.

She caught six in about an hour, and two of them I had to come down and net for her. She had hooked a big one, and after he was triumphantly netted we looked up to see and old German in peasant clothes watching us from the road.

“Gut tag,” I said.

“Tag,” he said. “Have you good fishing?”

“Yes. Very good.”

“Good,” he said. “It is good to have somebody fishing.” And went hiking along the road.

In contrast to him were the farmers in Uber-Prechtal, where we had obtained full fishing permits, who came down and chased us away from the stream with pitchforks because we were Auslanders.

In Switzerland I discovered two valuable things about trout fishing. The first was while I was fishing a stream that parallels the Rhone river and that was swollen and gray with snow water. Flies were useless, and I was fishing with a big gob of worms. A fine, juicy-looking bait. But I wasn’t getting any trout or even any strikes.

An old Italian who had a farm up the valley was walking behind me while I fished. As there was nothing doing in a stream I knew from experience was full of trout, it got more and more irritating. Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl. Finally I sat down and waited for the Italian to go away. He sat down, too.

He was an old man, with a face like a leather water bottle.

“Well, Papa, no fish today,” I said.

“Not for you,” he said solemnly.

“Why not for me? For you, maybe?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said, not smiling. “For me trout always. Not for you. You don’t know how to fish with worms.” And spat into the stream.

This touched a tender spot, a boyhood spent within forty miles of the Soo, hoisting out trout with a cane pole and all the worms the hook would hold.

“You’re so old you know everything. You are probably a rich man from your knowledge of fishworms,” I said.

This bagged him.

“Give me the rod,” he said.

He took it from me, cleaned off the fine wriggling gob of trout food, and selected one medium-sized angleworm from my box. This he threaded a little way on the number ten hook, and let about three-fourths of the worm wave free.

“Now that’s a worm,” he said with satisfaction.

He reeled the line up till there was only the six feet of leader out, and dropped the free swinging worm into a pool where the stream swirled under the bank. There was nothing doing. He pulled it slowly out and dropped it in a little lower down. The tip of the rod twisted. He lowered it just a trifle. Then it shot down in a jerk, and he struck and horsed out a fifteen-inch trout and sent him back over his head in a telephone pole swing.

I fell on him while he was still flopping.

The old Italian handed me the rod. “There, young one. That is the way to use a worm. Let him be free to move like a worm. The trout will take the free end and then suck him all in, hook and all. I have fished this stream for twenty years and I know. More than one worm scares the fish. It must be natural.”

“Come, use the rod and fish now,” I urged him.

“No. No. I only fish at night,” he smiled. “It is much too expensive to get a permit.”

But by my watching for the river guard while he fished and our using the rod alternately until each caught a fish, we fished all day and caught eighteen trout. The old Italian knew all the holes, and only fished where there were big ones. We used a free wiggling worm, and the eighteen trout averaged a pound and a half apiece.

He also showed me how to use grubs. Grubs are only good in clear water, but are a deadly bait. You can find them in any rotten tree or sawlog, and the Swiss and Swiss-Italians keep them in grub boxes. Flat pieces of wood bored full of augur holes with a sliding metal top. The grub will live as well in his hole in the wood as in the log, and is one of the greatest hot weather baits known. Trout will take a grub when they will take nothing else in the low water days of August The Swiss, too, have a wonderful way of cooking trout They boil them in a liquor made of wine vinegar, bay leaves, and a dash of red pepper. Not too much of any of the ingredients in the boiling water, and cook until the trout turns blue. It preserves the true trout flavor better than almost any way of cooking. The meat stays firm and pink and delicate. Then they serve them with drawn butter. They drink the clear Sion wine when they eat them.

It is not a well-known dish at the hotels. You have to go back in the country to get trout cooked that way. You come up from the stream to a chalet and ask them if they know how to cook blue trout. If they don’t you walk on a way. If they do, you sit down on the porch with the goats and the children and wait. Your nose will tell you when the trout are boiling. Then after a little you will hear a pop. That is the Sion being uncorked. Then the woman of the chalet will come to the door and say, “It is prepared, monsieur.”

Then you can go away and I will do the rest myself.

THERE ARE GREAT FISH IN THE RHONE CANAL

In the afternoon a breeze blows up the Rhone valley from Lake Geneva. Then you fish upstream with the breeze at your back, the sun on the back of your neck, the tall white mountains on both sides of the green valley and the fly dropping very fine and far off on the surface and under the edge of the banks of the little stream, called the Rhone canal, that is barely a yard wide, and flows swift and still.

Once I caught a trout that way. He must have been surprised at the strange fly and he probably struck from bravado, but the hook set and he jumped into the air twice and zigged nobly back and forth and toward every patch of weed at the current bottom until I slid him up the side of the bank.

He was such a fine trout that I had to keep unwrapping him to take a look, and finally the day got so hot that I sat under a pine tree on the bank of the stream and unwrapped the trout entirely and ate a paper-bag full of cherries I had and read the trout-dampened Daily Mail. It was a hot day, but I could look out across the green, slow valley past the line of trees that marked the course of the Rhone and watch a waterfall coming down the brown face of a mountain. The fall came out of a glacier that reached down toward a little town with four gray horses and three gray churches that was planted on the side of the mountain and looked solid, the waterfall that is, until you saw it was moving. Then it looked cool and flickering, and I wondered who lived in the four houses and who went to the three churches with the sharp stone spires.

Now if you wait until the sun gets down behind the big shoulder of the Savoie Alps where France joins on to Switzerland, the wind changes in the Rhone valley and a cool breeze comes down from the mountains and blows down stream toward the Lake of Geneva. When this breeze comes and the sun is going down, great shadows come out from the mountains, the cows with their many pitched bells begin to be driven along the road, and you fish down the stream.

There are a few flies over the water and every little while some big trout rises and goes “plop” where a tree hangs over the water. You can hear the “plop” and look back of you up the stream and see the circles on the water where the fish jumped. Then is the time to rewrap the trout in Lord Northcliffe’s latest speech reported verbatim, the reported imminent demise of the coalition, the thrilling story of the joking earl and the serious widow, and, saving the Bottomley case to read on the train going home, put the trout-filled paper in your jacket pocket. There are great trout in the Canal du Rhone and it is when the sun has dropped back of the mountains and you can fish down stream with the evening breeze that they can be taken.

Fishing slowly down the edge of the stream, avoiding the willow trees near the water and the pines that run along the upper edge of what was once the old canal bank with your back cast, you drop the fly on to the water at every likely looking spot. If you are lucky, sooner or later there will be a swirl, or a double swirl where the trout strikes and misses and strikes again, and then the old, deathless thrill of the plunge of the rod and the irregular plunging, circling, cutting upstream and shooting into the air fight the big trout puts up, no matter what country he may be in. It is a clear stream and there is no excuse for losing him when he is once hooked, so you tire him by working him always against the current and then, when he shows a flash of white belly, slide him up against the bank and snake him up with a hand on the leader.

It is a good walk into Aigle. There are horse chestnut trees along the road with their flowers that look like wax candles, and the air is warm from the heat the earth absorbed from the sun. The road is white and dusty, and I thought of Napoleon’s grand army marching along it through the white dust on the way to the St. Bernard pass and Italy. Napoleon’s batman may have gotten up at sun up before the camp and sneaked a trout or two out of the Rhone canal for the Little Corporal’s breakfast. And before Napoleon, the Romans came along the valley and built this road and some Helvetian in the road gang probably used to sneak away from the camp in the evening to try for a big one in one of the pools under the willows. In the Roman days the trout perhaps weren’t as shy.

So I went along the straight white road to Aigle, through the evening and wondered about the grand army and the Romans and the Huns that traveled light and fast, and yet must have had time to try the stream along toward daylight, and very soon I was in Aigle, which is a very good place to be. I have never seen the town of Aigle, it straggles up the hillside, but there is a cafe across the station that has a galloping gold horse on top, a great wistaria vine as thick through as a young tree, that branches out and shades the porch with hanging bunches of purple flowers, that bees go in and out of all day long and that glisten after a rain, green tables with green chairs, and seventeen per cent dark beer. The beer comes foaming out in great glass mugs that hold a quart and costs forty centimes, and the barmaid smiles and asks about your luck. Trains are always at least two hours apart in Aigle, and those waiting in the station buffet, this cafe with the golden horse and the wistaria hung porch, is a station buffet, mind you, wish they would never come.

OFF THE SPANISH COAST — IT’S TUNA

Vigo is a pasteboard looking village, cobble streeted, white and orange plastered, set up on one side of a big, almost landlocked harbor that is large enough to hold the entire British navy. Sun-baked brown mountains slump down to the sea like tired old dinosaurs, and the color of the water is as blue as a chromo of the bay at Naples.

A gray pasteboard church with twin towers and a flat, sullen fort that tops the hill where the town is set up look out on the blue bay, where the good fishermen will go when snow drifts along the northern streams and trout lie nose to nose in deep pools under a scum of ice. For the bright, blue chromo of a bay is alive with fish.

It holds schools of strange, flat, rainbow colored fish, hunting-packs of long, narrow Spanish mackerel, and big, heavy-shouldered sea bass with odd, soft-sounding names. But principally it holds the king of all fish, the ruler of the Valhalla of fishermen.

The fisherman goes out on the bay in a brown lateen-sailed boat that lists drunkenly and determinedly and sails with a skimming pull. He baits with a silvery sort of a mullet and lets his line out to troll. As the boat moves along, close-hauled to keep the bait under water, there is a silver splatter in the sea, as though a bushel full of buckshot had been tossed in. It is a school of sardines jumping out of water, forced out by the swell of a big tuna who breaks water with a boiling crash and shoots his entire length six feet into the air. It is then that the fisherman’s heart lodges against his palate, to sink to his heels when the tuna falls back into the water with the noise of a horse diving off a dock.

A big tuna is silver and slate blue, and when he shoots up into the air from close beside the boat it is like a blinding flash of quicksilver. He may weigh 300 pounds and he jumps with the eagerness and ferocity of a mammoth rainbow trout. Sometimes five and six tuna will be in the air at once in Vigo Bay, shouldering out of the water like porpoises as they herd the sardines, then leaping in a towering jump that is as clean and beautiful as the first leap of a well-hooked rainbow.

The Spanish boatmen will take you out to fish for them for a dollar a day. There are plenty of tuna and they take the bait. It is a back-sickening, sinew-straining, man-sized job even with a rod that looks like a hoe handle. But if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish when your muscles are nauseated with the unceasing strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and be able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods and they will make you welcome.

For the cheerful, brown-faced gods that judge over the happy hunting grounds live up in the old, crumbly mountains that wall the bright, blue bay of Vigo. They live there wondering why the good, dead fishermen don’t come down to Vigo where the happy hunting grounds are waiting.

HUNTING ON THE CONTINENT

In a popular conception Europe is a very over-crowded, over-civilized, altogether decadent place where what shooting is done is committed by fashionably dressed languid members of the aristocracy who shoot hundreds of braces of protected grouse or woodcock, driven past them by beaters, between pauses for cups of tea and snapshots by the photographers for the leading illustrated weeklies.

Hunting, to be never confused with shooting under pain of social ostracism, consists of these same popular social figures donning pink coats and remaining in an upright position on top of a horse as long as possible as near as practicable to the rear of a pack of dogs who pursue a fox across the fields and meadows of the loyal and cheering peasantry.

Not so on the continent. Hunting is the great national sport of France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia and points east. It is called hunting, “La Chasse,” and it means shooting. And there is plenty to shoot. Right now you would have extreme difficulty getting inside of any local train leaving Paris in any direction on Saturday or Sunday because of the thousands of hunters, their shot guns slung over the shoulders, leaving for a week end in the country.

There is probably more game within twenty miles of Paris, France, than within twenty miles of Toronto, Ontario. There is good deer hunting in Germany, good snipe and plover shooting in the Ruhr, good partridge and rabbit shooting in almost every department of France and dangerous big game hunting in France, Belgium and Germany.

It is a moot question whether there is any dangerous big game in Ontario, excluding the skunk and porcupine. The hunter in the woods is in fully as much danger from the moose as though he were stationed in the members’ enclosure at the Woodbine [race track] taking pot shots at the favorite. The black bear wants just one thing from the hunter, distance. Wolves, I understand, are a tender subject.

But there is scattered all over Europe a really dangerous game animal. He is the wild boar and every year incautious hunters are killed by him. Last year there were two hunters killed in France alone by wild boars. During the war when there was almost no shooting game flourished unchecked all over Europe. One of the best little flourishers of them all was the wild boar.

In some districts like the wild Auvergne country and parts of the wooded slopes of the Cote d’Or down below Dole boars became so numerous that they destroyed crops and were a public menace. One farmer last winter had shot eighteen on his place in less than a year. The nineteenth was a big, chunky, viciously built fellow that the farmer saw out of his window one snowy morning. He took down the old shot gun and fired from the back door. The boar went into a thicket. The farmer followed him and the boar charged with a squealing grunt of rage and, bowling the farmer over, savaged him with his tusks. A wild boar’s tusk is like a razor and about three to six inches long. It makes a ghastly wound and once a boar gets a man down it keeps driving into him in an insane rage until the man is dead. The farmer’s wife finally killed the boar.

A wild boar will weigh up to 200 pounds and ounce for ounce and pound for pound is about as fierce and vicious an animal as there is. It is also one of the very finest things to eat in the world and as “Sanglier” and “Marcassin,” the latter young boar, is one of the reasons that make Dijon the place that all good eaters hope to go when they die.

An American pal of mine named Krebs decided to go boar hunting. He went down to a little town in the Cote d’Or in the foothills of the blue wall of the Jura where the boars were reported to be tearing up the crops and intimidating the population.

All the hunters in the place turned out. The reputation of the little town, we can call it Cauxonne, was at stake. Speeches were made in the local cafe. Impassioned appeals.

An American had come all the way to Cauxonne to hunt boars. Such a thing. Further he was an American journalist. If Cauxonne revealed itself as the great boar hunting center, that every citizen assembled knew it to be, Tourists, with a capital T, would flock in from all over the world. What an opportunity! The American must get boars. It was an affair touching the honor, the future, and the prosperity, above all, brothers, the prosperity, of Cauxonne. The excitement lasted well into the night.

Krebs was waked before daylight. The boar hunters were assembled at the café. They were waiting for him. He arrived half asleep. Inside the cafe were about twenty men. Bicycles were stacked outside. Hunting the boar was no thing to be undertaken on an empty stomach. They must have a small drink of some sort. Something to warm the stomach.

Krebs suggested coffee. What a joke. What a supreme and delightful joker the American. Coffee. Imagine it. Coffee before going off to hunt the Sanglier. What a thing. Drole enough, eh?

Marc. Marc was the stuff. No one ever started after the wild boar without first a little marc. Patron, the marc.

The marc was produced.

Now marc, pronounced mar as in marvelous, is one of the three most powerful drinks known. As an early morning potion it can give vodka, douzico, absinthe, grappa, and other famous stomach destroyers two furlongs and beat them as far as Zev beat Papyrus. It is the great specialty of Burgundy and the Cote d’Or and three drops of it on the tongue of a canary will send him out in a grim, deadly, silent search for eagles.

The marc was produced. It passed from hand to hand and from hand to mouth. Cauxonne was practically already famous. They must celebrate. Had not the American all but already shot dozens, nay hundreds, of wild boars? There was no doubt of it. Cauxonne was one of the great tourist centers of France. But had not the terrific slaughter of boars soon to be accomplished destroyed one of her greatest assets? No. It was no matter. Nothing mattered. Another bottle of marc, patron.

At nine o’clock in the morning the boar hunters mounted their fleet of bicycles and tore at a terrific clip in a northerly direction out of town. Stragglers and bent and damaged bicycles were found along the road all day. The main body of hunters slept very comfortably in a stretch of woods about four miles north of town, their heads pillowed on their bicycles. Krebs hunted hard all day and shot a large crow. He left for Paris that night afraid that if he stayed the boar hunters would want to repeat the hunt next morning.

Germany is full of game. In tramping through the Black Forest I have time and again seen deer browsing on some hillside just out of the edge of the forest, or in the evening coming down to drink at a little trout stream way back in the hills. Nearly every well-to-do German with sporting proclivities in the Schwartzwald or the mountainous, forest country of south Germany has one or two stag hounds and I have a standing invitation to hunt any fall with Herr Bugler of Triberg.

There are lots of snipe, plover and woodcock all down through the Rhineland and around the Ruhr and good duck shooting along the Rhine in the spring. Last spring coming down the river from Mayence to Cologne we passed great rafts of ducks. The British officers in the garrison at Cologne had very good pheasant, grouse, and quail shooting in the country within sight of the great cathedral towers.

Switzerland is the home of the chamois. I have never come any closer to the chamois than in the form of a gasoline strainer. He produces a very fine grade of celluloid horn, however, which is used to ornament the alpenstocks that are sold to tourists. So he cannot be regarded as extinct. But as a popular sporting animal he is about on the same plane as the wooden carved bears that are sold in Berne.

There are still chamois. But they live very high and far off and are very rarely shot and only then by an expert mountaineer and climber who works with field glasses and a telescope sight. Switzerland is a good game country though. Full of rabbits, big snow hares, partridges and the giant black cock. Black cock, or Capercailzie, are a sort of glorified partridge with glossy, iridescent plumage. They are larger than a big Orpington chicken, terrific flyers, and live in the forests of Switzerland and nearly all central and western Europe.

Italy is probably the only country in the world where they not only shoot but eat foxes. In the fall in Milan you will see hanging outside the door of a butcher’s shop two or three deer, a long line of pheasants and quail, and one or two red foxes. Everybody who can get a license and get out hunts in Italy. The shooting is probably poorer than in any country in Europe because no sorts of birds seem to be protected and all day long in the hills you hear the boom of the black powder fowling pieces and in the evening see the hunters coming into town with their game bags full of thrushes, robins, warblers, finches, woodpeckers and only an occasional game bird. Next day in the marketplace you can see long lines of song birds of every sort hung up for sale. Even sparrows are sold.

To get a license to shoot in Italy you must have a certificate that you have never been in jail signed by the chief of police and the mayor of your home town. This gave me some difficulty when I first applied for a shooting license. In the Abruzzi, the wild, mountainous part of Italy lying up in the country from Naples, there are still bears. There are wolves too, in the wild wastes of the Campagna, within thirty miles of Rome. It is a safe statement that there will be wolves in Italy long after they are exterminated in Ontario. For the Roman wolves have existed since long before the Christian religion first came to Rome while less than five hundred years ago the American continent was undiscovered.

Belgium is good shooting country and the Ardennes forest is one of the greatest wild boar hunting parts of Europe.

In the Pyrenees, in the south of France and north of Spain, there is perhaps the wildest country of western Europe. Every year hunters kill dozens of bears in the Pyrenees mountain fastnesses.

What is the reason for the continued existence of game in good numbers in the most highly civilized and well-settled countries of the world while in many of the United States, like Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, game is being rapidly exterminated? It is careful protection, rigidly enforced closed seasons, and the fact of government owned forests, which are really farmed for timber rather than cut over and denuded of trees. Indiana was once a timber country. So was the lower peninsula of Michigan. Today there is hardly a patch of virgin timber in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Michigan deer hunters are already going north into Ontario. Ontario’s supply of game seems inexhaustible. But wait until the steady hunting, the destruction of the timber and the forest fires have kept up for fifty years. See the result that has been obtained in the States by the motor car that allows a party to hunt over a hundred miles where they used to be able to hunt over five. The prairie chicken, one of the finest of game birds, has been practically wiped out. Quail have been practically exterminated in many states. The curlew has gone. The wild turkey has gone.

But France will always be a game country. For there are forests in France that were there in Caesar’s time. More important still, there are new forests in France that were not there in Napoleon’s time. Even more important, there will be new forests, a hundred years from now, where today M. Poincare has looked on only scarred hillsides. And all the forest will be full of game.

The Frenchman likes to hunt. If the game falls off he wants to know the reason why.

CAMPING OUT

Thousands of people will go into the bush this summer to cut the high cost of living. A man who gets his two weeks’ salary while he is on vacation should be able to put those two weeks in fishing and camping and be able to save one week’s salary clear. He ought to be able to sleep comfortably every night, to eat well every day and to return to the city rested and in good condition.

But if he goes into the woods with a frying pan, an ignorance of black flies and mosquitoes, and a great and abiding lack of knowledge about cookery the chances are that his return will be very different. He will come back with enough mosquito bites to make the back of his neck look like a relief map of the Caucasus. His digestion will be wrecked after a valiant battle to assimilate half-cooked or charred grub. And he won’t have had a decent night’s sleep while he has been gone.

He will solemnly raise his right hand and inform you that he has joined the grand army of never-agains. The call of the wild may be all right, but it’s a dog’s life. He’s heard the call of the tame with both ears. Waiter, bring him an order of milk toast.

In the first place he overlooked the insects. Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, gnats and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren’t for them everybody would live in the bush and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.

But there are lots of dopes that will counteract the pests. The simplest perhaps is oil of citronella. Two bits’ worth of this purchased at any pharmacist’s will be enough to last for two weeks in the worst fly and mosquito-ridden country.

Rub a little on the back of your neck, your forehead and your wrists before you start fishing, and the blacks and skeeters will shun you. The odor of citronella is not offensive to people. It smells like gun oil. But the bugs do hate it.

Oil of pennyroyal and eucalyptol are also much hated by mosquitoes, and with citronella they form the basis for many proprietary preparations. But it is cheaper and better to buy the straight citronella. Put a little on the mosquito netting that covers the front of your pup tent or canoe tent at night, and you won’t be bothered.

To be really rested and get any benefit out of a vacation a man must get a good night’s sleep every night. The first requisite for this is to have plenty of cover. It is twice as cold as you expect it will be in the bush four nights out of five, and a good plan is to take just double the bedding that you think you will need. An old quilt that you can wrap up in is as warm as two blankets.

Nearly all outdoor writers rhapsodize over the browse bed. It is all right for the man who knows how to make one and has plenty of time. But in a succession of one-night camps on a canoe trip all you need is level ground for your tent floor and you will sleep all right if you have plenty of covers under you. Take twice as much cover as you think that you will need, and then put two-thirds of it under you. You will sleep warm and get your rest.

When it is clear weather you don’t need to pitch your tent if you are only stopping for the night. Drive four stakes at the head of your made-up bed and drape your mosquito bar over that, then you can sleep like a log and laugh at the mosquitoes.

Outside of insects and burn sleeping the rock that wrecks most camping trips is cooking. The average tyro’s idea of cooking is to fry everything and fry it good and plenty. Now, a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.

A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.

The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.

The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in com meal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.

The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout.

With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.

While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done — but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.

The stew kettle will cook you dried apricots when they have resumed their predried plumpness after a night of soaking, it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.

In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.

All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.

Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.

Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.

Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out and if your pals are Frenchmen they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.

It is all right to talk about roughing it in the woods. But the real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush.

SKEETER DOPE

He is one of the few wild animals that are not afraid of man. He scents him afar off and with a zooming cry attacks him and sucks his blood. He has driven men to madness and made whole sections of a continent uninhabitable. No, he is not the vampire bat, he is the mosquito.

This yam is for the city dweller who can’t get away for a vacation this summer. When he finishes it he will chortle with glee, think sadly of the poor people who have gone up into the bush, and stride off to a movie with his heart full of love for Toronto. There are very few mosquitoes in Toronto.

We were up in the bush. Our camp was so far out in the tall and unsevered that there wasn’t even an echo. An echo would die of lonesomeness out there.

The first night was perfect. There was a wind from the north and it was cold and we slept like logs. There wasn’t a mosquito around.

But the next night at dusk a warm south wind brought them up from the cedar swamp in clouds. If you have never seen a cloud of mosquitoes you cannot appreciate it. It is just like a cloud of dust. Only it is mosquitoes.

We retired into our tent and dropped the mosquito netting over the front. Pretty soon a mosquito bit me on the nose. I killed him and another took his place. Ted lit a candle and started to hunt down all the mosquitoes in the tent. We cleared the tent of them and lay down to sleep and then came that familiar zoom and another proboscis was inserted into my face.

The mosquitoes were coming through the netting as though it were the bars of a cage. By smearing ourselves with citronella oil we managed to get some sleep. About as much sleep as a man gets with a few thousand buzzing, biting, ungentlemanly insects settling down on his face as soon as it comes out of the blankets and satisfying their hunger by pushing their bills into his countenance.

The next night I came in soaked and tired from a day’s fly fishing and as I emptied my creel I noted a hunted look on Ted’s face.

“I lost the skeeter dope,” he said.

“You what?” said I, paralyzed.

“I was trying to get the cork out and it stuck and I pushed it in and then I set the bottle down and it spilled.”

Then I knew how Napoleon felt on St. Helena and what Caesar’s feelings were when he observed Brutus sticking his jackknife in him, and how the “only one grain of corn, mother” bird felt when he found that there wasn’t any corn.

We were out for two weeks. We were twenty-six miles from the nearest town. Our mosquito netting had meshes that would permit a mosquito to be as active as a Sinn Feiner, and Ted lost the mosquito dope.

Just then a warm breeze commenced to blow from the south across the cedar swamp up toward the high ground of our camp and a keen observer could have seen what looked like a cloud of dust coming up from the swamp. Then I began to appreciate mosquitoes.

We built two smudges and sat between them. The mosquitoes stuck around and every once in a while made a dash through the smoke.

Then we built four smudges and sat inside of them. The mosquitoes came in through the cracks in the smoke. We began to feel like smoked hams. I suggested as much to Ted.

“We are,” he said.

Then I started to cheer him up.

“Suppose,” said I, “that mosquitoes were as big as crows? What chance would we have then?” He said nothing.

“Suppose they ate fish? There wouldn’t be a fish in the stream.” He didn’t reply.

“We’ve got a lot to be thankful for,” I said.

“Oh, shut up!” he said in a very unmannerly way.

We stuck it for two weeks but sometimes we were pretty desperate.

Ted suggested that after we had eaten my cooking for a long, enough time we would be poisonous to a mosquito.

I retorted that he was probably poisonous to them anyway.

He suggested I had bought that mosquito netting.

I asked who lost the skeeter dope?

He threw a flapjack at me.

Finally, after a few days it commenced to blow from the north, and we didn’t see another mosquito.

Ted remarked that I was a fine cook.

I said that he certainly cast a wicked fly.

The moral is that we should have had cheesecloth instead of the kind of mosquito netting they are selling this year. And you need two bottles of dope. Better make it three.

ALPINE AVALANCHES

Far below in the valley town Andre heard the great roar.

It came in a loud crack and then a terrible roar like the end of the world.

“Up your way, Andre,” said the postmaster sagely.

Two men standing in the postoffice looked at Andre queerly.

“I would not live up there for all the money in the canton,” one man said.

The postmaster laughed.

“There is no one fears the mountains like the mountaineer.”

He handed Andre his pile of papers and weighed out two pounds of sauerkraut from the barrel, “I hope you will find everything well, Andre.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Andre said, and slinging his rucksack on his back opened the door out into the bright Alpine sunshine.

Towing his skis behind him on a cord about his waist, Andre started in his bent-kneed, mountaineer’s stride up the steep, icy road that wound up the valley. He was very worried. He knew what that roar meant. It was an avalanche.

In the spring the avalanches fall with a certain regularity. They have their established paths. You see these paths in the summer, bare swaths cut through the forests on a steep hillside. Many of the spring avalanches fall the same dates almost each year. Nearly all of the big ones have familiar names — nicknames given to them because of that familiarity that brings contempt.

But winter avalanches have no nicknames. They come suddenly and terribly, and they bring death.

So Andre trudged up the road until it swung off in a direction that did him no good. Then he stamped into his skis, shot down the clamps and thrust along up the valley, holding just that upward grade he could make comfortably without slipping back.

For miles he went steadily up in the tireless, thrusting climb that makes the ski for the mountaineers what the canoe is to the Indian or the snowshoe to the trapper of the barren lands of the north. Suddenly he came around a bend in the valley onto the work of the avalanche he had heard in the town. He thanked God that he had not yet married Helza in the village.

The valley was wiped out. Instead there was the most snow Andre had ever seen in his life. It rose sheer ahead of him, two hundred feet high. A gigantic rubble of snow, like the crest of a flood, towering, frozen, immovable. Trunks of trees projected from it.

On the right the side of the mountain was bare. There had been the sharp slipping crack and all the snow had roared away from the side of the mountain, with the same instantaneous rush that snow sliding off the roof has, to pour down into the valley its weight of thousands of tons, turning over and over and finally piling up and up into this mass.

Andre looked up at it from below and felt very small. Where was his house, he wondered. It had been directly in the path of the ‘vlanche. His heart was heavy. It would be a long time now before he could marry.

He started to climb up the left side of the valley. This was a great avalanche. It had wiped him out completely. He might as well have a look at it.

Up he zigzagged until he was level with the height of the avalanche. Then he saw something. About a hundred yards above him, on the opposite side of the valley from where he had left it was his house! It looked a little tipsy, it is true. But it was right side up. There it was. No mistake.

Andre was frightened. He did not know whether to start down the valley in a long rush to the town or to go down on his knees. He compromised. He crossed himself and started for the house. There it was. All right. Everything inside. Just a little crockery broken.

“It was evidently a sign to me,” thought Andre, “that this side of the valley is better. In the spring I will dig new foundations here. But I wish the Bon Dieu had also removed my bam in safety.”

What had happened was the great wind from the falling avalanche had lifted the house on it as though the rush of air were a solid thing and deposited it on the far side of the valley three hundred yards away.

Avalanches seldom do good deeds like that. I have seen an iron bridge, weighing I do not know how many tons, that had been lifted 200 feet up the side of an Alpine valley by the rush of wind from a great, falling snow-slide. Again I have seen a swath of forest that had been scoured bare, the tree trunks cut off at the base as though they were matchsticks.

Kipling wished the name of “Our Lady of the Snows” on to Canada and Canadians have been stepping out from under it ever since. There is plenty of snow in Canada. Or rather there has been until this winter. But east of the Rockies there are no avalanches.

Other countries regard snow as a blessing, not as a libel. In the mountains it makes it possible to skid the timber down. It makes hard, smooth roads, it makes it possible to bring the mountain meadow hay, cut and cured in the summertime, down on big sledges with turned up runners that the sledgeman runs between and leans against to make the hay sled turn to left or right.

Finally snow brings tourists. It brings them by the hundreds of thousands. So while Canada indignantly denies that she is “The Lady of the Snows” we have the spectacle of five different countries in Europe all loudly clamoring that they have the most and the deepest snow in the civilized world. They spend thousands of dollars advertising their snowy claims, too. But none of them ever mention avalanches.

Avalanches are the skeleton in the winter sports’ closet. They cause ninety per cent of the deaths in mountain skiing. If you have ever sat in the house and heard the sharp, rattling roar as a big chunk of snow slides off the roof you know how quick an avalanche starts. They go off like a steel trap.

Skiers used to be advised, if they got into an avalanche, to try and turn and run directly down the slope and get ahead of it. That advice was written by some fireside hint compiler.

You might exactly as well try to outrun a burst from a Lewis gun fired directly at your back as try to ski ahead of an avalanche. There is only one thing to do. Swim in it as though you were in the water and try and keep your head from being buried. If you can kick off your skis you will have a better chance of staying up. The whirling snow will seize on your skis and drag you under by them.

If the avalanche is from the side of a hill and spreads out into a flat valley you have a good chance of coming through all right. But if it goes down into a steep gulch or steep valley it will pile up and the unlucky skier who is caught is smothered if he is not crushed.

Although winter avalanches are much more tricky and difficult to figure than those that fall in the spring in the mountains the person who is caught in one has a much better chance of surviving. For new-fallen winter, powder snow weighs only about 150 pounds a cubic yard while old, wet, spring snow weighs about three quarters of a ton per cubic yard.

Powder snow too is full of air. You can live for some time without suffocating if overwhelmed by a winter avalanche. But the heavy, wet, spring snow contains almost no air. All its weight is water, and if you are not crushed you are very liable to be drowned.

Plenty of skiers have escaped unhurt although carried down hundreds of feet by an avalanche if they have been able to keep on the surface and if the snow has spread out onto a gradual slope. But last winter a young man was killed not far from where we were skiing by an avalanche which carried him only about fifty feet. In that rush, though, it took him over a precipice.

Your first avalanche is a terrifying thing. It is the deadly suddenness of it that puts you out. You may be skiing down a slope running parallel with the mountainside when there is a C-R-A-C-K! The side of the mountain seems to drop sideways out from under you, the snow piles up in a rushing flood of sliding cakes and over and over you go.

That is a “wind-board” avalanche. Wind-board is treacherous stuff to ski on. It is a hard layer of snow that lies precariously on the main field. It has been hardened by the wind and often lies over pockets or bubbles that make patches that only need to be cut by the running blade of the ski to start avalanching.

It is not, of course, as dangerous as the great “ground avalanches,” such as played the trick on Andre’s house. But you cannot tell what it may carry you over if you are skiing in difficult country. It may be fatal to be carried twenty-five feet by a little windslab snow slide in the high Alps where on some of the long steep slopes of the Dolomites you might be able to survive a half-mile avalanche ride.

One day last January, after a championship bob race on the Sonloup les Avants course in which we had smashed our bob and lost the race through hitting a rut just at the final ice turn before the home stretch, when everybody felt sore and disappointed, and our one desire was to avoid commiserations and “better-lucks-next-times,” Young George O’Neil and I started off for the Dent de Jaman on skis.

Before you get to where skiing is possible you have to hike, toting or towing your skis, up one of the stiffest, straight up and down, heart-breaking stretches of road in the world. We got up into the open country above the shoulder of the mountain, crossed several avalanches, having a hard time picking our way over the huge snowfalls, and then reached the long snow fields of the col, or saddle, of the mountain. By the time we were up under the edge of the Dent, a blunt, granite tooth like a miniature Matterhorn, it was dark and we had to run down in the dark.

The open fields were all right. But once we got onto the descending road we made a beautiful mess of things. In the dark on the icy road we fell about every twenty yards. We fell hard and handsome. We fell into trees, each other, over the bank, on our faces, on our backs and in several new styles.

Ultimately George’s ski came off in a fall and shot over the edge and down into a steep gulch below. He saw it strike on the roof of a cabin below in the faint moon that was now up and skid on off and down. We made the rest of the trip down on foot.

Next morning George was laid up and I started up the trail alone in a blinding snowstorm. I mushed on as fast as I could make it up hill for the only chance of getting the ski lay in reaching the hut where it had hit in falling and see the direction the mark had made. Hadley and Isabelle Simmons were following me up with a lunch.

As I reached the edge of the road where the ski had gone over, the snow turned to rain. Now the only reason more people do not get killed skiing is because the dangerous avalanches all fall during rain — and anybody that has any sense doesn’t go out in the rain.

There was a faint crease in the high piled snow on the roof of the hut about 200 feet down the steep side. I knew it must be the snowed-in mark made by the ski. So I sighted along it and figured the ski would light below and run straight on down until it hit a clump of willows that stuck up out of the bed of a mountain torrent that ran under the snow about a half a mile below.

Straight up above the road was a regular avalanche funnel of a valley. A narrow funnel of a valley rising almost straight up from the road to Cap au Moine. Furthermore I had heard that avalanche come down the year before. We had crossed it later and it had spread out right into this same mountain torrent’s bed.

It looked like a bad bet. But after thinking it over I decided it was probably safe enough if I took off my skis and wallowed down. Any slope over 25 degrees will avalanche. But chamois tracks will sometimes cut across a slope of 40 or 50 degrees. Their legs sink instead of setting the snow loose as a pair of skis do.

There is nothing chamoislike about size eleven skiing boots but the principle seemed the same. So I went down into the bed of the stream and there, sure enough, was the ski stuck in the bushes.

It was only about a half a mile climb up, but it seemed like a hundred years wallowing up through the wet snow, arm-pit deep. What made it seem so long was that wonderful super-avalanche trap all ready to spring, hanging straight up above as far as you could see. All the way up I kept thinking that the ski was only worth about fifteen francs anyway.

The girls were at the top, on the safe side of the road, soaked to the skin by the warm rain. We went into a hay barn built into the side of the mountain out of the avalanche track and put on dry sweaters out of the rucksacks and brought out the thermos bottle and the sandwiches.

While we sat in the dark hut, leaning back against the hay packed solid up to the roof and watching the rain through the open door fourteen avalanches came down. I counted them. No one else had such a personal interest in them as I had. But we were all very glad to get home. It was the warm rain’s doing. The mountaineers call the warm wind-rain foehn. It sometimes comes in the midst of the coldest winter weather. It comes from nowhere and it goes back to the same place. Sometimes it lasts for days. Other times for only an hour or so. But it always brings avalanches and it can be death to be out in.

After you have lived a long time in the mountains you see the mountain dwellers’ standpoint. I remember once in the spring we were crossing the St. Bernard pass before it was open. In Bourg St. Pierre we wandered around the little town halfway up the pass while Hadley had a nap in the inn. Bourg is just below the snow line. There was a little cemetery with many graves. On most of the graves was this inscription. “Victim of the Mountain.”

“That’s odd,” said Chink. “Victim of the mountain. Sounds as though the mountain were a person.”

“How is it, father?” I asked the priest. “Victim of the mountain?”

“He is the great enemy of the mountain-dwelling people,” answered the priest, looking down into the gorge the river cut below us. “It is different from the sea. The mountain does not help the mountain man. He is not his livelihood.”

“It is very strange, father,” Chink said.

“Yes, it is very strange,” the priest said. “When one is young one goes always into the high mountains. These are all young men.” He pointed at the crosses. “But when one is older one knows better.” He smiled. “It is better to avoid an enemy such as the mountain. Yet we can never leave him. Perhaps, in that too, he shows he is our enemy.”

A MOVEABLE FEAST

This memoir concerns Hemingway’s years as a young, struggling, expatriate journalist and writer in Paris in the 1920’s. The book describes his apprenticeship as a young writer while he was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

A Moveable Feast consists of various personal accounts, observations and stories. He provides specific addresses of apartments, bars, cafes, and hotels — many of which can still be found in Paris today. Among other notable literary figures, the memoir includes references to Sylvia Beach, Hilaire Belloc, Aleister Crowley, John Dos Passos, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Pascin, Ezra Pound, Evan Shipman, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Hermann von Wedderkop. Not published during Hemingway’s lifetime, A Moveable Feast was arranged from his manuscripts and notes by his fourth wife and widow Mary Hemingway in 1964, three years after the author’s death.

Hemingway with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and his son, John Nicanor Hemingway, in Schruns Austria, 1926

Hemingway and his fourth wife Mary Hemingway on safari in Kenya, c. 1954

CONTENTS

Preface

Note

A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel

Miss Stein Instructs

“Une Génération Perdue”

Shakespeare and Company

People of the Seine

A False Spring

The End of an Avocation

Hunger Was Good Discipline

Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple

Birth of a New School

With Pascin at the Dome

Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit

A Strange Enough Ending

The Man Who Was Marked for Death

Evan Shipman at the Lilas

An Agent of Evil

Scott Fitzgerald

Hawks Do Not Share

A Matter of Measurements

There Is Never Any End to Paris

The first edition

A Moveable Feast

If you are lucky enough to have lived

in Paris as a young man, then wherever you

go for the rest of your life, it stays with

you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

               ERNEST HEMINGWAY

               to a friend, 1950

Preface

For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more.

There is no mention of the Stade Anastasie where the boxers served as waiters at the tables set out under the trees and the ring was in the garden. Nor of training with Larry Gains, nor the great twenty-round fights at the Cirque d’Hiver. Nor of such good friends as Charlie Sweeney, Bill Bird and Mike Strater, nor of André Masson and Miro. There is no mention of our voyages to the Black Forest or of our one-day explorations of the forests that we loved around Paris. It would be fine if all these were in this book but we will have to do without them for now.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

Ernest Hemingway

San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

Note

Ernest started writing this book in Cuba in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter of 1958-59, took it with him to Spain when we went there in April, 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba, after having put it aside to write another book, The Dangerous Summer, about the violent rivalry between Antonio Ordonez and Luis Miguel Dominguin in the bull rings of Spain in 1959. He made some revisions of this book in the fall in 1960 in Ketchum. It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris.

M. H.

A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named apéritifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

The Café des Amateurs was the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard, that wonderful narrow crowded market street which led into the Place Contrescarpe. The squat toilets of the old apartment houses, one by the side of the stairs on each floor with the two cleated cement shoe-shaped elevations on each side of the aperture so a locataire would not slip, emptied into cesspools which were emptied by pumping into horse-drawn tank wagons at night. In the summer time, with all windows open, we would hear the pumping and the odor was very strong. The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings. No one emptied the Café des Amateurs though, and its yellowed poster stating the terms and penalties of the law against public drunkenness was as flyblown and disregarded as its clients were constant and ill-smelling.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife — second class — and the hotel where Verlaine had died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.

It was either six or eight flights up to the top floor and it was very cold and I knew how much it would cost for a bundle of small twigs, three wire-wrapped packets of short, half-pencil length pieces of split pine to catch fire from the twigs, and then the bundle of half-dried lengths of hard wood that I must buy to make a fire that would warm the room. So I went to the far side of the street to look up at the roof in the rain and see if any chimneys were going, and how the smoke blew. There was no smoke and I thought about how the chimney would be cold and might not draw and of the room possibly filling with smoke, and the fuel wasted, and the money gone with it, and I walked on in the rain. I walked down past the Lycée Henri Quatre and the ancient church of St.-Étienne-du-Mont and the windswept Place du Panthéon and cut in for shelter to the right and finally came out on the lee side of the Boulevard St.-Michel and worked on down it past the Cluny and the Boulevard St.-Germain until I came to a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.

I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

Now that the bad weather had come, we could leave Paris for a while for a place where this rain would be snow coming down through the pines and covering the road and the high hillsides and at an altitude where we would hear it creak as we walked home at night. Below Les Avants there was a chalet where the pension was wonderful and where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go. Traveling third class on the train was not expensive. The pension cost very little more than we spent in Paris.

I would give up the room in the hotel where I wrote and there was only the rent of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine which was nominal. I had written journalism for Toronto and the checks for that were due. I could write that anywhere under any circumstances and we had money to make the trip.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually. Anyway we would go if my wife wanted to, and I finished the oysters and the wine and paid my score in the café and made it the shortest way back up the Montaigne Ste. Geneviève through the rain, that was now only local weather and not something that changed your life, to the flat at the top of the hill.

“I think it would be wonderful, Tatie,” my wife said. She had a gently modeled face and her eyes and her smile lighted up at decisions as though they were rich presents. “When should we leave?”

“Whenever you want.”

“Oh, I want to right away. Didn’t you know?”

“Maybe it will be fine and clear when we come back. It can be very fine when it is clear and cold.”

“I’m sure it will be,” she said. “Weren’t you good to think of going, too.”

Miss Stein Instructs

When we came back to Paris it was clear and cold and lovely. The city had accommodated itself to winter, there was good wood for sale at the wood and coal place across our street, and there were braziers outside of many of the good cafés so that you could keep warm on the terraces. Our own apartment was warm and cheerful. We burned boulets which were molded, egg-shaped lumps of coal dust, on the wood fire, and on the streets the winter light was beautiful. Now you were accustomed to see the bare trees against the sky and you walked on the fresh-washed gravel paths through the Luxembourg gardens in the clear sharp wind. The trees were sculpture without their leaves when you were reconciled to them, and the winter winds blew across the surfaces of the ponds and the fountains blew in the bright light. All the distances were short now since we had been in the mountains.

Because of the change in altitude I did not notice the grade of the hills except with pleasure, and the climb up to the top floor of the hotel where I worked, in a room that looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter, was a pleasure. The fireplace drew well in the room and it was warm and pleasant to work. I brought mandarines and roasted chestnuts to the room in paper packets and peeled and ate the small tangerine-like oranges and threw their skins and spat their seeds in the fire when I ate them and roasted chestnuts when I was hungry. I was always hungry with the walking and the cold and the working. Up in the room I had a bottle of kirsch that we had brought back from the mountains and I took a drink of kirsch when I would get toward the end of a story or toward the end of the day’s work. When I was through working for the day I put away the notebook, or the paper, in the drawer of the table and put any mandarines that were left in my pocket. They would freeze if they were left in the room at night.

It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris.

If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. But if the light was gone in the Luxembourg I would walk up through the gardens and stop in at the studio apartment where Gertrude Stein lived at 27 rue de Fleurus.

My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries. These were fragrant, colorless alcohols served from cut-glass carafes in small glasses and whether they were quetsche, mirabelle or framboise they all tasted like the fruits they came from, converted into a controlled fire on your tongue that warmed you and loosened it.

Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.

Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married — time would fix that — and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.

When they came to our flat they seemed to like us even more; but perhaps that was because the place was so small and we were much closer together. Miss Stein sat on the bed that was on the floor and asked to see the stories I had written and she said that she liked them except one called “Up in Michigan.”

“It’s good,” she said. “That’s not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.”

“But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make the story come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.”

“But you don’t get the point at all,” she said. “You mustn’t write anything that is inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It’s wrong and it’s silly.”

She herself wanted to be published in the Atlantic Monthly, she told me, and she would be. She told me that I was not a good enough writer to be published there or in The Saturday Evening Post but that I might be some new sort of writer in my own way but the first thing to remember was not to write stories that were inaccrochable. I did not argue about this nor try to explain again what I was trying to do about conversation. That was my own business and it was much more interesting to listen. That afternoon she told us, too, how to buy pictures.

“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures,” she said. “It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”

“But even if I never bought any more clothing ever,” I said, “I wouldn’t have enough money to buy the Picassos that I want.”

“No. He’s out of your range. You have to buy the people of your own age — of your own military service group. You’ll know them. You’ll meet them around the quarter. There are always good new serious painters. But it’s not you buying clothes so much. It’s your wife always. It’s women’s clothes that are expensive.”

I saw my wife trying not to look at the strange, steerage clothes that Miss Stein wore and she was successful. When they left we were still popular, I thought, and we were asked to come again to 27 rue de Fleurus.

It was later on that I was asked to come to the studio any time after five in the winter time. I had met Miss Stein in the Luxembourg. I cannot remember whether she was walking her dog or not, nor whether she had a dog then. I know that I was walking myself, since we could not afford a dog nor even a cat then, and the only cats I knew were in the cafés or small restaurants or the great cats that I admired in concierges’ windows. Later I often met Miss Stein with her dog in the Luxembourg gardens; but I think this time was before she had one.

But I accepted her invitation, dog or no dog, and had taken to stopping in at the studio, and she always gave me the natural eau-de-vie, insisting on my refilling my glass, and I looked at the pictures and we talked. The pictures were exciting and the talk was very good. She talked, mostly, and she told me about modern pictures and about painters — more about them as people than as painters — and she talked about her work. She showed me the many volumes of manuscript that she had written and that her companion typed each day. Writing every day made her happy, but as I got to know her better I found that for her to keep happy it was necessary that this steady daily output, which varied with her energy, be published and that she receive recognition.

This had not become an acute situation when I first knew her, since she had published three stories that were intelligible to anyone. One of these stories, “Melanctha,” was very good and good samples of her experimental writing had been published in book form and had been well praised by critics who had met her or known her. She had such a personality that when she wished to win anyone over to her side she would not be resisted, and critics who met her and saw her pictures took on trust writing of hers that they could not understand because of their enthusiasm for her as a person, and because of their confidence in her judgment. She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable and she talked well about them.

But she disliked the drudgery of revision and the obligation to make her writing intelligible, although she needed to have publication and official acceptance, especially for the unbelievably long book called The Making of Americans.

This book began magnificently, went on very well for a long way with great stretches of great brilliance and then went on endlessly in repetitions that a more conscientious and less lazy writer would have put in the waste basket. I came to know it very well as I got — forced, perhaps would be the word — Ford Madox Ford to publish it in The Transatlantic Review serially, knowing that it would outrun the life of the review. For publication in the review I had to read all of Miss Stein’s proof for her as this was a work which gave her no happiness.

On this cold afternoon when I had come past the concierge’s lodge and the cold courtyard to the warmth of the studio, all that was years ahead. On this day Miss Stein was instructing me about sex. By that time we liked each other very much and I had already learned that everything I did not understand probably had something to it. Miss Stein thought that I was too uneducated about sex and I must admit that I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women. I knew many inaccrochable terms and phrases from Kansas City days and the mores of different parts of that city, Chicago and the lake boats. Under questioning I tried to tell Miss Stein that when you were a boy and moved in the company of men, you had to be prepared to kill a man, know how to do it and really know that you would do it in order not to be interfered with. That term was accrochable. If you knew you would kill, other people sensed it very quickly and you were let alone; but there were certain situations you could not allow yourself to be forced into or trapped into. I could have expressed myself more vividly by using an inaccrochable phrase that wolves used on the lake boats, “Oh gash may be fine but one eye for mine.” But I was always careful of my language with Miss Stein even when true phrases might have clarified or better expressed a prejudice.

“Yes, yes, Hemingway,” she said. “But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.”

I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated.

“But what about the old man with beautiful manners and a great name who came to the hospital in Italy and brought me a bottle of Marsala or Campari and behaved perfectly, and then one day I would have to tell the nurse never to let that man into the room again?” I asked.

“Those people are sick and cannot help themselves and you should pity them.”

“Should I pity so and so?” I asked. I gave his name but he delights so in giving it himself that I feel there is no need to give it for him.

“No. He’s vicious. He’s a corrupter and he’s truly vicious.”

“But he’s supposed to be a good writer.”

“He’s not,” she said. “He’s just a showman and he corrupts for the pleasure of corruption and he leads people into other vicious practices as well. Drugs, for example.”

“And in Milan the man I’m to pity was not trying to corrupt me?”

“Don’t be silly. How could he hope to corrupt you? Do you corrupt a boy like you, who drinks alcohol, with a bottle of Marsala? No, he was a pitiful old man who could not help what he was doing. He was sick and he could not help it and you should pity him.”

“I did at the time,” I said. “But I was disappointed because he had such beautiful manners.”

I took another sip of the eau-de-vie and pitied the old man and looked at Picasso’s nude of the girl with the basket of flowers. I had not started the conversation and thought it had become a little dangerous. There were almost never any pauses in a conversation with Miss Stein, but we had paused and there was something she wanted to tell me and I filled my glass.

“You know nothing about any of this really, Hemingway,” she said. “You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy.”

“I see.”

“In women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and they can lead happy lives together.”

“I see,” I said. “But what about so and so?”

“She’s vicious,” Miss Stein said. “She’s truly vicious, so she can never be happy except with new people. She corrupts people.”

“I understand.”

“You’re sure you understand?”

There were so many things to understand in those days and I was glad when we talked about something else. The park was closed so I had to walk down along it to the rue de Vaugirard and around the lower end of the park. It was sad when the park was closed and locked and I was sad walking around it instead of through it and in a hurry to get home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The day had started out so brightly too. I would have to work hard tomorrow. Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now. Then all I had to be cured of, I decided Miss Stein felt, was youth and loving my wife. I was not at all sad when I got home to the rue Cardinal Lemoine and told my newly acquired knowledge to my wife. In the night we were happy with our own knowledge we already had and other new knowledge we had acquired in the mountains.

“Une Génération Perdue”

It was easy to get into the habit of stopping in at 27 rue de Fleurus late in the afternoon for the warmth and the great pictures and the conversation. Often Miss Stein would have no guests and she was always very friendly and for a long time she was affectionate. When I had come back from trips that I had made to the different political conferences or to the Near East or Germany for the Canadian paper and the news services that I worked for she wanted me to tell her about all the amusing details. There were funny parts always and she liked them and also what the Germans call gallows-humor stories. She wanted to know the gay part of how the world was going; never the real, never the bad.

I was young and not gloomy and there were always strange and comic things that happened in the worst time and Miss Stein liked to hear these. The other things I did not talk of and wrote by myself.

When I had not come back from any trips and would stop in at the rue de Fleurus after working I would try sometimes to get Miss Stein to talk about books. When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

To keep my mind off writing sometimes after I had worked I would read writers who were writing then, such as Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence or any who had books published that I could get from Sylvia Beach’s library or find along the quais.

“Huxley is a dead man,” Miss Stein said. “Why do you want to read a dead man? Can’t you see he is dead?”

I could not see, then, that he was a dead man and I said that his books amused me and kept me from thinking.

“You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.”

“I’ve been reading truly good books all winter and all last winter and I’ll read them next winter, and I don’t like frankly bad books.”

“Why do you read this trash? It is inflated trash, Hemingway. By a dead man.”

“I like to see what they are writing,” I said. “And it keeps my mind off me doing it.”

“Who else do you read now?”

“D. H. Lawrence,” I said. “He wrote some very good short stories, one called ‘The Prussian Officer.’ ”

“I tried to read his novels. He’s impossible. He’s pathetic and preposterous. He writes like a sick man.”

“I liked Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock,” I said. “Maybe that not so well. I couldn’t read Women in Love.”

“If you don’t want to read what is bad, and want to read something that will hold your interest and is marvelous in its own way, you should read Marie Belloc Lowndes.”

I had never heard of her, and Miss Stein loaned me The Lodger, that marvelous story of Jack the Ripper and another book about murder at a place outside Paris that could only be Enghien les Bains. They were both splendid after-work books, the people credible and the action and the terror never false. They were perfect for reading after you had worked and I read all the Mrs. Belloc Lowndes that there was. But there was only so much and none as good as the first two and I never found anything as good for that empty time of day or night until the first fine Simenon books came out.

I think Miss Stein would have liked the good Simenons — the first one I read was either L’Ecluse Numéro 1, or La Maison du Canal — but I am not sure because when I knew Miss Stein she did not like to read French although she loved to speak it. Janet Flanner gave me the first two Simenons I ever read. She loved to read French and she had read Simenon when he was a crime reporter.

In the three or four years that we were good friends I cannot remember Gertrude Stein ever speaking well of any writer who had not written favorably about her work or done something to advance her career except for Ronald Firbank and, later, Scott Fitzgerald. When I first met her she did not speak of Sherwood Anderson as a writer but spoke glowingly of him as a man and of his great, beautiful, warm Italian eyes and of his kindness and his charm. I did not care about his great beautiful warm Italian eyes but I liked some of his short stories very much. They were simply written and sometimes beautifully written and he knew the people he was writing about and cared deeply for them. Miss Stein did not want to talk about his stories but always about him as a person.

“What about his novels?” I asked her. She did not want to talk about Anderson’s works any more than she would talk about Joyce. If you brought up Joyce twice, you would not be invited back. It was like mentioning one general favorably to another general. You learned not to do it the first time you made the mistake. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.

Anderson’s stories were too good to make happy conversation. I was prepared to tell Miss Stein how strangely poor his novels were, but this would have been bad too because it was criticizing one of her most loyal supporters. When he wrote a novel finally called Dark Laughter, so terribly bad, silly and affected that I could not keep from criticizing it in a parody, Miss Stein was very angry. I had attacked someone that was a part of her apparatus. But for a long time before that she was not angry. She, herself, began to praise Sherwood lavishly after he had cracked up as a writer.

She was angry at Ezra Pound because he had sat down too quickly on a small, fragile and, doubtless, uncomfortable chair, that it is quite possible he had been given on purpose, and had either cracked or broken it. That he was a great poet and a gentle and generous man and could have accommodated himself in a normal-size chair was not considered. The reasons for her dislike of Ezra, skillfully and maliciously put, were invented years later.

It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, “You are all a génération perdue.”

“That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,” Miss Stein said. “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

“Really?” I said.

“You are,” she insisted. “You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death....”

“Was the young mechanic drunk?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

“Have you ever seen me drunk?”

“No. But your friends are drunk.”

“I’ve been drunk,” I said. “But I don’t come here drunk.”

“Of course not. I didn’t say that.”

“The boy’s patron was probably drunk by eleven o’clock in the morning,” I said. “That’s why he makes such lovely phrases.”

“Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,” Miss Stein said. “It does no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.”

Later when I wrote my first novel I tried to balance Miss Stein’s quotation from the garage keeper with one from Ecclesiastes. But that night walking home I thought about the boy in the garage and if he had ever been hauled in one of those vehicles when they were converted to ambulances. I remembered how they used to burn out their brakes going down the mountain roads with a full load of wounded and braking in low and finally using the reverse, and how the last ones were driven over the mountainside empty, so they could be replaced by big Fiats with a good H-shift and metal-to-metal brakes. I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought who is calling who a lost generation? Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he’d made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill. But sitting there with the beer, watching the statue and remembering how many days Ney had fought, personally, with the rear-guard on the retreat from Moscow that Napoleon had ridden away from in the coach with Caulaincourt, I thought of what a warm and affectionate friend Miss Stein had been and how beautifully she had spoken of Apollinaire and of his death on the day of the Armistice in 1918 with the crowd shouting “à bas Guillaume” and Apollinaire, in his delirium, thinking they were crying against him, and I thought, I will do my best to serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she had done as long as I can, so help me God and Mike Ney. But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels. When I got home and into the courtyard and upstairs and saw my wife and my son and his cat, F. Puss, all of them happy and a fire in the fireplace, I said to my wife, “You know, Gertrude is nice, anyway.”

“Of course, Tatie.”

“But she does talk a lot of rot sometimes.”

“I never hear her,” my wife said. “I’m a wife. It’s her friend that talks to me.” * * * * *

Shakespeare and Company

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odéon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears and at the line of the collar of the brown velvet jacket she wore. She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.

I was very shy when I first went into the bookshop and I did not have enough money on me to join the rental library. She told me I could pay the deposit any time I had the money and made me out a card and said I could take as many books as I wished.

There was no reason for her to trust me. She did not know me and the address I had given her, 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine, could not have been a poorer one. But she was delightful and charming and welcoming and behind her, as high as the wall and stretching out into the back room which gave onto the inner court of the building, were shelves and shelves of the wealth of the library.

I started with Turgenev and took the two volumes of A Sportsman’s Sketches and an early book of D. H. Lawrence, I think it was Sons and Lovers, and Sylvia told me to take more books if I wanted. I chose the Constance Garnett edition of War and Peace, and The Gambler and Other Stories by Dostoyevsky.

“You won’t be back very soon if you read all that,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll be back to pay,” I said. “I have some money in the flat.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said. “You pay whenever it’s convenient.”

“When does Joyce come in?” I asked.

“If he comes in, it’s usually very late in the afternoon,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen him?”

“We’ve seen him at Michaud’s eating with his family,” I said. “But it’s not polite to look at people when they are eating, and Michaud’s is expensive.”

“Do you eat at home?”

“Mostly now,” I said. “We have a good cook.”

“There aren’t any restaurants in your immediate quarter, are there?”

“No. How did you know?”

“Larbaud lived there,” she said. “He liked it very much except for that.”

“The nearest good cheap place to eat is over by the Panthéon.”

“I don’t know that quarter. We eat at home. You and your wife must come sometime.”

“Wait until you see if I pay you,” I said. “But thank you very much.”

“Don’t read too fast,” she said.

Home in the rue Cardinal Lemoine was a two-room flat that had no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container, not uncomfortable to anyone who was used to a Michigan outhouse. With a fine view and a good mattress and springs for a comfortable bed on the floor, and pictures we liked on the walls, it was a cheerful, gay flat. When I got there with the books I told my wife about the wonderful place I had found.

“But Tatie, you must go by this afternoon and pay,” she said.

“Sure I will,” I said. “We’ll both go. And then we’ll walk down by the river and along the quais.”

“Let’s walk down the rue de Seine and look in all the galleries and in the windows of the shops.”

“Sure. We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink.”

“We can have two drinks.”

“Then we can eat somewhere.”

“No. Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”

“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of the Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”

“And we’ll never love anyone else but each other.”

“No. Never.”

“What a lovely afternoon and evening. Now we’d better have lunch.”

“I’m very hungry,” I said. “I worked at the café on a café crème.”

“How did it go, Tatie?”

“I think all right. I hope so. What do we have for lunch?”

“Little radishes, and good foie de veau with mashed potatoes and an endive salad. Apple tart.”

“And we’re going to have all the books in the world to read and when we go on trips we can take them.”

“Would that be honest?”

“Sure.”

“Does she have Henry James too?”

“Sure.”

“My,” she said. “We’re lucky that you found the place.”

“We’re always lucky,” I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.

People of the Seine

There were many ways of walking down to the river from the top of the rue Cardinal Lemoine. The shortest one was straight down the street but it was steep and it brought you out, after you hit the flat part and crossed the busy traffic of the beginning of the Boulevard St.-Germain, onto a dull part where there was a bleak, windy stretch of river bank with the Halle aux Vins on your right. This was not like any other Paris market but was a sort of bonded warehouse where wine was stored against the payment of taxes and was as cheerless from the outside as a military depot or a prison camp.

Across the branch of the Seine was the Île St.-Louis with the narrow streets and the old, tall, beautiful houses, and you could go over there or you could turn left and walk along the quais with the length of the Île St.-Louis and then Notre-Dame and Île de la Cité opposite as you walked.

In the bookstalls along the quais you could sometimes find American books that had just been published for sale very cheap. The Tour D’Argent restaurant had a few rooms above the restaurant that they rented in those days, giving the people who lived there a discount in the restaurant, and if the people who lived there left any books behind there was a bookstall not far along the quai where the valet de chambre sold them and you could buy them from the proprietress for a very few francs. She had no confidence in books written in English, paid almost nothing for them, and sold them for a small and quick profit.

“Are they any good?” she asked me after we had become friends.

“Sometimes one is.”

“How can anyone tell?”

“I can tell when I read them.”

“But still it is a form of gambling. And how many people can read English?”

“Save them for me and let me look them over.”

“No. I can’t save them. You don’t pass regularly. You stay away too long at a time. I have to sell them as soon as I can. No one can tell if they are worthless. If they turn out to be worthless, I would never sell them.”

“How do you tell a valuable French book?”

“First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.”

After that bookstall near the Tour D’Argent there were no others that sold American and English books until the quai des Grands Augustins. There were several from there on to beyond the quai Voltaire that sold books they bought from employees of the left bank hotels and especially the Hotel Voltaire which had a wealthier clientele than most. One day I asked another woman stall-keeper who was a friend of mine if the owners ever sold the books.

“No,” she said. “They are all thrown away. That is why one knows they have no value.”

“Friends give them to them to read on the boats.”

“Doubtless,” she said. “They must leave many on the boats.”

“They do,” I said. “The line keeps them and binds them and they become the ships’ libraries.”

“That’s intelligent,” she said. “At least they are properly bound then. Now a book like that would have value.”

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood. At the head of the Île de la Cité below the Pont Neuf where there was the statue of Henri Quatre, the island ended in a point like the sharp bow of a ship and there was a small park at the water’s edge with fine chestnut trees, huge and spreading, and in the currents and back waters that the Seine made flowing past, there were excellent places to fish. You went down a stairway to the park and watched the fishermen there and under the great bridge. The good spots to fish changed with the height of the river and the fishermen used long, jointed, cane poles but fished with very fine leaders and light gear and quill floats and expertly baited the piece of water that they fished. They always caught some fish, and often they made excellent catches of the dace-like fish that were called goujon. They were delicious fried whole and I could eat a plateful. They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all.

One of the best places to eat them was at an open-air restaurant built out over the river at Bas Meudon where we would go when we had money for a trip away from our quarter. It was called La Pêche Miraculeuse and had a splendid white wine that was a sort of Muscadet. It was a place out of a Maupassant story with the view over the river as Sisley had painted it. You did not have to go that far to eat goujon. You could get a very good friture on the Île St.-Louis.

I knew several of the men who fished the fruitful parts of the Seine between the Île St.-Louis and the Place du Verte Galente and sometimes, if the day was bright, I would buy a liter of wine and a piece of bread and some sausage and sit in the sun and read one of the books I had bought and watch the fishing.

Travel writers wrote about the men fishing in the Seine as though they were crazy and never caught anything; but it was serious and productive fishing. Most of the fishermen were men who had small pensions, which they did not know then would become worthless with inflation, or keen fishermen who fished on their days or half-days off from work. There was better fishing at Charenton, where the Marne came into the Seine, and on either side of Paris, but there was very good fishing in Paris itself. I did not fish because I did not have the tackle and I preferred to save my money to fish in Spain. Then too I never knew when I would be through working, nor when I would have to be away, and I did not want to become involved in the fishing which had its good times and its slack times. But I followed it closely and it was interesting and good to know about, and it always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few fritures home to their families.

With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smoke-stacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river. With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning. Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life. This was the only truly sad time in Paris because it was unnatural. You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.

In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.

A False Spring

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

In the spring mornings I would work early while my wife still slept. The windows were open wide and the cobbles of the street were drying after the rain. The sun was drying the wet faces of the houses that faced the window. The shops were still shuttered. The goatherd came up the street blowing his pipes and a woman who lived on the floor above us came out onto the sidewalk with a big pot. The goatherd chose one of the heavy-bagged, black milk-goats and milked her into the pot while his dog pushed the others onto the sidewalk. The goats looked around, turning their necks like sight-seers. The goatherd took the money from the woman and thanked her and went on up the street piping and the dog herded the goats on ahead, their horns bobbing. I went back to writing and the woman came up the stairs with the goat milk. She wore her felt-soled cleaning shoes and I only heard her breathing as she stopped on the stairs outside our door and then the shutting of her door. She was the only customer for goat milk in our building.

I decided to go down and buy a morning racing paper. There was no quarter too poor to have at least one copy of a racing paper but you had to buy it early on a day like this. I found one in the rue Descartes at the corner of the Place Contrescarpe. The goats were going down the rue Descartes and I breathed the air in and walked back fast to climb the stairs and get my work done. I had been tempted to stay out and follow the goats down the early morning street. But before I started work again I looked at the paper. They were running at Enghien, the small, pretty and larcenous track that was the home of the outsider.

So that day after I had finished work we would go racing. Some money had come from the Toronto paper that I did newspaper work for and we wanted a long shot if we could find one. My wife had a horse one time at Auteuil named Chèvre d’Or that was a hundred and twenty to one and leading by twenty lengths when he fell at the last jump with enough savings on him to keep us six months. We tried never to think of that. We were ahead on that year until Chèvre d’Or.

“Do we have enough money to really bet, Tatie?” my wife asked.

“No. We’ll just figure to spend what we take. Is there something else you’d rather spend it for?”

“Well,” she said.

“I know. It’s been terribly hard and I’ve been tight and mean about money.”

“No,” she said. “But—”

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers. I thought of bathtubs and showers and toilets that flushed as things that inferior people to us had or that you enjoyed when you made trips, which we often made. There was always the public bathhouse down at the foot of the street by the river. My wife had never complained once about these things any more than she cried about Chèvre d’Or when he fell. She had cried for the horse, I remembered, but not for the money. I had been stupid when she needed a grey lamb jacket and had loved it once she had bought it. I had been stupid about other things too. It was all part of the fight against poverty that you never win except by not spending. Especially if you buy pictures instead of clothes. But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to the rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

“I think we ought to go,” my wife said. “We haven’t been for such a long time. We’ll take a lunch and some wine. I’ll make good sandwiches.”

“We’ll go on the train and it’s cheap that way. But let’s not go if you don’t think we should. Anything we’d do today would be fun. It’s a wonderful day.”

“I think we should go.”

“You wouldn’t rather spend it some other way?”

“No,” she said arrogantly. She had the lovely high cheek-bones for arrogance. “Who are we anyway?”

So we went out by the train from the Gare du Nord through the dirtiest and saddest part of town and walked from the siding to the oasis of the track. It was early and we sat on my raincoat on the fresh cropped grass bank and had our lunch and drank from the wine bottle and looked at the old grandstand, the brown wooden betting booths, the green of the track, the darker green of the hurdles, and the brown shine of the water jumps and the whitewashed stone walls and white posts and rails, the paddock under the new leafed trees and the first horses being walked to the paddock. We drank more wine and studied the form in the paper and my wife lay down on the raincoat to sleep with the sun on her face. I went over and found someone I knew from the old days at San Siro in Milano. He gave me two horses.

“Mind, they’re no investment. But don’t let the price put you off.”

We won the first with half of the money that we had to spend and he paid twelve to one, jumping beautifully, taking command on the far side of the course and coming in four lengths ahead. We saved half of the money and put it away and bet the other half on the second horse who broke ahead, led all the way over the hurdles and on the flat just lasted to the finish line with the favorite gaining on him with every jump and the two whips flailing.

We went to have a glass of champagne at the bar under the stand and wait for the prices to go up.

“My, but racing is very hard on people,” my wife said. “Did you see that horse come up on him?”

“I can still feel it inside me.”

“What will he pay?”

“The cote was eighteen to one. But they may have bet him at the last.”

The horses came by, ours wet, with his nostrils working wide to breathe, the jockey patting him.

“Poor him,” my wife said. “We just bet.”

We watched them go on by and had another glass of champagne and then the winning price came up: 85. That meant he paid eighty-five francs for ten.

“They must have put a lot of money on at the end,” I said.

But we had made plenty of money, big money for us, and now we had spring and money too. I thought that was all we needed. A day like that one, if you split the winnings one quarter for each to spend, left a half for racing capital. I kept the racing capital secret and apart from all other capital.

Another day later that year when we had come back from one of our voyages and had good luck at some track again we stopped at Pruniers on the way home, going in to sit at the bar after looking at all the clearly priced wonders in the window. We had oysters and crabe Mexicaine with glasses of Sancerre. We walked back through the Tuileries in the dark and stood and looked through the Arc du Carrousel up across the dark gardens with the lights of the Concorde behind the formal darkness and then the long rise of lights toward the Arc de Triomphe. Then we looked back toward the dark of the Louvre and I said, “Do you really think that the three arches are in line? These two and the Sermione in Milano?”

“I don’t know, Tatie. They say so and they ought to know. Do you remember when we came out into the spring on the Italian side of the St. Bernard after the climb in the snow, and you and Chink and I walked down all day in the spring to Aosta?”

“Chink called it ‘across the St. Bernard in street shoes.’ Remember your shoes?”

“My poor shoes. Do you remember us having fruit cup at Biffi’s in the Galleria with Capri and fresh peaches and wild strawberries in a tall glass pitcher with ice?”

“That time was what made me wonder about the three arches.”

“I remember the Sermione. It’s like this arch.”

“Do you remember the inn at Aigle where you and Chink sat in the garden that day and read while I fished?”

“Yes, Tatie.”

I remembered the Rhône, narrow and grey and full of snow water and the two trout streams on either side, the Stockalper and the Rhône canal. The Stockalper was really clear that day and the Rhône canal was still murky.

“Do you remember when the horse-chestnut trees were in bloom and how I tried to remember a story that Jim Gamble, I think, had told me about a wisteria vine and I couldn’t remember it?”

“Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. I remember everything. Sometimes he was right and sometimes you were right. I remember the lights and textures and the shapes you argued about.”

Now we had come out of the gateway through the Louvre and crossed the street outside and were standing on the bridge leaning on the stone and looking down at the river.

“We all three argued about everything and always specific things and we made fun of each other. I remember everything we ever did and everything we ever said on the whole trip,” Hadley said. “I do really. About everything. When you and Chink talked I was included. It wasn’t like being a wife at Miss Stein’s.”

“I wish I could remember the story about the wisteria vine.”

“It wasn’t important. It was the vine that was important, Tatie.”

“Do you remember I brought some wine from Aigle home to the chalet? They sold it to us at the inn. They said it should go with the trout. We brought it wrapped in copies of La gazette de Lucerne, I think.”

“The Sion wine was even better. Do you remember how Mrs. Gangeswisch cooked the trout au bleu when we got back to the chalet? They were such wonderful trout, Tatie, and we drank the Sion wine and ate out on the porch with the mountainside dropping off below and we could look across the lake and see the Dent du Midi with the snow half down it and the trees at the mouth of the Rhône where it flowed into the lake.”

“We always miss Chink in the winter and the spring.”

“Always. And I miss him now when it is gone.”

Chink was a professional soldier and had gone out to Mons from Sandhurst. I had met him first in Italy and he had been my best friend and then our best friend for a long time. He spent his leaves with us then.

“He’s going to try to get leave this next spring. He wrote last week from Cologne.”

“I know. We should live in this time now and have every minute of it.”

“We’re watching the water now as it hits this buttress. Look what we can see when we look up the river.”

We looked and there it all was: our river and our city and the island of our city.

“We’re too lucky,” she said. “I hope Chink will come. He takes care of us.”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“Of course not.”

“He thinks we explore together.”

“We do. But it depends on what you explore.”

We walked across the bridge and were on our own side of the river.

“Are you hungry again?” I said. “Us. Talking and walking.”

“Of course, Tatie. Aren’t you?”

“Let’s go to a wonderful place and have a truly grand dinner.”

“Where?”

“Michaud’s?”

“That’s perfect and it’s so close.”

So we walked up the rue des Saints-Pères to the corner of the rue Jacob stopping and looking in the windows at pictures and at furniture. We stood outside of Michaud’s restaurant reading the posted menu. Michaud’s was crowded and we waited for people to come out, watching the tables where people already had their coffee.

We were hungry again from walking and Michaud’s was an exciting and expensive restaurant for us. It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through his thick glasses holding the menu up in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.

Standing there I wondered how much of what we had felt on the bridge was just hunger. I asked my wife and she said, “I don’t know, Tatie. There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more. But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger.”

I was being stupid, and looking in the window and seeing two tournedos being served I knew I was hungry in a simple way.

“You said we were lucky today. Of course we were. But we had very good advice and information.”

She laughed.

“I didn’t mean about the racing. You’re such a literal boy. I meant lucky other ways.”

“I don’t think Chink cares for racing,” I said compounding my stupidity.

“No. He’d only care for it if he were riding.”

“Don’t you want to go racing any more?”

“Of course. And now we can go whenever we want again.”

“But you really want to go?”

“Of course. You do, don’t you?”

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

The End of an Avocation

We went racing together many more times that year and other years after I had worked in the early mornings, and Hadley enjoyed it and sometimes she loved it. But it was not the climbs in the high mountain meadows above the last forest, nor nights coming home to the chalet, nor was it climbing with Chink, our best friend, over a high pass into new country. It was not really racing either. It was gambling on horses. But we called it racing.

Racing never came between us, only people could do that; but for a long time it stayed close to us like a demanding friend. That was a generous way to think of it. I, the one who was so righteous about people and their destructiveness, tolerated this friend that was the falsest, most beautiful, most exciting, vicious, and demanding because she could be profitable. To make it profitable was more than a full-time job and I had no time for that. But I justified it to myself because I wrote it, even though in the end, when everything I had written was lost, there was only one racing story that survived, because it was out in the mails.

I was going to races alone more now and I was involved in them and getting too mixed up with them. I worked two tracks in their season when I could, Auteuil and Enghien. It took full-time work to try to handicap intelligently and you could make no money that way. That was just how it worked out on paper. You could buy a newspaper that gave you that.

You had to watch a jumping race from the top of the stands at Auteuil and it was a fast climb up to see what each horse did and see the horse that might have won and did not, and see why or maybe how he did not do what he could have done. You watched the prices and all the shifts of odds each time a horse you were following would start, and you had to know how he was working and finally get to know when the stable would try with him. He always might be beaten when he tried; but you should know by then what his chances were. It was hard work but at Auteuil it was beautiful to watch each day they raced when you could be there and see the honest races with the great horses, and you got to know the course as well as any place you had ever known. You knew many people finally, jockeys and trainers and owners and too many horses and too many things.

In principle I only bet when I had a horse to bet on but I sometimes found horses that nobody believed in except the men who trained and rode them that won race after race with me betting on them. I stopped finally because it took too much time, I was getting too involved and I knew too much about what went on at Enghien and at the flat racing tracks too.

When I stopped working on the races I was glad but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better. I put the racing capital back into the general funds and I felt relaxed and good.

The day I gave up racing I went over to the other side of the river and met my friend Mike Ward at the travel desk in the Guaranty Trust which was then at the corner of the rue des Italiens on the Boulevard des Italiens. I was depositing the racing capital but I did not tell that to anyone. I didn’t put it in the checkbook though I still kept it in my head.

“Want to go to lunch?” I asked Mike.

“Sure, kid. Yeah I can do it. What’s the matter? Aren’t you going to the track?”

“No.”

We had lunch at the square Louvois at a very good, plain bistro with a wonderful white wine. Across the square was the Bibliothèque Nationale.

“You never went to the track much, Mike,” I said.

“No. Not for quite a long time.”

“Why did you lay off it?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Yes. Sure I do. Anything you have to bet on to get a kick isn’t worth seeing.”

“Don’t you ever go out?”

“Sometimes to see a big race. One with great horses.”

We spread paté on the good bistro bread and drank the white wine.

“Did you follow them a lot, Mike?”

“Oh yes.”

“What do you see that’s better?”

“Bicycle racing.”

“Really?”

“You don’t have to bet on it. You’ll see.”

“That track takes a lot of time.”

“Too much time. Takes all your time. I don’t like the people.”

“I was very interested.”

“Sure. You make out all right?”

“All right.”

“Good thing to stop,” Mike said.

“I’ve stopped.”

“Hard to do. Listen kid, we’ll go to the bike races sometime.”

That was a new and fine thing that I knew little about. But we did not start it right away. That came later. It came to be a big part of our lives later when the first part of Paris was broken up.

But for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on our own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name. I have started many stories about bicycle racing but have never written one that is as good as the races are both on the indoor and outdoor tracks and on the roads. But I will get the Vélodrome d’Hiver with the smoky light of the afternoon and the high-banked wooden track and the whirring sound the tires made on the wood as the riders passed, the effort and the tactics as the riders climbed and plunged, each one a part of his machine; I will get the magic of the demi-fond, the noise of the motors with their rollers set out behind them that the entraîneurs rode, wearing their heavy crash helmets and leaning backward in their ponderous leather suits, to shelter the riders who followed them from the air resistance, the riders in their lighter crash helmets bent low over their handlebars their legs turning the huge gear sprockets and the small front wheels touching the roller behind the machine that gave them shelter to ride in, and the duels that were more exciting than anything, the put-puting of the motorcycles and the riders elbow to elbow and wheel to wheel up and down and around at deadly speed until one man could not hold the pace and broke away and the solid wall of air that he had been sheltered against hit him.

There were so many kinds of racing. The straight sprints raced in heats or in match races where the two riders would balance for long seconds on their machines for the advantage of making the other rider take the lead and then the slow circling and the final plunge into the driving purity of speed. There were the programs of the team races of two hours, with a series of pure sprints in their heats to fill the afternoon, the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometers on the big banked wooden five-hundred-meter bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called “the Sioux” for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty-meter cement track of the Parc du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where we saw that great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic. I must write the strange world of the six-day races and the marvels of the road-racing in the mountains. French is the only language it has ever been written in properly and the terms are all French and that is what makes it hard to write. Mike was right about it, there is no need to bet. But that comes at another time in Paris.

Hunger Was Good Discipline

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.

After you came out of the Luxembourg you could walk down the narrow rue Férou to the Place St.-Sulpice and there were still no restaurants, only the quiet square with its benches and trees. There was a fountain with lions, and pigeons walked on the pavement and perched on the statues of the bishops. There was the church and there were shops selling religious objects and vestments on the north side of the square.

From this square you could not go further toward the river without passing shops selling fruits, vegetables, wines, or bakery and pastry shops. But by choosing your way carefully you could work to your right around the grey and white stone church and reach the rue de l’Odéon and turn up to your right toward Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and on your way you did not pass too many places where things to eat were sold. The rue de l’Odéon was bare of eating places until you reached the square where there were three restaurants.

By the time you reached 12 rue de l’Odéon your hunger was contained but all of your perceptions were heightened again. The photographs looked different and you saw books that you had never seen before.

“You’re too thin, Hemingway,” Sylvia would say. “Are you eating enough?”

“Sure.”

“What did you eat for lunch?”

My stomach would turn over and I would say, “I’m going home for lunch now.”

“At three o’clock?”

“I didn’t know it was that late.”

“Adrienne said the other night she wanted to have you and Hadley for dinner. We’d ask Fargue. You like Fargue, don’t you? Or Larbaud. You like him. I know you like him. Or anyone you really like. Will you speak to Hadley?”

“I know she’d love to come.”

“I’ll send her a pneu. Don’t you work so hard now that you don’t eat properly.”

“I won’t.”

“Get home now before it’s too late for lunch.”

“They’ll save it.”

“Don’t eat cold food either. Eat a good hot lunch.”

“Did I have any mail?”

“I don’t think so. But let me look.”

She looked and found a note and looked up happily and then opened a closed door in her desk.

“This came while I was out,” she said. It was a letter and it felt as though it had money in it. “Wedderkop,” Sylvia said.

“It must be from Der Querschnitt. Did you see Wedderkop?”

“No. But he was here with George. He’ll see you. Don’t worry. Perhaps he wanted to pay you first.”

“It’s six hundred francs. He says there will be more.”

“I’m awfully glad you reminded me to look. Dear Mr. Awfully Nice.”

“It’s damned funny that Germany is the only place I can sell anything. To him and the Frankfurter Zeitung.”

“Isn’t it? But don’t you worry ever. You can sell stories to Ford,” she teased me.

“Thirty francs a page. Say one story every three months in The Transatlantic. Story five pages long makes one hundred and fifty francs a quarter. Six hundred francs a year.”

“But, Hemingway, don’t worry about what they bring now. The point is that you can write them.”

“I know. I can write them. But nobody will buy them. There is no money coming in since I quit journalism.”

“They will sell. Look. You have the money for one right there.”

“I’m sorry, Sylvia. Forgive me for speaking about it.”

“Forgive you for what? Always talk about it or about anything. Don’t you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles? But promise me you won’t worry and that you’ll eat enough.”

“I promise.”

“Then get home now and have lunch.”

Outside on the rue de l’Odéon I was disgusted with myself for having complained about things. I was doing what I did of my own free will and I was doing it stupidly. I should have bought a large piece of bread and eaten it instead of skipping a meal. I could taste the brown lovely crust. But it is dry in your mouth without something to drink. You God damn complainer. You dirty phony saint and martyr, I said to myself. You quit journalism of your own accord. You have credit and Sylvia would have loaned you money. She has plenty of times. Sure. And then the next thing you would be compromising on something else. Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry. Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now?

Lipp’s is where you are going to eat and drink too.

It was a quick walk to Lipp’s and every place I passed that my stomach noticed as quickly as my eyes or my nose made the walk an added pleasure. There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer I asked for a distingué, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad.

The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes à l’huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly. When the pommes à l’huile were gone I ordered another serving and a cervelas. This was a sausage like a heavy, wide frankfurter split in two and covered with a special mustard sauce.

I mopped up all the oil and all of the sauce with bread and drank the beer slowly until it began to lose its coldness and then I finished it and ordered a demi and watched it drawn. It seemed colder than the distingué and I drank half of it.

I had not been worrying, I thought. I knew the stories were good and someone would publish them finally at home. When I stopped doing newspaper work I was sure the stories were going to be published. But every one I sent out came back. What had made me so confident was Edward O’Brien’s taking the “My Old Man” story for the Best Short Stories book and then dedicating the book for that year to me. Then I laughed and drank some more beer. The story had never been published in a magazine and he had broken all his rules to take it for the book. I laughed again and the waiter glanced at me. It was funny because, after all that, he had spelled the name wrong. It was one of two stories I had left when everything I had written was stolen in Hadley’s suitcase that time at the Gare de Lyon when she was bringing the manuscripts down to me to Lausanne as a surprise, so I could work on them on our holidays in the mountains. She had put in the originals, the typescripts and the carbons, all in manila folders. The only reason I had the one story was that Lincoln Steffens had sent it out to some editor who sent it back. It was in the mail while everything else was stolen. The other story that I had was the one called “Up in Michigan” written before Miss Stein had come to our flat. I had never had it copied because she said it was inaccrochable. It had been in a drawer somewhere.

So after we had left Lausanne and gone down to Italy I showed the racing story to O’Brien, a gentle, shy man, pale, with pale blue eyes, and straight lanky hair he cut himself, who lived then as a boarder in a monastery up above Rapallo. It was a bad time and I did not think I could write any more then, and I showed the story to him as a curiosity, as you might show, stupidly, the binnacle of a ship you had lost in some incredible way, or as you might pick up your booted foot and make some joke about it if it had been amputated after a crash. Then, when he read the story, I saw he was hurt far more than I was. I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We would work it out. Then, finally, she told me. I was sure she could not have brought the carbons too and I hired someone to cover for me on my newspaper job. I was making good money then at journalism, and took the train for Paris. It was true all right and I remember what I did in the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true. That was over now and Chink had taught me never to discuss casualties; so I told O’Brien not to feel so bad. It was probably good for me to lose early work and I told him all that stuff you feed the troops. I was going to start writing stories again I said and, as I said it, only trying to lie so that he would not feel so bad, I knew that it was true.

Then I started to think in Lipp’s about when I had first been able to write a story after losing everything. It was up in Cortina d’Ampezzo when I had come back to join Hadley there after the spring skiing which I had to interrupt to go on assignment to the Rhineland and the Ruhr. It was a very simple story called “Out of Season” and I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

Well, I thought, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that. There is most certainly no demand for them. But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only needs confidence.

It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on food so you will not get too much hunger-thinking. Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it. And as long as they do not understand it you are ahead of them. Oh sure, I thought, I’m so far ahead of them now that I can’t afford to eat regularly. It would not be bad if they caught up a little.

I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race. When I had written a novel before, the one that had been lost in the bag stolen at the Gare de Lyon, I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, but I knew too that I must write a novel. I would put it off though until I could not help doing it. I was damned if I would write one because it was what I should do if we were to eat regularly. When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice. Let the pressure build. In the meantime I would write a long story about whatever I knew best.

By this time I had paid the check and gone out and turned to the right and crossed the rue de Rennes so that I would not go to the Deux-Magots for coffee and was walking up the rue Bonaparte on the shortest way home.

What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most? There was no choice at all. There was only the choice of streets to take you back fastest to where you worked. I went up Bonaparte to Guynemer, then to the rue d’Assas, up the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the Closerie des Lilas.

I sat in a corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook. The waiter brought me a café crème and I drank half of it when it cooled and left it on the table while I wrote. When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it.

But in the morning the river would be there and I must make it and the country and all that would happen. There were days ahead to be doing that each day. No other thing mattered. In my pocket was the money from Germany so there was no problem. When that was gone some other money would come in.

All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again.

Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple

The Closerie des Lilas was the nearest good café when we lived in the flat over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and it was one of the best cafés in Paris. It was warm inside in the winter and in the spring and fall it was very fine outside with the tables under the shade of the trees on the side where the statue of Marshal Ney was, and the square, regular tables under the big awnings along the boulevard. Two of the waiters were our good friends. People from the Dôme and the Rotonde never came to the Lilas. There was no one there they knew, and no one would have stared at them if they came. In those days many people went to the cafés at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.

The Closerie des Lilas had once been a café where poets met more or less regularly and the last principal poet had been Paul Fort whom I had never read. But the only poet I ever saw there was Blaise Cendrars, with his broken boxer’s face and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand. He was a good companion until he drank too much and, at that time, when he was lying, he was more interesting than many men telling a story truly. But he was the only poet who came to the Lilas then and I only saw him there once. Most of the clients were elderly bearded men in well worn clothes who came with their wives or their mistresses and wore or did not wear thin red Legion of Honor ribbons in their lapels. We thought of them all hopefully as scientists or savants and they sat almost as long over an apéritif as the men in shabbier clothes who sat with their wives or mistresses over a café crème and wore the purple ribbon of the Palms of the Academy, which had nothing to do with the French Academy, and meant, we thought, that they were professors or instructors.

These people made it a comfortable café since they were all interested in each other and in their drinks or coffees, or infusions, and in the papers and periodicals which were fastened to rods, and no one was on exhibition.

There were other people too who lived in the quarter and came to the Lilas, and some of them wore Croix de Guerre ribbons in their lapels and others also had the yellow and green of the Médaille Militaire, and I watched how well they were overcoming the handicap of the loss of limbs, and saw the quality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces had been reconstructed. There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed ski run, and we respected these clients more than we did the savants or the professors, although the latter might well have done their military service too without experiencing mutilation.

In those days we did not trust anyone who had not been in the war, but we did not completely trust anyone, and there was a strong feeling that Cendrars might well be a little less flashy about his vanished arm. I was glad he had been in the Lilas early in the afternoon before the regular clients had arrived.

On this evening I was sitting at a table outside of the Lilas watching the light change on the trees and the buildings and the passage of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards. The door of the café opened behind me and to my right, and a man came out and walked to my table.

“Oh here you are,” he said.

It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead.

“May I sit with you?” he asked, sitting down, and his eyes which were a washed-out blue under colorless lids and eyebrows looked out at the boulevard.

“I spent good years of my life that those beasts should be slaughtered humanely,” he said.

“You told me,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Very odd. I’ve never told anyone in my life.”

“Will you have a drink?”

The waiter stood there and Ford told him he would have a Chambéry Cassis. The waiter, who was tall and thin and bald on the top of his head with hair slicked over and who wore a heavy old-style dragoon mustache, repeated the order.

“No. Make it a fine à l’eau,” Ford said.

“A fine à l’eau for Monsieur,” the waiter confirmed the order.

I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was the open air and the fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light was changed again and I had missed the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.

“You’re very glum,” he said.

“No.”

“Yes you are. You need to get out more. I stopped by to ask you to the little evenings we’re giving in that amusing Bal Musette near the Place Contrescarpe on the rue Cardinal Lemoine.”

“I lived above it for two years before you came to Paris this last time.”

“How odd. Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. The man who owned it had a taxi and when I had to get a plane he’d take me out to the field, and we’d stop at the zinc bar of the Bal and drink a glass of white wine in the dark before we’d start for the airfield.”

“I’ve never cared for flying,” Ford said. “You and your wife plan to come to the Bal Musette Saturday night. It’s quite gay. I’ll draw you a map so you can find it. I stumbled on it quite by chance.”

“It’s under 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine,” I said. “I lived on the third floor.”

“There’s no number,” Ford said. “But you’ll be able to find it if you can find the Place Contrescarpe.”

I took another long drink. The waiter had brought Ford’s drink and Ford was correcting him. “It wasn’t a brandy and soda,” he said helpfully but severely. “I ordered a Chambéry vermouth and Cassis.”

“It’s all right, Jean,” I said. “I’ll take the fine. Bring Monsieur what he orders now.”

“What I ordered,” corrected Ford.

At that moment a rather gaunt man wearing a cape passed on the sidewalk. He was with a tall woman and he glanced at our table and then away and went on his way down the boulevard.

“Did you see me cut him?” Ford said. “Did you see me cut him?”

“No. Who did you cut?”

“Belloc,” Ford said. “Did I cut him!”

“I didn’t see it,” I said. “Why did you cut him?”

“For every good reason in the world,” Ford said. “Did I cut him though!”

He was thoroughly and completely happy. I had never seen Belloc and I did not believe he had seen us. He looked like a man who had been thinking of something and had glanced at the table almost automatically. I felt badly that Ford had been rude to him, as, being a young man who was commencing his education, I had a high regard for him as an older writer. This is not understandable now but in those days it was a common occurrence.

I thought it would have been pleasant if Belloc had stopped at the table and I might have met him. The afternoon had been spoiled by seeing Ford but I thought Belloc might have made it better.

“What are you drinking brandy for?” Ford asked me. “Don’t you know it’s fatal for a young writer to start drinking brandy?”

“I don’t drink it very often,” I said. I was trying to remember what Ezra Pound had told me about Ford, that I must never be rude to him, that I must remember that he only lied when he was very tired, that he was really a good writer and that he had been through very bad domestic troubles. I tried hard to think of these things but the heavy, wheezing, ignoble presence of Ford himself, only touching-distance away, made it difficult. But I tried.

“Tell me why one cuts people,” I asked. Until then I had thought it was something only done in novels by Ouida. I had never been able to read a novel by Ouida, not even at some skiing place in Switzerland where reading matter had run out when the wet south wind had come and there were only the left-behind Tauchnitz editions of before the war. But I was sure, by some sixth sense, that people cut one another in her novels.

“A gentleman,” Ford explained, “will always cut a cad.”

I took a quick drink of brandy.

“Would he cut a bounder?” I asked.

“It would be impossible for a gentleman to know a bounder.”

“Then you can only cut someone you have known on terms of equality?” I pursued.

“Naturally.”

“How would one ever meet a cad?”

“You might not know it, or the fellow could have become a cad.”

“What is a cad?” I asked. “Isn’t he someone that one has to thrash within an inch of his life?”

“Not necessarily,” Ford said.

“Is Ezra a gentleman?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Ford said. “He’s an American.”

“Can’t an American be a gentleman?”

“Perhaps John Quinn,” Ford explained. “Certain of your ambassadors.”

“Myron T. Herrick?”

“Possibly.”

“Was Henry James a gentleman?”

“Very nearly.”

“Are you a gentleman?”

“Naturally. I have held His Majesty’s commission.”

“It’s very complicated,” I said. “Am I a gentleman?”

“Absolutely not,” Ford said.

“Then why are you drinking with me?”

“I’m drinking with you as a promising young writer. As a fellow writer in fact.”

“Good of you,” I said.

“You might be considered a gentleman in Italy,” Ford said magnanimously.

“But I’m not a cad?”

“Of course not, dear boy. Who ever said such a thing?”

“I might become one,” I said sadly. “Drinking brandy and all. That was what did for Lord Harry Hotspur in Trollope. Tell me, was Trollope a gentleman?”

“Of course not.”

“You’re sure?”

“There might be two opinions. But not in mine.”

“Was Fielding? He was a judge.”

“Technically perhaps.”

“Marlowe?”

“Of course not.”

“John Donne?”

“He was a parson.”

“It’s fascinating,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re interested,” Ford said. “I’ll have a brandy and water with you before I go.”

After Ford left it was dark and I walked over to the kiosque and bought a Paris-Sport Complet, the final edition of the afternoon racing paper with the results at Auteuil, and the line on the next day’s meeting at Enghien. The waiter Emile, who had replaced Jean on duty, came to the table to see the results of the last race at Auteuil. A great friend of mine who rarely came to the Lilas came over to the table and sat down, and just then as my friend was ordering a drink from Emile the gaunt man in the cape with the tall woman passed us on the sidewalk. His glance drifted toward the table and then away.

“That’s Hilaire Belloc,” I said to my friend. “Ford was here this afternoon and cut him dead.”

“Don’t be a silly ass,” my friend said. “That’s Aleister Crowley, the diabolist. He’s supposed to be the wickedest man in the world.”

“Sorry,” I said.

Birth of a New School

The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit’s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit’s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake. A pencil-lead might break off in the conical nose of the pencil sharpener and you would use the small blade of the pen knife to clear it or else sharpen the pencil carefully with the sharp blade and then slip your arm through the sweat-salted leather of your pack strap to lift the pack again, get the other arm through and feel the weight settle on your back and feel the pine needles under your moccasins as you started down for the lake.

Then you would hear someone say, “Hi, Hem. What are you trying to do? Write in a café?”

Your luck had run out and you shut the notebook. This was the worst thing that could happen. If you could keep your temper it would be better but I was not good at keeping mine then and said, “You rotten son of a bitch what are you doing in here off your filthy beat?”

“Don’t be insulting just because you want to act like an eccentric.”

“Take your dirty camping mouth out of here.”

“It’s a public café. I’ve just as much right here as you have.”

“Why don’t you go up to the Petite Chaumière where you belong?”

“Oh dear. Don’t be so tiresome.”

Now you could get out and hope it was an accidental visit and that the visitor had only come in by chance and there was not going to be an infestation. There were other good cafés to work in but they were a long walk away and this was my home café. It was bad to be driven out of the Closerie des Lilas. I had to make a stand or move. It was probably wiser to move but the anger started to come and I said, “Listen. A bitch like you has plenty of places to go. Why do you have to come here and louse a decent café?”

“I just came in to have a drink. What’s wrong with that?”

“At home they’d serve you and then break the glass.”

“Where’s home? It sounds like a charming place.”

He was sitting at the next table, a tall fat young man with spectacles. He had ordered a beer. I thought I would ignore him and see if I could write. So I ignored him and wrote two sentences.

“All I did was speak to you.”

I went on and wrote another sentence. It dies hard when it is really going and you are into it.

“I suppose you’ve gotten so great nobody can speak to you.”

I wrote another sentence that ended the paragraph and read it over. It was still all right and I wrote the first sentence of the next paragraph.

“You never think about anyone else or that they may have problems too.”

I had heard complaining all my life. I found I could go on writing and that it was no worse than other noises, certainly better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon.

“Suppose you wanted to be a writer and felt it in every part of your body and it just wouldn’t come.”

I went on writing and I was beginning to have luck now as well as the other thing.

“Suppose once it had come like an irresistible torrent and then it left you mute and silent.”

Better than mute and noisy, I thought, and went on writing. He was in full cry now and the unbelievable sentences were soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the saw-mill.

“We went to Greece,” I heard him say later. I had not heard him for some time except as noise. I was ahead now and I could leave it and go on tomorrow.

“You say you used it or you went there?”

“Don’t be vulgar,” he said. “Don’t you want me to tell you the rest?”

“No,” I said. I closed the notebook and put it in my pocket.

“Don’t you care how it came out?”

“No.”

“Don’t you care about life and the suffering of a fellow human being?”

“Not you.”

“You’re beastly.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you could help me, Hem.”

“I’d be glad to shoot you.”

“Would you?”

“No. There’s a law against it.”

“I’d do anything for you.”

“Would you?”

“Of course I would.”

“Then keep the hell away from this café. Start with that.”

I stood up and the waiter came over and I paid.

“Can I walk down to the sawmill with you, Hem?”

“No.”

“Well I’ll see you some other time.”

“Not here.”

“That’s perfectly right,” he said. “I promised.”

“What are you writing?” I made a mistake and asked.

“I’m writing the best I can. Just as you do. But it’s so terribly difficult.”

“You shouldn’t write if you can’t write. What do you have to cry about it for? Go home. Get a job. Hang yourself. Only don’t talk about it. You could never write.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Did you ever hear yourself talk?”

“It’s writing I’m talking about.”

“Then shut up.”

“You’re just cruel,” he said. “Everybody always said you were cruel and heartless and conceited. I always defended you. But not any more.”

“Good.”

“How can you be so cruel to a fellow human being?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Look, if you can’t write why don’t you learn to write criticism?”

“Do you think I should?”

“It would be fine,” I told him. “Then you can always write. You won’t ever have to worry about it not coming nor being mute and silent. People will read it and respect it.”

“Do you think I could be a good critic?”

“I don’t know how good. But you could be a critic. There will always be people who will help you and you can help your own people.”

“What do you mean my own people?”

“The ones you go around with.”

“Oh them. They have their critics.”

“You don’t have to criticize books,” I said. “There’s pictures, plays, ballet, the cinema—”

“You make it sound fascinating, Hem. Thank you so much. It’s so exciting. It’s creative too.”

“Creation’s probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.”

“Of course there’s nothing to prevent me doing creative writing too.”

“Not a thing. Except you may set yourself impossibly high standards by your criticism.”

“They’ll be high. You can count on that.”

“I’m sure they will be.”

He was a critic already so I asked him if he would have a drink and he accepted.

“Hem,” he said, and I knew he was a critic now since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, “I have to tell you I find your work just a little too stark.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Hem it’s too stripped, too lean.”

“Bad luck.”

“Hem too stark, too stripped, too lean, too sinewy.”

I felt the rabbit’s foot in my pocket guiltily. “I’ll try to fatten it up a little.”

“Mind, I don’t want it obese.”

“Hal,” I said, practicing speaking like a critic, “I’ll avoid that as long as I can.”

“Glad we see eye to eye,” he said manfully.

“You’ll remember about not coming here when I’m working?”

“Naturally, Hem. Of course. I’ll have my own café now.”

“You’re very kind.”

“I try to be,” he said.

It would be interesting and instructive if the young man had turned out to be a famous critic but it did not turn out that way although I had high hopes for a while.

I did not think that he would come back the next day but I did not want to take chances and I decided to give the Closerie a day’s rest. So the next morning I woke early, boiled the rubber nipples and the bottles, made the formula, finished the bottling, gave Mr. Bumby a bottle and worked on the dining-room table before anyone but he, F. Puss the cat, and I were awake. The two of them were quiet and good company and I worked better than I had ever done. In those days you did not really need anything, not even the rabbit’s foot, but it was good to feel it in your pocket.

With Pascin at the Dome

It was a lovely evening and I had worked hard all day and left the flat over the sawmill and walked out through the courtyard with the stacked lumber, closed the door, crossed the street and went into the back door of the bakery that fronted on the Boulevard Montparnasse and out through the good bread smells of the ovens and the shop to the street. The lights were on in the bakery and outside it was the end of the day and I walked in the early dusk up the street and stopped outside the terrace of the Nègre de Toulouse restaurant where our red and white checkered napkins were in the wooden napkin rings in the napkin rack waiting for us to come to dinner. I read the menu mimeographed in purple ink and saw that the plat du jour was cassoulet. It made me hungry to read the name.

Mr. Lavigne, the proprietor, asked me how my work had gone and I said it had gone very well. He said he had seen me working on the terrace of the Closerie des Lilas early in the morning but he had not spoken to me because I was so occupied.

“You had the air of a man alone in the jungle,” he said.

“I am like a blind pig when I work.”

“But were you not in the jungle, Monsieur?”

“In the bush,” I said.

I went on up the street looking in the windows and happy with the spring evening and the people coming past. In the three principal cafés I saw people that I knew by sight and others that I knew to speak to. But there were always much nicer-looking people that I did not know that, in the evening with the lights just coming on, were hurrying to some place to drink together, to eat together and then to make love. The people in the principal cafés might do the same thing or they might just sit and drink and talk and love to be seen by others. The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafés because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together. The big cafés were cheap then too, and all had good beer and the apéritifs cost reasonable prices that were clearly marked on the saucers that were served with them.

On this evening I was thinking these wholesome but not original thoughts and feeling extraordinarily virtuous because I had worked well and hard on a day when I had wanted to go out to the races very badly. But at this time I could not afford to go to the races, even though there was money to be made there if you worked at it. It was before the days of saliva tests and other methods of detecting artificially encouraged horses and doping was very extensively practiced. But handicapping beasts that are receiving stimulants, and detecting the symptoms in the paddock and acting on your perceptions, which sometimes bordered on the extrasensory, then backing them with money you cannot afford to lose, is not the way for a young man supporting a wife and child to get ahead in the full-time job of learning to write prose.

By any standards we were still very poor and I still made such small economies as saying that I had been asked out for lunch and then spending two hours walking in the Luxembourg gardens and coming back to describe the marvelous lunch to my wife. When you are twenty-five and are a natural heavyweight, missing a meal makes you very hungry. But it also sharpens all of your perceptions, and I found that many of the people I wrote about had very strong appetites and a great taste and desire for food, and most of them were looking forward to having a drink.

At the Nègre de Toulouse we drank the good Cahors wine from the quarter, the half, or the full carafe, usually diluting it about one-third with water. At home, over the sawmill, we had a Corsican wine that had great authority and a low price. It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message. In Paris, then, you could live very well on almost nothing and by skipping meals occasionally and never buying any new clothes, you could save and have luxuries.

Coming back from The Select now where I had sheered off at the sight of Harold Stearns who I knew would want to talk horses, those animals I was thinking of righteously and light-heartedly as the beasts that I had just foresworn. Full of my evening virtue I passed the collection of inmates at the Rotonde and, scorning vice and the collective instinct, crossed the boulevard to the Dôme. The Dôme was crowded too, but there were people there who had worked.

There were models who had worked and there were painters who had worked until the light was gone and there were writers who had finished a day’s work for better or for worse, and there were drinkers and characters, some of whom I knew and some that were only decoration.

I went over and sat down at a table with Pascin and two models who were sisters. Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not. Pascin was a very good painter and he was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense. The two models were young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile depravity. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring.

“The good and the bad sisters,” Pascin said. “I have money. What will you drink?”

“Une demi-blonde,” I said to the waiter.

“Have a whisky. I have money.”

“I like beer.”

“If you really liked beer, you’d be at Lipp’s. I suppose you’ve been working.”

“Yes.”

“It goes?”

“I hope so.”

“Good. I’m glad. And everything still tastes good?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Do you want to bang her?” He looked toward the dark sister and smiled. “She needs it.”

“You probably banged her enough today.”

She smiled at me with her lips open. “He’s wicked,” she said. “But he’s nice.”

“You can take her over to the studio.”

“Don’t make piggishness,” the blonde sister said.

“Who spoke to you?” Pascin asked her.

“Nobody. But I said it.”

“Let’s be comfortable,” Pascin said. “The serious young writer and the friendly wise old painter and the two beautiful young girls with all of life before them.”

We sat there and the girls sipped at their drinks and Pascin drank another fine à l’eau and I drank the beer; but no one was comfortable except Pascin. The dark girl was restless and she sat on display turning her profile and letting the light strike the concave planes of her face and showing me her breasts under the hold of the black sweater. Her hair was cropped short and was sleek and dark as an oriental’s.

“You’ve posed all day,” Pascin said to her. “Do you have to model that sweater now at the café?”

“It pleases me,” she said.

“You look like a Javanese toy,” he said.

“Not the eyes,” she said. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“You look like a poor perverted little poupée.”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But alive. That’s more than you.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Good,” she said. “I like proofs.”

“You didn’t have any today?”

“Oh that,” she said and turned to catch the last evening light on her face. “You were just excited about your work. He’s in love with canvases,” she said to me. “There’s always some kind of dirtiness.”

“You want me to paint you and pay you and bang you to keep my head clear, and be in love with you too,” Pascin said. “You poor little doll.”

“You like me, don’t you, Monsieur?” she asked me.

“Very much.”

“But you’re too big,” she said sadly.

“Everyone is the same size in bed.”

“It’s not true,” her sister said. “And I’m tired of this talk.”

“Look,” Pascin said. “If you think I’m in love with canvases, I’ll paint you tomorrow in water colors.”

“When do we eat?” her sister asked. “And where?”

“Will you eat with us?” the dark girl asked.

“No. I go to eat with my légitime.” That was what they said then. Now they say “my régulière.”

“You have to go?”

“Have to and want to.”

“Go on, then,” Pascin said. “And don’t fall in love with typewriting paper.”

“If I do, I’ll write with a pencil.”

“Water colors tomorrow,” he said. “All right, my children, I will drink another and then we eat where you wish.”

“Chez Viking,” the dark girl said.

“Me too,” her sister urged.

“All right,” Pascin agreed. “Good night, jeune homme. Sleep well.”

“You too.”

“They keep me awake,” he said. “I never sleep.”

“Sleep tonight.”

“After Chez Les Vikings?” He grinned with his hat on the back of his head. He looked more like a Broadway character of the Nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, I liked to remember him as he was that night at the Dôme. They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit

Ezra Pound was always a good friend and he was always doing things for people. The studio where he lived with his wife Dorothy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs was as poor as Gertrude Stein’s studio was rich. It had very good light and was heated by a stove and it had paintings by Japanese artists that Ezra knew. They were all noblemen where they came from and wore their hair cut long. Their hair glistened black and swung forward when they bowed and I was very impressed by them but I did not like their paintings. I did not understand them but they did not have any mystery, and when I understood them they meant nothing to me. I was sorry about this but there was nothing I could do about it.

Dorothy’s paintings I liked very much and I thought Dorothy was very beautiful and built wonderfully. I also liked the head of Ezra by Gaudier-Brzeska and I liked all of the photographs of this sculptor’s work that Ezra showed me and that were in Ezra’s book about him. Ezra also liked Picabia’s painting but I thought then that it was worthless. I also disliked Wyndham Lewis’s painting which Ezra liked very much. He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgment. We never argued about these things because I kept my mouth shut about things I did not like. If a man liked his friends’ painting or writing, I thought it was probably like those people who like their families, and it was not polite to criticize them. Sometimes you can go quite a long time before you criticize families, your own or those by marriage, but it is easier with bad painters because they do not do terrible things and make intimate harm as families can do. With bad painters all you need to do is not look at them. But even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous. Ezra was kinder and more Christian about people than I was. His own writing, when he would hit it right, was so perfect, and he was so sincere in his mistakes and so enamored of his errors, and so kind to people that I always thought of him as a sort of saint. He was also irascible but so perhaps have been many saints.

Ezra wanted me to teach him to box and it was while we were sparring late one afternoon in his studio that I first met Wyndham Lewis. Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible. But it was not very good because he knew how to fence and I was still working to make his left into his boxing hand and move his left foot forward always and bring his right foot up parallel with it. It was just basic moves. I was never able to teach him to throw a left hook and to teach him to shorten his right was something for the future.

Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Bohème. He had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra’s left leads or blocked them with an open right glove.

I wanted us to stop but Lewis insisted we go on, and I could see that, knowing nothing about what was going on, he was waiting, hoping to see Ezra hurt. Nothing happened. I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me sticking out his left hand and throwing a few right hands and then said we were through and washed down with a pitcher of water and toweled off and put on my sweatshirt.

We had a drink of something and I listened while Ezra and Lewis talked about people in London and Paris. I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great race horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

“I met the nastiest man I’ve ever seen today,” I told my wife.

“Tatie, don’t tell me about him,” she said. “Please don’t tell me about him. We’re just going to have dinner.”

About a week afterwards I met Miss Stein and told her I’d met Wyndham Lewis and asked her if she had ever met him.

“I call him ‘the Measuring Worm,’ ” she said. “He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb. Sighting on it and measuring it and seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.”

So I thought of him as the Measuring Worm. It was a kinder and more Christian term than what I had thought about him myself. Later I tried to like him and to be friends with him as I did with nearly all of Ezra’s friends when he explained them to me. But this was how he seemed to me on the first day I ever met him in Ezra’s studio.

Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble. He worried about everyone and in the time when I first knew him he was most worried about T. S. Eliot who, Ezra told me, had to work in a bank in London and so had insufficient time and bad hours to function as a poet.

Ezra founded something called Bel Esprit with Miss Natalie Barney who was a rich American woman and a patroness of the arts. Miss Barney had been a friend of Rémy de Gourmont who was before my time and she had a salon at her house on regular dates and a small Greek temple in her garden. Many American and French women with money enough had salons and I figured very early that they were excellent places for me to stay away from, but Miss Barney, I believe, was the only one that had a small Greek temple in her garden.

Ezra showed me the brochure for Bel Esprit and Miss Barney had allowed him to use the small Greek temple on the brochure. The idea of Bel Esprit was that we would all contribute a part of whatever we earned to provide a fund to get Mr. Eliot out of the bank so he would have money to write poetry. This seemed like a good idea to me and after we had got Mr. Eliot out of the bank Ezra figured we would go right straight along and fix up everybody.

I mixed things up a little by always referring to Eliot as Major Eliot pretending to confuse him with Major Douglas an economist about whose ideas Ezra was very enthusiastic. But Ezra understood that my heart was in the right place and that I was full of Bel Esprit even though it would annoy Ezra when I would solicit funds from my friends to get Major Eliot out of the bank and someone would say what was a Major doing in a bank anyway and if he had been axed by the military establishment did he not have a pension or at least some gratuity?

In such cases I would explain to my friends that this was all beside the point. Either you had Bel Esprit or you did not have it. If you had it you would subscribe to get the Major out of the bank. If you didn’t it was too bad. Didn’t they understand the significance of the small Greek temple? No? I thought so. Too bad, Mac. Keep your money. We wouldn’t touch it.

As a member of Bel Esprit I campaigned energetically and my happiest dreams in those days were of seeing the Major stride out of the bank a free man. I cannot remember how Bel Esprit finally cracked up but I think it had something to do with the publication of The Waste Land which won the Major the Dial award and not long after a lady of title backed a review for Eliot called The Criterion and Ezra and I did not have to worry about him any more. The small Greek temple is, I believe, still in the garden. It was always a disappointment to me that we had not been able to get the Major out of the bank by Bel Esprit alone, as in my dreams I had pictured him as coming, perhaps, to live in the small Greek temple and that maybe I could go with Ezra when we would drop in to crown him with laurel. I knew where there was fine laurel that I could gather, riding out on my bicycle to get it, and I thought we could crown him any time he felt lonesome or any time Ezra had gone over the manuscript or the proofs of another big poem like The Waste Land. The whole thing turned out badly for me morally, as so many things have, because the money that I had earmarked for getting the Major out of the bank I took out to Enghien and bet on jumping horses that raced under the influence of stimulants. At two meetings the stimulated horses that I was backing outraced the unstimulated or insufficiently stimulated beasts except for one race in which our fancy had been overstimulated to such a point that before the start he threw his jockey and breaking away completed a full circuit of the steeplechase course jumping beautifully by himself the way one can sometimes jump in dreams. Caught up and remounted he started the race and figured honorably, as the French racing phrase has it, but was out of the money.

I would have been happier if the amount of the wager had gone to Bel Esprit which was no longer existent. But I comforted myself that with those wagers which had prospered I could have contributed much more to Bel Esprit than was my original intention.

A Strange Enough Ending

The way it ended with Gertrude Stein was strange enough. We had become very good friends and I had done a number of practical things for her such as getting her long book started as a serial with Ford and helping type the manuscript and reading her proof and we were getting to be better friends than I could ever wish to be. There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers. One time when I gave the excuse for not having stopped in at 27 rue de Fleurus for some time that I did not know whether Miss Stein would be at home, she said, “But Hemingway, you have the run of the place. Don’t you know that? I mean it truly. Come in any time and the maidservant” — she used her name but I have forgotten it— “will look after you and you must make yourself at home until I come.”

I did not abuse this but sometimes I would stop in and the maidservant would give me a drink and I would look at the pictures and if Miss Stein did not turn up I would thank the maidservant and leave a message and go away. Miss Stein and a companion were getting ready to go south in Miss Stein’s car and on this day Miss Stein had asked me to come by in the forenoon to say good-by. She had asked us to come and visit, Hadley and I staying at an hotel, but Hadley and I had other plans and other places where we wanted to go. Naturally you say nothing about this, but you can still hope to go and then it is impossible. I knew a little about the system of not visiting people. I had to learn it. Much later Picasso told me that he always promised the rich to come when they asked him because it made them so happy and then something would happen and he would be unable to appear. But that had nothing to do with Miss Stein and he said it about other people.

It was a lovely spring day and I walked down from the Place de l’Observatoire through the little Luxembourg. The horse-chestnut trees were in blossom and there were many children playing on the graveled walks with their nurses sitting on the benches, and I saw wood pigeons in the trees and heard others that I could not see.

The maidservant opened the door before I rang and told me to come in and to wait. Miss Stein would be down at any moment. It was before noon but the maidservant poured me a glass of eau-de-vie, put it in my hand and winked happily. The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I had never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever.

Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, “Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.”

I swallowed the drink and put the glass down on the table and started for the door. The maidservant shook her finger at me and whispered, “Don’t go. She’ll be right down.”

“I have to go,” I said and tried not to hear any more as I left but it was still going on and the only way I could not hear it was to be gone. It was bad to hear and the answers were worse.

In the courtyard I said to the maidservant, “Please say I came to the courtyard and met you. That I could not wait because a friend is sick. Say bon voyage for me. I will write.”

“C’est entendu, Monsieur. What a shame you cannot wait.”

“Yes,” I said. “What a shame.”

That was the way it finished for me, stupidly enough, although I still did the small jobs, made the necessary appearances, brought people that were asked for and waited dismissal with most of the other men friends when that epoch came and the new friends moved in. It was sad to see new worthless pictures hung in with the great pictures but it made no difference any more. Not to me it didn’t. She quarreled with nearly all of us that were fond of her except Juan Gris and she couldn’t quarrel with him because he was dead. I am not sure that he would have cared because he was past caring and it showed in his paintings.

Finally she even quarreled with the new friends but none of us followed it any more. She got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors. But Picasso had painted her, and I could remember her when she looked like a woman from Friuli.

In the end everyone, or not quite everyone, made friends again in order not to be stuffy or righteous. I did too. But I could never make friends again truly, neither in my heart nor in my head. When you cannot make friends any more in your head is the worst. But it was more complicated than that.

The Man Who Was Marked for Death

The afternoon I met Ernest Walsh, the poet, in Ezra’s studio, he was with two girls in long mink coats and there was a long, shiny, hired car from Claridge’s outside in the street with a uniformed chauffeur. The girls were blondes and they had crossed on the same ship with Walsh. The ship had arrived the day before and he had brought them with him to visit Ezra.

Ernest Walsh was dark, intense, faultlessly Irish, poetic and clearly marked for death as a character is marked for death in a motion picture. He was talking to Ezra and I talked with the girls who asked me if I had read Mr. Walsh’s poems. I had not and one of them brought out a green-covered copy of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, A Magazine of Verse and showed me poems by Walsh in it.

“He gets twelve hundred dollars apiece,” she said.

“For each poem,” the other girl said.

My recollection was that I received twelve dollars a page, if that, from the same magazine. “He must be a very great poet,” I said.

“It’s more than Eddie Guest gets,” the first girl told me.

“It’s more than who’s that other poet gets. You know.”

“Kipling,” her friend said.

“It’s more than anybody gets ever,” the first girl said.

“Are you staying in Paris very long?” I asked them.

“Well no. Not really. We’re with a group of friends.”

“We came over on this boat, you know. But there wasn’t anyone on it really. Mr. Walsh was on it of course.”

“Doesn’t he play cards?” I asked.

She looked at me in a disappointed but understanding way.

“No. He doesn’t have to. Not writing poetry the way he can write it.”

“What ship are you going back on?”

“Well that depends. It depends on the boats and on a lot of things. Are you going back?”

“No. I’m getting by all right.”

“This is sort of the poor quarter over here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But it’s pretty good. I work the cafés and I’m out at the track.”

“Can you go out to the track in those clothes?”

“No. This is my café outfit.”

“It’s kind of cute,” one of the girls said. “I’d like to see some of that café life. Wouldn’t you, dear?”

“I would,” the other girl said. I wrote their names down in my address book and promised to call them at Claridge’s. They were nice girls and I said good-by to them and to Walsh and to Ezra. Walsh was still talking to Ezra with great intensity.

“Don’t forget,” the taller one of the girls said.

“How could I?” I told her and shook hands with them both again.

The next I heard from Ezra about Walsh was that he had been bailed out of Claridge’s by some lady admirers of poetry and of young poets who were marked for death, and the next thing, some time after that, was that he had financial backing from another source and was going to start a new magazine in the quarter as a co-editor.

At the time the Dial, an American literary magazine edited by Scofield Thayer, gave an annual award of, I believe, a thousand dollars for excellence in the practice of letters by a contributor. This was a huge sum for any straight writer to receive in those days, in addition to the prestige, and the award had gone to various people, all deserving, naturally. Two people, then, could live comfortably and well in Europe on five dollars a day and could travel.

This quarterly, of which Walsh was one of the editors, was alleged to be going to award a very substantial sum to the contributor whose work should be judged the best at the end of the first four issues.

If the news was passed around by gossip or rumor, or if it was a matter of personal confidence, cannot be said. Let us hope and believe always that it was completely honorable in every way. Certainly nothing could ever be said or imputed against Walsh’s co-editor.

It was not long after I heard rumors of this alleged award that Walsh asked me to lunch one day at a restaurant that was the best and the most expensive in the Boulevard St.-Michel quarter and after the oysters, expensive flat faintly coppery marennes, not the familiar, deep, inexpensive portugaises, and a bottle of Pouilly Fuisé, began to lead up to it delicately. He appeared to be conning me as he had conned the shills from the boat — if they were shills and if he had conned them, of course — and when he asked me if I would like another dozen of the flat oysters as he called them, I said I would like them very much. He did not bother to look marked for death with me and this was a relief. He knew I knew he had the con, not the kind you con with but the kind you died of then and how bad it was, and he did not bother to have to cough, and I was grateful for this at the table. I was wondering if he ate the flat oysters in the same way the whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con; but I did not ask him. I began my second dozen of the flat oysters, picking them from their bed of crushed ice on the silver plate, watching their unbelievably delicate brown edges react and cringe as I squeezed lemon juice on them and separated the holding muscle from the shell and lifted them to chew them carefully.

“Ezra’s a great, great poet,” Walsh said, looking at me with his own dark poet’s eyes.

“Yes,” I said. “And a fine man.”

“Noble,” Walsh said. “Truly noble.” We ate and drank in silence as a tribute to Ezra’s nobility. I missed Ezra and wished he were there. He could not afford marennes either.

“Joyce is great,” Walsh said. “Great. Great.”

“Great,” I said. “And a good friend.” We had become friends in his wonderful period after the finishing of Ulysses and before starting what was called for a long time Work in Progress. I thought of Joyce and remembered many things.

“I wish his eyes were better,” Walsh said.

“So does he,” I said.

“It is the tragedy of our time,” Walsh told me.

“Everybody has something wrong with them,” I said, trying to cheer up the lunch.

“You haven’t.” He gave me all his charm and more, and then he marked himself for death.

“You mean I am not marked for death?” I asked. I could not help it.

“No. You’re marked for Life.” He capitalized the word.

“Give me time,” I said.

He wanted a good steak, rare, and I ordered two tournedos with sauce Béarnaise. I figured the butter would be good for him.

“What about a red wine?” he asked. The sommelier came and I ordered a Châteauneuf du Pape. I would walk it off afterwards along the quais. He could sleep it off, or do what he wanted to. I might take mine someplace, I thought.

It came as we finished the steak and french-fried potatoes and were two-thirds through the Châteauneuf du Pape which is not a luncheon wine.

“There’s no use beating around the bush,” he said. “You know you’re to get the award, don’t you?”

“Am I?” I said. “Why?”

“You’re to get it,” he said. He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face, and I looked at him and his marked-for-death look and I thought, you con man conning me with your con. I’ve seen a battalion in the dust on the road, a third of them for death or worse and no special marks on them, the dust for all, and you and your marked for death look, you con man, making a living out of your death. Now you will con me. Con not, that thou be not conned. Death was not conning with him. It was coming all right.

“I don’t think I deserve it, Ernest,” I said, enjoying using my own name, that I hated, to him. “Besides, Ernest, it would not be ethical, Ernest.”

“It’s strange we have the same name, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Ernest,” I said. “It’s a name we must both live up to. You see what I mean, don’t you, Ernest?”

“Yes, Ernest,” he said. He gave me complete, sad Irish understanding and the charm.

So I was always very nice to him and to his magazine and when he had his hemorrhages and left Paris asking me to see his magazine through the printers, who did not read English, I did that. I had seen one of the hemorrhages, it was very legitimate, and I knew that he would die all right, and it pleased me at that time, which was a difficult time in my life, to be extremely nice to him, as it pleased me to call him Ernest. Also, I liked and admired his co-editor. She had not promised me any award. She only wished to build a good magazine and pay her contributors well.

One day, much later, I met Joyce who was walking along the Boulevard St.-Germain after having been to a matinée alone. He liked to listen to the actors, although he could not see them. He asked me to have a drink with him and we went to the Deux-Magots and ordered dry sherry although you will always read that he drank only Swiss white wine.

“How about Walsh?” Joyce said.

“A such and such alive is a such and such dead,” I said.

“Did he promise you that award?” Joyce asked.

“Yes.”

“I thought so,” Joyce said.

“Did he promise it to you?”

“Yes,” Joyce said. After a time he asked, “Do you think he promised it to Pound?”

“I don’t know.”

“Best not to ask him,” Joyce said. We left it at that. I told Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra’s studio with the girls in the long fur coats and it made him happy to hear the story.

Evan Shipman at the Lilas

From the day I had found Sylvia Beach’s library I had read all of Turgenev, what had been published in English of Gogol, the Constance Garnett translations of Tolstoi and the English translations of Chekov. In Toronto, before we had ever come to Paris, I had been told Katherine Mansfield was a good short-story writer, even a great short-story writer, but trying to read her after Chekov was like hearing the carefully artificial tales of a young old-maid compared to those of an articulate and knowing physician who was a good and simple writer. Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water. But Chekov was not water except for the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

“To tell you the truth, Hem,” Ezra said, “I’ve never read the Rooshians.”

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste — the one and only correct word to use — the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

“Keep to the French,” Ezra said. “You’ve plenty to learn there.”

“I know it,” I said. “I’ve plenty to learn everywhere.”

Later after leaving Ezra’s studio and walking along the street to the sawmill, looking down the high-sided street to the opening at the end where the bare trees showed and behind them the far façade of the Bal Bullier across the width of the Boulevard St.-Michel, I opened the gate and went in past the fresh-sawn lumber and left my racket in its press beside the stairs that led to the top floor of the pavillon. I called up the stairs but there was no one home.

“Madame has gone out and the bonne and the baby too,” the wife of the sawmill owner told me. She was a difficult woman, over-plump, with brassy hair, and I thanked her.

“There was a young man to see you,” she said, using the term jeune homme instead of monsieur. “He said he would be at the Lilas.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “If Madame comes in, please tell her I am at the Lilas.”

“She went out with friends,” the wife said and gathering her purple dressing gown about her went on high heels into the doorway of her own domaine without closing the door.

I walked down the street between the high, stained and streaked white houses and turned to the right at the open, sunny end and went into the sun-striped dusk of the Lilas.

There was no one there I knew and I went outside onto the terrace and found Evan Shipman waiting. He was a fine poet and he knew and cared about horses, writing and painting. He rose and I saw him tall and pale and thin, his white shirt dirty and worn at the collar, his tie carefully knotted, his worn and wrinkled grey suit, his fingers stained darker than his hair, his nails dirty and his loving, deprecatory smile that he held tightly not to show his bad teeth.

“It’s good to see you, Hem,” he said.

“How are you, Evan?” I asked.

“A little down,” he said. “I think I have the ‘Mazeppa’ licked though. Have you been going well?”

“I hope so,” I said. “I was out playing tennis with Ezra when you came by.”

“Is Ezra well?”

“Very.”

“I’m so glad. Hem, you know I don’t think that owner’s wife where you live likes me. She wouldn’t let me wait upstairs for you.”

“I’ll tell her,” I said.

“Don’t bother. I can always wait here. It’s very pleasant in the sun now, isn’t it?”

“It’s fall now,” I said. “I don’t think you dress warmly enough.”

“It’s only cool in the evening,” Evan said. “I’ll wear my coat.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No. But it’s somewhere safe.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I left the poem in it.” He laughed heartily holding his lips tightly over the teeth. “Have a whisky with me, please, Hem.”

“All right.”

“Jean,” Evan got up and called the waiter. “Two whiskies please.”

Jean brought the bottle and the glasses and two ten-franc saucers with the syphon. He used no measuring glass and poured the whisky until the glasses were more than three-quarters full. Jean loved Evan who often went out and worked with him at his garden in Montrouge, out beyond the Porte d’Orléans, on Jean’s day off.

“You mustn’t exaggerate,” Evan said to the tall old waiter.

“They are two whiskies, aren’t they?” the waiter asked.

We added water and Evan said, “Take the first sip very carefully, Hem. Properly handled, they will hold us for some time.”

“Are you taking any care of yourself?” I asked.

“Yes, truly, Hem. Let’s talk about something else, should we?”

There was no one sitting on the terrace and the whisky was warming us both although I was better dressed for the fall than Evan as I wore a sweatshirt for underwear and then a shirt and a blue wool French sailor’s sweater over the shirt.

“I’ve been wondering about Dostoyevsky,” I said. “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?”

“It can’t be the translation,” Evan said. “She makes the Tolstoi come out well written.”

“I know. I remember how many times I tried to read War and Peace until I got the Constance Garnett translation.”

“They say it can be improved on,” Evan said. “I’m sure it can although I don’t know Russian. But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over.”

“I know,” I said. “But you can’t read Dostoyevsky over and over. I had Crime and Punishment on a trip when we ran out of books down at Schruns, and I couldn’t read it again when we had nothing to read. I read the Austrian papers and studied German until we found some Trollope in Tauchnitz.”

“God bless Tauchnitz,” Evan said. The whisky had lost its burning quality and was now, when water was added, simply much too strong.

“Dostoyevsky was a shit, Hem,” Evan went on. “He was best on shits and saints. He makes wonderful saints. It’s a shame we can’t reread him.”

“I’m going to try The Brothers again. It was probably my fault.”

“You can read some of it again. Most of it. But then it will start to make you angry, no matter how great it is.”

“Well, we were lucky to have had it to read the first time and maybe there will be a better translation.”

“But don’t let it tempt you, Hem.”

“I won’t. I’m trying to do it so it will make it without you knowing it, and so the more you read it, the more there will be.”

“Well I’m backing you in Jean’s whisky,” Evan said.

“He’ll get in trouble doing that,” I said.

“He’s in trouble already,” Evan said.

“How?”

“They’re changing the management,” Evan said. “The new owners want to have a different clientele that will spend some money and they are going to put in an American bar. The waiters are going to be in white jackets, Hem, and they have been ordered to be ready to shave off their mustaches.”

“They can’t do that to André and Jean.”

“They shouldn’t be able to, but they will.”

“Jean has had a mustache all his life. That’s a dragoon’s mustache. He served in a cavalry regiment.”

“He’s going to have to cut it off.”

I drank the last of the whisky.

“Another whisky, Monsieur?” Jean asked. “A whisky, Monsieur Shipman?” His heavy drooping mustache was a part of his thin, kind face, and the bald top of his head glistened under the strands of hair that were slicked across it.

“Don’t do it, Jean,” I said. “Don’t take a chance.”

“There is no chance,” he said, softly to us. “There is much confusion. Many are leaving. Entendu, Messieurs,” he said aloud. He went into the café and came out carrying the bottle of whisky, two large glasses, two ten-franc gold-rimmed saucers and a seltzer bottle.

“No, Jean,” I said.

He put the glasses down on the saucers and filled them almost to the brim with whisky and took the remains of the bottle back into the café. Evan and I squirted a little seltzer into the glasses.

“It was a good thing Dostoyevsky didn’t know Jean,” Evan said. “He might have died of drink.”

“What are we going to do with these?”

“Drink them,” Evan said. “It’s a protest. It’s direct action.”

On the following Monday when I went to the Lilas to work in the morning, André served me a bovril, which is a cup of beef extract and water. He was short and blond and where his stubby mustache had been, his lip was as bare as a priest’s. He was wearing a white American barman’s coat.

“And Jean?”

“He won’t be in until tomorrow.”

“How is he?”

“It took him longer to reconcile himself. He was in a heavy cavalry regiment throughout the war. He had the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire.”

“I did not know he was so badly wounded.”

“No. He was wounded of course but it was the other sort of Médaille Militaire he has. For gallantry.”

“Tell him I asked for him.”

“Of course,” André said. “I hope it will not take him too long to reconcile himself.”

“Please give him Mr. Shipman’s greeting too.”

“Mr. Shipman is with him,” André said. “They are gardening together.”

An Agent of Evil

The last thing Ezra said to me before he left the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to go to Rapallo was, “Hem, I want you to keep this jar of opium and give it to Dunning only when he needs it.”

It was a large cold-cream jar and when I unscrewed the top the content was dark and sticky and it had the smell of very raw opium. Ezra had bought it from an Indian chief, he said, on the avenue de l’Opéra near the Boulevard des Italiens and it had been very expensive. I thought it must have come from the old Hole in the Wall bar which was a hangout for deserters and for dope peddlers during and after the first war. The Hole in the Wall was a very narrow bar with a red-painted façade, little more than a passageway, on the rue des Italiens. At one time it had a rear exit into the sewers of Paris from which you were supposed to be able to reach the catacombs. Dunning was Ralph Cheever Dunning, a poet who smoked opium and forgot to eat. When he was smoking too much he could only drink milk and he wrote in terza riruce which endeared him to Ezra who also found fine qualities in his poetry. He lived in the same courtyard where Ezra had his studio and Ezra had called me in to help him when Dunning was dying a few weeks before Ezra was to leave Paris.

“Dunning is dying,” Ezra’s message said. “Please come at once.”

Dunning looked like a skeleton as he lay on the mattress and he would certainly have eventually died of malnutrition but I finally convinced Ezra that few people ever died while speaking in well rounded phrases and that I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza riruce and that I doubted even if Dante could do it. Ezra said he was not talking in terza riruce and I said that perhaps it only sounded like terza riruce because I had been asleep when he had sent for me. Finally after a night with Dunning waiting for death to come, the matter was put in the hands of a physician and Dunning was taken to a private clinic to be disintoxicated. Ezra guaranteed his bills and enlisted the aid of I do not know which lovers of poetry on Dunning’s behalf. Only the delivery of the opium in any true emergency was left to me. It was a sacred charge coming from Ezra and I only hoped I could live up to it and determine the state of a true emergency. It came when Ezra’s concierge arrived one Sunday morning at the sawmill yard and shouted up to the open window where I was studying the racing form, “Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre.”

Dunning having climbed to the roof of the studio and refusing categorically to come down seemed a valid emergency and I found the opium jar and walked up the street with the concierge who was a small and intense woman very excited by the situation.

“Monsieur has what is needed?” she asked me.

“Absolutely,” I said. “There will be no difficulty.”

“Monsieur Pound thinks of everything,” she said. “He is kindness personified.”

“He is indeed,” I said. “And I miss him every day.”

“Let us hope that Monsieur Dunning will be reasonable.”

“I have what it takes,” I assured her.

When we reached the courtyard where the studios were the concierge said, “He’s come down.”

“He must have known I was coming,” I said.

I climbed the outside stairway that led to Dunning’s place and knocked. He opened the door. He was gaunt and seemed unusually tall.

“Ezra asked me to bring you this,” I said and handed him the jar. “He said you would know what it was.”

He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You bastard.”

“Ezra said you might need it,” I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle.

“You are sure you don’t need it?” I asked.

He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door.

I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket.

“He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound,” I said to the concierge.

“Perhaps he will be tranquil now,” she said.

“Perhaps he has some of his own,” I said.

“Poor Monsieur Dunning,” she said.

The lovers of poetry that Ezra had organized rallied to Dunning’s aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase “Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre” gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very great poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery.

“We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,” he once said to me. “The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.”

Scott Fitzgerald

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget. He had come into the Dingo bar in the rue Delambre where I was sitting with some completely worthless characters, had introduced himself and introduced a tall, pleasant man who was with him as Dunc Chaplin, the famous pitcher. I had not followed Princeton baseball and had never heard of Dunc Chaplin but he was extraordinarily nice, unworried, relaxed and friendly and I much preferred him to Scott.

Scott was a man then who looked like a boy with a face between handsome and pretty. He had very fair wavy hair, a high forehead, excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped Irish mouth that, on a girl, would have been the mouth of a beauty. His chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome, almost beautiful, unmarked nose. This should not have added up to a pretty face, but that came from the coloring, the very fair hair and the mouth. The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.

I was very curious to see him and I had been working very hard all day and it seemed quite wonderful that here should be Scott Fitzgerald and the great Dunc Chaplin whom I had never heard of but who was now my friend. Scott did not stop talking and since I was embarrassed by what he said — it was all about my writing and how great it was — I kept on looking at him closely and noticed instead of listening. We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was open disgrace. Scott had ordered champagne and he and Dunc Chaplin and I drank it together with, I think, some of the worthless characters. I do not think that Dunc or I followed the speech very closely, for it was a speech and I kept on observing Scott. He was lightly built and did not look in awfully good shape, his face being faintly puffy. His Brooks Brothers clothes fitted him well and he wore a white shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a Guard’s tie. I thought I ought to tell him about the tie, maybe, because they did have British in Paris and one might come into the Dingo — there were two there at the time — but then I thought the hell with it and I looked at him some more. It turned out later he had bought the tie in Rome.

I wasn’t learning very much from looking at him now except that he had well shaped, capable-looking hands, not too small, and when he sat down on one of the bar stools I saw that he had very short legs. With normal legs he would have been perhaps two inches taller. We had finished the first bottle of champagne and started on the second and the speech was beginning to run down.

Both Dunc and I were beginning to feel even better than we had felt before the champagne and it was nice to have the speech ending. Until then I had felt that what a great writer I was had been carefully kept secret between myself and my wife and only those people we knew well enough to speak to. I was glad Scott had come to the same happy conclusion as to this possible greatness, but I was also glad he was beginning to run out of the speech. But after the speech came the question period. You could study him and neglect to follow the speech, but the questions were inescapable. Scott, I was to find, believed that the novelist could find out what he needed to know by direct questioning of his friends and acquaintances. The interrogation was direct.

“Ernest,” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you Ernest, do you?”

“Ask Dunc,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. This is serious. Tell me, did you and your wife sleep together before you were married?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But how can you not remember something of such importance?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It is odd, isn’t it?”

“It’s worse than odd,” Scott said. “You must be able to remember.”

“I’m sorry. It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

“Don’t talk like some limey,” he said. “Try to be serious and remember.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s hopeless.”

“You could make an honest effort to remember.”

The speech comes pretty high, I thought. I wondered if he gave everyone the speech, but I didn’t think so because I had watched him sweat while he was making it. The sweat had come out on his long, perfect Irish upper lip in tiny drops, and that was when I had looked down away from his face and checked on the length of his legs, drawn up as he sat on the bar stool. Now I looked back at his face again and it was then that the strange thing happened.

As he sat there at the bar holding the glass of champagne the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the puffiness was gone and then it drew tighter until the face was like a death’s head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the color left the face so that it was the color of used candle wax. This was not my imagination. His face became a true death’s head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.

“Scott,” I said. “Are you all right?”

He did not answer and his face looked more drawn than ever.

“We’d better get him to a first aid station,” I said to Dunc Chaplin.

“No. He’s all right.”

“He looks like he is dying.”

“No. That’s the way it takes him.”

We got him into a taxi and I was very worried but Dunc said he was all right and not to worry about him. “He’ll probably be all right by the time he gets home,” he said.

He must have been because, when I met him at the Closerie des Lilas a few days later, I said that I was sorry the stuff had hit him that way and that maybe we had drunk it too fast while we were talking.

“What do you mean you are sorry? What stuff hit me what way? What are you talking about, Ernest?”

“I meant the other night at the Dingo.”

“There was nothing wrong with me at the Dingo. I simply got tired of those absolutely bloody British you were with and went home.”

“There weren’t any British there when you were there. Only the bartender.”

“Don’t try to make a mystery of it. You know the ones I mean.”

“Oh,” I said. He had gone back to the Dingo later. Or he’d gone there another time. No, I remembered, there had been two British there. It was true. I remembered who they were. They had been there all right.

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

“That girl with the phony title who was so rude and that silly drunk with her. They said they were friends of yours.”

“They are. And she is very rude sometimes.”

“You see. There’s no use to make mysteries simply because one has drunk a few glasses of wine. Why did you want to make the mysteries? It isn’t the sort of thing I thought you would do.”

“I don’t know.” I wanted to drop it. Then I thought of something. “Were they rude about your tie?” I asked.

“Why should they have been rude about my tie? I was wearing a plain black knitted tie with a white polo shirt.”

I gave up then and he asked me why I liked this café and I told him about it in the old days and he began to try to like it too and we sat there, me liking it and he trying to like it, and he asked questions and told me about writers and publishers and agents and critics and George Horace Lorimer, and the gossip and economics of being a successful writer, and he was cynical and funny and very jolly and charming and endearing, even if you were careful about anyone becoming endearing. He spoke slightingly but without bitterness of everything he had written, and I knew his new book must be very good for him to speak, without bitterness, of the faults of past books. He wanted me to read the new book, The Great Gatsby, as soon as he could get his last and only copy back from someone he had loaned it to. To hear him talk of it, you would never know how very good it was, except that he had the shyness about it that all non-conceited writers have when they have done something very fine, and I hoped he would get the book quickly so that I might read it.

Scott told me that he had heard from Maxwell Perkins that the book was not selling well but that it had very fine reviews. I do not remember whether it was that day, or much later, that he showed me a review by Gilbert Seldes that could not have been better. It could only have been better if Gilbert Seldes had been better. Scott was puzzled and hurt that the book was not selling well but, as I said, he was not at all bitter then and he was both shy and happy about the book’s quality.

On this day as we sat outside on the terrace of the Lilas and watched it get dusk and the people passing on the sidewalk and the grey light of the evening changing, there was no chemical change in him from the two whisky and sodas that we drank. I watched carefully for it, but it did not come and he asked no shameless questions, did nothing embarrassing, made no speeches, and acted as a normal, intelligent and charming person.

He told me that he and Zelda, his wife, had been compelled to abandon their small Renault motor car in Lyon because of bad weather and he asked me if I would go down to Lyon with him on the train to pick up the car and drive up with him to Paris. The Fitzgeralds had rented a furnished flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt not far from the Etoile. It was late spring now and I thought the country would be at its best and we could have an excellent trip. Scott seemed so nice and so reasonable, and I had watched him drink two good solid whiskies and nothing happened, and his charm and his seeming good sense made the other night at the Dingo seem like an unpleasant dream. So I said I would like to go down to Lyon with him and when did he want to leave.

We agreed to meet the next day and we then arranged to leave for Lyon on the express train that left in the morning. This train left at a convenient hour and was very fast. It made only one stop, as I recall, at Dijon. We planned to get into Lyon, have the car checked and in good shape, have an excellent dinner and get an early-morning start back towards Paris.

I was enthusiastic about the trip. I would have the company of an older and successful writer, and in the time we would have to talk in the car I would certainly learn much that it would be useful to know. It is strange now to remember thinking of Scott as an older writer, but at the time, since I had not yet read The Great Gatsby, I thought of him as a much older writer. I thought he wrote Saturday Evening Post stories that had been readable three years before but I never thought of him as a serious writer. He had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no harm. I could not believe this and I wanted to argue him out of it but I needed a novel to back up my faith and to show him and convince him, and I had not yet written any such novel. Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.

My wife, Hadley, was happy for me to make the trip, though she did not take seriously the writing of Scott’s that she had read. Her idea of a good writer was Henry James. But she thought it was a good idea for me to take a rest from work and make the trip, although we both wished that we had enough money to have a car and were making the trip ourselves. But that was something I never had any idea would happen. I had received an advance of two hundred dollars from Boni and Liveright for a first book of short stories to be published in America that fall, and I was selling stories to the Frankfurter Zeitung and to Der Querschnitt in Berlin and to This Quarter and The Transatlantic Review in Paris and we were living with great economy and not spending any money except for necessities in order to save money to go down to the feria at Pamplona in July and to Madrid and to the feria in Valencia afterwards.

On the morning we were to leave from the Gare de Lyon I arrived in plenty of time and waited outside the train gates for Scott. He was bringing the tickets. When it got close to the time for the train to leave and he had not arrived, I bought an entry ticket to the track and walked along the side of the train looking for him. I did not see him and as the long train was about to pull out I got aboard and walked through the train hoping only that he would be aboard. It was a long train and he was not on it. I explained the situation to the conductor, paid for a ticket, second class — there was no third — and asked the conductor for the name of the best hotel in Lyon. There was nothing to do but wire Scott from Dijon giving him the address of the hotel where I would wait for him in Lyon. He would not get it before he left, but his wife would be presumed to wire it on to him. I had never heard, then, of a grown man missing a train; but on this trip I was to learn many new things.

In those days I had a very bad, quick temper, but by the time we were through Montereau it had quieted down and I was not too angry to watch and enjoy the countryside and at noon I had a good lunch in the dining car and drank a bottle of St.-Émilion and thought that even if I had been a damned fool to accept an invitation for a trip that was to be paid for by someone else, and was spending money on it that we needed to go to Spain, it was a good lesson for me. I had never before accepted an invitation to go on any trip that was paid for, instead of the cost split, and in this one I had insisted that we split the cost of the hotels and meals. But now I did not know whether Fitzgerald would even show up. While I had been angry I had demoted him from Scott to Fitzgerald. Later I was delighted that I had used up the anger at the start and gotten it over with. It was not a trip designed for a man easy to anger.

In Lyon I learned that Scott left Paris for Lyon but had left no word as to where he was staying. I confirmed my address there and the servant said she would let him know if he called. Madame was not well and was still sleeping. I called all the name hotels and left messages but could not locate Scott and then I went out to a café to have an apéritif and read the papers. At the café I met a man who ate fire for a living and also bent coins which he held in his toothless jaws with his thumb and forefinger. His gums were sore but firm to the eye as he exhibited them and he said it was not a bad métier. I asked him to have a drink and he was pleased. He had a fine dark face that glowed and shone when he ate the fire. He said there was no money in eating fire nor in feats of strength with fingers and jaws in Lyon. False fire-eaters had ruined the métier and would continue to ruin it wherever they were allowed to practice. He had been eating fire all evening, he said, and did not have enough money on him to eat anything else that night. I asked him to have another drink, to wash away the petrol taste of the fire-eating, and said we could have dinner together if he knew a good place that was cheap enough. He said he knew an excellent place.

We ate very cheaply in an Algerian restaurant and I liked the food and the Algerian wine. The fire-eater was a nice man and it was interesting to see him eat, as he could chew with his gums as well as most people can with their teeth. He asked me what I did to make a living and I told him that I was starting in as a writer. He asked what sort of writing and I told him stories. He said he knew many stories, some of them more horrible and incredible than anything that had ever been written. He could tell them to me and I would write them and then if they made any money I would give him whatever I thought fair. Better still we could go to North Africa together and he would take me to the country of the Blue Sultan where I could get stories such as no man had ever heard.

I asked him what sort of stories and he said battles, executions, tortures, violations, fearful customs, unbelievable practices, debaucheries; anything I needed. It was getting time for me to get back to the hotel and check on Scott again, so I paid for the meal and said we would certainly be running into each other again. He said he was working down toward Marseilles and I said sooner or later we would meet somewhere and it was a pleasure to have dined together. I left him straightening out bent coins and stacking them on the table and walked back to the hotel.

Lyon was not a very cheerful town at night. It was a big, heavy, solid-money town, probably fine if you had money and liked that sort of town. For years I had heard about the wonderful chicken in the restaurants there, but we had eaten mutton instead. The mutton had been excellent.

There was no word from Scott at the hotel and I went to bed in the unaccustomed luxury of the hotel and read a copy of the first volume of A Sportsman’s Sketches by Turgenev that I had borrowed from Sylvia Beach’s library. I had not been in the luxury of a big hotel for three years and I opened the windows wide and rolled up the pillows under my shoulders and head and was happy being with Turgenev in Russia until I was asleep while still reading. I was shaving in the morning getting ready to go out for breakfast when they called from the desk saying a gentleman was downstairs to see me.

“Ask him to come up, please,” I said and went on shaving, listening to the town which had come heavily alive since early morning.

Scott did not come up and I met him down at the desk.

“I’m terribly sorry there was this mix-up,” he said. “If I had only known what hotel you were going to it would have been simple.”

“That’s all right,” I said. We were going to have a long ride and I was all for peace. “What train did you come down on?”

“One not long after the one you took. It was a very comfortable train and we might just as well have come down together.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Not yet. I’ve been hunting all over the town for you.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “Didn’t they tell you at home that I was here?”

“No. Zelda wasn’t feeling well and I probably shouldn’t have come. The whole trip has been disastrous so far.”

“Let’s get some breakfast and find the car and roll,” I said.

“That’s fine. Should we have breakfast here?”

“It would be quicker in a café.”

“But we’re sure to get a good breakfast here.”

“All right.”

It was a big American breakfast with ham and eggs and it was very good. But by the time we had ordered it, waited for it, eaten it, and waited to pay for it, close to an hour had been lost. It was not until the waiter came with the bill that Scott decided that we have the hotel make us a picnic lunch. I tried to argue him out of this as I was sure we could get a bottle of Mâcon in Mâcon and we could buy something to make sandwiches in a charcuterie. Or, if things were closed when we went through, there would be any number of restaurants where we could stop on our way. But he said I had told him that the chicken was wonderful in Lyon and that we should certainly take one with us. So the hotel made us a lunch that could not have cost us very much more than four or five times what it would have cost us if we had bought it ourselves.

Scott had obviously been drinking before I met him and, as he looked as though he needed a drink, I asked him if he did not want one in the bar before we set out. He told me he was not a morning drinker and asked if I was. I told him it depended entirely on how I felt and what I had to do and he said that if I felt that I needed a drink, he would keep me company so I would not have to drink alone. So we had a whisky and Perrier in the bar while we waited for the lunch and both felt much better.

I paid for the hotel room and the bar, although Scott wanted to pay for everything. Since the start of the trip I had felt a little complicated about it emotionally and I found I felt much better the more things I could pay for. I was using up the money we had saved for Spain, but I knew I had good credit with Sylvia Beach and could borrow and repay whatever I was wasting now.

At the garage where Scott had left the car, I was astonished to find that the small Renault had no top. The top had been damaged in unloading the car in Marseilles, or it had been damaged in Marseilles in some manner and Zelda had ordered it cut away and refused to have it replaced. His wife hated car tops, Scott told me, and without the top they had driven as far as Lyon where they were halted by the rain. The car was in fair shape otherwise and Scott paid the bill after disputing several charges for washing, greasing, and for adding two liters of oil. The garage man explained to me that the car needed new piston rings and had evidently been run without sufficient oil and water. He showed me how it had heated up and burned the paint off the motor. He said if I could persuade Monsieur to have a ring job done in Paris, the car, which was a good little car, would be able to give the service it was built for.

“Monsieur would not let me replace the top.”

“No?”

“One has an obligation to a vehicle.”

“One has.”

“You gentlemen have no waterproofs?”

“No,” I said. “I did not know about the top.”

“Try and make Monsieur be serious,” he said pleadingly. “At least about the vehicle.”

“Ah,” I said.

We were halted by rain about an hour north of Lyon.

In that day we were halted by rain possibly ten times. They were passing showers and some of them were longer than others. If we had waterproof coats it would have been pleasant enough to drive in that spring rain. As it was we sought the shelter of trees or halted at cafés alongside the road. We had a marvelous lunch from the hotel at Lyon, an excellent truffled roast chicken, delicious bread and white Mâcon wine and Scott was very happy when we drank the white Mâconnais at each of our stops. At Mâcon I had bought four more bottles of excellent wine which I uncorked as we needed them.

I am not sure Scott had ever drunk wine from a bottle before and it was exciting to him as though he were slumming or as a girl might be excited by going swimming for the first time without a bathing suit. But, by early afternoon, he had begun to worry about his health. He told me about two people who had died of congestion of the lungs recently. Both of them had died in Italy and he had been deeply impressed.

I told him that congestion of the lungs was an old-fashioned term for pneumonia, and he told me that I knew nothing about it and was absolutely wrong. Congestion of the lungs was a malady which was indigenous to Europe and I could not possibly know anything about it even if I had read my father’s medical books, since they dealt with diseases that were strictly American. I said that my father had studied in Europe too. But Scott explained that congestion of the lungs had only appeared in Europe recently and that my father could not possibly have known anything about it. He also explained that diseases were different in different parts of America, and if my father had practiced medicine in New York instead of in the Middle West, he would have known an entirely different gamut of diseases. He used the word gamut.

I said that he had a good point in the prevalence of certain diseases in one part of the United States and their absence in others and cited the amount of leprosy in New Orleans and its low incidence, then, in Chicago. But I said that doctors had a system of exchange of knowledge and information among themselves and now that I remembered it after he had brought it up, I had read the authoritative article on congestion of the lungs in Europe in the Journal of the American Medical Association which traced its history back to Hippocrates himself. This held him for a while and I urged him to take another drink of Mâcon, since a good white wine, moderately full-bodied but with a low alcoholic content, was almost a specific against the disease.

Scott cheered a little after this but he began to fail again shortly and asked me if we would make a big town before the onset of the fever and delirium by which, I had told him, the true congestion of the lungs, European, announced itself. I was now translating from an article which I had read in a French medical journal on the same malady while waiting at the American Hospital in Neuilly to have my throat cauterized, I told him. A word like cauterized had a comforting effect on Scott. But he wanted to know when we would make the town. I said if we pushed on we should make it in twenty-five minutes to an hour.

Scott then asked me if I were afraid to die and I said more at some times than at others.

It now began to rain really heavily and we took refuge in the next village at a café. I cannot remember all the details of that afternoon but when we were finally in a hotel at what must have been Châlon-sur-Saône, it was so late that the drug stores were closed. Scott had undressed and gone to bed as soon as we reached the hotel. He did not mind dying of congestion of the lungs, he said. It was only the question of who was to look after Zelda and young Scotty. I did not see very well how I could look after them since I was having a healthily rough time looking after my wife Hadley and young son Bumby, but I said I would do my best and Scott thanked me. I must see that Zelda did not drink and that Scotty should have an English governess.

We had sent our clothes to be dried and were in our pajamas. It was still raining outside but it was cheerful in the room with the electric light on. Scott was lying in bed to conserve his strength for his battle against the disease. I had taken his pulse, which was seventy-two, and had felt his forehead, which was cool. I had listened to his chest and had him breathe deeply, and his chest sounded all right.

“Look, Scott,” I said. “You’re perfectly O.K. If you want to do the best thing to keep from catching cold, just stay in bed and I’ll order us each a lemonade and a whisky and you take an aspirin with yours and you’ll feel fine and won’t even get a cold in your head.”

“Those old wives’ remedies,” Scott said.

“You haven’t any temperature. How the hell are you going to have congestion of the lungs without a temperature?”

“Don’t swear at me,” Scott said. “How do you know I haven’t a temperature?”

“Your pulse is normal and you haven’t any fever to the touch.”

“To the touch,” Scott said bitterly. “If you’re a real friend, get me a thermometer.”

“I’m in pajamas.”

“Send for one.”

I rang for the waiter. He didn’t come and I rang again and then went down the hallway to look for him. Scott was lying with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully and, with his waxy color and his perfect features, he looked like a little dead crusader. I was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that I was leading, and already I missed not working and I felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life. I was very tired of Scott and of this silly comedy, but I found the waiter and gave him money to buy a thermometer and a tube of aspirin, and ordered two citron pressés and two double whiskies. I tried to order a bottle of whisky but they would only sell it by the drink.

Back in the room Scott was still lying as though on his tomb, sculpted as a monument to himself, his eyes closed and breathing with exemplary dignity.

Hearing me come in the room, he spoke. “Did you get the thermometer?”

I went over and put my hand on his forehead. It was not as cold as the tomb. But it was cool and not clammy.

“Nope,” I said.

“I thought you’d brought it.”

“I sent out for it.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No. It isn’t, is it?”

You could not be angry with Scott any more than you could be angry with someone who was crazy, but I was getting angry with myself for having become involved in the whole silliness. He did have a point though, and I knew it very well. Most drunkards in those days died of pneumonia, a disease which has now been almost eliminated. But it was hard to accept him as a drunkard, since he was affected by such small quantities of alcohol.

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer. I loved all wines except sweet or sweetish wines and wines that were too heavy, and it had never occurred to me that sharing a few bottles of fairly light, dry, white Mâcon could cause chemical changes in Scott that would turn him into a fool. There had been the whisky and Perrier in the morning but, in my ignorance of alcoholics then, I could not imagine one whisky harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.

While waiting for the waiter to bring the various things I sat and read a paper and finished one of the bottles of Mâcon that had been uncorked at the last stop. There are always some splendid crimes in the newspapers that you follow from day to day, when you live in France. These crimes read like continued stories and it is necessary to have read the opening chapters, since there are no summaries provided as there are in American serial stories and, anyway, no serial is as good in an American periodical unless you have read the all-important first chapter. When you are traveling through France the papers are disappointing because you miss the continuity of the different crimes, affaires, or scandales, and you miss much of the pleasure to be derived from reading about them in a café. Tonight I would have much preferred to be in a café where I might read the morning editions of the Paris papers and watch the people and drink something a little more authoritative than the Mâcon in preparation for dinner. But I was riding herd on Scott so I enjoyed myself where I was.

When the waiter arrived with the two glasses with the pressed lemon juice and ice, the whiskies, and the bottle of Perrier water, he told me that the pharmacy was closed and he could not get a thermometer. He had borrowed some aspirin. I asked him to see if he could borrow a thermometer. Scott opened his eyes and gave a baleful Irish look at the waiter.

“Have you told him how serious it is?” he asked.

“I think he understands.”

“Please try to make it clear.”

I tried to make it clear and the waiter said, “I’ll bring what I can.”

“Did you tip him enough to do any good? They only work for tips.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I thought the hotel paid them something on the side.”

“I mean they will only do something for you for a substantial tip. Most of them are rotten clean through.”

I thought of Evan Shipman and I thought of the waiter at the Closerie des Lilas who had been forced to cut his mustache when they made the American bar at the Closerie, and how Evan had been working out at his garden in Montrouge long before I had met Scott, and what good friends we all were and had been for a long time at the Lilas and of all of the moves that had been made and what they meant to all of us. I thought of telling Scott about this whole problem of the Lilas, although I had probably mentioned it to him before, but I knew he did not care about waiters nor their problems nor their great kindnesses and affections. At that time Scott hated the French, and since almost the only French he met with regularly were waiters whom he did not understand, taxi-drivers, garage employees and landlords, he had many opportunities to insult and abuse them.

He hated the Italians even more than the French and could not talk about them calmly even when he was sober. The English he often hated but he sometimes tolerated them and occasionally looked up to them. I do not know how he felt about the Germans and the Austrians. I do not know whether he had ever met any then or any Swiss.

On this evening in the hotel I was delighted that he was being so calm. I had mixed the lemonade and whisky and given it to him with two aspirins and he had swallowed the aspirins without protest and with admirable calm and was sipping his drink. His eyes were open now and were looking far away. I was reading the crime in the inside of the paper and was quite happy, too happy it seemed.

“You’re a cold one, aren’t you?” Scott asked and looking at him I saw that I had been wrong in my prescription, if not in my diagnosis, and that the whisky was working against us.

“How do you mean, Scott?”

“You can sit there and read that dirty French rag of a paper and it doesn’t mean a thing to you that I am dying.”

“Do you want me to call a doctor?”

“No. I don’t want a dirty French provincial doctor.”

“What do you want?”

“I want my temperature taken. Then I want my clothes dried and for us to get on an express train for Paris and to go to the American hospital at Neuilly.”

“Our clothes won’t be dry until morning and there aren’t any express trains,” I said. “Why don’t you rest and have some dinner in bed?”

“I want my temperature taken.”

After this went on for a long time the waiter brought a thermometer.

“Is this the only one you could get?” I asked. Scott had shut his eyes when the waiter came in and he did look at least as far gone as Camille. I have never seen a man who lost the blood from his face so fast and I wondered where it went.

“It is the only one in the hotel,” the waiter said and handed me the thermometer. It was a bath thermometer with a wooden back and enough metal to sink it in the bath. I took a quick gulp of the whisky sour and opened the window a moment to look out at the rain. When I turned Scott was watching me.

I shook the thermometer down professionally and said, “You’re lucky it’s not a rectal thermometer.”

“Where does this kind go?”

“Under the arm,” I told him and tucked it under my arm.

“Don’t upset the temperature,” Scott said. I shook the thermometer again with a single sharp downward twitch and unbuttoned his pajama jacket and put the instrument under his armpit while I felt his cool forehead and then took his pulse again. He stared straight ahead. The pulse was seventy-two. I kept the thermometer in for four minutes.

“I thought they only kept them in for one minute,” Scott said.

“This is a big thermometer,” I explained. “You multiply by the square of the size of the thermometer. It’s a centigrade thermometer.”

Finally I took the thermometer out and carried it over by the reading light.

“What is it?”

“Thirty-seven and six-tenths.”

“What’s normal?”

“That’s normal.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“Try it on yourself. I have to be sure.”

I shook the thermometer down and opened my pajamas and put the thermometer in my armpit and held it there while I watched the time. Then I looked at it.

“What is it?” I studied it.

“Exactly the same.”

“How do you feel?”

“Splendid,” I said. I was trying to remember whether thirty-seven six was really normal or not. It did not matter, for the thermometer, unaffected, was steady at thirty.

Scott was a little suspicious so I asked if he wanted me to make another test.

“No,” he said. “We can be happy it cleared up so quickly. I’ve always had great recuperative power.”

“You’re fine,” I said. “But I think it would be just as well if you stayed in bed and had a light supper, and then we can start early in the morning.” I had planned to buy us raincoats but I would have to borrow money from him for that and I did not want to start arguing about that now.

Scott did not want to stay in bed. He wanted to get up and get dressed and go downstairs and call Zelda so she would know he was all right.

“Why would she think you weren’t all right?”

“This is the first night I have ever slept away from her since we were married and I have to talk to her. You can see what it means to us both, can’t you?”

I could, but I could not see how he and Zelda could have slept together on the night just past; but it was nothing to argue about. Scott drank the whisky sour down very fast now and asked me to order another. I found the waiter and returned the thermometer and asked him how our clothes were coming along. He thought they might be dry in an hour or so. “Have the valet press them and that will dry them. It doesn’t matter that they should be bone-dry.”

The waiter brought the two drinks against catching cold and I sipped mine and urged Scott to sip his slowly. I was worried now he might catch cold and I could see by now that if he ever had anything as definitely bad as a cold he would probably have to be hospitalized. But the drink made him feel wonderful for a while and he was happy with the tragic implications of this being Zelda’s and his first night of separation since their marriage. Finally he could not wait longer to call her and put on his dressing gown and went down to put the call through.

It would take some time for the call and shortly after he came up, the waiter appeared with two more double whisky sours. This was the most I had ever seen Scott drink until then, but they had no effect on him except to make him more animated and talkative, and he started to tell me the outline of his life with Zelda. He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St.-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.

Scott was very articulate and told a story well. He did not have to spell the words nor attempt to punctuate and you did not have the feeling of reading an illiterate that his letters gave you before they had been corrected. I knew him for two years before he could spell my name; but then it was a long name to spell and perhaps it became harder to spell all of the time, and I give him great credit for spelling it correctly finally. He learned to spell more important things and he tried to think straight about many more.

On this night though he wanted me to know and understand and appreciate what it was that had happened at St.-Raphael and I saw it so clearly that I could see the single seater seaplane buzzing the diving raft and the color of the sea and the shape of the pontoons and the shadow that they cast and Zelda’s tan and Scott’s tan and the dark blonde and the light blond of their hair and the darkly tanned face of the boy that was in love with Zelda. I could not ask the question that was in my mind, how, if this story was true and it had all happened, could Scott have slept each night in the same bed with Zelda? But maybe that was what had made it sadder than any story anyone had ever told me then, and, too, maybe he did not remember, as he did not remember last night.

Our clothes came before the call did and we dressed and went downstairs to have dinner. Scott was a little unsteady now and he looked at people out of the side of his eyes with a certain belligerency. We had very good snails, with a carafe of Fleury to start with and while we were about halfway through them Scott’s call came. He was gone about an hour and I ate his snails finally, dipping up the butter, garlic and parsley sauce with broken bits of bread, and drank the carafe of Fleury. When he came back I said I would get him some more snails but he said he did not want any. He wanted something simple. He did not want a steak, nor liver and bacon, nor an omelette. He would take chicken. We had eaten very good cold chicken at noon but this was still famous chicken country, so we had poularde de Bresse and a bottle of Montagny, a light, pleasant white wine of the neighborhood. Scott ate very little and sipped at one glass of the wine. He passed out at the table with his head on his hands. It was natural and there was no theater about it and it even looked as though he were careful not to spill nor break things. The waiter and I got him up to his room and laid him on the bed and I undressed him to his underwear, hung his clothes up, and then stripped the covers off the bed and spread them over him. I opened the window and saw it was clear outside and left the window open.

Downstairs I finished my dinner and thought about Scott. It was obvious he should not drink anything and I had not been taking good care of him. Anything that he drank seemed to stimulate him too much and then to poison him and I planned on the next day to cut all drinking to the minimum. I would tell him that we were getting back to Paris now and that I had to train in order to write. This was not true. My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing. I went upstairs and opened all the windows wide and undressed and was asleep almost as soon as I was in bed.

The next day we drove to Paris on a beautiful day up through the Côte d’Or with the air freshly washed and the hills and the fields and the vineyards all new, and Scott was very cheerful and happy and healthy and told me the plots of each and every one of Michael Arlen’s books. Michael Arlen, he said, was the man you had to watch and he and I could both learn much from him. I said I could not read the books. He said I did not have to. He would tell me the plots and describe the characters. He gave me a sort of oral Ph.D. thesis on Michael Arlen.

I asked him if he had a good connection on the phone when he talked to Zelda and he said that it was not bad and that they had many things to talk about. At meals I ordered one bottle of the lightest wine I could locate and told Scott he would do me a great favor if he would not let me order any more as I had to train before I wrote and should not under any circumstances drink more than half a bottle. He co-operated wonderfully and when he saw me looking nervous toward the end of a single bottle, gave me some of his share.

When I had left him at his home and taken a taxi back to the sawmill, it was wonderful to see my wife and we went up to the Closerie des Lilas to have a drink. We were happy the way children are who have been separated and are together again and I told her about the trip.

“But didn’t you have any fun or learn anything, Tatie?” she asked.

“I learned about Michael Arlen, if I would have listened, and I learned things I haven’t sorted out.”

“Isn’t Scott happy at all?”

“Maybe.”

“Poor man.”

“I learned one thing.”

“What?”

“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

“Isn’t that fine?”

“Yes. And we’re going to Spain.”

“Yes. Now it’s less than six weeks before we go. And this year we won’t let anyone spoil it, will we?”

“No. And after Pamplona we’ll go to Madrid and to Valencia.”

“M-m-m-m,” she said softly, like a cat.

“Poor Scott,” I said.

“Poor everybody,” Hadley said. “Rich feathercats with no money.”

“We’re awfully lucky.”

“We’ll have to be good and hold it.”

We both touched wood on the café table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this café table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

A day or two after the trip Scott brought his book over. It had a garish dust jacket and I remember being embarrassed by the violence, bad taste and slippery look of it. It looked the book jacket for a book of bad science fiction. Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked the jacket and now he didn’t like it. I took it off to read the book.

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.

Hawks Do Not Share

Scott Fitzgerald invited us to have lunch with his wife Zelda and his little daughter at the furnished flat they had rented at 14 rue Tilsitt. I cannot remember much about the flat except that it was gloomy and airless and that there was nothing in it that seemed to belong to them except Scott’s first books bound in light blue leather with the titles in gold. Scott also showed us a large ledger with all of the stories he had published listed in it year after year with the prices he had received for them and also the amounts received for any motion picture sales, and the sales and royalties of his books. They were all noted as carefully as the log of a ship and Scott showed them to both of us with impersonal pride as though he were the curator of a museum. Scott was nervous and hospitable and he showed us his accounts of his earnings as though they had been the view. There was no view.

Zelda had a very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before and had quarreled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me, to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a kill-joy or a spoilsport. Those were the two words she used to him and there was recrimination and Zelda would say, “I did not. I did no such thing. It’s not true, Scott.” Later she would seem to recall something and would laugh happily.

On this day Zelda did not look her best. Her beautiful dark blonde hair had been ruined temporarily by a bad permanent she had gotten in Lyon, when the rain had made them abandon their car, and her eyes were tired and her face was too taut and drawn.

She was formally pleasant to Hadley and me but a big part of her seemed not to be present but to still be on the party she had come home from that morning. She and Scott both seemed to feel that Scott and I had enjoyed a great and wonderful time on the trip up from Lyon and she was jealous about it.

“When you two can go off and have such simply wonderful times together, it only seems fair that I should have just a little fun with our good friends here in Paris,” she said to Scott.

Scott was being the perfect host and we ate a very bad lunch that the wine cheered a little but not much. The little girl was blonde, chubby-faced, well built, and very healthy looking and spoke English with a strong Cockney accent. Scott explained that she had an English nanny because he wanted her to speak like Lady Diana Manners when she grew up.

Zelda had hawk’s eyes and a thin mouth and deep-south manners and accent. Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night’s party and return with her eyes blank as a cat’s and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be able to write.

Zelda was jealous of Scott’s work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular pattern. Scott would resolve not to go on all-night drinking parties and to get some exercise each day and work regularly. He would start to work and as soon as he was working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party. They would quarrel and then make up and he would sweat out the alcohol on long walks with me, and make up his mind that this time he would really work, and would start off well. Then it would start all over again.

Scott was very much in love with Zelda and he was very jealous of her. He told me many times on our walks of how she had fallen in love with the French navy pilot. But she had never made him really jealous with another man since. This spring she was making him jealous with other women and on the Montmartre parties he was afraid to pass out and he was afraid to have her pass out. Becoming unconscious when they drank had always been their great defense. They went to sleep on drinking an amount of liquor or champagne that would have little effect on a person accustomed to drinking, and they would go to sleep like children. I have seen them become unconscious not as though they were drunk but as though they had been anesthetized and their friends, or sometimes a taxi-driver, would get them to bed, and when they woke they would be fresh and happy, not having taken enough alcohol to damage their bodies before it made them unconscious.

Now they had lost this natural defense. At this time Zelda could drink more than Scott could and Scott was afraid for her to pass out in the company they kept that spring and the places they went to. Scott did not like the places nor the people and he had to drink more than he could drink and be in any control of himself, to stand the people and the places, and then he began to have to drink to keep awake after he would usually have passed out. Finally he had few intervals of work at all.

He was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to Paris, the town best organized for a writer to write in that there is, and he thought always that there would be someplace where he and Zelda could have a good life together again. He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the mountains of the Esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.

Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there the next summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be brown and only have a single apéritif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda would be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and Zelda and their daughter were going to go there that summer.

I was trying to get him to write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did.

“You’ve written a fine novel now,” I told him. “And you mustn’t write slop.”

“The novel isn’t selling,” he said. “I must write stories and they have to be stories that will sell.”

“Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.”

“I’m going to,” he said.

But the way things were going, he was lucky to get any work done at all. Zelda did not encourage the people who were chasing her and she had nothing to do with them, she said. But it amused her and it made Scott jealous and he had to go with her to the places. It destroyed his work, and she was more jealous of his work than anything.

All that late spring and early summer Scott fought to work but he could only work in snatches. When I saw him he was always cheerful, sometimes desperately cheerful, and he made good jokes and was a good companion. When he had very bad times, I listened to him about them and tried to make him know that if he could hold onto himself he would write as he was made to write, and that only death was irrevocable. He would make fun of himself then, and as long as he could do that I thought that he was safe. Through all of this he wrote one good story, “The Rich Boy,” and I was sure that he could write better than that as he did later.

During the summer we were in Spain and I started the first draft of a novel and finished it back in Paris in September. Scott and Zelda had been at Cap d’Antibes, and that fall when I saw him in Paris he was very changed. He had not done any sobering up on the Riviera and he was drunk now in the day time as well as nights. It did not make any difference any more to him that anyone was working and he would come to 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs any time he was drunk either in the day time or at night. He had begun to be very rude to his inferiors or anyone he considered his inferior.

One time he came in through the sawmill gate with his small daughter — it was the English nurse’s day off and Scott was caring for the child — and at the foot of the stairs she told him she needed to go to the bathroom. Scott started to undress her and the proprietor, who lived on the floor below us, came in and said, “Monsieur, there is a cabinet de toilette just ahead of you to the left of the stairs.”

“Yes, and I’ll put your head in it too, if you’re not careful,” Scott told him.

He was very difficult all that fall but he had begun to work on a novel when he was sober. I saw him rarely when he was sober, but when he was sober he was always pleasant and he still made jokes and sometimes he would still make jokes about himself. But when he was drunk he would usually come to find me and, drunk, he took almost as much pleasure interfering with my work as Zelda did interfering with his. This continued for years but, for years too, I had no more loyal friend than Scott when he was sober.

That fall of 1925 he was upset because I would not show him the manuscript of the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. I explained to him that it would mean nothing until I had gone over it and rewritten it and that I did not want to discuss it or show it to anyone first. We were going down to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria as soon as the first snowfall there.

I rewrote the first half of the manuscript there, finished it in January, I think. I took it to New York and showed it to Max Perkins of Scribners and then went back to Schruns and finished rewriting the book. Scott did not see it until after the completed rewritten and cut manuscript had been sent to Scribners at the end of April. I remembered joking with him about it and him being worried and anxious to help as always once a thing was done. But I did not want his help while I was rewriting.

While we were living in the Vorarlberg and I was finishing rewriting the novel, Scott and his wife and child had left Paris for a watering place in the lower Pyrénées. Zelda had been ill with that familiar intestinal complaint that too much champagne produces and which was then diagnosed as colitis. Scott was not drinking, and starting to work and he wanted us to come to Juan-les-Pins in June. They would find an inexpensive villa for us and this time he would not drink and it would be like the old good days and we would swim and be healthy and brown and have one apéritif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda was well again and they were both fine and his novel was going wonderfully. He had money coming in from a dramatization of The Great Gatsby which was running well and it would sell to the movies and he had no worries. Zelda was really fine and everything was going to be disciplined.

I had been down in Madrid in May working by myself and I came by train from Bayonne to Juan-les-Pins third class and quite hungry because I had run out of money stupidly and had eaten last in Hendaye at the French-Spanish frontier. It was a nice villa and Scott had a very fine house not far away and I was very happy to see my wife who had the villa running beautifully, and our friends, and the single apéritif before lunch was very good and we had several more. That night there was a party to welcome us at the Casino, just a small party, the MacLeishes, the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds and we who were living at the villa. No one drank anything stronger than champagne and it was very gay and obviously a splendid place to write. There was going to be everything that a man needed to write except to be alone.

Zelda was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk’s eyes were clear and calm. I knew everything was all right and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned forward and said to me, telling me her great secret, “Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?”

Nobody thought anything of it at the time. It was only Zelda’s secret that she shared with me, as a hawk might share something with a man. But hawks do not share. Scott did not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane.

A Matter of Measurements

Much later, in the time after Zelda had what was then called her first nervous breakdown and we happened to be in Paris at the same time, Scott asked me to have lunch with him at Michaud’s restaurant on the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Pères. He said he had something very important to ask me that meant more than anything in the world to him and that I must answer absolutely truly. I said that I would do the best that I could. When he would ask me to tell him something absolutely truly, which is very difficult to do, and I would try it, what I said would make him angry, often not when I said it but afterwards, and sometimes long afterwards when he had brooded on it. My words would become something that would have to be destroyed and sometimes, if possible, me with them.

He drank wine at the lunch but it did not affect him and he had not prepared for the lunch by drinking before it. We talked about our work and about people and he asked me about people that we had not seen lately. I knew that he was writing something good and that he was having great trouble with it for many reasons but that was not what he wanted to talk about. I kept waiting for it to come, the thing that I had to tell the absolute truth about; but he would not bring it up until the end of the meal, as though we were having a business lunch.

Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, “You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I thought I had told you.”

“No. You told me a lot of things but not that.”

“That is what I have to ask you about.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”

“Come out to the office,” I said.

“Where is the office?”

“Le water,” I said.

We came back into the room and sat down at the table.

“You’re perfectly fine,” I said. “You are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.”

“Those statues may not be accurate.”

“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.”

“But why would she say it?”

“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to see a doctor.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.”

“Now do you believe me?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come on over to the Louvre,” I said. “It’s just down the street and across the river.”

We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still he was doubtful about himself.

“It is not basically a question of the size in repose,” I said. “It is the size that it becomes. It is also a question of angle.” I explained to him about using a pillow and a few other things that might be useful for him to know.

“There is one girl,” he said, “who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda said—”

“Forget what Zelda said,” I told him. “Zelda is crazy. There’s nothing wrong with you. Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.”

“You don’t know anything about Zelda.”

“All right,” I said. “Let it go at that. But you came to lunch to ask me a question and I’ve tried to give you an honest answer.”

But he was still doubtful.

“Should we go and see some pictures?” I asked. “Have you ever seen anything in here except the Mona Lisa?”

“I’m not in the mood for looking at pictures,” he said. “I promised to meet some people at the Ritz bar.”

Many years later at the Ritz bar, long after the end of the World War II, Georges, who is the bar chief now and who was the chasseur when Scott lived in Paris, asked me, “Papa, who was this Monsieur Fitzgerald that everyone asks me about?”

“Didn’t you know him?”

“No. I remember all of the people of that time. But now they ask me only about him.”

“What do you tell them?”

“Anything interesting that they wish to hear. What will please them. But tell me, who was he?”

“He was an American writer of the early Twenties and later who lived some time in Paris and abroad.”

“But why would I not remember him? Was he a good writer?”

“He wrote two very good books and one which was not completed which those who know his writing best say would have been very good. He also wrote some good short stories.”

“Did he frequent the bar much?”

“I believe so.”

“But you did not come to the bar in the early Twenties. I know that you were poor then and lived in a different quarter.”

“When I had money I went to the Crillon.”

“I know that too. I remember very well when we first met.”

“So do I.”

“It is strange that I have no memory of him,” Georges said.

“All those people are dead.”

“Still one does not forget people because they are dead and people keep asking me about him. You must tell me something about him for my memoirs.”

“I will.”

“I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night — in what year?” He smiled.

“He is dead too.”

“Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?”

“His first wife wrote very beautifully,” I said. “She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I ever read. Except Sir Samuel Baker’s book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia. Put that in your memoirs. Since you are interested in writers now.”

“Good,” said Georges. “The Baron was not a man that you forget. And the name of the book?”

“Out of Africa,” I said. “Blickie was always very proud of his first wife’s writing. But we knew each other long before she had written that book.”

“But Monsieur Fitzgerald that they keep asking me about?”

“He was in Frank’s time.”

“Yes. But I was the chasseur. You know what a chasseur is.”

“I am going to write something about him in a book that I will write about the early days in Paris. I promised myself that I would write it.”

“Good,” said Georges.

“I will put him in exactly as I remember him the first time that I met him.”

“Good,” said Georges. “Then, if he came here, I will remember him. After all one does not forget people.”

“Tourists?”

“Naturally. But you say he came here very much?”

“It meant very much to him.”

“You write about him as you remember him and then if he came here I will remember him.”

“We will see,” I said.

There Is Never Any End to Paris

When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when you got used to it. I could always go to a café to write and could work all morning over a café crème while the waiters cleaned and swept out the café and it gradually grew warmer. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a café in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby’s breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat’s weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie, the femme de ménage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.

But when you are poor, and we were really poor when I had given up all journalism when we came back from Canada, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a baby in Paris in the winter. At three months Mr. Bumby had crossed the North Atlantic on a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January. He never cried on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather. But our Paris was too cold for him.

We went to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Liechtenstein and stopped at Bludenz where there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to Schruns, which was a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.

The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. The meals were simple and excellent and the dining room and the wood-planked public bar were well heated and friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and poverty as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down, but its longer course was down.

There were no ski lifts from Schruns and no funiculars, but there were logging trails and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on seal skins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leave payment for any wood you used. In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hütte, the Madlener-Haus and the Wiesbadener-Hütte.

In back of the Taube there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tchagguns across the valley where there was a beautiful inn with an excellent collection of chamois horns on the walls of the drinking room. It was from behind the lumber village of Tchagguns, which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing went all the way up until you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.

Schruns was a healthy place for Bumby who had a dark-haired beautiful girl to take him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town were very friendly. Herr Walther Lent who was a pioneer high-mountain skier and at one time had been a partner with Hannes Schneider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski waxes for climbing and all snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled. Walther Lent’s system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.

Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain country where there was no one else and where the snow was untracked and then travel from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps. You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.

Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and later at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.

We loved the Vorarlberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about Thanksgiving time and stay until nearly Easter. There was always skiing even though Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in a winter of heavy snow. But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.

We were always hungry and every meal time was a great event. We drank light or dark beer and new wines and wines that were a year old sometimes. The white wines were the best. For other drinks there was kirsch made in the valley and Enzian Schnapps distilled from mountain gentian. Sometimes for dinner there would be jugged hare with a rich red wine sauce, and sometimes venison with chestnut sauce. We would drink red wine with these even though it was more expensive than white wine, and the very best cost twenty cents a liter. Ordinary red wine was much cheaper and we packed it up in kegs to the Madlener-Haus.

We had a store of books that Sylvia Beach had let us take for the winter and we could bowl with the people of the town in the alley that gave onto the summer garden of the hotel. Once or twice a week there was a poker game in the dining room of the hotel with all the windows shuttered and the door locked. Gambling was forbidden in Austria then and I played with Herr Nels, the hotel keeper, Herr Lent of the Alpine ski school, a banker of the town, the public prosecutor and the captain of Gendarmerie. It was a stiff game and they were all good poker players except that Herr Lent played too wildly because the ski school was not making any money. The captain of Gendarmerie would raise his finger to his ear when he would hear the pair of gendarmes stop outside the door when they made their rounds, and we would be silent until they had gone on.

In the cold of the morning as soon as it was light the maid would come into the room and shut the windows and make a fire in the big porcelain stove. Then the room was warm, there was breakfast of fresh bread or toast with delicious fruit preserves and big bowls of coffee, fresh eggs and good ham if you wanted it. There was a dog named Schnautz that slept on the foot of the bed who loved to go on ski trips and to ride on my back or over my shoulder when I ran down hill. He was Mr. Bumby’s friend too and would go for walks with him and his nurse beside the small sleigh.

Schruns was a good place to work. I know because I did the most difficult job of rewriting I have ever done there in the winter of 1925 and 1926, when I had to take the first draft of The Sun Also Rises which I had written in one sprint of six weeks, and make it into a novel. I cannot remember what stories I wrote there. There were several though that turned out well.

I remember the snow on the road to the village squeaking at night when we walked home in the cold with our skis and ski poles on our shoulders, watching the lights and then finally seeing the buildings, and how everyone on the road said, “Grüss Gott.” There were always country men in the Weinstube with nailed boots and mountain clothes and the air was smoky and the wooden floors were scarred by the nails. Many of the young men had served in Austrian Alpine regiments and one named Hans, who worked in the sawmill, was a famous hunter and we were good friends because we had been in the same part of the mountains in Italy. We drank together and we all sang mountain songs.

I remember the trails up through the orchards and the fields of the hillside farms above the village and the warm farm houses with their great stoves and the huge wood piles in the snow. The women worked in the kitchens carding and spinning wool into grey and black yarn. The spinning wheels worked by a foot treadle and the yarn was not dyed. The black yarn was from the wool of black sheep. The wool was natural and the fat had not been removed, and the caps and sweaters and long scarves that Hadley knitted from it never became wet in the snow.

One Christmas there was a play by Hans Sachs that the school master directed. It was a good play and I wrote a review of it for the provincial paper that the hotel keeper translated. Another year a former German naval officer with a shaven head and scars came to give a lecture on the Battle of Jutland. The lantern slides showed the movements of the two battle fleets and the naval officer used a billiard cue for a pointer when he pointed out the cowardice of Jellicoe and sometimes he became so angry that his voice broke. The school master was afraid that he would stab the billiard cue through the screen. Afterwards the former naval officer could not quiet himself down and everyone was ill at ease in the Weinstube. Only the public prosecutor and the banker drank with him, and they were at a separate table. Herr Lent, who was a Rhinelander, would not attend the lecture. There was a couple from Vienna who had come for the skiing but who did not want to go to the high mountains and so were leaving for Zurs where, I heard, they were killed in an avalanche. The man said the lecturer was the type of swine who had ruined Germany and in twenty years they would do it again. The woman with him told him to shut up in French and said this is a small place and you never know.

That was the year that so many people were killed in avalanches. The first big loss was over the mountains from our valley in Lech in the Arlberg. A party of Germans wanted to come and ski with Herr Lent on their Christmas vacations. Snow was late that year and the hills and mountain slopes were still warm from the sun when a great snowfall came. The snow was deep and powdery and it was not bound to the earth at all. Conditions for skiing could not be more dangerous and Herr Lent had wired the Berliners not to come. But it was their vacation time and they were ignorant and had no fear of avalanches. They arrived at Lech and Herr Lent refused to take them out. One man called him a coward and they said they would ski by themselves. Finally he took them to the safest slope he could find. He crossed it himself and then they followed and the whole hillside came down in a rush, rising over them as a tidal wave rises. Thirteen were dug out and nine of them were dead. The Alpine ski school had not prospered before this, and afterwards we were almost the only members. We became great students of avalanches, the different types of avalanches, how to avoid them and how to behave if you were caught in one. Most of the writing that I did that year was in avalanche time.

The worst thing I remember of that avalanche winter was one man who was dug out. He had squatted down and made a box with his arms in front of his head, as we had been taught to do, so that there would be air to breathe as the snow rose up over you. It was a huge avalanche and it took a long time to dig everyone out, and this man was the last to be found. He had not been dead long and his neck was worn through so that the tendons and the bone were visible. He had been turning his head from side to side against the pressure of the snow. In this avalanche there must have been some old, packed snow mixed in with the new light snow that had slipped. We could not decide whether he had done it on purpose or if he had been out of his head. He was refused burial in consecrated ground by the local priest anyway, since there was no proof he was a Catholic.

When we lived in Schruns we used to make a long trip up the valley to the inn where we slept before setting out on the climb to the Madlener-Haus. It was a very beautiful old inn and the wood of the walls of the room where we ate and drank were silky with the years of polishing. So were the table and chairs. We slept close together in the big bed under the feather quilt with the window open and the stars close and very bright. In the morning after breakfast we all loaded to go up the road and started the climb in the dark with the stars close and very bright, carrying our skis on our shoulders. The porters’ skis were short and they carried heavy loads. We competed among ourselves as to who could climb with the heaviest loads, but no one could compete with the porters, squat sullen peasants who spoke only Montafon dialect, climbed steadily like pack horses and at the top, where the Alpine Club hut was built on a shelf beside the snow-covered glacier, shed their loads against the stone wall of the hut, asked for more money than the agreed price, and, when they had obtained a compromise, shot down and away on their short skis like gnomes.

One of our friends was a German girl who skied with us. She was a great mountain skier, small and beautifully built, who could carry as heavy a rucksack as I could and carry it longer.

“Those porters always look at us as though they looked forward to bringing us down as bodies,” she said. “They set the price for the climb and I’ve never known them not to ask for more.”

In the winter in Schruns I wore a beard against the sun that burned my face so badly on the high snow, and did not bother having a haircut. Late one evening running on skis down the logging trails Herr Lent told me that peasants I passed on those roads above Schruns called me “the Black Christ.” He said some, when they came to the Weinstube, called me “the Black Kirsch-drinking Christ.” But to the peasants at the far upper end of the Montafon where we hired porters to go up to the Madlener-Haus, we were all foreign devils who went into the high mountains when people should stay out of them. That we started before daylight in order not to pass avalanche places when the sun could make them dangerous was not to our credit. It only proved we were tricky as all foreign devils are.

I remember the smell of the pines and the sleeping on the mattresses of beech leaves in the woodcutters’ huts and the skiing through the forest following the tracks of hares and of foxes. In the high mountains above the tree line I remember following the track of a fox until I came in sight of him and watching him stand with his right forefoot raised and then go carefully to stop and then pounce, and the whiteness and the clutter of a ptarmigan bursting out of the snow and flying away and over the ridge.

I remember all the kinds of snow that the wind could make and their different treacheries when you were on skis. Then there were the blizzards when you were in the high Alpine hut and the strange world that they would make where we had to make our route as carefully as though we had never seen the country. We had not, either, as it all was new. Finally towards spring there was the great glacier run, smooth and straight, forever straight if our legs could hold it, our ankles locked, we running so low, leaning into the speed, dropping forever and forever in the silent hiss of the crisp powder. It was better than any flying or anything else, and we built the ability to do it and to have it with the long climbs carrying the heavy rucksacks. We could not buy the trip up nor take a ticket to the top. It was the end we worked for all winter, and all the winter built to make it possible.

During our last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to the next winter, a nightmare winter disguised as the greatest fun of all, and the murderous summer that was to follow. It was that year that the rich showed up.

The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them. The pilot fish talks like this: “Well I dont know. No of course not really. But I like them. I like them both. Yes, by God, Hem; I do like them. I see what you mean but I do like them truly and there’s something damned fine about her.” (He gives her name and pronounces it lovingly.) “No, Hem, dont be silly and dont be difficult. I like them truly. Both of them I swear it. You’ll like him (using his baby-talk nickname) when you know him. I like them both, truly.”

Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again. The pilot fish leaves of course. He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never around for very long. He enters and leaves politics or the theater in the same way he enters and leaves countries and people’s lives in his early days. He is never caught and he is not caught by the rich. Nothing ever catches him and it is only those who trust him who are caught and killed. He has the irreplaceable early training of the bastard and a latent and long denied love of money. He ends up rich himself, having moved one dollar’s width to the right with every dollar that he made.

These rich loved and trusted him because he was shy, comic, elusive, already in production, and because he was an unerring pilot fish.

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured.

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year before they would never have come. There was no certainty then. The work was as good and the happiness was greater but no novel had been written, so they could not be sure. They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure. Why should they? Picasso was sure and of course had been before they had ever heard of painting. They were very sure of another painter. Many others. But this year they were sure and they had the word from the pilot fish who turned up too so we would not feel that they were outlanders and that I would not be difficult. The pilot fish was our friend of course.

In those days I trusted the pilot fish as I would trust the Corrected Hydrographic Office Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, say, or the tables in Brown’s Nautical Almanac. Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and as stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone. That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery. I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.

When they said, “It’s great, Ernest. Truly it’s great. You cannot know the thing it has,” I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, “If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?” That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.

Before these rich had come we had already been infiltrated by another rich using the oldest trick there is. It is that an unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband. When the husband is a writer and doing difficult work so that he is occupied much of the time and is not a good companion or partner to his wife for a big part of the day, the arrangement has advantages until you know how it works out. The husband has two attractive girls around when he has finished work. One is new and strange and if he has bad luck he gets to love them both.

Then, instead of the two of them and their child, there are three of them. First it is stimulating and fun and it goes on that way for a while. All things truly wicked start from an innocence. So you live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry. You lie and hate it and it destroys you and every day is more dangerous, but you live day to day as in a war.

It was necessary that I leave Schruns and go to New York to rearrange publishers. I did my business in New York and when I got back to Paris I should have caught the first train from the Gare de l’Est that would take me down to Austria. But the girl I was in love with was in Paris then, and I did not take the first train, or the second or the third.

When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully, and Mr. Bumby standing with her, blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Vorarlberg boy.

“Oh Tatie,” she said, when I was holding her in my arms, “you’re back and you made such a fine successful trip. I love you and we’ve missed you so.”

I loved her and I loved no one else and we had a lovely magic time while we were alone. I worked well and we made great trips, and I thought we were invulnerable again, and it wasn’t until we were out of the mountains in late spring, and back in Paris that the other thing started again.

That was the end of the first part of Paris. Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed as it changed. We never went back to the Vorarlberg and neither did the rich.

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

The Delphi Classics Catalogue

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Series One

Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray

Series Two

Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare

Series Three

Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving

Series Four

Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey

Series Five

Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris

Series Six

Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson

Series Seven

Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs

Ancient Classics

Aeschylus
Alcaeus
Ammianus Marcellinus
Apollodorus
Appian
Apuleius
Apollonius of Rhodes
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arrian
Augustine
Bede
Cassius Dio
Cato
Catullus
Cicero
Clement of Alexandria
Demosthenes
Diodorus Siculus
Diogenes Laërtius
Euripides
Frontius
Herodotus
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Homer
Horace
Josephus
Julius Caesar
Juvenal
Livy
Longus
Lucan
Lucian
Lucretius
Marcus Aurelius
Martial
Nonnus
Ovid
Pausanias
Petronius
Pindar
Plato
Pliny the Elder
Pliny the Younger
Plotinus
Plutarch
Polybius
Procopius
Propertius
Quintus Smyrnaeus
Sallust
Sappho
Seneca the Elder
Seneca the Younger
Septuagint
Sophocles
Statius
Strabo
Suetonius
Tacitus
Terence
Theocritus
Thucydides
Tibullus
Virgil
Xenophon

Delphi Poets Series

A. E. Housman
Alexander Pope
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Andrew Marvell
Beowulf
Charlotte Smith
Christina Rossetti
D. H Lawrence (poetry)
Dante Alighieri (English)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Delphi Poetry Anthology
Edgar Allan Poe (poetry)
Edmund Spenser
Edward Lear
Edward Thomas
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Emily Dickinson
Ezra Pound
Friedrich Schiller (English)
George Herbert
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Isaac Rosenberg
Johan Ludvig Runeberg
John Clare
John Donne
John Dryden
John Keats
John Milton
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Leigh Hunt
Lord Byron
Ludovico Ariosto
Luís de Camões
Matthew Arnold
Michael Drayton
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Robert Browning
Robert Burns
Robert Frost
Robert Southey
Rumi
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Philip Sidney
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Gray
Thomas Hardy (poetry)
Thomas Hood
Torquato Tasso
T. S. Eliot
W. B. Yeats
Walter Savage Landor
Walt Whitman
Wilfred Owen
William Blake
William Cowper
William Wordsworth

Masters of Art

Albrecht Dürer
Amedeo Modigliani
Canaletto
Caravaggio
Claude Monet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Diego Velázquez
Edgar Degas
Édouard Manet
Eugène Delacroix
Francisco Goya
Giotto
Gustav Klimt
J. M. W. Turner
Johannes Vermeer
John Constable
Leonardo da Vinci
Michelangelo
Paul Cézanne
Paul Klee
Peter Paul Rubens
Piero della Francesca
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Sandro Botticelli
Raphael
Rembrandt van Rijn
Thomas Gainsborough
Titian
Vincent van Gogh
Wassily Kandinsky

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Hemingway’s home in Ketchum, Idaho, where he ended his life on 2 July 1961

Hemingway’s grave in Ketchum Cemetery, Idaho